The Battle of Long Island, fought August 27, 1776, was the largest battle of the Revolutionary War in troops engaged, and it came within days of becoming a catastrophic American defeat. Washington's forces were nearly surrounded and trapped against the East River. Only a night retreat, executed in near total secrecy, saved the army. The council of war that decided on retreat left an actual signed record. So does a letter written days before the battle describing how desperately unprepared the army was, and a British general's own account of the engagement sent to London.
After the British evacuated Boston in March 1776, Washington correctly guessed New York would be their next target. He marched roughly 19,000 soldiers to Manhattan and fortified positions across the harbor, including Brooklyn Heights on Long Island. In early July, a British fleet of 400 ships carrying 32,000 troops under General William Howe arrived at Staten Island, the largest expeditionary force Britain had ever sent overseas. Just before the battle, Joseph Reed, serving as Washington's adjutant general, wrote urgently to New Jersey's Provincial Congress at Washington's direct request.
Genl. Howe is arrived at the Hook with a very large Force. It would be too dangerous a Secret to intrust to a Letter to mention how inadequate our Army is to encounter it.
On August 27, British forces executed a flanking march through the Jamaica Pass, a route American commanders had left lightly guarded, and struck the American defenses from behind while a frontal assault pinned them in place. The American line collapsed. A contemporary map published in London that same year carried, printed directly in its margin, an extract of General Howe's own official report of the battle to his superior, Lord George Germain.
Howe's report, as reproduced on the map, described the action as a decisive British success, with American forces driven from their positions and pursued to their fortified lines at Brooklyn. The map itself, drawn by William Faden, is held at the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division.
With his army pinned against the East River and the British digging siege lines closer each day, Washington convened a council of war on August 29. The decision reached that night, to evacuate the entire army across the river to Manhattan under cover of darkness, survives as a signed document listing the reasoning of Washington's general officers.
In such a situation we should have been reduced to the alternative of desperately attempting to cut our way through a vastly superior enemy with certain loss of a valuable stock of artillery and artillery stores, which the continent has been collecting with great pains; or by famine and fatigue have been made an easy prey to the enemy. In either case the campaign would have ended in the total ruin of our army.
Over the night of August 29 into the morning of August 30, roughly 9,000 Continental troops were rowed across the East River to Manhattan in near total silence, their boats muffled, campfires left burning to deceive British sentries. A fog settled over the river as the last boats crossed at dawn, concealing the final withdrawal. By the time the British realized what had happened, the American army was gone.
News of the defeat reached London to celebration, bells rung and candles lit across the city, and King George III awarded Howe the Order of the Bath. Washington's own reputation as a military commander suffered. But the army survived intact to fight again, and the retreat itself, executed without the loss of a single soldier in the crossing, was recognized even by contemporaries as a remarkable feat of discipline under the worst possible conditions.
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