Band of Giants_The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence

by Jack Kelly

  Destitute Maryland Continentals, having distinguished themselves again and again during the war, had to make their own way home from the deep South. Many resorted to begging. Joseph Plumb Martin, who had fought in the ranks since the beginning of the conflict and would leave behind one of the most vivid memoirs of the war, had to take a job on a farm in New York in order to earn traveling money to reach his home in Connecticut. He said of his fellow soldiers, “When the country had drained the last drop of service it could screw out of the poor soldiers, they were turned adrift like old worn-out horses, and nothing said about land to pasture them upon.”16

  Washington, Steuben, and Knox all pleaded with Congress to maintain a small army. Knox preached the need for an academy, perhaps near the still-important base at West Point, to train officers, engineers, and artillerymen in the science of war. Congress would not hear of it. “Standing army” was a dirty word. The Continental Army would immediately shrink to seven hundred men stationed at a few scattered posts on the frontier.

  * * *

  One ceremony remained. When the ink had dried on the Treaty of Paris, it was time for the last redcoats to leave. Early in November, Washington said goodbye to the troops still left at West Point. Of Henry Knox, he would later write that there was “no one whom I have loved more sincerely, nor any for whom I have had a greater friendship.”17 He gave his principal adviser the honor of leading the march into New York City.

  On the spanking clear morning of November 25, Washington and Knox, with a small contingent of troops—ill-clad as always—rode south from Harlem Heights through a desolate landscape. All the trees on Manhattan Island had been cut down, many of the homes abandoned. Part of the city still lay in ruins from the 1776 fire. On Staten Island, Americans jeered at the enemy troops marching toward the embarkation docks. An ill-tempered British ship’s gunner fired in anger a cannonball that fell short, pointlessly expending powder in what may have been the last shot of the war.

  Ranks of civilian officials joined Washington and his men in a stately parade into town. Patriots turned out to cheer. The troops, an eyewitness noted, “were ill-clad and weather-beaten, and made a forlorn appearance. But then they were our troops.”18 Many of the city’s loyalist residents embarked with the British, never to return.

  Dinners, speeches, and fireworks filled the following days. Most officers had, like their men, already gone home. Some were dead. Charles Lee, the erratic general who had read Thucydides in the wilderness and had guided Washington’s hand in his first shaky weeks of command, had died in October 1782, still dishing vitriol. William Alexander, the self-styled Lord Stirling, had proven his courage and ability in the fiercest fighting on Long Island and polished his reputation through Trenton, Brandywine, and Monmouth. Washington had put him in charge of the Northern Department when the army departed for Yorktown. Stirling, always an extravagant imbiber, fell ill in Albany. He died there in January 1783 at the age of forty-seven.

  At noon on December 4, the few officers still left in New York met at Fraunces Tavern for a farewell dinner. Like their men, they had shared the most vivid experiences of their lives and had come to know and trust each other in ways no civilian could imagine. Like their men, they had received meager appreciation from an ungrateful nation.

  Washington had little appetite for the food laid out in the tavern’s upstairs great room, none for further speeches. A “breathless silence” descended on the officers. Eight years of struggle and fatigue, of comradeship and violent death, of confusion, heartbreak, perseverance, and glory, were over. Wine glasses were filled. Washington’s hand trembled as he lifted his and said, “With a heart full of love and gratitude, I now take leave of you.”

  They drank. “I cannot come to each of you to take my leave,” Washington said, “but shall be obliged to you, if each of you will come and take me by the hand.”19

  Henry Knox stepped forward first to grasp his Excellency’s hand. The eyes of both men brimmed over. They embraced. Then Baron von Steuben. Then the others. “Such a scene of sorrow and weeping I had never before witnessed,” one officer reported. Washington embraced each man in turn.

  Then he waved, strode out of the room, passed the crowd waiting outside, and stepped into a boat manned by twenty-two rowers. He crossed to New Jersey and traveled on horseback to Philadelphia, then to Annapolis where Congress was sitting. He handed in his commission, leaving Henry Knox in charge of the skeleton army. He endured a few more dinners, an outpouring of thanks. George Washington, now a private citizen, reached his home at Mount Vernon on Christmas Eve, 1783.

