Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  “There was no end to the accounts of almost miraculous escapes of the inmates of the houses…” one onlooker recalled.

  A soldier walking down the street was struck and, though he displayed no external injuries, was left deaf, dumb, and blind. Three American officers were killed by a single lightning bolt, “the points of their swords melted off, and the coins melted in their pockets,” said the same eyewitness. “Their bodies appeared as if they had been roasted.”

  This same witness also saw ten men from a Connecticut regiment killed in “a single flash” of lightning. They were buried together in a common grave.

  Even plainspoken George Washington, preoccupied with the British preparations to land on Long Island the next day—a clear summer day, ironically—conceded that the storm had been “a most violent gust.”

  But it didn’t stop the British from landing, or derail their victory in the Battle of Long Island six days later.

  Another storm, though, prevented British ships from sailing up the East River and cutting off Washington’s line of retreat by boat from Brooklyn to Manhattan Island.

  Other storms and weather phenomena still lay ahead and would have their effects, good and bad, upon the protagonists of the Revolutionary War. What schoolchild, for instance, doesn’t know the story of the American army’s wintertime withdrawal and sufferings at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, at the end of 1777? Not so well known is the fact that the winter of 1778–1779, which the Americans spent at nearby Morristown, New Jersey, was far colder.

  And the fact that a majority of the illnesses suffered at Valley Forge struck, not during the coldest winter months, but during the warming days just before and during the spring of 1778.

  The best-known “weather story” of the American Revolution, undoubtedly, is that of the snowy Christmas night of 1776 when George Washington braved the ice floes and freezing temperatures of the Delaware River to mount his early-morning attack upon the Hessians quartered at Trenton, New Jersey. And indeed, who will ever forget the many artistic images of Washington standing stern and brave in his Durham boat as it picks its way across the turbulent river waters?

  In another incident, called the Battle of the Clouds, unexpected bad weather saved Washington and his men from possibly overwhelming British attack outside Philadelphia in late 1777. Shortly after the Battle of Brandywine (September 11, 1777), British General Sir William Howe managed to approach both American flanks with nothing but clifflike hills behind them. A drive on each flank—a double envelopment—would have trapped Washington with the steep South Valley Hills barring any easy retreat to the rear. Fortunately for Washington and his men, Pennsylvania’s Chester County experienced a violent storm as a cold front arrived in the wake of hot, heavy weather that afternoon. The clash of weather systems produced a memorable thunderstorm, extremely heavy rain, rivers of mud, and nearly zero visibility for the troops on either side. Just as well, since few weapons would have fired in any case. The British had their bayonets, true, but couldn’t organize or see well enough to form battle lines. Saved by the weather, the Americans managed to slip and slide down the far side of the hills and, as the saying goes, perform an orderly withdrawal.

  Two more storms late in the Revolutionary War also deserve credit for helping the American side at a critical moment, perhaps even saving the Revolution for the Americans.

  October 13, 1781: With Lord Cornwallis besieged at Yorktown, a French and American army at his front, a French fleet at his back, and a dilatory British flotilla preparing to set sail from New York on a possible rescue mission, another violent and freakish storm struck the city and its environs. Savage sheets of hail drove some of the ships aground and two large warships collided. Wrote the fleet’s unhappy Rear Admiral Thomas Graves: “Ships have parted their cables, others broke their anchors and three have been driven on shore; I see no end to disappointments.”

  For this—and a few other reasons—the rescue mission simply did not get started in time to do any good.

  At Yorktown, just days later, Lord Cornwallis and his advisers thought they saw a way out of their predicament, even with the Colonials and their French allies drawn up in a ring around Yorktown. Across the York River, at the backs of the British, was another peninsula, with Gloucester Point, Virginia, at its tip. A small French garrison held nearby Gloucester Fort, but could easily be sent packing by a large British contingent…such as the entire expeditionary force trapped at Yorktown. Why not remove the British troops from their Yorktown entrenchments at night and secretly ferry them across the York River to Gloucester Point before the morning light would reveal the move to the Americans? Hadn’t Washington secretly moved his troops across the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan in the dead of night after the Battle of Long Island in 1776? He had, and thus had saved his Continental Army to fight another day.

