Proceed, Sergeant Lamb

by Robert Graves

  To be brief, in September 1780, Major André secretly met General Arnold near Fort Lafayette, and there arranged and settled everything; but by some accident was prevented from returning to the ship that had brought him up the river under a flag of truce. He therefore returned on horseback by a roundabout way, with a safe conduct from General Arnold made out in the feigned name of ‘John Anderson’. He had the plans of West Point, and a Detail of the state of the forces there, hid in his stockings. He passed safely over Pine’s Bridge, the same that I had passed in my escape to New York two years before; but, near Tarrytown, came upon a party of eight men gambling under a tulip-tree by the road-side. One of them was dressed in stolen British uniform and Major André concluded that he was among friends; for he had passed over the Croton River, then considered the boundary between the British and American sides of the Debateable Ground. He acknowledged that he was a British officer on important business and asked them to assist him safely to King’s Bridge. But they proved to be American Skinners, nominally members of the Westchester militia. They were here awaiting the return of some friends who had gone to sell stolen cattle to the Cowboys. When they declared themselves, he altered his tone and told them that he also was in the American service, but had pretended to be British as a ruse to get him through; he then produced General Arnold’s pass. ‘Damn Arnold’s pass,’ they said. The truth was that they wanted money and his first introduction of himself as British afforded them an excuse for ‘skinning’ him. They proceeded to rob him of his two watches (silver and gold), and a few guineas; and then stripped him of his riding boots, which were a very valuable commodity in the revolutionary lines. They thus accidentally came across the papers hid in the stockings, and pulled them out, believing them to be paper-currency. Their leader, the only one of them who could read, cried out: ‘A spy, by God!’ Major André then grew alarmed and offered them a thousand guineas between the party if they would bring him safe to King’s Bridge. They debated whether to do so: but either they distrusted his ability to provide so great a sum at short notice, or feared that, once in safety, he would go back on the bargain. They therefore concluded to bring him back into their own lines, in the hope of being rewarded for the capture of a spy; but were equally unaware of the worth of their prize as innocent of any true patriotic spirit—being Skinners, not regular soldiers.

  Major André, pretending indignation at his detention, desired the American officer before whom he was brought to inform General Arnold that John Anderson had been arrested with General Arnold’s own pass; which was granted. General Arnold, on receipt of this report, abandoned everything. He leapt upon a horse and was soon at the river, where his own barge was waiting with its crew; in this he hurried downstream, with a white flag, to the British ship which was waiting for Major André, and so came safe away.

  ‘Whom can we trust now?’ cried General Washington in despair when the news reached him, and the shock was very great; for it seems that he himself was to have inspected West Point about the time of its proposed abandonment to our forces and would therefore have been seized. Moreover, he had shown such favour to General Arnold, notwithstanding all that had been whispered against that strange man by his enemies in Congress, that he now stood suspect of being himself concerned in the treason.

  The unfortunate Major André had been persuaded by General Arnold to discard his regimentals for the purpose of his ride; and, being under an assumed name, was therefore in the character of a spy. A court-martial by American and French generals sentenced him to death. They hoped thereby to oblige Sir Henry Clinton to give up General Arnold to their country’s vengeance, in exchange for Major André. But to do so was plainly not consistent with British honour. Sir Henry offered to barter the Major against six American colonels; but this was refused. General Arnold then himself proposed to Sir Henry that he might be permitted to ride out and surrender himself to General Washington in exchange for the man whom he had involuntarily betrayed to his death. Sir Henry replied: ‘Your proposal, Sir, does you great honour; but were Major André my own brother, I could not consent to such a transaction.’

