THE BATTLE OF LONG ISLAND

By John L. Moore

Eight weeks after Congress declared independence from Great Britain in July 1776, British and Hessian soldiers inflicted a disastrous defeat on the American army at the Battle of Long Island.

Largely forgotten today, the Aug. 27 battle was one of the largest of the American Revolutionary War, which lasted eight years. Gen. William Howe pitted thousands of soldiers against Gen. George Washington’s much smaller force, which was made up of Continental Army troops and men belonging to state militias.

The Americans included three Pennsylvanians who figure in the history of the Poconos–Lt. Col. Daniel Brodhead, Col. Samuel Miles, and Maj. Gen. John Sullivan.

Brodhead moved to the Poconos as a child in 1737, and his father is regarded as the founder of East Stroudsburg. Miles was a soldier in Benjamin Franklin’s 1756 expedition that built Fort Hamilton in Stroudsburg. In 1779, Sullivan led an American army across Monroe County as he marched into western New York to attack the Iroquois Indians. The Sullivan Trail, a modern road west of Tannersville, bears his name.

All three men had significant leadership roles in the battle, and all three left written accounts of their participation.

Afterwards, the American commanders indulged in a round of finger-pointing. Sullivan blamed Miles for the defeat, a charge that Brodhead refuted. “Upon the whole, less generalship never was shown in any army since the art of war was understood,” Brodhead declared.

The war began in 1775 when rebellious Massachusetts colonists skirmished with British troops at Lexington and Concord. Soon after, rebels and British fought again at the Battle of Bunker Hill. George Washington arrived in Massachusetts in July with orders