Meanwhile, Sullivan crossed over from the mainland with his troops on August 8. Unfortunately, the very next day, d’Estaing learned the British fleet he had avoided at New York was approaching Newport. With a confrontation now unavoidable, he hastily turned his ships seaward to find room to maneuver.
The French and English briefly exchanged fire, but a gale stopped their naval battle and damaged ships on both sides. D’Estaing then informed his allies at Newport that he must sail to Boston to refit his damaged ships, leaving a furious Sullivan alone at the north end of Aquidneck Island and vulnerable to attack by the British in Newport. His militia quickly melting away, Sullivan turned his fury on “middleman” Lafayette, who himself was so angry he almost challenged the American general to a duel.
In the end, on the night of August 30, under expectant attack by the British, Sullivan was able to ferry his harried Continentals back to the mainland…and just in the nick of time, since Sir Henry Clinton appeared the very next day with another five thousand redcoats fresh from the British base of New York. In Boston, meanwhile, Admiral d’Estaing’s men faced insults from Americans encountered on the street.
It had not been an auspicious start to the Franco-American alliance. Nor were matters greatly rectified when d’Estaing rejected Lafayette’s plea to attack Nova Scotia and sailed off in his refitted fleet for the British West Indies.
To generate a more substantial contribution to the American cause, Lafayette returned to France in early 1779. He was greeted with excitement, wide acclaim—and a slap on the wrist by King Louis XVI for failure to obtain permission to join the American army. At the same time, he was allowed to purchase and command the king’s dragoons…but he wouldn’t be returning to America for more than a year, not until April 27, 1780.
His wife, in the meantime, had produced an infant son, promptly named George Washington; France had prepared to invade England but then backed off from that plan, and the king, finally, agreed to send a substantial body of troops and a second fleet across the Atlantic to help the Americans win the Revolution.
D’Estaing, all the while, had not been entirely idle. After seizing the islands of Grenada and Dominic in the sunny Caribbean, he sailed northward once more and thought he saw easy pickings in the form of Savannah, capital of Georgia. He was wrong, and he and his American ally, Major General Benjamin Lincoln, were repulsed, losing one thousand men in the process. It was a defeat that paved the way, materially and psychologically, for a British sweep through all of Georgia and up into South Carolina, a drive capped by Sir Henry Clinton’s arrival from New York and the siege that led to the capitulation of Charleston in the spring of 1780.
Thus, Lafayette reappeared in America at a second critical point in the Revolution. And once again, Newport was front and center of events—but this time as a base for the French rather than the British, who had moved out their Newport forces for their siege of Charleston. Washington soon conferred with the latest French commander on the scene, fifty-five-year-old Compte de Jean Baptiste de Rochambeau. Eager to make use of the count’s army of ten thousand, Washington once again brought up his dream of ousting the British from New York. But Rochambeau doubted that even together the allies could overcome such a stronghold. He remained in Newport, stalled, and generally did little the rest of the year…except send his own son back home to France with an urgent request for more men, more ships, and more support.
The winter and spring of 1781 only brought more bad news for the American cause. The “central government” that went under the name of Congress basically had been broke for months, its paper money close to worthless. One result was that food and pay were not reaching the men of the Continental Army. The separate states had been unable, or unwilling, to take up the slack.
Another result was outright mutiny. In January 1781, Pennsylvania troops wintering at Morristown, New Jersey, rebelled, killed two officers, and began marching to Philadelphia to confront Congress. Stopped by Major General Anthony Wayne and New Jersey’s Continentals, then promised better treatment, they eventually calmed down. But weeks later, New Jersey’s own troops mutinied, too. Washington had four of their leaders arrested and executed two of them. In his diary, he dejectedly wrote: “…[I]nstead of having the prospect of a glorious offensive campaign before us, we have a gloomy and bewildered prospect of a defensive one…”
As another bit of bad news, the traitor Benedict Arnold had invaded Virginia with two thousand men, cruised up the James River with impunity and seized Richmond, the state’s capital. Not far south, in the Carolinas, the armies of Lord Cornwallis and America’s Nathanael Greene were in a deadly dance with an uncertain outcome. Few onlookers would have guessed that the British surrender at Yorktown was only months away.
