Trouble Up in Harlem

In the late 18th century, before Manhattan was enlarged by landfills, the East River’s Kips Bay reached as far inland as today’s Third Avenue at 33rd Street. There, on the morning of September 15, 1776, within three weeks of driving George Washington’s army from Brooklyn, the British landed in force, determined to reoccupy Manhattan.By midday Washington had ordered General Israel Putnam to evacuate the army from the city to Harlem Heights. A short, stocky, 58-year-old veteran of the French and Indian Wars, Putnam was nearly uneducated and knew little of logistics or strategy. But Old Put was energetic and enterprising, a natural battlefield commander, worshiped by his men for his roaring ways and “deliberate fortitude.”Within three hours, his staff had carried evacuation orders to every unit in Lower Manhattan. By 4 p.m. the army was marching north in a column straggling from what would later be 23rd Street to Chambers Street. Putnam kept them moving, galloping up and down the line, roaring at the men to keep up the pace. They marched up along a course roughly equivalent to Eighth Avenue. At what is now Columbus Circle they turned onto Bloomingdale Road (today’s Broadway as far as 105th Street) to Harlem Heights.Meanwhile, the British marched north along the East Side’s Post Road toward McGown’s Pass (on Central Park’s East Drive, west of Fifth Avenue and 106 Street), little more than the breadth of Central Park away. Washington posted Colonel William Smallwood’s Marylanders across the Post Road at 96th Street and Fifth Avenue. Largely old hunting buddies who had gone to war together, they waited for the British to come within range and then laid down heavy, accurate fire. The Redcoats, surprised to find resistance, paused before returning fire. The exchange continued until, with Putnam’s command safe, the Marylanders made an orderly withdrawal.Two days later, at dawn on September 17, Colonel Thomas Knowlton and 120 Rangers – superb fighting men, then as now – slipped down to Morningside Heights, where Columbia University, Barnard College, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine now stand. The Redcoats spotted them near a farm on 106th Street between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. British pickets fired an alarm, summoning a column of some 400 infantrymen up Bloomingdale Road.Knowlton dispersed his men along one of the farm’s stone walls and ordered his men not to show themselves or fire until the first British soldiers reached a spot on the road about 50 yards south. The Redcoats swung briskly past the mark, Knowlton gave the order, and his men let them have it.For half an hour, they shot it out, “practically face to face.” Then, with roaring drums and skirling bagpipes signaling the advance of the Royal Highland Regiment of Foot, the renowned Black Watch, kilts and all, Knowlton ordered his men to fall back, each firing in turn to cover one another’s withdrawal. As Knowlton’s men reached the area beneath the 125th Street I.R.T. station, a British bugler near Grant’s Tomb “put his horn to his lips and blew the fox hunter’s signal for the end of the chase, of a fox gone to earth.” The Americans had run away – again.Washington, a fox-hunting man, understood the insult immediately. He ordered Knowlton to take the Rangers and three rifle companies and seize the rocky rise now occupied by the General Grant Houses, near Broadway between 123rd and 124th Streets. Other American troops, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Crary, would distract the British by skirmishing in their front. Thus began the Battle of Harlem Heights, the last engagement fought between regular armed forces on the island of Manhattan.Knowlton was leading from the front, as usual, when a British marksman took him down at around 11 a.m. The Rangers launched a ferocious attack to avenge him, and Crary’s men joined in. The British fell back to a buckwheat field near Broadway between 119th and 120th streets and both sides began slugging it out. The American line stood from Riverside Church to Teachers College, just north of 120th Street. The British were about a block south, strung along 119th Street, with reinforcements dribbling in: a company of Hessian riflemen, a battalion of Hessian grenadiers, the Black Watch, and two artillery pieces.But around 2 p.m., the Americans began pushing forward again, and suddenly the Redcoats withdrew, “rather abruptly.” Some Americans, “made reckless by the sight of Highlanders and the British on the run,” chased them to 111th Street before obeying Washington’s orders to break off the engagement. Then the shooting stopped, and the rebels, realizing that for the first time in the campaign they had licked some of the world’s finest soldiers in a stand-up fight, began cheering.The pressure off, Washington withdrew his army to safety in White Plains. He returned in late November 1783, triumphant on a white horse.

Trouble Up in Harlem

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