Then out of the far woods and down the hill came the British in pursuit, sounding their bugles, as if on a fox hunt. “I never felt such a sensation before,” Reed wrote. “It seemed to crown our disgrace.”
What the Virginia fox hunter watching the scene from his saddle may have felt or thought can only be imagined, for he never said. But his response was an immediate decision to make a fight, if only, as he later explained to Patrick Henry, “to recover that military ardor which is of the utmost moment to an army.”
Washington ordered a counterattack across the Hollow Way, and sent Knowlton and his men, plus three companies of Virginians led by Major Andrew Leitch, on the encircling move to the left, with Reed as guide. They were to get behind the redcoats and entrap them in the Hollow Way. Greene and Putnam led the main attack, and both were soon in the thick of it.
The enemy had “rushed down the hill with all speed to a plain spot of ground,” wrote Joseph Hodgkins, who was back in action with Greene’s troops for the first time since Brooklyn. “Then our brigade marched out of the woods. Then a very hot fire began on both sides.”
But Knowlton’s encircling move ran into trouble when some of his men opened fire too soon, attacking the enemy’s flank, instead of getting behind and cutting off their retreat. The fighting grew fierce. Within minutes Knowlton and Major Leitch both fell, mortally wounded.
With the chance to encircle and capture the British gone, Washington threw more of his forces into the main attack, and the British, too, rushed in reinforcements. In little time the British had committed 5,000 men.
The struggle went on for hours, the Americans, for once, holding their own. Slowly the British began to give way. Then the British turned and ran, and the Americans took after them. “[We] drove the dogs near three miles,” wrote one of the Connecticut men.
Fearing the enemy might bring up still more strength, and that his men might be running into a trap, Washington called off the attack, which was not easily done. “The pursuit of a flying enemy was so new a scene, that it was with difficulty our men could be brought to retreat,” wrote Joseph Reed.
From all that Joseph Hodgkins had seen, and from what others had told him, he reckoned they had killed no fewer than 500 of the enemy and wounded that many or more. “They were seen to carry off several wagon loads. Besides our people buried a good many that they left.”
Probably the British and Hessian losses were 90 killed and about 300 wounded. The number of American casualties was far lower, fewer than 100 wounded and 30 killed, but these included Major Leitch and Colonel Knowlton, whose deaths were a heavy blow to the army. To Reed, who had carried the wounded Knowlton from the field, and to Washington, Thomas Knowlton was the “greatest loss.”
***
REPORTING TOCONGRESS on the Battle of Harlem Heights, Washington referred to it only as “a pretty sharp skirmish” and made no claims to a great victory. But to the troops it was a genuine victory at long last, and an urgently needed lift to their self-respect. They had seen the backs of redcoats on the fly. As Henry Knox wrote, “They find that if they stick to these mighty men, they will run as fast as other people.”
Nathanael Greene, who from the first weeks at Boston had never doubted that the army would fight if properly led, wrote proudly to William Ellery, a delegate to Congress from Rhode Island:
Our people beat the enemy off the ground…. Had all the colonies good officers, there is no danger of the troops; never was troops that would stand in the field longer than the American soldiery. If the officers were as good as the men, and had only a few months to form the troops to discipline, America might bid defiance to the whole world.
British prisoners captured in the fight said they had never expected the Americans to attack, and were “never more surprised.” Henry Clinton, in accounting for what happened, blamed the “impetuosity” of the light infantry for pursuing the rebels in the first place. For contrary to what Washington thought, the British had had no plans for or any intention of engaging the rebels that day, or anytime soon.
***
FOR DAYS THE TWO ARMIES, close as they were, remained perfectly quiet, “as quiet,” wrote Lieutenant Tilghman of Washington’s staff, “as if they were a thousand miles apart.”
The position of the Americans on the rocky heights above the Harlem River was as advantageous as any they had held since the war began, and they labored on steadily to make it still more secure. “If we cannot fight them on this ground, we can on none in America,” concluded Joseph Reed. Nor was the point lost on the British commander-in-chief who, with New York in hand, saw no reason to press the attack just yet.
In his own good time William Howe was drawing up plans to outmaneuver the rebels once again, while his brother, Lord Howe, reflected on whether it might be the opportune moment for another peace overture. Increasing numbers of rebel soldiers, all “much dispirited,” were crossing the lines to defect, reinforcing the commonly held opinion among the British commanders that the rebellion had run its course.
Meanwhile, others of the British army were finding New York delightful. There were “many fair houses” for quarters. Food was more plentiful than ever. It was the height of the harvest season and the supply of fresh produce from the farms of Long Island seemed limitless. As a bonus, the rebels, in their hurry to leave, had left behind more than 5,000 barrels of flour.
Off-duty British soldiers and officers flocked like tourists to inspect the abandoned rebel fortifications, marveling at their size and number and the work that had gone into them.
