British army at Flatbush. Major-General Grant commanded the left wing,
which extended to the coast, and the greater part of the forces under
General Clinton. Earl Percy and Lord Cornwallis turned short to the
right, and approached the opposite coast of Flatland.
On the night previous to the action, General Clinton was successful in
seizing a pass through the heights, leading into the level country
between them and Brooklyn. Before this movement was completed, General
Grant advanced along the coast, at the head of the left wing, with ten
pieces of cannon. As his first object was to draw the attention of the
Americans from their left, he moved slowly, skirmishing as he advanced,
with the light parties stationed on that road.
This movement was soon communicated to General Putnam, who reinforced
the parties which had been advanced in front; and as General Grant
continued to gain ground, still stronger detachments were employed in
this service. About three in the morning, Brigadier-General Lord
Stirling was directed to meet the enemy, with the two nearest regiments,
on the road leading from the Narrows. Major-General Sullivan, who
commanded all the troops without the lines, advanced at the head of a
strong detachment on the road leading directly to Flatbush; while
another detachment occupied the heights between that place and Bedford.
About the break of day, Lord Stirling reached the summit of the hills,
where he was joined by the troops which had been already engaged, and
were retiring slowly before the enemy, who almost immediately appeared
in sight. A warm cannonade was commenced on both sides, which continued
for several hours; and some sharp but not very close skirmishing took
place between the infantry. Lord Stirling being anxious only to defend
the pass he guarded, could not descend in force from the heights; and
General Grant did not wish to drive him from them until that part of the
plan which had been entrusted to Sir Henry Clinton should be executed.
About half-past eight, the British right having then reached Bedford, in
the rear of Sullivan’s left, General De Heister ordered Colonel Donop’s
corps to advance to the attack of the hill, following himself with the
centre of the army. The approach of Clinton was now discovered by the
American left, which immediately endeavoured to regain the camp at
Brooklyn. While retiring from the woods by regiments, they encountered
the front of the British. About the same time the Hessians advanced from
Flatbush, against that part of the detachment which occupied the direct
road to Brooklyn. Here General Sullivan commanded in person; but he
found it difficult to keep his troops together long enough to sustain
the first attack. The firing heard towards Bedford had disclosed the
alarming fact that the British had turned their left flank, and were
getting completely into their rear. Perceiving at once the full danger
of their situation, they sought to escape it by regaining the camp with
the utmost possible celerity. The sudden rout of this party enabled De
Heister to detach a part of his force against those who were engaged
near Bedford. In that quarter, too, the Americans were broken, and
driven back into the woods; and the front of the column led by General
Clinton continuing to move forward, intercepted and engaged those who
were retreating along the direct road from Flatbush. Thus attacked both
in front and rear, and alternately driven by the British on the
Hessians, and by the Hessians back again on the British, a succession of
skirmishes took place in the woods, in the course of which, some part of
the corps forced their way through the enemy and regained the lines of
Brooklyn, and several individuals saved themselves under cover of the
woods; but a great proportion of the detachment was killed, or taken.
The fugitives were pursued up to the American works; and such is
represented to have been the ardour of the British soldiers, that it
required the authority of their cautious commander to prevent an
immediate assault.
The fire towards Brooklyn gave the first intimation to the American
right that the enemy had gained their rear. Lord Stirling perceived the
danger, and that he could only escape it by retreating instantly across
the creek. After one other gallant attempt, however, upon a British
corps under Lord Cornwallis, the brave men he commanded were no longer
able to make opposition, and those who survived were, with their
general, made prisoners of war.
The British army were masters of the field, but before morning,
Washington had won one of his brightest military laurels in the safe
withdrawal, unperceived by the enemy, of his defeated and dispirited
troops to the opposite shore of New York.
[Illustration]
VIEW ON THE SUSQUEHANNA,
(ABOVE OWAGO, OR AT GRAND ISLAND.)