  Twenty

  The Large Hearts of Heroes

  1824

  On August 15, 1824, a platoon of aging Revolutionary War veterans stood by the seawall at the southern tip of New York City. Thirty thousand citizens crowded the wharf. Fifty thousand more lined the half-mile stretch of Broadway that led to City Hall. A tall, fleshy, sixty-seven-year-old man limped down the gangway. All began to cheer. “Lafayette!” they yelled. “Marquis!” they still called him, although he had long since renounced his title. The hero stepped onto American soil. The old soldiers called out the names of battles: Brandywine. Monmouth. Yorktown. Lafayette shook each of their hands, as warm and affable as ever. Yes, yes, he remembered. Of course.

  Almost fifty years had passed since a small band of patriots had faced British muskets on Lexington Green. President James Monroe, who had himself been wounded one wintry day at Trenton, had invited Lafayette, now the last living major general of the Continental Army, to tour the country as the Nation’s Guest. The Frenchman was returning to see the fruits borne by the tree of freedom that he and his generation had planted. “How have I loved liberty?” he asked. “With the enthusiasm of religion.”1

  The short journey up the thoroughfare took two hours. Then began a celebration such as the nation had never seen: dinners, galas, speeches, salutes, parades, fireworks. At the Lafayette Ball in Castle Garden, five thousand guests wandered through a fairyland dominated by thirty-foot-high illuminated transparencies showing Lafayette, Washington, and the marquis’s French estate at La Grange. Toasts, cheers, huzzahs, dancing. During the public receptions that occupied at least two hours of every day, Lafayette shook hands with any citizen who wished to touch history. Many waited in line all night for the chance.

  He went off to Boston, where nearly seventy-five thousand citizens greeted him. Traveling with him was his son, forty-four-year-old George Washington Lafayette, and a secretary. Lafayette journeyed to Quincy, where he met the eighty-nine-year-old John Adams. The former president’s beloved wife, Abigail, had succumbed to typhoid seven years earlier. Afterward, Lafayette allegedly commented, “That was not the John Adams I knew.” A decrepit Adams likewise noted, “That was not the Lafayette I knew.”2

  Thirteen mammoth arches of wood and canvas painted to look like stone honored the Nation’s Guest in Philadelphia. As his entourage traveled south, reminders of the man Lafayette had called his “adopted father” accumulated. First, Washington City, as it was called then, the permanent federal capital on the Potomac, not yet grown into its grand design. Then Mount Vernon and the simple vault that held the remains of George and Martha Washington.

  When he had returned to his estate after the war, his Excellency had felt that his time of public service was over and that his life was drawing to a close. Events had proven him wrong. In December 1799, his duty to his country finally completed, Washington had been stricken with a severe sore throat. The inveterate horseman had insisted on riding through cold, wet weather to see about planting some trees at Mount Vernon. Afterward, he had found it difficult to breathe. His doctors had bled him to no avail. Old Hoss had died at sixty-seven. His protégé, the closest he ever had to a son, now emerged from the vault, his face wet with tears.

  Then on to Yorktown. October 19 marked the forty-third anniversary of the surrender. Could it have been so lo
ng? Salutes were fired, but nothing like the soul-wrenching din of the cannonade by which Henry Knox had brought Cornwallis to his knees.

  Knox had served as President Washington’s secretary of war. He had overseen the creation of the country’s first permanent navy, commissioning a class of innovative super frigates, including the USS Constitution, which had proven themselves during the War of 1812. He had lived to see the establishment of his longtime dream, the Military Academy at West Point.

  Like many officers, Knox had struggled with debt. He invested borrowed money to improve a tract of land his wife had inherited in Maine. He and Lucy eventually settled there. They endured the deaths of nine of their twelve children, each loss a bayonet point to the heart.

