by John McCain
They marched back to White Marsh slowly, pausing for an hour’s rest near a walnut tree, where nuts lay on the ground in abundance. Martin grabbed a few handfuls and cracked and ate them. They crossed the river again at sunset at a ford where the cold water was deeper. On the other side they were met by quartermasters who had brought no nourishment other than barrels of whiskey. Their intention was to give the men a small measure to warm them, but the tired and hungry marchers tried to revive themselves by consuming more than their allotment, and empty stomachs ensured the effect was immediate and noticeable. Resuming the march, the inebriates encountered a fence they had to climb over. “Here was fun,” Martin remembered. The men “would pile themselves up on each side of the fence, swearing and hallooing, some losing their arms, some their hats, some their shoes, and some themselves.” Once over they stumbled on and reached camp at midnight. “I had been nearly 30 hours without a mouthful of anything to eat, excepting the walnuts, having been the whole time on my feet (unless I happened to fall over the fence, which I do not remember to have done) and wading in and being wet with the water. . . . I rolled myself up in my innocency, lay down on the leaves and forgot my misery till morning.”
As winter approached, General Howe increasingly turned his attention to opening secure supply routes from New York to occupied Philadelphia. At present the British were landing supplies at Head of Elk, Maryland, and marching them fifty miles to Philadelphia, a route vulnerable to American raids. A safer alternative was to bring British supply ships up the Delaware River. But the Americans had established a network of forts along the Delaware to make it impassable to British ships. Howe resolved to destroy it.
British forces had captured the southernmost fort on the New Jersey side of the Delaware, and British land and naval batteries had laid siege throughout October to the two most important forts, Fort Mercer in Red Bank and Fort Mifflin, on an island in the Delaware, just below its confluence with the Schuylkill River (where Philadelphia International Airport is located today). Washington dispatched two Connecticut regiments, including Martin’s, to reinforce them.
They marched through the night, as they were often made to, barefoot, poorly clothed, tired, hungry, and cold, until they “could proceed no further from sheer hunger and fatigue.” They crossed the Delaware at Bristol, Pennsylvania. At the end of a three days’ march, having eaten meals of rotten beef one night and a goose wing the next, Martin arrived at the army’s encampment in the village of Woodbury, New Jersey. From there, in the last week of October, he and the other able-bodied soldiers of the two Connecticut regiments deployed to Fort Mifflin, which lay on an island surrounded by a swamp that Martin describes as “nothing more than a mudflat.”
The fort itself was hardly picturesque. In a colorful description of its wretchedness and vulnerability to British artillery, Martin disparaged “the pen I was confined in,” a “fort it could not with propriety be called.” The historian Thomas McGuire called it “a hodgepodge of stone and mud; of logs and ship’s spars and pine rafts set in mud; of ramparts and dikes filled with more mud.”
The history of the American Revolution often seems to abound in improbable coincidences. Built before the revolution by a British Army engineer, Captain John Montresor, Fort Mifflin’s fate was again in its creator’s hands, for Montresor had been assigned the duty of destroying it.
The defense of Fort Mifflin was Martin’s worst experience in the war. He devotes more pages of his narrative to his sufferings there than he does to any other battle. Fifty years later the memory of it still embittered him. “In the cold month of November,” he begins, “without provisions, without clothing, not a scrap of either shoes or stockings to my feet or legs, and in this condition to endure a siege in such a place as that, was appalling in the highest degree.”
The siege had begun on September 26 and didn’t end until November 15, two weeks after Martin’s regiment reinforced its beleaguered defenders, who throughout the siege never numbered more than five hundred. Martin mistakenly remembered the first attack on Mifflin he experienced beginning on the night of October 22. It was actually an attack on Mercer by a Hessian force of two thousand infantry and an artillery battalion. It was repulsed with staggering losses by the fort’s two hundred American defenders and the entangling, at times impenetrable network of sharpened tree branches they had constructed, called “abatis.” Two British warships, the Augusta and the Merlin, were also lost in the failed attack, caught in the chevaux-de-frise, a marine abatis of long wooden poles with sharp metal tips, and destroyed in the morning by cannons from both Mercer and Mifflin. Martin recalled the fate of the Augusta being the result of a failed attack on Mifflin.
