Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  Aside from all that, however, the Zweibrueckens comprised the only Rochambeau regiment “raised on German soil.” And they wore a different uniform from their comrades-in-arms—“deep celestial blue coats,” as opposed to the “standard white uniform of the French infantry.”

  Like the rest of Rochambeau’s army, Count Deux-Ponts and his men marched down the East Coast and into Virginia in the fall of 1781 to take up the Siege of Yorktown alongside the Americans. As the Allies’ parallel entrenchments advanced toward the British-held town, it became obvious that the besiegers must seize two key redoubts in order to continue progress and move up their cannon to more advantageous position. The decision was to storm the redoubts the night of October 14 with two four-hundred-man columns, one American and one French. Alexander Hamilton would lead the Americans against Redoubt No. 10, also known as the Rock Redoubt, while Count Deux-Ponts would command his own Zweibrueckens as the lead element in the French attack on Redoubt No. 9.

  And so it was done, albeit with inevitable losses and some difficulties. At the base of Redoubt No. 9, Deux-Ponts and his men were halted by the defensive abatis that still stood in the way, despite advance “softening” by Allied artillery. With the eager Zweibrueckens slowed and withering under enemy fire from above, the regiment’s axmen fought furiously to chop a path through the barrier.

  Later, in relating the events, Deux-Ponts said, “We threw ourselves into the ditch…and each one sought to break through the fraises and to mount the parapet.”

  And mount the parapet the Germans finally did. The enemy charged the intruders, but were repelled by a volley of musket fire. Then, the attacking Zweibrueckens were at the top of the redoubt and firing down into their opponents huddled below. Deux-Ponts was just ordering a bayonet charge when the troops below put down their muskets and surrendered. “Vive le Roi,” shouted the triumphant Germans—in French.

  It all happened very fast. After clearing the impediments in front of the redoubt, it had taken Deux-Ponts and his men only seven minutes to capture the redoubt. Nearby, Alexander Hamilton and his Americans had seized their objective as well. Now the Patriot cannon could move up and rake the British forward lines at will. For Lord Cornwallis, his back against the York River, the siege was a lost cause. In just five days, on October 19, 1781, he would surrender.

  In the Battle of Redoubt No. 9 the Zweibrueckens lost a few good men, to be sure—fifteen killed, apparently, and seventy-seven wounded. It was only after the smoke of battle had cleared, however, that they were deprived of their veteran commander, Count Deux-Ponts.

  When a newly placed sentry cried out warning of an enemy patrol nearby, Deux-Ponts peered over the parapet to see what he could see. Just then a ricocheting cannonball struck close by and painfully peppered his face with shrapnel-like gravel. He had to be evacuated immediately, but he would soon recover sufficiently to carry the surrender terms to the king of France.

  Drums Covered in Black

  SHE WAS IN THE CONTINENTAL ARMY AS A WIFE, COOK, AND WASHERWOMAN married to a commissary sergeant, and while she never made general, she was a familiar figure at West Point. She was in the trenches at Yorktown, she traveled with generals, she had a glimpse of the defeated Cornwallis, and she took home memories of a conversation with Commander in Chief George Washington. Few men and almost no women witnessed such great events or rubbed elbows so frequently with the historic figures of the Revolutionary War.

  Married to Aaron Osborn as a twenty-four-year-old servant, Sarah Osborn for a time did washing and sewing for American soldiers at West Point. She and her husband were there at the time of Benedict Arnold’s defection to the British and the capture of his contact man, British Major John André.

  She, herself, saw two of the bargemen who, at his order, took Arnold to a waiting British ship in the Hudson River. She herself heard them say that after General Arnold “jumped aboard,” they and their fellow bargemen were invited to join him in defection. They all went aboard the British vessel, “[a]nd some chose to stay and some to go, and did accordingly.”

  Sarah Osborn was also with the American force that hurried south in the summer of 1781 with Washington’s French allies, in the effort to trap Lord Cornwallis on the Virginia peninsula between the York and James Rivers. She later recalled riding on horseback through the streets of Philadelphia (where she had to bake bread for the troops). Her only female company consisted of two white women and a black woman named Letta.

