The Stockbridge-Munsee Company and the Battle of Kingsbridge, 1778

Grant recipient: Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians
Amount: $200,000, a Preservation Planning Grant from the National Park Service's American Battlefield Protection Program

By late summer 1778, the American Revolutionary War had settled into an uneasy stalemate. British defeats at Saratoga and Monmouth and the British evacuation of Philadelphia were offset by the American defeat at Newport, Rhode Island, and by American difficulty coordinating with their new French allies. Both sides turned to raiding and harassing each other's outposts, looking for weaknesses. Outside New York City, in what is now the Bronx, elite American light infantry had the job of keeping British troops out of New Jersey and away from American supply lines.

Who the Stockbridge-Munsee were

One of those elite units was the Stockbridge Infantry Company. Over the previous century, Mohican and Munsee families driven from their ancestral lands in the Hudson River Valley had come together as one tribe, the Stockbridge. In the French and Indian War (the Seven Years' War) of 1756–1763 they served as British scouts and rangers under the well-known Robert Rogers, hoping to protect what land they had left and win the favor of New York's colonial government. That loyalty was not returned. Two years after the war, both the British Board of Trade and the colonial government rejected the tribe's efforts to reclaim its territory, a betrayal that pushed the Stockbridge-Munsee toward the Patriot side as the Revolution approached.

They volunteered as minutemen when the war began and fought as line infantry at Bunker Hill, Saratoga and Barren Hill. With that experience, and some members' service in the earlier war, the company was by August 1778 thoroughly battle-tested and among the best troops in the Continental Army. General George Washington made it part of his veteran light infantry, the troops he relied on for the most important missions.

The Battle of Kingsbridge

On the morning of August 31, 1778, the company was operating near Van Cortlandt's Ridge, key high ground between New York City and White Plains, with orders to disrupt British patrols. Moving against what it believed was a small party of Hessian cavalry, it marched into a trap: the British had sent more than 500 men to drive the American light infantry back toward White Plains.

As the roughly 60 men of the company entered the open fields on the ridge, the British attacked. The Stockbridge-Munsee held their line but were outflanked by the Queen's Rangers and the mounted Queen's Legion, Loyalist units in which many men had served in Rogers' Rangers in the earlier war. They were now fighting, and killing, men they had once served beside and may have counted as friends.

Outnumbered, the company broke up and tried to escape through nearby woods. The Loyalists cut them off, surrounded them and killed them without allowing them to surrender. The number killed is still debated; accounts from the time put it between 15 and 40 Stockbridge-Munsee, against one British cavalryman killed and a handful wounded.

Aftermath

The company never fought as a unit again. It had lost its leaders and many of the tribe's young men, and Washington honorably discharged the survivors and let them go home. By the war's end, the tribe had been pushed off its land at Stockbridge and moved to the Oneida Country in upstate New York, the first of a series of forced removals that ended with the establishment of the Stockbridge-Munsee Reservation in north-central Wisconsin in 1856.

Preserving the battlefield

Today the Stockbridge-Munsee Community's Tribal Historic Preservation Office leads long-term preservation of the Kingsbridge battlefield, working with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation to research and interpret this turning point in the tribe's history. With the grant, the tribe will carry out field surveys that do not disturb the ground to define the battlefield's boundaries, identify key terrain, and trace how the combatants moved during and after the fighting.

The American Battlefield Protection Program's Preservation Planning Grants support projects to preserve and interpret sites of armed conflict on American soil. The program also offers Battlefield Land Acquisition, Interpretation and Restoration Grants to encourage community stewardship of historic sites at the state, tribal and local levels.

Sources

• National Park Service, American Battlefield Protection Program, "The Elite of the Continental Army: Investigating the Stockbridge-Munsee Infantry Company and Mohican Service at the Battle of Kingsbridge." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-elite-of-the-continental-army-investigating-the-stockbridge-munsee-infantry-company-and-mohican-service-at-the-battle-of-kingsbridge.htm
• Preservation Planning Grants: https://www.nps.gov/orgs/2287/preservation-planning-grants.htm
• The Park Service's page describes the dead as potentially 80% of the company, a share that does not match its own figures of about 60 men and 15 to 40 killed, so this page gives only the counts.