Prelude to Glory, Vol. 4

by Ron Carter

  There was silence for a moment. “Send a messenger.”

  “Under a white flag?”

  “No. Most often with a wampum belt.”

  “Who makes—“

  Billy got no further. Suddenly Eli sat bolt upright, and Billy stared at him in puzzlement. Eli spoke with an intensity Billy had not heard from him.

  “Joseph Brant would honor a wampum belt. We can make one—you and I.”

  Notes

  Billy and Eli are fictional characters, hence the sequences in this chapter are fictional. However, the Iroquois often used sweat lodges for religious and spiritual purposes (see Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, p. 81).

  Fort Ticonderoga

  June 12, 1777

  CHAPTER VII

  * * *

  Weariness lined his face. It showed in his eyes and in his two-day beard stubble and the sag of his shoulders and his wilted uniform. Arthur St. Clair, lately commissioned major general in the Continental army of the United States, hung his tricorn officers’ hat and cape on the pegs behind the door, walked past the old, scarred pinewood desk and slowly settled onto the straight-backed, rough-hewn chair facing the door. The chair groaned, and St. Clair let it take his weight gradually, waiting for it to crack. It held. For a time he sat in silence, critically studying the detail of the low-ceilinged office reserved for the commanding officer of Fort Ticonderoga.

  The best of the French engineers had used trees and stones from the forest when they built the large, five-sided, thick-walled fort. The ravages of time had taken their toll, and the scars left by cannon and musketfire were grim evidence of the battles the aging structure had survived as the British took it from the French and the Americans took it from the British.

  The office walls were of deteriorating pine logs, chinked with mud, lime, and straw. The floor and ceiling were of rough-sawed pine planks that had shrunk since being nailed to their log underpinnings, and slight gaps had appeared between the boards. Tiny crumbs of chinking had sifted from the walls to the floor to leave a dusting of fine white powder around the perimeter of the room. A small stone fireplace divided the south wall, and a narrow cot and blanket occupied one of the corners next to it. Two small windows on either side of the door in the north wall provided light during the day, sufficient only to cast into the room an atmosphere of perpetual gloom. A five-foot bench made of unfinished pine stood beneath one window, and a small American flag graced the west wall, its red and white stripes and blue field with thirteen circled stars the only splash of color in an otherwise colorless room. Two pine chairs, neither sanded nor finished, both with cracked seats, faced the battered desk. A faint, musty odor tainted the air.

  Two small north-facing windows provided a narrow view into the large parade ground and the mess halls for officers and enlisted men, barracks, hospital, commissary, and armory built into the thick, crumbling stone walls that surrounded a forty-foot flagpole in the center. Two lamps stood on the desk, one on the plain mantel above the fireplace, and two others hung on the east and west walls. There was no clock in the room.

  St. Clair drew his watch from its pocket in his tunic. Twenty minutes past eleven o’clock. He thrust it back and pulled his orders from inside his tunic to read them once more.

  Born forty years earlier in Scotland to the clan St. Clair, pronounced Sinclair, that had emigrated from Normandy to Scotland in the eleventh century, he had early devoted himself to the life of a soldier. He came to America with the Royal American Regiment, where he fought with distinction at Louisbourg, under the command of William Howe when General Wolfe took Quebec during the Seven Years’ War, which ended in 1763. With the fighting finished, he had shocked his family, and the British army, by siding with the upstart colonies in their rise against English domination. Using inherited money and his wife’s fortune, he bought four thousand acres in the beautiful Ligonier Valley in Pennsylvania, to become the largest landowner west of the Appalachian Mountains. When the rebellious Americans chose to stand against the British at the North Bridge in Concord, St. Clair made his services available as a colonel in the militia, then in the Second Pennsylvania Battalion, where he was with those who reached the gates of Quebec on December 30, 1775, before they were turned back by a blizzard and a determined stand at the city gates by the British under General Sir Guy Carleton.