The attack on Mifflin was an ongoing affair, a daily bombardment of shell and shot, with little shelter available to its defenders. Martin describes the barracks at Mifflin being particularly dangerous: “It was as much as a man’s life was worth to enter them, the enemy often directing their shot at them in particular.” The men slept little if at all. Martin claims he never slept a minute through the entire siege. There were those who were so fatigued they went into the barracks to sleep a little, but “it seldom happened they all came out again alive.”
The soldiers worked through the night rebuilding the works the British batteries leveled during the day, steeling themselves for the rain of grapeshot from British mortars. The only place Martin recalls being safe enough to grab a few moments’ rest was a ditch between the fort’s eastern wall and a palisade facing away from the British batteries. But the fort’s engineer, a French officer named Fleury, “a very austere man,” kept them at their labors. When they tried to slip away to their hiding place, Martin sadly recounts, Colonel Fleury would “come to the entrance and call us out. He had always his cane in his hand, and woe betided him he could get a stroke at.”
Martin counted five British batteries with six heavy guns each on the Jersey shore, as well as three mortar batteries, and another battery of heavy guns higher up the river, all of them hammering away at Mifflin night and day. Soldiers can become inured to ceaseless terrors, and some will acquire a sort of shell-shocked indifference to their circumstances. The Americans had one 32-pound cannon in the fort but no shot for it. The British also had a 32-pounder, with an ample supply of solid shot, which they regularly fired at the fort’s parade ground. The fort’s artillery officers decreed that any soldier who managed somehow to get hold of one of the fired cannonballs would receive a slug of rum. “I have seen 20 to 50 men standing on the parade waiting with impatience the coming of the shot, which would often be seized before its motion had fully ceased,” Martin recalled, “and conveyed off to our gun to be sent back to its former owners. When the lucky fellow had swallowed his rum, he would return to wait for another.”
At dawn on November 14 the British commenced a final daylong artillery barrage in preparation for storming the fort. In addition to their seven land-based gun batteries and three mortars, Martin counted nine British ships bringing their guns to bear on Mifflin, including six sixty-four-gun ships of the line and a thirty-six-gun frigate. If his memory is correct, a total of 480 land and naval guns, as well as the three mortars, fired on Fort Mifflin in a single day. Some officers tried to count how many guns were fired every minute, “but it was impossible; the fire was incessant.” Mifflin had become a hell that would disturb the sleep of its survivors for the rest of their lives.
The soldiers manned their posts on the palisades, “ordered to defend to the last extremity.” Martin saw one man, who had climbed a flagstaff to raise a signal flag, cut in half as he descended. He saw five men manning one cannon “cut down by a single shot.” Others were “split like fish to be broiled.” The dead and wounded were too numerous to count. “Our men were cut down like cornstalks,” he remembered.
By that afternoon all the fort’s guns had been silenced despite a brief decrease in the volume of British fire as their ships battled several American ships that had attempted to come to Mifflin’s res
cue. “If ever destruction was complete, it was here,” Martin wrote. The fort’s grounds were “as completely ploughed as a field,” all its buildings “hanging in broken fragments.” At sundown the cannonade ceased, and the Americans, having little left to defend and no guns to defend it with, prepared their escape before the British stormed the fort. As the survivors made their way to the wharves, Martin looked for his closest friend in the army and found him “lying in a long line of dead men.”
