Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  The story doesn’t end there. It also turns out, according to documents found nearly one hundred years later, that Lee, during his long captivity, submitted to the British a plan of his own for subduing the rebellious colonies! In his own handwriting no less, these documents were found, it seems, among the papers of a companion of General Sir William Howe, commander in chief of British forces.

  Chosen with Purpose

  FOR AN OAR-POWERED RIVER CRAFT, THESE WERE REAL MONSTERS. FORTY TO sixty feet long, in use since 1750, the Delaware River’s Durham boats could carry fifteen tons of iron ore, pig iron, or other cargo from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, downriver to Philadelphia. A crew of six, plus their captain, took the heavily loaded boats downstream, sped along by the current. The watermen steered and powered their craft as needed by great oars. The boats then returned, with cargoes up to three tons, with their crews pushing the way upstream with long poles.

  The riverboats first appeared as a natural market outgrowth of the Durham Mine Furnace near tiny Riegelsville in Bucks County. Robert Durham built the shallow-draft boats with an eye toward carrying heavy loads while negotiating the river’s rapids. Pointed at each end like canoes, they typically had an eight-foot beam and would float in five inches of water empty and thirty inches when fully loaded with heavy cargo such as pig iron.

  An eventual fleet of three hundred Durhams manned by two thousand or so rivermen was destined to serve on the Delaware for more than a century, almost to the first days of the American Civil War. The boats plied their waterway from Easton to Philadelphia and back, loaded with cargoes such as the traditional iron, produce, grain, soft goods, and even whiskey.

  Their most dramatic moment, however, came on the wild, stormy Christmas night of 1776 at a point where the river is 1,000 feet wide. For here, at McKonkey’s Ferry, George Washington was ready with 2,400 men to cross the Delaware—if it could be done—and to attack the Hessians encamped at Trenton a short distance beyond the opposite shore.

  No mere skiffs or rowboats, these were the commodious, heavy-duty craft that Washington and his men already had used in their first crossing of the Delaware early that December, just hours ahead of the pursuing British. And that choice had been no accident, that narrow escape no chance affair. Harassed and hounded by the British all the way south through New Jersey after his defeats in the New York area, the Virginian at the head of the tattered American army refused to panic and flee by any means that might present themselves. As he well knew, any means that might somehow pop into view also might not. The salvation of his army could not be left to mere chance.

  The fact is that Washington had a plan: If he could reach and cross the Delaware, commandeer all its boats and destroy all its bridges for thirty miles or so in either direction, he would have a wide ditch between himself and the British.

  He knew about the Durham boats that plied the Delaware. In fact, he wrote on December 1, “The boats all along the Delaware River should be secured, particularly the Durham Boats.”

  That is what he and his small army did when they accomplished Washington’s “First Crossing of the Delaware” a week later, on December 8. Even with the leisurely pace adopted by the pursuing British under Lord Cornwallis, it was a close thing—very close. The redcoats reached Trenton and the river’s eastern banks only hours after Washington and his men had pushed off for the opposite shore in their motley fleet of boats, Durhams included. The tall Virginian had stayed behind to the last, too. A Delaware captain, Enoch Anderson, later recalled those dismal days just east of the river: “We continued on our retreat—our regiment in the rear and I, with thirty men, in the rear of the regiment, and General Washington in my rear with pioneers—tearing up bridges and cutting down trees to impede the march of the enemy.”

  With the “ditch” now separating the opposing forces, Sir William Howe, overall commander of the British ground forces, was content to turn back for New York for a comfortable winter season spent in the city’s warm, more civilized quarters, while leaving various garrisons in a line of posts through newly occupied New Jersey. One of those garrisons, of course, was the Hessian contingent left to guard the Delaware at Trenton.

  As Howe, Cornwallis, and Company turned away, few on the British side thought the shattered rebel army would dare stir up any more trouble until the next spring, at which time the Americans could be defeated again. One of these days they would realize the futility of fighting the mighty, well-seasoned, trained, fed, clothed, and equipped British army. Wouldn’t they?

