Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  Ominously, too, Major Patrick Ferguson’s well-trained troops, about 1,100 strong, held the high ground. “The enemy,” said Collins later, “was posted on a high, steep and rugged ridge, or spur of the mountain, very difficult of access.”

  This “mountain,” a chip chiseled off the Blue Ridge to the west, abruptly rose six or more stories high from a flat slab of land on South Carolina’s border with its northern namesake. The Americans quickly surrounded its base, then made ready to assault the enemy above. By the account of the young Mr. Collins, the Americans would climb alongside a stream on the right, with another stream to the left. He described the slope to be conquered as a veritable cliff. At least, that was the slope he and his regiment faced, looking up.

  It was no encouraging prospect, he admitted in his autobiography written many years later. As the Americans prepared their multifaceted attack, he wrote: “Each leader made a short speech in his own way to his men, desiring every coward to be off immediately; here I confess I would willingly have been excused, for my feelings were not the most pleasant—this may be attributed to my youth, not being quite seventeen years of age—but I could not well swallow the appellation of coward.”

  Young Collins looked about him and saw that others, many of them older than himself, were obviously thinking the same thing. “Every man’s countenance seemed to change,” he wrote. “Well, thought I, fate is fate, every man’s fate is before him and he has to run it out, which I am inclined to think yet.” And so began the assault up the northeastern end of the mountain. Militia Colonels Isaac Shelby, John Sevier, and William Campbell were in command of the three American columns now streaming up the mountainside. They numbered 1,200 to 1,500 or more by various accounts.

  The men advancing with young Collins carried “four or five” musket balls in their mouths—“to prevent thirst, also to be in readiness to reload quick.” His regiment, incidentally, was commanded by Major William Chronicle.

  Above, Major Patrick Ferguson had ordered his men to ready their bayonets—those not so equipped were told to cut down the shaft of their hunting knives and jam them into the business end of their rifles. Ironically enough, the Scottish-born Ferguson, a marksman and firearms expert, previously had invented a rapid-fire rifle far advanced for its day…but the British high command in the American colonies failed to take advantage of the possibilities it offered. Incidentally, Ferguson was the able British officer who decided against shooting a mounted American officer in the back near Brandywine Creek in Pennsylvania in the fall of 1777…quite possibly, Ferguson later surmised, sparing the life of a reconnoitering General George Washington.

  Now, three years later, he was operating in the backcountry of South Carolina as commander of the left wing of a three-pronged attempt by Lord Cornwallis to move into North Carolina and Virginia from his base at Charleston. While operating against the backcountry rebels, Ferguson had gathered a force of a thousand or more Loyalists. He recently penetrated into North Carolina territory, but he received intelligence that militiamen from west of the Blue Ridge—“over-the-mountain” men, many of them Scottish Highlander settlers or descendants—were gathering in significant numbers to oppose his drive north. Aware that he had stirred up a hornets’ nest, he began to shift eastward, thinking to link up with Cornwallis in or near Charlotte, North Carolina. He issued a call for the Loyalists of North Carolina to “run to camp” with him and thus escape the “back water men,” whom he unfortunately called “a set of mongrels.”

  He sent word to Cornwallis asking for a reinforcement of three hundred to four hundred “good soldiers, part dragoons” to “finish the business.” Now pursuing him through several days of heavy rains were the ragged over-the-mountain men he had so unfairly disparaged. It all came to a head at King’s Mountain the afternoon of October 7, 1780.

  The Loyalists awaiting the day’s action atop the heavily wooded promontory were startled by the appearance of the Americans after all. “So rapid was their attack,” wrote a Loyalist officer from South Carolina, “that I was in the act of dismounting to report that all was quiet and the pickets [were] on the alert when we heard their [the Americans’] firing about half a mile off.”

  Loyalist Captain Alexander Chesney had just returned from a reconnaissance that revealed no approaching Americans. Now, however, they were very much in evidence…and Ferguson’s choice of a standoff site perhaps was not fated to be a favorable one after all. Explained Chesney later: “King’s Mountain, from its height, would have enabled us to oppose a superior force with advantage, had it not been covered with wood, which sheltered the Americans and enabled them to fight in the favorite manner.”

