Revolution! America – Chapter 6 – The Brick Chronicle

General Washington was desperate to take any action that might reverse the seemingly unending series of misfortunes he and the rebel army had suffered. In a brazen move that flouted the European custom of suspending military actions during the winter, he summoned what forces he had still with him, and on the frigidly cold and stormy Christmas night of 1776, Washington crossed the icy Delaware back into New Jersey with 2,400 men and nearly 400 tons of artillery.

The mission depended on secrecy, and the rebel troops did not know their destination as they endured an all-night march in which two exhausted men fell and froze to death. At eight o’clock in the morning, they arrived in the village of Trenton where 1,500 Hessian soldiers stationed in the town’s abandoned houses were caught by surprise. Rebel artillery fired down the main streets as Hessians poured out of the houses, and savage house-to-house fighting ensued. The Hessian commander was riddled with bullets and fell from his horse.

Within forty-five minutes, twenty-one Hessians were dead, ninety wounded, and nine hundred taken prisoner, the rest having escaped. No rebels were killed in the fighting, and only five were injured. A huge amount of muskets, bayonets, cannons, and swords were plundered along with forty barrels of rum that Washington ordered spilled out on the ground. Many of his men had different ideas about the rum, however, and celebrated their victory by getting extremely drunk. The jubilant Washington was lenient on his troops for the indiscretion and had the cash value of the spoils split up among his men.

When British forces were sent to drive the rebels out of Trenton, Washington made another bold, almost reckless move. Skirting his army around the approaching enemy, he marched them twelve miles into their territory for a surprise attack on another outpost at Princeton. Washington himself led a charge up a hill against British troops taking cover behind a fence. In another brisk victory, the rebels inflicted 500 casualties and took about 250 prisoners.

Seventy-year-old Benjamin Franklin had been sent by Congress to Paris in December and, upon his arrival, the rustically dressed legendary American philosopher was treated as a celebrity. He immediately set about generating support for the rebel Americans against Britain, and although King Louis XVI was unwilling to risk the outbreak of another bankrupting war, his foreign minister worked with Franklin to secretly supply the struggling Continental Army with vital military supplies.

Defying a royal order against direct involvement by the French in the American War, the nineteen-year-old nobleman Marquis de Lafayette, filled with zeal for the noble cause of liberty, left behind his pregnant wife and infant daughter, purchased his own sailing ship, and set off for America, offering his leadership services to the rebel cause at his own expense. Despite having no combat experience and not speaking more than a few words of English, the Continental Congress commissioned Lafayette as a major general and sent him to serve under General Washington in hopes of honoring the French and securing more aid.

The British strategy for 1777 called for Howe’s army in New York to capture the rebel capital of Philadelphia while another army of seven thousand troops at Quebec would invade from the north and travel down the Hudson valley, thereby cutting off New England from the rest of the colonies. This northern army, led by Bunker Hill veteran General John Burgoyne, included about five hundred allied Native Americans and got underway with the recapture of Fort Ticonderoga on July 5.

Burgoyne had hoped to rally loyalists to support his campaign, but the actions of the Native Americans in his command outraged locals and swelled the ranks of rebel militias. Sent ahead of the main army, the tribal warriors raided the homes of settlers and butchered the inhabitants. In one instance that took on a mythological scope in its retelling, two braves captured a beautiful young settler name Jane McCrea who, unbeknownst to them, was the loyalist fiancée of one of Burgoyne’s own men. She was shot, scalped, stripped, further mutilated, and her body rolled down a hill.

Cut off from his supply chain as he moved down the Hudson, Burgoyne was forced to send a detachment of 1,400 Hessians, loyalists, and Native Americans to raid nearby Bennington for horses, cattle, and foodstuffs. They were caught unaware by a rebel force of two thousand militiamen stationed there. Having learned that the loyalists among them had put white paper on their hats so their German allies would not fire on them, the rebels did the same and so were able to move in close before suddenly attacking. More than two hundred British forces were killed and another seven hundred captured.

Meanwhile, fifteen thousand British troops left New York by sea with General Howe and landed at the northern point of Chesapeake Bay, about fifty-five miles south of Philadelphia. Washington positioned eleven thousand of his men to block their advance at Brandywine Creek, but was outflanked on the battlefield by Howe yet again, and the rebels suffered nine hundred casualties and four hundred men captured. The Marquis de Lafayette distinguished himself in his first battle, however, charging toward the enemy on horseback, then rallying retreating troops, despite having been shot in the calf.

As the rebel army fell back toward Philadelphia, Washington ordered his generals to maneuver their divisions to harass the British as they slowly advanced. This strategy backfired on September 19 when the British became aware of a rebel encampment just four miles away at Paoli. Late that night, removing the flint from their guns to avoid any chance of alerting the enemy, 1,200 Redcoats quietly approached the rebel camp and launched a devastating bayonet attack, killing or mauling hundreds of rebels in their sleep in what was dubbed the Paoli Massacre.

On October 4, 1777, the British slipped past Washington’s army and occupied the enemy capital, Philadelphia. What might have been a monumental blow to rebel morale was balanced out by news from the north where, in two engagements on September 19 and October 7, upward of fifteen thousand rebel troops and militiamen engaged and defeated the army of Burgoyne at Saratoga along the Hudson. The victory was propelled by Daniel Morgan’s elite band of sharpshooters who carefully took aim at the British officers.

