Washington's Immortals

by Patrick K. O'Donnell

  Halting the charge did little to calm the nerves of the untested troops. As the Redcoats advanced, they loosed a deadly volley, killing the 2nd’s second in command, Major Archibald Anderson, and wounding several other Marylanders. The death of a senior officer likely had a chilling effect on the raw recruits’ morale. To their dishonor, the 2nd Maryland broke and ran. The Guards captured the two American artillery pieces under the command of Captain Anthony Singleton.

  The near-rout of the Marylanders almost led to Greene’s capture. Seeing the 2nd Regiment flee, the American commander attempted to rally the broken troops. British soldiers passed within thirty yards of the southern commander, but Greene was saved by “Col. Morris calling to me and advertising to me of my situation. I had just time to retire.”

  Although trees, smoke, and “unevenness of the ground” obscured the 1st Maryland’s view of the battlefield, word of the breakthrough reached Howard. “Capt. Gibson, Deputy Adjutant General rode to me and informed me that a party of the enemy, inferior in numbers to us, were pushing through the cleared ground and into our rear, and if we would face about and charge them, we might take them.”

  Howard rode over to the 1st Maryland commander, Colonel John Gunby, who issued an order: “Face about.”

  Led by veterans Gassaway Watkins and William Beatty, the 1st changed direction, fired, and reloaded their muskets as they surged toward the Guards’ flank. Howard remembered, “[We] immediately engaged with the Guards. Our men gave some well-directed fire, and we then advanced and continued firing.”

  As the two elite units closed to within yards of each other, the Marylanders’ line erupted with a tremendous volley of fire. “They fired at the same instant, and they appeared so near that the blazes from the muzzles of their guns seemed to meet,” recalled one participant. The Marylanders’ shots had an immediate and deadly impact on the Guards, who “were thrown into confusion by a heavy fire.”

  In the melee, someone shot Gunby’s horse out from under him, and the officer from Maryland’s Eastern Shore found himself pinned underneath the animal. Howard immediately took command and urged his men forward into the Guards’ left flank. Howard’s close friend Captain Gassaway Watkins, Jack Steward, and other veterans from the original Maryland 400 interspersed within the 1st Maryland’s ranks kept the men fighting as a cohesive unit.

  The piercing sound of a bugle broke through the din of battle. In a scene reminiscent of Cowpens, William Washington’s cavalry swooped down upon the Guards, slashing and hacking with their sabers. “The swords of the horsemen were upon the enemy, who were rejoicing in victory and safety,” as one Continental described it, “and before they suspected danger, multitudes lay dead.”

  In the thick of the action, six-foot-six, 260-pound Peter Francisco cleaved several British soldiers with his six-foot broadsword. He later attested, “[I] was wounded in the thigh by a bayonet, from the knee to the socket of the hip, and, in the presence of many, [I] was seen to kill two men, besides making many other panes which were doubtless fatal to others.”

  Stunned by Washington’s cavalry, the Redcoats reeled. As at Cowpens, Howard, sensing an opportunity, ordered the men to charge with bayonets. Letting out a yell, the Marylanders, including Private Thomas Carney, surged forward. The African American Continental “bore a conspicuous part as a soldier . . . when the Maryland troops came to the charge, he bayoneted seven of the enemy.”

  The 1st Maryland tore into the ranks of the elite 2nd Guards Battalion. The Marylanders, with their core group drawn from the elite of Maryland society, pitted themselves against British officers of noble lineage. Both units had a proud history and had engaged in many of the major battles since Long Island.

  Under the onslaught, the Guards buckled. The melee broke into desperate hand-to-hand combat. Williams later described the bitter fighting: “They bayoneted and cut to pieces a great number of British Guards.” Fists, swords, and bayonets lacerated flesh and bone. The fighting swirled around fifer James Nowell, who had recovered from “an accidental wound in one of his legs from a bayonet in ye encampment [at Elizabethtown, New Jersey]” only to have his bad luck continue. In the firefight, he again suffered wounds to the leg.

