Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  The three redcoats ate a hearty breakfast before setting out again the next morning. As they were leaving, however, they briefly met the older Mrs. Martin’s two daughters-in-law, Grace and Rachel. Apparently the three soldiers never quite realized.…

  ***

  Still more women contributed to the final outcome in briefly told, yet not-sosmall ways. In South Carolina again, Rebecca Motte told her fellow Patriots to go ahead and burn down her plantation home overlooking the Congaree River, literally to smoke out a British garrison that had turned it into a fortified outpost. Flaming arrows set fire to the roof, forcing out the redcoats—who then joined with the besieging Patriots in fighting the fire and saving what they could of Rebecca Motte’s magnificent home.

  In New York, fall of 1776, Mary Lindley Murray entertained British General Sir William Howe and his officers with a fine, slow-moving dinner at her Murray Hill estate in mid-Manhattan…while American General Israel Putnam was moving out his troops on the west side of the island. Howe was glad to join Mrs. Murray because her husband, Robert, was a well-known Loyalist. Not so Mrs. Murray, however. She delayed Howe’s departure in every conceivable fashion (“More wine, Sir William?”), well aware that Putnam’s withdrawal from lower Manhattan was under way.

  Nor should we overlook the impact of little-known Hannah White Arnett of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, one night in late 1776 when the prospect of an American triumph over the British appeared very dim indeed. With the redcoats in hot pursuit, George Washington’s crumbling army was headed for the hills and beyond, to Pennsylvania eventually.

  Gathered at the home of Hannah Arnett and husband, Isaac, was a dispirited clot of would-be rebels. They were debating whether to accept British offers of a pardon for previously unruly Americans now willing to declare their allegiance to the Crown by a certain deadline. After hours of argument pro and con, they had to admit the great cause of Revolution appeared destined to failure—the wise course for them, however reluctant they might feel, would be to go ahead and accept the British “peace offering.”

  Entering the discussion at this point—literally stepping into the doorway—was Isaac’s wife, Hannah, furious and scathing. Were they men or traitors, she wanted to know. Without waiting for an answer, she reminded them that the American colonists were in the right, not England. “We are poor, weak and few, but God is fighting for us!” she declared. “We entered into this struggle with pure hearts and prayerful lips. We had counted the cost and were willing to pay the price, were it in our heart’s blood.”

  But now look! “And now, now because for a time the day is going against us, you would give up all and sneak back like cravens to kiss the feet that have trampled upon us. And you call yourselves men!”

  She reminded her stunned listeners that they were the “sons of those who gave up home and fortune and fatherland to make for themselves and for dear liberty a resting place in the wilderness!”

  For shame, she exclaimed. “Oh, shame upon you, cowards!”

  Hannah didn’t finish until she had threatened to forsake home, hearth, and even husband Isaac if the men didn’t recant their decision to accept the British offer of amnesty.

  She had offered strong medicine as cure for their low spirits, to be sure, but it worked. However bitter the taste of her railing, the men meeting at Isaac Arnett’s house that night reversed themselves and pledged to continue their support of the Revolutionary cause. A woman arguing with passion had swayed them all.

  “Bloody Ban” Tarleton

  FOR A SPORADICALY EMBATTLED SOUTH CAROLINA, THE WAR JUST WOULDN’T go away. Even after the British gave up on cracking the Patriot defenses at Sullivan’s Island, and after the Cherokee Nation was subdued in 1776, there always seemed to be a fresh storm cloud on the horizon. In 1779, the Carolinians watched in dismay as the British and their Loyalist friends regained command of Savannah—and virtually all of Georgia—with relative ease. Next on the Crown’s agenda, quite obviously, would be the key port city of Charleston.

  In time, South Carolina would come up with a new set of heroes. In the affair of Sullivan’s Island, it had been William Moultrie, militia colonel. In the case of the Cherokee uprising, it was militia colonel Andrew Williamson. Next on the horizon would be militia colonel Andrew Pickens, Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” and Thomas Sumter, the “Gamecock.” First, though, the British would produce Banastre Tarleton as ranking villain of the piece. Only twenty-five, son of a slave trader in Liverpool, “Bloody Ban” had purchased his commission in the British army, as permitted by custom of the day. And now Lieutenant Colonel Tarleton commanded the hard-riding, green-jacketed British Legion.