  Washington Irving would call Knox “one of those providential characters which spring up in emergencies as if formed by and for the occasion.”3 A man of wide-ranging intellect and a pious spirit, Knox had written to a boyhood friend who had become a clergyman: “I have been but too much entangled with the little things of a little globe.”4 In 1806, Knox was just beginning to get his finances in order. His daughter, observing him dote on his grandchild, said, “Oh Father I believe you never will be old.”5 A few days later a chicken bone lodged in his throat and killed him at age fifty-six.

  * * *

  From Yorktown, Lafayette traveled on to Virginia. He visited Monticello, where a failing Thomas Jefferson treated him to some excellent vintage wines. James Madison rode over from his home at Montpelier to join them for dinner. When the three friends parted, each was touched by how the others had aged.

  Lafayette had come to know the one-time Virginia governor well during the 1780s, when Jefferson had served as envoy in France. Together they had drafted a document that became the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, one of the cornerstones of the French Revolution. Lafayette had played an influential role in the early years of that upheaval, leading the National Guard, the people’s army. But as a moderate, he had, after 1790, increasingly come in conflict with the radicals. An enemy of both the monarchists of Europe and the Jacobins in France, he was captured by the Austrians in 1792 and spent five years in a dungeon. Washington, then president, tried to intervene, but it was Napoleon who had finally arranged Lafayette’s release. True to his principles, Lafayette had opposed the Bonaparte dictatorship.

  “His was not the influence of genius,” the nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill would write of Lafayette, “nor even of talents; it was the influence of a heroic character.”6

  The visitors now got to see the Virginia countryside where Lafayette had ridden at the head of his most important command, where he had briefly recruited his friend, the infirm Daniel Morgan, to rejoin the effort. With the peace, Morgan, under the quiet influence of his wife, Abigail, had donned a coat of respectability and become a pillar of the Presbyterian church. He had owned a grist mill and a number of farms in Virginia, including the estate he called Saratoga. Increasing lameness and disability had forced him to curtail his activity and move in with his married daughter in Winchester. He met regularly with some local riflemen who had accompanied him on that awful, memorable march to Quebec. The veterans would sit and smoke and reminisce over the hardship and swagger of their youth.

  A rough life of exposure, illness, and injury caught up with the Old Wagoner in the summer of 1802. Lying on his deathbed in extreme pain, he told his physician, “Doctor, if I could be the man I was when I was twenty-one years of age, I would be willing to be stripped stark naked on the top of Allegheny Mountain, to run for my life with a pack of dogs at my heels.”7

  * * *

  The party of Frenchmen spent the winter of 1824–25 in Washington City waiting for the roads to dry out so that Lafayette could fulfill his vow to visit each of the twenty-four states. In the capital, he was able to watch firsthand the savage infighting of American democracy. Because no candidate received a majority of the electoral college votes in the 1824 election, the new president had to be chosen by the House of Representatives. In what came to be known as the “corrupt bargain,” John Quincy Adams beat out popular-vote winner Andrew Jackson. Jackson supporters screamed, yet the Union held together.

  When Lafayette addressed a packed joint session of Congress in December, the only person who declined to give him a standing ovation was the French ambassador. In his native country, democracy had proven less robust than in the New World. With the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 came the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. The obese King Louis XVIII did not look kindly on Lafayette or his trip to America.

  Everywhere he went, Lafayette shook hands with veterans, many of whom he recognized and called by name. They shared a special bond. They had lived at an accelerated pace, packing so many moments with scintillating memories.

  With the arrival of spring, Lafayette’s small party headed south in a creaking carriage. He visited Fayetteville, North Carolina, delighted by the first town in America named for him. More than six hundred towns, counties, rivers, and mountains would honor the marquis or commemorate his home at La Grange. The first half of the nineteenth century saw a wave of place names dedicated to Revolutionary War heroes: Knoxville, Montgomery, Waynesboro, Steubenville, Greene County, Mount Washington. A town in western Massachusetts was even named for General Charles Lee.

  At Camden, South Carolina, Lafayette, a dedicated Freemason, laid the cornerstone of a monument to Johann de Kalb, the stout-hearted German officer who had accompanied him to America and who had gone down fighting during the rout of Gates’s army.

