Monday, February 13, 2012

Marinus Willett, Forgotten Savior of Peekskill

BIOGRAPHY 

No Peekskill street bears his name.
No statue of him graces any Peekskill park.
No memorial plaque commemorating his stunning exploits during the Revolution can be found anywhere in Peekskill.
He was Lt. Col. Marinus Willett, an outstanding soldier whose determined action saved Peekskill from destruction at the hands of the British. Yet he is hardly remembered by the community he delivered from the enemy.

Meet Marinus Willett
Marinus Willett was born on July 31, 1740, in Jamaica, Long Island. Originally called Rustdorp by the Dutch, when the Brutish took over in 1664 they named it Jameco, after the Lenape word for beaver. The tenth of thirteen children and one of the six sons of Aletta Clowes and Edward Willett, Marinus was named for a great uncle, Marinus Van Varick.
Later genealogical research casts doubt on the claim made in the 19th century that he was the great-grandson of Thomas Willett, first mayor of New York in 1665. This lineage was never claimed by Marinus Willett.
Little is known about his childhood, except that he worked as a cabinet maker. At the age of 18, he gained military experience as a lieutenant in the French and Indian War by taking part in attacks on French-held Forts Ticonderoga and Frontenac.
In the years before the Revolution, Willett was a fervent and effective member of the Sons of Liberty. Like other secret societies, it was formed to protest the series of onerous acts passed by the British to extract more taxes from the colonies.
After the news of the armed rebellion at Lexington and Concord in April of 1775 reached New York, the British decided to evacuate the city. On June 6th, seeing a British detachment taking five wagonloads of muskets to the docks, Willett dashed into the street, grabbed the bridle of the lead horse and stopped the column.
An unruly crowd gathered, and Willett--by now an accomplished rabble-rouser--stirred them up. He announced to the astonished British that they could only leave the city with the personal weapons they carried. The spare guns would have to remain, and remain they did. Willett even persuaded one of the British soldiers to join the American cause.
In 1892, a plaque commemorating this event was placed by the Sons of the Revolution at the northwest corner of Broad and Beaver streets. It contains a representation of old Broad Streetand Federal Hall and a medallion head of Marinus Willett.
Two months after the seizure of the British weapons, Willett became a captain in Col. Alexander McDougall's First New York militia regiment and took part in the misguided and abortive invasion of Canada.
An obvious key objective of British forces during the war, Peekskill guarded the southern gate to the Hudson Highlands, a natural mountainous barrier. Part of the Appalachian mountain chain, the Highlands commanded a vital avenue of communication--the crucial waterway known as the North River, today called the Hudson to honor its discoverer.
Travel back in time with me to the spring of 1777. British forces had wintered comfortably in New York City and now occupy Westchester as far north as Dobbs Ferry.


    Marinus Willett in a 1791 oil painting by portrait artist Ralph Earle.
     Owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Above the Croton River, American forces are in control. In between is the so-called "Neutral Ground." Raided by marauding Tory forces called "skinners," who steal cattle from farmers to sell to the British in New York City, the region is defended by patriot militia and irregulars called "cowboys."
Brig. Gen. William Heath, nominally in command of the Eastern Department at Peekskill, is on leave and visiting his home in Massachusetts. Commanding Continental forces in the Highlands and headquartered at Peekskill is Scottish-born Alexander, now a Brigadier General.
McDougall, 46, a wealthy merchant and dedicated patriot, had been a member and later a leader of the Sons of Liberty. He wrote and had printed an anonymous broadside, To the Betrayed Inhabitants, protesting provincial payments for housing and provisions for British troops under the Quartering Acts. Accused of libel, he refused to post bail and was held in jail for five months. Public demonstrations became so frequent his release was ordered by Governor Tryon.
McDougall fought delaying actions in 1776 against the British at Brooklyn Heights and White Plains. [In one of those peculiar alterations that occur in street names, MacDougal Streetin New York's Greenwich Village was later named for him.]
In command at Fort Independence on Roa Hook (opposite the present entrance to Camp Smith) is Lt. Col. Marinus Willett, 36, who spends every available moment drilling his New York militia troops of the Third Continental Regiment.
At Peekskill, McDougall's forces erect redoubts and barracks in a military complex on a series of three hills lying south of the present Bear Mountain State Parkway