  And what was the “favorite manner”? After driving back the Loyalist pickets and reaching the crest, the Americans “opened an irregular but destructive fire from behind trees and other cover.”

  Ah yes, trees! Indeed, another teenage American warrior, Private Thomas Young, barefoot and all of sixteen also, later recalled, “Ben Hollingsworth and myself took right up the side of the mountain and fought from tree to tree…”

  From the perspective of young Collins, meanwhile, reaching the crest had not at all been such an easily accomplished goal. Hardly had he and his companions begun their climb, he later wrote, when, “The shot of the enemy soon began to pass over us like hail.” Cool as the day apparently was, he quickly was in a sweat. And there was no fast advance in his sector of the assault. Said he: “My lot happened to be in the center where the severest part of the battle was fought. We soon attempted to climb the hill, but were fiercely charged upon and forced to fall back to our original position. We tried a second time, but met the same fate. The fight then seemed to become more furious.”

  About this time, Major Ferguson “came in full view within rifle shot, as if to encourage his men, who…were falling very fast.” Ferguson, it seems by many accounts, was a highly visible figure wheeling about on his horse, dressed in a checkered hunting shirt over his uniform, brandishing his dress sword, blowing commands with a silver whistle held between his teeth. He was unfortunately too visible for his own good, as events turned out. “He soon disappeared,” wrote Collins. “We took to the hill a third time. The enemy gave way. When we had gotten near the top, some of our leaders roared out, ‘Hurrah, my brave fellows! Advance! They are crying for quarter!’”

  And so it ended, about an hour after the first shots were fired. The Americans had won a great victory, one that would set back Cornwallis’s advance north into Virginia by a full year. The over-the-mountain men, the ragtag militia, had killed 157 of the Loyalist force, wounded 163, and taken 698 prisoner.

  Among the enemy dead was Patrick Ferguson, his body riddled by shot. When young Collins walked over to look at the British officer’s body at the top of King’s Mountain, he saw a sight he could still describe nearly six decades later with clarity and convincing detail. Ferguson had been the target of many rifles at practically the same moment, it appeared. “Seven rifle balls had passed through his body, both of his arms were broken, and his hat and clothing were literally shot to pieces.”

  Therein lay the secret of the American victory that day, added Collins. Rather than prove advantageous, holding the high ground had been the undoing of the British force. “Their great elevation above us had proved their ruin,” wrote Collins in 1836 at age seventy-four. “They overshot us altogether, scarce touching a man, except those on horseback, while every rifle from below, seemed to have the desired effect.”

  Add to that the heavy woods denying the Loyalist defenders a clear view while affording the attacking Americans good cover, and there are two persuasive reasons why the casualties of the comparatively ill-trained, unprofessional Americans amounted to only twenty-eight killed, with another sixty-two wounded, in defeating the British-led Loyalists at King’s Mountain in the fall of 1780.

  Significantly, too, once the great American victory at King’s Mountain became known, “…[W]e seemed to gather strength, for many that before lay neutra
l, through fear or some other cause, shouldered their guns, and fell in the ranks; some of them making good soldiers.”

  Man in a Red Shoe

  SOMEONE WAS WATCHING WHEN BENEDICT ARNOLD MADE HIS SUDDEN BREAK for British lines. Someone…a young American soldier assigned to Arnold’s security detail, his one-hundred-man “life guards.” A young man at first puzzled by the strange events unfolding before him, then realizing what they portended. He was Alpheus Parkhurst, twenty, a Massachusetts native drawn from a Patriot company based at West Point to serve in Arnold’s life guards, and he didn’t really mean or plan to watch a historic moment that early morning. He was just there, as he was supposed to be.

  For years afterward, he remembered America’s most notorious traitor as “a lame man, having been wounded in his ankle, and on that foot he wore a large red shoe.” Aside from that oddity, stemming from his wounding in the Battle of Saratoga, “He was a smart-looking man about middling size.”

