Forgotten Patriots

Named after the public house where King Henry V rested after his great victory at Agincourt, the Red Lion was a small frame building close by the junction of three busy country roads on the western end of Long Island, a stone’s throw from Upper New York Bay. Martense Lane, looping through a gap in the hills that formed the island’s spine, brought travelers from Flatbush and other villages of Kings County. The Narrows Road came up the shore of the Lower Bay from Denyse’s Ferry, the link between Long Island and Staten Island. Finally, just behind the Red Lion, the Gowanus Road led back up to the village of Brooklyn, on the Heights above New York City, skirting the mill ponds and broad tidal marshes along Gowanus Creek. Five days earlier a mixed force of 20,000 British redcoats and green-coated Hessian jaegers—German mercenaries—had come ashore at Gravesend Bay, and General George Washington expected that the Gowanus Road would be one of the routes they would take to attack the American force occupying Brooklyn Heights. This morning, however, the road was full of Burd’s feckless militia.²

About halfway to the Heights, a mile or so up from the Red Lion, the stampeding Americans were corralled by a pair of energetic officers, roused from sleep by messengers and the rattle of musket fire. One was Colonel Samuel Holden Parsons, a Connecticut lawyer and militia officer recently awarded a commission in the Continental Army; the other was Colonel Samuel Atlee of Pennsylvania, a veteran of the French and Indian War who had brought a battalion of musketry from his state to help Washington defend New York City. The moon would be down soon, so it must have been getting difficult to see, but Parsons and Atlee somehow formed the frightened men into a line to screen the road.³

While they waited anxiously for the enemy to appear, General Lord Stirling, the ranking American officer in that part of Long Island, came down from the Heights with detachments of regulars from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware. By sunup, a little after five o’clock, the total number of Americans on the scene had grown from a few score to 2,100 or more. Massed just down the road from them by now were two full brigades of redcoats and at least part of the kilted Forty-second Royal Highland Regiment (the fabled Black Watch), plus a detachment of Royal Artillery and two companies of local Tories—something like 7,000 men in all, with more on the way. At their head was Major General James Grant, a tough career officer who had famously assured Parliament only the year before that Americans would “never dare to face an English army, and didn’t possess any of the qualifications necessary to make a good soldier.”⁴

The fighting resumed in earnest at around seven, as Grant funneled the first of his columns into the Gowanus Road by the Red Lion, drums beating the march step and regimental colors snapping in the bright morning air. Stirling, still getting his defenses set up, sent Atlee’s musketeers forward to delay the enemy at a spot where the road narrowed to cross a patch of marsh. Grant deployed for battle, but the Pennsylvanians held steady, braving a hail of grapeshot until Stirling pulled them back to a wooded slope near the road. For the next several hours both sides blazed away with muskets, rifles, mortars, and cannon, rarely more than 100 yards apart. “The balls and shells flew very fast, now and then taking off a head,” declared one Maryland soldier. “Our men stood it amazingly well, not even one shewed a Disposition to shrink.”

When it looked as though Grant might try to circle behind the American positions, Stirling sent Parsons to occupy a prominent hill east of the Gowanus Road, on the left flank of the American line. Parsons took several hundred men, including a part of Atlee’s battalion, and held the hill despite three ferocious assaults that left the slopes littered with enemy dead and wounded. One of Atlee’s officers boasted that the Americans had “mowed them down like grass.”⁵

It was now early afternoon, and although Atlee’s men had not slept or eaten in nearly twenty-four hours, they continued to fight tenaciously in the increasingly oppressive August heat. Then they discovered something worse than hunger or fatigue: they had fallen into a trap and were about to be surrounded. In Atlee’s words, the “Grand Body of the British Army” was not in front of them, as they originally believed, but at their backs.⁶

