by Chris DeRose
And while the Congress bickered, young men readied for war.
In August of 1776, Monroe’s Third Virginia Regiment, along with the Fifth, was ordered to join Washington on Long Island.10 The strong young man, now over six feet tall and broad-shouldered, had commenced his life of service. Monroe later described his public career in his memoirs. (He refers to himself throughout in the third person, in a tradition at least as old as Caesar’s Commentaries.) “As Mr. Monroe had been employed, with little intermission, from the time that he entered into the army until his retirement in 1825 from the high office which he then held, and from a very early period, in the most important trusts abroad and at home, he was necessarily a party, in the stations which he held, to the great events which occurred in them, so far as they related to his own country; a spectator of many others on the interesting theatre on which he moved; and well acquainted with almost all which mastered that very interesting epoch.” Like so many young men both before and after him, Monroe left the place of his birth for the first time in the company of armed compatriots, setting forth for a place distant and different from anything he had ever known.
The Third Regiment reached Washington’s army shortly after the Battle of Long Island, which had seen two American regiments “nearly cut to pieces.”11 Monroe’s company and three others under the command of Major Leitch and Colonel Knolton were sent to Harlem Heights to meet the advancing British. It was a vicious fight, in which both the major and colonel were killed. But the British were checked. After more than a year of training and spoiling for a fight, Monroe had seen war close up. It is an open question whether the sight of men trying to kill him, and the experience of leveling his musket to respond in kind, conformed to Monroe’s excited expectations—or whether it ever has for any eager young man in a theater of war. After Harlem Heights, members of the Third Regiment were awarded the highest possible commendation by George Washington.12
Like the army and the country at large, Monroe admired George Washington. Years later he described the great general asan example to the world for talents as a military commander, for integrity, fortitude, and firmness under the severest trials, for respect to the civil authority and devotion to the rights and liberties of his country, of which neither Rome nor Greece have exhibited the equal. I saw him in my earliest youth, in the retreat through Jersey, at the head of a small band, or rather, in its rear, for he was always near the enemy, and his countenance and manner made an impression on me which time can never efface . . . a deportment so firm, so dignified, so exalted, but yet so modest and composed, I have never seen in any other person.13
Hero worship was a common thread that ran through Monroe’s life, magnified by the early loss of his father. He constantly sought out the example of more experienced men—people who were respected and accomplished—and tried to emulate the qualities that made them so.
Washington would rely on his personal popularity after defeats at the battles of Long Island and White Plains and the captures of Forts Washington and Lee, which sent the rebel army retreating through the state of New Jersey. These reversals, Monroe observed, “put fairly at issue with the nation the great question whether they were competent and resolved to support their independence, or would sink under the pressure.”
Washington’s army had retreated across the Delaware River, taking with them every boat they could lay their hands on. The enemy was left without means of pursuit and assumed the fighting was done for the season. Washington needed to achieve victory, and quickly, or the war would be over before it had truly begun. The string of defeats had done nothing to raise confidence in the cause of independence in America or abroad. Worse yet, the enlistment of a substantial part of the army would end with the new year. So Washington made a bold plan. “The first attack,” Monroe recorded, “was to be made on Trenton, on the result of which everything would depend.”14
On Christmas Day, 1776, 2,400 of Washington’s men re-crossed the Delaware River to prepare the assault. Lieutenant James Monroe eagerly offered to join the advance party of fifty men that would be led by Captain William Washington, a distant cousin of the general.15 After landing, the advance party secured the main road that led from Trenton to Princeton to prevent the rest of the British army in New Jersey from learning of the attack. In the hours before the battle, Monroe and a group of men took control of an important street heading into town.16
Dr. Riker, a physician who lived outside of town, had not expected the call of history when he put out his candles and crawled into bed that Christmas night. But during the night he heard Monroe and his men outside, arose from his bed and, believing them to be British, scolded the intruders. When Dr. Riker learned they were Americans, however, he told them that he too was a patriot and brought them food. He also told Monroe, as commander, that he would join them in the action that was obviously afoot. “I am a doctor, and I may help some poor fellow,” Riker said.17 As it turned out, Monroe himself would be in dire need of the doctor’s help.
In the first hours of December 26, 1776, the American army advanced on Trenton and ambushed their surprised enemy. The Hessians sounded the alarm, drums beat the call to arms, and Monroe remembered that “two cannon were placed in the main street to bear on the head of our column as it entered.” Had the Hessians been allowed to fire their artillery, they could have ambushed the American troops on the narrow road and delayed them until the town had fully mobilized for defense. They might have wiped them out completely. If the Battle of Trenton held the balance of the Revolutionary War, this encounter on the road to that city held the balance of the battle. The cannons had to be captured.
