Deeming it crucial to hold New York City against the British, Washington disposed most of the Continental troops in Manhattan and Long Island during the early summer of 1776. However, even as extensive military defenses were being erected on the two islands, enemy troops began to converge. On 29 June the first warships arrived with troops from Halifax under General William Howe (1729–1814), who had been named British commander in April. Within a few days a fleet of eighty-two ships filled New York Bay. On 12 July two British vessels, the Phoenix and the Rose, sailed past American batteries on the Hudson and anchored at Tappan Zee, four miles upriver. The same day the Eagle arrived at New York with General Howe’s brother, Vice Admiral Viscount Richard Howe (1726–99), who had sailed from England at the head of a fleet whose strength was rumored to be 150 ships with fifteen thousand British and Hessian soldiers. On 16 July the New York Convention appointed John Jay, Robert Yates (1738–1801) of Albany, Christopher Tappen of Ulster, Robert R. Livingston and Gilbert Livingston of Dutchess, and William Paulding of Westchester to a secret committee “to devise and carry into execution” measures to obstruct the Hudson River and “annoy” enemy ships attempting navigation up the river.

The next day the convention amplified the committee’s powers: Jay and his colleagues were authorized to take over the materials being used for the construction of vessels at Poughkeepsie, impress “boats, Vessels, Teams, Waggons, Horses, and Drivers,” and even “call out the militia” to fulfill their mission.1 The committee left White Plains to meet on 19 July at Fort Montgomery on the west bank of the Hudson near Bear Mountain. Letters from Washington and from William Duer to the committee members highlighted the urgency of their mission.2 On 22 July, the committee assigned Jacobus Van Zandt (1726–86), Augustine Laurence, and Samuel Tudor, the superintendents for construction of naval vessels at Poughkeepsie, the task of superintending “the making a Chain to fix across Hudson’s River at the most convenient place near fort Montgomery.”3 This chain was destroyed by Sir Henry Clinton during his raid up the Hudson River in October 1777, but together with the naval vessels and other defenses, it delayed Clinton sufficiently to prevent his assisting Burgoyne at Saratoga. The chain was replaced in 1778 by the great chain built across the river at West Point.

The committee also voted to augment the armament of all forts along the Hudson. At a meeting at Poughkeepsie on 22 July, Jay was instructed to travel to the Salisbury, Connecticut, ironworks to procure heavy cannon, shot, and trucks for fortification of the vital waterway.4 The documents printed below record his mission of July 1776.