By another such tale, he carried away a 1,110-pound cannon on his back during the Patriot retreat at Camden, South Carolina. By his own later account, he did kill two of the enemy at each battle, and at Camden he also rescued his commander, a Colonel Mayo of Powhatan County, Virginia, from certain death.
His real exploits and feats of strength were remarkable enough. Not the least of his accomplishments as a mere private was his wide-ranging battle record. Serving first in the North, he took part in the Battles of Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth, and the capture of Stony Point. He also had a role in the Patriot raid of Paulus Point and fought at Fort Mifflin on Mud Island in the Delaware River. He suffered a musket wound in the right thigh at Monmouth and a serious bayonet injury at Stony Point. After recuperating and moving south, he survived Camden with no further harm, but encountered a British bayonet at Guilford Court House that laid open one leg from knee to hip. Left in a nearby log cabin with four others (who all died of their wounds), Francisco was found “by a good old man” who took him home and nursed him back to health.
In a petition to Congress for a pension, Francisco later gave his own, often graphic account of his various actions. At Camden, he saved Colonel Mayo’s life “by killing an officer [British] who was in the act of taking his [Mayo’s] life, when the battle had nearly subsided.” And at Stony Point, he “was the second man who scaled the walls of that fort.”
After recovering from the wound suffered at Guilford Court House, Francisco returned to Virginia (on foot) just in time for a run-in at Ward’s Tavern in Amelia County with Banastre Tarleton’s dragoons. The youngster was entirely on his own. Taken by surprise, he was accosted by nine of the British troopers. One of them demanded the young man’s knee buckles and watch.
Francisco defiantly said the cavalryman would have to help himself, and when the unwary dragoon leaned over to do so, the unarmed Francisco seized the Englishman’s own sword and killed him with a single blow to the head. He then turned to the rest of the company and killed two more, one of them a mounted trooper firing a musket at the young rebel.
At that point, a troop of four hundred more dragoons appeared, but Francisco confused his enemy by shouting for a totally fictitious force of his own to join him. He then made his escape with all but one of the horses belonging to the original nine. An enraged Tarleton sent one hundred of his men in pursuit, but to no avail. Francisco was clean away, his feat at Ward’s Tavern soon memorialized in a famous engraving of the era.
Fittingly, the young soldier completed his Revolutionary War career at Yorktown in his “home state.” He was not, however, a native of Virginia—nor even of the Colonies. His origin, in fact, always has been a mystery, although it is now thought that he was of aristocratic Portuguese descent and perhaps was born in the Azores.
He first came to light, historically, as a young boy, four to six years old, abandoned on the docks of City Point (today’s Hopewell, Virginia), on the James River below Richmond. Judge Anthony Winston, a colonial legislator from today’s Buckingham County, Virginia, heard of his plight, took him home, and raised him.
The youngster was exposed to the concepts of liberty and defiance espoused by Winston’s nephew Patrick Henry and their mutual associates as the Revolution drew near. Francisco allegedly was present for Henry’s “Liberty or Death” speech at St. John’s Church in today’s Richmond, Virginia. At about age sixteen, unusually large and physically developed for his age, Francisco eagerly joined the Revolutionary fray with the Tenth Virginia Regiment.
He did not attend school until after the Revolutionary War was won. From that experience, however, comes one testament to his truly extraordinary strength. His schoolmaster, Frank McGraw, is recorded as once saying that “Francisco would take me in his right hand and pass me over the room, playing my head against the ceiling as though I had been a doll.”
In addition, a grandson claimed the adult Francisco once approached a cow and her calf stuck deep in mud and heaved them out by hand. Francisco’s son, Dr. Benjamin Francisco, often recalled the story that his father lifted a challenging brawler’s horse over a fence (and thus avoided a fight with the thoroughly awed challenger).