Captain William Washington rushed forward and was struck down by musket fire. Lieutenant Monroe attacked as well, sending “the troops around the cannon to flight.” Out of the repetitive pops of gunfire came the musket ball that hit James Monroe. The young lieutenant came to rest in the piles of new fallen snow, which were quickly stained scarlet around him. The eighteen-year-old Virginian lay dying on the road to Trenton, New Jersey, quickly bleeding out through his left shoulder. Perhaps Monroe thought of Virginia, and how improbable it was that he should lie dying so far from home. Maybe the sounds of gunfire that filled his ears reminded him of Spence Monroe, who had taught him how to hunt in his frontier boyhood. Both of his parents had died young, and for a moment it may have seemed that he would follow in their footsteps.
But Dr. Riker was quick with his clamp and stopped the bleeding, saving Monroe’s young life. Without a professional doctor in his immediate presence, it is unlikely that Monroe would have survived his wound.
Monroe was carried from the battlefield and operated on by Dr. Riker and Dr. Cochrane, the surgeon general of the army. The next night he was taken to the home of the Coryell family, where he remained in bed for ten days. Each day, Riker stopped by to clean and dress Monroe’s wound to prevent infection. After leaving the Coryell home, Monroe spent nine weeks in the home of Henry Wyncoops. He paid his doctor’s bills from his own pocket, and would refuse a wounded soldier’s pension from the government.18
While his body would recover, Monroe would never be the same. Gone was the brash young Virginian who had disparaged the troops of other states. When he left his blood in the snow before Trenton, James Monroe became no longer just a Virginian but an American. For Monroe’s fellow officers who “came from all the states,” the effect of the war was to “break down local prejudices and attach the mind and feeling to the union.”19
For his heroism at Trenton, Monroe was promoted to captain. Later in life, while writing his memoirs, his pride in his actions as a soldier shone through, even after all the intervening years. But Monroe was modest about his battlefield exploits in comparison with the accomplishments of the men in charge of directing the events of those momentous days for America: “In the great events of which I have spoke Mr. Monroe, being a mere youth, counted for nothing in comparison with those distinguished citizens who had the direction of public affairs.” He believ
ed the wartime statesmen were unequalled in history.20
April of 1777 was a month of disappointment for both Monroe the solider and Madison the statesman. Monroe’s promotion to captain had become a burden; he was a high-ranking officer in a top-heavy army. With a scarcity of battlefield commands, he would have to raise his own troops. When Monroe was finally well, he returned to Virginia to do just that. Lacking a large personal fortune from which to pay soldiers, he resorted to appeals to patriotism. They did not get him far.
In the meantime, Virginians were having their first elections to the House of Delegates. Madison, as a member of the Fifth Virginia Convention, had automatically become a Delegate when the state Constitution was adopted. Now he would have to defend his seat. Charles Porter, an Orange County tavern owner, would be his opponent. Popular campaign tactics included plying the voters with food and alcohol—a practice prohibited by law but nonetheless widespread. By virtue of Porter’s trade, the freeholders of Orange would perhaps be the fullest and drunkest on Election Day. Madison, for his part, would have none of it. He would follow the rules and not buy votes with food and drink. He appealed to the public based on his tenure in office, his early impact on the new state government, and his service in the Orange County militia. He was defeated.
Yet not everyone appreciated Porter’s “generosity.” His tactics would lead some voters in Orange to file a formal complaint, presented to the House on December 21, 1777:Mr. Charles Porter, one of the candidates at the election of delegates for the said county, on the 24th of April last, did, contrary to an ordinance of convention, make use of bribery and corruption during the said election, and praying that the said election may be set aside.21
The petition was referred to the Committee on Privileges and Elections, where it died. In his excellent biography of Madison, Ralph Ketcham points out that delegates who had obtained their seats by the same means Porter had used would naturally be reluctant to pursue this investigation. 22 The results would stand. But this would be Madison’s last unsuccessful election.
Monroe wrote to one of his former captains about his own disappointment, “I am very unhappy in finding myself incapable of raising a sufficient proportion of men to take the field.” Monroe had failed to raise troops to command, and he was desperate to get back to the action, where he was needed. He vastly preferred “that mode of life, attended with its usual fatigue and danger to the one in which I at present act.”23
On August 11, Monroe rejoined the army in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. General Lord Alexander Stirling had invited him to serve as his aide-de-camp. It was far from the battlefield command Monroe sought, but he was back in the fight, in an important if unglamorous position. It was during this time that he first met the Marquis de Lafayette, a French nobleman and military officer who had been inspired by the American cause to join Washington’s army. Though a year younger than Monroe, Lafayette was serving in America as a general. Later Monroe remembered his friendship with Lafayette, “attended in the progress through life, in their respective stations, with the most interesting occurrences.” 24
As aide-de-camp Monroe was required to convey orders from Stirling to the troops serving under him in battle and when in camp or marching to take the orders of the commander in chief to Stirling.25 Stirling, a wealthy New Jerseyan with a disputed Scottish title, was an exemplary general with the financial wherewithal to support a large company.
On August 25, Washington marched the army through Philadelphia for inspection by Congress: “The line extended six or seven miles.”26 Monroe would be present for the opening maneuvers of “the Philadelphia Campaign,” a series of battles in which the British would attempt to take America’s capital city while Washington fought to repel them.
