The Maryland 400: An Hour Bought With Blood

During the rout at the Battle of Long Island on August 27, 1776, a force of Maryland soldiers, most experiencing real combat for the first time, repeatedly charged a fortified British position to prevent the British from cutting off the retreat of Washington's main army. Their commander, Major Mordecai Gist, wrote to Maryland's government four days later with a company-by-company count of the dead, wounded, and missing. The unit's actions bought the rest of the army the time it needed to reach the safety of Brooklyn Heights. The popular name for this action, the Maryland 400, was not used during the war itself. It was coined nearly 120 years later, in 1895, when a monument to the unit was dedicated in Brooklyn.

As the British flanking column under Cornwallis and Clinton swept around the American left through the undefended Jamaica Pass, the American forces under Major General William Alexander, known by his self-claimed title Lord Stirling, found themselves at risk of complete encirclement. Stirling ordered most of his command to retreat across Gowanus Creek toward the safety of Brooklyn Heights, but a force of Maryland troops under Major Mordecai Gist remained behind as a rearguard, tasked with holding a British position at the Vechte-Cortelyou House, a stone Dutch farmhouse, long enough for the rest of the army to escape.

Stirling and Gist led the Marylanders in repeated assaults against the fortified house, held by British troops with artillery support and outnumbering the Americans several times over. A corporal in the unit, William McMillan, recorded what the fighting looked like from inside the ranks.

McMillan and 50 to 60 of his remaining comrades, including his own brother, were eventually surrounded and surrendered. Roughly 80 percent of his company alone was killed or captured in the assault.

Gist himself survived and made it back to American lines with a small group of survivors. He wrote to Maryland's authorities on August 30, 1776, just four days after the battle, with a precise accounting of the losses by company.

Colonel William Smallwood, the regiment's overall commander who had not been present during the battle itself, compiled a more complete casualty list weeks later in a letter to Matthew Tilghman, president of Maryland's Council of Safety, dated October 12, 1776. That letter, held at the Maryland State Archives and transcribed in the published Journal and Correspondence of the Maryland Council of Safety, gives a total of 256 killed and missing, though Smallwood's original enclosed list of names has since been lost, meaning no complete roster of the dead survives today.

A Delaware officer who fought alongside the Marylanders that day, Colonel John Haslet, credited their action directly in his own report: the spirited attack made by Smallwood's battalion at the time the Delaware troops and themselves were retreating greatly facilitated the escape of both regiments.

The Maryland rearguard's repeated charges, sustained for close to an hour against overwhelming odds, held the British advance at the Old Stone House long enough for the rest of Stirling's command and the broader American army to reach Brooklyn Heights rather than being captured or destroyed in the open. Stirling himself, refusing to surrender to the British directly, fought his way to Hessian lines and surrendered to them instead. Fewer than a dozen of the Marylanders who made the final charges made it back to American lines unharmed. The survivors and the reconstituted Maryland Line went on to fight at Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, and Germantown, earning a reputation for discipline and reliability that Washington relied on repeatedly for the remainder of the war, a reputation that gave Maryland its enduring nickname, the Old Line State.