Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  Stand Forth, Ye Patriot!

  TEDDY ROOSEVELT LATER, MUCH LATER, CALLED HIM “A FILTHY LITTLE atheist.” He died a social outcast in the free nation he helped to create. His disinterred bones subsequently disappeared in England, the result of a shoddy court fight over an old enemy’s estate.

  But once upon a revolutionary time, the restless radical Thomas Paine was the man of the hour, the catalyst pamphleteer whose tract Common Sense summed up the grievances of the rebellious American colonies and laid out their future course in burning, idealistic terms.

  The sober Virginian George Washington was one who read Paine’s prose, pronouncing it “sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning.” Thomas Jefferson read it before settling down to his great work, the Declaration of Independence. Many other Patriots preparing for revolution also read it and applauded.

  But the little pamphlet may have had its greatest effect among the people. It was, after all, on its own front cover, “Addressed to the Inhabitants of America.” According to various reference works, it appeared either on January 8 or January 10, 1776. The Pennsylvania Evening Post dated January 9 referred to its publication and availability for purchase.

  No matter what the exact date, the forty-seven-page pamphlet had immediate impact on the seething colonies when it appeared under the imprimatur of Philadelphia printer R. Bell on Third Street.

  Sold for two shillings a copy, Common Sense achieved an estimated circulation of 120,000 in three months’ time, with 500,000 eventually sold altogether.

  “In view of the small population of the country at the time, these figures were phenomenal,” wrote the late historian and Jeffersonian scholar Dumas Malone in his book The Story of the Declaration of Independence.

  As for the pamphlet’s political effects, Malone called Tom Paine “the most important influence on the public mind” in the early months of 1776. Noting that Paine, a recent arrival from England, served as a catalyst agent for “more cautious minds,” Malone added: “The chief significance of this burning pamphlet lay in its call for immediate independence. Paine skillfully marshaled practical arguments but, like most agitators, he minimized difficulties for which responsible leaders had to allow.

  “In dealing with the constitutional controversy he may have made no points not already made by James Otis, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and others; but he went beyond the specific questions at issue to make a powerful attack on monarchy as an institution, the British monarchy in particular, and to set forth in glowing language the virtues of a republic.”

  Also, according to Malone, “No one until then had so clearly perceived or so strikingly described the historic mission of America as the hope and asylum of free peoples.”

  And Malone quoted an entire passage:

  O ye that love mankind. Ye that dare oppose not only the

  tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world

  is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round

  the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe

  regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her

  warning to depart. O receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an

  asylum for mankind.

  Another famous line from Common Sense was Paine’s declaration, “The sun never shined on a cause more just.” He also noted the illogic of an island (England) ruling a continent.

  But the restless journalist/political philosopher’s best-known single line came later, from his intermittent Crisis reports on the progress of the Revolution itself, reports that were read to the disheartened rebel troops and, allegedly, cheered them despite their physical deprivations. That line, from the first Crisis was, “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

  As it turned out, Paine’s own career and fortunes were also trying. Given a Loyalist’s farm property at New Rochelle, New York, after the Revolution, Paine spent two frustrating years seeking financial backing for his dream of constructing iron bridges. Unsuccessful in this country, he returned to his native England, where he was able to see one of his bridges built, but at a financial loss to himself.

  Still restless and rebellious, he was also an apostle of the French Revolution. His second major work, The Rights of Man, called upon the English people to overthrow their king and establish a republic.

  Fortunately, Paine was in France when the exasperated British tried him for treason and made him an outlaw. Like Washington, Hamilton, and James Madison, he had been made a French citizen, and in September 1792, he was elected to the French Convention.

  But Paine, during the guillotine’s reign of terror, apparently aroused the ire of Robespierre’s followers by vainly pleading for King Louis XVI’s life. Soon deprived of both his Assembly seat and his new French citizenship, he was thrown into prison. “Poor Paine, outlawed in England, was now arrested in France as an Englishman,” adds the venerable Dictionary of American Biography.