  Every possible argument was tried upon General Washington to persuade him to save the Major’s life—appeals to his humanity, to his honour, to justice; rich promises; threats of retaliation against the Charleston traitors then in our hands. But nothing availed. The American people demanded a victim and, since General Arnold had escaped, this must be Major André. General Washington could not save the Major, even had he wished, nor even substitute an honourable fusillade for the disgrace of the gibbet. Unless he displayed the same ruthless fury as the rest of his countrymen, his own position would be knocked from under him; and he knew that there was none capable of replacing him as Commander-in-Chief. Moreover, General Greene, the Marquis de La Fayette and others, whether from private rancour against Arnold or a desire to appear as single-minded partisans of the cause of Liberty, were so insistent upon the disgraceful sentence being carried out that they seemed to be literally thirsting for Major André’s blood. General Washington therefore signed the death-warrant; and, to the extraordinary grief and horror of the whole British Army, the execution was carried out. It took place in the same manner exactly that I had described in my delirious vision, and at the very hour. No doubt the profound affection with which the Major had inspired me contributed to my vision, nor was I the only one so favoured. His sister and several other persons were warned in dreams of his melancholy fate. The officers and sergeants of the Royal Welch Fusiliers went into mourning for him, and so did several other regiments.

  As for the eight Skinners: they were rewarded by being each given a farm and a yearly pension of two hundred dollars for life. Three of them, one of whom was my faithless guide Isaac van Wart, were awarded silver Congressional medals inscribed Fidelity and (in Latin) Patriotism Triumphs. There is a popular stanza that runs something in this style:

  Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?

  If treason prospers, ’tis no longer treason.

  But for a succession of trivial accidents, Major André would have come safely back into the British lines; West Point would have been yielded up; and Benedict Arnold, playing the General Monk, might well have restored the Colonies, for a time at least, to their former allegiance and won the thanks of posterity. But it happened otherwise, and the cause of Liberty was revived by that excess of indignation which discovered treason excites in the breasts of lukewarm patriots. General Arnold was burned in effigy in towns and villages, often with obscene and disgusting circumstance; and every man who happened to bear the same surname as he, whether related to him or not, was obliged to change it, in order to quit himself of the odium that it now conveyed.

  About this time, we in the Carolinas suffered a great setback. We were waiting at Charlotte for the order to advance further into North Carolina and strike at Hillsborough, when news came that an unsuccessful attack by the enemy had been made on a post in Georgia, far to the south. Major Ferguson, with eleven hundred Loyalist militia and volunteers, was detached to intercept the enemy on their return. But he was himself intercepted by enemy forces of whose existence Lord Cornwallis was unaware—an army of three thousand backwoodsmen from across the Blue Mountains. Their anger had been stirred by the news that the Cherokee Indians, their bitterest enemies, were now on the war-path as King George’s allies. They had also been promised pay for their service in the unusual currency of human flesh—so many negroes, taken from the Tories, for each man according to his rank! At King’s Mountain a swarm of these rough, uncivilized men, armed with Deckard rifles, surrounded Major Ferguson’s people and shot them to pieces from behind trees and boulders; the Major himself was mortally wounded, and nearly half his force were either wounded or killed before the remainder clubbed their firelocks in surrender. The mountainy men hanged up a score of prisoners, and then returned home.

  This Major Ferguson was, after Major André, the most beloved officer in the Army and had the greatest power of any
to enlist Loyalists in our service. He was also the most remarkable marksman then living.

  A curious instance, by the bye, of the disparity of British and American ideas of honour and policy in warfare, is afforded by contrasting Colonel Daniel Morgan’s order for the concerted attempt upon General Fraser’s life, near Saratoga (which was carried out), with Major Ferguson’s adventure at the time of the Brandywine fighting in 1777. According to his own account, he was out scouting when he observed an American officer, remarkable for Hussar dress, pass slowly within a hundred yards of him, followed by another dressed in dark green with a large cocked hat and mounted on a bay. Major Ferguson ordered three good shots to steal near and fire at the horsemen; but ‘the idea disgusted me; I recalled the order’. Major Ferguson’s account continues: ‘In returning, the Hussar made a wide circuit, but the other passed within a hundred yards of us; upon which I advanced from the woods towards him. On my calling, he stopped, but after looking at me, he proceeded. I again drew his attention, but he slowly continued on his way and I was within that distance at which, in the quickest firing, I could have lodged half a dozen balls in or about him before he was out of my reach. I had only to determine; but it was not pleasant to fire at the back of an unoffending individual, who was acquitting himself very coolly at his duties; so I let him alone.’