Married three times (and twice widowed), Francisco tried his hand as a farmer, blacksmith, and operator of a tavern and country store before finally finding his niche as sergeant at arms for the Virginia House of Delegates late in life. A still-famous figure of the American Revolution, he died apparently of appendicitis at around age seventy. The states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, both with significant Portuguese populations, for many years have marked March 15 as Peter Francisco Day (in memory of Guilford Court House, March 15, 1781) and Virginia joined them in 1972 by officially recognizing the same date.
Personal Glimpse: Betsy Ross
QUITE POSSIBLY IN A HOUSE STILL STANDING ON ARCH STREET IN PHILADELPHIA and open to the public today, Elizabeth Griscom Ross Ashburn Claypoole, well-known upholsterer in her day and a woman destined to be thrice widowed by the Revolutionary War, labored at what would make her an American legend for her very own contribution to the cause.
It was, legend says, the American flag! The Stars and Stripes.
No one knows for sure…yet no one can say for sure either that Betsy Ross did not create the American flag.
She did produce flags for the Pennsylvania navy, and her legend is specific in detail. William Canby, her grandson, presented a paper to the Pennsylvania Historical Society in 1870 in which he told how his grandmother, on her deathbed thirty-five years earlier, had told family members she sewed the first American flag at the behest of a secret committee of the Continental Congress, including George Washington, that visited her in May or June of 1776 in anticipation of the Declaration of Independence.
Allegedly, Washington sketched or showed her the basic flag scheme in the back room of her home and upholstery shop, but it was a design embellished with six-point stars. She showed him how a good seamstress could make more attractive five-point stars with a fold of the cloth and a cut of the scissors. The flag today indeed does sport five-point stars.
Good story, and the truth is that George Washington actually was in Philadelphia in the spring of 1776 for a visit with the Continental Congress. The “secret” committee supposedly was composed of himself, his good friend and congressional colleague Robert Morris, and George Ross, uncle of Betsy’s late husband, John Ross.
As for her husband, therein lies the first of three sad stories to burden her life. A Quaker girl by family and upbringing, she had eloped to marry John Ross, son of an Episcopalian minister. As a result, she was read out of her family’s Quaker Meeting. They married in November of 1773, and in January of 1776 Ross was mortally injured in the accidental explosion of a Patriot munitions storehouse he was guarding on the Delaware River. Betsy Ross, twenty-four and still childless, was a widow.
Meanwhile, Congress did not adopt the new national flag until June 14, 1777. Coincidentally, Betsy Ross married for the second time the next day, notes Paul J. Sanborn in an article written for Garland Publishing’s two-volume encyclopedia The American Revolution, 1775–1783.
The official flag resolution called for “thirteen stripes [for the original thirteen colonies] alternate red and white” and “thirteen stars white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.”
Betsy’s second husband was Joseph Ashburn, an officer on the American brigantine Patty. They had two children, and she continued her upholstery business on Arch Street. Three years later, though, his ship failed to return from its latest voyage.
Two years or more after that, an old friend, John Claypoole, turned up at Betsy’s door to report he had been in the Old Mill Prison in England with her husband, Joseph. His ship had been captured by the British, and sadly, Joseph had died in the prison.
Claypoole, himself, was a Revolutionary War veteran who had been wounded in the Battle of Germantown outside of Philadelphia and then somehow wound up at Old Mill in England. In a year’s ti
me, he became Betsy’s third and last husband.
They had five daughters…but not an entirely happy life, since his health failed—perhaps because of his war wounds and the time spent in prison—and he spent the last seventeen years of his life bedridden, with wife Betsy taking care of him, their children, and her upholstery business.
After his death in 1817 (attributed, you could certainly argue, to Revolutionary War causes), she kept at her business until finally retiring in 1827 at the age of seventy-five—she had spent more than fifty years in her specialty by that time. She died in 1836 at age eighty-four.
Today, notes Sanborn, “historians generally agree that the Betsy Ross story is more legendary than historic.” But he adds that there is another point of view. “Both sides come well prepared to argue their case. The debate still continues.” Then, too, there is argument over the real location of the Betsy Ross house on Arch Street. Was it really 239 Arch? Some say yes, some no. “We only know she lived nearby, but in which house, no one is certain.”