The British Attack Peekskill
On Sunday, March 23, 1777, an attack force consisting of the British frigate H.M.S. Brune, four transports and other naval support craft appears in the Hudson off Peekskill. About 500 British troops and four light cannons served by sailors are landed unopposed in Lent's Cove, between Charles Point and Indian Point.
Their mission is to destroy the Continental encampment and any wharves, warehouses, buildings, equipment or supplies useful to the American cause.
General McDougall decides that his Peekskill garrison is too small to attack the superior British force. A defeat at the hands of the enemy would open the Highlands and jeopardize the weapons and supplies stored at Continental Village and Fishkill.
McDougall prudently withdraws his troops to the north of Peekskill. The retreating Americans burn one of the barracks on Fort Hill, thus denying it to the attacking British. For the same reason, they burn a mill on McGregory Creek and several warehouses near the waterfront.
The British set up their four field pieces on Drum Hill and fire on Peekskill. Nathaniel Brown, a Continental soldier retreating before the British, stops to drink from a spring and is killed by fragments from a British cannonball. The spring near which he is standing is located on Division Street, north of the junction with Highland Avenue. It will hereafter be known as the Soldier's Spring. General McDougall sends an urgent message to Lt. Col. Willett on Roa Hook telling him to leave the fort in charge of a subordinate and to meet him at Bald Hill (north of the present Van Cortlandtville) with a detachment of troops. After the hanging of British spy Edmund Palmer in August of 1777, the hill will acquire the sinister name it bears to this day: Gallows Hill.

Colonel Willett Reports
At about three in the afternoon, Marinus Willett and 80 soldiers join McDougall on Bald Hill. Quickly taking in the situation, Willett spots British troops on a hill to the south of Peekskill Hollow Creek (the site of the present Cortlandt town hall), where they have set fire to a house. He immediately proposes to attack them by circling to their rear and asks McDougall to make a feint to the left to distract attention from his flanking movement.
Initially uncomfortable with this plan, McDougall prefers to wait for Dutchess County militia reinforcements expected the next day. Willett pesters the reluctant commander, who finally gives him permission to execute his plan.
Aggressively ordering his troops forward, Willett moves them through a gully with guns "at trail" to avoid detection. After being delayed by two fences at which they are subjected to enemy musket fire, in a loud voice Willett gives the order, “Fix bayonets and charge!”
On hearing that chilling command, the British troops, busy reloading their muskets, fall back to the Post Road
. Confusion reigns in the gathering darkness. Unfamiliar with the terrain, the entire British force is soon in disorderly retreat back to their boats, leaving behind the baggage and supplies that had been landed with their expedition. One abandoned item, a blue cloak made of camlet (a mixture of silk and wool) will have special significance for Marinus Willett.
Willett's decisiveness and the unflinching determination of his well-drilled troops undoubtedly saved Peekskill from the fate of other rebel towns struck in lightning raids.
Burning was a common British retaliatory tactic as punishment for communities storing grain and supplies for rebel forces. The previous autumn, they had burned White Plains after the battle there. One month after their attack on Peekskill, Danbury in Connecticut will be raided, and homes, warehouses and provisions destroyed. Later in 1777, the British will attack and burn the upriver town of Kingston, temporarily serving as New York’s capital because an attack on Albany was anticipated.
Two years later, the same fiery fate awaits the Connecticut towns of Groton, New Haven, East Haven, Fairfield and Green's Farms. New London will be savagely torched in 1781.
Peekskill will be overrun twice by the British—first in the fall of 1777 to guard their flank in the attack on Forts Clinton and Montgomery near Bear Mountain, and again in the summer and fall of 1779 during their campaign to capture Stony Point and Verplanck Point.
On each of these occasions, the enemy's troops will remain longer and wreak greater havoc than before. By then, Willett and his troops will be long gone. One likes to think the outcome of these subsequent attacks would have been different had Marinus Willett still been in Peekskill.