  Despite the failure at Quebec, St. Clair’s leadership and uncommon judgment were noticed, and he was with General Washington when the tattered remains of the Continental army struck the feared Hessians garrisoned at Trenton the morning of December 26, 1776, and killed or captured the entire command. It was St. Clair who cornered and demanded, and received, the surrender of the last Hessian regiment near Assunpink Creek. Six days later the American army found itself pinned against the Delaware River by British General Charles Cornwallis and four thousand angry British regulars, whose sole ambition in life was to avenge their humiliation at Trenton and utterly destroy the upstart Americans.

  St. Clair had sat at the table of General Washington’s hastily convened war council, and siding with General Washington against some of the other officers, provided critical suggestions that resulted in the daring, unheard of strategy adopted by Washington, by which the Americans circled the entrenched Cornwallis in a forced night march to take Princeton, while Cornwallis prepared his army to storm empty American trenches on the Delaware River the following morning.

  Handsome, with steel-blue eyes, deep brown hair, and a granite jaw and chin, St. Clair had proven his tough, brilliant thinking, his unflinching loyalty to Washington and the American cause, and fierce courage under fire, and had been promoted by Congress to the rank of major general. Shortly thereafter he received a letter from Pennsylvania Congressman James Wilson informing him with flowery accolades that “ . . . the important Command of Ticonderoga is destined for your next campaign. I presage it a Theater of Glory.”

  St. Clair unfolded his written orders, glanced at the signature at the bottom—Major General Philip Schuyler—and read them once more. He had long since learned that orders written in the confines of the elegant office of a commanding general, or of the president of the Continental Congress, in the comfort and security of a city, are not the same orders when they are read in the field, where men are every minute facing the harsh realities of camp life and living with the daily threat of the horrors of war.

  Proceed with all haste—Fort Ticonderoga—take command—bring the fort and environs to a state of readiness earliest—send a written report of conditions upon arrival.

  St. Clair slowed to read what he considered the most critical words in the document: “You have the strongest assurances from Congress that the king’s troops were all ordered round to New York, leaving only a sufficient number to garrison their forts in Canada.”

  He raised his eyes to stare at the north wall, remembering the last words spoken to him by John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, before St. Clair left Philadelphia for his journey up the Hudson. Hancock had been firm, unequivocal, when he told him “there is absolutely no probability of an active campaign by British forces from Quebec.” Rather, Hancock had said, all British soldiers now gathered there were to be boarded on troop ships, to sail east down the St. Lawrence River, thence south down the Atlantic coast to New York.

  Hancock sitting in Philadelphia, Schuyler sitting in Albany—from there, they can afford the luxury of absolute certainty that Fort Ti will not be attacked. Sitting here, in this forsaken wilderness, with a fort and men that are destitute and an angry army of the best trained soldiers in the world gathering within striking distance to the north, is a very nervous thing. If they’re right, so much the better. But if they’re wrong . . .

  At the thought, a slight shudder ran through him. He again read the painstakingly flourished signature of Major General Philip Schuyler, and a cynical frown passed over his face as he remembered.

  Generals Schuyler and Gates at each other’s throats—Gates adamant that Washington was wr
ong about the Trenton plan—abandoned Washington while we were loading the boats to cross the Delaware to attack—went to Philadelphia to inform Congress of Washington’s folly in thinking he could take Trenton—Gates, a politician, paper-shuffler, but no field commander, no fighter. Schuyler, given command of Fort Ti—me his second in command, while the two of them sit in Albany, so they can keep an eye on the other while they continue their ridiculous squabble over who will command the entire western army—and Congress finally deciding to give Gates command of the southern half—Schuyler command of the northern—stupidity beyond belief! I hope some day to understand the process by which the Continental Congress comes up with the insanity of splitting what plainly should be a single command, half to one general, half to another, when the two generals are locked in a feud born of vanity and lust for power.

  A brisk rap at the door broke St. Clair’s thoughts.

  “Enter.”

