Fort Lee

The Cliffs of Decision: Fort Lee and the Revolutionary War's Darkest Hour

On the morning of November 20, 1776, roughly six thousand British and Hessian troops under Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis began scaling the sheer rock face of the Palisades in the pre-dawn darkness, ascending from the Hudson River toward the flat ground above where the Continental Army's Fort Lee sat largely unprepared. Within hours, the fort would be abandoned, hundreds of pieces of precious equipment lost, and George Washington's army would begin a desperate retreat across New Jersey that nearly ended the American Revolution before it had truly begun. Fort Lee's story is not one of triumph. It is a story of strategic miscalculation, narrow escape, tenacious leadership, and the forging of resolve under catastrophic pressure — the kind of story that reveals far more about the character of the Revolution than any victory ever could.

To understand what happened at Fort Lee, one must first understand why it existed. In the summer of 1776, after the Continental Army evacuated New York City following its defeat at the Battle of Long Island, American commanders confronted a pressing strategic question: how to deny the British Royal Navy control of the Hudson River. If British warships could sail freely up the Hudson, they could sever New England — the cradle of the rebellion — from the middle and southern colonies, splitting the new nation in two. Washington and his generals conceived a plan to block the river using a paired fortification system. Fort Washington, on the high ground of Manhattan's northern tip, would work in concert with a companion fort on the New Jersey Palisades directly across the river. That companion was originally called Fort Constitution, but it was soon renamed Fort Lee in honor of Major General Charles Lee, then one of the most celebrated officers in the Continental Army.

Construction of Fort Lee began in the summer of 1776 under the supervision of Nathanael Greene, the Rhode Island-born major general whom Washington trusted perhaps more than any other subordinate. Greene, who was largely self-educated in military science and had risen from a Quaker ironworker's son to a commanding general in barely two years, oversaw the building of earthwork fortifications on the bluff overlooking the Hudson. The position seemed formidable: the Palisades rose some three hundred feet above the river, and the fort commanded sweeping views of the waterway and the opposite shore. To complement the fixed fortifications, American engineers deployed chevaux-de-frise — massive underwater obstructions made of iron-tipped wooden beams anchored to heavy stone-filled cribs — sunk into the riverbed between the two forts. The theory was elegant: the chevaux-de-frise would force enemy ships to slow or stop in the channel, where they could be raked by cannon fire from both banks simultaneously.

The theory failed. On October 9, 1776, British warships HMS Phoenix, HMS Roebuck, and HMS Tartar sailed upriver past the twin forts, sustaining only minor damage. The chevaux-de-frise proved insufficient to block the channel, and the cannon fire from both forts inflicted no crippling harm. The entire strategic premise of the Hudson River defense — the very reason Fort Lee and Fort Washington existed — was undermined in a single afternoon. Yet rather than draw the obvious conclusion and evacuate both positions, the American command hesitated. Greene, who held authority over both forts, argued strenuously that Fort Washington could and should be held. He assured Washington that the garrison could be evacuated by boat across the Hudson if the situation became untenable. Washington, against his better instincts, deferred to Greene's judgment.

It was a catastrophic error. On November 16, 1776, British General William Howe launched a coordinated assault on Fort Washington from multiple directions. Hessian troops under General Wilhelm von Knyphausen attacked from the north, while British regulars struck from the south and east. Colonel Robert Magaw, commanding the fort's garrison of nearly three thousand men, found his defensive lines collapsing inward. Greene, watching from Fort Lee across the river, realized the gravity of the situation and crossed the Hudson with Washington to assess the crisis firsthand. They arrived to witness the final stages of the disaster but could do nothing to reverse it. Magaw surrendered the garrison that afternoon. Nearly 2,800 Continental soldiers were taken prisoner — the largest single American loss of the entire war until the fall of Charleston in 1780. The prisoners would suffer terribly; many would die in the infamous British prison ships anchored in New York Harbor.