  Now, in October 1781, Lord Cornwallis and his advisers formed exactly the same escape plan. On the afternoon of October 16, they placed their sick and wounded in small boats heading across the wide river mouth to the north-side shore.

  About eleven o’clock that night, a skeletal force of Germans moved into the British trenches while the regular British infantry quietly began boarding the small boats for the river crossing that really counted. The first wave carried a thousand men across. It was a critical moment for the embattled British, but all seemed to be going well. Cornwallis, due to cross the river with the second wave, was busy writing a letter asking Washington to go easy and have mercy on the skeletal force being left behind.

  However, as the empty boats of the first wave returned to the Yorktown side, disaster struck. A squall barreled down the waterway, whipping up the normally placid waters into angry waves, blowing two boats full of troops downstream, scattering many others, and lashing the area with hard rain until 2 A.M. As a result, Cornwallis abandoned his escape plan. The next day, in broad daylight and under Allied fire, he brought back the thousand men left stranded on the opposite shore. As dragoons leader Banastre Tarleton wrote later: “Thus expired the last hope of the British army.”

  Black Patriots

  A MEMBER OF THE TENTH VIRGINIA REGIMENT, SHADRACK BATTLES OF Albemarle County, Virginia—a carpenter in his civilian life—served his budding country well and with distinction, from the Battles of Brandywine and Germantown, Pennsylvania, in late 1777 to the fighting at Monmouth, New Jersey, and Savannah, Georgia, later on. One of at least five black men from Thomas Jefferson’s home county of Albemarle to fight in the Revolutionary War, he took his honorable discharge at Augusta, Georgia. Living into the nineteenth century, he went to court in 1820 to claim his pension…but he was so infirm at that point that he had to be carried to the courthouse on a litter. Some researchers, noting the entry “col.” in his records, concluded he was a colonel and, thus, the first black officer in the nation’s history. Alas, he was only a private in rank—“col.” meant “colored” in the parlance of the day, rather than colonel. Still, he was proudly able to say in his pension papers that he served as his commander Clough Shelton’s “right hand man.”

  ***

  Always by his master’s side, in war and peace—called a servant rather than the slave he really was—Billy Lee was there with George Washington at every step. He served as a personal valet, frequent hunting companion before the Revolution, military orderly during the war—however needed. A slaveholder like so many of his fellow Virginia gentry, Washington purchased the then teenage “Billy” from Mrs. John Lee of Westmoreland county in 1768, on the eve of the Revolution. Until Washington’s death in 1799, Billy Lee stayed with the commander in chief. In two falls in the 1780s, however, he broke both knees and, now crippled, could no longer travel extensively. He turned to shoemaking at Mount Vernon. When Washington died, Billy Lee was freed in his master’s will. The former slave lived until about 1828 and, sadly, in his later years may have become an alcoholic.

  ***

  The gunfire was just beginning to abate April 19, 1775. Beaten down and bed
raggled by their daylong running battle through an aroused Colonial countryside, the British troops who had marched out of Boston to Lexington, Concord, and back, now reached the relative safety of Charlestown Neck. Their angry pursuers—Minutemen, militia, and others who simply picked up their muskets and joined in—wouldn’t be able to pursue them into the city streets. Now, too, after the last flare-up of gunfire, the redcoats saw the rebels rescue a wounded black man—possibly Prince Estabrook of the Lexington Minuteman Company. Estabrook, a slave who volunteered for service, had been on the Lexington Common for the confrontation with the British early that morning. Destined to stay in the fight for freedom to the triumphant end in 1783, he indeed was wounded at some point in the first day’s fighting with the British.

