White Plains

The Battle of White Plains and the Fight for American Independence

By the autumn of 1776, the American Revolution was in danger of ending before it had truly begun. George Washington's Continental Army, battered and demoralized after a catastrophic defeat on Long Island in August and a harrowing retreat from Manhattan in the weeks that followed, was running out of room to maneuver. The British commander, General William Howe, possessed one of the most powerful expeditionary forces the British Empire had ever assembled—some 25,000 well-trained regulars and German auxiliaries, supported by the Royal Navy's unchallenged dominance of the waterways surrounding New York. If Howe could trap and destroy Washington's army, the rebellion would almost certainly collapse. It was in this desperate context that the rolling hills and farmlands of White Plains, a modest courthouse town in Westchester County, became the site of one of the most consequential engagements of the war's opening year—not because of what happened there, but because of what did not.

White Plains had served as the seat of Westchester County since 1757 , its name derived from the Weckquaeskeck word "Quarropas," meaning white marshes or plains. And it had already played a pivotal role in the cause of independence before a single shot was fired there. In the county's first courthouse, built in 1758, the members of the Fourth Provincial Congress of New York assembled on July 9, 1776, and there received a copy of the Declaration of Independence sent to them by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The document was referred to a committee of five, chaired by John Jay.

On the opening day ten of the fourteen counties of the province had representatives present.

Staten Island, in the hands of the British, sent no delegates.

This committee reported back favorably that same day, whereupon the Provincial Congress immediately approved the document, and instructions were sent to New York's delegates in Philadelphia to sign the Declaration. New York's delegation had been the sole colony unable to vote on July 4, lacking authorization from its provincial legislature; the Convention unanimously resolved "that the reasons assigned by the Continental Congress for declaring the United Colonies free and independent States, are cogent and conclusive." On the same day, the body changed its name from the Provincial Congress of the Colony of New York to the Convention of Representatives of the State of New York. The Convention ordered the Declaration printed as a broadside by the New York printer John Holt; the only known original copy, bearing manuscript annotations by Provincial Congress secretary John McKesson and attested by secretary Robert Benson, survives today in the Huntington Library in California.

On July 11, 1776, Judge John Thomas of Purchase stood on the steps of the courthouse in White Plains and read the Declaration of Independence to the public for the first time in the State of New York. The town thus holds a singular distinction in the story of American independence—it is, by the reckoning of many New Yorkers, the birthplace of New York State itself. That courthouse was burned during the Westchester Campaign in the fall of 1776. In 1910, the Daughters of the American Revolution erected a monument at the site on South Broadway at Mitchell Place, constructed in part from stones taken from the original courthouse's foundation.

To understand why the armies converged on White Plains, one must follow the sequence of moves and countermoves that defined the New York campaign of 1776. After driving the Americans from Brooklyn Heights and then from lower Manhattan, Howe executed an ambitious flanking maneuver in mid-October, landing a substantial force at Throgs Neck on the western shore of Long Island Sound on October 12. When that landing was contested, Howe re-embarked and put ashore again on October 18 at Pell's Point, where Colonel John Glover's brigade of roughly 750 Massachusetts men fought a brilliant delaying action from behind a series of stone walls, buying Washington the time he needed to move the bulk of his army northward to White Plains.

Washington established his headquarters at the Jacob Purdy House, a circa-1720 farmhouse, from approximately October 23 to 28, 1776.

Jacob Purdy himself had joined the Westchester Militia in 1775 and served until the end of the Revolution.

The house—now the headquarters of the White Plains Historical Society—was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

By the time Howe moved against Washington, the American commander had his 14,000-man army safely ensconced on high ground overlooking White Plains behind constructed defensive works. Israel Putnam's division held the American right, William Heath occupied the left, and Washington himself commanded the center. Washington anchored both flanks on bodies of water and bent both flanks backward to protect their rear.

The left rested on Hatfield Hill and Horton's Mill Pond, the center on Purdy Hill, and across the Bronx River sat Washington's right atop Chatterton's Hill.

Despite its strengths, Washington's position was not flaw-free. Across the Bronx River stood Chatterton's Hill, rising 180 feet above the waterway.

It was a ridge about three-quarters of a mile long running north and south, its gently rounded top crisscrossed by stone walls between cultivated fields.

The hill stood half a mile from the American right and could be used by the British to enfilade Washington's entire line.

Washington did not initially occupy it.

At 10:00 a.m. on October 28, 1776, Howe ordered columns commanded by Lieutenant General Sir Henry Clinton and Lieutenant General Leopold von Heister to advance on the American position. Washington initially dispatched about 1,000 soldiers commanded by Joseph Spencer to slow the advance.

Spencer's men met Howe's advancing column one and a half miles in front of the main line and doggedly resisted the British from stone wall to stone wall as they slowly fell back. Colonel Johann Gottlieb Rall's Hessian regiment outflanked the advanced Americans several times and drove them across the Bronx River to Chatterton's Hill.

Colonel Rufus Putnam commanded two American militia regiments who were in the process of belatedly fortifying the hill. Seeing the hill's importance, Washington ordered Colonel John Haslet's 1st Delaware Regiment to reinforce the militia. Colonel Alexander McDougall's brigade soon followed Haslet.

Also sent to the hill were Rudolphus Ritzema's 3rd New York Regiment, Charles Webb's 19th Continental Regiment, and William Smallwood's 1st Maryland Regiment.

There, as at Long Island before them, the Delaware and Maryland Continentals fought side by side.