  In a microcosm of the fighting between the two elite units, two officers dueled valiantly. The acting commanding officer of the Guards, Lieutenant Colonel James Stewart, attacked Baltimore native Captain John Smith of the 1st Maryland. According to legend, Smith and Stewart had dueled prior to the battle. A close friend of John Smith recounted the melee:

  Smith and his men were in a throng, killing the Guards and grenadiers like so many Furies. Colonel Steward [sic], seeing the mischief Smith was doing, made up to him through the crowd, dust, and smoke, and made a violent lunge at him with his small sword. The first that Smith saw was the shining metal like lightning at his bosom he only had time to lean a little to the right, and lift up his left arm so as to let the polished steel pass under it when the hilt struck his breast, it would have been through his body but for the haste of the colonel and happening to set his foot on the arms of a man Smith had just cut down, his unsteady step, his violent lunge and missing his aim brought him with one knee upon the dead man, the Guards came rushing up very strong, Smith had no alternative but to wheel round to the right and give Steward a back handed blow over or across the head on which he fell; his orderly sergeant attacked Smith, but Smith’s sergeant dispatched him; a 2nd attacked him Smith hewed him down, a 3rd behind him threw down a cartridge and shot him in the back of the head, Smith now fell among the slain but was taken up by his men and brought off, it was found to be only a buckshot lodged against the skull and had only stunned him.

  One of Smith’s men fighting next to him was Marylander James Gooding, who had been gut-shot in Camden, was captured, and later “deserted from the British.” The Continental private’s hand was disabled by “a cannon’s being thrown off its conveyance. Being placed between two pieces of cannon his hearing has been much injured since.”33

  33. During the war, Gooding claimed he trusted Smith with his military pay and land grant. In his pension application Gooding swore under oath, “He never received any land and entrusted Captain John Smith to receive his pay, who retired with it to South Carolina and never paid him a cent.”

  In a decisive move, Howard’s men recaptured Singleton’s cannon. Tarleton summed up the pivotal moment: “The Maryland brigade followed by Washington’s cavalry moving upon them before they could receive assistance, retook the cannon, and repulsed the guards with great slaughter.” Howard recounted, “I observed Washington’s horse, and as their movements were quicker than ours, they first charged and broke the enemy. My men followed very quickly, and we pressed through the guards.”

  Exposed and now flanked by the 1st Marylanders, the Guards faced nearly certain destruction, which would open a critical hole in the center of Cornwallis’s line. Howard thought, “The whole were in our power.” Tarleton later reflected, “At this period, the events of the action was doubtful, and victory alternately presided over each army.”

  At that crucial moment, Cornwallis emerged from the woods and, immediately understanding the dire nature of the scene unfolding before him, ordered a desperate gambit. He commanded Lieutenant John McLeod, who had dragged his two three-pound grasshopper artillery pieces nearly a mile, to fire grapeshot into the Marylanders and cavalry, despite the fact that it would also hit the Guards. The iron balls tore into the flesh of Continentals and Redcoats alike. The draconian measure tipped the battle toward the British.

  The grape had a devastating effect on the Marylanders. As Washington’s horsemen wheeled to the rear, Howard’s men now found themselves in a dangerously exposed position. “Columns of the enemy appear[ed] in different directions. Washington’s horse having gone off, I found it necessary to retire, which I did leisurely, but many of the guards who were lying on the ground and who we supposed were wounded, got up and fired at
us as we retired.”

  Through the grape and musket fire, the Marylanders withdrew. Seeing the Continentals’ backs, the 23rd and 71st Foot and the cavalry rallied and charged “with greatest alacrity.”

  Possibly rattled by his near capture and the disintegration of the 2nd Maryland, Greene was unwilling to risk the entire army. He ordered a general withdrawal.

  Greene the planner had a prearranged line of retreat toward the northeast. Using the Reedy Fork Road as an escape route to the prearranged encampment at the ironworks at Speedwell Furnace, Williams organized the army’s retreat: “The artillery horses being shot, we were obliged to leave four six pounders in the field which was our only considerable loss. The General ordered the troops to retire which was executed with such good order and regularity.”

