IT is First Rhode Island Regiment Week in the town of Yorktown, and last Tuesday night the Town Council issued a proclamation to that effect. The main observance of the 215th anniversary of the Battle of Croton Heights, however, will not take place until Memorial Day, when Linda G. Cooper, Town Supervisor, leads a parade starting at 11 A.M. from Town Hall in Yorktown Heights.
Two years into the American Revolution the state of Rhode Island was scraping the bottom of military manpower. In February 1778, Gov. Nicholas Cooke and his legislature overrode the objections of slaveholders and authorized the recruiting of black freemen and slaves as regular soldiers in the Continental Army.
The new recruits were drawn from the state's several hundred black men, formed into the First Rhode Island Regiment. Slaves enlisted in the new unit, to be led by whites, were pledged their freedom at war's end.
With the blessing of Brig. Gen. James Varnum of Rhode Island and the tacit approval of Gen. George Washington, Gen. Nathanael Greene took the lead in helping organize the 130-man regiment. The nominal size of a regiment was 590 enlisted men. But few of the dangerously understrength Continental Army units ever approached that level.
This black Rhode Island addition to the Army distinguished itself in the hotly contested Battle of Newport on Aug. 29, 1778, in which the First Rhode Island was cited by the commanding general,John Sullivan, for its "desperate valor in repelling three furious Hessian infantry assaults."
The First Rhode Island's ranking officer was Col. Christopher Greene, 41, Nathanael Greene's third cousin, who had come from Valley Forge. Other white officers included Col. Jeremiah Olney, Lieut. Col. Samuel Ward Jr. and Maj. Ebenezer Flagg.
Traveling west from Newport on Jan. 5, 1781, to join the main army, the First Rhode Island was observed at a Connecticut ferry crossing by the Marquis Francois Jean de Chastellux, one of Rochambeau's five major generals. Chasetellux wrote in his journal: "The majority of these enlisted men are Negroes or mulattoes, strong, robust men. Those I saw made a very good appearance."
On April 15, 1781, the First Rhode Island was assigned a defensive position at the northern bank of the Croton River, on the American lines guarding the northernmost part of Westchester County's Neutral Ground, an almost uninhabited, unfortified area between the two armies.
The area protected by Greene's First Rhode Islanders included several fords across the Croton plus one strategic structure, the Pines Bridge, over which the spy Maj. John Andre, displaying Benedict Arnold's pass, had crossed the previous fall.
The Pines Bridge was guarded at all times. But the pickets at the fords were customarily withdrawn at dawn, on the assumption that an enemy force would not try a daylight crossing.
As was customary at the time, the country around the river crossings was infested by Tories. Many disaffected farmers had fled to New York City to join Col. James De Lancey's Loyal Westchester Refugee Corps. De Lancey, always eager to strike an unexpected blow at the Americans, received intelligence about the intermittently guarded fords across the Croton.
Late on May 13, 1781 -- 215 years ago this week -- De Lancey assembled a sizable loyalist force of 60 cavalry and 200 infantrymen and slipped north on back roads through the Neutral Ground. His destination, Blenis Ford on the Croton River, was kept secret. There were too many spies on both sides.
Halting just short of the ford, the British raiders remained hidden in the woods until, with the first gray light of May 14, the American guards withdrew for breakfast. Minutes later De Lancey's troopers crashed out of the shrubbery and galloped across the ford, riding hell for leather up a steep slope toward the elegant Davenport house, where Greene and his officers were still sleeping.
It was far from the first British hit-and-run cavalry attack in upper Westchester County, but it was one of the bloodiest.
De Lancey was angered by a pistol shot from an upstairs window of the house. His Refugees dismounted and tore into the house, sabering Colonel Greene and killing Major Flagg and his lieutenant.
Outside loyalist infantrymen overwhelmed the Rhode Islanders, who were outnumbered 2 to 1. The raiders killed 14, wounded 100 and took 30 prisoners, most of whom were soon sold into slavery in the British West Indies.
De Lancey, without a single casualty, left as swiftly as he had arrived, riding down the hillside and crossing Pine's Bridge.
Colonel Greene, in his nightclothes, was thrown over a saddle and died.
The dead -- white officers and black rank and file -- lie today beneath two separated stone memorials alongside the Crompond Presbyterian Church of Yorktown, on Route 202 east of the Taconic State Parkway.
Colonel Olney and Colonel Ward took command of the regrouped regiment. Three months later, convoying the artillery and baggage train, the First Rhode Island joined the great 6,000-man French-American march to Virginia. At Cornwallis's capitulation in Yorktown, Va., the freemen and soon-to-be-freed slaves stood at attention alongside all the other Continental regiments -- from Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia -- and took the salute of the enemy, which until recently had almost destroyed them.
The men of the First Rhode Island paid particular attention to their military bearing. After watching the Continental Army units pass in review before Washington and Rochambeau, Baron Ludwig von Closen, aide-de-camp to the French commander, wrote in his journal that the First Rhode Islanders were the "most neatly dressed, the best under arms and the most precise in all their maneuvers."