The British commander-in-chief and most of the 15 superior officers had their quarters in the best residences of New York. That town was packed snugly into the southern angle of the island of Manhattan, like a gift in the toe of a Christmas stocking. Southward, some of its finest houses looked across the Battery to the bay. Northward the town extended little beyond the common fields, of which the City Hall Square of 1898 is a reduced survival. The island of Manhattan—with its hills, woods, swamps, ponds, brooks, roads, farms, sightly estates, gardens, and orchards—was dotted with the cantonments and garrisoned forts of the British. The outposts were, largely, entrusted to bodies of Tory allies organized in this country. Thus was much of Long Island guarded by the three Loyalist battalions of General Oliver De Lancey, himself a native of New York. On Staten Island was quartered General Van Cortlandt Skinner’s brigade of New Jersey Volunteers, a troop which seems to have had such difficulty in finding officers in its own State that it had to go to New York for many of them,—or was it that so many more rich New York Loyalists had to be provided with commissions than the New York Loyalist brigades required as officers?
But the most important British posts were those which guarded the northern entrance to the island of Manhattan, where it was separated from the mainland by Spuyten Duyvel Kill, flowing westward into 16 the Hudson, and the Harlem, flowing southward into the East River. King’s Bridge and the Farmers’ Bridge, not far apart, joined the island to the main; and just before the Revolution a traveller might have made his choice of these two bridges, whether he wished to take the Boston road or the road to Albany. In 1778 the British “barrier” was King’s Bridge, the northern one of the two, the watch-house being the tavern at the mainland end of the bridge. Not only the bridge, but the Hudson, the Spuyten Duyvel, and the Harlem, as well, were commanded by British forts on the island of Manhattan. Yet there were defences still further out. On the mainland was a line of forts extending from the Hudson, first eastward, then southward, to the East River. Further north, between the Albany road and the Hudson, was a camp of German and Hessian allies, foot and horse. Northeast, on Valentine’s Hill, were the Seventy-first Highlanders. Near the mainland bank of the Harlem were the quarters of various troops of dragoons, most of them American Tory corps with English commanders, but one, at least, native to the soil, not only in rank and file, but in officers also,—and with no less dash and daring than by Tarleton, Simcoe, and the rest, was King George III. served by Captain James De Lancey, of the county of West Chester, with his “cowboys,” officially known as the West Chester Light Horse.
Thus the outer northern lines of the British were just above King’s Bridge. The principal camp of the Americans was far to the north. Each army was affected by conditions that called for a wide space of territory between the two forces, between the outer rim of the British circle, and the inner face of the American arc. Of this space the portion that lay bounded on the west by the Hudson, on the southeast by Long Island Sound, and cut in two by the southward-flowing Bronx, was the most interesting. It was called the Neutral Ground, and neutral it was in that it had the protection of neither side, while it was ravaged by both. Foraged by the two armies, under the approved rules of war, it underwent further a constant, irregular pillage by gangs of mounted rascals who claimed attachment, some to the British, some to the Americans, but were not owned by either. It was, too, overridden by the cavalry of both sides in attempts to surprise outposts, cut off supplies, and otherwise harass and sting. Unexpected forays by the rangers and dragoons from King’s Bridge and the Harlem were reciprocated by sudden visitations of American horse and light infantry from the Greenburg Hills and thereabove. The Whig militia of the county also took a hand against British Tories and marauders. Of the residents, many Tories fled to New York, some Americans went to the interior of the country, 18 but numbers of each party held their ground, at risk of personal harm as well as of robbery. Many of the best houses were, at different times during the war, occupied as quarters by officers of either side. Little was raised on the farms save what the farmers could immediately use or easily conceal. The Hudson was watched by British war-vessels, while the Americans on their side patrolled it with whale-boats, long and canoe-like, swift and elusive. For the drama of partisan warfare, Nature had provided, in lower West Chester County,—picturesquely hilly, beautifully wooded, pleasantly watered, bounded in part by the matchless Hudson and the peerless Sound,—a setting unsurpassed.
Thus was it that Miss Elizabeth Philipse, Major John Colden, and Miss Philipse’s negro boy, Cuff, all riding northward on the Albany post-road, a few miles above King’s Bridge, but still within territory patrolled daily by the King’s troops, constituted, on that bleak November evening in 1778, a group unusual to the time and place.
’Twas a wettish wind, concerning which Miss Elizabeth expressed, in the imperative mood, her will that it be dratted,—a feminine wind, truly, as was clear from its unexpected flarings up and sudden calmings down, its illogical whiskings around and eccentric changes of direction. Now it swept down the slope from the east, as if it meant to bombard 19 the travellers with all the brown leaves of the hillside. Now it assailed them from the north, as if to impede their journey; now rushed on them from the rear as if it had come up from New York to speed them on their way; now attacked them in the left flank, armed with a raw chill from the Hudson. It blew Miss Elizabeth’s hair about and additionally reddened her cheeks. It caused the young Tory major to frown, for the protection of his eyes, and thus to look more and more unlike the happy man that Miss Elizabeth’s accepted suitor ought to have appeared.
“I make no doubt I’ve brought on me the anger of your whole family by lending myself to this. And yet I am as much against it as they are!” So spake the major, in tones as glum as his looks.
“’Twas a choice, then, between their anger and mine,” said Miss Elizabeth, serenely. “Don’t think I wouldn’t have come, even if you had refused your escort. I’d have made the trip alone with Cuff, that’s all.”
“I shall be blamed, none the less.”
“Why? You couldn’t have hindered me. If the excursion is as dangerous as they say it is, your company certainly does not add to my danger. It lessens it. So, as my safety is what they all clamor about, they ought to commend you for escorting me.”