Washington was on the brink of retreating from New York City, but he was getting pushback from some of his generals regarding how it should be done.
Fortunately for him, this Gordian Knot was cut by a letter arriving from John Hancock on behalf of the Continental Congress.
Nathanael Green and William Heath weren’t necessarily in agreement with Hancock’s recommendations, but orders are orders and everyone prepared to move out based on those.
But about a week later, something happened to render part of those orders moot.
…but the situation was not excellent, for the American side, anyway.
George Washington got a wake-up call in the form of a letter from Congress. In that letter he was told that it was not a good idea to burn down New York City; what’s more, they weren’t quite so invested in his holding the City as he thought they were. This was a good news/bad news situation for him, since he knew that strategically, the British occupying New York had the potential to be a huge problem, especially if they were able to take the entire Hudson Valley.
But even if they didn’t, having one of our biggest and busiest ports was going to create a lot of headaches, regardless of what was supposed to be moving in or out of the city.
Meanwhile, we have Ezra Lee making his first attempt at genuinely deploying the Turtle submersible. The currents plus the darkness made maneuvering very difficult, and while he did get close enough to Admiral Howe’s ship to stick the explosive charge to it, the spear he used couldn’t penetrate the hull enough to stick. In recent years it’s thought that he tried to pierce the hull near the rudder, which had an iron plate on it; another theory involved the recent use of copper on ships’ bottoms, but this copper was quite thin and would have been easily pierced.
Lee made one more attempt with the Turtle, on October 6, but that try also failed. The Turtle was lost less than a week later when the sloop serving as her tender was sunk by British ships. Who knows? Maybe there are still pieces of her in the Hudson River.
The American Army has evacuated Brooklyn. Reports are coming in from all over that the Loyalists are being rather sore winners over the event. Refugees are coming into Connecticut from across the Long Island Sound. George Washington, literally the last man out of Brooklyn, is trying to figure out his next move, and that of the British.
Nathanael Greene, who missed the Battle of Long Island because he’d been seriously ill, finally returns to duty. At last, some good news for General Washington! And maybe some sage advice regarding what should be done next to preserve New York City!
And Greene tells him to get out of town. There’s no way that you can hold a place like New York City if you can’t control the shoreline across the East River, no more than a few hundred feet away.
Washington doesn’t think this is a good idea, partially because he thinks New York is more important to the Continental Congress than it actually is. But Greene has another idea, which we’ll get into in a couple of days.
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.
