Episode Details

Two months after declaring independence, George Washington faced the largest expeditionary force Britain had ever sent across an ocean — 400 ships and 32,000 men — arriving off a city that could not be defended. This is the story of the New York campaign of 1776: the catastrophe at the Battle of Long Island, where General Howe marched his army through an unguarded pass in the dark and rolled up the American line at dawn; the doomed, magnificent stand of a few hundred Maryland soldiers that bought the army its escape; and the night the Continental Army slipped across a mile of water under the enemy’s nose, saved by a regiment of Marblehead fishermen and a providential fog.

It is also the story of how close it all came to ending — Kip’s Bay, the fall of the city, the disaster at Fort Washington, the prison ships, and a shrinking army retreating across New Jersey in the cold behind a general who confided to his brother that “the game is pretty near up.” The words of July were written. Whether they meant anything now depended on a winter that had not yet come.