N.Y. Journal: Battle of Brooklyn

I had no idea that when I spread a picnic blanket in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, I am spreading it over cannon balls and a soldier's grave. Brooklyn is commemorating the Battle of Brooklyn this weekend---the first major battle of the Revolutionary War and a battle somehow lost in history because it was a crushing defeat.

We started at the entrance to Prospect Park with our backs to Grand Army Plaza's massive military monument---a monument to Civil War victories instead of the battle that actually took place on the ground where we stood.

Our guide, professor William Parry, took us down paths I'd traveled before with no idea they were the same ones American soldiers took during the attack. We learned that while there were no grand monuments, the park's designers quietly preserved the original topography where the battle took place. There the S-curve of the road follows the original path, and the hill to the left of it was the same hill where the Americans had stood against the Hessians. A boulder with a plaque set inside---one I must have run past dozens of times---was the only memorial.

We tramped past broken glass and scattered Wendy's bags to climb the hill where the Americans, while dealing with the Hessians, found themselves with the British at their back. We trekked across Long Meadow, a field that would have been blanketed with sunbathers on a sunny day, to take the path the Revolutionary soldiers took to flee the British cannonballs. We walked down First St., now lined with graceful brownstones, and ended at the Old Stone House, where a soldier with a sad career had saved the Revolutionary War.

Within this overall story of defeat, there are two stories of personal victory. On the hill where we stood, John Calendar faced the British after all the other Americans had fled. In the French and Indian War, Calendar was ordered to man two cannons but thought the assignment pointless. So he tried to leave, whined that he had no ammunition when an officer stopped him, and finally deserted his post. He was court-martialed, convicted, and sent home in disgrace. George Washington himself said publicly that Calendar was guilty of the worst sin a soldier could commit: cowardice.

Calendar reenlisted as a private in the hope of redeeming his shame. On the hill where we stood, he refused to abandon his post and fired his two cannon alone after all the other Americans had left the scene. As Hessians pinned American soldiers to the trees with bayonets, two soldiers were about to kill Calendar when a British officer ran forward to stop them, saying, "This is the bravest man I've ever seen." The officer later told Washington of Calendar's bravery and begged him to reinstate him as an officer. Washington did.

There's another tale of personal victory. Lord William Alexander Stirling was a grasping man with a mediocre career who had decided, said our guide, that if he couldn't achieve greatness he wanted to inherit great things. He bribed a genealogist and jurors to declare him the heir of the Earl of Stirling, but when he demanded Long Island, Maine, and Novia Scotia as his inheritance, Parliament---and in particular James Grant, a real Scottish lord---laughed in his face.

When the British Parliament was debating what to do with the pesky Americans, that same James Grant stood and said that he had fought with the Americans during the French and Indian War, and they were cowards. "Give me 5,000 men," he bragged, "and I will march the flag of England across the continent."

When Grant and Stirling's troops met in the Battle of Brooklyn, Stirling reminded his American troops of Grant's boast, rousing them with the promise that Grant should see American bravery and not get past "yonder Mill Pond."

"It's a wonderful story," said professor Parry, adding that it would have been even better if Grant hadn't trounced him.

Yet in the end, Stirling took 400 Marylanders and pounded 2,000 British soldiers stationed in what is now known as the Old Stone House. Five times he attacked and twice took the house, exhausting the British to the point that they later made a tactical error that would preserve the American troops and save the Revolutionary War. Stirling, later described by correspondents as the "bravest man in America," would go on to die penniless, his wife thrown out in the street. But that one bright moment in a sad career career saved the war.

Memories of defeat are worth preserving, if only for those stories of personal heroism---people like Calendar and Stirling, who overcame their weaker natures to reach moments of greatness when it mattered.