Paroled after the Yorktown surrender, he recovered from a nearly terminal illness and was allowed to tour West Point with General Henry Knox as his host.
All well and good, but Ewald’s real fame came only after he returned to his native Kassel, Germany, in 1783. He was soon widely recognized as an expert on light infantry tactics. He gained fame also from his 1785 Essay on Partisan Warfare.
A commoner by birth, he was destined to end life as a “noble,” thanks not to his Hessian compatriots, but to Denmark. Apparently unhappy at his lack of promotion at Kassel, he resigned and joined the Danish army, where he vaulted from his onetime Hessian captaincy to the rank of lieutenant general by the time of his retirement in 1813. In the interim, he helped Denmark to remain neutral in the Napoleonic Wars and fought with bravery and distinction once events forced the Danes into Napoleon’s camp. The Danes were so pleased with Ewald, they granted him nobility in 1790.
He died of dropsy at his estate near Kiel in June of 1813, still a national hero to the Danes. His name, though, would achieve enduring new fame in the twentieth century, thanks to the publication of his Revolutionary War diary in 1948…thanks, in turn, to the efforts of translator-historian Joseph P. Tustin, who located all four volumes of the eighteenth-century, first-person account after World War II.
That war, incidentally, was not so kind to the onetime Jaeger captain’s earthly remains—blown up when Allied bombs fell upon the Kiel Cemetery in the last months of the conflict.
The Word Did Spread
SIR HENRY CLINTON, COMMANDER OF HIS MAJESTY’S FORCES IN AMERICA, FIRST heard the grim news of Yorktown on the deck of a wooden ship not all that far away from the recent action. Likewise for Admiral Thomas Graves, in command of the fleet carrying Clinton’s relief force and approaching the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay just days after the Yorktown debacle. Loyalists coming out to meet the fleet in small boats conveyed the bad news.
By the time the fleet turned and sailed back to New York, Cornwallis had dispatched a written communiqué to his superior Clinton informing him of the surrender. The Cornwallis dispatch was waiting for Clinton when he reached New York.
France would learn the news before England, incidentally. Apparently a visitor from Paris first brought the news to London on November 25, weeks after the surrender of October 19, 1781. A captured American privateer, now the HMS Rattlesnake, arrived in London later the same day with the official word from Admiral Graves. He had written his dispatches for London aboard a ship just off the entrance to the Chesapeake.
Even in 1781, the prime minister’s office was at the 10 Downing Street address so well known today. Lord George Germain, secretary for American Affairs, now hurried there to inform Lord North of the stunning setback. And the prime minister was stunned. “Oh God,” he said. “Oh God, it is all over, it is all over!”
King George III at first refused to acknowledge the disaster. Addressing Parliament the next day, he never mentioned Yorktown. He then wrote Lord North a note saying that with the proper measures taken, “a good end may yet be made to this war.”
That, of course, never happened. In several months’ time, Germain, chief proponent of the government’s ill-fated American policies, was gone…dumped. Lord North insisted on resigning against the king’s wishes…after persuading George III not to abdicate the throne in his own distress over the American failures. Thus, it was a new government that would begin to negotiate a peace treaty with the victorious Americans in 1782.
Casualties
IT DID NOT GO EASY. OF THE ESTIMATED 200,000 AMERICAN MEN UNDER ARMS during the eight-year Revolutionary War, both militia and Continental Army, 25,324 were lost forever…but not all of them in the war’s 1,331 land battles and seafights. Of those who died of war-related causes, 6,284 were killed outright in battle, while another 10,000 (at least) died of diseases, with smallpox and dysentery leading the list. Another 8,500 men, more unnecessarily, died as prisoners.
Among the figures also reported by Thomas Fleming in his book Liberty! The American Revolution were percentages—12.5 percent of the American men under arms died, a figure second among American wars only to the 13 percent lost to the Union side during the American Civil War.
