The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [166]
The British moved over the water from Staten Island on the evening of June 6 and arrived at Elizabethtown about 3 a.m., expecting no resistance. They were surprised by Dayton’s men. The Americans, realizing that they were engaged with a very large army, held back the British the best they could in a brief skirmish and then began an orderly retreat toward Connecticut Farms, firing at the British as they went. This harassment slowed the British force considerably. By the time they arrived at Connecticut Farms, the Americans there had time to assemble enough men to do battle. General William Maxwell’s brigade formed a line near the Presbyterian meetinghouse and held off the British for several hours as more Americans arrived. The British finally pushed the Continentals back and out of the village. The Redcoats then set fire to a dozen buildings in the village, including the meetinghouse, and, in the melee, it was charged that a British soldier shot and killed Hannah Caldwell, the wife of Rev. James Caldwell, a beloved local minister and patriot. The British denied one of their soldiers had shot Mrs. Caldwell.
The Americans withdrew westward and set up another line. One of the keys to victory for the British was a small bridge that crossed the Rahway River, a narrow tributary only slightly wider than a brook. Dayton’s regiment, with a single cannon, defended the bridge. They were already in place as the British appeared. Ordered to assist them was the Morris militia under Seely, but to do so the men had to cross an open meadow as the British artillery was put in position.
Seely had been the head of the militia for four years by then and was an accomplished leader. Cursing as loudly as he could to get his men to move faster, the colonel led the militia into and across the meadow. They soon became targets of a heavy cannon and musket bombardment and scrambled for cover behind any large rock or thick tree trunk they could find. Ashbel Green, a seventeen-year-old volunteer who later became a minister, was caught in the middle of the shelling. He wrote later, “Cannonball and grape shot . . . swept over us like a storm of hail, the ground trembling under us at every step. No thunderstorm I have ever witnessed, either in loudness of sound or the shaking of the earth, equaled what I saw and felt in crossing that meadow.”4
Dayton’s Continentals and Seely’s militia held the bridge and the line that Greene had put together held off the entire British army during heavy skirmishing that lasted several hours. Late in the afternoon, Washington’s wing of the army arrived and the commander in chief aligned them in a north-south arc at the foot of the Watchung Mountains to await another British advance. There was none. Knyphausen knew he had been defeated and withdrew to Elizabethtown.
The Second Rhode Island saw little action that day, but did the next. Washington assumed that Knyphausen might be preparing to move northward, toward West Point, a target Washington always believed key for the Redcoats.
To protect himself, Washington sent a fifteen hundred man force under General Edward Hand, including the Second Rhode Island, to DeHart’s Point to harass the enemy. The Rhode Islanders walked directly into the five-thousand-man British and Hessian force. Greenman wrote, “Marched forward in this position to attack the enemy. Fired two rounds at them.”
Sylvanus Seely and the Morris militia stood right next to the Rhode Islanders. The several hundred militiamen had been ordered to join the Continental Army force and advanced as the center column. When they encountered fire, along with the Second Rhode Island, the militia, Seely wrote, “behaved exceedingly well.” Some men fell back after the shock of the first volley, but moved toward the enemy on Seely’s orders. The Morris County men took twenty British prisoners in that first engagement and, with the Rhode Islanders, moved forward into the woods in an effort to claim more. They were stopped cold. “The enemy opened up on us with a number of field pieces,” Seely