  ***

  Peter Salem, a black American militiaman fighting the Battle of Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill on June 17, 1775, apparently fired the shot that fatally wounded British Marine Major John Pitcairn. Almost exactly two months prior to this battle, on the night of April 18–19, Pitcairn had been in charge of the redcoats who encountered American Minutemen on the Lexington Green and killed eight of them in the Revolutionary War’s first eruption of real gunfire.

  ***

  Jehu Grant, in his own words, “was a slave to Elihu Champlen who resided at Narranganset, Rhode Island,” but ran away in August 1777 because he was afraid his master, a Tory, would sell him to the British on nearby ships. His master secretly was supplying the British with cattle, sheep, cheese, and other farm goods. Grant fled to Danbury, where he joined the Patriot forces as a wagoner. The following June his master tracked him down and demanded his return to Rhode Island—and slavery. Fortunately for Grant, Joshua Swan of Stonington, Connecticut, bought him from Champlen several years after the war and allowed him to work for his freedom. Now located in Milton, Connecticut, with Swan, the newly freed Grant married and fathered six children. In his old age he was denied a war services pension because he was a runaway slave at the time of his service.

  ***

  Then there was that true enough hero of the naval war, James Forten, a powder boy all of fourteen years in age when his American ship, the Royal Louis, was forced to surrender to three British warships. When one of the British captains took pity on the young black prisoner and offered him freedom and an education in England if he would forswear his allegiance to the United States, Forten refused. “I was captured fighting for my country,” he declared. “I will never be a traitor to her.”

  Like his fellow captured seamen, he wound up in the British prison ship New Jersey, anchored in New York Harbor. There, he lost weight—and his hair—but survived.

  Later in life, he stuck by his country once again, albeit under less trying circumstances. Offered the presidency of Liberia in Africa, he said no, he would rather continue being an American citizen.

  Riders All

  GALLOPING THROUGH THE NIGHT (OR SOMETIMES DAY), PUSHING UP HILL AND down dale, disregarding the prickly thorn and whiplash branch, the bent, dedicated figure in the saddle (or some other conveyance) was…well, not only Paul Revere, but any one of a small host of Patriots.

  And yes, it was often to deliver the familiar message, The British are coming! The British are coming!

  Thus, in Virginia one time, it was a young man named Jack Jouett who rode his horse for forty tough, nighttime miles through brake and brush, just in time to alert Governor Thomas Jefferson and permit his narrow escape from Banastre Tarleton’s dragoons (but not quite in time to allow Virginia legislator Daniel Boone similar avoidance of the British dragnet).

  In the future state of Delaware, Caesar Rodney, a delegate to the Continental Congress, learned in July 1776 that the revolutionary body would be voting the very next day on the proposal to declare the independence of the colonies—in far-off Philadelphia. He had to get to Philadelphia from his home in Dover for that crucial vote! He rode all night, through thunder and lightning, until he reached Philadelphia and its Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) the next morning. He then, without even changing his mud-spattered clothes, joined his fellow delegates in their historic vote for independence.

  Another time, it was George Washington’s faithful aide-de-camp, Tench Tilghman, who did some hasty traveling…but, in his case, with good news! Tilghman, weak from a bout with fever, set out from Virginia to inform the Congress in Philadelphia that the British had surrendered at Yorktown. The difficult trip took the Marylander by boat to Annapolis, then another leg northward by a second boat, then by a relay of horses the final 130 miles to Philadelphia. He left Yorktown on Saturday, October 20, 1781; he endured the grounding of his first watery craft and the temporary becalming of the second; he slogged along muddy roads and managed two river fordings aboard his string of strange horses, all the while shaking off persistent chills, fever, and plain exhaustion. He at last reached the congressional seat of Philadelphia at 3 A.M. on Wednesday, October 24.