Brigadier General Benedict Arnold displayed reckless bravery, riding his horse at full gallop between the British and rebel lines, dodging fire from both, to lead a successful surprise charge against the German mercenaries. For the third time in the war, however, Arnold was shot in his left leg. Worse, his horse, also shot, collapsed to its side, landing on and breaking Arnold’s already wounded leg. Refusing to have the leg amputated, he spent months in agonizing pain recovering in a hospital and ended up with one leg two inches shorter than the other.

Burgoyne, finding his army surrounded, was forced to surrender and did so at a ceremony on October 17, handing his sword over to General Horatio Gates. Some six thousand British and German soldiers then marched forward to lay down their arms as musicians from the rebel army played “Yankee Doodle.” They were then marched as prisoners to an internment camp in Boston and eventually to Virginia where they were held for several years.

In November, after more than a year of debate, the Continental Congress gave its approval to the Articles of Confederation which officially established the United States of America as a nation, or at least “a firm league of friendship” between the states for their common welfare and defense. No executive or legislative branches of government were created, and the current Congress was to continue its role as the single-house legislature with powers over war, trade, and alliances, but no powers to collect taxes. Article XI offered Quebec admittance into the union.

It would be three years before all thirteen states ratified the Articles of Confederation, but Congress acted on its new powers immediately. News of the surrender of a British army to the Americans at Saratoga reached France on December 4, and two days later the king assented to negotiations to begin a treaty of alliance with the United States. Benjamin Franklin and John Adams appeared before King Louis XVI in February 1778 to make the treaty official. In response, Britain declared war on France on March 17.

After making an unsuccessful attack on the British army at Germantown, Washington marched his troops eighteen miles northwest of Philadelphia to camp for the winter at Valley Forge, where the exhausted men had to build their own cabins. “The soldiers lived in misery,” recalled Lafayette. “They lacked for clothes, hats, shirts, shoes; their legs and feet black from frostbite—we often had to amputate.” Two thousand five hundred soldiers died at Valley Forge from disease, starvation, or exposure, and seven hundred horses fell dead.

As the winter began to thaw, the army’s new quartermaster general, Nathanael Greene, was finally able to get adequate supplies and uniforms to the troops. New life was also breathed into the camp when the Prussian military commander Baron von Steuben arrived, offering his services to the army without pay. Steuben established a regular routine of drills, teaching the soldiers European tactics and discipline, and endearing himself to the soldiers with occasional outbursts of heavily accented profanities.

Word of the alliance with France arrived in May, further lifting spirits. The British responded to the news by evacuating Philadelphia to move their army back to New York—to protect it from a potential combined attack from the rebel army and French fleet. As they marched across New Jersey, Washington’s army attacked their rear guard in what became a pitched battle in 100-degree heat. Both sides suffered about five hundred casualties with about half of those caused by heat stroke.

General Charles Lee, who had just returned after a prisoner exchange with the British, was ordered to lead the attack on a regiment of retreating Redcoats. Instead, he ordered the retreat of his own troops right into the path of the advancing Washington, who became outraged at the insubordination. “You damned poltroon!” he shouted, cursing at Lee “till the leaves shook on the tree,” according to one witness. Lee was subsequently court-martialed and released from the army. Decades later, it was revealed that while in British custody, Lee had offered Howe plans for defeating the Americans.

After Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, northern New York became a frontier battleground. Colonists loyal to Britain formed militias and joined with the Iroquois against the revolutionaries. At Cobleskill in May, when a detachment of rebel soldiers gave chase to twenty tribal warriors, the rebels quickly found themselves ensnared in a trap and greatly outnumbered. “They were Butchered in the most Inhuman manner,” recounted a man who helped bury the dead. Another report told that one soldier had “his body cut open and his intestines fastened around a tree several feet distant.”

In November, a force of three hundred Iroquois and two hundred loyalist militiamen attacked the rebel fort at Cherry Valley. The garrison’s commanding officer, Ichabod Alden, had established his headquarters in a comfortable house in the village outside the safety of the walls of the fort. When the attack began, Alden ran for the fort’s gate, but just before reaching it, paused to fire a pistol at his pursuers. The gun misfired and he was hit in the forehead by a thrown tomahawk. Moments later, he was scalped.

Finding the fort impenetrable, the Iroquois set upon the village, going from house to house, looting, burning, maiming, and killing, making little distinction between rebels and loyalists. The first house entered was that of Robert Wells, a friend of the militia’s loyalist leader whom he had hoped to protect. Wells and his entire family of nine were butchered along with three servants. By day’s end, sixteen soldiers and thirty-two civilians were killed, the latter mostly women and children.

Back in Philadelphia, General Howe received word he was to be recalled to England, thereby leaving it to General Henry Clinton to devise a new military strategy for the British to win the war. A lull in hostilities with the British in 1779 allowed Washington to divert forces to punish the Iroquois tribes that had allied themselves with loyalists in New York. The “total destruction and devastation of their settlements” were Washington’s express orders, and at least forty native villages and their surrounding farms were torched.

“Bad as the savages are,” observed one American officer, “they never violate the chastity of any women, their prisoners.” The same could not be said of the Continental Army: “When They came to the Onondaga Town,” recalled one chief, “They put to death all the Women and Children, excepting some of the young Women that they carried away for the use of their Soldiers, and were put to death in a more shameful and Scandalous manner; Yet these Rebels call themselves Christians.”

Opening Quote

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Opening Quote