The Revolution also was second only to the Civil War in the ratio of deaths to general population. The future nation’s population in the 1770s was 2,640,000 whites and blacks. As Fleming reported, “The Revolutionary dead represented 0.9 percent of the American population.” By contrast, the cost in the Civil War was 1.6 percent of the country’s population. By contrast again, the ratio of deaths to population during World War II was 0.28.
Incidentally, New Jersey led all future states in the number of engagements fought, with 238 battles and skirmishes of various size fought on its soil. New York came next, with 228.
Hero of Another Revolution
TADUESZ (AMERICANIZED TO THADDEUS) KOSCIUSZKO, THE POLISH-LITHUANIAN engineer who designed the defenses of West Point and the American positions at Saratoga, later served with Nathanael Greene during his Southern campaign. One highlight of the Pole’s work with Greene was his design of amphibious wagons—with their wheels and axles fully detachable, they became flatbottomed boats that enabled Greene to cross the rivers in his path as he retreated before Cornwallis in the “Race to the Dan (River)” of early 1781. After the war, Kosciuszko was a founder of the Society of the Cincinnati.
But the most dramatic days of Kosciuszko’s life still lay ahead when he returned to Poland in 1784—the minor nobleman soon was a military and revolutionary leader as Poland tried to throw off the yoke of Russian rule. Granting freedom to the Polish serfs and gathering the support of virtually all social classes, he briefly served as a “benevolent dictator,” noted David Zabecki in The American Revolution, 1775–1783.
After achieving significant victories over the Russians in two campaigns for Polish independence, however, Kosciuszko was severely wounded and taken prisoner. “The Third Partition of Poland followed in 1795,” wrote Zabecki, “and Poland disappeared from the map for the next 123 years.”
Released by the Russians after two years of captivity, the now-crippled Kosciuszko revisited the young United States, where the enthralled and still-thankful citizens of Philadelphia “unhooked the horses from his carriage and drew it through the streets by hand—a gesture they were to repeat for Lafayette a few years later.”
After more years of lobbying—and fruitlessly pining—for the Polish cause, the hero moved to Switzerland, where he died in 1817. But he would not be forgotten—as one monument to his memory, the citizens of Krakow built a 150-foot hill from soil taken from “all of his Polish and American battle-fields.” At West Point, Cadet Robert E. Lee was one of the organizers in the cadet-funded effort establishing a Kosciuszko monument—the first monument erected at the new American Military Academy.
Settling Down
STILL RELATIVELY YOUNG, THIS HARD-FIGHTING BRITON WENT HOME AFTER Yorktown to a hero’s welcome, a continued military career, election to Parliament, partnership in a gambling club, a life of womanizing and drinking—with future King George IV of England among his drinking pals—and a tempestuous, fifteen-year love affair with a woman writer who would make him a thinly disguised figure in a popular novel. But “Bloody Ban,” the widely hated Banastre Tarleton, finally settled down in his middle age with a younger wife, became a full general and knight, contracted the gout, and lived out his life in quiet retirement in Shropshire.
Blanket from Bunker Hill
ONLY NINETEEN WHEN THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS APPOINTED HIM A MAJOR general (unpaid) in 1777, the Marquis de Lafayette still had a lifetime—and a new career or two—ahead of him when he returned to France after the successful conclusion of the American Revolution.
Still pending were: the French Revolution; a mix of political and military roles; five years to be spent as a captive of his country’s enemies; an up-and-down relationship with Napoleon, emperor of the French; and a triumphant return to the newly f
ormed United States in his later years.
Back in France, the “hero of two worlds” had inherited a large estate in Brittany, but he and young wife Adrienne chose to live in a mansion on today’s Rue de Lille in Paris. Despite his great wealth and prestigious social position, close to King Louis XVI, Lafayette soon showed himself to be an apostle for liberal reforms in the very foundations of French society and government.
The country’s finances had been so sapped by the recent military adventure in America that the king turned to the traditional Assembly of Notables for solutions. At that point, Notables-member Lafayette shocked his peers by calling for establishment of a truly democratic parliament, or “National Assembly,” diluting the age-old dominance of the nobility and clergy. He would allow Protestants new religious liberties, tax the rich, and help the poor.
