by Bob Drury
It was during Knox’s Indian wars that Gen. Anthony Wayne capped his aggressive military career. In the aftermath of the Battle of Monmouth Court House, Wayne’s daredevil personal heroics were encapsulated by the nighttime bayonet charge he personally led to capture what was considered an impenetrable British fort at Stony Point on the Hudson River north of New York City. Thereafter ordered south by Washington, he never forgot the lessons of the Paoli Massacre, and cut a bloody swath through the British lines across the deep south before the war’s end. Such was his renown that the state of Georgia gave him a rice plantation for negotiating peace treaties—soon to be broken—with the Cherokee and Creek tribes who had been allies of the British. Along the way he acquired the sobriquet “Mad Anthony” Wayne, in part for the manner in which he put down mutinies by trying and executing the ringleaders on the spot in view of his entire force.
Hard living and hard charging, a bout of malaria, and the two musket balls lodged in his body had left Wayne in poor health. He retired from the Continental Army in 1783 and returned home to Chester County with the rank of major general. Upon his recovery he played an active part in the Pennsylvania state assembly as well as at the Constitutional Convention. Like Henry Knox, Wayne was an outstanding soldier and a poor businessman. He lost his Georgia plantation to financial mismanagement and was rescued from further malefactions when, in 1792, President Washington called him out of retirement and appointed him commander of America’s fledgling professional army, the Legion of the United States. His first task was to extinguish the Northwest Indian War then raging across the territory destined to become the state of Ohio.
After a series of brutal skirmishes, in the summer of 1794 Wayne’s forces crushed a combined American Indian army of Shawnee and Miami at the Battle of Fallen Timbers just south of present-day Toledo. After a two-year respite at his Pennsylvania home, in 1796 he again headed west on an inspection tour of the camps and outposts he had stood up during his Indian campaigns. These included the United States Army’s first formal basic training facility at Legionville, just outside Pittsburgh. It was during this journey that Wayne took ill near Detroit. His subordinates managed to transfer him to better medical facilities at Fort Presque Isle, now Erie, Pennsylvania. For naught. He died there on December 15, 1796, at the age of 51 from a combination of severe gout and what may have been infected stomach ulcers. But “Mad Anthony” Wayne’s eerie legend does not conclude at that frontier outpost.
In 1809 Wayne’s son, Col. Isaac Wayne, journeyed to Fort Presque Isle to disinter his father and return his remains to the family plot in Pennsylvania. The physician whom Isaac Wayne hired to exhume the body found it in surprisingly good shape and, as embalming fluid was unavailable at the site, he decided to boil the flesh off the cadaver’s bones for easier transport. Isaac Wayne then carted his father’s skeleton some 300 miles across the state of Pennsylvania. It was interred with full military honors at Saint David’s Episcopal Church in Radnor Township. According to legend, Isaac Wayne’s wagon bounced so mightily across the state’s rough frontier roads that many of his father’s bones were jounced from the cart. Every January 1, on the anniversary of his birthday, Anthony Wayne’s ghost is said to rise from his grave to ride along what is now U.S. Route 322 between Radnor and Erie in search of his lost bones.
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Of all the strategic camps Wayne established across the Old Northwest Territories during his Indian campaigns, he may have been most attached to Fort Greeneville, where he had signed the final treaty with the defeated tribal confederacy. It was of course named in honor of his old friend and fellow Valley Forge survivor Nathanael Greene. Following Benedict Arnold’s betrayal, Washington appointed Greene as the commandant of West Point, where he oversaw the military court’s decision to execute John André. After Gen. Gates’s defeat at the Battle of Camden, Washington ordered Greene to take command of the southern theater of war, handing him total authority over all Continental troops from Delaware to Georgia. It was a splendid selection.
