Washington's Immortals

by Patrick K. O'Donnell

  Source: National Park Service

  Utilizing a defense in depth, which was quite novel for the time, Morgan led his forces, including the Marylanders, to victory over the British at the Battle of Cowpens. During the battle, William Washington, who would fight alongside the Marylanders throughout the South, dueled Banastre Tarleton. Washington narrowly escaped death after his sword broke in half, but his courageous African American orderly saved his life. Tarleton and nearly two hundred of his men escaped.

  Source: William Ramney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cowpens

  The son of a slave trader, Banastre Tarleton was a British cavalry officer with a reputation for ruthlessness, earning him the nicknames “Bloody Ban” and “The Butcher.” As Cornwallis’s right hand in the southern campaign, he pursued the Marylanders throughout the Revolution, frequently facing them in battle. He lost two fingers at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse but later pursued a political career after the war ended.

  Source: Library of Congress

  The terrain at Cowpens played an important role in the battle. The Greene River Road bisected the field, and it was flanked by ravines and creeks. General Morgan used the landscape to his advantage, delivering a crushing defeat to the British.

  Author Photo

  A distant cousin to George Washington, William Washington, an officer with the Continental Light Dragoons was influential in several battles, particularly the Battle of Cowpens. Known as a bold and fierce commander, he fought alongside the Marylanders at several engagements throughout the Southern Campaign. He was wounded and taken prisoner at the Battle of Eutaw Springs.

  Source: National Park Service

  Arguably Washington’s most able general, Nathanael Greene led the southern army, including the Marylanders. He characterized his strategy in the South this way: “We fight, get beat, rise and fight again.” His battlefield strategy ultimately accomplished the goal of largely clearing the Carolinas of British forces.

  Source: National Park Service

  Elite regiments at the core of the army, the stalwart Maryland Line kept the American Army together during 1780 and 1781, including during the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. Cornwallis won the engagement, but lost more than a quarter of his men. The battle had an enormous impact on the war and compelled Cornwallis to advance north into Virginia.

  Source: U.S. Army National Guard

  The overlooked battle and siege at Fort Ninety Six involved a sapping tunnel dug under the fort as well as a forlorn hope assault. Even in the heat of battle, a deep bond formed between two assault members in the forlorn hope: Captain Perry Benson and free African American soldier Thomas Carney, who saved Benson’s life after he was severely wounded during the attack. Both men maintained their friendship long after the war.

  Author Photo

  After nearly six years of continuous war, many Marylanders, including Mordecai Gist, witnessed the surrender of Cornwallis’s army. They had come full circle. In their first battle, the Marylanders had been “cut to atoms” by Cornwallis’s guns at Brooklyn, and they faced their nemesis on the battlefield multiple times before his final defeat at Yorktown.

  Source: U.S. Capitol

  General Washington resigned his commission in front of Congress at the Maryland State House in Annapolis at the conclusion of the war. Many of the officers of the Immortals were present to hear him say, “Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of action. . . and take my leave of all the employments of public life.” Hearing of Washington’s plan to resign instead of becoming a dictator, King George III proclaimed, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”

  Source: U.S. Capitol

  1779

  Chapter 23

  Despots

  Throughout the second half of 1778 and into 1779, some of the most heated fights experienced by the Marylanders occurred not in battle, but in courts-martial held by the American army. Otho Holland Williams, released from captivity in February 1778, served in July 1778 on the court that heard charges against General Charles Lee, who was “charged with disobedience of orders in retreating unnecessarily, and in showing disrespect to the Commander in chief” at the battle of Monmouth. Williams and the rest of the jury found him guilty and sentenced him to be relieved from duty for one year. Williams noted that it was the “most important [trial] that has occurred so far,” but it was far from the last, as courts-martial beset the Maryland Line for some time.

