Burgoyne was forced to rebuild the wilderness road for his huge supply train, a Herculean task made more difficult by American General Philip Schuyler’s axmen, a thousand of them, busily felling trees and destroying bridges ahead of the redcoat column. Reported Scheer and Rankin: “…Schuyler’s men felled giant pines, so that the branches intertwined and made abatis that could not be dragged away but had to be hewn apart. In Wood Creek they made crude dams of trees and mountainous boulders around which the rain-fattened waters spread, filling existing swamps and creating vast new bogs.”
Burgoyne had his own squads of axmen and other laborers toiling those hot summer days amid swarms of mosquitoes in an effort to clear a path through the wilderness and repair the damages wrought by the Americans. As he wearily reported, his wagon road not only had to forge past the felled trees, but his men had to build more than forty bridges and repair others, “one of which was of logwork over a morass two miles in extent.”
In sum, it took Burgoyne nearly twenty days to move twenty miles, a fitting omen for the remaining days of his ill-fated campaign, which would end in October with his surrender of an entire British army.
***
“Tricks of the trade” some might call these tactics tried by the Patriots of South Carolina. Soon after the British abandoned their position at Camden in 1781, the Americans and British fought a minor battle over possession of Fort Watson at a key road intersection in the Santee country. The Americans surrounded the British outpost, built on top of an Indian mound, but lacked the artillery to make life uncomfortable for the redcoats inside the stockade walls. No big problem, suggested militia Colonel Hezekiah Maham, simply build a tower of logs with a protected platform for sharpshooters.
General Francis Marion, the Carolina “Swamp Fox,” was quick to see the tower’s potential and ordered its immediate construction. Working under cover of night, the Patriots quietly assembled their sixty-foot “Maham Tower” close to the stockade walls.
The next morning, American riflemen could look down from their tower and shoot at anyone moving within the interior of the fort. After two American assaults, backed by the lethal fire from above, the British surrendered.
Not long after, General Nathanael Greene, commander of the Continental Army’s Southern Department, was stymied in his siege of the Loyalist garrison at Ninety-Six, the British outpost on the state’s western frontier. Greene also tried to cover the interior of the enemy strongpoint with rifle fire from a “Maham Tower,” but was frustrated when the Loyalists behind a star-pattern earthen redoubt simply raised the height of their parapets with rows of sandbags.
Greene also tried setting afire houses within the “Star Fort” by shooting burning arrows onto the roofs, but the Loyalists foiled this plan, as well—they stripped all the wooden shingles from the houses. They also found and stopped a tunnel being dug in their direction by Greene’s Polish-born engineer, Thaddeus Kosciuko.
After Virginia’s Colonel Light-Horse Harry Lee arrived from freshly vanquished Augusta, Georgia, with reinforcements, he was assigned the next trick of the trade in siege operations—cut off the enemy’s water supply. He was only partially successful, but enough so that the Loyalists tried digging an emergency well. When that effort failed utterly, the Loyalists came up with a trick of their own—they sent out naked black men at night to fetch water from a nearby stream, on the theory that they would blend in with the nighttime darkness.
In the end, with two thousand fresh redcoats on the march to the relief of Ninety-Six, Greene lifted his month-long siege after a single, all-out, and costly assault on June 18 that failed to crack the Loyalist defensive ring. Nonetheless, soon after withdrawing, Greene had the pleasure of seeing the British abandon the Ninety-Six strongpoint, their last fortress in the South Carolina backcountry.
***
James McElwee was a brave man indeed—an American captured when Savannah fell to the resurgent British in December 1778 and then held aboard a British prison ship for eight months.
Then came the day when he and other prisoners were offered a good dinner, a drink of rum, and clean clothes if they would join in a birthday toast to King George—that is, simply to say, “God save the King!”
