Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  In another way, the dispute between the two was the outcome of more recent conflicts that were both political and personal in nature. Gwinnett, after taking over the presidency of the Georgia Council of Safety early in 1777, was under a double cloud: first, there was talk that his predecessor, Archibald Bulloch, had been poisoned; second, rightly or wrongly, he was blamed for a botched military venture against Loyalists based in northern Florida. One reason it didn’t succeed was the prior tension between Gwinnett and McIntosh. Gwinnett’s Popular Party had accused Lachlan’s older brother, William, a cavalry colonel in the state militia, of deserting his command area. He later was exonerated, only to be stung by a much more serious development—Lachlan’s younger brother, George, was clapped into irons on a charge of outright treason!

  While Gwinnett’s dream of leading a punitive force against the Florida Loyalists was ill-considered from the outset, he had no choice in ordering the arrest of George McIntosh in March 1777. The damning evidence that now rocked Georgia’s entire Whig establishment came from an impressive source—the redoubtable John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress.

  A recently seized letter to British authorities from East Florida’s royal governor, he reported, revealed that George McIntosh, a member of Revolutionary Georgia’s governing Council of Safety, not only was trading with the enemy through a deceptive partnership but was considered secretly loyal to the Crown. Congress, rather than Gwinnett on his own, recommended the arrest that followed receipt of Hancock’s documents.

  While Lachlan McIntosh loudly defended his brother and fumed against Gwinnett—while the proposed military expedition still loomed in a limbolike state—Georgia’s Patriots were preparing for their first Assembly session under the new postcolonial constitution. Just then, George McIntosh was released on bail, with four fellow members of the Council among the guarantors of his bond. Charges of “Toryism” still filled the air when the newly created Assembly met in early May to organize Georgia’s state government—and, not so incidentally, to elect the state’s first governor.

  Gwinnett, of course, would have been the leading candidate, but Georgia’s political wars had stirred up so much rancor that a moderate coalition drawn from both Whig factions successfully nominated John Adam Treutlen instead. He was a member of the Popular Party, but no Gwinnett crony. The latter, in the meantime, could thank an Assembly investigation for declaring him innocent of any wrongdoing in the confused affair of the proposed military expedition.

  What did that mean for General McIntosh, a potential commander of the strike force who had been both hot and cold to its formation? If Gwinnett was blameless in the affair, did that mean General McIntosh was at fault instead?

  Thus McIntosh took to the Assembly floor, assailing Button Gwinnett as both “Scoundrell & Lying Rascal.”

  They met, each with a second, the very next morning in former Royal Governor James Wright’s pasture, as ordained by crisscrossing notes the night before. An eighteenth-century conception of honor—and considerable pentup ill feeling—brought them there. And unfortunately, only one was destined to survive their brief duel by pistol.

  The time was dawn; the date, Friday, May 16, 1777.

  General McIntosh brought Colonel Joseph Habersham, fellow aristocrat, as his second; Gwinnett was represented by George Wells, friend and political ally from Augusta. Moving beyond the sight of some spectators, the four men halted to discuss the duel’s deadly terms—most important, how far apart they should stand. McIntosh, clearly out for blood, gave the chilling reply, “Eight or ten feet should be sufficient.” Gwinnett had already given the general that choice, but Habersham slightly altered the determination on distance when he suggested standing another foot or so apart.

  Next, should they start back to back and pace off the steps between them? “By no means,” declared the vengeful-minded McIntosh, “let us see what we are about.” As a result, they stood facing each other, only a short distance apart. When all was ready, they could fire their single-ball pistols at will. And they did.

  At the loud double report, Gwinnett fell to the ground. He had been struck above the knee, his leg broken by the vicious impact.

  General McIntosh still stood, smoking pistol in hand, but he also had been wounded in the leg—a flesh wound in the thigh. He asked Gwinnett if he would like to go through a second exchange of shots, and Gwinnett gamely said yes, if he could be helped to his feet.

  At this point, Wells and Habersham intervened, assuring the two duelists they had “behaved like gentlemen and men of honor.” They now could go home, each with his sense of wounded pride assuaged, and they did…only Gwinnett went home and, on Monday morning, May 19 three days later, died of “mortification,” known to us today as gangrene.