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Posted by Notorc @ 2/13/2012 09:33:00 AM 0 comments
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Monday, February 06, 2012

The First Americans, 2: An Inevitable Clash of Cultures

HISTORY

The arrival of Europeans in the New World resulted in almost immediate exploitation of native Americans.
Columbus's first contacts were with the gentle and innocent Taino Indians on the island of San Salvador.
 "They should make good and intelligent servants," was his initial impression, conveyed in letters to his royal Spanish patrons, Ferdinand and Isabella.
Although Columbus maintained he had seen "no better people" in the world, his admiration did not deter him from chaining and shipping hundreds of Taino men and women back to Spain. Rapacious Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English slavers who came later piously justified their actions on the grounds that Indians were "idolators" and "heathens."

Grossly Undercounted
As recently as sixty years ago estimates of the size of the Indian population north of the Rio Grande at the time of Columbus's first landfall placed it at between one million and a million and a half. Demographers now recognize that these figures were grossly in error.
The indigenous population of America and Canada at the end of the fifteenth century is now believed to have numbered between twelve and fifteen million. In the three contiguous continents, North, Central and South America, the total Indian population is believed to have been an astonishing one hundred million.
Columbus brought alcohol, not uncommon baggage for conquerors. According to Herodotus, the ancient Greeks always introduced drink to the lands they colonized.
Columbus also carried a more sinister cargo: a pandemic of the contagious diseases of the Old World. Lacking previous exposure, within a few generations the Indian population of the Americas was decimated.
Epidemics of smallpox, measles, cholera, typhoid, and dysentery swept through whole tribes like wildfire on the prairie. Ironically, recent studies have confirmed that the crewmen on Columbus’s ships returned to Europe with a disease, syphilis, acquired in the New World, which spread with equal rapidity. Some observers consider the exchange an inadvertent but exquisite form of payback.
By the time of the 1910 federal Census, only a scant 210,000 Indians could be found and counted in the United States. There is small comfort in the knowledge that American Indians now number more than 2.8 million.
What Scottish poet Robert Burns called "man's inhumanity to man" still "makes countless thousands mourn." The relentless genocide of North American Indians is now being repeated in the Brazilian rain forest. And for the same reasons: A desperate lust for gold and for land.
Despite their lack of civilization, the Indians' gentle use of the world around them was remarkably sophisticated and forward-looking. Land was an abstract commodity--much like air or fire or water--something there to be freely used by the group.
Not understanding the European concept of "title" or ownership of land by individuals, they were at a disadvantage in making treaties. Under pressure of immigration and westward expansion, whites abrogated such treaties almost as soon as they were made.
Possessions and authority among Indians often passed through a female line of descent. In contrast to the Old World practice of hereditary rule, leadership of clans and tribes was based on ability or proficiency. Decisions bearing on tribal policy were reached by unanimous consent--not mere majority agreement--at public meetings attended both by men and women.

Native Languages
Some four hundred identifiable tribal cultures flourished north of the Rio Grande in the fifteenth century. We shall probably never know the number of different languages spoken in the Americas, most of them now lost or in the process of disappearing as older native speakers die,. Scholars estimate these to have numbered around 2,200, many with local or regional variations.
Native American languages have a practical side. During World War II Marine Corps
Navajo language talkers confounded Japanese code breakers in the Pacific. Similarly, U.S. Army Cherokee speakers confused the Germans opposing the landings at Omaha Beach in Normandy.
Every native language that disappears takes with it clues to philosophies, histories and irreplaceable environmental wisdom accumulated over many millennia. More than half of the remaining 140 native languages may fall silent unless organized action is taken to teach them. In the U.S., nine centers now offer immersion language courses to young tribal members.
Native language distribution gives tantalizing clues to early migrations. For example, the tribes in the lower Hudson Valley all spoke an Algonquian language--but an Algonquian tongue was spoken as far west as Montana by the Blackfoot and by the Cree in subarctic Canada. Sioux was spoken in the Great Plains by the proud tribe of that name, but it was also the language in what are now Virginia and the Carolinas.

