defence, and even the loss, of New York, as an incident of a campaign, were very different from an effort to wrest the city from the grasp of a British garrison, under cover of yawning broadsides.
History is replete with facts to show how hopefully men will seek to regain lost positions, when an original capture would have been deemed utterly hopeless. Poland wellnigh remained a smothered nationality through an inspiration, which never could have been evoked, in a plan to seize from the Russian domain a grand estate, upon which to establish an original Poland.
To have held but to have lost New York, would simply show the defects of the defence, and the margin wanting in ability to retain, while no less suggesting how, in turn, it might be regained, at the right time, by adequate means and methods. The occupation and defence of Brooklyn Heights was the chief element of value in this direction. It not only combined the general protection of the city and post, in connection with the works upon Governor's Island, but to have neglected either would have admitted an inability to retain either.
British troops at Brooklyn would command New York. American troops at Brooklyn presented the young nation in the attitude of guarding the outer doorway of its freshly-asserted independence. It put the British to the defensive, and compelled them to risk the landing of a large army, after a protracted ocean voyage, before they could gain a footing and measure strength with the colonists. It does not lessen our estimate of the skill of Washington to know that Congress failed to supply adequate forces; but he made wise estimates, and had reason to expect a prompt response to his requisitions.
That episode at Breed's Hill, which tested the value of even a light cover for keen sharpshooters, had so warned Howe of the courage of his enemy that the garrison of Bunker Hill had never worried Putnam's little redoubt across the Charlestown Isthmus; neither had the troops at Boston ever assailed, with success, the thin circumvallation which protected the besiegers.
At Brooklyn, Washington established ranges for firing-parties, so that the rifle could be intelligently and effectively used, as the British might, in turn, approach the danger line. All these preparations, although impaired by the illness and absence of General Greene, had been so well devised, that even after General Howe gained the rear of Sullivan and Stirling and captured both, he halted before the entrenchments and resorted to regular approaches rather than venture an assault.
If that portion of the proper garrison of New York which had been sent to Canada, to waste from disease and fill six thousand graves, had been available at New York, they might have made of Jamaica Ridge and Prospect Hill a British Golgotha before the lines of Brooklyn.
If we conceive of an invasion of New York to-day, other than by some devastating fleet, we can at once see that the whole outline of defence as proposed by Washington, until he ordered the retreat, was characteristic of his wisdom and his settled purpose to resist a landing, fight at every ridge, yield only to compulsion, enure his men to face fire, and "make every British advance as costly as possible to the enemy."
The summary is briefly this: There was an universal revolt of the colonies, and a fixed purpose to achieve and maintain independence. There was,
