The Philadelphia Campaign

by Thomas J McGuire

  Beyond Newark, the British Army “crossed the White Clay Creek, which was surrounded on both sides by steep, rocky heights that formed a most frightful defile half an hour in length,” Ewald wrote with apprehension. “I still cannot understand why Sullivan abandoned this position, where a hundred riflemen could have held up the army a whole day and killed many men.” The Jägers had to go forward, fully expecting to be ambushed. “My hair stood on end as we crammed into the defile,” the Jäger captain admitted, “for the precipitous rocks on both sides of the creek and along the defile were so steep that no one could scale them.”138 But not a shot was fired at them, and hardly a soul was to be seen in the immediate area.

  “Everyone is pleased with the good march and the fact that it was kept a secret, thus cutting off Washington from Lancaster,” a relieved Captain von Münchhausen noted in his diary. From the Nicholas House in Hockessin, Delaware, where Howe established headquarters, the captain reported, “When our vanguard arrived here, it seemed that the rebels were also on the move. We were only five miles away from them and only five miles from Newport. There was much activity in front of us. We saw two regiments coming from Newport on two different roads, with their flags flying, and in very good order, as if they were heading for the road to Lancaster.” This was probably Weedon's Brigade. “I was ordered by the General to ride quickly so as to lead the Hessian jägers diagonally through the woods to cut off these troops, if possible. At the same time General Howe, with the light infantry, marched directly toward them for the same purpose. But the rebels, who had become aware of all this, retreated quickly. Notwithstanding this, the jägers got close enough to send a few amusette balls at them.”139

  While on this march, the British light troops passed the home of Col. Samuel Patterson, commander of the 2nd Regiment of New Castle County Militia. “This day we got two Stand of Colours, a number of Regimental Swords, and five or six Stand of Arms &c. at Colonel Pattersons House; he made his escape as the Light Infantry appea'd,” Lt. Henry Stirke of the 10th Light Infantry Company wrote in his diary.140 One of the captured flags, of dark blue or green fringed silk with a canton of thirteen red and white stripes, is a rare survivor of the Revolution, thanks to a British officer who sent it home as a trophy. “I must tell you a Piece of good Luck I had a few Days before the Battle of the Brandywine,” Capt. William Dansey of the 33rd wrote to his mother. “On a Flanking Party, I took the Horse, Arms, Colours and Drums belonging to a Rebel Colonel of the Delaware Militia, made his Brother prisoner, & caused all his Baggage to be taken, which the General very politely sent back again, but the Horse, Arms & Colours came to my share, the latter I hope to bring a Trophy to Brinsop,” the Dansey estate near Hereford, England.141

  The Patterson family's odyssey was by no means over. “Toward evening one of our patrols brought in a coach harnessed to six very fine horses,” Ewald wrote slyly. “Found in the coach was Lady Patterson, the wife of an American colonel—a lady who before autumn had overtaken her beauty must have been attractive—together with her maid, a dainty blonde, and three Negro servants. The entire baggage was thoroughly searched, and everything belonging to the colonel was distributed among the jägers.” His gallantry with an elderly lady of quality not failing, Ewald continued his tale, with tongue firmly in cheek:

  Since darkness now fell over this partage d'Arlequin, and these ladies did not dare continue their journey at night, they were put up for the night in our gypsy dwellings, which were mostly nothing but huts of brushwood. At daybreak, after we had treated the ladies to breakfast and had exchanged their six good horses for six very patient ones, they resumed their journey. They bid us farewell and we wished them a pleasant journey. I do not believe they had ever dreamed in all their lives of making a toilette under such circumstances.142

  In response to the British march, the Continentals stood to arms for the better part of the day, waiting for Howe's army to appear in front. American scouts reported that the British had moved onto the main road between Wilmington and Lancaster, effectively turning Washington's right flank and rendering his entrenchments useless. Further, the head of the British column was now turning away from Wilmington and moving west toward Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

  After Howe had set up headquarters at the Nicholas House, on the road between Wilmington and Lancaster, he prepared to cross the border into Pennsylvania. Capt. Lt. Francis Downman of the Royal Artillery complained:

