Battle of Fort Washington: The Worst Day of the Revolution

The high ground of northern Manhattan, near where the George Washington Bridge now anchors its American tower, was in seventeen seventy-six the site of a catastrophe that nearly ended the American Revolution before it had properly begun.

After a string of battlefield disasters that summer, the Continental Army had been pushed off Long Island and out of most of Manhattan. General Washington left a garrison of roughly three thousand men behind at Fort Washington, a fortification on the island's highest point, believing it might delay the British advance up the Hudson River. It was one of the worst decisions of his military career.

On November sixteenth, seventeen seventy-six, a combined British and Hessian force of eight thousand soldiers attacked from multiple directions simultaneously. Four thousand Hessian mercenaries under General Wilhelm von Knyphausen drove up from the north while Redcoats pressed from the south and east. The Americans fought back hard, repulsing two Hessian charges and inflicting heavy casualties on the attackers. But the fort was surrounded by land and water, there was no escape route, and by afternoon the position was hopeless.

Colonel Robert Magaw, the garrison commander, had declared the previous day that he was "determined to defend this post to the last." He surrendered instead. Fifty-nine Americans were killed in the fighting. Nearly three thousand were taken prisoner, making it one of the largest captures of American soldiers in the entire war.

The prisoners fared terribly. The British confined most of them to overcrowded ships anchored in New York Harbor, vessels so foul with disease and starvation that they became a death sentence in wood and tar. Of the nearly three thousand men taken at Fort Washington, fewer than eight hundred survived long enough to be released in a prisoner exchange eighteen months later. Nearly three-quarters of the captured garrison died in captivity.

The fall of Fort Washington sent Washington's army fleeing across New Jersey in a retreat that looked, to many observers, like the final collapse of the American cause. It was only the surprise crossing of the Delaware on Christmas night seventeen seventy-six, the attack on the Hessians at Trenton, and a second victory at Princeton that kept the Revolution alive.