Washington [173]
At this point Nathanael Greene, having returned to service, urged Washington to burn and abandon a city teeming with Tories. The British, he feared, could isolate American troops in southern Manhattan as they had so effectively done in Brooklyn Heights. At a September 7 war council, Washington sided with a majority of generals who wanted to hold the town, lest its loss “dispirit the troops and enfeeble our cause.”34 The next day a chastened Washington informed Hancock of a compromise decision to keep five thousand men in the city, while removing the rest to points north on the island. The tone of this letter was diametrically opposed to the cocksure attitude Washington had exhibited after the Boston siege. Humbled by experience, Washington said that he and his generals had resolved to wage a defensive war, a policy from which he would only periodically deviate. “It has been even called a war of posts, that we should on all occasions avoid a general action or put anything to the risk unless compelled by a necessity into which we ought never to be drawn.”35 Never again, he swore, would he send young troops into “open ground against their superiors both in number and discipline.”36 This strategy was neither glamorous nor particularly congenial to Washington’s personality, but it might prove sure and effective.37 That Washington was able to adjust his strategic doctrine again showed his capacity for growth and his realistic nature.
On September 12, alarmed by British actions in the Harlem River, another war council revoked the earlier decision to defend New York. Two days later Washington transferred his headquarters to a graceful Palladian mansion set on a hilltop in the northern terrain of Harlem Heights. It was owned by Roger Morris, who had been Washington’s successful rival for the hand of Mary “Polly” Philipse. Because many men remained behind, the British didn’t realize that the Americans were relinquishing the city. While Putnam supervised American troops in lower Manhattan, some militiamen manned makeshift defenses in the center of the island. One of them, Joseph Plumb Martin, stationed at the cove of Kip’s Bay on the East River (the East Thirties in modern-day Manhattan), ridiculed their defensive lines as “nothing more than a ditch dug along the bank of the river, with the dirt thrown out towards the water.”38 For some soldiers, their only weapons consisted of sharpened scythes fastened to poles, forming primitive spears.
During the night of September 14-15, five British ships dropped anchor in Kip’s Bay, soon accompanied by eighty-four barges that had been secreted in Newtown Creek on Long Island, with four thousand British and Hessian troops on board. At eleven A.M. the warships’ big guns swiveled toward Manhattan and began to thunder with a horrendous, sustained racket, blowing the American breastworks to smithereens. “So terrible and so incessant a roar of guns few even in the army and navy had ever heard before,” wrote Ambrose Serle.39 For the few hundred American hayseeds cowering onshore, the cannonade, lasting an hour, provoked a terrified flight. “I made a frog’s leap for the ditch,” wrote Joseph Plumb Martin, “and lay as still as I possibly could and began to consider which part of my carcass was to go first.”40
Once the American defenses were demolished, British and Hessian troops waded ashore in neat rows, their bayonets flashing. As in the Battle of Brooklyn, the Hessians took no prisoners and oversaw mass executions, shooting in the head dozens of young Americans who tried to surrender; one Hessian decapitated an American prisoner and posted his head on a pike. These atrocities spread contagious fear among the American troops, but officers lost their nerve as well, abandoning their men. Joseph Plumb Martin bluntly parceled out blame: “I do not recollect of seeing a commissioned