  As Parkhurst reported years later in his petition for a service-related pension, Arnold at the time (summer of 1780) was living in the Beverley Robinson house across the Hudson River from West Point, while the “guard” lived in “tents and barracks” around the house. “Their business was to stand guard and sentry around the house and to go on errands to different places and was all the time under arms.” The middle-aged Arnold had just recently married his twenty-year-old wife and been appointed commander of the key American fortress on the Hudson.

  Then came the most dramatic morning of young Parkhurst’s duty with the Arnold security detail. The young man guessed something was up when an aide-de-camp “rode up in great haste and the general came to the door and the aide-de-camp ordered the general’s horse to be brought as quick as it could be done.” A bay horse soon appeared. “The general and his aide started off together for the river, and the aide soon returned and brought back the general’s horse.”

  In the meantime, Parkhurst had seen “the general dismount, step into a barge that lay there, and draw his sword, and the barge started off in great speed.” He saw the barge make its way for about a mile downriver, with Arnold “sitting down.”

  Downstream was the location of His Majesty’s ship Vulture and other British vessels…but it was to the Vulture that Benedict Arnold made his way that morning.

  Back at the Robinson house, meanwhile, the excitement was not yet over. No more than forty or fifty minutes after Arnold’s strange departure, the young soldier “heard a great rumbling and trampling of horses and, looking round, saw a great smoke of dust, the weather being dry, and in a few moments General Washington with 160 horse rode up.” In the confusion that followed, Parkhurst could not quite hear what was said, but the soldier knew something indeed was amiss when, after only fifteen minutes there, George Washington turned for West Point.

  A remarkably fortunate witness to history in the making, Parkhurst soon found himself across the river at the American fortress of West Point—the Arnold guard force was marched off just an hour or so after Washington left the Robinson house. Parkhurst thus arrived at West Point in time for a glimpse of the third actor in the drama, Major John André, chief British intelligence officer in New York…and the traitor Arnold’s contact man. It, of course, was his capture two days before, with incriminating papers tucked in his boot, that had set off the chain of events witnessed by young Parkhurst.

  At West Point, Parkhurst later said, he “saw General Washington and Major André with him, and he [André] was then dressed in blue citizen’s clothes.” The British officer obviously was a prisoner. “Andre’s arms were pinioned back, but he rode on horseback.”

  Parkhurst’s story ends there.

  It ends, except that he had somehow managed to witness one other “inside” event that day. It came earlier, as Arnold himself was responding to the alarming news that André had been captured. What Parkhurst witnessed at this point had to do with Arnold’s wife, the former Peggy Shippen, widely known as a close André friend and suspected Loyalist. Parkhurst recalled that “as Arnold stepped to the door, when his aide rode up, he turned to his wife and said, as near as…[I] can recollect, ‘Something has come to light and I must bid you goodbye forever,’ and then mounted his steed and galloped away.”

  According to Parkhurst, too, Arnold’s wife “had fits and appeared to be in great distress of mind,” which is exactly as she appeared later in the day to a nonplused and aggrieved George Washington.

  Hysterical Wife

  FOR GEORGE WASHINGTON, ALEXANDER HAMILTON, THE MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE, and sundry other of Washington’s many aides, the scene in the rambling old house on the Hudson was singularly unnerving…nothing at all like their battlefield experiences of the past few years.

  They were gathered in the home of Washington’s old-time (but pro-British) friend, Colonel Beverley Robinson, in Westchester County, New York, across the river from West Point. In an upstairs bedroom a young wife and mother was screaming and yelling. Not yet twenty, she wore a nearly sheer nightgown as she shrilled that her husband had left her, that only Washington could remove a hot iron burning into her head and that, no, the concerned Washington who had come to visit and comfort her was not really he, but rather a stranger intent upon murdering her infant son!

  Among the stunned onlookers was Washington’s faithful aide from Maryland, Tench Tilghman, a first cousin to the hysterical young lady—the former Margaret (Peggy) Shippen of Philadelphia.

  The fact is, she had good reason to be upset—nor is there any doubt that Washington and his entire party also were upset.