  On January 5, 1779, a letter appeared in the Maryland Gazette, Baltimore’s principal newspaper. Signed by John Eager Howard, ­Samuel Smith, and many other Maryland officers, it declared, “Captain [Edward] Norwood, (who is discharged from the service by a sentence of a court-martial on a disagreement with General Smallwood) during the campaigns in which he served with us, has ever conducted himself in such a manner as to command our warmest friendship and esteem as an officer and a man of honour.”

  For some time trouble had been brewing between the other Maryland officers and William Smallwood, whom they viewed as autocratic and petty, often retaliating harshly for the smallest slights. In the case related to the letter in the newspaper, Smallwood had discharged Captain Edward Norwood of the 4th Regiment for refusing to obey orders. Norwood didn’t take his dismissal lying down. In addition to getting his fellow officers to sign a letter in his defense, he submitted a letter of his own to the Gazette. He charged that Smallwood had orchestrated his court-martial “for only saying General Smallwood was a partial man and no gentleman.” He added, “I am sorry to say, such a system of despotism will appear to be springing up in our army that an officer who does his duty ever so exactly, and has neglected to pay a servile court to a haughty superior, holds his commission by a very precarious tenure.”

  In a country currently rebelling against its king, Norwood’s charges of despotism resonated strongly. Incensed, Smallwood refused to let the matter drop and continued haranguing the officers who had supported Norwood. In March 1780 several officers, including Howard, sent Smallwood a note, which said, “Your scurrilous observations on the testimony we gave of our favorable opinion of Captain Norwood, discovers the malevolence and presumption, more than the probity and liberality of your mind.” They added that other officers, “whom you took occasion to abuse in your ungentlemanly performance of 105 pages,” would have signed the note as well except that they were “out of camp.”

  Smallwood seemed to single out Howard for revenge. He called for a court-martial against the young officer on three charges: disobeying orders on several days in January 1779, in one instance by not properly participating in a parade; “not furnishing the morning reports and weekly returns of his battalion at the time ordered and in a correct military manner”; and giving rum to servants as well as the combat troops. Gassaway Watkins, the imposing lieutenant from Howard County, Maryland, described the charges a little differently. “Was present when Colonel Hazen arrested Colonel Howard, for not keeping his men on the parade until they were frozen,” he wrote in his memoirs.

  The court delivered a mixed verdict. It said that Howard hadn’t disobeyed orders, but that he hadn’t remained with the part of his unit that participated in the parade. In addition it said that he had filed his reports on time but “in general the reports he furnished were incorrect and unmilitary.” It also found him guilty of distributing the rum. Extraordinarily, George Washington personally intervened in the case, contravening the verdict of the court. He wrote that “painful as it is to him at all times to differ from a Court Martial in sentiment, he cannot concur with them in opinion where they find [Howard] guilty of disobedience of orders,” although he did say that Howard had made mistakes in regard to the reports and the rum. Howard emerged from the incident with his reputation largely intact, while Smallwood remained as unpopular as ever. One possible reason for Smallwood’s petty tyrannical escapades was the absence of his right-hand man, Mo
rdecai Gist, a firm but fair leader who might have stopped the charges against Howard had he been in camp. Gist remained in Baltimore by the side of his dying wife, who gave birth to his son Independence only a few months after their marriage. He even disobeyed Washington’s orders to return to the field, writing to the commander in chief, “It is with pain that I inform You of Mrs. Gist’s extreme Indisposition whose life is dispaird of by her physicians and it is an additional wound to my sensibility that this melancholy circumstance compels me to act Incompatible with your Excellency’s orders.” A few months after he returned to the field, Gist became a widower for the second time in his life.

  Unlike Smallwood, Williams was very popular with the other Marylanders. He maintained contact with Samuel Smith, who was recovering in Baltimore from his wounds taken at Mud Island, and through Smith with Nathaniel Ramsay, who was captive with his wife in British-­occupied New York City. The friendship between Smith and Williams was deep. Jokingly, Smith referred to the letters from Williams as “like those from a favorite son.” He went on to say that he would like to name his oldest son Otho.