  James Monroe, the new American minister to France, came to his rescue in 1794 by claiming Paine as an American citizen.

  While in prison, however, Paine had begun his third major treatise, The Age of Reason, which earned him a reputation as an atheist for its attacks upon Christian “mythology.” Historians today, however, regard the English Quaker’s son as a deist whose unorthodox views scandalized his contemporaries of the eighteenth century.

  Late in life, Paine returned to America to spend his last seven years in Bordentown, New Jersey; New York City and nearby New Rochelle. Always poor, bohemian in dress, a heavy drinker, and intemperate enough to embroil himself in one political controversy after another, he spent those years as a social outcast.

  When he died in 1809, “consecrated ground was denied to the infidel,” notes the biographical dictionary. So Paine was buried in a corner of his New Rochelle farm.

  But not for long. In 1819, an old enemy, William Corbett, wishing to atone for his attacks upon Paine three decades earlier, “had the latter’s bones dug up, and took them back to England, intending to raise a great monument to the patriotic author of the Rights of Man,” says the biographical dictionary.

  “The monument was never erected, and on Corbett’s death in 1835, the bones passed into the hands of a receiver in probate.

  “The court refused to regard them as an asset, and, with the coffin, they were acquired by a furniture dealer in 1844, at which point they are lost to history.”

  No Retreat Really Necessary

  WITH ITS MIX OF SIEGE, REPEATED BATTLE, AND FEROCIOUS CIVIL WAR, ITS 137 engagements, its collection of colorful heroes and truly villainous villains, South Carolina was no place for the faint of heart during the American Revolution.

  For this is where Banastre Tarleton had his start, where the partisan leaders known as the “Gamecock” and “Swamp Fox” fought and roamed, where “Bloody Bill” Cunningham and the church-burning Major James Wemyss rode the countryside as well.

  South Carolina’s major city, Charleston, would be one of the last bastions in America for the British, but they paid dearly for the “privilege” of coming and going.

  Their first assault on the port city, launched in June 1776, came only as an afterthought and really was aimed at a single island in the harbor rather than Charleston itself. The resulting Battle of Sullivan’s Island produced the Palmetto state’s first heroes of the Revolution…and made the palmetto tree a “hero” of sorts as well.

  When General Sir Henry Clinton, Lord Cornwallis, Admiral Sir Peter Parker, and their respective forces came together at the mouth of the Cape Fear River in North Carolina for a major, Loyalist-supported Southern campaign, they saw that the Loyalist masses expected to join them would not be forthcoming after all. The recent Loyalist defeat at Moore’s Creek Bridge near Wilmington, North Carolina, had shattered Royalist hopes for a massive backlash against the rebellious Whigs and Patriots.

  Rather than leave Southern waters empty-handed, Parker persuaded Clinton to attack Sullivan’s Island on the east side o
f the harbor mouth at Charleston. According to Clinton’s memoirs, there was no intention to assault the port city itself. As he stated, neither the time of year nor the limited manpower at his disposal nor his orders would have allowed him to extend such a major effort at that point. But Sullivan’s Island and its incomplete Patriot fort looked like easy prey. “Sullivan’s Island, if it could be seized without much loss of time, might prove a very important acquisition,” Clinton wrote later.

  So it was that fifty or more British ships, laden with troops and cannon, appeared off the Charleston bar on June 1. The alarmed Patriots of the city naturally expected Charleston itself would be the British objective. The Continental Army’s Major General Charles Lee, British-born and a veteran military professional, had been stunned by the city’s incomplete and totally porous defenses. He made clear his total disregard for the attempts by homespun militia Colonel William Moultrie to fortify Sullivan’s Island, graphically predicting that it would be a “slaughter pen.”

  But South Carolina’s “president,” John Rutledge, wanted the key island defended, and Moultrie apparently had no qualms about facing British guns with his still-incomplete fortress walls of sand and sponge-like palmetto logs. He was also unperturbed at Lee’s concern that the island outpost afforded no line of retreat. “For my part,” Moultrie later wrote, “I never was uneasy on not having a retreat because I never imagined that the enemy could force me to that necessity.”

