Stephenson M. Patriot Battles. How the War of Independence Was Fought
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the saratoga campaign 309
discreet officer,” as one of Gates’s aides described him, swept up Learned’s
corps, and attacked von Riedesel’s Brunswickers. The Germans held
steady at first, but the collapse of Balcarres’s light infantry exposed their
right flank, and they too were forced to retreat. At this critical point
Simon Fraser was hit (a gut wound, invariably fatal in those days), and
the British battle line collapsed. As Burgoyne said later, losing Fraser
“helped turn the fate of the day.”
Arnold then turned his attention to the formidable Balcarres’s
Redoubt, but it was too well-defended and he was repulsed with heavy
losses. Now he moved on to Breymann’s Redoubt, which anchored
the far right of the British entrenchments, galloping between the
British and American lines, so legend has it, defying the fire of both.
Morgan had already engaged the German defenders of the redoubt,
but Arnold forced his way in through a rear sally port and the position
fell. Breymann was killed (perhaps fragged), and Arnold took another
wound in the same leg that had been hit at Quebec in 1775. (Typically,
he stubbornly refused to have the leg lopped.)
For Burgoyne, his “reconnaissance” had been a disaster. In
precisely fifty-two minutes he had lost more killed (278, of whom 94
were German) than at Bunker’s Hill (226); 331 were wounded, and 285
taken prisoner—a 56 percent loss. The Americans lost 30 killed and 100
wounded. It was, said Wilkinson, “a scene of complicated horror.”
How grotesque now was the comparison between Burgoyne’s
jauntiness at the beginning of the expedition and this squalid ending
with the British pinned back in their main camp, where even the
wounded had no respite. The British positions were untenable, and
Burgoyne ordered a general retreat back to the Fishkill, a stream
feeding into the Hudson on its western side. Hunkered down in two
encampments on the northern side of the Fishkill, Burgoyne threw the
dice one last time. He had laid out his remaining artillery—twenty-
seven guns—in the hope that Gates might just walk into them. Gates
almost obliged. In the morning fog of 11 October he ordered a general
advance across the Fishkill. It was only the timely warning of a British
deserter that halted Glover, Learned, and Nixon’s divisions just as the
morning mist burned off and the British opened fire. In a panicked
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scramble Gates managed to withdraw his force out of gun range. It
was the last fling. Shelled from high ground to the west, cut off to the
north by John Stark, and bombarded from the south, Burgoyne was,
observed Lieutenant Anburey, “worn down by a series of incessant toils
and stubborn actions.”
48
Von Riedesel described the situation: “Even
for the wounded, no spot could be found which could afford them a
safe shelter—not even, indeed, for so long a time as might suffice for a
surgeon to bind up their ghastly wounds.”
49
On 16 October Burgoyne capitulated on what he thought, with
good reason, were extremely favorable terms. Under a “convention”
agreed on with Gates the army was to be repatriated with the promise
that it would not take any further part in the war. Congress would later
renege on Gates’s agreement.
Only two days before, Dr. Thacher reported Henry Clinton so
close to Albany that “it must involve General Gates in inexpressible
embarrassment and difficulty by placing him between two armies, and
thereby extricating Burgoyne from his perilous situation.”
50
But almost
as Thacher was writing this, Clinton had pulled back down the Hudson.
It had been close; but what good is a ten when you need an ace?
The War in the South
19
The Laurels of Victory,
the Willows of Defeat
CAMDEN, 16 AUGUST 1780
D
uring the two-year campaign to subdue the South the British
were engaged in ten major battles. They “won” seven of
them and lost the war. Defeat sometimes comes not in some
apocalyptic bloodbath but through a thousand cuts that drain away
the blood, the energy, the will. Bright-eyed, confident, and feisty at the
beginning, by the end the British resembled a punch-drunk slugger,
both eyes swollen closed, the legs gone, but still gamely, desperately,
pathetically, willing to swing away.
The British brigadier general Charles O’Hara put his finger on it
in a letter to the duke of Grafton on 1 November 1780, ten months after
the first British landings.
It is a fact beyond doubt that their own numbers are not materially
reduced, for in all our Victories, where we are said to have cut
them to pieces, they very wisely never staid long enough to expose
themselves to those desperate extremities . . . how impossible must
it prove to conquer a Country, where repeated success cannot
ensure permanent advantages, and the most trifling check to our
patriot battles 314
Arms acts like Electric Fire, by rousing at the same moment every
Man upon the vast Continent to persevere upon the most distant
dawn of hope.
1
It was, and is, the great colonial conundrum: the more vigorously the
undergrowth of insurrection was hacked, the more robustly it grew
back.