That wouldn’t do for McElwee. He yanked off his own shirt, waved it like a flag, and shouted, “God save George Washington and the American colonies.” In the stunned silence that followed, he said it again: “God save George Washington!” Tossing aside the truly offensive shirt, he then turned to the outraged commander of the prison ship and said, “Now, sir, I and the lice will die together.” According to Nat and Sam Hilborn in their book Battleground of Freedom: South Carolina in the Revolution, he fortunately survived, was exchanged months later, “and lived many years afterward.”
***
Emily Geiger was quite a remarkable young woman. All of eighteen years old when the Patriots needed her services to carry a letter of instruction from one American general to another through Tory country in the South Carolina Midlands in the summer of 1781. General Nathanael Greene wished to inform partisan leader Thomas Sumter, the Carolina “Gamecock,” about details of British Lord Rawdon’s withdrawal into the Low Country from the newly abandoned British stronghold of Ninety-Six on the state’s western frontier. With no one on Greene’s staff willing to risk the long ride through hostile territory, Emily volunteered. She agreed not only to carry Greene’s letter, but also to memorize its contents as a safeguard against loss of the document itself, which she stuffed into her bodice for safekeeping.
Sure enough, she was caught by the British on the second day of her mission. According to the legend told and retold many times since, Emily’s highly suspicious male captors took her to a nearby headquarters for interrogation, but didn’t have the effrontery to search her person. For that delicate purpose, they sent for a Tory woman and left Emily locked in a room in the interim. That was their mistake. Alone, she took out the incriminating piece of paper, tore it into small bits and ate them, one by one. When she was searched, there was nothing left to find.
Released in due course, she continued on her journey, found Sumter, and relayed Greene’s message verbally. Fortunately, her memory served her—and Sumter—quite well, despite the harrowing hours she spent as a captive of the enemy.
At Large in England
THE PRISONERS, IT SEEMS, WERE SOMETIMES A BIT UNRULY. UNCOWED BY THE threat of solitary confinement in the “black hole,” they treated guards and other staff with obvious contempt. They staged organized demonstrations to celebrate their country’s victories. They petitioned high enemy officials with their grievances. They even heckled one of their wardens “so vociferously… that he was forced to seek refuge in his office.”
And escape! They were always planning escapes, making escapes, coming back from unsuccessful escapes—and even making good on still more escape attempts.
“Their often well-planned escape methods included climbing the walls, jumping the pickets, laboriously digging tunnels, bribing guards or staff, stealing keys, picking locks, feigning illness to use the less secure prison hospitals, and assuming an assortment of disguises,” wrote Sheldon S. Cohen in his 1995 book, Yankee Sailors in British Gaols: Prisoners of War at Forton and Mill, 1777–1783.
Indeed, one of the Yankee mariners held prisoner in England’s two large prisons assigned to the American rebels went so far as to replace a real body in a casket. Alexander Tindall’s ruse did not go unnoticed, but no great matter—after another failed attempt a month later, he succeeded in a third and final escape attempt less than six months after the casket caper.
Nor was he alone in achieving such a farewell to incarceration in England. At Forton, near Portsmouth, England, about sixty prisoners popped out of a tunnel that unexpectedly came up short—“breaking up in a cellar of an old woman,” according to American privateer officer Luke Matthewman. She shouted for help after recovering from her shock, but the escaping prisoners hastily gagged the poor old woman and went about thei
r business. Fate was not on their side in this particular case, it turns out. Fifty-eight men were recaptured in short order, although Matthewman and his privateer skipper, John Smith, did reach safety in continental Europe.
Europe, with its helpful American agents such as Benjamin Franklin, was usually the goal. Before reaching the English Channel, though, American escapees often could count on a sort of “underground railway” of English sympathizers to help hide, feed, and clothe them—sometimes for weeks at a time.
In all, about three thousand men, both early American navymen and privateer crewmen, passed through the gates of the two land prisons in England established to house captured American mariners. “As a group,” wrote Cohen, “they ranged in age from boys of nine to aging men of about 60. They were mostly white, though a small, indeterminate number of black seamen could be found in their ranks (and two American Indians).”