  Not if you asked George Washington, who even at this nadir of his country’s fortunes was busy gathering his forces—his Durham boats in particular—for a second crossing of the Delaware, the one to be attempted at McKonkey’s Ferry the night of December 25. As is well known, the weather was far from mild that wintry night. The wind howled as the men shuffled forward to take their places in the boats, many leaving bloodstains on the snow from their ill-shod feet. Snow already covered the ground. More was about to blow and swirl in their faces…sleet, too.

  The water was high, the current was fierce, and ice floes filled the river—speeding floes that could smash into and capsize any small boat that might foolishly venture into the rushing water. “The floating ice in the river made the labor almost incredible,” wrote Washington’s artillery master, Henry Knox, later.

  Even so, General John Glover and his saltwater sailors from Marblehead, Massachusetts, did their job that terrible night on a half-frozen, yet still-coursing freshwater river. Not a man or a gun was lost as they ferried Washington and his primary force of 2,400 men across the river for the surprise attack—and victory—at Trenton the next morning. They did their job, the troops did their job, Washington did his…and, last but far from least, the sturdy Durham boats, under the worst of conditions, did theirs.

  Civil War in the South

  “I BEGAN TO GROW UP—TIMES BEGAN TO BE TROUBLESOME, AND PEOPLE BEGAN to divide into parties.” Friends of the past, now Whigs or Tories, “began to watch each other with jealous eyes.”

  That’s the way it began and would continue in the Carolinas—a nasty civil war among friends and longtime neighbors of different ethnic backgrounds in some cases, and of different loyalties in all cases. The Whigs were the Patriots and the Tories the Loyalists. Except when the British or the Continental Army was on the march, the war in the Carolinas was a guerrilla war of unauthorized raids that could degenerate into atrocity and murder.

  Gradually becoming involved in this maelstrom of violence, vendetta, and hatred was teenager James P. Collins. No longer an apprentice tailor who had one day amused himself by making a miniature suit for a cat (see “The Well-Suited Cat,”), he now began his own guerrilla role for the Whigs as a local “collector of news” for a neighboring militia captain named Moffitt.

  For a time, the “news” he brought back from his rovings on horseback within a thirty-mile radius of home was useful in frustrating Tory plans. He came to view Tories in three categories: those who truly believed in their cause “from principle”; those who were cowards and mere “tools” for others; and those who “believed it impossible for the cause of liberty to succeed and thought in the end, whatever they got, they would be enabled to hold, and so become rich. The latter resorted to murder and plunder, and every means to get hold of property.”

  Then there were, in his neighborhood, men “who pretended neutrality entirely on both sides; they pretended friendship to all.” Young Collins obviously didn’t think much of them—in fact, thanks to their nosiness and loose lips, the Tories learned of his spying activities and “swore revenge.”

  He gave up his intelligence forays for the time being, but the British capture of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1780 brought a new phase of the revolutionary struggle in the Carolinas. “[T]here was a proclamation for all to come forward, submit, and take protection; peace and pardon would be granted.” Officers leading “guards or companies of men” were dispatched in all directions “to receive the submi
ssion of the people.” “Vast numbers” of colonists stepped forward and submitted, whether through fear, outright willingness, or simply a hope for peace and quiet. But there were strings attached to the loyalty “submission” that the real Patriots could not accept.

  Coming near Collins’s home on a submission errand was “one Lord Hook, who came up and stationed himself at or near Fishing Creek at some distance below where we lived.” Almost every man in the area went to hear what he had to say. “He got up, harangued the people in a very rough and insulting manner and submitted his propositions for their acceptance. Some bowed to his sceptre, but far the greater part returned home without submitting.”

  Their noncompliance provoked a deadly brawl typical of Carolina warfare. Lord Hook attacked a nearby iron foundry (Billy Hill’s Ironworks), “killed several men, set the works on fire, and reduced them to ashes.”

  At that, Collins and his outraged father, Daniel, joined Moffitt’s band of seventy Minutemen. “In a few days there was a meeting of several officers, and it was determined to attack Lord Hook, and take vengeance for the burning of the ironworks.”