Only later would the Americans tumble to the fact that Grant’s move up the Gowanus Road from the Red Lion had been a diversion. So was a second thrust, spearheaded by the jaegers, who had started up the road from Flatbush to Brooklyn around nine or ten in the morning, pushing back 800 defenders under General John Sullivan of New Hampshire. The main enemy force, perhaps 14,000 strong, had actually slipped out of their Flatlands camp the night before in a long column led by General William Howe, commander-in-chief of His Majesty’s forces. Completely undetected, the enemy swung east through New Lots and up to Jamaica. By daybreak on the twenty-seventh they had come down the road from Jamaica to Brooklyn as far as Bedford and proceeded to descend on the unsuspecting Americans from behind, cutting them down almost at will. “The Hessians and our brave Highlanders gave no quarters,” gloated a British officer. “It was a fine sight to see with what alacrity they dispatched the rebels with their bayonets, after we had surrounded them so they could not resist. Multitudes were drowned and suffocated in morasses—a proper punishment for all Rebels.” One report had American riflemen spitted to trees with bayonets.⁷

From east to west, the American lines collapsed in waves of confusion and panic. Along the Gowanus Road, where Atlee and Parsons had managed to hold the British at bay for hours, organized combat degenerated into random clashes and running firefights. By early afternoon, the American army had broken into isolated parties of officers and men trying to reach the safety of the American camp in Brooklyn Heights, plunging through woods and fields to avoid enemy cavalry on the roads. A Pennsylvanian, Lieutenant James McMichael, recalled the slow destruction of his battalion as the men were driven from place to place, skirmishing with the enemy until they finally made it back to the lines at half past three, utterly spent. Eighteen-year-old Michael Graham, also from Pennsylvania, remembered “the confusion and horror of the scene. . . . Our men running in almost every direction, and run which way they would, they were almost sure to meet the British or Hessians.” Graham narrowly avoided capture by wading across a swamp. Colonel Parsons and a handful of his men fought their way past the enemy six or seven times, then hid out in heavy woods and returned to their lines at around three o’clock the following morning.⁸

Many surrendered or, disoriented and demoralized, simply dropped their weapons. Frederick Nagel, a Pennsylvania soldier then only fifteen or sixteen years old, recalled that when the enemy captured his colonel after hours of fighting, “we all fled in confusion into some briars and high grass, along a pond. About sunset the British and Hessians came upon us and took us prisoners.” Jabez Fitch, a thirty-nine-year-old lieutenant in Parsons’s Connecticut brigade, sought cover in a swamp with some companions—only to be surprised on the other side by Hessians, who let go with two heavy volleys that sent the Americans reeling back into the swamp again. Emerging a second time, close to where they had begun, they were engaged by yet another enemy force. Eventually recognizing that they were surrounded, they agreed to let every man fend for himself. Fitch went north and was soon captured by regulars of the Fifty-seventh Regiment. Later that afternoon, having survived “various Struggles, running thro’ the Fire of many of the Enemy’s detachments,” Colonel Atlee and several dozen weary men surrendered to soldiers of the Seventy-first Highland Regiment. Hessians found General Sullivan in a cornfield, waving a pistol in each hand. General Stirling, too, fell prisoner, but not before organizing a rear-guard action against redcoats now advancing down the Gowanus Road. His heroic stand at Nicholas Vechte’s stone farmhouse afforded many fleeing Americans time to reach their lines on the far side of Gowanus Creek.⁹