  At this time, some of Maryland’s oldest soldiers were leaving the service because their three-year enlistments had expired. Many of the men had gone without pay, and they had households to maintain. Three years of battling the British and the elements, an economy in hyperinflation, and a war that seemed without end had worn down many of them. Among them was Lieutenant James Peale, who resumed his life as an artist.

  The patriotic and the ardent—and those lucky enough not to be physically maimed—stayed. The core officers like Gist, Steward, Howard, and William Beatty become more important than ever. They provided the leadership, continuity, and experience that filtered down through their commands, and they worked desperately to fill their depleted ranks.

  Filling Maryland’s regiments remained a constant challenge. In 1778 the General Assembly passed a law that required Maryland to raise 2,902 recurits for service in the Continental Army, giving each county in Mayland a quota to fill. In 1776 and 1777, the men were nearly all volunteers, but now Maryland turned to a variety of machinations and even a draft to fill the shortfall of bodies. About a fifth of the men volunteered, while the bulk were militiamen or substitutes, and a small number were drafted by the state.

  Vagrants were the first to be rounded up by the draft. Men were considered vagrant if they were free spirits without fixed domiciles and over eighteen years old. They were pressed into service by the local militia for at least nine months. If the vagrant signed on for three years, he would receive the standard enlistment bonus of land and money.27

  27. The amount of money and land depended on the year of enlistment.

  A large source of manpower came from substitutes. The rich could avoid the draft by hiring men to serve in their place. The practice could be a shady business. Horror stories abounded as dishonest constables or militia leaders forced substitutes to enroll and then resold them to the highest bidder in another county. The racket yielded a small fortune before it was shut down by the state government.

  Unlike the volunteers who filled the Marylander ranks at the beginning of the war, some of these new men did not want to be there. The officers and NCOs had to work with soldiers from diverse backgrounds and attempt to mold them into a fighting unit. The newcomers joined a core cadre of old soldiers and best friends who believed in the cause, fought for each other, and kept the Maryland regiments together under very difficult circumstances.

  In the spring of 1779, the Marylanders camped at Middletown, New Jersey, to thwart the British trade with the Tories in Monmouth County and along the Jersey Shore. Far removed from Continental bases of supply, the new recruits and veterans had to purchase their food, clothing, and other incidentals from a hostile local population. Men with hardly any money at all and no wages were forced to buy their own food. Combined with hyperinflation, this situation created widespread dissatisfaction within the Maryland ranks.

  Hyperinflation ran rampant through the American economy and posed a grave threat to the American Revolution. The Continental Congress was printing its own money, but that money was rapidly becoming worthless. Over the course of three years, the value of the paper dollar tanked; by 1781 it took seven hundred dollars to purchase one British pound. Examples of hardship and pain abounded: “a bad supper and grog” and lodging cost $850, and one Continental officer noted that an “ordinary horse [was] worth $20,000; I say twenty thousand dollars!”

  Several factors contributed to the depreciation of the Continental dollar. Foremost, Congress didn’t have the ability to tax, and the states to this point had made no voluntary payments to Congress. In addition, several states were issuing their own currency, which competed with the Continental currency. In an effort to destroy the American economy funding the Revolution, the British engaged in economic warfare and launched a covert counterfeiting program; British agents distributed the fake dollars throughout the colonies, exacerbating the inflation problem.

  Practically bankrupt because it didn’t have hard coin to back up the paper it was printing, Congress largely depended on French money, but there wasn’t enough funding to buy provisions to feed the army. Men weren’t paid, clothed, or fed. The value of the dollar approached zero, and the miserable state of the American economy became a grave threat to the American Revolution.