  Prince’s Heroine in America

  ALREADY A WIDELY CELEBRATED HEROINE OF ONE REBELLION AGAINST THE Crown, and later a highly visible participant in the American Revolution, Flora MacDonald MacDonald was a staunch Loyalist.

  Oddly enough, long before she came to colonial America from Scotland in the mid-1770s, she had been branded an enemy of the British Crown…and had gone to prison as a result. Her offending action in that situation had been providing aid and comfort to Bonnie Prince Charlie, claimant to the English throne, three decades before the American Revolution. In a scenario that could have been dreamed up in Hollywood (and indeed has been re-created on film), she helped the heir to the House of Stuart to escape English fury after the Battle of Culloden in 1746.

  Charles Edward Louis Stuart, born in Rome in 1720, was the grandson of King James II, who was deposed in favor of his daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, in 1688. In 1702, Anne Stuart, Mary’s sister, ascended to the throne as the last of the Stuarts to rule England—under her reign, in fact, the combination of Scotland and England became Great Britain.

  Four decades after her death in 1714, Prince Charlie, the young Stuart pretender, and the proud Highland clans of Scotland battled the English at Culloden Moor in a futile effort to restore Stuart rule…but lost both the battle and the Jacobite Rebellion to the Duke of Cumberland, himself a royal heir.

  The duke’s cavalry showed little mercy to their routed foes, whom they chased down and, in many cases, killed on the roads and in the fields surrounding the battle site. Bonnie Prince Charlie managed to slip out of the country and reach safe haven in France, thanks in large part to the young Scottish lass Flora MacDonald, then twenty-four and the daughter of a gentleman farmer of South Uist in the Hebrides islands.

  For the Bonnie Prince’s sake, she served time on a prison ship. Her crime: disguising the would-be king as her own maidservant, Betty Burke, and leading him to safety.

  It was a famous act on her part—so famous that Dr. Samuel Johnson and his companion of journal-keeping fame, James Boswell, came calling upon her nearly twenty years after her release in 1747. By then, she had married one Allan MacDonald, produced several children, and moved to the island of Skye, also in the Hebrides. According to Boswell’s journal, she was a small, mild-mannered woman of “genteel appearance, mighty soft and well bred.”

  But she and her husband were poor; they had lost all their livestock, and they very shortly decided to join the wave of Scottish Highlanders, hundreds from Skye itself, seeking better fortune in the American colonies. Spring of 1775—marked by the opening shots of the Revolution in Lexington and Concord—found Allan and Flora MacDonald putting down new roots in North Carolina. They first chose a spot in Cross Creek, at the site of today’s Fayetteville. They then moved twenty miles to today’s Cameron Hill as neighbors to Flora’s half sister Annabella (Mrs. Alexander MacDonald), but their final move was to land adjoining Cheek’s Creek in Anson County (today’s Montgomery County).

  Allan “had just begun to establish himself when the Revolution broke out,” wrote Blackwell P. Robinson in Moore County, North Carolina, 1747– 1847. He also noted that the MacDonald couple had sailed for Wilmington, North Carolina, aboard the wooden ship Baliol
from Campbelltown, Kintyre, in August of 1774 with their sons, Alexander and James, and their daughter, Anne, and her husband, Alexander McLeod, and the McLeod children—a real family migration.

  A migration from poverty, yes, but also into a revolutionary storm—for here, once again, Flora MacDonald would find herself painfully caught up in political turmoil soon leading to battle among those supporting the Crown and those who violently opposed its continued rule over the colonies. And this time, Flora was clearly on the side of the monarchy, with husband Allan named a major and called upon by Royal Governor Josiah Martin to raise Loyalist troops to fight the rebels. Flora herself—still famous among her Scottish peers—was a popular speaker at meetings in support of the Loyalist cause.

  Unfortunately, both Allan and son-in-law Alexander McLeod were among the Loyalist officers taken prisoner in early 1776 when the rebels won the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge, sometimes called “the Lexington of the South.” This time, it was the antiroyalist Whigs tracking down the shattered enemy. Soon the countryside was plagued by armed bands plundering Loyalist and Whig households alike, as a bloody, unorganized, and often senseless civil war took hold in the Carolinas.

