Before I get into the events of New Rochelle, I have to confess that I’m kind of hating today’s artwork, and it’s not even published yet.
Well, if I have to look at it then so do you. They can’t all be gems.
The Battle at Pell’s Point had the Continental Army putting up more resistance than any reasonable British general should expect, so General Howe knew that reinforcements and supplies would be needed, so he camped out in New Rochelle for a few days while the bodies gathered for action.
Lord Stirling was able to do some reconnaisance and see just what the Americans were going to be facing, and Washington used the information to move a little more hastily toward White Plains. As a rseult, he had a base of operations before the British had moved significantly; what’s more, he was able to set up a defensive position on high ground near the Bronx River.
It would be another few days but before long another significant battle would take place.
The Battle of Pell’s Point, also known as the Battle of Pelham, was an important battle of the Revolution that doesn’t get the attention that so many others get, largely because of the When and Where of the battle, and the fact that it wasn’t a huge win or loss for either side.
What it did do, however, was provide some cover and distraction from the fact that Washington was still moving forces out of New York—that is, off of Manhattan Island—and onto the mainland, toward White Plains.
As noted yesterday, the British army’s original goal was to make this move inland yesterday, but the winds weren’t cooperating with their ships in Hell’s-Gate, so it was very slow going getting from Throgs Neck, which was little more than marshland and not even quite connected to the mainland, to Pell’s Point. There were 4000 British soldiers faced against about 750 Continental soldiers, but fortunately the Americans saw them coming and were ready for them despite being quite outnumbered.
In the end, this was technically a victory for the British but a tactical one for the Americans, since the battle gave Washington the cover he needed to finish moving troops out of Manhattan and up toward White Plains.
Yesterday I took my four-year-old grandson to the National Museum of Railroad History and Innovation (some people may remember it as the B&O Museum) in Baltimore, and that visit reminded me of the fact that when a train passes by, the things you most notice are the engine and the caboose. This may be why I’ve described so many battles as “important but overlooked”; they took place in the middle of things and don’t have some deep iconography attached to them (e.g. Washington crossing the Delaware before the Battle of Trenton). But they’re all part of the larger mosaic that makes up the story of the American Revolution.
When Washington’s Council of War (with a single exception) determined that sticking around New York City was a bad idea, the next step was deciding which way to go, and how to go about it.
To a certain extent, the decision was made for them, because the British had pretty well sewed up the Hudson River, which meant that getting across and into New Jersey stealthily would be problematic.
The other option was to move north, into the Bronx and the downstate area west and north of Pelham. There would still be a river to cross (the Bronx River), but that was much smaller and, better still, it wasn’t fortified by British ships.
They identified several crossing points and set up units to monitor those places, plus another couple of units to keep an eye on the British in general. In this manner they were able to move four regiments of men across to the mainland without alerting the British.
But having this option made for them also helped ensure that they could continue to defend the lower Hudson Valley and stave off that severing of the connection between New England and the rest of the colonies that Britain so coveted.
Over the next several days we’ll bring you up to the conflict that today is known as the Battle of White Plains.
The Most Honourable Order of the Bath is a British order of chivalry that was first created by King George I in 1725. It’s typically bestowed by a monarch based on the advice of His/Her Majesty’s government.
When General William Howe received his order, there was a single class called the Knight Companion. However, in 1815 this class was discontinued in favor of three separate classes for civilians and another three (with the same class names) for the Military Division.
Now, I said that George I instituted the Order of the Bath in 1725, and I was accurate about that, but it’s important to recognize that a literal bath was part of the ritual for a new knight in the Middle Ages, and therefore knights of any kind were known as “Knights of the Bath”. However, the last occasion on which knights were created in this fashion was in 1661. So George I was instituting a new Order, but not reinstating one, in the sense that he was not creating a standing group in which there was a fixed number of honorees.
The Order of the Bath, however, did take on some of the accoutrements of the Knights, including their motto (juncta in uno, “three joined in one”) and the badge design (three crowns in a plain gold oval). Interestingly, both the significance of the motto and the meaning of the design are lost to time, and anything ascribed to them nowadays is conjecture.