The fall of Fort Washington transformed Fort Lee from a strategic anchor into a dangerously exposed outpost. Greene, who bore significant responsibility for the catastrophe across the river, now faced the urgent question of what to do with the remaining garrison on the New Jersey side. Washington, deeply shaken, ordered preparations for evacuation, but the speed of the British response outpaced American planning. Howe wasted no time exploiting his advantage. He dispatched Cornwallis with a powerful force to cross the Hudson north of Fort Lee and envelop the position.

What happened in the early morning hours of November 20 became one of the war's most dramatic episodes. Cornwallis transported his troops across the Hudson to Lower Closter Landing, several miles north of the fort, and began the ascent of the Palisades. The climb was extraordinary — soldiers hauling themselves and their equipment up steep, rocky paths in darkness. By the time American sentries detected the movement and word reached Greene, the British were already on the heights. Greene acted with the decisiveness that would later define his reputation as one of the war's finest generals. He dispatched urgent warnings to Washington and ordered an immediate evacuation. There was no time for an orderly withdrawal. Soldiers fled south toward the Hackensack River, leaving behind tents still standing, kettles still boiling over breakfast fires, and — most painfully — cannons, ammunition, and hundreds of barrels of flour and provisions that the starving army could ill afford to lose. A British officer who entered the abandoned fort remarked on the eerie scene of a camp vacated so hastily that it looked as if the occupants might return at any moment.

Washington joined the retreating column, and what followed was the agonizing march across New Jersey that tested the survival of the Continental Army and, by extension, the Revolution itself. From Fort Lee, the army moved through Hackensack, then Newark, then New Brunswick, then Princeton, then Trenton, with Cornwallis in pursuit and enlistments expiring daily. Soldiers deserted in alarming numbers. The civilian population, sensing which way the wind was blowing, showed diminishing enthusiasm for the patriot cause. Congress fled Philadelphia. The American Revolution appeared to be collapsing.

It was during this retreat that one of the war's most consequential acts of literary creation took place. Thomas Paine, the English-born pamphleteer whose "Common Sense" had electrified the colonies earlier that year, was serving as a volunteer aide-de-camp attached to Greene's division. Paine had been at Fort Lee. He had witnessed the chaos of the evacuation and shared in the misery of the retreat. By firelight and on drumheads, he began composing "The American Crisis," the opening lines of which would become among the most famous in American literature: "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman." Published on December 19, 1776, just days before Washington's crossing of the Delaware and the surprise attack on Trenton, the pamphlet reignited patriot morale at the precise moment it was most desperately needed. The words that revived the Revolution were born in the disaster at Fort Lee.

What makes Fort Lee distinctive in the broader narrative of the American Revolution is precisely its character as a site of failure, adaptation, and renewal. The town does not offer visitors the satisfaction of a battlefield victory or the drama of a celebrated stand. Instead, it presents something arguably more important: evidence of how the Revolution survived its worst moments. The Hudson River defense strategy was a reasonable idea that did not work. The decision to hold Fort Washington was a grievous miscalculation by men who were still learning how to wage war against a professional imperial army. The evacuation of Fort Lee was a scramble, not a maneuver. And yet from this sequence of disasters emerged the conditions for one of history's great reversals. The retreat across New Jersey stripped the army to its most committed core, clarified Washington's strategic thinking, and produced the literary catalyst that reminded Americans what they were fighting for.

Modern visitors to Fort Lee can stand in Fort Lee Historic Park, operated by the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, and look across the Hudson to the site of Fort Washington. The physical geography is immediately, viscerally instructive — the width of the river, the height of the cliffs, the proximity of the two positions that were supposed to work together and did not. For students and teachers, Fort Lee offers an unparalleled case study in the gap between strategic planning and operational reality, in the consequences of command decisions made under uncertainty, and in the resilience required to sustain a revolutionary cause through defeat. For any American who wants to understand not just how the Revolution was won, but how close it came to being lost, Fort Lee is essential ground. The cliffs still stand. The river still flows. And the story they tell — of miscalculation, escape, endurance, and the stubborn refusal to surrender a cause — remains as instructive now as it was in the desperate autumn of 1776.