After most of the defenders took what supplies could be carried and abandoned the fort, Martin stayed behind as one of a party of soldiers ordered to torch anything left that would burn. As he was working, some of the British ships were near enough that he could hear soldiers saying they would “give it to the damned rebels in the morning.” After the last of Mifflin’s defenders had trooped to the wharves, where flatboats waited to ferry them across the river, the mounting flames consuming the battered fort so illuminated the river that Martin and his comrades could be plainly seen by the British, who immediately fired their guns at them. Miraculously they made it across unharmed. Five days later Fort Mercer was destroyed, and the Delaware was opened to British supply ships.
Martin ends his account “of as hard and fatiguing job . . . as occurred during the Revolutionary War” with an observation that has appeared in many histories of the war. It is a lament common to soldiers of every nation in every war and quite likely the inspiration for his book.
I was at the siege and capture of Lord Cornwallis, and the hardships of that were no more to be compared with this than the sting of a bee is to the bite of a rattlesnake. But there has been but little notice taken of it; the reason of which is there was no Washington, Putnam or Wayne there. Had there been, the affair would have been extolled to the skies. No, it was only a few officers and soldiers who accomplished it in a remote quarter of the army. Such circumstances and such troops generally get but little notice taken of them, do what they will.
What is it soldiers expect from those whose lives and liberty they defend? Not fame and no more in the way of material compensation than the modest benefits they are promised. Few veterans of the Revolutionary War would receive in their lifetime the acclaim or compensation they deserved. But they must have had hopes that their countrymen would make good on that most basic obligation to them: a simple understanding of their sacrifice and appreciation of its contribution to the character of their country and the history of their times. Yet in that expectation too, as Martin’s complaint makes clear, they were often disappointed.
After the loss of the Delaware forts, Martin’s regiment rejoined the main army as it marched and countermarched to little effect in the weeks before it encamped for the winter. As winter came on, the soldiers’ accumulating miseries left them, in Martin’s words, “as starved and as cross and ill-natured as curs.” He writes of envying a squirrel he watched starve to death: “He got rid of his misery soon. He did not live to starve piecemeal six or seven years.” He mocks a Thanksgiving meal decreed by Congress that followed two or three days without any rations and amounted to nothing more than a small portion of rice and vinegar. “The army was not only starved but naked,” he complains. “The greatest part were not only shirtless and barefoot but destitute of all other clothing, especially blankets.” It is in this condition that they entered winter quarters at Valley Forge.
Martin arrived at Valley Forge on December 18 having had little or nothing to eat for days and “perishing with thirst.” He couldn’t find water in the camp, hadn’t the strength to build a shelter, and worried that the entire army would freeze to death. He feared that were the British to attack then, the revolution would be finished. “But a kind and holy Providence took more notice and better care of us than did the country in whose service we were wearing away our lives.”
He had been there for two nights with nothing more to eat than half a small pumpkin, when he was warned that in the morning he would be ordered to march again. “I never heard a summons to duty with so much disgust before or since as I did that.” But the summons proved to be fortuitous. He was ordered to join a foraging party that scoured the Pennsylvania countryside for the army’s provisions that terrible winter. The duty wasn’t onerous. They were headquartered in a little village and were comfortably sheltered and fed well. When Martin wasn’t hunting and collecting provisions, he was at liberty to come and go as he pleased. “I had had enough to eat and been under no restraint,” he recalled. “I had picked up a few articles of comfortable summer clothing. . . . Our lieutenant had never concerned himself about us.”
He remained in these comparatively pleasant circumstances until late April 1778, when he rejoined his regiment at Valley Forge. Nearly a quarter of the eleven thousand soldiers encamped there had perished during the worst suffering that winter. Martin returned in time to join the Continentals as they learned the drills, tactics, and exacting discipline of the Prussian military system under the tutelage of Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, who was turning the ragtag, wasted remnant of a fighting force into a professional army.
In May Martin marched across the Schuylkill River to within twelve miles of Philadelphia with three thousand soldiers under the command of the Marquis de Lafayette. The British, having got wind of the advance, marched out to meet them and nearly trapped the Americans. But Lafayette recognized their vulnerability and skillfully got his force safely away, earning the praise of Martin, who wasn’t normally given to complimenting the officers he served under. The young general “knew what he was about,” Martin wrote. “He was not deficient in either courage or conduct.”
