on Bergen and at Paulus-Hook, have behaved in a scandalous manner,
running off from their posts on the first cannonade from the ships of
the enemy. At all the posts we find it difficult to keep the militia
to their duty." (_Mercer to Washington_, Sept. 17th, 1776.) "I don't
know whether the New Engd troops will stand there [at Harlem
Heights], but I am sure they will not upon open ground,"
etc.--_Tilghman._ _Document_ 29.]

The events of the 15th naturally and justly roused the wrath of both
Washington and Mercer, and their denunciations become a part of the
record of the time. But in recording them it belongs to those who
write a century later to explain and qualify. Justice to the men who
figured in these scenes requires that the terms of reproach should not
be perpetuated as a final stigma upon their character as soldiers of
the Revolution. All military experience proves that troops who have
once given way in a panic are not therefore or necessarily poor
troops; and the experience at Kip's Bay and Powle's Hook was only an
illustration in the proof. These men had their revenge. If the records
of New Jersey and Pennsylvania were to be thoroughly examined, they
would doubtless show that large numbers of Mercer's militia re-entered
the service and acquitted themselves well. This is certainly true of
many of the routed crowd whom Washington found it impossible to rally
on Murray's Hill and in Murray's corn-field. Some of those who ran
from the Light Infantry on the 15th assisted in driving the same Light
Infantry on the 16th. Prescott's men a few weeks later successfully
defended a crossing in Westchester County and thwarted the enemy's
designs. Not a few of the militia in Douglas's brigade were the
identical men with whom Oliver Wolcott marched up to meet Burgoyne a
year later, and who, under Colonels Cook and Latimer, "threw away
their lives" in the decisive action of that campaign, suffering a
greater loss than any other two regiments on the field. Fellows, also,
was there to co-operate in forcing the British surrender. In Parsons'
brigade were young officers and soldiers who formed part of the select
corps that stormed Stony Point, and among Wadsworth's troops were
others who, five years later, charged upon the Yorktown redoubt with
the leading American Light Infantry battalion.[191]

[Footnote 191: The Major of this battalion (Gimat's) was John
Palsgrave Wyllys, of Hartford, who, as Wadsworth's Brigade-Major, was
t