The opening moves of the campaign, however, augured well for
the invaders. During the last days of 1778 the port of Savannah was
taken by Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell, who had come down
from New York with 3,500 men. General Robert Howe, the American
commander, outflanked and comprehensively routed, was forced to
abandon the city. Nine months later the Swiss-born Major General
Augustine Prevost and his 3,200 defenders beat off the combined
attentions of Admiral Count Charles d’Estaing’s 4,000 French infantry
and General Benjamin Lincoln’s 1,500 Continentals, militia, and
cavalry. A classic eighteenth-century siege of the kind mounted against
Savannah, complete with all the arcane business of approaches—first,
second, and third parallels; lines of contravallation and circumvallation;
saps; gabions; fascines, and siege guns—took time, and with the
hurricane season approaching, d’Estaing was concerned for the safety
of his fleet. A hurriedly planned and ineptly executed assault went
badly wrong. The wonderfully named Major Beamsley Glazier led a
successful counterattack, which left 173 French and American soldiers
dead. (The final casualty count would be a staggering 800 by the time
they were forced to abandon the siege.) Count Casimir Pulaski, with a
fatal élan that seems to characterize Polish cavalrymen, was mortally
wounded leading an attack against the fortifications, not something for
which cavalry is best adapted.
Sir Henry Clinton was being given a chance to redeem the embarrassing
failure of his 1776 attempt to capture Charleston (or Charles-Town, as
it was more usually called in the eighteenth century). On 11 February
the laurels of victory, the willows of defeat 315
1780 his invasion force landed on Simmons (now Seabrook) Island,
and the commander in chief took very special care to prepare his
investment of the city. By 1 March he controlled James Island, and soon
after he had crossed over to the mainland. After a month of spirited
skirmishing, the British opened their siege lines. The Royal Navy,
even under the command of the geriatric Admiral Marriot Arbuthnot,
managed to sail past Fort Moultrie without injury and establish itself
in the inner harbor (abetted by a spectacularly ignominious misuse of
the American fleet by Commodore Abraham Whipple, who preferred
to scuttle rather than fight).
If an eighteenth-century siege had an almost stately progression
about it, the experience for besieger and besieged was anything but
genteel. Captain Johann Ewald of the Hesse-Hanau jägers recorded the
difficulties the besiegers faced.
The intolerable heat, the lack of good water, and the billions of
sandflies and mosquitoes made up the worst nuisance. Moreover,
since all our approaches were built in white, sandy soil, one could
hardly open his eyes during the south wind because of the thick
dust . . . I tried to protect the workers as much as possible, but
there were at least one hundred sharpshooters . . . whose fire was
so superior to mine that the jägers no longer dared fire a shot.
2
The defenders had to endure almost constant bombardment: “It
appeared as if the stars were tumbling down,” recorded General William
Moultrie in his journal for 9 May 1780. “The fire was incessant almost
the whole night; cannon-balls whizzing and shells hissing continually
amongst the ammunition chests and temporary magazines blowing up;
great guns bursting, and wounded men groaning along the lines. It was a
dreadful night!”
3
The British victories at Moncks Corner (14 April) and
Lenuds Ferry (6 May) snuffed out all hope of evacuation or reinforcement
and also raised the profile of the young Lieutenant Colonel Banastre
Tarleton, who, said Horace Walpole, “boasts of having butchered more
men and lain with more women than anybody else in the Army”—proof
that an Oxford education was not incompatible with licensed thuggery.
patriot battles 316
On 8 May General Benjamin Lincoln refused Clinton’s invitation
to surrender, but on 11 May the panicked civilian authorities of the city
demanded Lincoln accept the best terms he could get. In the end, despite
a gallant defense, there would be no “honors of war.” The Americans
(over 3,300 of them) were to march out with colors cased to ground their
arms. The common soldiery was destined for prison hulks; the officers
for better quarters and the hope of exchange. For Lincoln there would
be a very sweet revenge. But he would have to wait until 18 October
1781, at Yorktown, Virginia.
When Clinton left the South on 5 June 1780 to head back to New
York, he instructed Cornwallis not to jeopardize South Carolina and
Georgia by any intemperate adventure into North Carolina. This was
about as realistic, given Cornwallis’s military instincts, as expecting
restraint from a hungry rottweiler adjacent to a juicy steak. Charles, Lord
Cornwallis knew one thing. If the South was to be held, and the patriot
cause defeated, it would not be done by sitting on his defensive duff in
Charleston. The enemy had to be aggressively rooted out and defeated. It
would not be lack of testosterone that lost the South to the British.