  As the British, under General Sir Henry Clinton, tightened a nearly inescapable noose of siege works and naval and land forces around Charleston in the spring of 1780, Tarleton and his men were sent riding in the middle of an April night toward a place called Monck’s Corner. There, thirty-two miles from Charleston, American General Isaac Huger guarded the last open corridor of escape from the besieged city. But Tarleton and his men burst upon their loosely guarded camp at three in the morning, killing dozens of Americans, scattering others far and wide. General Huger and his subordinate Colonel William Washington had to plunge into the nearby swamps to escape Tarleton’s wrath.

  With the American escape hatch closed, General Benjamin Lincoln, in a matter of days, was forced to surrender his army defending the old port city. This proved to be the worst American defeat of the Revolutionary War by the numbers. The British scooped up nearly 5,500 armed prisoners (seven generals among them), nearly 400 artillery pieces, 376 barrels of powder, more than 8,000 cannonballs, nearly 6,000 muskets, and 33,000 rounds for small arms. Even worse, the Continental Army no longer could claim a presence in the South.

  No presence, that is, except for the Third Virginia Regiment, all of 350 to 400 strong. Previously on their way to help man the defenses at Charleston, these Continentals now turned back for safer territory to the north. Accompanying Colonel Abraham Buford and his men were South Carolina’s Governor John Rutledge and fellow Patriot officials, all in flight from British-occupied Charleston. They soon found out, however, that they were under hot pursuit by Tarleton, who would like nothing better than to snare a rebel governor and entourage. Covering a startling 150 miles in a twenty-four-hour period, the young Englishman’s cavalry and mounted infantry just missed taking the Rutledge party, but caught up with Colonel Buford’s Virginians at the Waxhaws settlement near the North Carolina border.

  Even though Tarleton claimed to have 700 men with him, rather than his actual 270, Buford refused a demand to surrender. Before he could catch his breath, Tarleton attacked. The Americans waited until too late before firing their first volley. Before the Patriots could reload, the dragoons were among them, cutting and slashing them with bayonet and saber.

  The numbers tell the story—5 dragoons killed and 14 wounded to the staggering Patriot totals of 113 killed and 150 wounded. It had been a massacre; it would be known far and wide as the Waxhaws or Buford Massacre. From this battle, too, came the expression “Tarleton’s quarter,” which meant no quarter, no mercy, since Tarleton’s dragoons showed no mercy to their fallen enemy, repeatedly attacking them with the bayonet. “The demand for quarter, seldom refused to a vanquished foe, was at once found to be in vain,” reported onlooking army surgeon Robert Brownfield.

  It may be, in the heat and confusion of battle, that some Americans continued to fire on Tarleton’s force after the white flag of surrender appeared. Be that as it may, such desultory resistance still doesn’t explain the bloodbath that followed—for fifteen minutes “after every man was prostrate,” said Dr. Brownfield later, the dragoons moved around the battlesite, “plunging their bayonets into everyone that exhibited any sign of life.” In some cases, they used their bayonets to push aside bodies on top of bodies to “come at those beneath.” Tarleton’s lame excuse: His Loyalists erroneously thought their commanding officer had been killed.

 
In one case symbolic of the entire bloody affair, a Patriot officer, Captain John Stokes, suffered a total of twenty-three wounds. He started out parrying the blows of one dragoon with a small sword, but then a second dragoon assailed Stokes and “by one stroke, cut off his right hand through the metacarpal bones,” reported Dr. Brownfield. Still trying to parry blows aimed at his head, Stokes next lost the forefinger of his left hand and his left arm was “hacked in eight or ten places from the wrist to the shoulder.” He finally went down with his head “laid open almost the whole length of the crown to the eye brows.” He then was subjected to “several” cuts on the face and shoulders. Incredibly, the worst was yet to come. When a dragoon asked if he expected mercy, the still-conscious American said, “I have not, nor do I mean to ask quarters. Finish me as soon as possible.” The dragoon complied all too readily, twice plunging his bayonet into the American’s body. But still he lived. “Another asked the same question,” related Dr. Brownfield, “and received the same answer, and he also thrust his bayonet twice through his body.”