Philadelphia was the second largest city in the English-speaking world, smaller only than London. It was easily the greatest city in America. Its loss would have enormous symbolic, political, and economic fallout. At least that’s what Admiral Howe, leader of the British forces, believed. But Howe’s very understanding of war—troops with brightly colored uniforms scheduling battles at preordained locations and times, in a jolly chasing game of “capture the flag”—would be tempered by what he experienced in America.
On September 11, 1777, Monroe experienced his first battle as an aide-de-camp. Howe’s army had been making their way to Philadelphia rapidly. Washington was waiting for them, his divisions spread across the east side of Brandywine Creek. Rather than face the fortified Continentals head on, Howe and General Cornwallis crossed the creek far north of the American position, turned south, and came crashing down hard. The American right flank was completely surprised, including Stirling’s brigade, which seems to have taken the worst of it. Lafayette was wounded, probably in sight of his friend Monroe.27 Once the sounds of battle were heard downstream, a division of British and Hessian forces on the west side of the creek crossed and attacked in the center. The Brandywine ran red, and the British successfully took the east bank and captured the American artillery.28 The American lines, divided and squeezed in the middle and to the right, broke and retreated. It was a decisive British victory, but Washington still remained between Howe and Philadelphia.
Howe lured Washington north and himself slipped south toward Philadelphia. Belatedly, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton wrote to John Hancock, the president of Congress, with this dire warning: “If Congress have not yet left Philadelphia, they ought to do it immediately without fail, for the enemy have the means of throwing a party this night into the city.”29 Howe took Philadelphia, but Congress simply reconvened in smaller Pennsylvania towns—York, and then Lancaster.
And life in the American capital was more than Howe had bargained for. He was in a hostile city and cut off from the rest of the British army. With the Delaware River in American hands, Howe could not be resupplied by water.30 To protect his supply line over land, Howe dispersed three thousand men. Two battalions were sent to invade the town of Bilingsport, while four stayed in Philadelphia to hold the city. At Germantown, five miles north of Philadelphia, there were nine thousand British troops.31
With the English army dispersed in this way, Washington, whose instincts were toward bold, decisive offensive action, would attempt a knockout blow. The Americans marched quickly, covering twenty miles as the night of October 3 gave way to morning.32 The Americans would strike at the heart of the British camp, taking the four main roads into town and meeting in the middle.
The battle of Germantown began at 5:00 a.m. on October 4. The intense fog made the coordination necessary to execute the brilliant but complicated plan difficult. One of the four American units was delayed at the “Chew House,” a mansion of heavy stone occupied by British troops. The Americans eventually advanced without taking the building, but the delay had given the enemy critical time to mobilize.
The British counterattack was powerful and drove the Americans back. As the militia fled, Stirling held his men firm, their bravery the only barrier to an even more bloody retreat.33 Still, the American army had, on the whole, acquitted themselves well, and very nearly won the day. If they had captured the nine thousand British troops in Germantown, the war would likely have ended then and there. Four years later, it was the capture of seven thousand British at York Town that ended major combat operations of the American Revolution and brought on negotiations for peace.
On October 16, the American army under Benedict Arnold and Horatio Gates won the decisive battle of Saratoga in upstate New York. Howe’s Philadelphia campaign had cost the British dearly. “Gentleman” Johnny Burgoyne, the British commander at Saratoga, waited vainly for reinforcements that never came. As a consequence, fifty-eight hundred British surrendered after taking roughly a thousand casualties.34 If Germantown had gone as Washington planned—and it nearly had—the two battles together would have delivered a death blow to the British and ended the war in 1777.
Though the American victory at Saratoga did not end the war, it was still crucial to the ultimate ou
tcome. On the basis of victory there, the French decided that the Americans could win. The exhaustive diplomatic efforts of Americans in Europe, and on the battlefields of Pennsylvania and New York, would soon bring the nation of France fully into the war. French involvement was what America needed to win. It meant an army of experienced troops and officers, a reliable stream of financing, and ships to counter the British naval advantage.
On November 15, 1777, two decades after an American union was first conceived and over two years since it was proposed in Congress, the framework for a federal government was completed by that body and submitted to the states for approval. Under the Articles of Confederation, each state would have equal representation—because the small states would not join a union on any other terms. When the roll was called on the issue, only Virginia dissented. Under the Articles of Confederation, that state—the most populous one—would be no more powerful than Delaware.
By a close margin it was decided to apportion requisitions on states based on the value of land, including improvements.35 Though each state would have only one vote, each would send not fewer than two representatives nor more than seven; these delegates would be term-limited to three years of service in any six-year period. Congress punted hard on the issue of the Western lands. The Articles prohibited Congress from regulating their boundaries; in fact, these would not be determined until after the dissolution of the Confederation and the establishment of a new United States under the Constitution.36 (The West was such a contentious issue that it still delayed Maryland’s ratification of the Articles until March of 1781.) All decisions on major questions would require nine of thirteen states. Amendments to the Articles would require the consent of every single state.
