supported them, flying in every direction. Putnam's division of about four thousand troops was still in the lower city, sure to be cut off, unless the British could be delayed. When all else fails, the commander-in-chief must in person give the example of daring. Washington presented himself to rally the fugitives and hold the advancing forces in check; but, on the appearance of a party of not more than sixty or seventy, they ran away without firing a shot, leaving him within eighty yards of the enemy. Reminded that it was in vain to withstand the British alone, he turned to guard against further disaster, and to secure Harlem Heights. As the Hessians took immediate possession of the breastworks which guarded the Boston road, near the present Lexington avenue, the brigades fled, not without loss, across woody fields to Bloomingdale. Most of Putnam's division escaped by a road very near the Hudson; its commander, heedless of the intense heat of the day, rode from post to post to call off the pickets and guards. Silliman's brigade threw itself into the redoubt of Bunker Hill, where Knox, at the head of the artillery, thought only of a gallant defence; but Aaron Burr, who was one of Putnam's aids, guided them by way of the old Monument lane to the west side of the island, where they followed the winding road now superseded by the Eighth avenue, and regained the Bloomingdale road near the present Sixtieth street. The respite which saved Putnam's division was due to Mary Lindley, the wife of Robert Murray. When the British army drew near her house on Incleberg, as Murray Hill was then called, Howe and his officers, ordering a halt, accepted her invitation to a lunch; and, by the excellence of her repast and the good-humor with which she parried Tryon's jests at her sympathy with the rebels, she whiled away two hours or more of their time, till every American regiment had escaped. The Americans left behind a few heavy cannon, and much of their baggage and stores; fifteen of them were killed; one hundred and fifty-nine were missing, chiefly wilful loiterers. The British gained the island as far as the eighth mile-stone, with but two Hessians killed and about twenty British and Hessians wounded. At night their bivouac extended from the East river near Hell-gate to the Hudson at Bloomingdale. On Harlem Heights the American fugitives, weary from having passed fifteen hours under arms, disheartened by the loss of their tents and blankets, and wet by a cold driving rain that closed the sultry day, lay on their arms with only the sky above them. The dastardly flight of the troops at Kip's bay was reported to congress by Washington; and was rebuked in a general order, menacing instant death as the punishment of cowardice on the field. Meantime, he used every method to revive the courage of his army. At two o'clock in the dark and cloudy morning of the sixteenth Silas Talbot by his orders ran down the river in a fire-brig under a fair wind, and, grappling the Renommé, set the brig on fire, escaping with his crew; the Renommé freed itself, but, with the other ships-of-war, quitted its moorings. On the same day American troops extended their left wing from Fort Washington to Harlem. As an offset to this movement, Leslie, who commanded the British advanced posts, led the second battalion of light infantry, with two battalions of Highlanders and seven field-pieces, into a wood on the hill which lies east of Bloomingdale road and overlooks Manhattanville. From this detachment two or three companies of light infantry descended into the plain, drove in an American picket, and sounded their bugles in defiance. Engaging their attention by preparations for attacking them in front, Washington ordered Major Leitch with three companies of Weedon's Virginia regiment, and Colonel Knowlton with his volunteer rangers, to prepare secretly an attack on the rear of the main detachment in the wood; and Reed, who best knew the ground, acted as their guide. Under the lead of George Clinton, the American party which engaged the light infantry in front compelled them twice to retreat, and drove them back to the force with Leslie. The Americans in pursuit clambered up the rocks, and a very brisk action ensued, which continued about two hours. Knowlton and Leitch began their attack too soon, on the flank rather than in the rear. Reed's horse was wounded under him; in a little time Leitch was brought off with three balls through his side. Soon after, Knowlton was mortally wounded; in the agonies of death, all his inquiry was if the enemy had been beaten. Notwithstanding the loss of their leaders, the men resolutely continued the engagement. Washington advanced to their support part of two Maryland regiments, with detachments of New Englanders; Putnam and Greene, as well as Tilghman and others of the general's staff, joined in the action to animate the troops, who charged with the greatest intrepidity. The British, worsted a third time, fell back into an orchard, and from thence across a hollow and up the hill which lies east of the Eighth avenue and overlooks the country far and wide. Their condition was desperate: they had lost seventy killed and two hundred and ten wounded; the Highlanders had fired their last cartridge; without speedy relief, they must certainly be cut off. The Hessian yagers were the first reinforcements that reached the hill, and were in season to share in the action, suffering a loss of one officer and seven men wounded. "Columns of English infantry, ordered at eleven to stand to their arms, were trotted about three miles, without a halt to take breath;" and the Linsing battalion was seen to