  By her own account, a not-so-young Flora MacDonald, suffering from fever, was “dayly oppressed with stragling partys of plunderers from their [the rebel] Army and night robbers who more than once threatened her life, wanting a confession where her husband’s money was.” Worse yet, the MacDonalds’ friends and neighbors for some reason began to blame them for the depredations suffered at the hands of “inspectors” appointed to visit and protect the dependents of Loyalist “menfolk” carried off as prisoners.

  Flora, in the meantime, fell off a horse and broke her arm. Then, in 1777, the rebels seized her land because she refused to take an oath of allegiance to their side.

  With her husband still held prisoner in Pennsylvania, she was given refuge near the home of her daughter, Anne, by fellow Tory Kenneth Black—later murdered by Philip Alston’s band of vengeful Whigs. Allan, meanwhile, appealed to the Continental Congress to free him in a prisoner exchange so he could help his wife, whom he described as “in a very sickly tender state of health, with a younger son, a Daughter & four Grand Children” to care for. In time, the Scotsman was freed.

  Flora and her daughter caught up with their husbands in New York, then went along as the two men rejoined their regiment, the Royal Highland Emigrants, by then posted in Nova Scotia. In October of l779, “at her husband’s insistence,” wrote Robinson in his Moore County history, Flora sailed for home aboard the Lord Dunsmore—not to North Carolina, but back to Skye.

  “Thus passed from the Carolina scene the renowned Flora,” adds the Robinson history, “no longer the comely lass who saved the life of the Stuart pretender, but a broken old woman who had sent her husband and sons to fight for the Hanoverians [the House of Hanover, which, in the person of George III, now held the British Crown] the usurpers of the throne that rightfully belonged, in her mind, to the Stuart line of Scotland.”

  It was bitter irony, and she later complained that she and her husband “both have suffered in our person, family and interest, as much as if not more than any two going under the name of Refugees or Loyalists, without the smallest recompence.”

  After her death in 1790, however, there were rewards of sorts. A final tribute to Flora MacDonald MacDonald was the epitaph contributed by the famed and learned Dr. Johnson that solemnly proclaimed: “Her name will be mentioned in history, and if courage and fidelity be virtues, mentioned with honour.”

  Still another, more dramatic, tribute came from the continual flow of admirers to her gravesite—admirers so fervent that they virtually destroyed her first two marble tombstones by knocking off chips to take home as venerated souvenirs. As a result, Dr. Johnson’s fine words had to be inscribed on a third stone.

  The Barley Did Prickle

  THEIR OARS MUFFLED IN CLOTH, FIVE AMERICAN WHALEBOATS STOLE THROUGH the summer night…on a mission of kidnapping. Aboard were thirty-six volunteers. Third in charge was Ensign Abel Potter of the Rhode Island militia. He would later write about the daring raid, soon to be known as “capture of the barefoot general.”

  The assignment in the summer of 1777 was to kidnap the unpopular British General Richard Prescott, commander of the five-thousand-man British force quartered in Rhode Island. Not only was Prescott heartily disliked, but the Americans also needed a prisoner of high rank to exchange for their own General Charles Lee, captured by the British in New Jersey half a year earlier.

  Prescott would fill the bill nicely, but he wouldn’t be an easy target. He was staying in a guarded private home five miles from his headquarters in Newport, a location that was protected to the south by the open sea, to the west by a Narragansett Bay filled with British ships, and to the north and east by his troop dispositions.

  The house in which he slept was located a mile inland from the bay, which the Americans had chosen for their approach. In short order, they safely sidled past the warships in the dark after launching their boats from Warwick Neck, ten miles above their preferred landing spot. Leading the resolute party was Lieutenant Colonel William Barton, a hatmaker from Providence, with Ensign Potter’s older brother James second in command. The raid had been Barton’s idea from the start.

