One night during the siege, a group of American sappers and miners working in the dark far in advance of the Patriot lines was visited by a tall man clothed in something like a cape. After looking around, he left—but first he warned that if they were captured, “be sure the enemy doesn’t find out that you’re sappers and miners.” Under the rules of warfare then existing, he was reminding them, they could have been executed as terrorists instead of soldiers simply doing their duty. Their nighttime visitor, himself risking capture, had of course been General George Washington.
On another night during the siege, he, General Benjamin Lincoln, General Henry Knox, and several other officers stood in the open close to the fighting for control of two key redoubts in the British line. Colonel David Cobb, a staff officer, warned: “Sir, you’re much too exposed here. Hadn’t you better step back a little?”
Washington replied (none too graciously, at that): “Colonel Cobb, if you are afraid, you have the liberty to step back.” A short while later, he told his officers he was pleased with the capture of the redoubts and told an aide, “Hand me my horse.” He then returned to his paperwork at headquarters.
The next day, interestingly, Alexander Hamilton was at newly captured Rock Redoubt with Knox, pooh-poohing Washington’s new order for his soldiers to yell a warning if they heard an artillery shell approaching. Knox was defending the idea as a way to save lives. Just then, two shells fell near them. Both men dove for cover, the diminutive Hamilton crouching behind the portly Knox. But Knox rolled over and left Hamilton closest to the as-yet-unexploded shells. When the shells exploded, neither officer was harmed, but Knox said, “Now what do you think Mr. Hamilton, about crying ‘Shell’? But let me tell you not to make a breastwork of me again!”
The artillery fire sweeping the Revolutionary War battlefields was no joke, and that was true for the men and officers of either side at Yorktown. Days before, Lord Cornwallis had stood on a British parapet next to a fellow officer, Major Charles Cochrane, as the hapless major literally lost his head to an Allied cannonball.
This story may be apocryphal, but if true, Washington’s greatest single moment of peril during the war came in connection with the Battle of the Brandywine in Pennsylvania, on the morning of September 11, 1777…the moment that he perhaps unwittingly rode his horse within shooting distance of an armed British officer, Major Patrick Ferguson, who stepped out of his hiding place in the bushes, hailed the American before him, and tried to detain him.
The American calmly turned his back and rode on…after stopping for a moment to look Ferguson up and down. The British officer easily could have shot the American—“But it was not pleasant to fire at the back of an unoffending individual, who was acquitting himself very coolly of his duty, so I let him alone.”
Not so incidentally, Ferguson was an accomplished gun-handler and marksman who had invented a rapid-fire rifle quite advanced for its day. As he said, he “could have lodged half a dozen balls in or about him before he was out of my reach.”
And why do historians think it was George Washington who had been in Ferguson’s sights that morning at Brandywine?
Well, himself wounded at Brandywine, Ferguson wrote to a relative that a British doctor treating American wounded repeated their information that General Washington had been with his light troops that morning, accompanied by a French officer in hussar uniform (Lafayette?). Ferguson had seen his man accompanied by an officer in hussar uniform, too. And his potential quarry had been dressed and mounted just as described by the wounded Americans, Ferguson asserted. Sadly, Ferguson was killed three years later in the American victory at King’s Mountain, South Carolina on October 7, 1780.
Battles Sometimes Overlooked
GEORGE WASHINGTON’S FOUR COLUMNS WERE SUPPOSED TO REACH JUMP-OFF position by 2 A.M., move out at 4 A.M., and hit the British hard and simultaneously at daybreak. But the Americans should have reckoned upon variables such as the thick, early-morning fog that killed visibility, forced uncertain guides to feel their way along and contributed to delays for all four columns. They should have realized that straying soldiers were likely to be gathered up by the enemy and then to reveal the plan of the day, thus thwarting any hope of surprise. They might also have guessed that communication among the four columns by horse-mounted messengers could fall prey to various kinds of interruption…such as the fog.
What no one could have guessed, however, was that a single stone house would prove the major obstacle for Washington in his attack against Sir William Howe at Germantown, just outside of Philadelphia, that Saturday, October 4, 1777. And at first it certainly didn’t appear that way.
Roaring down the Georgetown Pike, with the British Light Infantry in precipitate retreat before them, the men of American John Sullivan’s column streamed right past the sturdy Cliveden summer mansion belonging to the Philadelphia Chews. Rather than be overrun, elements of the British Fortieth Regiment under Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Musgrave took refuge inside the stone house…unnoticed. It wasn’t long, however, before the British inside the house were firing upon the Americans passing outside. It was no major threat to the overall scheme of attack by four columns, but the light fire was galling enough to force Washington and his officers into a council of war in a neighboring house. The commander in chief had to choose between moving on and leaving a mere regiment to cover the Cliveden House—or following the warning of Henry Knox against leaving any enemy element in the rear.
Washington chose the advice of his artillery chief.
Unfortunately, when his Lieutenant Colonel William Small advanced on the house with a white flag to offer the redcoats inside a chance to surrender, he was shot—fatally. Minutes later, an American cannonball barreled through the front door, streaked down the hallway inside, and burst out the back. And that was only the beginning of the intense fire the Americans lavished upon the Cliveden House and its frontal wall of stone two feet thick, without ever managing to dislodge the redcoats holding out inside.