“The shore of the Island, from Hell Gate on the East River, quite round by the town, up to Bloomingdale on the North River, an extent of near fourteen miles, is fortified at almost every accessible part, and there is hardly a height without a redoubt or battery on it,” wrote Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie in admiration. Ambrose Serle, after a walking tour of the town, recorded his “astonishment” at the sight of rebel breastworks and embrasures at the end of nearly every street and avenue.
The infinite pains and labor which they must have bestowed, one would have thought, from regret alone, would have inclined them to make some kind of stand. But their fears overpowered their resolution, and they evacuated the object of all their toil in one short hour, without making the least defense or anything like a handsome retreat.
On September 19, against the judgment of most of the British high command, including presumably his brother the general, Lord Howe issued a direct appeal to the people of America, in the form of a proclamation warning that the stubbornness of their representatives in Congress was leading to their downfall and misery. Americans ought to “judge for themselves,” he wrote, “whether it be more consistent with their honor and happiness to offer up their lives as a sacrifice to the unjust and precarious cause in which they are engaged,” or “to return to their allegiance, accept the blessings of peace,” and thus be “secured in the free enjoyment of their liberty and properties.”
The proclamation seemed only to irritate everyone on both sides, and was all but forgotten after the night of September 20–21, when fire raged out of control in New York and a large part of the city burned to the ground.
Fire was a constant fear in every town and city of the time, and never more than when the weather was as hot and dry as it had been that summer. Fire at night was the most terrifying of all.
The fire, it appears from several eyewitness accounts, began shortly after midnight in a “low grogery” called the Fighting Cocks, at Whitehall Slip, at the southern tip of New York.
Driven by a southwesterly wind, the flames turned quickly to wildfire. Choking smoke and fiery-red, windborne flakes of burning shingles filled the air, as the flames swept uptown, across Dock Street, Bridge Street, Stone, Marketfield, and Beaver streets. Seen from the American lines at Harlem, ten miles to the north, it looked as though the very heavens were ablaze.
No warning bells rang, because Washington had ordered every bell in the city carried away to be recas
t for cannon. British soldiers and others rushed to help, but the heat was so intense, the fire so out of control, that no one could get near it. There were too few buckets and little water at hand. The few fire engines there were proved useless.
Houses were torn down in advance of the flames, but then nothing seemed to check the inferno. Had the wind not shifted to the southeast at about two in the morning, the entire city might have been consumed. As it was, the fire raged up the west side, destroying nearly everything between Broadway and the Hudson, including the infamous Holy Ground, to as far as the open field at King’s College. When Trinity Church, at Broadway and Wall Street, burst into flames, its shingled steeple became a vast “pyramid of fire,” until it burned to its timbers and crashed to the ground.
“It is almost impossible to conceive a scene of more horror and distress,” wrote Frederick Mackenzie, who was among those trying to fight the flames.
The sick, the aged, women, and children, half naked, were seen going they knew not where, and taking refuge in houses which were at a distance from the fire, but from whence they were in several instances driven a second and even a third time…. The terror was increased by the horrid noise of the burning and falling houses, the pulling down of such wooden buildings as served to conduct the fire…the rattling of above 100 wagons, sent in from the army, and which were constantly employed in conveying to the common such goods and effects as could be saved. The confused voices of so many men, the shrieks and cries of the women and children…
Concerned that the burning city could be the prelude to a night attack by the rebels, the Howes held back from sending more soldiers and seamen to fight the blaze until daybreak, and by ten o’clock the fire had burned itself out.
Nearly five hundred houses were destroyed, or approximately a quarter of the city, and in the shock and horror of the moment it seemed certain the disaster was the villainous work of the enemy. Rebel incendiaries had been caught in the act, it was widely reported. One such man, caught with “fire brand” in hand, had been knocked down by a British grenadier and “thrown into the flames” for his reward. Another who was seen cutting off the handles of water buckets was hanged from a signpost by British sailors, then hung up by the heels like a slaughtered animal.
Witnesses reported having seen the fire break out in several different places, not just at Whitehall Slip, and this was taken as proof of arson. But Frederick Mackenzie, who was no less certain than others that the town had been “designedly” set afire, acknowledged in his diary, “There is no doubt…that the flames were communicated to several houses by means of the burning flakes of the shingles, which being light, were carried by the wind to some distance and…kindled the fire anew.”
In a letter to Lord Germain, General Howe charged the deed to unnamed “lurking” villains. “The Yankees [New York Loyalists] are convinced that the New England men set fire to the town; they will never forgive them,” wrote General James Grant. Governor William Tryon went further, implying in a letter to Germain that Washington himself had devised the plot and instructed the incendiaries.
More than a hundred suspects were rounded up, but no evidence was found against them. None were brought to trial. All were eventually released. It was never determined, then or later, that the “Great Fire” was anything other than accidental.
Washington, in his report to Congress, called it an accident. Writing privately, however, he allowed to Lund Washington that “Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.” Beyond that he said no more.