None of this was talk expected of a court favorite, and much of it was reaction to his experiences in America…in the recent Revolution.
As events turned out, with a push or two from Lafayette, France was teetering on the edge of her own revolution. And in the volcanic tumult that erupted in 1789, Lafayette, commander of the newly created National Guard, briefly emerged as one of the country’s most powerful figures. In 1790, on the first anniversary of Bastille Day, the still-young Frenchman led a huge crowd of 300,000 on the Champ de Mars in Paris in taking an oath of allegiance to “the nation, the law and the king.”
That, however, was a high point in Lafayette’s turbulent political career at home in France. Unwilling, or unable, to seize power himself, the idealistic and liberal Lafayette by 1791 had become an anathema both to the radicals and the conservatives tilting for control of France. Queen Marie Antoinette once was heard to say, “It would be better to perish than be saved by M. de Lafayette.”
He found brief respite when war with England broke out in 1792—he commanded a field army in the Netherlands. But this military affair didn’t go well and, worse, with a fresh uprising overthrowing the monarchy in mid-1792, Lafayette’s troops refused his orders to quell the mob in Paris. Lafayette then fled the country…and promptly became a prisoner of the Austrians.
He would not be released until five years later—a release that finally came about as a result of pressure from American diplomats and Napoleon, the new military hero of France who had defeated the Austrians in his northern Italy campaigns. Even then, Lafayette didn’t dare return to France until Napoleon took over the country’s reins of power in late 1799.
Home once again in 1800, but now largely stripped of his former wealth, Lafayette refused to become an apostle of the new dictator of France; he turned down a diplomatic post in America and a senate seat in France. On the other hand, Lafayette did support Napoleon in the sale of Louisiana to the United States in 1803.
Once Napoleon passed from the scene after Waterloo in 1815, Lafayette, now elected to the Chamber of Deputies, became a leader in political opposition to the more repressive policies of the restored Bourbon monarchy.
After a sentimental, heart-tugging, and yearlong tour of his beloved America in 1824 and 1825, Lafayette remained a political force in his own country—as a leader of the revolution of 1830 that dethroned the Bourbon king, Charles V. Still clinging to his long-held ideal of a constitutional monarchy for France, Lafayette supported the installation of Louis-Philippe as the new king…turning aside demands that he, himself, become president of a republican France.
Publicly regretting the latest king’s lack of zeal for liberal reforms, Lafayette went to his grave in May of 1834 at age seventy-seven. He was active up to his death in the political life of his native country as a leader of the liberal opposition—and, finally, as an advocate of a full-scale republic.
He is buried in Picpus Cemetery in Paris under a blanket of dirt taken, fittingly enough, from America’s own hallowed battleground, Bunker Hill.
Contributions Finally Recognized
AFTER THE REVOLUTION, AMERICAN NAVAL HERO JOHN PAUL JONES BOUNCED around Europe looking for work as an admiral-for-hire, and not always successfully. He was fired from the Russian navy by Catherine the Great, despite his defeat of the Turks in the Liman estuary on the Black Sea, a victory claimed by Russian Prince Potemkin and French Prince Nassau-Siegen. Jones, forty-five years of age, finished out his life in 1792 as a near-pauper, living in a rented apartment in Paris. He was buried in a French cemetery with little notice or fanfare. Legend holds that the American minister to France, Gouverneur Morris, was too busy hosting a dinner party to attend the funeral ceremony, arranged by the French. The naval hero’s remains would stay in France until disinterred in 1905 and placed in a crypt at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. This time, there was a fitting ceremony, with President Theodore Roosevelt presiding and hailing the determination and heroism of John Paul Jones. Incidentally, the Scots-born navy-man has been the subject of more than thirty biographies.
Two Who Rode
PAUL REVERE, LATER MADE IMMORTAL IN LONGFELLOW’S FAMOUS POEM THE Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, had his ups and downs during the Revolution itself. Not long after alerting the Minutemen at Lexington, Massachusetts, the Boston silversmith engraved the official seal still used by the commonwealth of Massachusetts. He operated a gunpowder mill that helped supply his fellow Patriots, and he was given command of the harbor fort called Castle William.