  It was afterwards proved that the gentleman in the cocked hat was General Washington himself, the Hussar being a French aide-de-camp!

  Major Ferguson’s defeat at King’s Mountain obliged us to defer our hopes of conquest and retire back into South Carolina. It was as miserable a march as I remember, for retirement is never agreeable even in fine weather, and it now rained for several days without intermission. Lord Cornwallis was sick of a fever and the command devolved on Lord Rawdon. We had no tents with us, and at night, when we encamped, it was in the wet and stinking woods; nor for several days had we any rum but only water as thick as puddle. The roads were over our shoes in mud and water. Sometimes we had bread but no beef, sometimes beef but no bread; seldom both together. On two occasions we were without food for fully forty-eight hours. For another five days we lived upon unground Indian corn, two and a half heads being a man’s daily ration. At first we merely parched it before a fire; but soon we discovered a better way of treating this hearty but difficult grain. Two men of every mess converted their canteens into rasps by punching holes in them with a bayonet. The ear was then scraped against the rasp and the flour that resulted was made into hoe-cakes, baked on our entrenching tools. We were in a very weak state, I can assure my readers. When we came to a river called Sugar Creek, swollen with a rapid flood, and the steep clay banks as slippery as ice, we could not get the wagons over except by using as draught-animals the Loyalist militia that remained to us. They were our chief reliance in this retreat, as knowing the country and not only protecting us from treachery and surprise but acting as foragers. They also had the difficult art of driving black cattle into the open from the recesses of swamps.

  Up to our breasts in yellow water, we forded the Catawba River which at that spot was nearly half a mile over. Fortunately our crossing was not opposed by hidden riflemen. So, after a journey of a fortnight, in which I am proud to say that the men never even murmured against the hardships they underwent, we came to the small town of Wynnsborough, which lies between the Catawba and Congaree Rivers; and there remained for the rest of the year 1780.

  CHAPTER XI

  How did the war go for our arms at the close of 1780? The French alliance was so far of no assistance to the Americans, and the six thousand white-uniformed Frenchmen who had failed to relieve Charleston were landed at Newport, Rhode Island, and there blockaded by the British Atlantic fleet. A second division of Frenchmen, who were to have followed, were locked up in Brest by the British Channel fleet. General Washington’s troops found Congress a cruel stepmother in the matter of pay and supplies; they were ragged and half-starved and lived from hand to mouth. Lately their condition had become worse, for General Nathaniel Greene was intrigued against by Samuel Adams and other Congressmen and forced to resign his post as Quartermaster-General. General Greene wrote to General Washington that he had ‘lost all confidence in the justice and rectitude of Congress. Honest intentions and faithful service are but a poor shield against men without principles, honesty or modesty.’ The troops had not been paid for one whole year even in Continental currency, and those whose time had expired were refused discharge. In the New Year there was a serious mutiny at Morristown in Pennsylvania: thirteen hundred Pennsylvania Ulstermen marching towards Philadelphia, under the command of three sergeants, with the resolve to force Congress to pay them. Before they set out, they had been ridden against by their officers armed with swords, and had killed one of them, a captain. They were met half-way with promises of redress and persuaded to return to duty. Another mutiny, of New Jersey men, was put down by shooting, and General Washington presently asked leave from Congress to raise the amount of lashes that might be awarded for such ill-behaviour to five hundred. Who were now the Bloody Backs?