  Upon the party’s landing in a quiet cove, James “took the first two sentinels” the raiders encountered, wrote Ensign Potter. He himself took care of a third man, who was standing guard right at the door of the general’s quarters. When that sentry issued a challenge and demanded a password, Abel Potter leaned forward as if to whisper the “countersign” in the other man’s ear. As the sentry unthinkingly leaned forward to hear, Potter grabbed his weapon and warned that he would die if he spoke a word.

  “The sentinel answered ‘I won’t’ tremblingly,” wrote Potter.

  Passing inside, the intruders encountered either the man of the house or his widow—accounts differ. According to Ensign Potter’s memory, however, it was the widow, a Mrs. Oberin.

  She knew his brother, a sea captain, and cried out, “Captain Potter, what’s the matter?”

  He quickly reassured her. “You need not be scared, Mrs. Oberin. We are not agoing to hurt you. Where is the general?”

  Upstairs, she said.

  In a trice, the two Potters and their commander, Colonel Barton, burst into Prescott’s bedroom. The startled British commander immediately heaved up in his bed. Clad in nightshirt and nightcap, he obviously had been prepared for a good night’s sleep.

  Any such hopes now dashed, he guessed the intent of his intruders right away.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, with considerable understatement, “your business requires haste, but do for God’s sake let me get my clothes.”

  Replied Barton: “By God, it is no time for clothes.”

  And so, off they went, taking an aide-de-camp, the three sentries, and the general with them. He was “barelegged,” wrote the younger Potter, and at one point they rushed through a field of barley, “which pricked him some.”

  In short order the Americans and their captives were back in the whaleboats and headed for home. Ensign Potter, wading in water up to his chest, was the last man to climb aboard the sturdy boats.

  Back at the Oberin house, an overlooked British soldier gave the alarm…but he had to ride first to the nearest British encampment.

  Rockets then announced his news. Shots were fired, and they did come close to the escaping whaleboats, wrote Potter many years later. He and his fellows “saw the shot strike the water around [us],” he said, but “None was hurt.”

  So ended a highly successful raid that produced just as much embarrassment for the British as the American side had endured the year before with the humiliating capture of General Lee. As hoped, the acquisition of General Prescott enabled the Americans to exchange him in 1778 for Lee.

  Congress later cited Barton for his bravery, awarded him a commemorative sword, and presented him with a
confiscated Loyalist home in Newport. As time passed, he was promoted to brigadier general, but his fighting career was cut short by a wound suffered on patrol. Also grateful for his exploit, his fellow Rhode Islanders made him adjutant of the state militia and a state legislator. For all that, though, Barton died in debt, owing to unfortunate speculations in Vermont lands.

  Young Potter, for his part, survived three tours of duty with the Rhode Island militia, moved to Vermont after the war, and one day sent a member of his family to school in Pownal, Vermont. The child’s teacher was the sentry he had silenced so effectively, yet bloodlessly, at the door of General Prescott’s quarters the night of July 9–10, 1777.

  Murder Most Foul

  SHE WAS YOUNG AND OH, SO FAIR, WITH LONG, AUBURN HAIR, BLUE EYES, AND A creamy white complexion. And she was in love with a young Loyalist serving, in 1777, with British General John Burgoyne’s army coming down from Canada into upper New York.

  It was a different time, so long ago, a time of war, but even then, human society was occasionally plagued by random, senseless, unplanned acts of violence.

  Poor Jane McRae. How, even at a time of war, caught between clashing armies, could she ever have anticipated the events yet to come? And wearing her wedding dress, too!

  Before the Revolutionary War erupted, she had lived with her brother John McRae, a pioneer farmer who tilled the rich soil beside the Hudson River, south of Fort Edward. Nearby was the neighboring Jones family, and all of them recent émigrés from New Jersey where Jane McRae and the Jones boy, David, had been childhood friends. Now, some years later and all grown up, they no longer were mere friends—they were in love.

  The war did intervene, to be sure. With revolution came a parting of the ways for the two families. John became a colonel in the rebel militia of their shared New York community. David, though, felt that his allegiance had to be with England. He soon was a lieutenant with Peter’s Provincial Rangers, assigned to General Simon Fraser’s corps, which in July 1777 was at the very spearhead of Burgoyne’s army as it moved south, aiming, it appeared, right at Fort Edward itself.