Most appointments to the Order were political in nature until about the 1770s, when they became more common for non-aristocratic naval, military or diplomatic achievements, likely because Britain was simply involved in more military activity at that point.
Women were first admitted to the Order in 1971. At this writing, according to Wikipedia, there are 46 people in the Order, plus a large number of Honorary members. Interestingly, the youngest member of the Order is 59 years old, not counting Prince William, who is 44; the oldest is 97 and is one of six members in their 90s.
So I’m thinking they’re sticking William at the card table in the corner so he can eat with the other kids.
By the time Charles Lee returned to duty, the Continental Army in New York was in a sad state of affairs. Many men had been injured or deserted. Supplies were low. Ammunition was low. Morale was low. And the British were up in the Bronx, gearing up for…something, who knows what.
Lee had, of course, missed all the action in Brooklyn and Manhattan, so he brought a new perspective to the table. And it was fortunate that Lee felt free to say what he thought of the situation, namely that it was untenable.
Fortunately, Washington was of a similar mind and apparently Lee’s comments were what he needed to take appropriate action. He immediately summoned a council of war.
Down in Staten Island, Nathanael Greene and Hugh Mercer were in Staten Island, encountering far less resistance than they expected. They got word of the war council and Greene departed while Mercer continued on…at least until he learned the status of his intended target.
Charles Lee was born in Great Britain and only came to British America in 1773, when he purchased an estate in western Virginia.
It wasn’t his first time in America; he’d fought for the British in the French and Indian War and married the daughter of a Mohawk chief.
Lee was injured in 1758 during an attack on Fort Ticonderoga. The following year he was part of the capture of Fort Niagara and of Montreal the year after that.
Lee returned to Europe and served in Portugal as a lieutenant colonel. In 1763 he returned to England and retired on half-pay. Two years later he served as an aide-de-camp under King Stanislaus II of Poland. He saw some action in the Russo-Turkish War but it was during a duel in Italy that he lost two fingers.
Lee returned to England and realized that he was sympathetic to the Colonists’ cause, so he moved to America and purchased an estate in what would now be West Virginia. When the Continental Army formed, he joined up immediately, expecting to be second-in-command to George Washington (he did realize that Congress would want a native-born Commander in Chief).
Lee took on the command of the Southern Department and was present for the Battle of Sullivan’s Island. He was given credit for the victory, though based on some accounts the win didn’t really belong to him.
Lee was captured in December 1776 in New Jersey and released in a prisoner exchange in 1778. In subsequent battles Lee was cast in a villain role by official reports, and he was court-martialed. He was found guilty by the jury but the court reduced the final charges and suspended from the army for a year. In 1780 Lee sent a scathing letter to Congress that led to his dismissal from the army.
He returned to Virginia but his debts piled up and he was advised to sell off his property. Unfortunately he died in 1782 before he could complete the sale and his sister Sidney Lee inherited the property. It’s not clear but he likely died of tuberculosis.
Lee’s legacy has waxed and waned over the years, and most recently it’s in a “down” cycle, as documents have been discovered that he may have been attempting to communicate with British officers regarding a potential plan with which they might defeat the American rebellion. However, there are still many who doubt the idea that Lee was specifically acting treasonously.
The Battle of Split Rock is really just a continuation of the Battle of Valcour, and a lot of it takes place in a location called Button Mould Bay (or Buttonmold Bay).
So why is it called the Battle of Split Rock?
That’s a fine question. On the western shore of Lake Champlain, just north of Button Mould Bay, is a formation called Split Rock Mountain. It rises sharply from the lake to an altitude of just over 1000 feet, and it’s where the confrontation between the British and the Americans resumed.
Button Mould Bay is an area of shallower water on the opposite side. It gets its name from a series of clay masses which have hardened almost to the point of concrete, into a shape much like an oversize button, or like the molds used in button making. Those concretions actually made it easier for Benedict Arnold to run his ship, and the galleys accompanying him, aground and set ablaze. This was the ship that had all of Arnold’s papers on it that I told you about the other day.
The Battle of Throgs Neck, or Throg’s Point, or a number of other names, was part of a move intended to trap Washington’s forces through flanking them from the north while Washington concentrated on the troops already in front of him on Manhattan Island.
