Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  Although the ultimate decision to defend Fort Washington had been the commander in chief’s, Greene took much of the blame, but the fast pace of war allowed little time for deep reflection. Washington’s tattered army now was busy simply surviving as it abandoned Fort Lee and retreated across New Jersey to the Delaware River opposite Trenton.

  It wasn’t long before Greene had redeemed himself with his coordination of men and supplies during the difficult withdrawal, and his command of an American wing in Washington’s surprise attack on the Hessians at Trenton the morning of December 26. At this point, Washington might have been wise to follow Greene’s urging to follow up with an attack on a presumably shaken Hessian garrison at nearby Burlington, but Washington this time rejected his subordinate’s advice—and later acknowledged that perhaps he did miss “a golden opportunity.”

  In any case, Greene was a good right arm in the Battle of Princeton that followed the stunning American success at Trenton. And that winter, Greene was in such good favor that Washington sent him to Philadelphia to consult with the Virginian’s ultimate “boss”—the Continental Congress.

  Returning from his attempt to acquaint the politicians with the army’s pressing needs, Greene sounded a theme heard in many variations ever since. The “talking gentlemen” of the Congress, he said, “tire themselves and everybody else with their long labored speeching that is calculated more to display their own talents than to promote the public interest.”

  Later in 1777, Greene was highly visible in Washington’s Pennsylvania campaign outside Philadelphia against the once-more invading General Howe. At Brandywine Creek that September, with Washington again surprised by an end-around, Greene rushed his men to the collapsing right flank, covering four miles in barely fifty minutes, and held long enough to allow the rest of the Continentals an orderly withdrawal. At Germantown, he led the army’s main column against the British encampment but was delayed in taking up position by a fog so heavy that even General Howe’s dog lost its way and was recovered by the Americans—who later returned the pet under a flag of truce, notes Thayer’s account.

  Although the Americans were rebuffed at Germantown, many considered it a moral victory in which the Continentals showed they were made of stern stuff indeed. They had to be, since their next trial was the miserable winter spent at nearby Valley Forge. But here, again, Greene displayed impressive skills after Washington ordered him to take over the vital, if dull-sounding, chores of quartermaster general, a job he held for two years…and hated. His accomplishments in this primarily administrative post were “little less than miraculous,” writes historian Thayer. “Laboring long hours, he managed to keep the army going from season to season despite shortages of funds, supplies, and means of transportation.” The Continentals emerged from Valley Forge in the spring of 1778 better fed and clothed than when they built their wintering log huts the previous December and January. Washington was more than willing to credit Greene, who, the commander in chief said, “enabled us, with great facility, to make a sudden move with the whole Army and baggage from Valley Forge in pursuit of the Enemy.”

  Greene briefly held a battlefield command again at Monmouth Courthouse, New Jersey, that same summer, but only to relieve General Charles Lee at the head of the American right wing after Lee was dismissed by a furious Washington. Otherwise, Greene was stuck with his commissary duties until summer of 1780, except for a momentary “sojourn” in his home state of Rhode Island at the side of John Sullivan for the Battle of Newport in the fall of 1778, an affair that ended badly through no fault of Greene’s, or Sullivan’s.

  Finally emerging from his despised purgatory as a supply officer, rankled by occasional charges that he had personally profited from the quartermaster post (stoutly denied), Greene in 1780 was handed his greatest challenge yet. In August of 1780, news came from South Carolina that Horatio Gates had squandered his army in the Battle of Camden. The redcoat tide soon would engulf North Carolina and even Virginia, the bottom half of the rebelling colonies, unless someone erected a buffer stopping the flow northward. With Congress leaving the choice of a new Southern commander up to him, Washington picked Greene for the seemingly impossible task. “My dear Angel,” Greene wrote to his wife, Kitty, “What I have been dreading has come to pass. His Excellency General Washington by order of Congress has appointed me to the command of the Southern Army.” Greene then headed south so hastily that he didn’t get to say goodbye to Kitty in person. He gathered key officers and units as quickly as possible, too. He made stops to recruit “Light-Horse Harry” Lee and his dragoons; Colonel William R. Davie as commissary officer; and Polish-born Thaddeus Kosciuszko as engineer officer for the campaign ahead. Once on station, Greene also planned to make full use of the fighting prowess of Virginia’s Brigadier General Daniel Morgan and Lieutenant Colonel William Washington’s cavalry.