Nor was Washington to say anything about Captain Nathan Hale, who was “apprehended” by the British the day after the fire and, it appears, as part of the roundup of suspected incendiaries.
By several accounts, Hale’s capture took place in New York. A report in the New York Gazette, a Tory paper, said an unnamed “New England man who had a captain’s commission” was seized in the city with “dreadful implements of ruin [firebrands]” and, when searched, “the sum of 500 [pounds] was found upon him.” This could refer to Hale, although Frederick Mackenzie noted that “a person named Nathan Hales” was apprehended on Long Island on the night of September 21.
Whatever the circumstances of his capture, Hale admitted to being a spy, and General Howe ordered him hanged without trial.
Hale was twenty-one years old, a handsome, athletic graduate of Yale, a schoolmaster and wholehearted patriot. Raised on a Connecticut farm, he was one of six brothers who served in the war. He had signed up more than a year before, taken part in the Siege of Boston, and lately joined Colonel Knowlton’s Rangers. Yet thus far he felt he had rendered no real service to the country, and when Knowlton, on orders from Washington, called for a volunteer to cross the lines and bring back desperately needed intelligence, he had bravely offered to go.
A fellow Connecticut officer, Captain William Hull, who had known Hale in college, tried to talk him out of it, warning that he was by nature “too frank and open for deceit and disguise,” and that no one respected the character of a spy. Hale had said only that he would “reflect, and do nothing but what duty demands.” The next thing Hull knew, his friend had disappeared.
The mission was doomed from the start, ill-planned and pathetically amateurish, and Hale was a poor choice. He knew nothing of spying. The scars from a powder burn on his face made him readily identifiable, and a Loyalist cousin who knew him well was serving as General Howe’s deputy commissary of prisoners.
Hale went under the guise of a Dutch schoolmaster in search of work. Apparently it was from naïvely confiding the truth of his mission to the wrong people that led to his capture.
He was hanged on the morning of September 21, in an artillery park near the Beekman house, a country estate not far from the East River that served as Howe’s headquarters.
It was Captain John Montresor, who, only hours afterward, under a white flag, brought word of Hale’s fate to the Americans and described what had happened to Hale to his friend Captain Hull. And it was Hull, later, who reported Montresor’s account of Hale’s last words as he was about to be executed: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” which was a variation on another then-famous line from the playCato. (One imagines that in delivering the line to his British executioners, Hale, knowing that it was as familiar to them as to him, put the emphasis on the second-to-last word: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose formy country.”)
On September 26, a British officer wrote in a letter,
We hung up a rebel spy the other day, and some soldiers got out of a rebel gentleman’s garden a painted soldier on a board, and hung it along with the rebel, and wrote upon it, General Washington, and I saw it yesterday beyond headquarters, by the roadside.
Hale’s place in the pantheon of American heroes, as the martyr spy of the Revolution, was not to come until years later. For now very little was known or said of his story. Washington, angry or saddened as he may have been, is not known to have mentioned the subject.
AMERICAN SOLDIERS WERE DESERTING as if leaving a sinking ship, thirty or forty at a time, many defecting to the enemy. Disobedience and theft were epidemic. It was far from an army of heroes only. “A spirit of desertion, cowardice, plunder, and shrinking from duty when attended with fatigue or danger, prevailed but too generally,” wrote Joseph Reed, who had become so demoralized that even he was on the verge of quitting.
An experience on the battlefield on September 16 had had a searing effect. In the heat of the fight, Reed had seen a soldier running from the enemy. Ordered to stop and go back, the soldier, a Connecticut private named Ebenezer Leffingwell, had raised his musket, taken aim from a distance of only a few yards, and pulled the trigger. But the lock only snapped. When Reed grabbed the gun of another soldier and pulled the trigger, it too snapped. Reed drew his sword and, striking twice, wounded Leffingwell on the head, severed a thumb, and forced him to surrender. “I should have shot him, could I have got my
gun off,” Reed said at Leffingwell’s court-martial on September 19.
Leffingwell, who confessed he had been running away, was found guilty of cowardice and of “presenting his firelock at his superior officer.” He was sentenced to be executed before the assembled troops the following day. But at Reed’s urging, Washington pardoned Leffingwell at the last moment, after Leffingwell had kneeled to be shot. The next such offender would “suffer death without mercy,” warned Washington.
“To attempt to introduce discipline and subordination into a new army must always be a work of much difficulty,” Reed wrote to his wife, “but where the principles of democracy so universally prevail, where so great an equality and so thorough a leveling spirit predominates, either no discipline can be established, or he who attempts it must become odious and detestable, a position which no one will choose.”
Washington was no less a commanding presence than ever, and except for his raging outburst at Kips Bay, he seemed imperturbable, entirely in control. In truth, he was as discouraged as he had ever been in his life, and miserably unhappy. It was all he could do to keep up appearances.