h of October, Washington
issued the following order: "The General desires the
commanding officers of each regiment or corps will give in a
list of the names and the officers and men who were killed,
taken, or missing in the action of the 27th of August on
Long Island and since that period. He desires the returns
may be correct, &c." (_Force_). A large number of these
lists are preserved in _Force_, 5th series, vol. iii., and
from these we obtain the losses of the following regiments:
Hitchcock's, total loss, one officer and nine men; Little's,
three men; Huntington's, twenty-one officers and one hundred
and eighty-six men; Wyllys', one officer and nine men;
Tyler, three men; Ward, three men; Chester, twelve men; Gay,
four men; Lasher, three officers. Smallwood's lost,
according to Gist, twelve officers and two hundred and
forty-seven men; Haslet, according to his own letters, two
officers and twenty-five men; Johnston's New Jersey, two
officers and less than twenty-five men, the rolls before and
after the battle showing no greater difference in the
strength of the regiment; Miles' two battalions, sixteen
officers and about one hundred and sixty men (_Document_
61); Atlee, eleven officers and seventy-seven men. (_Ibid._)
No official report of the losses in Lutz's, Kachlein's, and
Hay's detachments or the artillery can be found, but to give
their total casualties at one hundred and fifty officers and
men is probably a liberal estimate. Lutz lost six officers
(all prisoners); Kachlein not more; Hay, one; the artillery,
three. The regiments named in the foregoing list include all
from which Howe reported that he took officers prisoners,
from which it is safe to conclude that these were all that
lost any. No others are mentioned as having been engaged.
These figures show in round numbers a total of _one
thousand_, and this was our total loss, according to
official returns in nearly every case.

How many of these, in the next place, were killed and
wounded? If we are to credit certain Hessian and British
accounts, as well as those of our own local historians, the
battle-field on Long Island was a scene of carnage, a pen in
which our men were slaughtered without mercy. The confused
strife, says one writer, "is too terrible for the