General Sullivan dealt with an equally hellish situation as his 3,500 men tried to prevent any British advance beyond the densely wooded Heights of Guana. The Americans were stretched perilously thin along a defensive line that extended for miles. An enormous number of Hessian soldiers suddenly scrambled up the slope toward them. When Sullivan tried to retreat, he discovered that British soldiers had encircled his men amid ferocious blasts of gunfire. Thousands of terrified Americans, lacking bayonets to defend themselves, tried to straggle back toward Brooklyn Heights across a blood-drenched plain. The Hessians, reacting with slashing brutality, bayoneted many men to death and impaled some captives against trees. Of this outright butchery, one British officer commented: “We were greatly shocked by the massacres made by the Hessians and Highlanders after victory was decided.”¹⁵ This was the American bloodbath the British had long envisioned, in which colonial yokels were properly vanquished by their betters. Facing an orgy of retribution, American prisoners were turned into slave labor. “As long as we had no horses,” said one Hessian, “the prisoners were harnessed in front of the cannon.”¹⁶

The main reason for this slaughter was the success of the eastern flanking movement along the Jamaica Pass. Marching silently by night, Howe, Clinton, and Cornwallis led ten thousand men in a column two miles long through the gaping hole in patriot defenses. So egregious was the security lapse that the British encountered only five mounted militia officers at the pass, allowing them to sneak up behind the unsuspecting Stirling and Sullivan. The American death toll for the Battle of Brooklyn (or Battle of Long Island) was grim: three hundred killed and another thousand taken prisoner, including, temporarily, Generals Stirling and Sullivan. For Washington, it had been an unmitigated disaster. As Douglas Southall Freeman concluded, “The American Commander-in-Chief had appeared to be a tyro, a bungler as well as a beginner, in comparison with the English General.”¹⁷ John Adams summed up the case succinctly: “In general, our generals have been outgeneralled.”¹⁸ During this agonizing day, the commander in chief had been reduced to a helpless spectator of the carnage.

If George Washington stared into the abyss at any single moment of the war, it must have been as he contemplated the vast British force arrayed below him, poised to shatter his army forever. Luckily, General Howe didn’t press his advantage and withdrew his men from cannon range, even though his troops scented blood and “it required repeated orders to prevail on them to desist.”¹⁹ Howe feared that the casualties would have been too high to justify a charge against the American fortress. As he explained, if the troops had “been permitted to go on, it is my opinion they would have carried the redoubt, but . . . I would not risk the loss that might have been sustained in the assault.”²⁰

The Howe brothers imagined that they could now deliver the coup de grâce to Washington by slipping warships behind him in the East River, catching him in a vise between royal sailors and soldiers. Once again the weather rescued Washington. On August 28 a chill drizzle descended steadily on Brooklyn, soaking already-soggy ground. Since many American soldiers lacked tents, they had difficulty keeping clothes and munitions dry. The next day grew even darker and wetter as Washington, riding among his men and peering through the mist, saw that British troops had inched forward overnight, digging trenches to within six hundred yards of his outermost position. His army was being slowly, insidiously, trapped by the enemy. He found his men sick, bedraggled, and badly demoralized, “dispirited by their incessant duty and watching.”²¹ The men assigned to trench duty stood waist-deep in pools of water—a sight that surely reminded Washington of Fort Necessity—and the mood was scarcely relieved by the incessant roar of British cannon pummeling American positions.

From a military standpoint, Washington stood in an untenable position, and not only because ships might entrap him from behind. If Howe now lurched toward a thinly guarded Manhattan, Washington would not be able to save the troops there. He had to do something daring. On August 29, at four P.M., he ordered his generals to attend a war council at a Brooklyn Heights house called Four Chimneys with a superlative vista of New York Harbor. They voted unanimously to take advantage of the lull in fighting to withdraw from Brooklyn to Manhattan. After days of dithering, with his back to the wall, Washington was now crisply decisive. Though one-fourth of his men were sick, he wanted to evacuate the entire American army of 9,500 men across the East River that night, winding up the operation by dawn. He was willing to wager everything on this operation, perhaps because he had no other choice. Leaving nothing to chance, he decided that his troops would be kept ignorant and told only that they were changing positions.

In a prodigious effort, operating on his last reserves of energy, Washington pushed himself past the point of exhaustion and personally led the evacuation. He would later claim that, for forty-eight hours, he scarcely dismounted from his horse or shut his weary eyes. He now trusted his intuitions, as if a powerful survival instinct simplified everything. Earlier in the day he had perpetrated an excellent hoax to prepare for the operation. On the pretense of bringing over fresh troops from New Jersey, he had instructed General Heath to collect boats of every description that he could find. Now, right after dark, the Continental Army lined up to begin its silent retreat across the water. Washington himself, an indomitable presence, presided at the ferry landing. At first the crossing was impeded by rough winds, and only rowboats could be used, their oars covered with cloth to mute sounds. Then winds rose from the southeast, and sailboats could be used as the river turned smooth as glass. In another piece of deceptive theater, Washington kept campfires going in Brooklyn Heights to conceal the evacuation. He maintained such strict secrecy that only general officers knew the scope of the undertaking. Since nobody could speak, the soldiers moved like ghostly sleepwalkers in a pantomime. “We were strictly enjoined not to speak, or even cough,” wrote Private Joseph Plumb Martin.²² Although Washington tried to remove all possible supplies, the wheels of the heaviest cannon got stuck in thick mud, and this ordnance had to be discarded.

Even at its narrowest point (close to the current Brooklyn Bridge), the East River was a mile wide and notorious for treacherous currents. The Continental Army was exceedingly fortunate to enjoy the services of Colonel John Glover, a ship captain from Marblehead, who led a regiment of seamen, including several free blacks, from the Massachusetts fishing ports. A small, brawny man with a broad, square face and wild red hair, Glover had been a fiery political radical. The uniforms his men wore evoked sailors’ costumes: blue coats, white caps, and canvas breeches treated to make them waterproof. As they ferried soldiers across the river, these mariners piloted assorted small craft against brisk winds under a moonless sky. Some of them crossed a dozen times that night. The boats, often dangerously overloaded, sat only inches above the waterline. Amazingly enough, as these shadowy shapes glided through the night, the dozing British Army had no idea of this hectic activity.

For George Washington, patrolling the shore on horseback, it was a night of appalling tension. The one real blunder revealed the almost insupportable pressure he endured. He had assigned Colonel Edward Hand to defend the Brooklyn Heights ramparts until the last moment. General Mifflin gave Hand premature orders to come forward with his men to the ferry stop, and Washington was horrified to encounter them on the darkened road. At that moment, when Mifflin galloped up, Washington exploded in wrath. “Good God! General Mifflin, I am afraid you have ruined us!” he hissed in the dark. He labeled Mifflin’s order a “dreadful mistake,” said there was still “much confusion at the ferry,” and told Hand to return at once to the bluff.²³