That year’s summer would be remembered as especially warm. In late June, as Martin marched through New Jersey to Monmouth Courthouse (where the town of Freehold is located today), oppressive heat with temperatures reaching 100 degrees was added to the usual miseries of hunger and fatigue. General Howe had asked to be relieved of command that winter and had been replaced by Sir Henry Clinton. The new British commander in chief was ordered to evacuate Philadelphia. His troops started to move in the third week of June, as fatigued by the miserable heat as were the Americans. Washington determined to strike them as they slowly progressed to New York.
Martin marched with an advance guard of Continentals, ordered to harass General Clinton’s retreating columns while Washington and his generals decided where and whether to force a major engagement. The officer who argued most insistently against bringing the British to battle was General Charles Lee, a surly, eccentric though experienced officer. Lee had served as a soldier of fortune for several European monarchs and was notorious for his wanton lifestyle and his temper. He was convinced there was not another officer of his caliber in the Continental Army, including Washington. He argued that it was foolhardy to confront the British in New Jersey. He thought it foolhardy ever to risk a major engagement with the British, believing Americans were incapable of winning a set battle despite their recently acquired, well-drilled professionalism at the hands of von Steuben.
Despite Lee’s reservations and arrogance, Washington gave him command of a force of five thousand men, including Martin’s detachment, and ordered him to attack the rear of the British force and keep it engaged until Washington could bring up the rest of the army.
Dipping again into the meager supply of praise he reserved for officers, Martin recalled having been inspired on the eve of battle by the officer who commanded his “platoon,” a captain in a Rhode Island regiment, who told them they had “been wanting to fight. Now you shall have fighting enough before the night.” Even the sick and injured were stirred by their captain’s call to arms and refused to remain behind. Remembering with pride the excitement he felt in that moment, Martin called the captain “a fine brave man. . . . He feared nobody nor nothing.”
The attack began on June 28, and it would soon be clear that General Lee feared somebody. The morning broke hotter and more humid than the previous day. Men on foot and horseback stripped to the waist for relief from the ro
asting sun. Before the day ended many men and horses, British and American, who had survived musket ball and bayonet would perish from heatstroke. Martin’s company was working its way through a dense wood late in the morning toward the sound of cannon and musket fire. They came into the clear onto a field that was a “trifle hotter” than a “heated oven” and fell back to the woods because “it was almost impossible to breathe.” A moment later they were ordered to retreat.
They hadn’t gone far when Washington himself rode by and demanded to know who had ordered them to retreat. “General Lee,” he was informed. “Damn him,” Washington exclaimed. “It was certainly very unlike him,” Martin writes, “but he seemed in the instant to be in a very great passion.”
That he was.
Lee had given his officers hardly any orders, much less a battle plan, before Americans struck the British in an uncoordinated attack, with some units fighting and others unengaged. General Clinton had anticipated the attack and detached forces from his column to reinforce his rearguard, commanded by General Charles Cornwallis. Confusion overtook the American ranks. Not knowing whether to advance or retreat, they prudently chose the latter. Lee did nothing to impose order on his soldiers, and their retreat turned into a rout.
The scene Washington surveyed as he rode up beside his diffident subordinate shocked him. Seeing his ranks completely broken, he demanded of Lee, “What is the meaning of this, sir? I desire to know the meaning of this disorder and confusion!”
“The troops,” Lee replied, “would not stand the British bayonets.”
“You damn poltroon,” Washington countered, “you never tried them.”
Washington did as much violence to Lee as words could do. According to an eyewitness, he “swore on that day until the leaves shook on the trees.” The situation was desperate, however, and he couldn’t give any more attention to the insufferable Lee, whom he ordered to leave the field.