Climbing Sullivan Hill

Maybe it's the ghost of George Carlin at work, pointing out those contradictions in terms: After yesterday's post about a jumbo shrimp, today we turn to...military intelligence!

Sure, the Fourth of July 1776 was fun, but in the very next month, the rebel colonists had to stand and deliver—right here, in Battle Pass, on what is now the East Drive of Prospect Park (behind the present-day zoo). And it wasn't pretty. As we approach the August anniversary of the Battle of Brooklyn, I'm going to poke around this epic my way. Military history isn't my thing, although, strategy-wise, this battle was a corker. I like people stories, so today meet one of the battle's commanding officers: Major-General John Sullivan, the pistol-packin' decoy duck.

The steep rise west of Battle Pass is labeled Sullivan Hill on the park's map, prompting me to wonder who Sullivan was. Apparently, he was a jerk: an ambitious New Hampshire lawyer prone to foreclosing on and suing his neighbors (who loathed him accordingly). But in the fledgling American Revolution, George Washington found him "spirited and zealously attached to the cause," although with "a little tincture of vanity, an over desire of being popular, which now and then leads him into some embarrassments."

Sullivan's vanity must have been wounded when Washington belatedly split the command of the American troops in Brooklyn between him and another officer, named Putnam. But as the Redcoats and the Hessians closed around the Americans, Sullivan was reported to have fought bravely; according to this site, he engaged the Hessians in a running battle with a pistol in each hand until he was captured in a cornfield.

As a prisoner of war, Sullivan conveyed peace proposals from the British to the Continental Congress, prompting John Adams to call him "a decoy duck" for the enemy, sent to "seduce us...into a renunciation of our independence." After his release in a prisoner exchange, the Major General raised hackles for the rest of the war, losing some battles and bitching about commands and promotions. "No other officer of rank in the whole army has so often conceived himself neglected, slighted and ill-treated as you have done," wrote an exasperated Washington, "and none I am sure has had less cause than yourself to entertain such ideas." One of Sullivan's notable successes was a scorched-earth campaign against the upstate Iroquois who had sided with the Tories, carrying out Washington's express orders for "total ruinment of their settlements."

Today, I climbed Sullivan's namesake hill, and realized why the American forces felt so protected in their pass. (Through faulty intelligence, they never knew the enemy had marched all night to outflank them.) It's a steep scramble up a glacial moraine, and since the crumbling stairs are fenced off, I went alongside them up into the woods.

At the top of the hill lies the Long Meadow, across which Sullivan's vastly outnumbered troops retreated towards Park Slope and the Gowanus, perhaps right where these little campers frolicked today. The Battle of Brooklyn, the first major action of the American Revolution, was a bloody disaster, with some 1,000 American troops killed and more dying later as POWs; New York City remained in British hands until the end of the war.

And Sullivan? He went on to a distinguished career as a judge, congressman and governor of New Hampshire, but died senile and alcoholic, alienated, isolated and in debt. I wonder if he ever thought back to that day in the Brooklyn cornfield...or if he made up that part about the two pistols.

Images: Top: Mezzotint print, 1776, Library of Congress. Below: New Hampshire Division of Historical Resources.