  They approached his headquarters, making their way on foot through a peach orchard just after sunrise, “thinking the peach trees would be a good safeguard against the charge of the horseman [the British cavalry].” The headquarters sentries spotted the Americans, fired and ran off for help. Shortly, mounted British cavalrymen came into view—an imposing sight to the ragtag militiamen. “I had never seen a troop of British horse before, and thought they differed vastly in appearance from us—poor hunting-shirt fellows.”

  The trees did prove useful as hoped. “The leader drew his sword…and began to storm and rave, and advanced on us; but we kept close to the peach orchard.”

  The British drew closer, and their leader—apparently Lord Hook himself—shouted, “Disperse you damned rebels, or I will put every man of you to the sword.”

  At that, “Our rifle balls began to whistle among them, and in a few minutes my Lord Hook was shot off his horse and fell at full length; his sword flew out of his hand as he fell and lay at some distance…”

  At a loss, the stricken Lord Hook’s men circled him uncertainly two or three times. “At length, one halted and pointed his sword downward, seemed to pause a moment, then raising his sword, wheeled off and all started at full gallop.” In seconds, the troopers were gone and Lord Hook alone lay dead at the feet of Moffitt’s men. In the nearby yard were two wounded cavalrymen who had been left behind as well.

  After an argument between two of Moffitt’s men over whose shots actually killed Hook, the entire group of rebels was ready to disband and go home. “We then bound up the wounds of the two [British] men, took three swords, three brace of pistols, some powder and lead, perhaps my Lord Hook’s watch, and but little else, and departed, every man for his own place.”

  So it went in the Carolinas war, blow and counterblow, reprisal for reprisal. This apparently had been the first combat for young James Collins, only sixteen. How would he recall that day? Read between the lines as he closes his account of the battle in his autobiography: “For my own part, I fired my old shotgun only twice in the action. I suppose I did no more harm than burning so much powder.”

  ***

  Additional note: Collins’s tale of “Lord Hook” probably represents a skewed recollection of the fate dealt to a notorious Tory, Captain Christian Huck, operating in York County, South Carolina, in 1780. Huck, originally from Philadelphia, was known for his atrocities against Whigs in the Carolina backcountry—and for a special propensity for burning down Presbyterian churches. In his foray of July 1780 he destroyed William Hill’s Ironworks in York County, then threatened militia colonel William Bratton’s wife in an attempt to locate the officer. When Martha Bratton bravely refused to reveal her husband’s whereabouts, a Huck aide had to stop him from doing her physical harm. That night, as Huck (“Hook?”) and his men were encamped at nearby Williamson’s plantation, Whig militiamen, led by Bratton and Colonel Edward Lacey of General Thomas Sumter’s brigade, quietly surrounded them. In the attack that followed at dawn, Huck was killed. A stone tablet marking “Huck’s Defeat” has stood near the site of the Bratton home for many years.

  Rogue Warriors

  ONE OF THE MOST NOTORIOUS PARTISAN LEADERS, TORY OR WHIG, TO EMERGE from the bitter infighting that afflicted the Carolina countryside during the American Revolution was David Fanning. Apparently abused as an orphaned youth, he was so badly disfigured by scalding water in a childhood accident that he preferred to eat by himself. Later in life, he always kept his scarred scalp hidden beneath a silk cap.

  One of his enemies was the Whig militia officer Philip Alston, scion of an aristocratic family and himself a desperado and murderer of the worst kind.

  The terrain these two rogue warriors fought over in the name of Crown or Rebellion—or simply raided and plundered with their marauding bands—included the North Carolina sandhills best known today for the lovely resort and retirement towns of Pinehurst and Southern Pines.

  Full résumés of these two are not available to us today, but in Fanning’s case it’s fairly clear that he was born at a place in Amelia County, Virginia, called Beech Swamp, probably in 1755. Orphaned as a child, then bound to a county justice in North Carolina and apprenticed to a loom mechanic, he wound up in western South Carolina just before the Revolutionary War broke out.

  His first activity, as a Loyalist partisan, came in the same South Carolina backcountry—he fought the Patriots at Ninety-Six and Big Cane Brake in 1775. Twenty or twenty-one years of age by this time, he soon was leading Loyalist bands on raids and in skirmishes against area rebels. He was often captured by his enemies and, by his own account, just as often escaped their clutches.