Gustavus Conyngham, for instance, born an Irishman, had captured or sunk sixty British ships as skipper of Continental Navy cutters or privateers such as the Revenge until his first capture in 1779. Eventually confined at the Mill Prison, he escaped its confines not once, but twice. In the first instance, he and four companions made their way to the London home of Thomas Digges, born in Maryland but now a mercantile agent in England—and a known escape-helper. The five men reached his Villars Street address about a week after their breakout. Digges gave them money and made arrangements for them to slip onto a Dutch ship sailing for Rotterdam—and freedom—two days later.
“Mr. Digges did everything in his power to save me and all my countrymen that chance to fall his way,” wrote Conyngham afterward. And further: “Happy we have such a man Among that set of tyrants the[y] have in that Country.”
Conyngham’s first escape, consummated with the help of Digges, was in November of 1770. The Irishman’s next flight, in 1781, apparently was accomplished by bribing guards at the Mill Prison.
Other methods of escape noted at Mill Prison included the time twelve prisoners stuck a long wooden beam out a window, then climbed down a rope made of hammocks tied together, one after the other. Escapees were known to volunteer a trip to the nearby bay with prison laundry tubs, then leap into the water and swim off. Some made their way through sewage flues into the bay. Bribery, though, remained the easiest, safest means of escape…unless the bribee betrayed the briber.
Money, four guineas it is said, did change hands in the spectacular double-barreled exploit of Baltimore-born Joshua Barney, a Continental Navy officer sent to the Mill Prison in December 1781. Developing a friendship with a sympathetic guard, then feigning a sprained ankle and, finally, donning an English officer’s uniform, he chose the staff lunch hour to make his bid at escape.
He climbed the shoulders of a tall fellow prisoner to clear the inner wall and gate, then walked past his friend the guard (while passing him four guineas), and, unnoticed in his British uniform, simply glided beyond another unsuspecting guard at the outer gate. Barney found refuge with English sympathizers who provided a safe house and a boat to take him and a fellow American across the Channel. They were picked up, however, by a British privateer near the Channel Islands, but Barney “was able to slip off the vessel [as it neared English soil], seize her dingy, and flee to the Devon village of Causen,” wrote Cohen. Then, it was back to the safe house, followed by a six-week stay under wraps in London, and finally a packet boat to Belgium—and freedom.
Not all hands were able to escape, and some—a relative few—did defect to the enemy and join his navy, noted Cohen. Conditions in the two land prisons were not the best, but they were nothing like the rotting hulks in New York Harbor and elsewhere. Any Americans confined to the “detention vessels” were lucky to survive—Cohen cited one historian’s estimate that twelve thousand prisoners simply didn’t.
Personal Glimpse: Lafayette
GEORGE WASHINGTON HAD JUST MET THE YOUNG FRENCH OFFICER, WHO HAD arrived in the American camp in August 1777 with high recommendation from America’s agents in France. Congress had granted the untried nineteen-year-old temporary rank as a major general, but Washington and his staff had heard it all before. Not all of these foreign volunteers were of any great or lasting use to the American cause. For the time being, though, Washington decided to keep the newly arrived Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, close at hand to evaluate his potential.
As was often the case for Washington and his Continental Army, it was a critical moment. The British, after leaving New York and sailing up the Chesapeake Bay, were moving on Philadelphia. Maneuvering repeatedly for advantage, to deny Sir William Howe easy access either to the American capital or to American supply bases to the west, Washington tried to engage the British in set-piece battle on Brandywine Creek…on his terms.
As at Long Island the summer before, Washington was outflanked, but this time on the American right. Galloping to the scene with the commander in chief was his new staff aide, Lafayette. Leaping from his horse and trying to rally the men streaming in retreat was, again, Lafayette. Wounded in the leg but disappearing in the confusion of battle for a time, was Lafayette. Found by Washington later, twelve miles away, weak from loss of blood but trying to rally soldiers in a defensive formation at a bridge over Chester Creek was, yet again, Lafayette.