He marched off to war with the John Sullivan forces futilely challenging the British at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1778, and again in 1779, with the Massachusetts contingent dispatched to Penobscot Bay in future Maine in an effort to dislodge British forces establishing a new base on the bay.
The expedition was a disaster, and the Americans were scattered and forced to find their way back home through the wilderness of Maine. In the immediate aftermath, artillery officer Revere was relieved of command, under fire for alleged disobedience of orders, unmilitary behavior, and even cowardice. He returned to Boston under house arrest.
It would be nearly two years before a court-martial convened, but once exonerated on all counts, Revere put that unhappy episode behind him and continued to prove himself a man of many parts. Before the Revolution, he had served in the French and Indian War, taking part in the capture of Crown Point. An early Patriot, he had been a member of the Sons of Liberty, and he had taken part in the Boston Tea Party. Once the Revolutionary War began, he not only gave Massachusetts her seal, he also designed and printed the first Continental money.
In time, he invented a process for rolling sheet copper and operated a copper-rolling and brass-casting foundry near his powder mill in Canton, Massachusetts. His postwar activities included covering the dome of the new Massachusetts State House with copper leaf—and joining Governor Samuel Adams in laying the cornerstone for the same historic structure. Revere also provided the copper sheathing for the hull of the U.S. frigate Constitution.
His silverware still widely known and respected today, Revere more obscurely served as Boston’s coroner and chief health officer for a time. He also founded an insurance company, Massachusetts Mutual Fire Insurance. No pun intended, he died in 1818 at age eighty-three, a revered Bostonian and hero of the Revolution.
An entirely different life awaited Jack Jouett of Virginia, sometimes called the “Paul Revere of the South” for his forty-mile nighttime ride in June 1780. He thus warned Thomas Jefferson that a British raiding party under Banastre Tarleton was on its way to Charlottesville in an effort to capture Jefferson, the outgoing governor of Virginia, and members of the rebel Virginia legislature, after all had been driven out of Richmond.
The husky young Jouett—six feet four if he was an inch—eluded Tarleton’s dragoons the day of the raid (although Virginia legislator Daniel Boone did not and was held overnight in a coal cellar and paroled the following day). Jefferson, lingering at his mountaintop Monticello mansion until the last possible moment, also escaped Tarleton’s clutches.
Tarleton’s men, it must be said, were kind to Monticello—and they didn’t know a Jefferson slave n
amed Caesar was trapped for eighteen hours under the wooden floor of the portico with the family silver and other valuables he had been hiding moments before the British horsemen appeared on the mountaintop in search of Thomas Jefferson.
Other British units visiting Jefferson’s Elk Hill plantation at Point of Fork (today’s Columbia, Virginia), were far less reverential. They “trashed” this Jefferson property, burning crops and barns, carrying off some of the livestock, cutting the throats of young colts, even forcing helpless slaves into confinement with other slaves suffering from deadly smallpox—causing many additional deaths among the Jefferson slaves at Elk Hill.
But what about Jack Jouett? Westward-minded like fellow Albemarle County natives George Rogers Clark and Meriwether Lewis, Jouett soon headed for the frontier (in 1782)…the Kentucky Territory. Following Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road past Cumberland Gap and the Alleghenies, Jouett first settled in Mercer County in central Kentucky, then moved on to adjoining Woodford County in the Kentucky blue grass country.
On the trek west through the untrammeled wilderness of the day, it is said, Jouett was startled one day to hear a woman screaming in distress. Hurrying forward to a lone cabin in the woods, he found she was being beaten by her husband.
Leaping into the fray, he knocked down her consort-assailant, only to have the wife turn on him with a long-handled iron frying pan, which she brought down on his head with considerable force. So much force, in fact, that his head punched out the bottom of the pan leaving Jouett with an iron ring around his neck. He had to travel another thirty-five miles to find a blacksmith who could free him of his frying-pan necklace.
Best Little Stories from the American Revolution Page 45
