Great Fire in New York

While Rawlings and Cadwallader were keeping the assailants at bay, Matthews and Sterling were making important movements. The former pushed up the wooded heights from his landing-place on the Harlem River, drove Baxter from his redoubt (afterward named Fort George), and stood a victor upon the hills overlooking the open fields around Fort Washington. Sterling, with his Highlanders, after making a feigned landing, dropped down to a point within the American lines, and rushing up a sinuous pathway, captured a redoubt on the summit, with two hundred men. Perceiving this, Cadwallader, who was likely to be placed between two fires, retreated along the road nearest the Hudson, battling all the way with Percy, who closely pursued him. When near the upper border of Trinity Cemetery (One Hundred and Fifty-fifth street), he was attacked on the flank by Sterling, who was pursuing across the island to intercept him. He passed on and reached the fort with a loss of a few killed, and about thirty made prisoners. Meanwhile the German and British assailants on the north, who were as four to one of the Americans in number, pressed the latter back to the fort, when Rall sent a summons to Magaw to surrender. This was soon followed by a like summons from Howe. The fight outside had been desperate. The ground was strewn with the mingled bodies of Americans, Germans, and Britons. Resistance to pike, ball, and bayonet, wielded by five thousand veteran soldiers, was now vain, and at noon Magaw yielded. At half-past one o'clock the British flag waved over the fort in triumph, where the American flag had been unfurled in the morning with defiance. The Americans had lost in killed and wounded not more than one hundred men; the British had lost almost a thousand. The garrison that surrendered numbered, with militia, about twenty-five hundred, of whom over two thousand were disciplined regulars. Knyphausen received Magaw's sword, and to the Germans and Highlanders were justly awarded the honors of the victory. Washington, standing on the brow of the Palisades at Fort Lee, with the author of "Common Sense" by his side, witnessed the disaster with anguish, but could afford no relief. The fort was lost to the Americans forever, and was named Knyphausen. Its unfortunate garrison filled the prisons of New York and crowded the British prison-ships wherein they were dreadful suffers.

The Jersey was the most noted of the floating British prisons. She was the hulk of a 64-gun ship lately dismantled, and placed in Wallabout Bay near the present Brooklyn Navy Yard. Sometimes more than a thousand prisoners were confined in her at one time, where they suffered indescribable horrors from unwholesome food, foul air, filth, and vermin, and from smallpox, dysentery and prison fever, that slew them by scores. Their treatment was often brutal in the extreme, and despair reigned there almost continually. Every night, the living, the dying, and the dead were huddled together. At sunset each day was heard the savage order, accompanied by horrid imprecations-"Down, rebels, down!" and in the morning the significant cry- "Rebels, turn out your dead!" The dead were then selected from the living, sewed up in blankets, taken upon deck, carried on shore and buried in shallow graves. Full eleven thousand victims were taken from the Jersey, and so buried, during the war. Their bones were gathered and placed in a vault by the Tammany Society of New York in 1808, with imposing ceremonies. That vault is at the southwestern corner of the Navy Yard, where their remains still rest. Several years ago a magnificent monument dedicated to the martyrs of the British prisons and prison-ships was erected in Trinity Churchyard, near Broadway, at a point over which speculators were trying to extend Albany street through the property of that corporation. The street was not opened. So patriotism triumphed over greed.

Philip Freneau, a contemporary, and sometimes called "the Poet of the Revolution," wrote a long poem, in three cantos, in 1780, entitled The British Prison-ships, in which he assumed the character of one of the victims. He bitterly complained of the American Loyalists or Tories, who bore a conspicuous part in the horrid scenes. Of these he wrote:

He gives the following picture of suffering:

The poet referred to the British commissary of prisons in New York, in the following lines: