by John McCain
He spurred his white charger into the thick of retreating soldiers, shouting at them, “Stand fast . . . and receive your enemy. The [army] is advancing to support you.” While British cannonballs tore up the earth all around him, he was everywhere at once, ordering, frightening, and inspiring his soldiers to turn and fight. His horse collapsed from exhaustion, but he quickly mounted another, impervious to the enveloping danger. He was as magnificent on that day as on any day of the long war for independence. “Never have I beheld such a superb man,” Lafayette remembered.
He rode back to where Martin and the New England troops had stopped their retreat and ordered them to make a stand behind a fence and keep the advancing British busy until the artillery formed a line. This they did, retreating only after what seemed to Martin to be the entire British force had charged them. Martin claimed they had been ordered by their officers to withdraw. The British brought their cannon to bear on the American artillery, but the Americans won the duel, leaving the British guns “mostly disabled” and forcing the British to fall back. During the cannonade Martin saw Mary McCauley, the famous Molly Pitcher, help man one of the guns, and admired her pluck when, after a British cannonball passed between her legs and tore away her petticoat, she appeared unconcerned by the near miss. Martin remembered her remarking only that it was “a good thing it did not pass a little higher, for in that case it might have carried away something else.”
Some of the outgunned British sought shelter from the heat in an orchard. Martin and his fellow New Englanders were ordered to charge their position. “You are the boys I want to assist in driving those rascals from yon orchard,” a New Hampshire colonel informed them. The British began retreating before the Americans could reach them. The same New Hampshire colonel ordered some of the troops, including Martin, to chase after them and keep them engaged until the rest of the New Englanders could catch them. “We overtook the enemy just as they were entering a meadow,” Martin recalled. “They were retreating in line, though in some disorder.” Martin singled out a British soldier “and took my aim directly between his shoulders.” It is the only time in his narrative that he mentions trying to kill someone, and fifty years later he seemed to regret it. “He was a good mark; being a broad-shouldered fellow. What became of him I know not; the fire and smoke hid him from my sight. One thing I know . . . I took as deliberate aim at him as ever I did any game in my life. But after all I hope I did not kill him, although I intended to at the time.”
When the retreating British reached a defensible position they turned and began exchanging fire with the pursuing New Englanders. Martin watched as a British cannonball cleaved an American officer’s leg at the thigh. Soon, though, the British were forced to resume their retreat. The Americans fired a final volley, and the engagement ended. “We then laid ourselves down under the fences and bushes to take a breath,” Martin wrote, “for we had need of it; I presume everyone has heard of the heat that day, but none can realize it that did not experience it.”
Martin helped carry the captain who had lost his leg to the field surgeon. His part in the battle of Monmouth Courthouse ended there, although the battle continued throughout the day and “the troops remained on the field all night with the Commander in Chief.” Darkness ended the fighting with both sides still on the field. But the British withdrew during the night, while the Americans remained with the man who had prevented their defeat and inspired them to fight the British to a standstill. Both sides had suffered heavy casualties, but the British had lost more men. Evidence of the Continental Army’s newly acquired discipline, ability, and resolve was plain for both sides to see.
Monmouth Courthouse was the last major battle of the war in the north. The British concentrated their efforts thereafter on conquering the south. But in that last major engagement, Joseph Martin and his Continentals, malnourished and exhausted though they were, had fought to a draw the best the British Empire could field. The next morning each of them received a drink of rum as a reward, though nothing to eat.
Washington followed the British and moved the main army back to New York. The Americans crossed the Hudson River at King’s Ferry and marched on to White Plains, where Martin’s regiment had fought two years earlier. Revisiting the battlefield, Martin was surprised to discover the skeletal remains of Hessians who had fallen at White Plains littering the ground, having been dug up, he assumed, by rooting dogs and wild hogs. The sad sight prompted him to offer a succinct and especially affecting definition of the cause for which he fought. There are more elaborate explanations of what liberty meant to the men who fought in the revolution, but never one that conveyed its essence more sensitively than the one Martin provides as he contemplates the inglorious fate of his fallen foes:
Poor fellows! They were left unburied in a foreign land; they had, perhaps, as near and dear friends to lament their sad destiny as the Americans who lay buried near them. But they should have kept home; we should then never have gone after them to kill them in their own country. But, the reader will say, they were forced to come and be killed here; forced by their rulers who have absolute power and death over their subjects. Well then, reader, bless a kind Providence that has made such a distinction between your condition and theirs. And be careful too that you do not allow yourself ever to be brought to such an abject, servile and debased condition.
MARTIN WAS NOT YET eighteen years old. He suffered a worse fate in the winter of 1779 than he had the previous winter, when he was excused from the agonies of Valley Forge. The winter at Morristown was the worst of the war, with the coldest temperatures of the century and heavy snowfalls; food, adequate clothing, and warm shelter extremely scarce; and the men, as usual, denied the pay they were promised. “We were absolutely, literally starved,” he recalled. He was reduced to eating birch bark, and others to roasting their shoes, if they had any.
By the spring of 1780, before the fighting season resumed, they began to mutiny. They had been pushed beyond endurance. With Congress insensible to their situation and a lack of support from too many of their countrymen whose hearts were hardened to their plight, they “saw no other alternative,” in Martin’s words, “but to starve to death or break up the army. . . . We had borne as long as human nature could endure.” There were only three major mutinies in the Continental Army during eight years of war. The Connecticut line mutiny of May 25, 1780, in which Martin participated, was the first.
During an evening roll call, grumbling in Martin’s regiment swelled to insubordination and then to open revolt when an officer traded abuse with one of the men. The men refused to leave the parade ground and, with their arms shouldered, formed into lines. Another regiment joined them. Though they had no clear plan of how they would proceed, they marched to where two other regiments were camped a couple hundred yards away to enlist them in their demonstration.
The officers of the two Connecticut regiments that were now mustering on their parade grounds tried to prevent their men from taking their arms with them. In an ensuing scuffle the officer in command of the 6th Connecticut, Colonel Return Jonathan Meigs, was stabbed with a bayonet and severely wounded. Martin, who admired Meigs, believed the wound was an accident. Accidental or not, the colonel’s misfortune may have served to cool somewhat the passions of the rebellious regiments.
Martin’s regiment started to return to their camp when one of the men shouted for them to stop. Some officers dragged the hothead out of the ranks, but before they could abuse him further they were forced at bayonet point to release him. When the men reached camp they reformed lines. An officer tried to plead and coax them into dispersing, falsely promising them at one point that the army had just that day received a large herd of cattle. A lieutenant colonel in the 4th Connecticut gave the order for his ranks to shoulder arms. He was ignored, which caused him, in Martin’s description, to fall into “a violent passion” before storming back to his quarters. Eventually the officers gave up and returned to their huts.
Most of the men remaine
d on the parade ground. They were approached by a colonel from the Pennsylvania line whom they all admired and who mollified them a little by reminding them that their officers shared their privations. He “had not a sixpence,” he told them, “to purchase a partridge that was offered me the other day.” Eventually the mutiny, if it could fairly be called that since the Connecticut troops never formed a clear plan to do anything more than demonstrate their anger and desperation, subsided. Martin summed up their plight with the dark humor at which he was so adept: “We therefore still kept upon the parade in groups, venting our spleen at our country and government, then at our officers, and then at ourselves for our imbecility in staying there and starving in detail for an ungrateful people who did not care what became of us, so they could enjoy themselves while we were keeping a cruel enemy from them.”
But as ill used and aggrieved as they were, they remained “unwilling to desert the cause of our country.” This hard-pressed loyalty, more than battles won or lost or individual heroics, was the proof of their patriotism, a more durable and honest patriotism than most possess. It cannot be diminished by their complaints and resentment, not even by insubordination and near mutiny. It is a patriotism supported by the rarest of resolves: they would not betray their country’s cause even when they believed their country had betrayed them.
MARTIN’S SERVICE WOULD CONTINUE until the war officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The hardships and dangers he endured did not abate until after the Battle of Yorktown. He fought in other battles. He survived various illnesses, including frequent bouts of dysentery caused by rotten meat he consumed. He starved year after year. He froze in the winters and boiled in the summers. He watched close friends die. He never saw his grandparents again; when he returned home for a short leave early in 1781, he found his grandmother had died and his grandfather had moved away to live with one of his sons.
He was nearly killed while exchanging insults across the Harlem River with some British cavalry, when an enemy soldier in a nearby house fired a shot at him. He saw the musket flash and instinctively dropped to the ground, and the ball passed just over him. The British thought they had killed him, but he jumped to his feet, slapped his backside at the enemy, and took off. Had he not moved when he did, “the ball would have gone directly through my body,” he recalled. “But ‘a miss is as good as a mile’ as the proverb says.” That same afternoon he was talking with a few other soldiers when a British sniper took a shot at them: “[The] ball passed between our noses which were not more than a foot apart.”
Not many days later he received his first and only wound of the war when a dozen Continentals were surprised by a larger party of loyalist troops. The two sides traded fire until the patriots ran off with the loyalists on their heels. They came to a fence made of fallen trees. Martin was the last to climb over it and caught his foot in one of the trees. He was still struggling to free himself when the enemy reached him. The loyalist commander drew his sword and slashed him below the knee, “which laid the bone bare.” Martin gave his foot one last desperate tug and managed to get free, leaving behind his shoe. He heard the loyalist who had cut him call him by name and urge him to surrender. He was a childhood friend who had served in Martin’s first regiment and had deserted early in the war. None of the loyalists fired their muskets at him as he ran, though he was within their range. Martin was never sure if their forbearance was an act of mercy from his former friend or if they just didn’t have time to reload their muskets before he ran out of range.
Martin left his Connecticut regiment in 1780, when he was selected to join a newly formed corps of miners and sappers and promoted to the rank of sergeant, an assignment that reflected the high regard his officers had for him. It was in this capacity that he found himself in Philadelphia in early September 1781, where he received his wages for the first time since 1776, with gold borrowed from the French after some soldiers refused to leave the rebel capital until they had been paid. He boarded a schooner there and sailed down the Delaware River, past the remnants of Fort Mifflin, where he had suffered two terrifying weeks in 1777, to Wilmington, Delaware. From there he marched overland to the north end of the Chesapeake Bay. During a brief halt in their march, he and his sergeant major sat on a fence that stood atop a steep bank. Their company’s captain, whom Martin disliked, sat on the other end. Noticing the fence’s flimsy construction, the sergeant major winked at Martin and both men began to wiggle the fence until it collapsed, tumbling the officer down the bank.
When they reached the Chesapeake they boarded another ship and sailed to the James River and then on to Williamsburg, Virginia. There they joined a corps under the command of Lafayette and marched for Yorktown, a tobacco port named for the river that ran beneath its bluffs. General Clinton had ordered Lord Cornwallis to construct defensible fortifications for his nearly eight thousand British and Hessian troops along the deep-water port, from where, if need be, the British fleet could evacuate them.
But on September 5 that fleet was defeated and chased back to New York by a French fleet commanded by the Comte de Grasse, recently arrived from the West Indies. By the last week of the month the British were surrounded on water by de Grasse’s fleet and on land by eight thousand Continentals, an equal number of French troops commanded by the Comte de Rochambeau, and over three thousand militia.
Rather than suffer heavy casualties by storming the British fortifications, Washington resolved to bombard the British into submission and ordered a series of parallel trenches dug where he could bring up his artillery and lay siege. Martin and his fellow miners and sappers were given the assignment. “We had holed him,” Martin wrote, referring to the British, “and now nothing remained but to dig him out.”
As they were about their work one dark, rainy night, they were approached by a tall man in a long overcoat, who “talked familiarly with us a few minutes.” Before he left, he warned the men that were they captured by the enemy, not to tell them who they were. The British would treat them like spies and refuse them quarter. The stranger returned a short time later with a company of engineers, who addressed him as “Your Excellency,” and Martin and his comrades discovered they had just been amiably chatting with their commander in chief.
Their work was undiscovered until the first line of trenches was nearly finished; too late the British began firing at them. The batteries were brought up at noon the following day, and the guns all fired at once. “It was a warm day for the British,” as Martin described it. The bombardment lasted several days, until the enemy’s forward guns were destroyed, after which Martin and his fellow sappers began work on a second, parallel line of trenches.
Under fire from British redoubts one night, the Americans decided to storm them, and four hundred soldiers commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton made the assault. Martin’s company was supplied with hatchets to cut away the abatis that lay in their way. A brief but bloody battle ensued, and Martin was exposed to a fierce barrage of British shells and grenades, his friends falling dead or seriously wounded at his side. Having cleared the abatis, he joined the assault on one of the redoubts armed with his hatchet.
By the time Martin and his sappers finished the second line of trenches, Cornwallis asked for a cease-fire to negotiate the terms of his surrender. A day later the American army stood at attention and watched as the British army marched out of their fortifications and stacked their arms.
After the surrender the French force remained at Yorktown, and the Continental Army returned to New York. Martin’s corps remained behind for a few weeks as winter approached and cold rains fell. Lacking tents or any shelter they slept in the elements. Eventually they boarded schooners and sailed north, disembarked in Maryland, and marched overland from there. They stayed two weeks in Philadelphia before marching to Burlington, New Jersey, where they quartered for the winter in a “large, elegant house.”
With the war for independence effectively won, Martin looked forward to a more com
fortable winter than he had spent since the war began.
NEARLY TWO YEARS WOULD pass before the Treaty of Paris was signed and the war officially ended. Martin had more adventures before him, and more hardships too. He was ordered to leave winter headquarters and take two men with him to find and bring back a deserter. He took his time and never did manage to locate the fugitive, but he spent a number of nights enjoying the hospitality of families residing in the various towns he passed through, marveling at the change in civilian attitudes now that the country’s independence was in sight. During previous encounters the Continentals had often been treated with disdain, suspicion, and sometimes outright hostility by people whose rights they were fighting to secure. They were begrudged food and other provisions, and often had to take it by force. They were given shelter reluctantly, usually only when demanded, accompanied by meager if any hospitality to underscore how greatly private citizens resented the army’s demands and how broadly they distrusted standing armies, be they British or American.
Now Martin and his friends were plied with food and drink, regaled with stories, and comfortably bedded in one household after another. They were conquering heroes. However, this benefaction too would prove temporary as the old prejudice against a standing army returned to the new republic in the years of peace ahead.
He contracted yellow fever that winter, and it nearly killed him. He was placed in a hospital with a number of sick and dying men, and he lost all his hair. There were no army physicians available to attend them, and “the apothecary’s stores in the Revolutionary army were as ill furnished as any others.” A local doctor treated him, and Martin credited his care and compassion with saving his life.