Colonel Abraham Buford’s 350 men of the 3rd Virginia Continentals
and the mauled survivors of the brutal little actions at Moncks Corner
and Lenuds Ferry, the only military presence of any standing in South
Carolina following the fall of Charleston, were dragging their sorry
way back to Hillsboro. On 27 May Tarleton, with 40 troopers of the
17th Light Dragoons, 130 horsemen of his Loyalist British Legion
doubled up with 100 Legion infantrymen, set off in pursuit. After a
characteristically punishing ride Tarleton caught up with Buford at
3:00 pm on 29 May 1780 and demanded his surrender, or else . . . Buford
responded with the customary rhetoric of intending to resist “to the
last extremity.” It was an exchange within the context of the combat
etiquette of the eighteenth century. Tarleton, however, was not a great
one for etiquette.
the laurels of victory, the willows of defeat 317
Buford drew up his men in one line with the order not to fire
until the enemy was within fifty yards—very effective on infantry
but a disastrously inappropriate tactic against cavalry. (Tarleton later
wrote his own tactical assessment: “Colonel Buford also committed a
material error, in ordering the infantry to retain their fire . . . which
when given had little effect either upon the minds or bodies of the
assailants, in comparison with the execution that might be expected
from the successive force of platoons . . . commenced at the distance of
three or four hundred paces.”).
4
Tarleton’s horsemen smashed through
the American line, and his infantry followed up with the bayonet.
5
Tarleton went down when his horse was shot from under him, and the
fact that his men might have thought their leader killed he later used to
explain the butchery that followed: an egotistical flourish completely in
character with this proto-Flashman. His after-battle report to Cornwallis
was tersely efficient: “I have cut a hundred and seventy officers and
men to pieces.” One hundred and thirteen Americans were killed and
203 captured, of whom 150 were wounded (a 65 percent casualty rate).
Tarleton lost five killed and twelve wounded.
6
It had not been George Washington’s choice, but Congress had
appointed Horatio Gates to the command of the southern theater. He
was received by the troops there “with respectful ceremony,” noted
Otto Holland Williams, and immediately began to act with a pomposity
compounded by profound ignorance. For example, he informed his
cavalry commander, William Washington, that cavalry was irrelevant
to warfare in the South, and this in some of the finest horse country in
the land, and the only theater of the war in which cavalry played an
important role. The army, although ill-prepared, was put on immediate
alert, and against the advice of commanders with local knowledge Gates
determined to take a direct route to Camden through countryside so
barren that the army starved, and when it did eat, the results were dire:
“Instead of rum we had a gill of molasses . . . which instead of livening
patriot battles 318
our spirits served to purge us as well as if we had taken a jallop, for the
men all the way as we went along were every moment obliged to fall out
of the ranks to evacuate.”
7
Gates was not a fighter and probably had no intention of fighting.
He had no faith in his militia, and yet his army was composed
predominantly of militia.
8
He intended to do what he had done at
Saratoga: take up defensive positions (to the north of Camden) and wait.
Unfortunately for him, Cornwallis was a fighter. He set out in search
of a battle, despite the fact that he believed Gates’s approaching army
numbered 5,000, whereas his own stood at 2,239. Around midnight
on a “hot, humid, and moonless” 15 August the cavalry screens, like
Matthew Arnold’s “ignorant armies” that “clash by night,” blundered
into each other, and after a brief exchange both pulled back.
Now it was time for Gates to make a decision, and true to form
he ducked his responsibility. At an awkwardly silent command council
he simply defaulted to Brigadier General Edward Stevens’s despairing
“Gentlemen, is it not too late now to do anything but fight?” Otho
Holland Williams, Gates’s assistant adjutant general, recorded the
extraordinary moment: “No other advice was offered, and the general
desired the gentlemen would repair to their respective commands.”
9
The cream of the American army, the Continentals of Mordecai
Gist’s 2nd Maryland brigade under the overall command of Baron
Johann de Kalb (who was appalled at the decision to give battle but
had not spoken up and would pay a very high price for his silence),
was placed on the right (west) of the Waxhaws Road, which, running
north-south, divided a mile-wide battlefield bracketed by swamps.
Smallwood’s 1st Maryland brigade was posted in reserve to de Kalb’s
rear. The Continentals totaled approximately 900 muskets.
To the left of the road Gates posted all of his militia (around 2,500
in total). Anchored on the road were General Richard Caswell’s 1,800
North Carolinians, and to their left Stevens’s 700 Virginians. Colonel
Charles Armand’s 120 cavalry were positioned behind the militia but
would play no part in the battle. Gates, as he had been at Saratoga, was
safely in the rear, behind Smallwood’s Marylanders and probably over
400 yards behind his front-line Continentals. Seven pieces of artillery