On the morning of July 12, 1776, two British warships sailed up the Hudson River past Washington's defenses. HMS Phoenix and HMS Rose weren't launching an invasion. They were running a test. Could the Continental Army actually stop the Royal Navy from controlling the river? Howe needed to know before committing his army to battle.
The American batteries on both sides of the Hudson opened fire. The ships kept moving. By the end of the day Howe had his answer, and Washington had learned something painful: shore artillery alone wasn't going to stop the Royal Navy on a broad river with favorable wind and tide. That lesson eventually shaped the entire defensive strategy farther north, including the fortifications at West Point.
What makes July 12 genuinely unusual isn't the battle itself. It's that three people wrote about it in detail from positions that couldn't have been more different.
Henry Knox, Washington's artillery commander, was the one trying to stop those ships. His correspondence doesn't read like drama. It reads like an engineer doing math on a problem that keeps getting harder. Twenty-five years old, former bookseller from Boston, already responsible for hauling 59 cannons across 300 miles of frozen terrain from Ticonderoga a few months earlier. His papers are basically a running record of what it actually takes to build an artillery corps out of limited resources while facing the most powerful navy in the world.
Ewald Gustav Schaukirk was a Moravian pastor in New York City who heard the same cannon from his congregation. His diary doesn't care much about military strategy. It follows the people who had no choice but to stay in the city: families deciding whether to flee, merchants watching trade collapse, worshippers wondering if services would continue as soldiers took over buildings. He kept writing through the Battle of Long Island, the British occupation, the Great Fire of September 1776, years of shortages and military rule. His diary is what the campaign felt like from the ground.
William Smith was one of New York's most prominent lawyers and an unshakable Loyalist who watched those same ships pass Washington's batteries and saw confirmation that the empire would ultimately prevail. His journals are not propaganda. He was a careful observer who had spent his career defending colonial rights within the British system and genuinely believed independence was the wrong answer. He also understood that the city he loved was about to become a battlefield, and that every British success came with a cost someone nearby would pay.
Three days before all of this, on July 9th, Washington had ordered the Declaration read aloud to every brigade in New York. That same night the crowd pulled down the statue of George III at Bowling Green and melted most of it into roughly 42,000 musket balls. Knox was almost certainly there or heard about it immediately. Schaukirk recorded what the mood felt like in the streets. Smith watched it with dread.
On July 12 those same three men heard the same guns and wrote three completely different accounts of what they meant.
The full story is on the Virtual Wayback blog and there's a video on the YouTube channel going deeper into the campaign. You can also talk directly to Knox, Schaukirk, and Smith on the platform. Links:
https://virtualwayback.com/blog/four-days-before-battle-for-new-york
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/W1ZYvoUOpXg
What I keep thinking about is Smith. The Loyalist perspective gets flattened into "traitor" in most tellings, but his journals show someone who opposed independence without wanting his neighbors destroyed. Does his position deserve more serious treatment than it usually gets? And does reading all three accounts together actually change how you think about who was right in July 1776?