  In the days after the British first appeared on the horizon, Lee fanned feverish efforts to build defenses for the city while Clinton landed hundreds of troops on outlying Long Island, right behind Sullivan’s Island. A narrow band of water separated the two and, to the British, looked fordable. As Moultrie well knew, it wasn’t…and there were not enough boats available for Clinton to attempt an amphibious “leap” to overwhelm Moultrie’s own men.

  Moultrie naturally stationed a defensive line and a small artillery battery to the rear of his fort and across the water from Long Island to deal with any real threat from that quarter.

  When contrary winds at last died down, Admiral Parker sent forward nine of his warships, carrying 270 guns, to bombard the rustic American fort on Sullivan’s Island. It now was June 28.

  Moultrie’s defenders answered with salvos from their own twenty-one guns. The British could fire seven times faster than the Americans, but the American marksmanship was the superior of the two. Meanwhile, Clinton’s two thousand troops on Long Island could only watch helplessly as the daylong artillery exchange continued. Instead of eighteen inches deep, Clinton discovered that the channel (called the “Breach”) separating him from the back end of Sullivan’s Island was seven feet deep—far too deep for soldiers on foot. He tried a landing the morning of June 28 with the few boats he could round up, but Moultrie’s rear guard easily drove them off.

  As the spectacular cannonades between ships and the fort continued, all Charleston watched from ashore. Recalled Moultrie: “Thousands of our fellow citizens were looking on with anxious hopes and fears.”

  The booming exchange finally ended about 9:30 that night. In the eerie silence, the dark shapes of the British ships faded away, back to their earlier anchorage three miles toward the sea.

  Daylight revealed a battered, but still intact and functioning, fort on Sullivan’s Island, with only seventeen Americans killed and twenty more wounded. The British cannonballs had buried themselves in the sandy enclosures or glanced off the soft, absorbent palmetto logs without real penetration. According to a Hessian soldier who took part in the later siege of Charleston, the palmetto logs could not be “razed by any gun on earth. For the pointblank shot of a twenty-four pounder strikes not even two inches into the wood and does no damage other than leaving the impression of the ball.”

  The fleet, in the meantime, had suffered 64 men killed and 131 more wounded By various accounts, two of its warships had been crippled, three attempting a flank attack on Sullivan’s Island ran aground, with one of them left in such bad shape that the crew set it afire on the twenty-ninth and blew it up.

  While the fleet and Clinton’s men on Long Island lingered for a few more days, all finally packed up and sailed away, heading back to New York to join General Sir William Howe’s operations in the summer and fall of 1776. Charleston had been given a respite from British attack that would last for four years. The heroes of the day were Colonel Moultrie, later to be General Moultrie, and all of his men who stuck to their guns under the terrific British bombardment.

  One in particular, though, was to be honored by the Charleston citizenry—Sergeant William Jasper of Moultrie’s Second Regiment, who left the protective walls of the fort to retrieve the regimental flag after it had been shot away by the British. He then again raised the flag—consisting of a blue field behind the South Carolina crescent—on an artillery sponge staff.

  Also honored was Moultrie…by having the fort on Sullivan’s Island named after him: Fort Moultrie.

  Torturous Path to Allegiance

  A BRIGHT YOUNG MAN, A REAL COMER IN PHILADELPHIA AND PENNSYLVANIA politics, was the attorney Joseph Galloway, a great friend of Benjamin Franklin. Born about 1730, Galloway grew up not only to marry the daughter of the Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, but later to become Speaker himself.

  He was Franklin’s close ally in pre-Revolutionary efforts to turn Pennsylvania from the proprietorship of the Penn family to a royal colony. Taking an Assembly seat in the early 1760s, Galloway soon became a leader in the legislature—during Franklin’s lengthy sojourns in England, Speaker Galloway proved an effective leader of the Franklin forces on behalf of their absent mentor. He also was a close friend to his former law student, now royal governor of New Jersey, William Franklin, Ben’s son.