  Accepting parole at one point in 1779, he kept to the sidelines for a short time, but sprang back into action with the arrival of fresh British forces under Lord Cornwallis in 1780. He now shifted to a base on the Deep River in North Carolina, from which he operated as both a Loyalist militia leader and a scout for Cornwallis. He reported to superiors in the regular British army based at Wilmington, close to the coast.

  No longer content with his minor actions of old, Fanning resolved to raid the Chatham County courthouse at Pittsboro to free Loyalist captives awaiting court-martial by their rebel foes. Taking the town by surprise in July of 1781, Fanning not only succeeded in freeing his compatriots, he also came away with a few dozen prisoners of his own, among them court officials, Patriot militia officers, and three members of the rebels’ state legislature.

  After a series of raids on rebel-owned plantations, he and 225 men triumphed in outright battle against twice as many Whig sympathizers—Patriots. Fanning and company killed 23, took 54 more prisoners and, as highly valued “booty,” captured 250 horses.

  Still ahead, though, was Fanning’s most spectacular feat of all. With the ranks of his followers swelled to about nine hundred, he and fellow Loyalist Colonel Hector McNeil marched on Hillsborough, North Carolina, on September 12, 1781. Here, Fanning’s raiders burst into town and cut a remarkable swath with no losses to his side. He released more Loyalist partisans being held captive, as well as a few British regulars in the same unhappy condition. He also took two hundred prisoners, including rebel Governor Thomas Burke, his Governor’s Council, and a slew of state legislators.

  After a bit of leisurely looting, the Loyalists withdrew, of course taking their prisoners with them. They had covered twenty-six miles by noon the next day, according to historian John Sayle Watterson III in The North Carolina Historical Review. McNeil was in the lead, and as fate would have it, he had failed to put out advance scouts.

  It was an unfortunate omission for all in Fanning’s band, in view of the inevitable pursuit that would follow their capture of Governor Burke. For now, at Lindley’s Mill on Cane Creek, the Loyalists were themselves taken by surprise. McNeil was immediately shot and killed in the rebel ambush led by Whig General John Butler. F
anning managed to reorganize his men and circle around for a flank attack on his Whig tormentors. After four hours of gunfire, the pursuers finally backed off…but they might not have, had they known that Fanning had lost the services of his next in command, Colonel McNeil, along with twenty-seven Loyalists killed and another sixty wounded. Indeed, Fanning himself was wounded in the arm—badly enough, it seems, for him to go into hiding to nurse himself while his men pushed on by themselves.

  Well, not entirely by themselves. They still had prisoners, who had been kept under guard in a nearby house for the duration of the gunfight. By Watterson’s account, the Loyalist survivors now took Burke and his fellow prisoners on a 160-mile, 10-day trek through swamp, marsh and all other manner of desolate terrain to Wilmington, where the governor was entrusted to eager British hands. As events evolved he spent weeks as a prisoner on Sullivan’s Island at Charleston, South Carolina, before being granted parole to return to North Carolina. Fanning, in the meantime, escaped his pursuers and recovered from his wound.

  As for his bloody rivalry with the Patriot partisan Philip Alston, they had clashed by the time Fanning raided the Chatham courthouse at Pittsboro. According to the account developed by Blackwell P. Robinson for his local history, Moore County, North Carolina, 1747–1847, their first notable encounter came after Fanning’s band, along with a clot of prisoners, stayed overnight at Loyalist sympathizer Kenneth Black’s home near today’s golfing resort town of Pinehurst. They were returning to a Fanning hideout at Big Raft Swamp in Robeson County.

  The next morning, Black guided the Loyalist band for a few miles, then changed horses with Fanning because his was injured. On his way home—alone and mounted on the lame horse—Black ran into a party of armed horsemen who were in pursuit of Fanning and led by Alston. Black turned his mount in an effort to flee, but it took the rebels no time to overtake and shoot him. With the Loyalist then at their mercy, wounded and lying face down in the muck of a swamp, “some of Alston’s men smashed his head with the butt of his own gun as he was begging for his life,” wrote Robinson.