  On the way to Philadelphia, all were “under the command of Generals Washington and [James] Clinton.” Her husband’s immediate boss all this time was Captain James Gregg, who delighted in showing off “the bare spot on his head where he had been scalped by the Indians.” He occasionally “had turns of being shattered in his mind,” it seems. Perhaps this was a result of the scalping, which had come about while he and two companions were pigeon hunting one day in upstate New York. The other two had been killed in the same incident.

  From Philadelphia, meanwhile, the march continued southward to Baltimore, where the Osborns accompanied General Clinton’s entourage aboard a ship sailing down the Chesapeake and ultimately up the James River toward Williamsburg, Virginia. The tide carried their vessel only twelve miles upstream from the river mouth, but the voyagers were happy enough with that—the tide now out, they had “a fine time catching sea lobsters.”

  Next, of course, it was on to nearby Yorktown, in those days often called “Little York.” Here, Cornwallis occupied the town, with his back firmly pressed against the York River. Trapped, he was under siege with the American entrenchments creeping closer and closer, and the artillery booming incessantly.

  Sarah Osborn took it all in upon arrival—still with her husband’s commissary contingent—at an encampment about a mile from the town itself. What she couldn’t at first comprehend, though, was the number of dead black people, “lying round…[the] encampment.” She was told that the British either had forced them out of Yorktown to starve or they had already starved and were then “thrown out.”

  Sarah set to work at her duties outside Yorktown—“washing, mending and cooking for the soldiers,” with help from the other three women in her party. The “roar of the artillery” went on for days. At some point before the siege ended, she herself went into the American entrenchments, where she “cooked and carried in beef, and bread, and coffee to the soldiers in the entrenchment.” That’s when (and where) she met Washington. He asked if she wasn’t “afraid of the cannonballs.”

  “No,” she quipped, “the bullets would not cheat the gallows,” and, more seriously, “It would not do for the men to fight and starve, too.”

  Washington’s forces, meanwhile, “dug entrenchments nearer and nearer to Yorktown every night or two till the last.”

  The British, too, had been firing artillery, but the next morning, about nine o’clock, a silence fell. Then came the enemy’s drums, beating “excessively.” Not only that, the American officers around her “all at once hurrahed and swung their hats.” The British had surrendered!

  Sarah soon would witness even more history in the making. Mounted British officers filed out of the town and ceremoniously proffered their swords to their American counterparts. Next came the British army, “who marched out beating and playing a melancholy tune, their drums covered with black handkerchiefs and their fifes with black ribbons tied around them, into an old field and there grounded their arms and then returned into town again to await their destiny.”

  She saw Washington, Clinton, and the Marquis de Lafayette among the victorious American officers, either on foot, or on horseback. She saw Cornwallis and decided that he looked small, “diminutive,” and cross-eyed. She saw the “large, portly” British General Charles O’Hara, Cornwallis’s second in command, surrender on behalf of the British army. She didn’t mention that he tried to slight the Americans by offering his sword to the French commander on the scene, but was refused and directed to the American second in command, Major General Benjamin Lincoln
. She did mention that as O’Hara passed by her vantage point, she saw him “full face, and the tears rolled down his cheeks.”

  From Slavery to Freedom

  APPEARING IN THE REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY JUST BEFORE YORKTOWN, WAS “Jim,” valet, groom, and spy for the Marquis de Lafayette. A slave, he was “lent” to the young Frenchman when he was campaigning in Virginia against invading British forces in 1781. Weeks before the siege of Yorktown, Jim volunteered to present himself to the British as a runaway slave and gather information for the Frenchman. Seeing the potential value of such a plan, the marquis went along with Jim’s proposal.