  Greene didn’t really expect to find much of an army awaiting him in Charlotte, but what he did find was shocking to see. “All that was left after the Camden battle were two thousand ragged and famished creatures who resembled scarecrows more than soldiers,” notes Thayer.

  An encouraging note, though, was the recent Battle of King’s Mountain, in which American “over-the-mountain men” from the Appalachians and beyond had defeated a significant Loyalist and British force. The victory was to be more crucial than anyone at first realized. Explains Thayer: “[Lord] Cornwallis [commander of British troops in the South] still had an army that was far superior in numbers to any force that Greene could put in the field, but the British soldiers were scattered throughout South Carolina and Georgia in numerous small forts and garrisons. After the British defeat at King’s Mountain, these occupied states grew restless, and Cornwallis did not dare to enlarge his main force at the expense of the garrisons.” So, Cornwallis would hunker down at Winnsboro, South Carolina, and await reinforcements before forcing the new American commander’s hand.

  Greene, too, needed time to prepare—to build—an army for the tough campaign ahead. Risking all, he divided his already-small command, sending Morgan, a few cavalry, and seven hundred light troops circling north of Winnsboro in position to harass Cornwallis—“and discourage any Loyalists who might think of enlisting under Cornwallis.” Greene then retired with his main force to Cheraw Hill, South Carolina, seventy-five miles east of Cornwallis, to train his troops, to “rebuild his army unmolested.” In the meantime, his subordinates harassed the British with raids and other guerilla tactics—with the help of militia leaders such as South Carolina’s Francis (“Swamp Fox”) Marion.

  Cornwallis, reinforced by an added 2,500 or so men in January 1781, was finally ready to leave his lair. As his first move, he sent the usually reliable Banastre Tarleton after the pesky Morgan, cavalryman William Washington, and their combined force of Continentals and untried militia. Tarleton, of “no quarter” notoriety, caught up with them at little-known Cowpens, South Carolina. But this time, for once, it was Tarleton who emerged from battle with a badly bloodied nose.

  The news set Cornwallis off in pursuit of Morgan, but high water in the Catawba River intervened and gave Morgan and Greene a moment’s respite to hold a council of war. Although the veteran Morgan worried over Greene’s bold strategy of a fighting retreat to Virginia, he stuck by his far younger superior. Together they outraced the needled Cornwallis to the Dan River on the Virginia–North Carolina border.

  This part of the campaign was no easy task. “Greene’s little army trudged along clay roads that turned into slippery mud as the rains began to fall,” wrote Thayer. “His men suffered terribly. Hundreds of soldiers were without shoes and left bloodstains behind to mark the army’s route.”

  At this point, winter of 1781, Cornwallis was not quite ready to contemplate going after Greene and company beyond the Virginia border. He halted, “hoping to replenish his supplies and to enlist more Loyalists.” He didn’t find much of either commodity—and Greene didn’t give him the leisure to deal with such problems in any case.<
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  Instead, an aggressive Greene plunged back into North Carolina before Cornwallis could regroup from the difficult race north. They now met in battle, real battle, at Guilford Courthouse, today’s Greensboro, North Carolina, in March of 1781. The outcome, by the numbers, was a defeat for the Americans, but more important, it was a Pyrrhic victory costing Cornwallis irreplaceable losses in personnel and materiel. Furthermore, as he now saw growing problems facing him, there was only one solution other than retreat to the south. “Convinced that British control could not be sustained in the Carolinas as long as Virginia remained an American supply base, Cornwallis made a fateful decision. He would march into Virginia and join the British forces already there. Greene, he was quite sure, would follow him, and the combined sections of the British army would make short work of destroying the Southern army.”

  One half of Cornwallis’s plan actually came about—he did march into Virginia, and at first quite successfully so. Greene, however, made no attempt to follow. Instead, Greene dashed southward to take on and gradually defeat, piecemeal, all the various forts and garrisons that Cornwallis had left uncovered. That took a while, and Cornwallis, in the fall of 1781, wound up at Yorktown…many thanks to American General Nathanael Greene and his brilliant campaign in the South.