Surrender did not put a man out of harm’s way, however, as many Americans quickly found out. A Hessian lieutenant admitted that his troops routinely beat rebels who knelt and begged for quarter. Lieutenant Jonathan Gillett (or Gillet), a farmer from West Hartford, Connecticut, later told his wife that when he gave himself up, enemy soldiers stole his watch, buckles, and other personal possessions, then clubbed him senseless with the butts of their guns. “I never shall forget the Roberys, blows and Insults I met with as well as hunger,” he declared. The Hessians who captured Thomas Foster, a Pennsylvania rifleman, stripped him of his clothes, then “put a cord about his neck and hanged him up to the limb of a tree, where they suffered him to remain until he was almost strangled.” Eventually, they cut him down and revived him with a little rum—then strung him up again, cut him down, and strung him up a third time. He counted himself lucky to have survived this macabre sport, as the redcoats assured him that Hessians had murdered a number of Americans this way after they had thrown down their weapons. Colonel Atlee’s captors marched him off toward Bedford, showering him and a large group of other prisoners with “the most scurrilous and abusive language” and vowing they would all be hanged. On their arrival, the British provost marshal, “one Cunningham,” confined Atlee and sixteen officers in a mere soldier’s tent, so small they had no room to lie down at night.¹⁰

Also squeezed into that tent in Bedford was Lieutenant Robert Troup, a native New Yorker and recent graduate of King’s College (now Columbia University). Troup had been one of only five men assigned to watch the narrow gorge where the road from Jamaica to Bedford cut through the wooded hills of eastern Kings County—the very route, as luck would have it, that the British took to get behind the American lines. Around the same time that Grant’s redcoats charged the American pickets at the Red Lion, Troup and his party were scooped up by an advance patrol of dragoons, who rushed them off for interrogation while the main body of General Howe’s forces swept through Bedford to fall on the American rear. Howe himself threatened to hang the five prisoners, and the redcoats reportedly amused themselves by seating the Americans on coffins, draping nooses around their necks, and carting them off as if to the gallows. In January 1777, after he had been exchanged, Troup testified that throughout this terrifying ordeal, the British continually berated him and his comrades “with the grossest language” and did so—a real indignity—in the presence of common soldiers. At Bedford, the provost marshal, a British officer he too knew only as “Cunningham,” appeared in the company of “a negro with a halter . . . telling them the negro had already hung several, and that he imagined he would hang some more . . . calling them rebels, scoundrels, villains, robbers, murderers, and so forth.”¹¹

What happened to Atlee and Troup squares with Lieutenant Jabez Fitch’s version of events, laid out six months later in a 12,000-word manuscript rather awkwardly entitled “A Narative of the treatment with which the American prisoners were Used who were taken by the British & Hessian Troops on Long Island York Island &c 1776. With some occasional Observations thereon.” After surrendering, Fitch wrote, he and a large body of other prisoners were herded off to New Utrecht, passing through a gauntlet of curses and threats from enemy soldiers, while one of the army’s camp followers, a woman whose husband had been killed in that day’s fighting, pelted them with rocks. When they finally reached New Utrecht, several hundred enlisted men, some gravely wounded, were locked in a barn. Fitch and twenty-odd officers went off to a nearby farmhouse, where they spent the next two days confined to a “very durty” room. British officers came by to question them, often “with mean & low lived Isolence, Despising & Rideculing the mean appearance of many of us who had been strip’d & abused by the Savages under their comd: [command].” Not all their captors behaved this badly, to be sure. The major in charge treated them with “the greatest Civility & Complesance.” Even General Grant, despite his widely publicized contempt for Americans, presented the officers with a side of mutton and several loaves of bread. But those were the exceptions. For Fitch, captivity was above all else a revelation of inhumanity on a scale he had never imagined possible among civilized peoples. That the British and their Hessian allies could beat, rob, and even murder men who had laid down their arms was so unexpected—so bewildering—that at first he did not know what to make of it.¹²

Not two months after the Declaration of Independence, the Battle of Brooklyn—a label it acquired almost immediately—dealt the American cause a potentially fatal blow. In its first head-on test against seasoned professional soldiers, the ill-trained and poorly equipped Continental Army had been routed with ease. What remained of it by sundown on August 27 was huddled miserably on the Heights, waiting for Howe to finish the job and wondering what would become of comrades led off into captivity. Never again would Washington risk an encounter on such a scale. Without Brooklyn, moreover, he had lost any realistic hope of holding on to New York, the new nation’s largest city after Philadelphia. Whether the loss of New York would in turn end the dream of independence remained to be seen, but things looked very bad. As Major General Nathanael Greene glumly reported, “The Country is struck with a pannick.”¹³