  The rear guard to which I belonged, with the 2nd brigade of artillery, did not reach our ground till 11 o'clock at night, after a very disagreeable march of 16 hours without anything to eat, and almost suffocated with dust, owing to the vast train of baggage waggons and cattle that were in front. We did not meet with the smallest interference in our march from the rebels, for we took a different road to that which they expected, and where they had raised works and collected a force. Mr. Washington is now encamped about three miles from us on a very strong ground with 20,000 men…. Our General and other officers are going to reconnoitre with a very strong detachment. In all probability a day or two will decide the fate of America.143

  That night, to shield Philadelphia and avoid being trapped on the Delmarva Peninsula, Washington's troops withdrew from their carefully prepared defenses and marched northward from Newport, crossing the border from New Castle County, Delaware, into Chester County, Pennsylvania. Somehow word got around that the British were heading for Chads's Ford on the Brandywine. “Our Army at that time expecting they would take their rout thro’ this place, over Brandywine Bridge, entrenched themselves very well on the Eastern bank of Red Clay Creek, about a mile westward from Newport, where they had moved the day before & waited their approach in the highest spirits imaginable,” President John McKinly of Delaware wrote from Wilmington on September 9, “but the enemy has for the present given them the slip, having moved farther north to pass Brandywine, at a Place called Chad's Ford, about 9 or 10 miles above this place.” How McKinly knew this is not clear; he told Caesar Rodney that the British “were pursued, or rather attempted to be out-marched, headed & interrupted, in their rout by the whole Continental Troops under Genl. Washington who set off for that purpose from their lines at four o'clock this morng.”144 Lt. William Beatty of the 7th Maryland wrote in his diary, “The Enemy not thinking it Proper to Continue their March on the Road by Wilmington and new Port, But Push'd to Cross the Brandewine at Shad's ford obliged our Army to move that way. The 9th we began this March about 2 o'Clock in the morning.”145

  The Continentals passed over the arc boundary, a twelve-mile circle drawn from New Castle that had been carefully surveyed and marked by Mason and Dixon ten years earlier, and moved up the roads to Chads's Ford. Spirits were still high but had deflated somewhat from their near fever pitch at Newport.

  Once over the Mason-Dixon line, the unofficial dividing line between the North and South, the cultural contrast between slave country and farms built by free labor was immediately noticeable. Although Delaware had up until recently been part of Pennsylvania, its culture below the fall line was—and still is—distinctly southern.

  Chester County was one of the three original counties established in Pennsylvania by William Penn, and its seat, the village of Chester on the Delaware River, was the site of the earliest European settlement in the state, having been founded as Upland by the Swedes in the late 1630s. Its rolling hills were covered with thick hardwood forests of chestnut, hickory, and oak, and the well-watered limestone topsoil was some of the best on the continent. The eastern townships, settled largely by British Quakers for nearly a century or more, presented a glorious image of William Penn's Peaceable Kingdom.

  Elkannah Watson, a New England soldier passing from Virginia to the Valley Forge encampment in the spring of 1778, described the region:

  Most of the slopes of the hill-sides are laid out into regular farms, and are under high cultivation. The verdure of the fields, and the neatness and superior tillage of the farms in the rich vales, were so grateful to the eye, af
ter being long accustomed to southern aspects…. The contrast, so obvious and so strong, in the appearance of these farms and of the southern plantations, will strike every observer, and can be imputed to but one cause. Here we witness the impulses and results of honest industry, where freemen labor for themselves. There we see the feeble efforts of coerced labor, performed by the enervated slave, uninspired by personal interest, and unimpelled by a worthy ambition. These distinctions are perceptible even between Maryland and Pennsylvania, separated only by an imaginary line.146

  To be sure, there were slaves in Pennsylvania and other northern states in the 1770s, but their numbers were small. Chester County, with a population of 21,000, had approximately 500 slaves, less than 4 percent of the population. The largest slaveholder was Judge William Moore of Charlestown Township, the chief justice of Chester County for more than forty years under the crown and a staunch Loyalist. Few Quakers owned slaves by the 1770s; Moore, an Anglican, still owned 10 slaves in 1780.