  Death by His Own Sword

  “THE BRITISH COMMANDER TOOK THE SWORD AND THRUST IT THROUGH COLONEL Ledyard. This I heard and saw.”

  And what Connecticut militiaman Joseph Wood heard before seeing his commander, Lieutenant Colonel William Ledyard, slain by sword was Ledyard’s proffer to surrender Fort Griswold to the attacking British.

  “When Colonel Ledyard found that he was not able to withstand the attack upon the fort, he opened the gate to surrender,” wrote Wood years later in his plea for a service pension. The British officer confronting Ledyard asked, “Who commands this fort?”

  According to Wood, Ledyard replied, “I did, but you do now.” And: “He presented to the British commander his sword.” That’s when the officer turned the same sword against Ledyard and ran him through, an infamous incident of the Revolutionary War. But…was it intentional, or even true?

  While the British capture of Fort Griswold on the Thames River at New London, Connecticut, on September 6, 1781, was a notoriously bloody affair, some historians have questioned the literal truth in reports that the defenseless American commander was murdered in the act of surrender. That he and 156 of his 157-man complement were killed, wounded, or captured, however, has been reported as the terrible price the militiamen paid for opposing a British raiding party of 800 or so. It may be that the Americans paid more than the usual penalty because they had killed two British troop commanders in the heat of battle that day, just a month or so before Yorktown.

  By many accounts, only one defender escaped British wrath as the fort fell to the redcoats—seventeen-year-old Nathanial Avery fled through a sally port in the fort’s south wall, ran down a hill beyond and eluded British capture. On the other hand, John C. Dann’s collection of pension petitions by Revolutionary War veterans (The Revolution Remembered) presents Wood’s detailed, eyewitness account of Ledyard’s death at the hands of an unnamed British officer. “The only firsthand description of the murder…” says Dann in his editorial introduction to the Wood account.

  Nor was that the end of the scene witnessed by Wood before he, too, escaped (linking up with young Avery outside the fort), he also said. According to Wood’s account, militia captain Allen immediately reacted to Colonel Ledyard’s brutal slaying. “Upon that, Captain Allen, who was standing nearby in the act of presenting his sword to surrender, drew it back and thrust it through the British officer who had thus killed Colonel Ledyard. Captain Allen was then immediately killed by the British. This I also saw. I then leaped the walls and made my escape.” Outside the fort, Wood encountered Avery, and together the two found a boat a mile or so up the river and rowed across to safety.

  For the Americans, the grim day had begun with a British ruse allowing the attackers to surprise the would-be defenders of New London, a port and sanctuary for American privateers harassing the British at sea. Led by the turncoat Benedict Arnold, himself once a Connecticut militia officer, a British and Loyalist force of more than 1,700 men descended upon the river entrance in twenty-four vessels. They arrived at 2 A.M. and began landing troops five hours later. Half the expeditionary force, under Arnold himself, would attack incomplete Fort Trumbull on the right-hand (New London) side of the river; the other half would assault Fort Griswold and its twenty-two cannon on the Groton Heights opposite. While Fort Griswold boasted casemates, stone-faced walls, and outer barriers of pointed pickets, a ditch and a ring of nasty tree limbs (an abatis), much of the fort was in disrepair. There were gaps in the abatis line and ditch, and some gun platforms were rotted through. Worse, only relatively few charges for the cannon were ready for use that morning.

  The American in charge was the unfortunate Lieutenant Colonel Ledyard, a militia artillery officer with roughly 140 men at his disposal as daybreak revealed the presence of the British landing force. Normally, Ledyard could have counted on hasty militia reinforcements from the surrounding countryside. Two quick shots from a Griswold artillery piece was the signal for help.

  And his men fired off the two-shot alarm signal as instructed. But the British were well aware that a signal of three quick shots meant that all was well; that, typically, an American privateer or prize ship was returning to harbor…take no alarm. As soon as the British heard the two-shot alarm sounded at Fort Griswold, they fired off a third cannon.