Elsewhere in this major battle, the Americans were far more successful in driving the British back, despite the ropey fog that clung on and on, aided and abetted by clouds of smoke from the cannon and musket fire. Americans and British alike suffered here and there from the confusion of battle and limited visibility, but overall the Americans fought ferociously—they might have prevailed but for still more of those omnipresent variables of war: For one, a drunken General Adam Stephen mistakenly led his men into the rear of Anthony Wayne’s flank and gave his officers contradictory orders; for another, the Americans pressing the British up front ran short of ammunition.
By 10 A.M., with the Cliveden House still unyielding and more than fifty American dead strewn about its front lawn, Washington and his men were pulling back. Among their other losses by now had been the son of Dr. John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey (the future Princeton) and a Signer of the Declaration of Independence. Fatally wounded by the same cannonball had been General Francis Nash, his name destined to live on when some of his soldiers founded the city of Nashville, Tennessee, just two years later.
Although Washington basically had been repulsed at Germantown, his men once again had shown they could and would fight. Another American army in just two weeks would show the same resolve under General Horatio Gates at Saratoga, New York—a clearcut victory.
The Cliveden House remains on site and has been open to the public in recent years as a historic landmark.
***
A double or even triple first was the Skirmish of Cooches Bridge, Pennsylvania, on September 3, 1777. Here, the Continental Army’s First Light Infantry Corps fought its first engagement of the Revolutionary War, this one against Sir William Howe’s advance elements as the British moved on Philadelphia. The American light infantry consisted of a hundred or more officers and men serving under an Irish-born British army veteran, Brigadier General William Maxwell. More important, the minor clash earned its place in history as possibly the first time the Stars a
nd Stripes was raised in battle.
***
With the most punishing winter in memory just past and the Continental Army riddled by dissent and desertions—even suffering ripples of mutiny—wouldn’t this be a good time to attack…perhaps even to end the war on a victorious note? So figured Wilhelm von Knyphausen, commander of the German troops fighting the American rebels on behalf of the British.
Down in the south, the dust was still settling from Sir Henry Clinton’s victorious siege of Charleston that June of 1780, while not far from von Knyphausen’s seat in New York, Washington and his ragged, winter-struck Continentals still lingered at Morristown, New Jersey, in part for a lack of horses.
Backed by seven thousand men, the German marched first for the passes in the Watchung Mountains screening Morristown from just such an attack from the east. With the passes secured, he figured, he could descend upon Washington’s base at Morristown and clean it out.
It didn’t work out that way at all. First, the German’s advance elements ran into an ambush by an American patrol that slowed the attempted night march until the next morning. Next, the New Jersey militia “turned out in surprising strength,” wrote Thomas Fleming in his book, Liberty! The American Revolution. Further, “…the New Jersey Continental brigade, stationed east of the mountains, made a fighting retreat that gave Washington time to get his men into the vital passes and onto the high ground beyond the village of Springfield.” The end result was a defeat for the German and his men, who only added to local enmity by burning down most of Springfield and nearby Connecticut Farms, the future city of Union, New Jersey.
Oddly enough, the Americans didn’t see their resilient response as anything to crow about. Would you believe, wrote Alexander Hamilton later, that a German baron and a few thousand men, in the month of June, “insulted and defied the main American army with the commander in chief at their head with impunity and made them tremble for the safety of their magazines forty miles in the country?”
Militiaman Ashbel Green touched on another aspect of war altogether when he looked about the scene of battle a day later. He registered his impressions of “gloomy horror—a dead horse, a broken carriage of a fieldpiece, a town laid in ashes, the former inhabitants standing over the ruins of their dwellings and the unburied dead, covered with blood and with the flies that were devouring it.” Green felt compelled to ask: “Is the contest worth all this?”
***
“The Truly Unfortunate Day,” is what one of the junior British admirals called it, and he was truly right. Pure ineptitude on the part of the British had made it so. Truly Unfortunate Day was the Battle of the Virginia Capes, which easily could have gone over to the British and spared them the embarrassment of surrender at Yorktown, but didn’t.
British Admiral Sir Thomas Graves lost the sea-battle to the French, thus raising the question of who really was to blame for the British debacle at Yorktown. Most historians, of course, blame Lord Cornwallis for sitting at Yorktown and waiting for the British fleet to arrive and pick him up, like some kind of bus service.
The fact is, Admiral Graves was the “bus driver” who somehow went astray and allowed himself to be hijacked by the French.
He did try, and for that reason, he did appear off the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay on September 5, 1781, with nineteen ships of the line, his orders to proceed across the lower bay and enter the York River and right there, at Yorktown, to pick up his passenger, Cornwallis. British intelligence was such that he wasn’t completely startled to find a fleet of French warships blocking his way in Lynnhaven Bay behind Virginia’s Cape Henry, although he might not have known the precise number of French ships was twenty-four, including the world’s largest warship, the 104-gun Ville de Paris.