  George Washington had arrived that morning, two days after his first meeting (in Hartford, Connecticut) with the Comte de Rochambeau, commander of the French forces newly landed in America as allies in the Patriot cause. Washington appeared this morning of September 25, 1780, expecting a hearty breakfast. He also anticipated greetings from Benedict Arnold, the temporary occupant of the Robinson house and commander of the garrison at nearby West Point, just two miles away as the crow flies. The lady of the house was Arnold’s new wife, and her infant, his child.

  Naturally, Washington, Hamilton, Lafayette, Tilghman and company were surprised to be told that their comrade-in-arms, himself a major general, had suddenly left the house at breakfast time. But they presumed he would be awaiting them at West Point, across the river. Still, that seemed a bit odd.

  The visitors hurried off to cross the wide Hudson by rowboat and visit the fort above. For the commander in chief, it was an anxiously awaited opportunity to inspect the key bastion. Unaccountably, though, the trusted commander was not there. Unhappily, too, Washington saw that the fort’s defenses were poorly designed and carelessly maintained—they never would suffice in the face of a determined British attack, an attack expected at any moment.

  The unpleasant truth dawned with a messenger’s news of a stranger’s capture two days before with incriminating documents found tucked into the bottoms of his stockings. A thoroughly shocked George Washington glanced through the papers: a pass signed by Arnold, plans of the defenses at West Point, minutes from a recent council of war and other prime intelligence. The captured stranger, it soon became clear, was British Army Major John André, adjutant general and aide to Sir Henry Clinton, commander of the Crown’s land forces in America.

  Now every added hour brought to light new pieces of the puzzle. André was an admiring acquaintance of Peggy Shippen from the days, just a couple of years earlier, when the British had occupied her hometown of Philadelphia. Further, at breakfast that very morning, Arnold had received a mysterious message. Clearly agitated, he had left the house minutes later. Obviously, he had been warned of his contact André’s capture.

  And now, late in the day, there came to the Robinson house a letter to Washington from Arnold himself. He had penned it from sanctuary aboard the British man-of-war Vulture in the nearby Hudson. (Colonel Robinson, in fact, was on board the Vulture, too!) Acknowledging “the world” might “censure” his behavior “as wro
ng,” Arnold wrote that he had but one favor to ask—“I am induced to ask your protection for Mrs. Arnold from every insult and injury that a mistaken vengeance of my country may expose her to.”

  While Washington did treat the young woman with gentlemanly kid gloves, his more immediate reaction was to beef up the defenses and manpower at West Point that very night. Soon after, a board of fourteen general officers named by the commander in chief condemned André as a spy and ordered his execution. Washington, in full agreement, refused all appeals to relent, and André went to the gallows at Tappan, New York, on October 2.

  As for Peggy Shippen, later shown to be a Loyalist through and through, the hysterics passed and she left the Robinson house on September 27 for sanctuary of her own in familiar Philadelphia. The storm of public outrage over her husband’s perfidy did erupt, and it later became quite evident that she herself had played a conscious role in his treasonable activities.

  History still has to wonder. Did she fake her hysterics to gull Washington and his aides into letting her escape a compromising situation (which they did)? Or, as one previously known to fall into hysterics on various occasions, was she simply frustrated by discovery of the plot to deliver West Point to the enemy?

  Two Brave Men Hanged

  IN PHILADELPHIA THE WINTER OF 1777–1778, HE STAYED AT BENJAMIN Franklin’s house as an aide-de-camp to British General Charles Grey. He then became a staff officer to General Sir Henry Clinton in New York and adjutant general of the British army. Taking over Clinton’s correspondence, playing handball with his boss, and generally proving indispensable, the younger officer, twenty-nine, also took charge of British intelligence functions.

  In May of 1779, he was in touch with a secret informer, code-named “Monk.”

  Just a month before, “Monk” had married the very young Peggy Shippen, one of the girls the young British officer had socialized with during the British occupation of Philadelphia in 1777–1778. “Monk” had major secrets to pass along. For instance, he could help the British seize the American fortress of West Point on the Hudson Heights near Newburgh, New York.