One fine Thursday morning in August of 1776, about 4000 British troops, led by General Henry Clinton and General George Cornwallis, landed at Gravesend Bay in Brooklyn. By the end of the day, their number had swelled to over 16,000.
George Washington’s problem was that he only heard about the initial 4000 later that day and decided that his guess regarding any invasion of Brooklyn was little more than a feint. Washington was no fool, but he was definitely wrong about this one.
It’s been coming for at least two months, and the Battle of Long Island has finally begun.
As we’ve noted a few times the past couple of days, George Washington had to make a few educated guesses about what the British were planning to do, but this left his troops thinly spread throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan, which left the Continental Army at a big disadvantage.
While numerous skirmishes have broken out up and down the coast between the British and American militia forces from time to time, this was Washington’s first major tangle with the British Army. That it didn’t go so great wasn’t his fault; that it didn’t go as badly as it could have is entirely his doing, as we’ll learn in a few days.
The reason that this portrait—and most of the others—of Rufus Putnam is in profile is that, when he was a child, one of his eyes was disfigured in an accident, giving it a, “outward, oblique cast.”
Putnam joined the Revolutionary War effort the very first day, after the battle at Lexington and Concord. During the Siege of Boston, Putnam directed efforts to fortify Dorchester Heights. Part of what had the British so flummoxed about that wasn’t that he did a good job (though he did), it was that he managed to get it all up and in place so fast.
Rufus Putnam worked his way up through the ranks quickly, so that by the time he was in New York, he was a colonel and designated an engineer.
But in December 1776, when the Continental Congress rejected his proposition to establish a national corps of engineers, Putnam resigned his commission. His resignation was short-lived and he eventually joined the Continental Army and served under Major General Horatio Gates. Putnam commanded two regiments in the battle of Saratoga.
He continued to work on critical fortifications, including Fort Putnam at West Point in 1778. In 1779 Putnam served under Major General Anthony Wayne in the Corps of Light Infantry following the capture of Stony Point, commanding the 4th Regiment. Putnam’s remaining military career was less eventful. In January 1783 he was commissioned as brigadier general.
After the war, Putnam returned to Massachusetts and returned to his original work as a surveyor. But a few years later, in 1788, Putnam led a group of veterans to settle land in the west, where they established what we now call Marietta, Ohio, the first European-American permanent United States settlement in the Northwest Territory. Putnam was appointed to serve as one of three judges of the Northwest Territory after Samuel Holden Parsons died. Marietta was settled on land that the local natives considered theirs, and it took a couple of years for the Ohio Brigade (with Putnam in the lead) to beat them back.
As Ohio residents organized to write a constitution and be admitted as a state, in 1802 Putnam was elected a Washington county delegate to the Ohio Constitutional Convention.
Putnam died on May 4, 1824, and was buried at Mound Cemetery in Marietta, Ohio.
Samuel Dunbar was born in Boston on October 2, 1704. When he was 4, his father died. At a very early age he attracted the attention of the Reverend Cotton Mather.
With Mather’s guidance, Dunbar attended Boston Latin School and Harvard College. In 1727, the people of Canton reached out and sent letters of inquiry asking that the 23 year old accept a ministry over the Church of Christ in Stoughton.
Dunbar was a Loyalist, much like nearly everyone else in New England in the mid-1700s, but as time went by he began to support Patriot causes. He was present at the meeting that brought about the Suffolk Resolves, and it was said that he opened that meeting with “the most extraordinary liberty prayer” ever heard.
So it makes sense that Dunbar was the first minister to read the Declaration from the pulpit.
Ever the polite man, George Washington strongly urged (rather than ordered) civilians to evacuate Manhattan before the British began their attack.
Washington’s biggest problem was that he knew that the British were coming, but he had no idea how they were going to do it, given that Manhattan is an island, and while Brooklyn is not (its location at the west end of Long Island notwithstanding; work with me a little here), it’s still got a lot of coastline to defend. So even if Washington had a number of troops similar to the Howes, they’d likely be stretched a little thin. With slightly more than half the British strength, he’s definitely stretching thin.