  Despite his ordeal at the Waxhaws, this remarkable man lived…to serve his new country after the Revolution as a federal judge in North Carolina. Think of him when driving through his namesake, Stokes County.

  Banastre Tarleton, meanwhile, in the single stroke of the bloody Waxhaws affair, became the most feared—and hated—minor officer among the British based in the South. He would continue his fierce, hard-riding style for the next two years, most notably to lose the Battle of Cowpens and to command the raiding party that almost snared Virginia’s outgoing Governor Thomas Jefferson at Charlottesville in 1781.

  Unfortunately for the British hoping for the support of the Carolinas, Tarleton’s no-quarter reputation simply hardened the attitude of many Americans. A second factor that pushed many neutral onlookers into active rebellion was a foolish and arrogant edict issued by Clinton before he left freshly subdued Charleston for unfinished business in the North. Not content with the parole rendering captured Patriots inactive neutrals, Clinton issued a proclamation restoring both the rights and duties of Carolina citizens who had accepted the neutralizing parole status—this meant that failure to defend the Crown against their own, still-rebellious countrymen would result in their being branded rebels themselves. Forced to take sides, many took to the field against the Crown rather than for it. South Carolina, far from being subdued, now would be freshly aflame with rebellion.

  Andrew’s Rage

  THE YOUTH BEFORE THE BRITISH OFFICER WAS TALL AND SKINNY. HIS UNRULY hair was brush thick, his eyes a deep blue. He came from a poor and fatherless home, and he frequently was an angry, angry young man. Even a bully at times. But he and his brother Robert, only slightly older, were in a tight spot now. Rebel partisans without a doubt, they were prisoners of the officer of dragoons. And they wouldn’t be treated kindly.

  Focusing upon fourteen-year-old Andrew, the officer ordered the young American to clean his boots.

  We can imagine those unforgettable wild eyes flashing in defiance—they always did when his temper flared, even years later as seventh president of the United States.

  “Sir,” he allegedly exclaimed, “I am a prisoner of war and claim to be treated as such.”

  But the officer of dragoons could flare up, too. Enraged at such impertinence, he swung his sword at the youngster, who ducked and at the same time attempted to parry the blow with his left hand. The results were an ugly laceration of his head and a gash across his fingers—he would carry the scars of the partially deflected blow for life. More immediately, however, he and Robert must do their best to survive their plight as prisoners of British soldiers sick and tired of the unending resistance offered by Patriot partisans—even youngsters like these two teenage brothers—in the Carolina backcountry. For now, the furious officer was done with them. Surrounded by their captors, they were consigned to a prison camp forty to forty-five miles away in Camden, South Carolina, and they would travel there on horseback.

  In their condition, that would be no easy journey. The destination, though, was worse. It was a country jail surrounded by a stockade that contained 250 prisoners and no bedding, no medicines, little food other than twists of bread, and no medical attention, though many others were also wounded.

  Fortunately, they wouldn’t freeze to death, since warmer temperatures had arrived in that spring of 1781. Still, other dangers stalked the two brothers. Separated and robbed after their arrival, they soon came down with the dreaded smallpox.

  Said the future president years later: “They kept me in jail at Camden about two months, starved me nearly to death and gave me the smallpox.…When it left me I was a skeleton—not quite six feet long and a little over six inches thick!” Fortunately, it was at this point that a real angel of mercy arrived on their behalf—their mother, Elizabeth.

  This brave but distraught woman was absolutely tireless in her efforts to rescue and care for her two sons. For years, she had refused to be beaten down by various blows sustained since immigrating from Ireland to a tough homesteading life on the poor red soil of the Waxhaws area. She had lost her husband to natural causes and been forced to move in with relatives. And she had buried an older son who died in the Revolution.