  Returning from Baltimore, Gist, recently promoted to the rank of brigadier general, complained to the Continental Congress, “We have the mortification to see the troops of every state provided with cloathing and other necessities at reasonable and moderate prices, whilst we alone have been obligated to purchase from private stores every necessity at the most exorbitant prices.” The days of the smartly outfitted men of the Baltimore Independent Company were long over. The dissatisfaction was palpable and reached a boiling point on April 3, 1779, when Gist lost control of one of his companies and had to call on the assistance of the local militia. “Coll. Gist has requested of me to let Coll. Holmes know that he stands in need of assistance of the militia in order to bring his men into order, that one company hath mutiny’d at Middletown and are determined to go off to the enemy if not prevented and desires that Coll. Holmes assist him with about fifty militia tomorrow at Middletown.” The incident foreshadowed additional mutinies that racked Continental regiments in January 1780, when nearly the entire Pennsylvania Line and a smaller portion of the New Jersey Line mutinied. The Maryland incident was significant because it was one of the first recorded mutinies, but the actual results seem to have been covered up. Very little correspondence related to the events exists, and what happened to the ringleaders remains unknown.

  Shortly after the incident, Gist’s men were replaced by Marylander Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Ford and his men, but the newcomers didn’t fare much better with the local population. At Shrewsbury, Ford’s men shot up the local church steeple, which had a symbol of the British Crown at the top, and attempted to set fire to the church when they couldn’t destroy their target with musket balls. (Christ Church at Shrewsbury retains the damaged orb and a musket ball embedded in the wood to this day.) Local insurgents later captured a dozen of Ford’s men. The coup de grâce for the Marylanders’ occupation of Monmouth County came in late April, when an eight-hundred-man raiding party originating in New York and led by British Major Patrick Ferguson attacked in force with the intent of destroying the Marylanders. An expert shot who had developed a novel breach-loading rifle before the war, Ferguson was a thirty-four-year-old, outspoken Scot.

  With Ferguson hot on his heels, Ford beat a hasty retreat back toward the American lines, abandoning the militiamen as well as an advance guard of Marylanders. Captain William Beatty recalled that before the attack the Continentals had “continued very peaceable Spending our Spare time With a number of fine Ladies in this neighbourhood.” With no warning, Ferguson attacked “in the morning before Sun rise,” Beatty recalled. “We were very near be
ing Cut off by a party of British under Major Ferguson But have little notice of the Enemies approach. We retreated about 7 Miles toward Monmouth Court House. I lost my Waiter & all my Cloaths except What I had On, Several Other officers Shar’d the same fate. Our loss in Men was 22.”

  After regrouping and moving north to the American fortress at West Point, the Marylanders would soon be doing the raiding.

  Chapter 24

  The Gibraltar of America—

  The Midnight Storming

  of Stony Point

  The light infantry moved through the darkness. Though it was midsummer, the night was cold, and the wind lashed at their faces, as one by one the Marylanders and other Continentals stepped off solid ground and plunged into waist-deep, thick, green muck. Because the slightest noise could alert the British to their presence, resulting almost certainly in instant death, the men maintained silence. They were part of a twenty-man commando-like team called a “forlorn hope”—in today’s lexicon, a suicide squad. Serving as the tip of a hundred-man spearhead assaulting one of the most heavily defended fortresses in North America, the men of the forlorn hope were determined to break through a formidable barrier and charge straight into British muskets and cannon, with little chance of cheating death.

  Armed with heavy axes and muskets slung over their shoulders, the men had to cut a hole through the abatis—pointed, blade-like, wooden stakes that were waiting for them, poised to tear into the flesh and lacerate the limbs of any man who attempted to penetrate the British defenses. The heavy axes they carried were necessary to dismantle the first fortifications the rest of the assault force would encounter. Until the abatis was removed, the rest of the assault force would be unable to enter the fort. The forlorn hope would use the axes to slowly hack their way through the timbers while under constant fire from the enemy. If they made it through alive, they would have to begin the process again and chop through yet another row of thick abatis, which guarded a fortification bristling with guns.