* * * * *
The spectator in this view looks up the Susquehanna, with the river
behind as well as before him; for the mountain on which he stands is
almost encircled by the bend with which it turns downward to Owago. It
is, perhaps, the best view that could be taken to express the etymology
of its name, (Crooked River,) besides being one of singular beauty. I
regretted only when the artist was there, that the rafts and arks with
which the river is for a great part of the year enlivened, were, from
the low state of the water, entirely wanting. The wild navigation of
these crafts gives the Susquehanna a picturesque character, which, to do
it pictorial justice, should not be omitted in the drawing. Perhaps the
amends may be.
[Illustration]
BRIDGE AT GLEN’S-FALLS, ON THE HUDSON.
* * * * *
Few of our readers who will not consider this subject as one of the most
picturesque in our collection, and yet many of them we fear have passed
over the bridge in our View unconscious of the proximity of so
extraordinary a scene as the Falls of the Hudson at this spot.
This was, at least, our own case when first visiting Lake George, from
Saratoga; and we would counsel every one to steal a few moments, even if
travelling by the stage, to descend from the covered bridge to the rocky
bed of the river. Miss Martineau observes—“We were all astonished at
the splendour of Glen’s Falls. The full, though narrow Hudson, rushes
along amidst enormous masses of rock, and leaps sixty feet down the
chasms and precipices which occur in the passage, sweeping between dark
banks of shelving rocks below, its current speckled with foam. The noise
is so tremendous, that I cannot conceive how people can fix their
dwellings in the immediate neighbourhood. There is a long bridge over
the roaring floods, which vibrates incessantly; and clusters of
saw-mills deform the scene. There is stone-cutting as well as planking
done at these mills. The fine black marble of the place is cut into
slabs, and sent down to New York to be polished. It was the busiest
scene that I saw near any water-power in America.”
Her description is excellent, but, as regards the mills, we cannot agree
with her; they certainly add much to the picturesque effect of the
scene.
[Illustration]
VIEW FROM MOUNT IDA,
NEAR TROY, NEW YORK.
* * * * *
The scenery in this neighbourhood is exceedingly beautiful. The junction
of the Mohawk and Hudson, the Falls of the Cohocs, the gay and elegant
town of Troy, Albany in the distance, and a foreground of the finest
mixture of the elements of landscape, compose a gratification to the eye
equalled by few other spots in this country. “Think,” says one of our
noblest and best writers, speaking of a similar scene—“think of the
country for which the Indians fought! Who can blame them? As the river
chieftains, the lords of the waterfalls and the mountains, ranged this
lovely valley, can it be wondered at that they beheld with bitterness
the forest disappearing beneath the settler’s axe—the fishing-place
disturbed by his saw-mills? Can we not fancy the feelings with which
some strong-minded savage, who should have ascended the summit of the
mountain in company with a friendly settler, contemplating the progress
already made by the white man, and marking the gigantic strides with
which he was advancing into the wilderness, should fold his arms and
say, ‘White man, there is eternal war between me and thee! I quit not
the land of my fathers but with my life! In those woods where I bent my
youthful bow, I will still hunt the deer; over yonder waters I will
still glide unrestrained in my bark canoe. By those dashing waterfalls I
will still lay up my winter’s food; on these fertile meadows I will
still plant my corn. Stranger, the land is mine! I understand not these
paper rights; I gave not my consent when, as thou sayest, those broad
regions were purchased for a few baubles of my fathers. They could sell
what was theirs; they could sell no more. How could my father sell that
which the Great Spirit sent me into the world to live upon? They knew
not what they did. The stranger came, a timid suppliant, few and feeble,
and asked to lie down on the red man’s bear-skin, and warm himself at
the red man’s fire, and have a little piece of land to raise corn for
his women and children; and now he is become strong, and mighty, and
bold, and spreads out his parchment over the whole, and says, ‘It is
mine.’ Stranger, there is not room for us both. The Great Spirit has not
made us to live together. There is poison in the white man’s cup; the
white man’s dog barks at the red man’s heels. If I should leave the land
of my fathers, whither shall I fly? Shall I go to the south, and dwell
among the groves of the Pequots? Shall I wander to the west? the fierce
Mohawk—the man-eater—is my foe. Shall I fly to the east?—the great
water is before me. No, stranger, here have I lived, and here will I
die! and if here thou abidest, there is eternal war between me and thee!