draw near, while two other German battalions occupied Macgowan's pass. Washington, unwilling to risk a general action, ordered a retreat. This skirmish restored the spirit and confidence of the Americans. Their loss was about sixty killed and wounded; but among these was Knowlton, who would have been an honor to any country, and Leitch, one of Virginia's worthiest sons. Howe would never own how much he had suffered; his general orders rebuked Leslie for imprudence. The result confirmed him in his caution. The ground in front of the Americans was so difficult and so well fortified that he could not hope to carry it by storm; he therefore waited more than three weeks, partly to collect means of transportation, and partly to form redoubts across the island. During the delay, Lord Howe and his brother, on the nineteenth, in a joint declaration, going far beyond the form prepared by the solicitor-general, promised in the king's name a revision of his instructions, and his concurrence in the revision of all acts by which his subjects in the colonies might think themselves aggrieved; and, appealing from congress, they invited all well-affected subjects to a conference. The paper was disingenuous; for the instructions to the commissioners, which were kept secret, demanded as preliminary conditions grants of revenue and further changes of charters. About one o'clock in the morning of the twenty-first, more than five days after New York had been in the exclusive possession of the British, a fire chanced to break out in a small wooden public-house of low character near Whitehall slip. The weather had been hot and dry; a fresh gale was blowing from the south-west; the flames spread rapidly; and the east side of Broadway, as far as Exchange place, became a heap of ruins. The wind veering to the south-east, the fire crossed Broadway above Morris street, destroyed Trinity church and the Lutheran church, and extended to Barclay street. The flames were arrested, not so much by the English guard as by the sailors whom the admiral sent on shore. Of the four thousand tenements of the city, more than four hundred were burnt down. In his report, Howe, without the slightest ground, attributed the accident to a conspiracy. When, after the disasters on Long Island, Washington needed to know in what quarter the attack of the British was to be expected, Nathan Hale, a captain in Knowlton's regiment, a graduate of Yale college, an excellent scholar, comparatively a veteran, but three months beyond one-and-twenty yet already betrothed, volunteered to venture, under a disguise, within the British lines. Just at the moment of his return he was seized and carried before General Howe, in New York; he frankly avowed his name, rank, and purpose; and, without a trial, Howe ordered him to be executed the following morning as a spy. That night he was exposed to the insolent cruelty of his jailer. The consolation of seeing a clergyman was denied him; his request for a Bible was refused. A more humane British officer, who was deputed to superintend his execution, furnished him means to write to his mother and to a comrade in arms. On the morning of the twenty-second, as he ascended the gallows, he said: "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." The provost-marshal destroyed his letters, as if grudging his friends a knowledge of the firmness with which he had contemplated death. His countrymen never pretended that the beauty of his character should have exempted him from the penalty which the laws of war of that day imposed; they complained that the hours of his imprisonment were imbittered by barbarous harshness. The Americans kept up the system of wearing out their enemy by continual skirmishes and alarms. On the twentythird, at the glimmer of dawn, in a well-planned but unsuccessful attempt to recapture Randall's Island, Thomas Henly of Charlestown, Massachusetts, "one of the best officers in the army," lost his life. He was buried by the side of Knowlton, within the present Trinity cemetery. The prisoners of war, five hundred in number, whom Carleton had sent from Quebec on parole, were landed on the twenty-fourth from shallops at Elizabeth point. It wanted but an hour or two of midnight; the moon, nearly full, shone cloudlessly; Morgan, as he sprung from the bow of the boat, fell on the earth as if to clasp it, and cried: "O my country!" They all ran a race to Elizabethtown, where, too happy to sleep, they passed the night in singing, dancing, screaming, and raising the Indian halloo from excess of joy. Washington hastened Morgan's exchange, and recommended his promotion. After the commander-in-chief, he was the best officer whom Virginia sent into the field. Seemingly irreconcilable differences of opinion delayed the continental congress in the work of confederation; Edward Rutledge despaired of success, except through a special convention of the states, chosen for this purpose alone. On the seventeenth, after many weeks of deliberation, the members of congress adopted an elaborate plan of treaty to be proposed to France. They wished France to engage in a separate war with Great Britain, and by this diversion to leave America the opportunity of establishing her independence. They were willing to assure to Spain freedom from molestation in its territories; they renounced in favor of France all eventual conquests in the West Indies; but they claimed the sole right of acquiring British continental America, the Bermudas, Cape Breton, and Newfoundland. The king of France might retain his exclusive rights in Newfoundland, as recognised by England in the treaty of 1763; but his subjects VOL. V.-4 |