  The ruse was completely successful. The distant militiamen who heard the three cannon shots stayed home. The only reinforcements Ledyard would receive that day were men fleeing across the river from Benedict Arnold’s attack on weak Fort Trumbull. Even so, the fighting for control of Griswold was fierce and bloody. Leading his troops forward, the overall British commander, Lieutenant Colonel Edmund Eyre, was mortally wounded. Next, a Major Montgomery, leading a second attack across the ditch, past the sharpened stakes, and through a cannon embrasure, was felled as well.

  It was soon after, with the maddened British swarming over his south and northeast walls, that Colonel Ledyard decided to surrender and ordered his men to desist. While some of them continued fighting, he made his way to the north gate…where he would die by his own sword.

  The British, reported a Sergeant Hempstead, another of the few surviving Americans, “wantonly went to shoting [sic] and bayoneting of us, the quarters [mercy] was continuously cryed for from everyone but to no purpose.” The sad result was the Fort Griswold “massacre,” another nail in the coffin of Arnold’s reputation, even though he wasn’t present in person.

  Meanwhile, Avery and militiaman Joseph Wood fell in with “large numbers of the militia on their way to New London,” said Wood in his pension request many years later. “It was near night when we got to New London. It was before dark. When we got there, Arnold had burned the town and left with his forces.”

  German Ally at Yorktown

  IF THE BRITISH HAD THE WIDELY HATED, BAYONET-WIELDING HESSIANS AS ALLIES in the Revolution, then the Americans also could claim a German force as their ally. Granted, this ally was not even a brigade in size; America’s German ally was but a single regiment.

  Even so, the tiny Zweibruecken Regiment was able to play a key role in the Patriot triumph at Yorktown, with its wounded commander, Count William Deux-Ponts, hailed by George Washington’s French allies as “the hero of Yorktown,” wrote David T. Zabecki in the encyclopedia The American Revolution, 1775–1783.

  Indeed, Count Deux-Ponts was entrusted with the enviable task of returning to France and officially presenting King Louis XVI with the surrender terms, along with captured British flags. No surprise, then, that Deux-Ponts “was received at Versailles as a conquering hero.” The French king was so moved, he awarded the young commander of the Zweibruecken Regiment the Order of Saint Louis, an honor still eluding many more sen
ior—more French!—officers of that era.

  Of course, both the name of the regiment and that of its commander translate the same—“two bridges.” The fact is, the commander and his men were German—they hailed from the Duchy of Zweibruecken in the region today known as the Rhineland-Palatinate. They spoke German, even thought German, but they were fighting with America’s French ally. Indeed, their 1,200-man contingent was one of only seven regiments comprising the entire expeditionary corps that France had dispatched to help the American revolutionaries. So, it appears the Zweibrueckens were German, and yet…you could say they were a tiny bit French, too.

  As Zabecki explains, their home territory had “passed back and forth between France and Germany for centuries and was even owned by Sweden for a brief time in the early eighteenth century.” Then, in 1731, “it passed back into German hands under the rule of the Birkenfeld-Bischweiler line of the ruling house of Bavaria.”

  The duchy’s ruler of that era, Duke Christian IV of Zweibruecken, arranged with French King Louis XV to have the duchy’s “tiny, one-regiment army” serve as part of the French army. And so it had, ever since 1757. By the 1770s, the regiment was so well thought of that Count Jean Baptiste Rochambeau, commander of the French land forces sent to the rebellious American colonies, specifically asked to have the Zweibrueckens at his side.

  The request was in response to more than the regiment’s apparently excellent reputation. Thought also was given to the many thousands of Hessians hired out by the German state of Hesse as mercenaries for the British side. The idea was that the German-Zweibruecken presence might induce many an unhappy Hessian soldier to “come over” from the other side…and many Hessians did desert, but most simply disappeared into the vast American frontier and agricultural lands. Only a relative handful joined the Zweibrueckens.

  Nor were they the only Germans “employed” by the French for the American Revolution. “Even Rochambeau’s French regiments had a high proportion of German-speaking troops from Alsace and Lorraine,” noted Zabecki. Rochambeau’s cavalrymen were Germans, Poles, and Irishmen; their regiment was “considered a ‘German Regiment.’” But it had been raised in France “as the ‘Voluntaires Etrangeres de la Marine.’”