Greene, who arrived in the Carolinas in late 1780, rapidly brought order to the chaotic skeleton force that had lost Savannah, lost Charleston, and finally been devastated at Camden. General Gates’s cowardice might well have opened the door for Gen. Cornwallis to execute Britain’s “southern strategy” of recruiting Loyalists throughout the deep south and taking the war to Virginia. Only Greene’s self-taught organizational and military skills stood in the way of that strategy. Greene’s first move was to divide his own troops, forcing Cornwallis to do the same with his superior force. Greene then proceeded to elude the enemy with a series of feints and strategic retreats until, in January 1781, his grand design paid off when a portion of his army under the command of Dan Morgan, by now promoted to general, virtually wiped out a force of over 1,000 British soldiers led by the hated Banastre Tarleton at the Battle of Cowpens in South Carolina. Greene joined his forces with Morgan’s soon afterward and, after four months of recruiting and refitting, finally thought the time right for a full-scale confrontation.
In mid-March 1781, Greene lured Cornwallis and his seasoned army of veterans to a hilly, forested battleground in the center of North Carolina far from the British supply depot on the state’s southern coastline. There, at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, rifle fire from the outnumbered Continentals so devastated Cornwallis’s lines that at the height of the battle the British general ordered grapeshot fired into the mass of men fighting hand-to-hand, killing Americans and his own soldiers indiscriminately. At this Greene ordered a tactical retreat, and though the Americans were the first to leave the field, Cornwallis’s bruised and battered forces were left with no choice but to make a run for Virginia via the North Carolina coast. While Cornwallis swerved north, Greene turned south to concentrate on reconquering South Carolina. Within two months the British were so weakened in both Carolinas that their occupation of Georgia became untenable. With the lower south in Continental hands, all that was left was for Cornwallis and his army to be bottled up at Yorktown.
At the war’s end in 1783, the 40-year-old Nathanael Greene retired from the Continental Army. He returned briefly to his home state, Rhode Island, but, like Anthony Wayne, he had received as a gift from the state of Georgia a 24,000-acre expanse of choice bottomland along the Savannah River as a gesture of appreciation for his services. In 1785 Greene; his wife, Caty; and their six children relocated to their new plantation, which they dubbed Mulberry Grove. In June of the following year Greene visited a nearby plantation to learn the mechanics of growing rice. There, in no small irony, he was felled by the heatstroke that had taken the lives of so many Continentals at the Battle of Monmouth Court House. Five days later, on June 19, 1786, he was dead at the age of 43. A shocked nation mourned the passing of the general who was one of only three—the others were Washington and Henry Knox—to serve during the entire eight years of the Revolutionary War. Greene was buried in a cemetery outside Savannah until 1901, when his remains were removed and interred beneath a monument in his honor in what is now the city’s financial district.
Naturally, as with so many other Valley Forge survivors, Greene’s life story has a strange coda. Nearly a decade after the death of her husband, Caty Greene was introduced to a shipmate while sailing from New England to Savannah. The young man, a recent Yale graduate from Massachusetts named Eli Whitney, had agreed to take a job as a tutor in South Carolina in order to save money for law school. Caty Greene invited Whitney to visit her at Mulberry Grove, which he did when he left his tutoring position because of a dispute over salary. It was at the Greene plantation that Whitney invented the cotton gin, which not only solved the south’s long-standing problem of speeding up cotton production, but not incidentally led to an almost immediate intensification of American slavery as the cotton crop became a profit machine. With the invention of the “gin”—short for “engine”—what little emancipation rhetoric that had existed below the Mason-Dixon Line was quickly drowned out by the roaring cataracts of
money pouring into the southern states.
One southerner who did not live to partake of this “cotton rush” was Henry Laurens. The senior Laurens resigned from his position as president of the Continental Congress in December 1778 in order to return to South Carolina and restore his failing business empire. It is estimated that during the war years Henry Laurens accumulated losses of close to four million in today’s dollars. These included the burning of his plantation outside Charleston by the British. The pull of public service proved too much for Laurens, however, and in the fall of 1780 he was named America’s minister to the Netherlands with a brief to obtain loans from the Dutch republic.
