Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [194]
At Gowanus, on the far right of the American line, General James Grant had meanwhile thrown seven thousand redcoats and two thousand Royal Marines, supported by two companies of Long Island Tories, against two thousand troops from Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware commanded by General Alexander. Alexander’s men fought gamely to keep control of the high ground—now called Battle Hill in Green Wood Cemetery—until the collapse of the American center at Flatbush made their position hopeless. Redcoats from Bedford were closing in behind them, while Hessians were crashing through the woods on their left. To give the rest of his force time to escape across the tidal flats along Gowanus Creek, Alexander counterattacked with barely four hundred Maryland troops.
Washington, who watched Alexander advance from a vantage point where Court Street now crosses Atlantic Avenue, reportedly wrung his hands and cried out: “Good God! What brave fellows I must this day lose!” Survivors remembered the “confusion and horror” as the fleeing Americans tried desperately to cross eighty yards of muddy flats under a hail of British canister, grape, and chain. “Some of them were mired and crying to their fellows for God’s sake to help them out; but every man was intent on his own safety and no assistance was rendered.” After savage fighting on the Gowanus Road near the Cortelyou House (now known as the Old Stone House, at Fifth Avenue and 3rd Street), Alexander was captured. By two P.M. all but nine of the Marylanders had been killed or taken prisoner. Thanks to their valor, however, hundreds of other Americans managed to wade or swim to solid ground on the other side of the creek, and hence to safety in Brooklyn Heights.
Had Howe kept up the chase, it is likely that the demoralized remnants of Washington’s army would have been driven into the East River. In only a few hours of fighting roughly twelve hundred Americans had died, and another fifteen hundred were wounded, captured, or missing—among them three generals and ninety-odd junior officers. The British, by contrast, reported only sixty dead and three hundred wounded or missing.
The American retreat across Gowanus Greek, by Alonzo Ghappel. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
Despite pleas by Clinton, Cornwallis, and others to finish what they had begun, Howe halted and began preparations for a formal siege—either because he didn’t have the heart for another Bunker Hill-like frontal assault or because he hoped that the rebels would give up without a struggle. Tuesday evening and all day Wednesday his forces dug trenches and probed the American defenses in a cold, soaking rain that made it impossible for men on either side to build campfires or keep their powder dry. Although the storm ended by noon on Thursday the twenty-ninth, two days after the battle, Howe continued to bide his time—and gave Washington the opening for one of the boldest strokes of the war.
That evening, as night fell, Washington ordered all units to form up and move down from the Heights to the ferry landing on the East River shore. “We were strictly enjoined not to speak, or even cough,” one private recalled. “All orders were given from officer to officer, and communicated to the men in whispers.” At water’s edge, a regiment of fishermen from Salem and Marblehead with commandeered rowboats, barges, sloops, skiffs, and canoes waited to ferry the army across to New York. Working silently, hour after hour, they rowed back and forth, under the cover of a thick fog that concealed the maneuver from enemy sentries. The last of ninety-five hundred men—Washington’s entire force—reached Manhattan just as dawn broke on Friday. Not until 8:30 would a chagrined Howe learn that the Americans had slipped his grasp.
Even though everyone knew that Washington’s audacity had