Washington did anticipate that this might happen, and sent American troops that way, but part of the problem that he had was that there were so many possibilities, and he just couldn’t cover them all. So he took a little gamble in sending his numbers to different places and hoping it would be enough.
In the case of Throgs Neck, it was 4000 British troops against 750 Americans, but they handled it in a clever way. They managed to contain the British advance by taking advantage of the local geography, forcing the British to retreat. But this only meant that they’d regroup and try again somewhere else. This led to the Battle of Pell’s Point, of which this battle is usually considered a part, or just a prelude.
As Mike will explain to you in a few days, the Battle of Pell’s Point is technically a British victory, but it also had a separate function that breaks well for the American side.
The Battle of Valcour Island didn’t really take place on the island; rather it was in Valcour Bay, a strait between New York and Valcour Island, in Lake Champlain.
After the failed invasion of Quebec the Continental forces retreated south to Fort Ticonderoga, at the south end of Lake Champlain. As they retreated they destroyed materiel they couldn’t use and left it behind in the relatively shallow, relatively narrow lake. This made navigating the lake tough for the British, so they took their time to get more reliable ships to assist with their next move.
That turned out to be a mistake.
As both sides prepared for the next conflict, the Americans scouted the lake and determined that they could effectively steer the British ships into Valcour Bay, where they would have ships waiting to fight them off. In addition, the wind was blowing the “wrong” way for British navigation, making things even tougher. Some British ships actually ran aground near the island but the battle itself was pretty brutal, with ships on both sides being badly hit. One British vessel’s powder magazine was struck and the entire ship exploded.
In the long run, however, darkness began to fall and both sides backed off. The Americans retreated, and the British basically stopped their attack largely because they were getting low on ammunition.
Benedict Arnold realized that Crown Point was no longer a viable defense point, so he destroyed and abandoned the fort, moving the forces to Ticonderoga. The next day, the British took Crown Point and remained there for about two weeks. Unfortunately, cold weather was already settling in and the decision was made to winter back up in Canada.
Remember when I said that taking their time was a mistake? Had they acted more quickly, they’d have beaten the weather AND caught the Americans by surprise. General Carleton and other officers recognized this in hindsight. Hessian commander Baron Riedesel noted, “If we could have begun our expedition four weeks earlier, I am satisfied that everything could have ended this year.”
And in a weird way, this battle was the catalyst for Benedict Arnold turning against the Americans. He’d lost a lot of personal papers during the battle, and when he requested compensation for some of his expenses in and following Quebec, he couldn’t provide documentation. He’d already been secretly negotiating with the British to change alliances (this would have been in late 1779), but that incident pushed him into resigning his command in order to be transferred to West Point, which he’d planned to surrender to the British.
Fortunately his plot was discovered and he fled to New York City, which was still occupied by the British. Eventually he got passage for himself and his family to England. He never set foot in the United States again.
The town created by Henry Shultz turned out to be as ephemeral as the man himself.
Don’t go looking for Hamburg, South Carolina, because you’ll be sorely disappointed. At best what remains is a ghost town, unoccupied since 1929 after several floods came through. Perhaps the most notable one was in 1911, after which nearby cities built levees to protect themselves, but there wasn’t enough of Hamburg remaining at that point to bother building one there.
For all that, Hamburg was a very big deal in Henry Shultz’ day. It was a little bit of a spite project on his part, meant specifically to compete with Augusta, Georgia, on the other side of the Savannah River. And for a long while it did quite well, largely because it was the terminus of a railroad line. But further expansions of the railroads and the completion of the Augusta Canal added up to a big drop in cargo passing through, and that was the beginning of the end.
If you visit North Augusta, you can see a road bridge across the river, which is in the same place as the bridge Mike discusses in the episode. Parallel to that bridge you’ll see some broken piers, which are remnants of the South Carolina Rail Road, which operated in that area until 1908.
![Cover art for October 15, 1776: Map of New York I[sland], with the adjacent Rocks and other remarkable Parts of Hell-Gate, map by Thomas Kitchin, Sr, Hydrographer to King Charles III, April 1778. via New York Public Library.](https://250andcounting.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/1776-10-15-cover-1024x1024.jpg)