Days after setting sail from Philadelphia, Laurens’s packet ship was intercepted by a British frigate off the coast of Newfoundland. When Royal Navy officers discovered a cache of papers in his possession containing the outlines of trade agreements and a treaty between the United States and the Netherlands, Laurens was taken to England, charged with treason, and imprisoned in the Tower of London—the first and only American ever incarcerated there. While Laurens languished in confinement for 15 months, Britain declared war on the Netherlands. He was finally freed on the last day of December 1781, in a prisoner exchange for Gen. Cornwallis. Two years later he was again sent overseas, as a member of the American contingent negotiating the Treaties of Paris with the British Crown. Spurning entreaties to return to Congress and take part in the Constitutional Convention, he retired permanently from public life and died in December 1792 at the age of 68. It is reported that his was the first formal cremation to be performed in the United States. His ashes were scattered on the grounds of his rebuilt estate, parts of which are still in use today as a Trappist monastery.
While he was held in the Tower of London, Henry Laurens was visited often by his son John’s wife, Martha, who was sometimes accompanied by his granddaughter Frances, the daughter John had never met. No doubt Henry and Martha spoke often of Henry’s meetings with John in Philadelphia. For while Henry was making his preparations to sail to Amsterdam, John had arrived in the capital city on parole after being captured by the British in May 1780. Neither father nor son suspected that their meetings in Philadelphia would be the last time they ever saw one another.
Following the Battle of Monmouth Court House, John Laurens sensed—perhaps even before Washington—that the conflict would now turn south. He badgered his commander in chief to be released from his duties as aide-de-camp in order to fight. After his duel with Charles Lee, Washington acceded to the young man’s requests, and with Congress’s blessing John Laurens was sent home to South Carolina with permission to raise a regiment of slaves who would be promised their postwar freedom. The state’s governor and other local politicians, however, saw no good coming of that scheme, and forbade Laurens to even attempt the endeavor. Stymied at one turn, Laurens took another, and was easily elected to South Carolina’s house of representatives where, he felt, he could argue his cause more authoritatively. Three times he would introduce a bill to fold a brigade of slaves into the Continental Army. Three times it would be voted down overwhelmingly.
While serving as a representative Laurens retained the rank of lieutenant colonel, and he fought with Continental forces in and around the Charleston area. In his thirst for glory Laurens foolishly disobeyed an order to retreat during an engagement in May 1779, and was wounded in the arm by shrapnel while another unlucky horse was blown out from under him. Upon his recovery he commanded an infantry regiment in the failed assault on Savannah, and in May 1780 he was taken prisoner after the fall of Charleston. He was paroled to Philadelphia on the gentleman’s condition that he not leave the state of Pennsylvania.
Laurens was released from his parole in a prisoner exchange in December of that year. He chafed to return south, but was instead persuaded by Alexander Hamilton to join Thomas Paine on a special mission to France. He and Paine returned from Europe three months later with over one third of a promised French gift of six million livres of silver as well as an even larger loan guarantee from Versailles. Laurens was at Washington’s side when the French fleet arrived in the waters off Yorktown in the fall of 1781, and along with Hamilton participated in the siege. Upon the ensuing British surrender, he was appointed by Washington to join Lafayette’s brother-in-law the Vicomte de Noailles to negotiate terms with Cornwallis. He then returned to South Carolina, where he organized a spy network for Gen. Greene.
On August 27, 1782, mere weeks before the British withdrew from Charleston for good, Laurens—who had malaria—dragged himself from his sickbed to lead a platoon of light infantry against a British foraging party. His detail was ambushed along the Combahee River, and Laurens fell from his saddle mortally wounded at the first volley. He was 27 years old. Only a month earlier Alexander Hamilton had begged his good friend to “quit your sword, put on a toga, come to congress.” But, as with Lear, all the power of John Laurens’s wits had given way to his impatience. With him died the seeds of whatever vision he carried for the future United States.
John Laurens was interred on the grounds of the plantation where he had spent his last night alive. When Henry Laurens returned from Europe, he had his son’s remains unearthed and laid to rest on his own estate outside Charleston. The elder Laurens was an educated man who surely knew his Cicero—“In peace, sons bury fathers; in war, fathers bury sons.” One can only hope that he was equally familiar with, and took solace in, the words of Cicero’s rediscoverer Petrarch, who observed that “a good death does honor to a whole life.”
