British Ascent of the Palisades

# The British Ascent of the Palisades and the Fall of Fort Lee, November 1776

In the autumn of 1776, the American cause in the Revolutionary War stood on precarious ground. Following a series of devastating defeats in the Battle of Long Island in August and the subsequent loss of New York City in September, General George Washington's Continental Army was in retreat, struggling to maintain cohesion and morale in the face of a seemingly unstoppable British advance. The Hudson River corridor had become the critical strategic axis of the campaign, and the Americans had invested considerable effort in fortifying positions along its banks to prevent the British from gaining full control of the waterway. Fort Washington, perched on the high ground of northern Manhattan, and Fort Lee, situated atop the towering Palisades cliffs on the New Jersey shore directly opposite, were intended to work in tandem to deny British naval passage up the Hudson. But by mid-November, this defensive strategy was collapsing, and the events that unfolded at the Palisades on November 20, 1776, would mark one of the war's most harrowing episodes of retreat and narrow escape.

The disaster began with the fall of Fort Washington on November 16. British and Hessian forces under General William Howe launched a coordinated assault on the fort, overwhelming its garrison of nearly three thousand American troops, all of whom were killed, wounded, or captured. It was one of the worst American losses of the entire war, and it rendered Fort Lee's position on the opposite shore strategically untenable. General Nathanael Greene, who commanded the Fort Lee garrison, and Washington himself, who had watched the fall of Fort Washington from the New Jersey side with anguished helplessness, now faced an urgent question: how quickly could the British follow up their victory by crossing the Hudson to strike Fort Lee?

The answer came just four days later. In the early morning darkness of November 20, Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis led an assault force of several thousand British troops across the Hudson River in flatboats. Rather than attempting a direct assault on the fortified position at Fort Lee, Cornwallis chose a landing site at Lower Closter Dock, located approximately six miles north of the fort, where the towering Palisades cliffs rose steeply from the river's edge. This was a calculated gamble. The Palisades were a natural fortress in their own right, with sheer rock faces that could have made any ascent a death trap if defenders were positioned above. However, Cornwallis had a decisive advantage: a local Loyalist who knew the terrain intimately and could guide the British column up a path through the cliffs that the Americans had failed to adequately guard. The ascent demonstrated a painful truth about the Palisades position — while the cliffs were formidable natural barriers, they could be scaled at several points by troops with knowledge of the routes. The American garrison, already depleted because many soldiers had been drawn away to reinforce other threatened positions, simply lacked the manpower to picket every possible approach path along miles of cliff face.

When word reached Fort Lee that a British force had scaled the Palisades and was advancing rapidly from the north, the situation became a desperate race against encirclement. Washington and Greene ordered an immediate evacuation. The retreat was so hurried that the Americans were forced to abandon enormous quantities of supplies, artillery, tents, and provisions — material the struggling army could ill afford to lose. Soldiers fled southward and westward toward the Hackensack River, narrowly avoiding capture as Cornwallis's troops closed in on the fort.

The fall of Fort Lee without a significant fight was a humiliating blow, but the successful escape of the garrison's troops prevented another catastrophic mass capture like the one at Fort Washington. What followed was the agonizing retreat across New Jersey, with Washington's dwindling army marching through freezing weather toward the Delaware River, pursued by Cornwallis's forces. The army's survival during these desperate weeks set the stage for Washington's bold counterstrike at the Battle of Trenton on December 26, 1776, a turning point that revived the revolutionary cause. The British ascent of the Palisades thus occupies a critical place in this larger narrative — a moment when the terrain that Americans had trusted to protect them was turned against them, and when the war's outcome hinged not on holding ground but on the capacity to endure loss and keep fighting.