  According to twentieth-century biographer Gerald W. Johnson, Andrew’s mother, Elizabeth, at this point had arranged with other partisans to exchange thirteen captured British soldiers for her two sons and five comrades incarcerated at the enemy’s pestilent jail in Camden. More recent biographer Robert V. Remini’s account offers a slightly different version, saying that the boys’ mother arrived “just as an exchange of prisoners was being arranged between the American and British commanders.” As a result, “she persuaded the British to include her sons in the exchange, along with five Waxhaw neighbors.”

  Whatever the exact detail, she succeeded in freeing both her boys, but all three now faced the long trek home with only two horses to carry them. Robert was still so sick he could not stand or even sit upright without support. Andrew was also weak and feverish. Undismayed, Elizabeth lashed her older son into place on one horse, then mounted the remaining one, and the trio set off—with Andrew stumbling along as best he could on bare feet. Their newly freed neighbors traveled with them, also on foot.

  Close to journey’s end, a merciless rainstorm drenched them all. In their weakened condition, the cold soaking was the last thing the two boys needed. Just forty-eight hours later, Robert was dead and Andrew was delirious from his fever. Somehow, though, the teenager rallied. His exhausted mother managed to bring him—and herself—through the ordeal. It would be months before Andrew was back to normal…only to face yet another cruel blow from the gods of war.

  Imagine his astonishment—fear and anger, too, we can guess—when his mother announced she would be leaving home to help care for the truly wrteched American prisoners held in British prison ships at Charleston, 160 miles away. She had seen the conditions at Camden, and so she had an idea of the deplorable environment on board the prison ships. There were Waxhaw men held there, too, among them two nephews.

  Leaving young Andrew, now fifteen, with the relatives who had opened their doors to her and her children previously, Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson was gone only a short while before she contracted cholera while nursing the men aboard the prison ships. She was buried just outside the city, her personal belongings sent to her son at the Waxhaws in a small bundle.

  Somehow, this same teenager managed to overcome the loss of his immediate family. Somehow, young Andrew Jackson outgrew and overcame the deprivations—but never all the anger—of his formative years, to become a territorial governor, a U.S. congressman, a U.S. senator, seventh U.S. president and, along the way, hero of the Battle of New Orleans, which of course he fought against the hated British.

  Shooting Uphill

  THE WEATHER THAT MORNING, ACCORDING TO A MAN—A TEENAGER, REALLY—who was there: “The sky was overcast with clouds, and at times a light mist of rain falling.” With hu
ndreds upon hundreds of the enemy already gathered on top of a steep, skyward-soaring hill—King’s Mountain, South Carolina—the pursuing militia and frontiersmen from Carolina and eastern Tennessee soon would face a moment of truth. They had indeed sought it out; they had been in pursuit of Major Patrick Ferguson’s sharpshooting Loyalists and a host of fellow Tories for days, but now, like a wild beast at bay, the hunted had turned to deal with the hunter. As it often was in the Carolinas, the mood was grim and ugly.

  Former apprentice tailor James Collins, soldiering today with his father but at his callow age of sixteen already a veteran Carolina partisan, understood the challenge very well. “Our provisions were scanty, and hungry men are likely to be fractious,” he later wrote; “…each one felt his situation; the last stake was up and the severity of the game must be played; everything was at stake—life, liberty, property, and even the fate of wife, children and friends, seemed to depend on the issue; death or victory was the only way to escape suffering.”

  Death or victory! As in any battle, it indeed would come down to that before day’s end…but for whom? And why?

  As related by James Collins, and confirmed by many others, he and his fellow militiamen “came in sight of the enemy” about two o’clock on Saturday afternoon. The British-led Loyalists were at considerable advantage right from the outset. For one thing, they had halted their march northeastward and about-faced at a moment and a place of their own choosing.

  There would be no surprising them, quite obviously. They could wait, prepared for battle and fully assured of their foe’s appearance.