  Forming a solid line of infantry, Cornwallis ordered all his units forward to pursue the retreating Americans, who put up a spirited rearguard defense. In one incident, a Virginian fired a ball that took out the kneecap and femur of Lieutenant Colonel James Webster, who was leading his brigade forward. Exhausted, with his ranks reduced by more than a quarter, Cornwallis was in no position to pursue Greene.

  Henry Lee’s cavalry was one of the last American units to leave the field. As they galloped off, Peter Rife, one of Lee’s cavalrymen, encountered two Irishmen in a scene that demonstrated the humanity of the men and the absurdity of war:

  There were two Irishmen, one of whom belonged to the British and the other to the American army. Of course Mr. Rife did not know their names; but, for the sake of convenience, we shall call the one belonging to the British O’Bryan, and the other Jimmison. O’Bryan had been badly wounded; and, from the intensity of his pain, without thinking or caring where he went, he had strayed off so far from corps to which he belonged and toward the Court House, that he was near the road by which the Americans retreated. Being within a few steps and recognizing in Jimmison a countryman, he called to him, and begged for mercy’s sake to give him a drink of water. He held in his hand a long round staff, resembling that on which the Ensign carries his flag, and had on the top of it a sharp iron, like that which we commonly see on top of a flag staff [a spontoon]. Jimmison happening to have some water in his canteen, stepped up very kindly and gave him a drink. When he turned to go away, and before he had got any distance, O’Bryan, so frenzied with pain and thirst, as Rife supposed, that he did not know what he was doing, threw his staff, with all his remaining strength, at his benefactor, and the iron point struck him, but inflicted only a slight wound. Jimmison then turned back and drove his bayonet into O’Bryan’s heart, which at once put an end to his life and his misery. Having done so, he turned toward Martinsville and overtook his company just as they were entering the village.

  The British pursued the Marylanders and the rest of Greene’s army only a few miles. Greene’s men retreated to their camp thirteen miles away at Speedwell Furnace, where Greene ordered them to construct fieldworks. Cornwallis had led 1,924 men into battle. Of those, 93 had been killed, 413 had been wounded, and 26 were missing. Pinned down with over a fourth of his army dead or wounded, Cornwallis could neither retreat nor advance but spent a miserable night in the hellish, blood-soaked fields of Guilford Courthouse.

  Clouds soon enveloped the sky as “a violent and constant rain” that lasted “40 hours” darkened the region, soaking the field of battle and the wounded Americans and British alike. Charles O’Hara, the colorful leader of the Brigade of the Guards, who had bullet wounds to the chest and thigh, described the suffering: “I never did, and I hope never shall again, experience two such days and Nights, as these immediately after the Battle, we remained on the very ground on which it had been fought cover’d with Dead, and Dying and with Hundreds of Wounded, Rebels, as well as our own. . . . [The torrential downpour] made it equally impractical to remove or administer the smallest comfort to many of the Wounded.” One officer who did receive medical attention was Tarleton; in a grisly scene, a surgeon amputated several of his fingers to treat a wound suffered in the battle. Tarleton later often waved the stump at his men and told them that he had given the missing fingers for king and country.

  Cornwallis’s commissary general Charles Stedman vividly remembered, “The night was remarkable for its darkness accompanied with rain which fell in torrents. Nearly fifty of the wounded, it is said sinking under their aggravated miseries, expired before the morning. The cries of the wounded and dying, who remained on the field of action during the night exceeded all description. Such a complicated scene of horror and distress, it is hoped, for the sake of humanity, rarely occurs, even in military life.”

  While neither the British nor the Americans realized it at the time, Guilford Courthouse altered the course of the war. It changed the strategy of both sides: it halted a potentially disastrous pending Patriot attack on New York, stopped the British conquest of the Carolinas, and set the stage for a stunning defeat of a British army at Yorktown.

  During the spring of 1781, George Washington remained obsessed with defeating Henry Clinton in New York and argued with his French counterpart General Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, that New York had to remain the objective.