Lafayette, it so happened, was destined to play an important role in the events leading up to that denouement of British fortunes. Delegated to march south into Virginia at the head of a relief force, Lafayette missed any confrontation with Arnold but found plenty of other British forces to keep him busy. Recapturing and then holding Richmond in late April, Lafayette could thumb his nose at his opposing commander, General William Phillips, the very man whose artillery battery had killed Lafayette’s father at Minden in 1759. (Phillips fell ill and died in May of 1781, the very next month.)
As events also turned out, Lafayette arrived in Virginia almost at the same moment that Lord Cornwallis bulled his way across the border from North Carolina. American General Wayne had joined Lafayette by June, and their small force of two thousand or so nipped at the heels of the Cornwallis army of four thousand as it moved down the James to Williamsburg, then to Portsmouth and, finally, in early August, to Yorktown and Gloucester, Virginia, at the mouth of the York River.
In the north, Washington still had been trying to talk Rochambeau into a joint assault on New York. But any such thoughts were abandoned when they received word on August 14 that French Admiral Francois Joseph de Grasse was setting sail from Haiti in the Caribbean for Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay with thirty warships and three thousand fresh troops. That news signalled the final course of the war. Washington and Rochambeau marched south to Virginia, de Grasse was able to plug up the watery approaches to Yorktown—Cornwallis was trapped, and in October he surrendered. In the meantime, Lafayette had commanded the successful assault on one of two key redoubts taken from the British in the final fighting of the brief Yorktown siege.
Two months later, the now widely lionized (and still very young) Lafayette returned to France for an entirely new military and political career as “hero of two worlds.” It was a career of many ups and downs that carried the liberal idealist through the French Revolution and the years of Napoleon’s rule. He would return to his beloved America for a famous yearlong tour in 1824, accompanied by his son, George Washington de Lafayette.
Lafayette’s old mentor, the original George Washington, long since had gone to his grave (in 1799), but not before the French nobleman sent him the key to the Bastille with the message that he offered this treasured symbol of the French Revolution as “a tribute which I owe as a son to my adoptive father, as an aide-de-camp to my general, as a missionary of liberty to its patriarch.”
Many Moments of Truth
WHILE THEY DIDN’T ENLIST IN THE CONTINENTAL ARMY EXPECTING TO FIGHT AS soldiers, a number of women emerged from the Revolution as real battlefield heroines anyway. Some of them were legendary—“Molly Pitcher,” for instance—and some not. Elizabeth Zane of Fort Henry, Virginia, probably falls into the latter category.
Her terrifying moment of truth came one late-summer day in 1782 with Indians and redcoats surrounding the small frontier fort. The odds were about 350 besiegers outside the fort versus about 60 men, women, and children inside. The Americans inside had been told to surrender or face a massacre.
Of the 60 inside the fort, mind you, only 18 were fully grown, able-bodied men.
Several assaults had been made against the small fortress, but the defenders so far had been ab
le to beat them back with spirited, well-aimed gunfire. Still, the gunpowder was running low. Soon, there would be no defense…and then what?
Not far away—a mere sixty or so yards, all the defenders knew—was a cabin belonging to “Betty” Zane’s oldest brother, Colonel Ebenezer Zane. And inside the empty cabin, as yet undiscovered by the enemy, was a store of gunpowder.
But…how to retrieve it? The eighteen men vied with one another for the privilege of making the dangerous dash to the cabin and back.
Betty Zane became the volunteer instead. She was granted permission to try the desperate, suicidal errand after arguing, with irrefutable logic, that the defenders couldn’t risk losing a single man. Further, the frontier-toughened lass asserted, she could run as fast as any man there.
But run she did not…at first. She meandered out the gate. She merely walked, almost in promenade, while the British and their Indian allies gawked—and held back from rushing forward, since she was under the guns of her allies inside the fort. Before the besiegers knew it—or divined her intentions—she was inside the cabin.