  In between Rodney’s and Tilghman’s trips to the original U.S. capital, a number of women had their own harrowing journeys. Remember Susanna Bolling of Virginia? (That’s all right, hardly anyone does today.) At home one day in 1781 when the British came and took over the Bolling house in City Point (today’s Hopewell, Virginia) as a headquarters for Lord Cornwallis, the teenager overheard discussion of British plans to surprise the Marquis de Lafayette and his small Patriot command nearby. Determined to warn the dashing young Frenchman, Susanna slipped away from the family premises that night by way of a tunnel built years before as a safeguard against Indian raids. She emerged on the banks of the Appomattox River and rowed herself across to the opposite shore. She then borrowed a farmer’s horse and rode on to Lafayette’s headquarters, where she delivered her warning in person.

  In another case, to the north and some time earlier, Lydia Barrington Darragh of Philadelphia tended to eavesdrop on the British officers who were using a room in her house on Second Street for their councils of war. A closet in an adjoining room allowed her to hear the British through its thin walls.

  The Irish-born mother of a young American officer on George Washington’s staff, sent off her freshly gleaned information in messages sewn into covered buttons, according to Robert I. Alotta’s book, Philadelphia’s American Revolution 1777–1778.

  On the night of December 2, 1777, however, she overheard plans that galvanized her into more direct action. The British were preparing to attack George Washington at nearby Whitemarsh two days later.

  The next morning, braving snow, wind, rough country roads—and the ever-present chance of discovery—Mrs. Darragh left her home and walked as far as a Patriot outpost at the junction of the York and Germantown roads, far from downtown Philadelphia. “There she met Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Craig of the Pennsylvania militia, an old family friend…[who] was surprised to see her,” writes Alotta.

  The result? She gave him the information, he rushed off to alert George Washington, and the subsequent British attempt against the Continentals at Whitemarsh failed. Later, a British officer bitterly complained to Lydia Darragh herself, “The enemy had notice of our coming, were prepared for us, and we marched back like a parcel of damned fools.”

  A female “Jack Jouett” was sixteen-year-old Sybil Ludington, who also rode nearly forty miles over rough roads in Putnam County, New York, the night of April 26, 1777, to warn the American militia that the British were on their way to attack nearby Danbury, Connecticut. The teenager, daughter of militia officer Henry Ludington, volunteered to spread the alarm after a messenger delivered the news to the Ludington home. The messenger and his own horse were too weary to undertake the task of rousing the area militia—yet it would be vital for them in defending Danbury and its Patriot military stores. Since her father had to stay and organize his men, Sybil rode off into the night to alert his outlying militiamen. She returned quite safely early the next day.

  In yet another case of a teenage girl taking on a heroic role, Laodicea Langston (“Dicey” for short) heard that t
he notorious Tory partisan “Bloody Bill” Cunningham was about to descend upon the South Carolina community where her brother, an ardent Patriot, was in hiding. Dicey knew “Bloody Bill’s” reputation. Typical was his murder of an ill, bedridden Whig officer named Steadman in the home of Charles Moore (now the Walnut Grove Plantation in the area encompassed by modern Spartanburg County). Not only did Cunningham kill the defenseless Captain Steadman, he shot two friends of the victim when they tried to escape by running from the house.

  Dicey Langston wanted no such fate for her brother and his fellow Whigs, so she set out at night from the family’s cabin near Traveler’s Rest in today’s Greenville County. In minutes, she was pushing her way along thickly wooded ground alternating with foot-sucking swampland. Miles later, she came to the Tyger River—its waters high and rushing from recent rains. She struggled across, up to her neck in the turbulent water, pulled herself up the embankment on the far side, then wearily trudged on…still in time, fortunately, to warn her brother and his compatriots that Cunningham’s “Bloody Scouts” were on the way.

  While Paul Revere may deserve every bit of the accolades, the legend, and even the Longfellow poetry associated with his historic ride, it would be no diminution of his achievement to hear an occasional cheer for the Jouetts, Tilghmans, Rodneys, Bollings, and Darraghs, Ludingtons, and Langstons of that time. And, no doubt, for quite a few others long since lost to our historical consciousness.