  Before the disastrous defeats at Charleston and Camden, the French had decided on a major escalation of the war. They sent Rochambeau with more than five thousand troops to Newport, Rhode Island, in the summer of 1780. Born in 1725, the count had joined the French cavalry after the death of his older brother, climbing to the rank of brigadier general during the French and Indian War. Prior to this assignment, Rochambeau had been placed in charge of an aborted French invasion of Britain in 1779; the troops for that invasion were diverted to North America. The grizzled, thirty-seven-year veteran of many wars bore a distinctive scar above his eye and was known for his mercurial demeanor. According to his aides, the general didn’t trust anyone, not even his subordinates, whom he considered to be “rogues and idiots.” However, Washington’s temperament melted the Frenchman’s taciturn personality.

  Washington pushed Rochambeau toward a final showdown in New York, an epic battle he thought would destroy the main British army in North America and end the war. The count sniffed out a disaster waiting to happen that would likely cause the destruction of the French and Amercian armies. For five years Clinton had prepared Manhattan’s defenses, and he was hoping for an American attack. This was the chance he had been waiting for to bring the elusive American and French armies into a major battle and defeat them. As in Savannah, the Crown would be behind excellent defenses. It looked as if time and money might actually be on the side of the British, and it behooved Clinton to let Washington attack rather than take a great risk himself. Time was running out on the French alliance and funding for the rebellion.

  In the spring of 1780, instead of attacking New York, Rochambeau saw an opportunity to pick off not Cornwallis, but a force of thirty-five hundred men that, under General William Phillips and later Benedict Arnold, had been raiding Virginia. Through tact, charm, and wisdom, he sowed the seeds of the allies’ southern strategy. Secretly, he called on Admiral François-Joseph-Paul de Grasse to sail from the Caribbean for the Chesapeake with the objective of trapping Phillips’s and Arnold’s forces. The British troops were separated from larger forces in Charleston and New York and could potentially be destroyed.

  The pyrrhic British victory at Guilford Courthouse, in no small part caused by the damage the Marylanders inflicted and their role in keeping Greene’s army togther, compelled Cornwallis to move his battered army to Wilmington, North Carolina, instead of following Clinton’s orders to hold South Carolina.

  Eventually, the earl decided to move north and invade Virginia, putting his army—and the outcome of the war—at risk. Simultaneously, Greene and the Marylanders marched back into South Carolina.

  Chapter 38

  Hobkirk’s Hill

  In the thick, sticky darkness of the South Carolina night on Apr
il 22, 1781, the Marylanders heaved massive sections of logs into place as quietly as possible. Just yards away, the Redcoats slumbered in Fort Watson, near the current location of Summerton, South Carolina, unaware that the Americans were erecting the means of their destruction. Slowly, the giant pile of green logs grew. For days, the Marylanders, Henry Lee’s cavalry, and Francis Marion’s irregulars had toiled, felling trees, hacking timber, and assembling the pieces of what became a forty-foot-tall tower.

  More than a week earlier, Nathanael Greene had decided to take action. On the heels of the battle for Guilford Courthouse, Charles, Earl Cornwallis’s damaged army was refitting in Wil­mington, North Carolina. Greene knew it would be some time before Cornwallis could take the field, but he did not know whether the British general had moved north toward Virginia or south toward the Carolinas after the battle at Guilford Courthouse. Taking the initiative, and following Washington’s axiom “Don’t be drove,” Greene returned to South Carolina, where the British had various outposts scattered from Ninety Six to Augusta to Fort Watson, Georgetown, and Camden. By moving his army rapidly, he hoped to dispatch each of them. And by cutting off certain choke points, he could put the others out of supply.

  Greene split his force into two groups. He formed a smaller task force from Lee’s Legion and a Maryland company of Continentals under Captain Edward Oldham, who had been with the Marylanders since the beginning, having joined the Flying Camp as a first lieutenant. He made his way up the ranks to captain. Oldham received high praise from his fellow officers. Lee wrote, “To the name of Captain Oldham, too much praise cannot be given. He was engaged in almost every action in the South, and was uniformly distinguished for gallantry and good conduct. With the exception of [Robert] Kirkwood, of Delaware . . . , he was probably entitled to more credit than any officer of his rank in Greene’s army—a distinction which must place him high on the rolls of fame.”