Battle of Setauket was a Revolutionary War engagement fought in New York, 1777. It was a British victory.
On August 22, 1777, Continental troops from Connecticut, led by Brigadier General Samuel Holden Parsons, tried and failed to seize a fortified Loyalist post at Setauket on Long Island, New York.
Parsons hoped to duplicate what the Meigs Raid had achieved against Sag Harbor, so his men made the crossing over Long Island Sound with that earlier triumph in mind. Word of the coming attack reached Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hewlett through spies beforehand, giving him time to turn the town's Presbyterian church into a stronghold, ringed with earthworks and a stockade for defense. When Parsons called on him to surrender, Hewlett refused, and a short exchange of gunfire followed, one that left neither side seriously damaged. Faced with this stalemate, Parsons pulled his men back and sailed home to Connecticut.
Under cover of darkness on August 21, Parsons and Webb pushed off across Long Island Sound in whaleboats, a handful of small brass cannons stowed aboard. By the following morning's early hours they came ashore at Crane's Neck, near what is now Old Field just to the west of Setauket, then pressed onward toward the town itself. Upon discovering that the Loyalists had dug in with strong fortifications, Parsons initially dispatched a flag of truce demanding they lay down arms. Hewlett would not yield to this demand, and gunfire erupted between the two sides for the next three hours. Casualties on both sides remained minimal, with Colonel Webb noting only a single wounded man, while the modest American artillery proved powerless against the entrenched defenses. Worried that British warships patrolling the Sound might catch wind of the fighting and sail over to investigate, Parsons broke off the attack and withdrew his men, carrying away a dozen horses seized from the enemy along with several blankets.
A dramatized version of this engagement shows up in the closing episode of season 1 of Turn: Washington's Spies. The show depicts Major Benjamin Tallmadge commanding Continental troops in an assault on the British garrison, which is under the command of a Major Edmund Hewlett.
The raiders made it safely back across the Sound, after which Parsons put Webb's regiment on patrol duty along the Connecticut coastline. By December 1777 the same trio, Parsons, Webb, and Meigs, tried again with a more ambitious plan to seize British supplies at Setauket. That effort came apart when heavy seas kept Meigs from making the crossing, and a British vessel seized Webb's boat.
Hewlett received praise in general orders for how he held the post, though the garrison pulled out of it within a few months. No large-scale expedition targeted Setauket again, but small raids struck the area on a regular basis. The town also served as a crucial relay point, passing intelligence from American operatives in New York along to Tallmadge, who ran Washington's spy network. Tallmadge, who had grown up in Setauket, headed what later became known as the Culper Ring, an operation in which several of the town's own residents played key roles.
Zachariah Greene, a Long Island refugee who supported the Patriot cause, took part in Parsons' expedition and went on to serve as minister of the Setauket Presbyterian congregation. In 1812 a new structure went up on the site.
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