Immediately upon spotting the approaching British, the French cut their anchor lines and stood to sea, to find maneuvering room for the battle sure to come. Graves bulled on into the bay before the strung-out French could form up for battle, but he didn’t attack. By early afternoon, the fleets were passing one another on parallel lines and ducking in and out of thundersqualls. “Graves dithered while [French Admiral Francoise] de Grasse waited for the center and rear divisions of his fleet to catch up,” reported Joseph N. Valliant Jr. in the October 1995 issue of Military History magazine.
What Admiral Graves was thinking aboard his ninety-gun flagship the London is not clear. After a time, his ships “running up on Middle Ground Shoal,” he ordered them to turn and reverse course. “The turnabout placed the slowest and leakiest of the British ships opposite the strongest and fastest Frenchmen,” added Valliant. “Then, to the astonishment of French and British alike Graves ordered his ships to slow to a drift.”
Naturally, the French now could close all gaps and tidy up their formation—even button their shirt collars if they so chose. But Admiral Graves was going by the admiralty “book” and its “Fighting Instructions” issued to captains like himself. And those told the British sea fighters always to fight the enemy in neat, line-to-line engagement.
In this particular case, however, Graves could have laid waste to the French in piecemeal fashion by attacking their separate lead division right away, “but he evidently never thought to violate the Admiralty’s sacrosanct canon of combat.”
And there still was worse to come…from the British point of view. About three hours after the French first emerged from Lynnhaven Bay, Graves decided the enemy’s first two divisions were properly lined up for battle, even if the French rear was still lagging behind. He signalled his fleet: “Bear down and engage.” But his London already was flying, and still was flying the signal: “Line ahead.” This was a flagrant contradiction in terms.
Neither instruction, in fact, was the apt one for the situation facing the British fleet. “The ‘line ahead’ signal,” added the Valliant article, “was understood to mean that the British fleet would edge toward the enemy, keeping its rigid line intact. The ‘bear down and engage’ signal ordered each ship to run downwind and approach the enemy at a sharp angle. Both approaches put the British force at a disadvantage.”
Confusion reigned aboard the British ships as London “turned toward the French.” Leading the lead English division, Rear Admiral Sir Francis Drake went with “bear down and engage.” But Sir Samuel Hood, leading the British rear, went with “line ahead.”
As a gap opened between the British divisions, they lost their advantage of proper formation and momentary numerical superiority to the French ships in line opposite the British vessels. Soon, London found herself between the French and some of the British ships. Ships trying to follow “began crowding together.” The guns on both sides began to speak…the frantic signals from Graves were lost in the clouds of gun smoke that now billowed.
“The diagonal approach of the British ships was a gift to the French,” noted Valliant. “They hit the British lead division before all its guns could bear on them.”
Three of the lead British ships took an immediate pounding—Shrewsbury, 74 guns; Intrepid, 64 guns; and Ajax, 74 guns. All were crippled.
Four French ships were also staggered: Marseilles, Bourgogne, Diademe, and Pluton, all 74 guns. Two slightly smaller French ships also were badly hurt.
With significant damage done to both sides, Graves at last pulled down his “line ahead” flags, “giving Hood clear orders at last.” His ships began to close with their French opposite numbers, but without much effect on either side. Thirty-five minutes later, Graves signalled: Desist. The firing stopped for the night as the sun set.
As the sun rose in the morning, the two fleets again were on parallel courses but holding off from further action. Graves and his senior subordinate Hood “were barely speaking” that day. Graves felt that Hood should have attacked the enemy’s rear division more quickly, while subordinate Admiral Hood “was furious because Graves had not thrown his whole fleet against the leading French division while it was isolated.”
Sitting down to compile a memorandum called “Sen
timents upon the Truly Unfortunate Day,” Hood was convinced that Graves simply drifted for ninety minutes and that gave the French all the opportunity needed to close the gap in their line, and thus withstand the British attack.
For another night and day now, the two fleets eyed each other while surviving crewmen busied themselves at making repairs. Meanwhile, the fleets had been easing out to sea. “By sunset on September 7, two days after the battle, they were 100 miles out to sea, off Cape Hatteras, N.C.”
Forgotten, overlooked, or ignored by Graves, meanwhile, was the real issue at stake—getting to Cornwallis at the mouth of the York River. Perhaps he was, as Valliant suggests, “preoccupied” with his crippled ships. In any case, Graves made no effort that night or the next day to place his ships across the entrance to the Chesapeake, a stretch of only ten miles, and thus keep the French out. Now, September 8 passed by, the ocean waters rough, with neither fleet making the effort to sail back to Virginia.
At last, though, one fleet did make its move. The night of September 9 saw that fleet turn back for the Chesapeake. It raised Cape Henry on September 11, only to discover that a French squadron of eight ships of the line, “plus frigates and transports carrying men, siege guns and supplies,” had just arrived from Newport, Rhode Island.
The admiral returning to the scene of battle had no fears at finding the French ships awaiting him, since Admiral de Grasse was French, too. And now, he had a total of thirty-six ships of the line, and Graves only had eighteen left in anything near fighting condition. The issue was settled. Cornwallis’s fate was sealed. His “bus” would not be coming.
Best Little Stories from the American Revolution Page 40