Indian Contributions
Indians made important contributions to the world's food supply, including corn, potatoes and sweet potatoes, manioc, peanuts, squash, peppers, tomatoes, pumpkins, beans, avocados, and dozens of other vegetables and herbs. Indian societies were well acquainted with plant medicines.
Before 1492, 40 percent of the modern world's medicinal drugs were being used in America to treat illnesses. Among these remedies were coca (cocaine, as a pain-killer), curare (a muscle relaxant), cinchona bark (quinine, for treating malaria), cascara sagrada (a laxative), datura (a pain-reliever), and ephedra (relief from allergies and asthma).
Indians ritually identified themselves with the animals they hunted. Common to Indian life was shamanism, an animalistic religion of Asiatic origin in which mediation between the visible and the spirit world is performed by shamans. Shamanist practices have been documented in cultures as diverse as Iron Age Ireland, pagan Scandinavia, classical Greece, and ice-bound Siberia.
Sometimes described as "medicine men," the shamans' powers went beyond treating the sick. In the Americas, they ranged from soothsayers, magicians and hypnotists to trained priests who presided over formal rituals and entire cults. Interestingly, the growth of consciousness-raising New Age movements in the 1980s fostered new interest in shamanism.
Like the philosophers Montaigne and Rousseau, it is easy to sentimentalize Indians as "noble savages." Far from being idyllic, their existence was harsh. The average life span barely exceeded 35 years; infant mortality was high. Evidence from graves reveals that diseases like arthritis and tuberculosis were common, and tooth decay was a problem.
Our modern world owes much to Indians, far beyond the woodcraft skills taught in summer camps and the foolish names applied to professional baseball and football teams. We are still in the process of learning truths they knew instinctively in their reverence for nature--that the land and its resources are not only for our use but must be preserved for generations to come.
In addition to the communality of land and possessions, belief in the freedom and dignity of the individual was common to many Indian societies. With patient research and a measure of good luck, we may yet learn the secret of the Indians' relationship with nature, and their basic sense of equality and respect for human rights.



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Posted by Notorc @ 2/06/2012 08:30:00 AM 0 comments
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Monday, January 30, 2012

The First Americans, 1: Asiatic Origins

HISTORY

Today’s American Indian population of more than 2.8 million counted in the 2010 Census is in sharp contrast to the native population in 1609, the year Henry Hudson sailed up the river that bears his name. The entire North American continent was then the exclusive domain of Indians.
A mere hundred years later, the Indian tribes of the Hudson Valley had sold their highly desirable lands to Dutch or English colonists, usually for a song. The Indian tribes of the region--Mahicans and Munsees--then scattered to the four winds, leaving only names on the land and a few tribal members in isolated remnant groups.
Some Hudson Valley tribes found their way to Massachusetts, others to upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. To find descendants of these tribes today, one would have to travel to Wisconsin or to Ontario in Canada, where small bands still live on reservations.
A similar extinction drama was played out in the Massachusetts Bay colony after the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620. Eventually, a whole section of American ethnography was pushed from their lands and settled on reservations in what were considered to be undesirable areas of the republic. In some cases, as in the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), they were given lands that proved to be oil-bearing, making a few rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
Indians owe their name to a monumental gaffe committed by Christopher Columbus five centuries ago. Thinking he had reached India in 1492, he called the people he encountered "los Indios." 
Eventually, it was recognized that he had not reached Asia but had discovered an unknown continent. By then, the word "Indian" or a close variant had entered the major languages of the world.
To rectify Columbus's error and avoid the stereotypes that have sprung up, it is fashionable today to refer to Indians as "Native Americans." Although it may be politically incorrect to demur, the term Native American is as much a misnomer as was Indian. We Americans are all descended from immigrants; Indians merely got here sooner than the rest of us.