Whatever the facts, the Betsy Ross Memorial Association, started in the nineteenth century, “raised 1,040,270 dimes to help buy the house.” When charges of graft muddied those waters, the city of Philadelphia stepped in, bought the property, and restored the house, in recent times second only to the Liberty Bell as a tourist attraction in Philadelphia.
Worst of All Winters
NOBODY HAD EVER SEEN A WINTER LIKE THIS ONE—POSSIBLY NOBODY IN THE entire eighteenth century. And here, in December 1779, to the “military capital of the United States,” came George Washington and his entourage of aides, servants, and Life Guards, plus an army of twelve thousand or more hungry, shivering men.
Awaiting them all behind New Jersey’s Watchung Mountains, located at the base of five mountainlike hills, was the village of Morristown and its cluster of fewer than one hundred homes. The wintering Continental Army should be safe here from British attack. As an early warning system, a string of beacons stretched outward from Morristown to far-flung outposts. In the event of a British advance, fires flaring up on platforms at the top of a series of poles eighteen to twenty feet high would give the alarm. The fires closest to Morristown would be spotted by men stationed in Washington’s “Fort Nonsense,” a hilltop redoubt built 230 feet above the village.
Washington had brought his ragtag army here in January of 1777 for a much-needed winter’s rest after the Battles of Trenton and Princeton. He and his army, then ranging from three thousand to seven thousand in strength at various times, spent an uneventful and mild five months here in early 1777—uneventful, that is, except for Washington’s orders to have his men inoculated against smallpox. Up to a thousand temporarily were laid low by the procedure before recovering.
The next wintering period was the tough one we always hear about, those harsh months spent at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. But Valley Forge and its deprivations for the troops were nothing compared to the winter spent at Morristown two years later, 1779–1780.
Once again, the soldiers shuffled onto the scene and ate up an estimated six hundred acres of timber in the process of building 1,000 to 1,200 log huts. They began to arrive in early December and again had to contend with snow. This time, though, they found two feet already on the ground, which itself was frozen. And in this extraordinary winter, a total of twenty-eight snowstorms would barrel into the area. It already had snowed four times in November. It would snow seven times in December, another six in January, four more in February, six more in March, and even once in April.
“The January 2–4 storm was notable in that it snowed four feet with high winds causing drifts of over six feet,” said the account by Paul J. Sanborn in Garland Publishing’s The American Revolution, 1775–1783.
It was so cold that rivers and harbors iced over. The British in New York City found they could transport men and supplies back and forth to Staten Island in New York Harbor on ice. The Americans, for their part, mounted a fruitless raid early in January in which General William Alexander (Lord Stirling) led three thousand men and artillery in five hundred sleighs across the ice to the British base on Staten Island. The assault proved fruitless because the British had learned of the foray in advance “and retreated into their defenses in plenty of time.” The Americans had to return home with little accomplished.
The failed raid gave George Washington unneeded headaches because some of the “so-called Jersey militia were no more than plunderers and brigands who played the militia role to destroy, to rob, and to plunder the island.” He now took steps to return identifiable looted items to the British on Staten Island, but it was too late. Stung by the episode, the British “struck back in retaliation by burning Newark Academy and Elizabethtown Meeting Hall and Church.”
Meanwhile, the wintry weather only continued. The ice and snow held up supplies that normally would have been transported by road, although the iced-over rivers sometimes served as substitute arteries of travel…by sled. Overall, however, the weather was a life-threatening nightmare for Washington and his twelve thousand-plus men. “Washington called upon Congress, then the states, and finally on New Jersey in a desperate attempt to feed his men,” wrote Sanborn. “The men were reduced to eating birch bark, shoes and leather belts to survive.”
Wrote Washington as early as December 16 (to Joseph Reed): “We have never experienced a like extremity at any period of the war.”