  At this moment, the British had seized and then vacated Richmond, leaving a smoking, partially burned-out town behind. They were now moving east along the north bank of the James River toward Williamsburg. Lafayette, strengthened by the arrival of Anthony Wayne and nearly a thousand Pennsylvania troops south of Fredericksburg, Virginia, had turned from retreat before the British and now, with two thousand Continentals and a few thousand Virginia militia, was in pursuit. He caught up with the enemy near Jamestown in early July, with a brief but fierce firefight resulting on July 6. The next day, intent on reaching British-held Portsmouth, Lord Cornwallis crossed over to the south bank of the James.

  In response to a plea for reinforcements from Sir Henry Clinton in New York, Cornwallis agreed, but warned that he was wary of seeing his army backed up against the waters and swamps of Tidewater Virginia—and thus “liable to become a prey to a foreign Enemy, with temporary superiority at Sea.” Mere weeks later, with French Admiral Francois de Grasse blocking British access to the York River north of the James, and Cornwallis by then under siege at Yorktown, that is exactly what happened.

  For now, though, Lafayette was content to take up a watch-and-wait position at Malvern Hill, still on the north bank of the James and located between Williamsburg and Richmond. By now, his black servant Jim was in position, too—as a new servant on the staff of Lord Cornwallis himself! Jim had appeared out of nowhere during the British crossing of the river, and they apparently had accepted his word that he was a runaway slave. He now worked in his Lordship’s own tent.

  “But though he reported faithfully on every move of the army as it moved eastward to Portsmouth,” said Burke Davis in his book The Campaign that Won America: The Story of Yorktown, “he could learn nothing of future British plans. As Lafayette complained, ‘his Lordship is so shy of his papers that my honest friend says he cannot get at them.’”

  He may not have stayed all the time with the Cornwallis entourage, though, and he repeatedly was at risk of being caught. According to Virginius Dabney’s Virginia: The New Dominion, A History from 1607 to the Present, “He made a number of trips to Portsmouth, then held by the British, delivered letters to other American spies and kept his eyes open for useful information.”

  Close to month’s end, Jim had momentous but tantalizing news. The British soon would be leaving Portsmouth, but where they would go he didn’t know.

  On August 1, Lafayette found out—they were landing at Yorktown and, just across the mouth of the York River, at Gloucester Point. The Marquis sent this electrifying news straight to George Washington to the north. And now, dreamed Lafayette, if only the French-American allies could place a blocking fleet in Hampton Roads.

  He soon received word that a fleet of warships indeed had entered the Chesapeake Bay and was moving toward Hampton Roads. But whose fleet—British or French?

  Of course, as the Marquis found out a few hours later, it was his countryman Admiral de Grasse. By this French presence, with twenty-eight warships and three regiments of troops, Cornwallis was doomed, caught on a peninsula with his back to waters controlled by the enemy. It was only a matter of time before Washington’s Continentals and Rochambeau’s French land forces joined Lafayette in placing a tight, inescapable ring around Yorktown.

  After the surrender, the defeated Cornwallis was invited to visit Lafayette’s headquarters. He did…and was stunned to find the slave Jim at Lafayette’s side. As events turned out, Cornwallis also had sought to turn Jim into a spy—against the Americans—but Jim, turning double agent, had fooled the British in that regard also.

  With the war over, the Virginia General Assembly agreed to Lafayette’s request to grant Jim his freedom. The legislature did the same for Saul Matthews, another slave-spy active in the Tidewater Virginia area, and gave Jim an annual pension of forty dollars.

  He, in turn, adopted the last name of his French “spymaster” and lifelong friend…to become a freed black, James Lafayette by name.

  Inventing a Navy

  IN THE BEGINNING, THE ENTIRE FLEET WAS THE SLOOP HANNAH, A CHARTER. Later, but still in the beginning also, the first commander in chief, Commodore Esek Hopkins, was ordered to protect the Chesapeake and Narragansett Bays, whereupon he instead sailed to the Bahamas and seized two poorly defended forts. But he also seized so much British weaponry—cannon, mortars, and their ammunition—it took two weeks to load it all aboard his half dozen newly commissioned warships.

