War in the Streets - reenactment of key Revolutionary battle in New York, New York - Brief Article

National Review, Oct 11, 1999 by Richard Brookhiser

When you think of the American Revolution, you think of Boston, Philadelphia, or other ye olde cities. But New York was where President Washington was first inaugurated, and it was also where General Washington suffered his most crushing defeat. The fight for New York occurred as the summer of 1776 turned to fall, and 223 years later I was filming it, with Manifold Productions, for a documentary for PBS.

In July and August the British put 30,000 troops on Staten and Long islands. Washington had 19,000 troops on Manhattan and in a line south of the village of Brooklyn. The key maneuver occurred in the middle of the night of August 26-7, when the British on Long Island flanked the American left on the Flatbush Road. The spot, then a rural crossroads, is now deep in the borough of Brooklyn. We shot a stand-up on an elevated subway platform, serenaded by converging, caterpillar-like trains.

Defeat is an orphan. If Washington had had light cavalry to guard his flank; if Nathanael Greene, who had devised the American battle plan, had not been ill and left the command to underlings; if a tavern keeper had not shown the British the way . . . For whatever reason, the enemy sneaked 14,000 men behind the American line and at dawn hit it from the front and the rear.

On the left and center, there was only carnage. "The Hessians and our brave Highlanders gave no quarter," wrote one Brit, "and it was a fine sight to see with what alacrity they dispatched the Rebels with their bayonets." Only on the right did the rebels hold their own.

The right was between Third and Fifth avenues, from Sunset Park back to Park Slope. The only way out of the beleaguered position, to the American inner lines on Brooklyn Heights, was across a tidal creek (now the Gowanus Canal). But the tide was coming in, and so was the enemy.

The Gowanus Canal is a somber channel. Old chairs and sewing-machine stands poke out, coated with white gunk, like George Segal sculptures. In the depths, I saw a crab (pre-seasoned, with a battery-acid finish). What had once been turmoil is now placid post-industrial decay.

A brigade of Marylanders, under the right's commander-William Alexander, "Lord" Stirling (a New York merchant with an imaginative Scottish title)-covered the retreat of the survivors. The situation was so desperate, all they could do was attack, which they did six times. There were 400 Marylanders when the fighting began; when it ended, 256 had been killed. Watching the debacle from a hill (where there is now a bank on Atlantic Avenue) and unable to send reinforcements, Washington exclaimed, "Good God, what brave fellows I must this day lose."

The dead were buried on a Dutchman's farm. In the 1950s, their remains were found under an auto-body shop. Congress directed the Army to make the site a national cemetery, but it's still an auto body shop. The cooperative owner let us shoot the lifts and the tires. Down the block there is usually a plaque, except when vandals unscrew it for its bronze; when we filmed, there was a rectangle of plaque-shaped unfaded paint.

Washington managed to ferry his survivors to Manhattan on the night of August 29-30; burning campfires and a providential fog kept the British unaware. In 1999 amateur rowers repeated the trip in daylight, in five-oar boats. I rowed behind a lady violin-maker from Germany. We passed only one dead thing in the East River. "Jimmy Hoffa," said the cameraman.

The fighting on Long Island had cost us 500 dead, and 1,000 prisoners, though we had also shown some skill and honor. When the British landed at Kip's Bay on eastern Manhattan on September 15, there were no casualties, because this time the Americans ran.

Washington heard the opening British cannonade at his headquarters in the country house of Robert Morris, which still stands at 160th Street, east of St. Nicholas Avenue. Riding down to the scene along the Post Road, he arrived in about half an hour. Taking a cab in rush hour, we took longer. When he reached the high ground behind the American lines, at about 34th Street and Lexington Avenue, he saw chaos. "I used every means in my power to rally [the men] and to get them into some order," he wrote next day, "but my attempts were fruitless and ineffectual." "The ground was literally covered with arms, knapsacks, staves, coats, hats," wrote a (fleeing) soldier. Worse than defeat, this was dishonor; worse even than that, it was dishonor that Washington seemed powerless to avert. For a man obsessed with reputation and control, this was one of the worst moments of his life. Nathanael Greene wrote that Washington let his horse trot listlessly towards the advancing enemy, until an aide pulled him to safety.

There is not even the ghost of a plaque, where the cabs barrel down Murray Hill. There are the cathedral-less spires of the Chrysler Building to the north, and the Empire State Building to the west-the ultimate vindications of our efforts, though the tall, anguished Virginian had no inkling of them then. If memory is too much to ask of commuters-and it may be-we should at least cling to aspiration. Our striving was bought with death and despair.