  Galloway had taken strong exception when mob violence broke out in reaction to the notorious Stamp Act. So strong, in fact, that he gathered an unofficial militia in Philadelphia to quash street demonstrations. But he also was an articulate voice noted for urging the British to recognize colonial aspirations to a greater role in their own governance.

  Therefore, he also would be a leading voice in the newly installed Continental Congress, meeting, it so happened, in his hometown of Philadelphia.

  Eventually he would be appointed to the committee struggling to define the rights of the colonies. It followed also that he should remain among the founders of America who were just then emerging in all the political turmoil swirling about on the eve of the Revolution…that he should have remained one of them, and yet he did not.

  Instead, in just two or three years, he would be a hated Loyalist and “superintendent” of British-occupied Philadelphia. His “Galloway’s Police” would be notorious for stifling attempts to send supplies to Washington’s starving army at Valley Forge during the winter of 1777–1778.

  What had happened? Who now can exactly say? At least part of his change of heart goes back to a single, one-vote defeat in the First Continental Congress.

  At issue was Galloway’s proposal to ease the cross-Atlantic tensions—a plan, hopefully, to solve the crisis altogether. Called the “Plan of Union,” his scheme envisioned an American parliament to balance the traditional Parliament of England. No legislation affecting the colonies could be rammed through either legislative body without the approval of its sister body on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Then, in America, there would be a “president-general” representing the king back in England.

  Was this plan so crazy? Well, in the First Congress his proposal, offered on September 28, 1774, failed to clear the neophyte American legislature by just one vote. Later, the British Commonwealth made wide use of a similar dominion status for member states such as Canada.

  According to the prevailing historical views of today, the revolutionary momentum had gone too far by the time Galloway tried to find a compromise that would avoid an outright break with the “Mother Country.” Indeed, Ben Franklin wrote from England to advise his old political ally and friend that his pro
posed union could be compared to “coupling and binding together the dead & the living.”

  One has to wonder how the inner Galloway reacted to that critique, since this hard-driving, obviously ambitious man strikes historians as vain, domineering, and suspicious of conspiracy. And he no doubt held aspirations of obtaining a Speaker-like role in the Continental Congress. Indeed, if his “Plan of Union” had succeeded, it might be Galloway that Americans honor today, rather than Franklin, Jefferson, and their compatriots. In any case, his plan foundered for lack of a single vote, with no minutes available for the congressional debate he triggered, other than personal notes jotted down by John Adams of Massachusetts.

  Galloway remained in Patriot ranks for another year or so, but only as a lukewarm adherent—worse, even, than a “sunshine Patriot.” He met with his two Franklin friends—father and son—when Ben returned from England in 1775 and, like William, was stunned to hear the elder Franklin say that he now favored a total break with England—that he now was for independence.

  The final straw for Joseph Galloway came when the Congress declared independence in July of 1776. At that point, he openly took the British side as an avowed Loyalist.

  For his onetime Patriot friends, he proved a spiteful enemy—as an enthusiast of the British occupation of Philadelphia, as the occupied city’s so-called superintendent, and as chief of his own anti-Patriot band of “police.” He also tried to enlist British support for plots to capture New Jersey’s rebel legislators—even the Continental Congress itself—but to no avail in either case. When the British left his hometown in 1778, he, of course, went with them…he went all the way to England, in fact, leaving behind the bitter comment, “I call this country ungrateful, because I have attempted to save it from the distress it at present feels, and because it has not only rejected my endeavors, but returned me evil for good.”

  In London, he didn’t offer much comfort to his new allies. Testifying before the House of Commons, he asserted that the Revolution could have been nipped in the bud if only Britain’s leadership had capitalized upon the deep residue of loyalty still remaining among Americans in 1775. He later wrote pamphlets explaining his views, including his Plan of Union.