  The door squeaked on its rusty iron strap hinges as it swung open and Major Isaac Dunn, St. Clair’s aide-de-camp and trusted confidant, strode into the room, balancing a plain pewter tray with a napkin cover. Average build, strong, balding, Dunn had been with him for months, and St. Clair had requested him as his personal aide when he received his orders to take command of Fort Ticonderoga.

  Urgency had driven St. Clair to push his entourage relentlessly from Philadelphia north, eighteen hours a day. They had traveled through the night of June 11th to arrive at the gates of the fort just after ten o’clock this morning. They had not slept for twenty-nine hours when they arrived. Nonetheless, St. Clair had perfunctorily executed the formalities of assuming command of the fort, politely but firmly refused the offer to rest and enjoy an officers’ banquet in the evening to celebrate his arrival, and sought out Colonel Jeduthan Baldwin, who had previously been ordered to Fort Ti to begin repairs to bring it up to fighting capability. St. Clair had stunned both Baldwin and the highly qualified Polish engineer, Colonel Thaddeus Kosciuszko, who was assisting Baldwin, when he requested that Baldwin appear in St. Clair’s office at twelve o’clock noon to make a verbal report on conditions at the fort, after which Baldwin was to take St. Clair on a complete tour of the fort and its surrounding defenses, for St. Clair to make his own appraisal of its state of readiness. St. Clair had not bathed, nor shaved, nor changed his uniform. He intended conducting the inspection just as he was.

  Dunn strode across the room. “Sir, I’ve brought some refreshment. You need to keep up your strength.” He set the tray down on the scarred desktop and waited while St. Clair removed the napkin and examined smoking coffee and the plate of hardtack and honey, broiled trout, and steamed potatoes.

  “Thank you, Major.”

  “Not at all, sir.” Dunn bobbed his head, turned on his heel, and strode to the door, his boots thumping hollow on the weathered, stained floor planks.

  St. Clair’s voice stopped him in the door frame. “Major, have you eaten?”

  “Yes, sir, while I was at the officers’ mess, waiting for your tray.”

  “Very good. Carry on.”

  Fish bones and skin were all that remained on the gray metal plate when the sound of boots outside the office brought St. Clair up short. He reached for his napkin as a rap came at the door, and he called, “Enter.” The door squeaked open and Dunn stepped inside.

  “Sir, Colonel Baldwin is here.”

  St. Clair stood. “Bring him in.”

  Well-built, square-faced, slightly hunched in his shoulders from countless hours spent poring over engineering books and making scale drawings of structures of every description, Baldwin had been a prominent figure in his hometown of Brookfield, Massachusetts. Feeling a duty to serve his country, he had become a captain in the British militia that in 1755 attacked the French-held position at Crown Point on the west shores of Lake George in the Seven Years’ War and plunged into the thick of the heaviest fighting. He took a severe wound to his leg, and when the doctors said amputate, he hauled himself upright on his cot, seized his bayonet, pointed it at the surgeons, and declared he would run through the first man who tried to hold him down. Looking into his face, the surgeons backed up, and the leg stayed on.

  With the British ever tightening their stranglehold on the colonies, Baldwin had slowly come to realize that the rights the Americans held so dear could be preserved only by breaking from the mother country. He rebelled at the tea tax and was elected to the Provincial Congress. He was with the leaders at the Battle of Bunker Hill, who stopped General Howe and his vaunted British regulars dead in their tracks three times before the Americans ran out of ammunition and withdrew. As he left the breastworks, he gathered up the body of his brother, Isaac, who had been killed by his side, and from that moment, the die was forever cast for Jeduthan Baldwin. Through the worst of it, and the best of it, he gave everything in him for the revolution and the cause of liberty. There was no patriot more respected than he.

  St. Clair extended his hand, and Baldwin took two steps to grasp it firmly, shake it warmly.

  “General, may I welcome you here. I stand at your service in anything you may wish.” It was genuine, sincere—not solicitous, not political.

  St. Clair nodded. “It is my great honor to meet you, sir. Please, be seated.” He gestured to the chairs in front of the desk and glanced at Dunn. “Major, would you remain with us?”