Thou hast taught me thy arts of destruction, for that alone I thank
thee; and now take heed to thy steps; the red man is thy foe. When thou
goest forth by day, my bullet shall whistle by thee; when thou liest
down at night, my knife is at thy throat. The noon-day sun shall not
discover thy enemy, and the darkness of midnight shall not protect thy
rest. Thou shalt plant in terror, and I will reap in blood! thou shalt
sow the earth with corn, and I will strew it with ashes! thou shalt go
forth with the sickle, and I will follow after with the scalping-knife!
thou shalt build, and I will burn, till the white man or the Indian
shall cease from the land. Go thy way for this time in safety, but
remember, stranger, there is eternal war between me and thee!’”
As the same writer afterwards observes, however, the Pilgrim Fathers
“purchased the land of those who claimed it, and paid for it—often,
more than once. They purchased it for a consideration, trifling to the
European, but valuable to the Indian. There is no overreaching in giving
but little for that which, in the hands of the original proprietors, is
worth nothing.”
[Illustration]
VIEW FROM GLENMARY LAWN,
THE RESIDENCE OF N. P. WILLIS.
(AT THE JUNCTION OF THE OWAGA AND SUSQUEHANNA.)
* * * * *
The Owaga here is scarce a quarter of a mile from its junction with the
Susquehanna, and the lawn of Glenmary is the western limit of the star
of interval land formed by the union of two broad valleys. The river
here is a secluded stream, shadowed originally with dark forest trees,
and running deep and still. The farm of Glenmary, part of which is
presented in the drawing, was once an Indian burial-place—warrant
enough for its possessing the highest rural beauty. The plough has
turned up many skeletons in the fields above, and a small museum of
Indian weapons and domestic implements was collected by the gentleman
from whom the land was bought by the writer. Off to the left of the
drawing, (too far off to be brought into the sketch,) a bright and
brawling brook comes leaping down from the hills, and passing by the
cottage door crosses the meadow to pay tribute to the Owaga; and back
from the meadow, by broad and easy terraces, the land rises to the
summit of a mountain ridge, crowned with primeval and gigantic forest
trees. Having possessed the reader thus of the principal features of the
spot, I may be excused for filling a page from an epistle to a friend,
descriptive of the artist’s visit, to Glenmary.
“This is not a very prompt answer to your last, my dear doctor, for I
intended to have taken my brains to you bodily, and replied to all your
‘whether-or-noes’ over a broiled oyster at Downing’s. Perhaps I may
bring this in my pocket. A brace of ramblers, brothers of my own,
detained me for a while, but are flitting to-day; and Bartlett has been
here a week, to whom, more particularly, I wish to do the honours of the
scenery. We have climbed every hill-top that has the happiness of
looking down on the Owaga and Susquehanna, and he agrees with me that a
more lovely and habitable valley has never sat to him for its picture.
Fortunately, on the day of his arrival, the dust of a six-weeks’ drought
was washed from its face, and, barring the _wilt_ that precedes Autumn,
the hill-sides were in holiday green, and looked their fairest. He has
enriched his portfolio with four or five delicious sketches, and if
there were gratitude or sense of renown in trees and hills, they would
have nodded their tops to the two of us. It is not every valley and
pine-tree that finds painter and historian, but these are as insensible
as beauty and greatness were ever to the claims of their trumpeters.