  Charles Biddle, who became vice president of Pennsylvania in the 1780s, commented on the sharp differences in temperament. “It is a saying of the people of Maryland that in traveling from Pennsylvania to the southward, the first countryman's house you stop at where the landlord behaves with politeness to you, you may be assured you are out of Pennsylvania.” Traditional southern culture has been famous for its hospitality and openness for centuries. By contrast, the hospitality in Pennsylvania, especially in the rural areas, was less welcoming and often cold and distant. This was partly due to the “quietism” of the Quakers and many of the German sects, who generally frowned upon outward display and, beyond commerce and marketing, mostly kept to themselves.

  “On the other hand, the Pennsylvanians say, that in going from Maryland to Pennsylvania, the first farm you come to where you see a good barn, the fences all up, and in good order, you may be certain that you are out of Maryland.” Neatness and cleanliness, especially among the Quakers, were next to godliness. “The fact is, in Pennsylvania, the people are generally industrious and seldom take notice of strangers. In Maryland, they are very hospitable, but indolent.”147

  Biddle recorded an interesting remark made in this same era by Judge Richard Peters, a prominent Philadelphian and chairman of the Pennsylvania Board of War. “Judge Peters says all the great and strange people we have in Pennsylvania are from Chester County.”148 The county had many extraordinary individuals who, in addition to being farmers or millers, were self-taught mathematicians, scientists, doctors, or craftsmen who made extraordinary clocks and cabinetry. Some possessed their own small libraries, and a respectable number were members of the American Philosophical Society.

  Humphry Marshall of West Bradford Township, in the center of the county, was such a person. A first-generation Anglo-American Quaker, Marshall was trained as a stone mason but became a self-taught botanist and scientist. It must have been in the family bloodline: His first cousin was John Bartram, who was born in Chester County in 1699 and was still working in 1777. Through his own study, Bartram became America's leading botanist and was called the greatest natural botanist in the world by the Swedish scientist Linnaeus. Bartram was appointed Botanist Royal for North America by King George III and opened a remarkable botanical garden along the Schuylkill River near Philadelphia. He also built his stone house with his own hands. Humphry Marshall did the same, building a handsome stone mansion in 1772, complete with astronomical observatory. He then opened a botanical garden and arboretum, and shortly after the Revolution, he published Arbustrum Americanum, the first American treatise on trees.

  The county abounded with such farmers. Wrote Elkannah Watson:

  On our journey to Valley Forge, a heavy storm, and roads almost impassable, compelled us to seek shelter at the house of an opulent farmer. Here we were received with the kindest hospitality, and found our host an intelligent, sensible man. He had a fine library, and was well informed on most subjects. His house was spacious and neat, and well supplied with the comforts and substantials of life. Independence, wealth, and contentment were conspicuous in everything, within and without the house. This man was but a specimen of his class—virtuous, affluent, and intelligent republican freemen.149

  August and September were crucial months for both harvesting and planting in the farming cycle of the region. Buckwheat fields, planted in late July, were in bloom and were not harvested until October. Winter wheat and rye fields were plowed in early September to prepare for planting at the end of the month; they would be harvested the following July. Apples and peaches were ripe for picking; cherry trees, numerous in the area, yielded their fruit in June and July. Many farms also grew small amounts of flax to make linen and hemp for rope.

  But the greatest agricultural product was “corn,” used in the broad English sense to mean grain, mainly wheat, but including barley and oats as well. Maize, or Indian corn, which was used on most farms for hog fodder, was tall and green in early September. “Our house stands upon a hill, it commands a beautiful prospect of the Country around, and which a few weeks past the fields were waving with yellow Corn,” Christopher Marshall wrote from Lancaster in mid-September. “Now the Indian Corn & Buckwheat makes a pleasing object, add to which the trees bending beneath the ripening Fruits, Herds of Cows, Oxen, and sheep fattening on luxuriant Pastures, yet my heart is heavy in the Contemplation of the distress that our once happy Land is now plunged in.”150