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Following the Battle of Monmouth Court House, Baron Friedrich von Steuben spent the winter of 1778–1779 in Philadelphia preparing and editing his military instruction manual. On March 29, 1779, the Continental Congress ordered published Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States. Steuben’s “Blue Book,” a work of martial art, encompassed “drill instructions, tactical maneuvers, procedures for marches, the establishment and maintenance of encampments, roll calls, inspections, drumbeats, guard duty, care of arms and ammunition, treatment of the sick, military reviews, and duties of officers and men.”
The following year Steuben served on the court-martial that convicted John André, and then accompanied Nathanael Greene to the south. From his post in Virginia he kept a steady stream of trained regulars flowing into Greene’s ranks. He was briefly felled by a bout of malaria, but recovered in time to take command of one of the three American divisions besieging Yorktown. At the war’s end he advised Washington on how to demobilize the Continental Army and also helped to draw up plans for the new nation’s defense.
Steuben’s tutelage proved the exception to the rule that actual war separates the parade ground from the battleground. Some respected revolutionary-era historians, Wayne Bodle in particular, downplay the Prussian’s role in transforming the Continental Army. They argue that, as the last major northern engagement, the Battle of Monmouth Court House was, in modern parlance, too small a sample size to truly gauge Steuben’s influence. More sympathetic voices rise in Steuben’s defense, pointing to the army’s newfound professionalism displayed not only by the rank and file at Monmouth, but in the too often ignored battles that raged across the south in 1780 and 1781. Even Bodle concedes that Steuben’s training regimen imbued Washington’s troops with “a deeper identification with and pride in their craft.” Further, the archivist and author John Buchanan cites several instances that make a strong case for Steuben’s impact.
The first instance occurred in defeat, at the battle of Camden. Buchanan notes that after the Virginia and North Carolina militiamen fled with Gen. Gates, the outnumbered northern regulars from Maryland and Delaware who had drilled under Steuben remained to fight and die with Johann de Kalb. “In the old days the Continentals probably would have fled when they saw the militia desert them,” writes Buchanan. Similarly, six months later during the victorious Battle of Cowpens, the tactics employed by Gen. Dan Morgan and Col. John Howard—including
a crisply executed bayonet charge that turned the tide of the fight—were the very model of training and discipline that Steuben had instilled at Valley Forge and laid out in his Blue Book. Finally, at the crucial Battle of Guilford Courthouse, it was again regulars from Delaware and Maryland who stood stalwart against a wild charge from crack British and Hessian troops, holding their lines until the enemy was within 100 feet before unleashing a thunderous volley and counterattack that broke the British.
The greater weight of Steuben’s training regimen might best be attributed to the man whose army he rebirthed in the mud and snow of Valley Forge. George Washington, in his last official act before tendering his resignation as the Continental Army’s commander in chief, penned a note to Steuben to express his “Sincere Friendship and Esteem for you.”
“Acknowledging your great Zeal, Attention and Abilities in performing the duties of your Office,” Washington concluded, “I wish to make use of this Last moment of my public Life to Signify in the strongest terms, my intire Approbation of your Conduct, and to express my Sense of the Obligations the public is under to you for your faithful and Meritorious Services.”
Steuben was discharged in March 1784, the same month he was granted his American citizenship. He settled in New York and moved with the seasons, spending winters in New York City and summering farther north in the Mohawk Valley, in a two-room cabin set on a tract of land, both gifts from the Empire State. The state of New Jersey also eventually deeded to him a 40-acre estate and gristmill across the Hudson River from Manhattan Island. Yet like so many of his Valley Forge compatriots, he fell on hard financial times. Expecting that his long-ago request for postwar financial compensation would be forthcoming from Congress, he borrowed heavily—accumulating debts he could repay only by selling his New Jersey farm and mill. Alexander Hamilton and a coterie of veteran officers stepped in to help when they could, but it was not until 1790 that the United States government granted Steuben a yearly pension of $2,500—nearly $65,000 today.