There she wasted no time. She grabbed a cloth, broke open a keg of gunpowder, and poured the contents onto the middle of the cloth, then jerked it up by the four corners to create a makeshift bag.
So far she had been extraordinarily lucky, but she knew she couldn’t simply walk back to the fort with her prize. This time, she would have to run…run as fast as she could. Casting all thoughts of eighteenth-century modesty aside, she pulled off her long skirt, then stepped out of her petticoats as well.
In seconds, her freed legs pounding, she was out the door and racing for the fort.
The woods all around erupted in gunfire, immediately answered by her comrades inside the fort. They still had a small store of gunpowder, but they would need every bit more that Betty Zane carried in the “bag” slung over her shoulder.
She ran like the wind, untouched so far; but then, partway home, she tripped and fell.
Before the enemy could take advantage, however, she scrambled to her feet and flew on.
Seconds later, she dashed through the hastily opened gate. And that was that. Gunpowder safely delivered, the Americans were able to hold out until their assailants gave up the siege a day and a half later and withdrew.
***
After the surrender of Fort Washington on Manhattan Island, New York, to the British in November of 1776, a horribly wounded American captured just outside the fallen bastion was given parole, then ferried across the Hudson River to the relative safety of New Jersey. Next, the battle victim was placed in a wagon that would bump and grind its way to Philadelphia on the primitive roads of the era. The suffering victim’s jaw, upper chest, and left arm all had been shredded by grapeshot. She would be lucky to survive, much less keep her mangled arm.
Apparently the first American woman to become a battlefield casualty of the Revolution, Margaret Cochran Corbin had stepped forward to take her artilleryman husband John Corbin’s place at his small-bore cannon after he was killed in the midst of the British and Hessian assault on Fort Washington. He himself, earlier in the action, had stepped forward to take the chief gunner’s place when he was struck down.
All three had begun the day in a two-piece battery belonging to the Pennsylvania Artillery’s First Company. Margaret Corbin, twenty-five, was present at the redoubt guarding nearby Fort Washington as one of those wives allowed to accompany Continental Army troops as a cook, laundress, seamstress, and nurse all wrapped in one.
Hardship was no stranger to the redhead, a native of Franklin County, Pennsylvania, who had been orphaned at age five when raiding Indians killed her father and abducted her mother. Raised by relatives, Margaret never saw her mother again.
She found brief happiness when she married Virginia-born John Corbin in 1772. They were living in Pennsylvania when the Revolutionary War erupted. Husband John joined his artillery company in 1775, and Margaret then followed him into the teeth of war.
When not tied down by her encampment chores among his fellow troops, she liked to watch husband John’s artillery drills. Thus, she saw and learned how to load and fire his battery’s guns.
As the British bombarded Fort Washington both from land and from their ships in the Hudson River in late 1776, she bravely stood by her husband’s gun position. British cannon shot rained down on rudimentary Fort Washington. Redcoats and Hessians overran one American position after another.
Toward the end, the Pennsylvania artillerymen, accompanied by Virginia militiamen, still held out against the Hessians swarming toward their redoubt on Laurel Hill, a ridge just north of Fort Washington’s perimeter. Then came the fateful salvos that killed Margaret’s husband.
That’s when she stepped forward to load and fire John Corbin’s gun again and again…until she, herself, was struck down by British grapeshot, her left arm nearly torn off. The triumphant Hessians found her among the American wounded and, after giving her basic medical care, granted her parole rather than hold her as a prisoner.
The hardy young woman survived her wounds, but her arm was crippled for life. In response to Margaret Corbin’s heroics, the Pennsylvania Executive Council later gave her nominal financial relief (thirty dollars!), while the Continental Congress allowed her to wear a soldier’s uniform and granted her half a soldier’s pay for life. For the remainder of the Revolutionary War, she served as a guard in the Corps of Invalids at West Point, New York, as the only woman member of the unit. She in fact married for a second time to an older Corps member, recalled Joe Lieberman in the February 1999 issue of Military History magazine.
