The left, or northern, wing consisted of 450 men of which 150 would be detached for the diversion in the center. Here the forlorn hope was commanded by Lieutenant James Gibbons, followed by the advance party under Major John Stewart. Colonel Richard Butler was in charge of the column, while Major Hardy Murfree was responsible for the diversion. Attached to both wings were parties of trained artillerymen, whose assignment was to put the captured cannons into action against the vessels in the river and the British posted at Verplancks Point. Spread among the various commands were specially ordered short pikes, called espontoons.

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Luck was with the Americans as their northern column passed through the enemy’s outer picket line. Lieutenant John Ross of the 71st Regiment, in charge of the Jaeger Post, heard first one of his men and then another fire warning shots. He had the drummer beat to arms and gathered his thirty men together. I saw no enemy, Ross later reported, and the night being extremely dark and very windy, made me suppose that what the men reported to me to have heard was occasioned by the wind rustling amongst the bushes. While Ross hesitated, Butler’s column passed through the swampy barrier.

On the southern end of the British picket line, Corporal Simon Davies was warned by his advanced sentries that there was a large body of the enemy advancing. When he fell back to the reserve post he found the sergeant supposed to be stationed there was absent. Davies and those with him continued back to the outer abatis, but before leaving that advanced area the corporal distinctly remembered hearing a noise in the water on my left, which appeared to me to have been occasioned by a large body of men wading through it.

Lieutenant Gibbons’ party leading the main northern group successfully penetrated the outer abatis without arousing any reaction. On the far right, the southern column was still moving into position when Major Murfree’s diversionary force opened fire in the center. The British forward defenses came alive with fire, most of it musketry. Ironically, the very steepness of the slopes bordering the shore, which made the position seem so strong, worked against many of the artillerymen, who could not depress their guns sufficiently to bear on the dark forms scrambling toward them. Only two of their cannons came into play. The Three-Pounder Battery opened fire in a predetermined direction that cut down some of Butler’s leading parties.

The other British cannon, the short brass twelve-pounder in Flèche No. 1, could barely traverse because of the restrictive nature of its embrasure. Its commander, Lieutenant William Horndon of the Royal Artillery, actively shifted fire from the left to the right in order to scour the swamp in front, but he looked on helplessly as the discharge blasts illuminated the thick rebel columns pressing along the south shore that he could not hit. A Connecticut officer in that southern force remembered wading through water that came up to his waist. He also recalled the British fire as very brisk and that the men of the Light Corps advanced with the greatest regularity and firmness. In addition, he noted that the enemy wasted their fire mostly over our heads.

Aroused from his sleep, Colonel Johnson reacted with more hot impetuosity than cool assessment. After ordering the men around him to stand to arms, he gathered fifteen or twenty and rushed toward the center of his line, where Major Murfree’s soldiers were giving a convincing imitation of the main attack. Johnson’s abrupt move also had the effect of disrupting the chain of command, leaving groups of soldiers gathering at various strongpoints, as per standing orders, with no instructions about what to do. A variety of signal rockets and alarm fires were part of the defensive plan, but in Johnson’s absence no one thought to employ them.

Behind the departing Johnson, Lieutenant John Roberts of the Royal Artillery reached his post at the Left Flank Battery, where he immediately encountered Captain Robert Clayton who snapped in a most ungentlemanly fashion, For God’s sake, why are not the Artillery here not being made use of, as the enemy are in the hollow and crossing the water. Roberts tried to explain that it was common practice not to store explosives in the open near the guns, and even if there had been munitions, the cannons could not bear on the enemy below. Realizing that there was nothing here for him to do, the artilleryman set off for the Howitzer Battery.

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