Fort Lee: The Cliff Where Washington Ran
New York
The Palisades cliffs above the Hudson River, right here at Fort Lee, are where George Washington watched his revolution unravel and then somehow managed to hold it together. This park preserves the site of the fortification the Americans called Fort Constitution and later Fort Lee, built in the summer of seventeen seventy-six as part of a two-fort strategy to block British ships from sailing up the Hudson River.
Fort Lee sat on the New Jersey cliffs; Fort Washington stood directly across the river on the Manhattan side. Together, they were supposed to create a crossfire that no British fleet could survive. The theory was sound. The execution was not.
When Fort Washington fell to a massive British and Hessian assault on November sixteenth, seventeen seventy-six, Fort Lee was suddenly exposed and indefensible. Four days later, on November twentieth, a British force under Lord Cornwallis made a pre-dawn crossing of the Hudson and scaled the Palisades above the fort in a lightning move that threatened to trap Washington and his entire remaining army. Washington and General Nathanael Greene ordered an immediate retreat, abandoning tents, cannon, food, and supplies that the American army could not afford to lose.
Thomas Paine, who was present as an aide to General Greene, wrote about this retreat in the first of his Crisis pamphlets, the essay that opens with the line: "These are the times that try men's souls." The flight from Fort Lee across New Jersey was, Paine admitted, a desperate rout. But it was also the beginning of something. Washington's army crossed the Delaware on Christmas night, surprised the Hessians at Trenton, and then marched to Princeton. Two small but decisive victories reversed the momentum of the entire war.
Today the park sits on the cliff edge with a reconstructed encampment and a visitor center. The view across the river, past the George Washington Bridge to the Manhattan bluffs where Fort Washington once stood, makes the geometry of that November catastrophe immediately legible.
