Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [193]
Howe and his officers professed to be delighted by their reception on Long Island. “The Inhabitants receiv’d our people with the Utmost Joy, having been long oppress’d for their Attachment to Government,” said one. “They sell their things to the Soldiers at the most Reasonable Terms & they kept up their stock in spite of the Rebels.” In Flatbush and other Kings County hamlets, however, fear and confusion reigned. Many years later, the elderly mother of Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt still remembered when a “rumor reached us that the soldiers were rapidly approaching. The whole village was in commotion. . . . Women and children were running hither and thither. Men on horseback were riding about in all directions.”
On the twenty-third Washington sent reinforcements to Sullivan and went over from New York to study the situation personally. On the twenty-fourth he dispatched more reinforcements under General Alexander, bringing the American total to around seven thousand. He also ordered General Israel Putnam of Connecticut to go over and see what he could do. “Old Put” was a capable veteran of the French and Indian War who had faced Howe at Bunker Hill. “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes,” he is supposed to have said. “Then, fire low.”
Putnam took charge of the Brooklyn Heights defenses, leaving Sullivan with around twenty-eight hundred men to cover the outer line along the Heights of Guan, the rocky, heavily wooded ridge of the glacial moraine that ran down the middle of Long Island. Only four roads traversed this barrier—at Gowanus, Flatbush, Bedford, and Jamaica—and even a relatively small force should have been able to defend it against an army advancing north toward Brooklyn Heights.1
Someone, however, had neglected to place troops at the Jamaica Pass, on the far left of the American line. A civilian spy (probably one of many Kings County Tories who attached themselves to the British army) soon brought word to General Clinton of the gap, and Clinton persuaded Howe to attack it in strength. Just after sundown on the twenty-sixth, a Monday, Howe, Clinton, and Cornwallis led better than ten thousand regulars in a two-mile-long column out of Flatlands toward New Lots in the east; with them went two companies of Long Island Tories under Oliver De Lancey. To deceive any watching Americans, they moved quietly and left their campfires burning. At New Lots they turned north to Jamaica; at about three A.M. on the twenty-seventh, they marched through the Jamaica Pass without opposition. They then turned west along the Jamaica Road toward the village of Bedford—today the intersection of Nostrand Avenue and Fulton Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant—where they arrived around 8:30 A.M. and fired two signal guns to alert the rest of the army.
Two smaller enemy forces now swung into action. At the Flatbush Pass in the center of the American line, five thousand Hessians attacked eight hundred Americans under General Sullivan. Realizing from the signal gun that Howe had somehow worked his way around him, Sullivan tried to fall back but couldn’t. Trapped between Howe’s light infantry coming down from Bedford and bayonet-wielding Hessians pouring up from Flatbush, his men broke and were slaughtered. “The greater part of the riflemen,” reported one German officer, “were pierced with the bayonet to trees.” A jubilant British officer gloated: “It was a fine sight to see with what alacrity they dispatched the Rebels with their bayonets after we had surrounded them so they could not resist.” Hundreds of Americans threw down their weapons and raced to reach safety behind the lines in Brooklyn Heights. Sullivan himself was captured in a cornfield near what is