Thus far, it is clear that there was nothing extravagant in the American claim to independence; nor in the readiness of Washington to seize and hold New York; nor in his belief that the colonial resources were equal to the contest.

One other element is of determining value as to the necessity for his occupation and defence of Brooklyn Heights.  New York was the only base from which Great Britain could operate against the colonies as an organized State.  By Long Island Sound and the Hudson River, her right hand would hold New England under the guns of her warships, and by quick occupation of Chesapeake and Delaware Bays and their tributary streams, her left hand would cut off the South.

If the views of Lord Dartmouth had prevailed, in 1775, there would have been no siege of Boston; but New York would have had a garrison fully equal to its defence, while sparing troops for operations outside.  But the prompt occupation of New York, as the headquarters of revolution, was a clear declaration to the world, and to the scattered people of the colonies, that a new nation was asserting life, and that its soil was free from a hostile garrison.  The occupation of New York centralized, at the social, commercial, and natural capital of the Republic, all interests and resources, and gave to the struggle real force, inspiration, and dignity.

Just as the men at Bunker Hill fought so long as powder and ball held out, but could not have been led to assail, in open field, the veterans whom they did, in fact, so effectively resist; and, as very often, a patriotic band has bravely defended, when unequal to aggressive action,—­so the possession, defence, and even the loss, of New York, as an incident of a campaign, were very different from an effort to wrest the city from the grasp of a British garrison, under cover of yawning broadsides.

History is replete with facts to show how hopefully men will seek to regain lost positions, when an original capture would have been deemed utterly hopeless.  Poland wellnigh regained a smothered nationality through an inspiration, which never could have been evoked, in a plan to seize from the Russian domain a grand estate, upon which to establish an original Poland.

To have held but to have lost New York, would simply show the defects of the defence, and the margin wanting in ability to retain, while no less suggesting how, in turn, it might be regained, at the right time, by adequate means and methods.  The occupation and defence of Brooklyn Heights was the chief element of value in this direction.  It not only combined the general protection of the city and post, in connection with the works upon Governor’s Island, but to have neglected either would have admitted an inability to retain either.

British troops at Brooklyn would command New York.  American troops at Brooklyn presented the young nation in the attitude of guarding the outer doorway of its freshly-asserted independence.  It put the British to the defensive, and compelled them to risk the landing of a large army, after a protracted ocean voyage, before they could gain a footing and measure strength with the colonists.  It does not lessen our estimate of the skill of Washington to know that Congress failed to supply adequate forces; but he made wise estimates, and had reason to expect a prompt response to his requisitions.