No one was entirely certain about the number of casualties. The British may have lost as few as 63 killed and 314 wounded or missing. Of the 9,000 or so Americans pitted against them, at least 300 died, though people returning to New York City after the battle seemed to think the number was much higher. One reported that “the fields and woods [of Brooklyn] are covered with dead bodies.” So did Ambrose Serle, personal secretary to Admiral Lord Richard Howe, the general’s older brother, who toured the scene of the fighting only days later. “Putrid dead Bodies” lay everywhere, Serle noted in his journal, and residents of the village could not enter the nearby woods owing to “the Stench of the dead Bodies of the Rebels.” Apparently, the British were unable—or unwilling—to clear the battlefield of corpses, as one visitor still noticed the smell in the summer of 1777, nearly a year later.¹⁴

But by all accounts the most astonishing result of the battle was the number and quality of American captives—three generals (Stirling, Sullivan, and Nathaniel Woodhull), three colonels (including Atlee), four lieutenant colonels, two majors, nineteen captains, and a thousand or more enlisted men. One British officer, flush with victory, believed His Majesty’s forces had taken as many as 2,000 prisoners; Earl Percy thought 1,500; Ambrose Serle, 1,200. By contrast, the British netted thirty Americans at Bunker Hill in June 1775, and several hundred more after the failed attack on Québec in December of that same year. Never before, in other words, had so many Americans been taken in arms—“so many,” Serle mused, “that we are perplexed where to confine them.”¹⁵

“Perplexed,” but not for lack of experience. Thanks to the rising frequency and scale of warfare between the great powers of Europe, the detention of large numbers of enemy captives had become a predictable result of every successful campaign conducted by His Majesty’s fleets and armies—predictable enough, at any rate, that a bureaucracy of sorts was already in place to deal with them.

Decades earlier, at the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713), the Admiralty assigned the business of caring for prisoners of war, military as well as naval, to a temporary Commission for Sick and Hurt Seamen. Shortly after the “War of Jenkins’ Ear” (1739-1742) erupted with Spain, the commission became a permanent body commonly referred to as the Sick and Hurt Board. The board’s work, as well as its staff and budget, expanded significantly during the War of the Austrian Succession (1744-1748), then again during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), both of which brought thousands of French and Spanish prisoners to England for detention. When the latter conflict ended, the Sick and Hurt Board may have had as many as 40,000 enemy captives under close confinement in English jails, old castles and country houses, a converted barracks, an abandoned pottery works, and the like.¹⁶

In March 1776, expecting that he would soon capture large numbers of American insurgents, General Howe had appointed a Boston Tory named Joshua Loring as his commissary general of military prisoners. ^a Loring, who reported (in theory, anyway) to the Sick and Hurt Board in London, possessed two unbeatable qualifications for the job: a settled conviction that men who took up arms against their sovereign deserved no mercy, and a beautiful wife, to whom the general had taken a fancy (Loring “fingered the cash,” quipped the Tory historian Thomas Jones, while “the General enjoyed madam”). It was now Loring’s responsibility to arrange food and shelter for the Americans seized on Long Island. Although his task may have looked rather modest compared to the one faced by the board during the Seven Years’ War, he had to contend with the fact that Kings County was plainly unsuitable for incarcerating large numbers of prisoners.¹⁷