  Hopkins then really did sail northward to Narragansett Bay, but just before he could reach land that early April of 1776, he and his flotilla were forced to do battle with the twenty-gun British warship Glascow. Since they approached her one by one, Glascow was able to pummel each American vessel, then proceed on into the bay while the Americans staggered into harbor at New London, Connecticut.

  Five months later, Hopkins was censured by a court-martial board and still later his commission was revoked.

  Hannah, for her part, had not fared so well, either. Chartered from the Marblehead (Massachusetts) Regiment’s John Glover, the sloop’s first attempt at naval action had resulted in capture of a ship belonging to a New England Patriot. Hannah next ran aground while in flight from the British.

  It wasn’t long after these false starts, however, that the original elements of today’s U.S. Navy found more noble beginnings. Significantly, Providence was one Hopkins ship that escaped the encounter with the British Glascow, and in May of 1776 the Providence acquired a new skipper. Born in Scotland, but thoroughly committed to the American cause, he was Lieutenant John Paul Jones.

  Ordered to interdict British shipping in Nova Scotia waters, Jones, in two months’ time, seized sixteen prizes. He next was ordered to raid British fisheries on the Grand Banks—this time commanding two ships, Providence and Alfred. After Providence returned with weather damages, Jones pressed on aboard Alfred and seized seven prize ships in a raid at Canso, Nova Scotia. By the time he returned in triumph to Boston, the navy’s first thirteen frigates authorized by Congress were nearly ready for duty—unfortunately, five never made it to sea and none of the thirteen would survive beyond 1781, thanks to British actions.

  In the meantime, three 74-gun ships of the line and seven more frigates were under way as Congress proceeded with plans to build a real Continental Navy.

  The future naval hero John Paul Jones was not alone in his depredations against the British. In May 1778, Captain Lambert Wickes led the Reprisal, Dolphin, and Lexington in taking well over a dozen prizes in the Irish Sea. Lexington and Reprisal, unfortunately, were lost on the way home.

  The next American raider to be heard from was Irish-born Gustavus Conyngham, who in 1777 obtained first one cutter (seized in a French port) and then another, which he named the USS Revenge. With Revenge, he blazed a fiery trail through the North Sea and on to the Irish Sea, grabbing off twenty prizes. Seemingly unstoppable, he then operated out of Spain, preying on British vessels sailing the Bay of Biscay and the South Atlantic. By the time he returned to America in late 1778 to take up a new career as a privateer, he had accounted for more than sixty enemy prizes taken over an eighteen-month period.

  Along America’s Atlantic coastline, meanwhile, the fledgling Continental Navy had not fared so well. Lost in, or as a result of, British action in 1777 and 1778 were the frigates Congress, Montgomery, Effingham, and Washington, all burned by their crews to avoid capt
ure by the British. In addition, Delaware was seized by the enemy. Virginia and Raleigh not only were seized when they ran aground, but they were turned against the Americans as Royal Navy ships by the same name. Meanwhile, off Barbados, the American frigate Randolph blew up while engaged with the British sixty-four-gun Yarmouth.

  The naval war was an up-and-down business, as events proved time and time again. In 1779, Captain Abraham Whipple’s three-ship squadron garnered more than $1 million in prize money by seizing eleven merchant ships cut out of a sixty-ship convoy bound for England from Jamaica. Whipple found the richly laden train of ships passing through the Grand Banks in a thick fog. He grabbed off his prizes one by one without notice by their neighbors.

  Offsetting that momentary triumph was the debacle of Penobscot Bay in future Maine—a failure for the largest ship assembly the Americans sent in harm’s way during the entire war. Under Captain Dudley Saltonstall aboard the frigate Warren, three Massachusetts State Navy ships, sixteen specially commissioned privateers, two more Continental Navy ships, and twenty vessels carrying militiamen nosed into the bay 150 miles northeast of Boston July 25, 1779, in an operation intended to eject the British from a newly established base.

  The British had only three sloops and four troop ships to defend their Penobscot interests, but the incoming American fleet failed to close and engage for ten or more days. Overly cautious Saltonstall and company then awoke one morning to find seven heavily gunned Royal Navy warships bearing down on them from the sea.