At this point, Washington had seen quite enough. Summoning his own personal physician, Dr. James Craik, Washington ordered: “Take care of him as if he were my son.” So began the very historic and very personal relationship between the usually austere, reserved American commander and the ebullient, eternally optimistic young nobleman from France.
Interestingly, the middle-aged Washington never had children of his own, although he had two stepchildren whom he loved and adopted. Lafayette, on the other hand, never had known his father, who had been killed in the Battle of Minden before his son reached the age of two. The French youth had been raised in the country by a grandmother and two aunts rather than by his mother in Paris. He moved to Paris at age eleven, however, to further his schooling. Both his mother and a wealthy grandfather died two years later. As a result, he came into a large inheritance. At age sixteen, he married into an aristocratic family close to the French court.
Still a teenager, he joined the Black Musketeers, an elite arm of the royal household troops. He also, like Washington, became a Mason. And as a lover of liberty, he became enthralled by the American Revolutionary cause, which happened to challenge the interests of Great Britain, that old enemy of Lafayette’s own country.
Immensely wealthy, he bought himself a ship, La Victoire, and in early 1777, at nineteen, set sail for America, arriving in South Carolina. He traveled north to Philadelphia to offer his services to the Continental Congress, which, while wary, went along with the recommendations of America’s agents in France (Silas Deane and Benjamin Franklin) who had endorsed the young nobleman. Given temporary rank of major general, Lafayette met Washington on August 1 of that year.
It was both a glad and dreary time to make such an acquaintance. On the one hand, Lafayette was present as witness to Washington’s defeats that fall in the Battles of Brandywine and Germantown, to Howe’s occupation of Philadelphia, to the massacre of Anthony Wayne’s none-too-alert troops at nearby Paoli and, finally, to the miserable winter the Continental Army spent at Valley Forge. To make matters worse, Lafayette had to recuperate from the leg wound suffered at Brandywine.
Even so, the Frenchman not only shared the poor rations and other hardships of the men under his command at Valley Forge, he also reached into his own pocket to provide them clothing.
Lafayette again rose to the occasion when Irish-born volunteer General Thomas Conway, himself a product of French military training, made contact with Lafayette to enlist him in the anti-Washington rumble known as the Conway Cabal. Lafayette promptly warned Washington of the sub-rosa effort to vault Horatio Gates into Washington’s post as commander in chief. A sharp letter from George to Horatio put a sudden stop to the wh
ole affair.
As for truly glad tidings, the fall of 1777 was notable for its electrifying news of British General Burgoyne’s surrender of his entire army at Saratoga, New York, ostensibly as a result of Gates’s generalship, but actually due in large part to the frontline heroics of one Benedict Arnold. Thanks to the pivotal Saratoga victory came another bolt from the blue—the word received the following spring that France had agreed to a formal alliance with the American revolutionaries.
That did not mean Washington would acquiesce to Lafayette’s dream of leading a new expedition into Canada, but it did mean the arrival of a French fleet under Count Charles d’Estaing in July of 1778. Oddly, the presence of Lafayette’s own countrymen was to prove an unexpected, often forgotten test of the young nobleman’s mettle, especially his diplomatic prowess.
D’Estaing, Lafayette’s distant cousin, at first approached New York but decided against confrontation with the British fleet harbored there. Washington had been hoping for action against New York, but had to settle for the alternative of a joint operation against British-held Newport, Rhode Island. The plan that quickly took shape anticipated a landing by General John Sullivan on Aquidneck Island at Newport with four thousand Continentals and a number of New England militia. D’Estaing would contribute four thousand French marines and the considerable fire support of his ships. Lafayette would command one of the two American divisions under Sullivan, act as liaison with the French, and generally coordinate the entire operation.
What looked good on paper, however, was not to prove viable in reality. Sullivan, for one, balked at abiding by young Lafayette’s suggestions. The latter’s French “cousins,” on the other hand, made no secret of the fact that they viewed both the American Continentals and the militia as something akin to mere rabble. Lafayette’s delicate and difficult job was to keep everybody happy.
Best Little Stories from the American Revolution Page 32