  On the other hand, the war was bearing very heavily upon the spirits and pockets of the British people. Towards the end of August 1780 came exceedingly grave news. Our outward-bound East India and West India merchant fleets, sailing in company, had been convoyed by the Channel Fleet as far south as the north-western promontory of Spain. There the Admiral in command, obeying the explicit orders of the Earl of Sandwich, from Admiralty House, turned homewards; leaving the protection of this glittering prize to a single line-of-battle ship and two or three frigates. On the 9th of August, the convoy was intercepted by a combined Spanish and French fleet of great strength. The commodore of the escort being forbidden to engage an enemy that so greatly exceeded him in strength, abandoned the convoy to the enemy. Thus were lost forty-seven West India merchantmen and transports, with cargoes valued at £600,000; five large East Indiamen with coin, bullion and other valuables aboard to the amount of £1,000,000; also two thousand sailors, eight hundred passengers, twelve hundred soldiers, eighty thousand muskets; and an immense quantity of naval stores destined for Madras as a means of re-equipping our squadron in those waters that had been mauled in battle with the French. In the memory of the oldest man, the Royal Exchange at London had never presented so dull and melancholy an aspect as on the Tuesday afternoon when the notice of this double loss was issued by the Admiralty. No instance had ever been known in the mercantile annals of England where so many ships had been captured at once, nor where loss was recorded of above one-fourth the sum of this. In the same month news reached London that an unescorted Quebec fleet of fifteen ships had been met off the Banks of Newfoundland by an American frigate and two brigantine privateers. Only three of our ships escaped. This came as a very serious blow to the garrison and people of Quebec. I may here append that in the course of this war against the combined fleets of France, Spain, Holland and the United States we lost three thousand merchant ships captured or sunk, besides other naval damage.

  The fault for these calamities did not lie with our sailors or their captains. The Earl of Sandwich, alias ‘Jeremy Twitcher’, it has already been noted, had wickedly thrown away our command of the seas. He had starved the dockyards, lied to the House of Lords about the number of warships in commission, bullied and betrayed his admirals; and condemned the few lonely frigates still afloat to choose, in their encounters with the magnificent fleets of our enemies, between fighting against dismal odds or running for safety. Often enough they chose the former alternative, and sometimes snatched an unhoped-for victory. The names of Howe, Rodney, Hyde Parker and Keppel need no recommendation from my humble pen! Yet I must not omit mention of Sir George Collier’s feat at Penobscot Bay; for this glorious action (which by the spite of Lord Sandwich was acknowledged by no ringing of bells or other public acclamation—Sir George, indeed, being superseded in his American command and on his return left unemployed and unpromoted) struck directly against the Americans in their own wate
rs.

  Penobscot is a harbour on the wild northern coast of Massachusetts, lying in what is now known as the State of Maine. In the summer of 1779 a settlement of distressed Loyalists was there planted; and the erection of a fort begun by a few companies of the Eighty-Second and Seventy-Fourth Regiments. No sooner did the people of Boston receive news of this work than they determined to mar it. Twenty-four transports, containing three thousand troops, and nineteen warships, manned by two thousand sailors and mounting 324 guns—the whole constructed at a cost of near £2,000,000—were despatched to Penobscot. Yet our small garrison, posted behind slight works held off the Bostonians for near three weeks. Sir George Collier then sailed to the rescue with a squadron mounting no more than two hundred guns. The American ships formed a line of battle, but broke at the first attack and were driven up the Penobscot River. I have seen a copy of a letter written by the American military commander, General Solomon Lovell, to the following effect: ‘To give a description of this terrible day is out of my power—to see four British ships pursuing seventeen sail of our armed vessels, nineteen of which were stout ships; transports on fire, men of war blowing up, and as much confusion as can possibly be conceived.’ To be brief, none of all the American ships escaped capture or destruction, and those of the Bostonians who escaped to the shore found themselves a hundred miles from any base, and without a morsel of food. A grand argument then ensued between the sailors and soldiers, the latter accusing the former of cowardice, the former returning the insult, and, weapons being snatched up, sixty men fell in fratricidal battle. Hundreds more perished of famine or exhaustion on their march back through the wilderness to the settled parts of the province.