According to a census taken as recently as 1771, the county’s entire population barely exceeded 3,600 souls. Brooklyn, the largest village, consisted of only a few score houses and single-story wooden buildings, plus a church. Flatbush, the county seat, was even smaller. New Utrecht, Bedford, New Lots, and Gravesend were little more than rustic hamlets clinging to country lanes and wagon roads. Most of the inhabitants were fourth- or fifth-generation descendants of Dutch and Walloon colonists who came to New Netherland in the middle of the previous century, drawn by some of the most beautiful and fertile farmland on the east coast of North America. Though not caring much for the British, they remained staunchly loyal to the Crown in large measure because they had prospered under British rule, producing a good part of the grain and cattle that New York City merchants processed and shipped out to feed the slaves on West Indian sugar plantations. Along the way the Dutchmen had acquired slaves of their own—so many that by the middle of the eighteenth century, one of every three people in Kings County was black, proportionally more than any other county north of the Mason-Dixon Line. That British authorities had never hesitated to use force to suppress slave resistance and revolt gave the white master class still further reason to remain loyal.¹⁸

Hence Loring’s dilemma. He really had nowhere to put a mass of prisoners other than in the houses and barns of local farmers or the occasional church. But taking over houses and barns and churches—or pulling them down for materials to construct barracks and stockades—would play havoc with one of the most bountiful agricultural regions in America and one now certain to be a vital source of provisions for the Royal Army and Navy. It would also antagonize one of the few places in the colonies not up in arms against the king.¹⁹

Washington simplified things for Loring on the night of August 29, when he evacuated Brooklyn Heights and brought the remnants of his army back across the East River into New York City. This celebrated stroke, carried off under the very noses of an unsuspecting foe, spared the Americans a second and undoubtedly terminal confrontation with Howe. It also left the British in nominal control of Queens and Suffolk counties, which were at once placed under martial law and scoured by light horse. Several thousand male residents of the island signed a loyalty oath, swearing their “utter abhorence [sic] of congresses rebellions etc.” Others gathered their belongings and fled across Long Island Sound to Connecticut. Suffolk militiamen blustered for a while about putting up a fight, then decided they were better off at home and threw down their weapons.²⁰

But Long Island—better than 100 miles from end to end and as much as 20 wide—was far too extensive ever to be entirely pacified by the forces at the disposal of General Howe or of Brigadier General Oliver De Lancey, the Tory boss of those parts of the island not garrisoned by regulars. East of the village of Jamaica, British authority thinned out rapidly, and it was generally conceded that the residents submitted only because they had no alternative. What was more, raiding parties from Connecticut and Rhode Island were soon shuttling back and forth across Long Island Sound in whaleboats, stealing or killing livestock and kidnapping prominent supporters of the Crown. One notably aggressive young officer, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Beekman Livingston, reported to General Washington at the end of September that he had just undertaken “a little excursion upon Long Island” and returned with 3,500 head of sheep and cows from the Shinnecock Hills; give him more men and he would strike the enemy camp at Jamaica itself.²¹

Trying to detain a large quantity of prisoners in such close proximity to what was shaping up as a semi-lawless no man’s land and with every prospect of more prisoners to come was clearly asking for trouble. Staten Island, as yet the only other part of America controlled by His Majesty’s forces, did not seem safe, either, because it lay too near the rebel-controlled mainland. The rebel general Hugh Mercer led a raid on Richmond village in mid-October that underscored the danger.²²

As soon as the magnitude of the British victory at Brooklyn became apparent, Loring and Howe therefore did the only thing that made sense under the circumstances: they began transferring their prisoners from Long Island to a handful of the numerous vessels that made up the British invasion fleet. Only the most severely wounded were left behind; they remained in the Flatbush and New Utrecht churches for another six to eight weeks.

On the afternoon of August 29, in a driving rain, armed guards rounded up two dozen American officers and some 400 men in New Utrecht and marched them down to the shore, hands tied behind their backs, and loaded them into flat-bottom boats. Their destination was the Pacific, a large transport lying in the Narrows off Staten Island. Once aboard, her captain—Jabez Fitch called him “that son of perdition”—threw them into the hold with “many vile Curses & Execrations” and arranged two cannon to spray them with grapeshot if they made trouble. The Pacific’s crew meanwhile taunted them with news that Washington’s army had been destroyed, that Congress “was broak up with great Confusion,” and that “we were to be sent home to Europe in Confinement,” presumably to be tried and executed for treason.