  The south was full of ghosts. Here Nathanael Greene had fought his brilliant campaign against Cornwallis, the prelude to Yorktown. After the war, Greene had returned home a hero. Weighed down with debt, he had tried to make a living on land in Georgia given to him by a grateful citizenry. He had been “embarrassed and perplexed in my private affairs,” even though, as he had written in his last letter to his friend Henry Knox, “I work hard and live poor.”8 He suffered a fatal stroke three years after the war ended.

  Anthony Wayne, who owned a rice plantation just down the river from Greene, had sat by his comrade’s deathbed. Like Greene, he had dabbled in farming. Later, he returned to Pennsylvania as a member of the convention that ratified the Constitution. But Wayne’s heart yearned for action. During the 1790s, Washington put him in charge of a military force to deal with a threat from Indians in Ohio. Wayne managed a successful campaign and neutralized the menace with a brilliant victory at the 1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers. He returned to Philadelphia and enjoyed the adulation he had craved all his life. “General Wayne was there in glory,” John Adams commented. “The man’s feelings must be worth a guinea a minute.”9 Mad Anthony Wayne died of gout and fever two years later.

  Lafayette carried the burden that falls on all aging survivors, the death of so many friends and comrades. Alexander Hamilton, his “brother,” had been shot down at forty-eight in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr. Baron von Steuben had retired to land granted him in upstate New York, where he died in 1794. Francis Marion passed away a year later at sixty-three. Light-Horse Harry Lee had served as governor of Virginia, but also spent time in a debtor’s prison, before he succumbed, leaving his son Robert E. Lee to paint an even larger tableau on the canvas of history.

  In New Orleans, Lafayette met with some of the tens of thousands of African American veterans who had fought for the Revolution. He was troubled by the failure of the founding generation to confront the great paradox of a people dedicated to freedom holding others in bondage. He took Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence to heart. He had urged Washington to “free your negroes.” Washington could bring himself to offer them only a truncated liberty after his death.

  The Nation’s Guest likewise took a more enlightened view of Native Americans than most of the citizens of his adopted country. He went out of his way to greet warriors who had sided with t
he Americans. He met an Indian woman who showed him a letter of commendation that a young Lafayette had long ago written to her father, a comrade in arms. The Iroquois warrior had saved the document even as he and his family had been repeatedly uprooted and driven westward. Lafayette was moved to tears as he listened to her story.

  Up the Mississippi by steam boat, up the Ohio, through the territory that the daring of George Rogers Clark had helped add to the new country. The party visited the booming western cities of Louisville and Cincinnati. At Pittsburgh, Lafayette stopped to see Braddock’s field, where a young George Washington had learned the grim reality of war. Then on to Buffalo, an obligatory visit to Niagara Falls, and down the newly opened Erie Canal, which cut straight through the Iroquois heartland that John Sullivan had invaded in 1779.

  Everywhere crowds—citizens trekked for miles to glimpse a legend, a storybook hero emblematic of the nation’s founding. Their enthusiasm set off an outpouring of patriotism that buoyed the nation for years afterward. Lafayette made it back to Boston in time to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Bunker Hill that June. To fulfill his vow, he traveled on to Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

  The leathery New Hampshire native John Stark, the man who had helped stop Howe at Bunker Hill and thwart Burgoyne at Bennington, had enjoyed one of the longest lives of any Revolutionary officer, having died in 1822 at the age of ninety-three. As an old man, Stark would offer the sentiment that summed up the attitude of many veterans and became his state’s motto: Live free or die.

  Lafayette sailed down Lake Champlain, where Benedict Arnold had delayed the British long enough to save the American cause in 1776. Arnold had made more money from the war than any American officer, receiving generous pay and annuities from the British. Money had always been important to the striving, self-made man. Happiness had eluded him. Arnold fled to Britain before the war ended, but the “Horse Jockey” could not elbow his way into polite English society. Always restless, he lived for a time among loyalist exiles in Canada. He returned to Britain and fitted out ships for the West Indies trade. In the early years of the Napoleonic Wars, he tried his hand as a privateer. Benedict Arnold died of natural causes in 1801. “Poor General Arnold,” the London Post recorded, “has departed this world without notice.”10