“How long since was it that I wrote to you of Bartlett’s visit to
Constantinople? Not more than four or five weeks, it seems to me; and
yet here he is, on his return from a professional trip to _Canada_, with
all its best scenery snug in his portmanteau! He steamed to Turkey and
back, and steamed again to America, and will be once more in England in
some twenty days—having visited and sketched the two extremities of the
civilized world. Why, I might farm it on the Susquehanna, and keep my
town-house in Constantinople, (with money.) It seemed odd to me to turn
over a drawing-book, and find on one leaf a freshly pencilled sketch of
a mosque, and on the next a view of Glenmary—my turnip-field in the
foreground. And then the man himself—pulling a Turkish para and a
Yankee shin-plaster from his pocket with the same pinch—shuffling to
breakfast in my abri on the Susquehanna, in a pair of peaked slippers of
Constantinople, that smell as freshly of the bazaar as if they were
bought yesterday—waking up with “_pekke! pekke!_ my good fellow!” when
William brings him his boots—and never seeing a blood-red maple (just
turned with the frost), without fancying it the sanguine flag of the
Bosphorus or the bright jacket of a Greek! All this unsettles me
strangely. The phantasmagoria of my days of vagabondage flit before my
eyes again. This, ‘By-the-by, do you remember, in Smyrna?’ and, ‘The
view you recollect from the Seraglio!’ and such like slip-slop of
travellers, heard within reach of my corn and pumpkins, affects me like
the mad poet’s proposition,
‘To twitch the rainbow from the sky,
And splice both ends together.’
“I have amused my artist friend since he has been here, with an
entertainment not quite as expensive as the Holly Lodge fireworks, but
quite as beautiful—the burning of log-heaps. Instead of gossipping over
the tea-table these long and chilly evenings, the three or four young
men who have been staying with us, were very content to tramp into the
woods, with a bundle of straw and a match-box; and they have been
initiated into the mysteries of ‘picking and piling,’ to the
considerable improvement of the glebe of Glenmary. Shelly says,
‘Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is,’
and I am inclined to think that there are varieties of glory in its
phenomena which would make it worth even your metropolitan while to come
to the west and ‘burn fallow.’ At this season of the year—after the
autumn droughts, that is to say—the whole country here is covered with
a thin smoke, stealing up from the fires on every hill, in the depths of
the woods, and on the banks of the river; and what with the graceful
smoke-wreaths by day, and the blazing heavens all around the horizon by
night, it adds much to the variety, and I think, more to the beauty of
our western October. It edifies the traveller who has bought wood by the
pound in Paris, or stiffened for the want of it in the disforested
Orient, to stand off a rifle-shot from a crackling wood, and toast
himself by a thousand cords burnt for the riddance. What experience I
have had of these holocausts on my own land, has not diminished the
sense of waste and wealth with which I first watched them. Paddy’s dream
of ‘rolling in a bin of gould guineas,’ could scarcely have seemed more
luxurious.
“Bartlett and I, and the rest of us, in our small way, burnt up enough,
I dare say, to have made a comfortable drawing-room of Hyde Park in
January, and the effects of the white light upon the trees above and
around were glorious. But our fires were piles of logs and brush—small
beer of course to the conflagration of a forest. I have seen one that
was like the Thousand Columns of Constantinople, ignited to a red heat,
and covered with carbuncles and tongues of flame. It was a temple of
fire—the floor living coals—the roof a heaving drapery of crimson—the
aisles held up by blazing and innumerable pillars, and sometimes swept
by the wind till they stood in still and naked redness, while the eye
could see far into their depths, and again covered and wreathed and
laved in ever-changing billows of flame. We want an American Tempesta or
‘Savage Rosa’ to ‘wreak’ such pictures on canvass; and perhaps the first
step to it would be the painting of the foliage of an American Autumn.”
[Illustration]
VIEW NEAR ANTHONY’S NOSE,
HUDSON HIGHLANDS.
* * * * *
This mountain, “known to fame,” serves as a landmark to the industrious
craft plying upon the Hudson, and thus fulfils a more useful destiny
than is commonly awarded to spots bright in story. It stands amid a host
of interesting localities, marked with the events of the Revolution, and
has witnessed, with less damage than other noses, many a conflict by
land and water.
On the opposite side of the river from the base of the mountain, lie the
two forts Montgomery and Clinton, taken by the British in October, 1777.
The commander-in-chief at New York was prompted to this expedition by
two objects: to destroy a quantity of military stores which the
Americans had collected in this neighbourhood, and to make a diversion
in favour of General Burgoyne. For these purposes Sir Henry Clinton
embarked between three and four thousand troops at New York, and sailed
with them up the Hudson. On the 5th of October they landed at Verplank’s
Point, a few miles below the entrance to the Highlands. The next
morning, a part of the force landed on Stony Point, which projects into
the river on the western side, just below the mountains; hence they
marched into the rear of the fortresses.