The Land Bridge
Originating in Asia, ancestors of the so-called Native Americans are believed to have reached Alaska from Siberia by a land bridge exposed in shallow Bering Strait. Geologists refer to the twin areas of Russia east of the Lena River and northwestern North America west of longitude 130 degrees as Beringia.
Although not very likely in a warming planet, a drop of only 120 feet in today's ocean level today would create a land bridge again and reveal the link from one continent to another. It seems clear the first Americans arrived in what is North America well before the last major glaciation and then made their way southward. Hugging the shoreline along the still ice-covered part of the continent, they depended on fish and shell fish for sustenance.
Evidence of their passage along the ocean strand may exist under shallow Pacific coastal waters. Robert Ballard, explorer of the Titanic wreck, has indicated an interest in such a project.
Their migration was for the most basic of reasons: food. Once past the southern limit of glacial ice, these hunter-gatherers traveled inland in small bands, moving with the game that supplied them with meat and furs.
Always seeking new regions where animals and plants were plentiful, they explored ever southward as the climate moderated. Taking whatever a bountiful nature offered, they made no effort to increase or propagate their food supply by domesticating animals or rising crops.
Eventually, wandering groups reached the southernmost tip of South America.  Excavations at the Monte Verde site in Chile have yielded radiocarbon dates of 12,500 years. This date, however, is not universally accepted. Other sites in the Americas have been claimed to have even earlier dates, and the jury is still out.
Nevertheless, by traveling as little as three miles a week, the distance between Alaska and Tierra del Fuego could have been covered in about 70 years. Along the way, mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths as large as elephants, and other animals all fell victim to their primitive flint-tipped spears.
Unlike later Indian hunters, who killed only as much as they needed for food, clothing and shelter, their Ice Age forbears killed wantonly. Ironically, by slaughtering their quarry in mass kills they hastened the extinction of the very animals upon which they depended.
Two such animals were the camel and the horse, once common on the plains of western America. Soon after the end of the Ice Age and before their total extinction, these quadrupeds also used the Bering Strait land bridge for migration--but in the opposite direction.
Spreading westward across Asia, the primitive wild horse of the steppes was eventually domesticated. When Indians encountered mounted Spanish explorers in 1539, all memory of earlier horses had been lost, and they regarded the strange new animals with awe. Once introduced to the horse, however, the Plains Indians quickly adapted to an equine way of life.

Old vs. New Worlds
At some time after 11,000 years ago, rising sea levels cut off the Bering Strait land bridge, blocking the passage of Stone Age peoples. That the Indians who occupied the New World were still living in the Stone Age when Columbus reached these shores has long interested scientists.
What was it that kept Indians from matching the growth of civilizations of the Old World?
First and foremost, the Indians had remained non-literate. Developed in the fertile Mesopotamian plain as an adjunct to trade and government, writing and reading gave the Old World an initial leap forward. These two skills led to logical thought, mathematics, science, medicine and invention. Useful arts followed: engineering, dam-building, irrigation, intensive agriculture, ceramics and metallurgy.
Reading and writing paralleled still another phenomenon--cities that sprang up abruptly in the Old World about six thousand years ago. Elaborate systems of piping and aqueducts supplying water over long distances provided public baths and carried off wastes, accelerating the clustering of peoples. Initial agricultural cultures soon gave way to commercial and industrial civilizations.
Cities became states and nations with stratified social and economic hierarchies. These record-keeping bureaucracies were regulated by a judiciary and a priesthood, and governed by a ruling minority.
In contrast, the Indian lifestyle of foraging, hunting, fishing and farming limited them to small groups of families and clans gathered in temporary camps and small villages. Their only political organizations were tribes and loose confederacies.
Unlike the sheep, goats, cattle, horses, donkeys and camels of the Old World, with the exception of the dog, the animals available to the Indians did not lend themselves to domestication. In northern Europe, even reindeer and elk were tamed and harnessed.
Lacking domestic animals, Indians in the Western Hemisphere were largely doomed to continuing their nomadic lifestyle. Without draft animals and the plow, their attempts at raising crops necessarily were rudimentary. And without beasts of burden and wheels to provide transport, possessions other than the most portable tools and utensils quickly became impediments to a wandering lifestyle.

Editor’s Note: Look for the second part of this series, “The First Americans, 2: An Inevitable Conflict of Cultures.” 

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