Hackensack

Hackensack at War: The Crossroads of Revolution in Bergen County

When George Washington rode into Hackensack on the raw afternoon of November 20, 1776, he was a general running out of ground. The previous night, thousands of British and Hessian troops had scaled the Palisades and overwhelmed Fort Lee, scattering its garrison and capturing stores that the Continental Army could not afford to lose. Washington had crossed the Hackensack River to reach the village, and from the stately home of Peter Zabriskie—one of Bergen County's most prominent dwellings—he scratched out desperate dispatches warning the Continental Congress that the situation was dire. Washington had actually established his headquarters at the Zabriskie house, known as Mansion House, as early as November 13 , using the days before the British crossing to survey local roads and bridges. Peter Zabriskie had built the home in 1751, and it contained fine appointments including Dutch tile fireplaces depicting biblical scenes; enlarged in 1776, the home was known as Mansion House.

Zabriskie was one of the driving forces in Bergen County politics and a founder of Queen's College—later Rutgers University.

Hackensack, Tappan, and New Brunswick had all competed to host the new college, and the first meeting of its trustees was held in Hackensack in May 1767, though the trustees ultimately voted in 1771 to locate it in New Brunswick.

Thomas Paine, who was a member of the garrison at Fort Lee, marched with the retreating troops through Hackensack and later immortalized the events in The American Crisis. He described how, on the morning of November 20, "an officer arrived with information that the enemy with 200 boats had landed about seven miles above," and General Greene "sent express to General Washington at the town of Hackensack, distant by the way of the ferry = six miles."

According to Washington's secretary, Lieutenant Colonel Robert H. Harrison, an express rider from Orangetown, New York, arrived at Washington's headquarters in Hackensack at 10 a.m., bringing the first news of the British landing above Fort Lee. Washington raced to the scene, and the army's desperate march to secure the New Bridge over the Hackensack River—before the British could cut them off—became a defining moment of the retreat across New Jersey.

Hackensack, the county seat of Bergen County, was not merely a waypoint in Washington's famous retreat across New Jersey. It was a place where the Revolution's survival hung visibly in the balance, where neighbors turned against neighbors with lethal consequences, and where the war's deepest contradictions—liberty proclaimed alongside slavery maintained—played out in miniature over seven agonizing years.

To understand why Hackensack mattered, one must first understand Bergen County on the eve of revolution. The county was one of New Jersey's oldest settled regions, home to Dutch Reformed families who had farmed its river valleys for generations. The First Reformed Church congregation at Hackensack had been organized in 1686 , and the Green itself had served as a public meeting place since 1698, when Captain John Berry donated the two-and-three-quarter-acre parcel to the Dutch Reformed Church; in the eighteenth century it doubled as the militia training ground. Bergen County's society was conservative, hierarchical, and deeply entwined with the institution of slavery; Bergen County held the highest concentration of enslaved people in the northern part of the state. Bergen was, in fact, the stronghold of slavery in New Jersey: by the 1800 census, the county had the largest number of enslaved persons in the state—2,825—constituting 18.6% of the total population, with 93.3% of Black residents living in slavery. When the imperial crisis began to accelerate in the early 1770s, loyalties in Bergen County fractured along lines of religion, ethnicity, kinship, and economic interest in ways that defied easy categorization. Broadly speaking, the Dutch Reformed community split between those whose theology and Enlightenment sympathies inclined them toward resistance and those whose traditionalism—and commercial ties to New York—kept them loyal to the Crown. By 1773, the county's political life had become openly contentious, with public meetings devolving into shouting matches over parliamentary taxation and colonial rights. Bergen County was not a hotbed of patriotism; it was a contested zone, and Hackensack sat at its center.

The formation of the Bergen County Committee of Safety in 1775 marked the moment when Hackensack's patriots attempted to impose revolutionary order on this fractured landscape. Among the leading figures on the committee was Judge John Fell, a prosperous merchant and civic leader who lived along the Hackensack River and threw his considerable influence behind the cause of independence. Fell was a merchant who before the Revolution had vessels plying the Hackensack and Passaic Rivers, and he served the county as a Justice of the Peace and a judge of the Court of Common Pleas. Fell would go on to serve as a delegate to the Continental Congress, but his prominence made him a target. On April 22, 1777, a band of twenty-five Loyalist raiders seized Fell at his home and carried him to New York City, where he was held prisoner for months under harsh conditions. Fell was paroled on January 7, 1778, and permitted to go home on May 11.

He kept a diary while serving as a member of the Continental Congress for the State of New Jersey from November 6, 1778, to November 30, 1779. His capture was not a random act of war but a calculated strike against the patriot leadership of Bergen County, and it illustrated how exposed Hackensack's revolutionaries were throughout the conflict.

The British invasion of November 1776 did more than send Washington's army fleeing—it also emboldened Bergen County's Loyalists to declare themselves openly. In the days following the British arrival, Loyalists met at New Bridge with Brigadier General Cortland Skinner, New Jersey's highest-ranking Loyalist, and organized a military corps. The person chosen to lead the new unit was Abraham Van Buskirk, whose land lay on the Teaneck side of New Bridge; the two other senior officers were Major Daniel Isaac Browne, the county clerk who lived next to the courthouse in Hackensack, and Major Robert Timpany, a schoolmaster at New Bridge.

The unit was named the 4th Battalion, New Jersey Volunteers , and it enlisted hundreds of Bergen County Loyalists for service anywhere in America until the conclusion of the war. The divided loyalties cut through families with excruciating precision. When the British arrived at New Bridge in November 1776, David G. Demarest immediately enlisted under Van Buskirk, throwing in his lot with the British. His wife Jane, however, along with their three sons, became avowed rebels, with the boys all enrolling in the Bergen County Militia—Gilliam starting at age fifteen in 1777, Philip that same year at sixteen, and John at sixteen in 1780.

Gilliam was eventually captured by the British but refused his father's repeated demands to join him in New York; after being exchanged, he was severely wounded in the hand in action against his own father's corps.

The war's toll on Hackensack itself was starkly physical.