So to evacuate Manhattan was the smartest move, since there was practically no way he could defend the land and the people living on it. The best he could do it say “please go, and with any luck you’ll be back before you know it.”
Unfortunately, “before you know it”, in this case, meant “not until 1783.”
We’ve visited Esek Hopkins in the past, when we told you about the transgressions he committed that led to today’s activity.
To be fair, when Hopkins chose to engage in the raid on Nassau, the reaction in Congress was mixed, especially at first. John Hancock was happy that the Continental Navy had seized badly-needed war supplies from the British, but members from the Southern colonies were upset by this failure to follow orders. The whole situation became politically quite complex. Part of the problem was that privateers were easier to hire than Continental Navy sailors, and here we had a guy behaving like a privateer. This could only make the problem harder to solve, because privateers wound up getting paid more.
The debate went on for several weeks, with John Adams, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Richard Henry Lee, Robert Treat Paine, and John Paul Jones (who was at Nassau) coming to the defense of Hopkins. Regardless, in the end he was formally censured. In the long run it wound up worse than if he’d simply lost his command, because he had to return to his ship disgraced and with the respect of his officers lost.
Nathanael Greene was among the first to step up when the shooting started at Lexington and Concord. This is almost certainly because a British official seized a vessel owned by Greene and his brothers.
After the Intolerable Acts were enacted in 1774, Greene organized a militia unit called the “Kentish Guards.” Despite his leadership, he was not selected as an officer in that militia because he had a limp he’d acquired in childhood (there are no records extant showing why this was the case.)
However, when the war broke out, Greene was selected to lead the Rhode Island Army of Observation and head to Boston. That company was involved with the battle at Bunker Hill but Greene wasn’t there for it; he was visiting home at the time.
Later that month, the Continental Army was established, and he became Brigadier General Nathanael Greene. Greene remained with the Boston-based forces after the siege of that city ended, but he rejoined Washington shortly thereafter in New York. As we note in today’s episode, Greene was ill with a severe fever when the Battle of Long Island broke out, but he was able to take command for the Battle of Harlem Heights in September, during the withdrawal from Manhattan. We’ll talk about that more in a few weeks.
George Washington’s means for maintaining motivation in the Continental Army came from two directions: discipline and stirring rhetoric as a means of providing the troops with something to rally for.
And his Orders of the Day for this day seem to be focused simultaneously on both.
As noted elsewhere, Washington could be a stickler for protocol, and it shows in his Orders of the Day, which were usually written in the third person. But there was also some room—not a lot, but some—for a little floridness in his writing. For example, here’s an excerpt from today’s orders:
The Honorable Continental Congress having been pleased to allow a Chaplain to each Regiment, with the pay of Thirty-three Dollars and one third per month—The Colonels or commanding officers of each regiment are directed to procure Chaplains accordingly; persons of good Characters and exemplary lives—To see that all inferior officers and soldiers pay them a suitable respect and attend carefully upon religious exercises: The blessing and protection of Heaven are at all times necessary but especially so in times of public distress and danger—The General hopes and trusts, that every officer, and man, will endeavour so to live, and act, as becomes a Christian Soldier defending the dearest Rights and Liberties of his country.
In other words, God is here, we’re paying for him to be here, and God is someone you really don’t want to annoy, so get it together, please.
The idea to have a flying camp at all belonged to Geroge Washington. He knew that he was going to be facing huge numbers of British soldiers soon, and he proposed having a mobile unit that could show up wherever they were needed.
While the soldiers came from three specific states, they were intended to be our first national force, with no specific state basis. Thus, they were recognized as “First Battalion,” “Second Battalion” and so on rather than “Burrell’s Connecticut Regiment” or “Pennsylvania Second Battalion”. That said, because there were specific quotas from each state, the various groups tended to have soldiers from those states and could still be identified as such.
These men were largely able to focus on the defense of New Jersey while the main Continental Army spent its time in New York. However, several men from Maryland and Delaware were assigned to fight in Brooklyn Heights when the Battle of Long Island broke out, and most of them lost their lives. They did, however, manage to prevent the capture of most of Washington’s army, but it could be viewed as a Pyrrhic victory.
