Battle of Pell's Point, 1776: Glover's stone walls

Pell's Point is one of the least known battles of the American Revolution, and one of the more useful. It did not stop the British. It slowed them for a day at a moment when a day mattered, because the Continental Army was trying to get off the island of Manhattan before it was trapped there.²

Washington boxed in

By the autumn of 1776 the British had beaten Washington on Long Island and in Manhattan. In late September his army was holding the heights at the north end of Manhattan, with the British army in front of it and the Royal Navy on the East River behind. In mid-October General Sir William Howe tried to get around it. Leaving a holding force facing the American lines, he took about 4,000 troops up the East River toward Long Island Sound to land in Westchester County, cut the American road to Connecticut and catch Washington from the east.³ › Battle of Long Island, 1776

The first landing, at Throgs Neck on 12 October, ran into trouble. The neck was cut off from the mainland by a creek and marsh, and about 25 riflemen under Colonel Edward Hand held the bridge until more Americans arrived. Howe waited there for several days. Washington used the time to decide to leave northern Manhattan for Westchester, a move that began on 18 October.⁴

The landing at Pell's Point

Early on 18 October Howe tried again, three miles to the north. His boats carried troops around Throgs Neck to Pell's Point, at the tip of Rodman's Neck on the Pelham shore, while another column was ferried across Pelham Bay. Henry Clinton and Charles Cornwallis directed the landing, with light infantry, grenadiers and dismounted light dragoons in the lead. They met almost no resistance on the beach and marched inland up the road later called Split Rock Road.⁵

Colonel John Glover saw them come. His brigade had camped on the west side of the Hutchinson River since 14 October, and that morning he watched the boats through a spyglass from a hill. In his own letter, quoted in Alfred M. Franko's history of the battle (revised in 1966 and republished by the Pelham Bicentennial Committee in 1975), he sent word to his superior, General Charles Lee, three miles away, and marched without waiting for orders, with about 750 men and three field guns.⁶

Wall to wall

Glover's brigade was four small Massachusetts regiments: the 13th Continental under Colonel Joseph Read, the 3rd under Colonel William Shepard, the 26th under Colonel Loammi Baldwin and his own 14th, led that day by a captain. He placed them one behind another on both sides of the road, each behind a stone wall.⁷

His advance guard of about forty men met the British vanguard first, traded five rounds and fell back. When the British followed, Read's regiment rose from behind its wall at about thirty yards and fired into them, and they broke. After an hour and a half the main body came on, about 4,000 men with seven guns in Glover's estimate. Read's men fired again at fifty yards, exchanged seven rounds and withdrew behind Shepard's regiment, which stood behind a double wall and, by Glover's count, fired seventeen rounds and drove the attackers back several times. The National Park Service describes the same pattern: concealed volleys at close range, then a withdrawal to the next line of walls. The fiercest fighting was around the Split Rock, a great boulder by the road.⁸

By about noon Cornwallis's flanking column was coming around the American left, and Hessian troops were joining the attack. Glover pulled back across the Hutchinson River, taking up the bridge behind him, and the two sides exchanged artillery fire across the water until dark. That night the brigade marched off toward Dobbs Ferry without food, and the British did not follow.⁹

How many fell at Pell's Point?

The American count is fairly firm: Glover wrote that he lost 8 killed and 13 wounded, among them Colonel Shepard. The British and Hessian losses are not. Howe reported 3 British killed and 20 wounded to London and said nothing of the Hessians. Franko cites deserters who put the losses at 800 to 1,000 and American eyewitnesses who guessed 200 to 400, and argues that the true figure was far above Howe's. The American Battlefield Trust gives 244 British casualties. The truth is probably somewhere in that wide range, and no figure can be checked.¹⁰

Why the delay mattered

The American Battlefield Trust counts Pell's Point as a British victory, since Glover gave up the ground. But it, the National Park Service and Franko all stress what the fight bought. Glover's men raised the army's morale and gave Washington's main body the time and space to complete its move to White Plains. Franko adds that the stubbornness of the defense persuaded Henry Clinton that he faced a far larger force, and the British waited for reinforcements before pushing on.¹¹

Ten days later the two armies met at White Plains, where the British won again, but the Continental Army was still in the field and out of the trap on Manhattan. Glover's Marblehead men would be back on the water two months later, rowing Washington across the Delaware.¹²