Commissary General Loring himself showed up the next day, taking down everyone’s name and rank and chatting affably. “He treated us with Complasance,” Fitch recalled, “& gave us Encouragement of further Endulgence.” It was all just talk, however, and a day or two later the Americans were switched to the Lord Rochford, half the size of the Pacific and thus so overcrowded that more than a few officers decided to sleep under the stars on the quarterdeck. Her captain, another of those “very Sovereign & Tyranacal” Englishmen in Fitch’s lengthening gallery of rogues, promptly ran her down through the Narrows to Gravesend Bay, where she dropped anchor near three other ships—the Mentor, the Whitby, and the Argo—holding the rest of the Long Island prisoners. Four hard days later, Fitch and about ninety other officers were moved again, this time to the Mentor, captained by yet another “worthless lowlived fellow.” It dawned on Fitch that putting all the officers together on one ship would make it easier for British recruiters to lure enlisted men into the king’s service.²³

Among the officers now sharing quarters with Fitch on the Mentor was Lieutenant Robert Troup. Following his capture at the Jamaica pass, Troup had spent two nights in Bedford and was then removed to Flatbush, where he and a number of other captives passed the next week cooped up in a farmhouse. Its Dutch owner, no friend to the American cause, fed them only biscuits and a little salt pork; they survived, Troup said, only because kindhearted Hessians occasionally gave them some apples and fresh beef. More of the same followed when he and seventy or eighty American officers were marched down to Gravesend Bay and thrown aboard the Mentor. Like Fitch, he described her as a filthy, reeking cattle ship ruled by a blasphemous skipper who cursed the Americans as “a pack of rebels” and subjected them to great hardships. He forced them “to lay upon the dung and filth of the cattle without any bedding or blankets.” He allowed them each only six ounces of pork and a pint of flour per day and made them drink bilge water. He refused them soap and fresh water to bathe or wash their clothes, though they became “much afflicted with lice and other vermin”—a detail that Fitch too remarked upon. “Very few of us have been perfectly free from live Stock,” was the New Englander’s rather sardonic way of putting it.²⁴

In the month that Fitch, Troup, and their fellow officers spent together on the Mentor, they whiled away the hours comparing notes about the disastrous events of August 27 and recounting, in Fitch’s words, “the perticular Circumstances of our first being Taken, & also the various Treatment, with which we met on that occasion.” They had plenty of stories to pass around, too, some of them not much better than battlefield rumors—like the one about the Hessians who used a wounded American prisoner for target practice.²⁵

The most troubling story, however, concerned the death of General Nathaniel Woodhull, commander of the Suffolk County, New York, militia and president of the New York Provincial Congress. In his “Narative,” Fitch wrote that when enemy cavalry captured Woodhull in Jamaica, “those Bloodthirsty Savages cut & wounded him in the head, & other parts of the Body, with their Swords in a most Inhuman manner.” Troup also claimed in his affidavit that Woodhull had been murdered, but supplied additional details that he said he got directly from Woodhull. The general, Troup said, had been taken the day after the battle by a troop of light horse under the command of Captain Oliver De Lancey, Jr., son of Brigadier General De Lancey. Woodhull told Troup he had surrendered on De Lancey’s personal assurances that he would be “treated like a gentleman”—whereupon, suddenly and without provocation, De Lancey and his men proceeded to “cruelly hack and cut him” with their swords. Carried aboard the Mentor “in a shocking mangled condition,” he too slept on the bare, filthy deck. He was then moved to the New Utrecht hospital, where he received only perfunctory care and soon died of his wounds. Even if Fitch and Troup knew that some on the American side had doubts about Woodhull’s devotion to the cause (and it is difficult to imagine how they could have known), the fact remained that one of the most prominent American prisoners had been barbarously assaulted by the enemy. What then lay in store for the rest of them?²⁶