Officially separated from the Continental Army in 1783, she spent the rest of her life at Highland Falls near West Point. Living until 1800 (she was only forty-nine when she died that year), she unfortunately became known as a gruff, hard-drinking local character with a penchant for wearing a petticoat and a uniform jacket. People called her “Captain Molly,” a nickname often applied to the women who had followed their Continental Army husbands into camp…sometimes, like Margaret Corbin, even into battle.
A monument in the cemetery at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point today marks her final resting place, while a second monument at Fort Tryon Park in upper Manhattan reminds visitors of her heroics that day in 1776 that her husband and so many of his comrades-in-arms fell victim to the British-Hessian assault on Fort Washington. Fort Tryon, which the temporarily triumphant British renamed for Royal Governor William Tryon, previously was known as Laurel Hill, the very spot where Margaret Corbin stepped forward to take her fallen husband’s place.
***
Another battle and another heroine stepping forth to fire her fallen husband’s cannon in the midst of hot combat were elements in the story of Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley.
By her real name most Americans today would not know her or her feats. By her nickname of Molly Pitcher, however, who doesn’t know the basic story?
While no less deserving of recognition, her actions in June of 1778 in fact were almost a carbon copy of Margaret Corbin’s nearly two years earlier.
Apparently born in Mercer County, New Jersey, Mary Ludwig eventually became a household servant in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she married a local barber, one John Casper Hays, in 1769. With Revolution breaking out, he became a Pennsylvania artilleryman. He then reenlisted as an infantryman in the Seventh Pennsylvania; his wife, Mary, soon followed him into camp and was on hand for the Battle of Monmouth, New Jersey, on the hot day of June 28, 1778.
Because of the heat, she was kept unusually busy carrying pitchers of water to the thirsty troops on the front lines. She also helped tend the wounded and in one case allegedly carried a man to the rear on her back.
But then her husband, assigned to the infantry’s attached artillery battery, was laid low by enemy fire. The remaining soldiers attending the artillery piece were about to take it off the line, says the legend, when Mary Hays dramatically said no, she could take over her husband’s duties of swa
bbing, loading, and firing the cannon. She then, like Margaret Corbin, kept his cannon in action until the battle was over—an American victory in this case.
With Mary now called “Molly Pitcher,” “Sergeant Molly,” and even, again like Corbin, “Captain Molly,” both she and her husband survived the war and returned to the Carlisle area, where he died shortly before 1790. She later remarried, to Revolutionary War veteran John McCauley.
Given a forty-dollar annuity by the Pennsylvania legislature in 1822 for her Revolutionary War services, Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley lived another ten years. Sources suggest her birth date could have been as early as 1744 or as late as 1754. Either way, she would have been an old woman—and already a legend—by the time of her death in 1832.
***
Other women met their moment of truth in more muted but no less heroic circumstances. Their husbands off fighting the British elsewhere, South Carolina sisters-in-law Grace and Rachel Martin learned that an enemy courier would be passing their way near the British Fort Ninety-Six. He would be carrying important dispatches, the two young wives were told.
They decided to intercept the courier that night.
Carrying rifles and dressed in their husbands’ clothing, they waited behind a rail fence and some bushes. Sure enough, along came the courier—and two armed escorts.
Brandishing their own rifles and trying to use deep, male-sounding voices, the brave pair stepped out of hiding and ordered the trio to halt. Totally surprised, the British soldiers not only surrendered, but gave up the courier’s dispatches with hardly a murmur. In seconds, the two exultant wives faded from sight, the redcoats relieved to be allowed to go their own way unharmed.
They, in fact, turned back toward their base at Fort Ninety-six but decided to stop for the night at a house they had passed earlier. The owner, a middleaged woman named Mrs. Martin, agreed to their request…and even heard their complaint of being stopped on the road by the two local rebels.
Best Little Stories from the American Revolution Page 33