  Baldwin and Dunn sat in chairs in front of the desk as St. Clair sat down facing them. St. Clair’s eyes swept Baldwin for a moment before he spoke.

  “I trust you will forgive my rough appearance. Duty sometimes interferes with protocol.”

  Baldwin’s answer was firm, strong. “Sir, your appearance is excellent.”

  St. Clair had not expected the reply. In that moment something between the men slipped into place, and by instinct alone they knew there was little need for pretense or maintaining a respectful distance. St. Clair sensed he could ask this man anything, and the answer would be the precise truth as best Baldwin understood it, let the chips fall where they may.

  “I was advised your health began to fail some time ago. Are you fit now? Am I imposing on your comfort to ask you here?”

  “Not at all,” Baldwin answered. “I went home for a time. I got well and returned here February eleventh. Been here since. I’m fine.”

  “February eleventh? In the winter?”

  “By sled, sir. Across the lake.” Baldwin smiled. “Passed over some cracks in the ice that were quite . . . interesting.”

  St. Clair smiled with him, then moved on. “Colonel, I have written assurances from both John Hancock and General Schuyler that there is no possibility of the British proceeding down Lake Champlain to attack this fort. They are firm on the idea that the British army around Quebec is going to move by boat down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic, and then south to New York to join Howe. Do you have an opinion about that?”

  Baldwin did not hesitate. “With all due respect, our scouts are telling us the British and some German mercenaries are beginning to gather at St. Johns, and that Indian patrols are coming south in larger numbers every day. I believe they are being sent by the British to feel out our strength and the condition of this fort. It’s nonsense to think the British would send their troops that far south on the Richelieu River, if they mean to turn them right around and send them back to Quebec to get on boats to go down the St. Lawrence.”

  “Are our scouts reliable?”

  “The best, sir. Major Benjamin Whitcomb’s Rangers. Long Hunters. Raised in this wilderness. They know all the Indians know about the forest.”

  St. Clair continued. “If an attack comes, when would you expect it?”

  “Soon. Whitcomb says they’re gathering boats up north on the Richelieu River.”

  Baldwin’s words struck deep, and St. Clair rounded his lips to blow softly as he accepted them. He moved on.

  “My orders are to bring this fort to battle readiness for two reasons. First, so Congress can assure the Americans we hold the key to the weste
rn frontier, and second, to stop the British in the event they ever decide to come up the lakes.”

  Baldwin remained silent, listening intently. Dunn leaned forward, elbows on knees, waiting. St. Clair spoke with measured words.

  “This fort was built by the French, who held the ground to the north, to stop the British who held the ground to the south.”

  He paused, and Baldwin’s head began to nod as understanding of where St. Clair was going broke clear in his mind.

  “The result is, the three heavy walls and the great share of the heavy cannon face south. The fort is exactly backwards to stop an attack from the north.”

  Baldwin answered. “I am aware of that, sir. It will be a distinct disadvantage should we ever have to face a determined attack from the north.”

  “Precisely. To change it all around will take time, which I do not think we have.”

  Dunn straightened as the first faint feeling of tension crept into the room. St. Clair leaned forward, elbows on the desktop, forearms extended, palms lying flat. His eyes were like flecks of blue flint.

  “I understand that last July you and Lieutenant Colonel John Trumbull made a written report to General Gates that considering the condition of this fort, it would be easier to defend East Point, across the lake, where cannon could reach enemy vessels coming south through the narrow neck, as well as cover this fort. Your report stated this fort was an ‘Old Fort & Redoubts, out of Repair.’ Is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Was anything done to build defenses on East Point?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  St. Clair leaned back and dug thumb and finger into weary eyes, then straightened. “I was told that at about the same time, Trumbull was at an officer’s dinner with General Gates, Colonel Anthony Wayne, General Benedict Arnold, and some others, when Trumbull stated that in his opinion, cannon placed on top of Mount Defiance, just south of here, could reach both the fort, and East Point. Was I correctly informed of Trumbull’s opinion regarding the cannon?”