General Putnam commanded at that time in this quarter. He had one
thousand continental troops, a part of which only were effective, and a
small body of militia. He believed the principal design of the enemy to
be the destruction of the stores; and when he was informed of their main
purpose, it was too late for him to resist with success. He supposed
that they were aiming at Fort Independence, and directed his attention
to its defence; the heavy firing on the other side of the river gave him
the first decisive information of their real intentions. Mr. Clinton, at
that time governor of the state, placed himself at this post on the
first notice that he received of the enemy’s advancing. Having made the
best disposition for the defence of the forts, he despatched an express
to General Putnam to acquaint him with his situation; but when it
reached his head quarters, that officer and General Parsons were
reconnoitring the position of the enemy on the east side of the river.
Lieut.-Col. Campbell, in the mean time, proceeded with nine hundred men
by a circuitous march to the rear of Fort Montgomery; while Sir Henry
Clinton, with Generals Vaughan and Tryon, moved onwards towards Fort
Clinton. Both fortresses were attacked at once, between four and five in
the afternoon: they were defended with great resolution. This will be
readily admitted, when it is remembered that the whole garrison
consisted of but six hundred men. The conflict was carried on till dark,
when the British had obtained absolute possession, and such of the
Americans as were not killed or wounded had made their escape. The loss
of the two garrisons amounted to about two hundred and fifty. Among the
killed on the enemy’s side was Lieut.-Col. Campbell.
It has been thought that an addition of five or six hundred men to these
garrisons would have saved the works; the correctness of this opinion
may be doubted. Fifteen hundred soldiers would have been barely
sufficient completely to man Fort Montgomery alone. The works themselves
were imperfect, and the ground was probably chosen rather for the
defence of the river, than because it was itself defensible.
Governor Clinton and his brother, General James Clinton, escaped after
the enemy had possession of the forts; the former by crossing the river.
The latter had been wounded in the thigh by a bayonet.
On the 8th, the English forces proceeded to the eastern side, where they
found Fort Independence evacuated. A party then burnt the continental
village, as it was called, a temporary settlement raised up by the war
for the accommodation of the army. Here had been gathered a considerable
number of those artisans, whose labours are particularly necessary for
military purposes; and a considerable quantity of military stores. They
then removed a chain which was stretched across the river at Fort
Montgomery, and advancing up the river, removed another which was
extended from Fort Constitution to the opposite shore at West Point.
General Vaughan then advanced still further up the Hudson, and on the
13th reached the town of Kingston, which he burnt. On the 17th, took
place the surrender of Burgoyne, and he returned down the Hudson with
his fleet to New York.
Count Grabouski, a Polish nobleman, was killed in the assault on Fort
Clinton, while acting as aid-de-camp to the British commander. He was
buried on the spot, but his grave is now undiscoverable.
[Illustration]
WASHINGTON’S MONUMENT AT BALTIMORE.
* * * * *
This fine monument stands at the end of a long street, forming an
ascending perspective; and as its base crowns the summit of a
considerable hill, it is fully relieved against the sky, and shows very
nobly. The square which immediately surrounds it is newly divided into
building-lots, and is becoming the “west end” of Baltimore. The Monument
and the handsome buildings which are going up around are a mutual
improvement of appearance.
The design of this monument was conceived in 1809, when a company
obtained leave of the legislature to raise 100,000 dollars for the
purpose by a lottery. By the year 1815, funds sufficient to authorize
the commencement of the work had been raised, and a plan had been
furnished by Mr. Robert Mills. On the 4th of July, the corner stone was
laid upon ground presented by Col. John E. Howard. The monument is a
Doric column upon a square base, surmounted by a pedestal, upon which is
placed a colossal statue of Washington. The base is fifty feet square,
and is elevated twenty feet; the column, to the feet of the statue, is
one hundred and sixty feet, and the statue is thirteen feet in height.
The statue is the work of Causici, an Italian, and represents Washington
at the instant when he resigned his commission after the Revolution.