  It was this peaceful, prosperous world that the two armies invaded in September 1777, leaving a lasting mark. “Not just chusing to take the Bull by the horns we disappointed Washington and turned his Right the 8th by a forced march from Pencader by Newark to New Garden,” General Grant reported, “a handsome Move of 14 Miles which He did not think us equal to, knowing the state of our carriages & in fact was so much disconcerted upon finding that We might by a subsequent Move get possession of the Heights of Wilmington, that He quit his Camp in the night & fled with precipitation over the Brandy Wine.”151

  The Continentals crossed the Brandywine to the eastern bank and took up positions on the heights, with their center at Chads's Ford. On the following day, September 10, they deployed along the creek a few miles above and below the ford, with scouting parties covering several Brandywine fording places, and began constructing artillery batteries.

  Howe's troops began crossing the Mason-Dixon line into New Garden Township during the midday hours of September 9. “This region of Pennsylvania is extremely mountainous and traversed by thick forests; nevertheless it is very well cultivated and very fertile,” Ewald commented. Unlike the area they had just come through, he noted, “Because we descended upon the inhabitants so quickly, contrary to their expectations, they had not left their plantations.” He further added, “The inhabitants of this region are generally Quakers, who, since they did not want to participate in the war, did not flee, but arrived in crowds and asked for protection.” Military intelligence was also provided: “We received positive information here that the greater part of the American army had entrenched behind the left bank of the Brandywine.”152 Lt. Heinrich von Feilitzsch of the Anspach Jägers commented, “I must note here in Pennsylvania, that the inhabitants are encountered everywhere. This province is more loyal to the King than all the others.” He fatuously added, “Therefore nothing is taken from the inhabitants,” which was not quite the case.153

  The British Army moved along two roads toward the village of Kennett Square through some very rugged terrain. “Some deserters come in, Some country people. Some with their Waggons also two people from Phila. who say Washington is determined to risk a battle rather than give up that City,” James Parker wrote. “At 12 M. the tents are struck & we march at one about 2 Miles along the Great Road & halt till 5 when Genl. How & Ld. Cornwallis With the light troops take to the Right. Genl. Kniphausen with the Artillery Baggage &c goes on to Kenetts Square where after a Very fatiguing March we arive at 12 at Night.” The road to the right went through a very difficult and steep gorge along White
Clay Creek, prompting Parker to make a comparison with the ancient battle of Caudine Forks, which ended with Rome's most humiliating defeat. “Our tract for 5 or 6 miles was through a Trough having high Surrounding hills on each side & Answer my idea of the Coudinforks where the Roman General Posthumeus was attacted by Pontius, & was obliged to surrender with his Whole Army. Our Army is now as light as possible.”154

  “Our march this day about 6 miles through an amazingly strong country, being a succession of large hills, rather sudden with narrow vales, in short an entire defile,” Montrésor observed. “Encamped on very strong ground where we joined Lt.-General Kniphuysen's division.” He too noted, “Almost all the Inhabitants found at their houses.”155

  The roads were narrow, and rain in the night made moving so much baggage and artillery extremely difficult. Once Howe arrived at Kennett Square, he gathered intelligence from local Loyalists concerning Washington's position at Chads's Ford and decided that this was where he would confront the Continental Army in the fight for Philadelphia.

  CHAPTER 4

  “As heavy a Fire from the Musketry as perhaps has been known this war.”

  THE BATTLE OF BRANDYWINE, SEPTEMBER 11, 1777

  September 11 dawned gray and dank, with fog shrouding the Brandywine Valley. Thursday was baking day on many of the local farms, as several civilian accounts attest, and the bake ovens were fired up with brushwood first thing in the morning for the all-day process. Normally a slight haze from cooking fires would have been puffing out of the large hearth chimneys and hanging in layers over the glens, but on this Thursday, the air was murky with the heavy volume of smoke collecting from hundreds of campfires. The atmosphere was tepid; this was not a pleasant, early-morning vapor, but the herald of a thick, late-summer day.