Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [195]
Washington’s escape from Brooklyn Heights, by J. C. Armytage. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
THE FALL OF NEW YORK
On September 11 Lord Howe met with a congressional delegation consisting of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Edmund Rutledge at the stone manor house Captain Christopher Billopp had built around 1680 in Tottenville, Staten Island. If Congress would revoke the Declaration of Independence, Howe repeated, the British would pardon all who had taken up arms against the king (essentially the same offer they had made to Washington a month before). Independence isn’t negotiable, replied the American delegates—with which the so-called conference came to an end.
Now even Washington could see that his days in New York were numbered. His dispirited army was falling apart—in one week six thousand of eight thousand Connecticut militia simply picked up and went home—and the longer he stayed in the city, the greater the danger he would be encircled and destroyed. At a war council on September 12, Washington accepted the advice of his officers to abandon all of Manhattan to the enemy except for Fort Washington at the northern end of the island. Greene (supported by John Jay, among others) argued strongly that New York should be burned as well as abandoned. (“That cursed town from first to last has been ruinous to the common cause,” exclaimed one officer.) Congress firmly rejected the idea. Two days later, leaving Putnam and five thousand men behind to cover his rear, Washington shifted his headquarters ten miles out of town to the home of Roger Morris on Harlem Heights (now the Morris-Jumel Mansion on 162nd Street).
On October fifteenth, the Howe brothers finally roused themselves for another move against Washington. That morning, Connecticut militiamen crouched in trenches a few miles above the city at Kip’s Bay (34th Street) observed so many flatboats of redcoats massing just across the East River at the mouth of Newtown Creek that it looked “like a large clover field in full bloom.” As they pushed off, five warships anchored nearby poured barrage after barrage into the American positions—“so terrible and so incessant a Roar of Guns few even in the Army & Navy had ever heard before,” declared Lord Howe’s secretary, Ambrose Serle. Awestruck spectators on the shore at Bushwick watched as four thousand British troops swarmed toward Manhattan to “the strains of exciting music, and the peals of thundering guns, the tall ships vomiting flames and murderous shot” under “rolling volleys of smoke.” The militia ran off in fear, and the British waded ashore without opposition. “The rogues have not learnt manners yet,” scoffed one of His Majesty’s officers; “they cannot look gentlemen in the face.” By early afternoon the British had taken possession of the Robert Murray farm—atop what is now Murray Hill—and were prepared to descend on the city below.
Washington, racing down from Harlem Heights, found his troops in complete disarray, “flying in every direction and in the greatest confusion.” He tried to rally them in a cornfield north of what is now 42nd Street, near where the Public Library now stands, but the sight of advancing redcoats sent them running again up the Bloomingdale Road (Broadway). At this, witnesses recall, Washington went berserk with rage. “The General was so exasperated,” a Virginia officer reported, “that he struck several officers in their flight, three times dashed his hat on the ground, and at last exclaimed, ‘Good God! Have I got such troops