That near-miraculous exploit on Aug. 29, 1776, ended the Battle of Brooklyn, being remembered this week on its 232nd anniversary
- a lopsided British victory that humiliated Washington in his first outing as commander and nearly scuttled the American patriots' fight for liberty, less than two months after the Declaration of Independence.
The observance of Battle Week began last weekend with a ceremonial reading of that document and will end on Sunday when re-enactors in Revolutionary War uniforms staging mock battles on two original sites including Brooklyn's famed Green-Wood Cemetery.
On Saturday, history-minded citizens also will mark the 100th anniversary of the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, a 149-foot granite obelisk erected over the mass grave of 11,500 people who died aboard British prison ships off Brooklyn during the revolution.
"These were America's first POWs," notes Ted General, vice president of the Society of Old Brooklynites, one of whose members, Brooklyn poet Walt Whitman, first proposed the monument.
Recently restored, the memorial in Brooklyn's Fort Greene Park is the largest Revolutionary War marker in New York City, whose population at the time was far more sympathetic to the British than to a rebellion led by radicals from Boston, Philadelphia and Virginia.
In fact, once a series of further debacles drove Washington's forces into New Jersey, New York became British military headquarters and would remain so until the war ended in 1783.
For all its historical significance, the Battle of Brooklyn has never achieved the iconic status of Paul Revere's ride, the Minutemen at Concord or Bunker Hill. It even competes with itself by another name
- the Battle of Long Island.
"The reason is simple - we lost," says Kenneth T. Jackson, a history professor at Columbia University and former director of the New-York Historical Society. "Americans like happy stories. Disaster for the American side does not fit into the larger narrative of American history."
The escape of Washington's defeated army from Brooklyn to Manhattan was accomplished in a flotilla of small boats. Aided by darkness, fog and winds that kept Admiral Richard Howe's fleet from entering the East River, the operation was so deftly executed that the British didn't know it was happening.
Jackson compares it to Britain's famous evacuation of troops trapped on French beaches at Dunkirk in 1940. "Dunkirk is better known but this was more dramatic," he said. "If it fails, essentially the war is over."
Brooklyn being no Gettysburg, one must look hard to find the places where fighting occurred. Many are immersed in residential neighborhoods, layered with subsequent history unrelated to the birth of a nation.