Weeks later, on March 18, the commander in chief wrote to the Marquis de Lafayette, then visiting in France: “The oldest people now living in this country do not remember so hard a winter as the one we are now emerging from.” In addition, Dr. James Thacher, traveling with Washington’s entourage for much of the war period, wrote in his journal about the same time that it had been the “most severe and distressing” winter “we have ever experienced.” Further, “an immense body of snow remains on the ground.” And, worse yet: “Our soldiers are in a wretched condition for the want of clothes, blankets and shoes; and these calamitous circumstances are accompanied by a want of provisions.”
Unsurprisingly, the truly harsh conditions contributed to a high number of desertions and even mutinous moments. More than a thousand men deserted the army that winter despite the threat of a death sentence if caught. Then, in a late-May incident, “two Connecticut regiments returning to Morristown from an extended tour of outpost duty found no pay and no food waiting for them,” recalled the Sanborn encyclopedia account. Furious, the men talked about marching for home, “foraging for food on the way.” An officer trying to reason with them was stabbed with a bayonet, but suffered only a superficial wound. A Pennsylvania officer then urged them to remember their cause and the fact that their leaders were suffering with them. “Pennsylvania troops were brought over if necessary to put down the revolt, but eventually everything settled down and the mutiny ended.”
The shortages in pay and supplies continued, with many of the troops left resentful of their fledgling government’s failure to support them. Fortunately, the worst winter of the century at last ended. It would remain a bitter memory for many, but the fact is that Washington’s more professional army of 1779–1780 lost only eighty-six men to disease and exposure, compared to the thousand or more lost at Valley Forge two years earlier, in what was a much milder—but more famously remembered—wintering period for the Continental Army.
Sleeping Here and There
“GEORGE WASHINGTON SLEPT HERE,” GOES THE OLD REFRAIN. AND INDEED, IN the course of an eight-year Revolutionary War, the astute commander in chief slept in many places. He especially did his sleeping in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
Why those three in particular? Simply because they were central. His war, for the most part, took place within a large clock face with the city of New York at center, upstate New York at twelve o’clock, and Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, at seven o’clock or so. His generals naturally operated a bit farther afield, and even for Washington, there were crucial events just beyond the edges of the clock face—at Bo
ston in the beginning, just beyond two o’clock, and, toward the end, at Yorktown, Virginia, to the lower right, about five o’clock.
Generally speaking, though, Washington spent most of his wartime days well within the circle of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. He certainly, even within that perimeter, was a man on the move, and constantly so. He indeed slept in many, many places.
When the British forced Washington to end a months-long stay in New York and environs late in 1776, he retreated across all of New Jersey and fetched up on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, more or less opposite Trenton, New Jersey. He settled briefly into Philadelphian Thomas Barclay’s 221-acre estate called Summer Seat. The same property later would be owned by Robert Morris, often called “The Financier of the Revolution.” George Washington wasn’t thinking of that just now, though. He was much more interested in military strategy, in striking a blow that would redeem America’s sinking hopes of eventual victory against the professional British war machine. On December 14, Washington shifted base to one William Keith’s farmhouse, a bit closer to the intended scene of action. Here Washington and his lieutenants laid their plans for the famous crossing of the Delaware on Christmas night of 1776.
After defeating George III’s Hessian allies in the Battle of Trenton the next morning, Washington established a new headquarters in nearby Newtown, Pennsylvania, in the home of one John Harris. In three days, he removed to Trenton itself, to the home of a departed Loyalist, one John Barnes, on Queen Street, as recalled in John Tebbel’s book, George Washington’s America.
In another three days’ time, Washington moved on to the True American Inn alongside Assunpink Creek (see index), still in Trenton. Never heard of it? Hardly anyone even in those days had…until the British suddenly appeared on the scene. As Tebbel reports, “Down to this hitherto unimportant stream came Lord Cornwallis from Princeton, with what Washington shortly discovered was a much superior force.”
Best Little Stories from the American Revolution Page 29