Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  The American units fled, some running aground, others (like the Warren) blown up by their own men. The outcome was fourteen ships destroyed, twenty-eight captured, five hundred Americans killed or captured…and Saltonstall later court-martialed and cashiered from the navy.

  Taking on the most powerful navy in the world, of course, meant the neophyte American navy would suffer more than an occasional bloody nose. It meant, too, that the revolutionaries could not possibly expect naval dominance at home or abroad. But they could, and did, let their presence be known, often in searing fashion. And often, too, the instigator was the colorful, if somewhat self-aggrandizing, John Paul Jones.

  By mid-1778, the public on both sides of the Atlantic had heard of his spectacular sounding deeds: his capture of the twenty-gun British sloop HMS Drake in the Irish Sea, his raid on shipping at Whitehaven, England, and his raid on an earl’s estate in Jones’s own hometown of Kirkcudbright, Scotland. His successes as temporary skipper of the frigate Ranger caught the public’s eyes and ears, but had no great military effect.

  With Jones, however, there almost always would be more to come. After waiting a year or so in France for the right ship to become available, he talked Benjamin Franklin into wheedling French permission for the purchase of the merchantman Duc de Buras, docked at Nantes. Refitting the former East Indiaman into a fighting ship, Jones named her the USS Bonhomme Richard in tribute to Franklin, creator of Poor Richard’s Almanac. Also, Jones was given command of a naval squadron including the new frigate Alliance, the French frigate Pallas, and the brig Vengeance. However, Jones would be the squadron’s only American skipper.

  About five weeks after the squadron set off on a round of commerce-raiding in the waters of the British Isles, Jones and company came across a forty-one-ship British convoy escorted only by the forty-four-gun Serapis and the twenty-gun Countess of Scarborough. For reasons of their own, the French skippers of Alliance and Vengeance stood off as Pallas made for the Countess and Jones was left to deal with the frigate Serapis himself.

  They closed at sunset and fought to a bloody standstill over the next two hours, their hulls grappled cannon-port to cannon-port for most of the time. Jones had lost the use of his eighteen-pounders at the outset when two of the heavy guns blew up in the face of their crews. He didn’t dare use them again. Instead, when the Serapis tried to cross his bow, Jones rammed into the British frigate. He saw that grappling and boarding the enemy ship was his only hope of surviving the battle at sea.

  The British ship’s Captain Richard Pearson didn’t understand at first. “Has your ship struck?” he yelled, meaning struck her colors in surrender.

  This is when John Paul Jones spoke his immortal words: “I have not yet begun to fight.”

  As the two ships swung together, hull kissing hull and cannon still firing at point blank range, neither adversary was able to storm the other with a boarding party. Jones’s crew kept the fight going with fierce musket fire that cleared the main decks of the Serapis, but her lower guns kept on firing straight through the hull of the Bonhomme Richard. During this period, Pierre Landais, French captain of the Alliance, fired upon his American ally’s ship, too.

  Finally, as crowds watched the dramatic sea battle from England’s nearby Flamborough Head, a topman from the Richard was able to crawl across the entangled yardarms and drop grenades onto the decks of the enemy ship below. One of the missiles careened through a hatch and exploded in the gunpowder stored on the gun deck. Most of the British guns still in service were knocked out of action by the blast that ensued. With half or more of his crew made casualties—but the convoy safely over the horizon—Pearson surrendered to Jones.

  His own crew sorely diminished and his ship actually sinking, Jones transferred to the Serapis and sailed to safety in neutral Holland—and to a permanent place in the lore of naval warfare, too. No surprise that he eventually returned home to accolades as the young navy’s best-known hero (and Landais to a court-martial and sacking).

  The Bonhomme Richard–Serapis engagement of September 1779 could be called the highwater mark of the Continental Navy’s war against the British. From this point, occasional flare-ups excepted, the French in effect took over the heavier naval duties of the conflict, with their blockade of waters below Yorktown the naval episode that hurt the British the most…that, you could argue, lost them the war.

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  Additional notes: Many other seafaring men would be heroes of the naval war fought by Americans against the British, whether as sailors in the fledgling Continental Navy and the various state navies or as privateers. Virginian James Barron, for instance, who began his campaign to protect Virginia ports and the Chesapeake Bay in 1775, never stopped fighting until after contributing to the victory at Yorktown in 1781

  Barron, born in 1740, had been at sea since the age of ten. As an adult, he sailed ships to the Caribbean and England as their master. Late in 1774, however, he resigned his captaincy of a merchantman bound for London, saying he must throw in his lot with the colonies and his native Virginia. He and brother Richard Barron then began organizing a militia unit among friends and fellow watermen.

  In 1775, Royal Governor Dunmore fled to the British warship Fowey, while a number of Loyalists also found sanctuary aboard British ships off the Virginia shores. When they sent foraging parties ashore in search of provisions, Barron responded by taking over British merchant ships.

  His first real brush with the Crown came as British warships approached Hampton, Virginia, in October of 1775, threatening to reduce the port town to ashes. Once the British dropped anchor in the harbor, however, the militia led by Barron joined with other men in fusillades of musket fire from the shore that drove off the enemy before he could do any harm.

  From that start, one thing led to another for James Barron and brother Richard. They were accustomed to the water, and the gigantic Chesapeake was their sea. Sailing the two armed schooners Liberty and Patriot, they formed the nucleus of the Virginia State Navy—destined in time to become the largest of the state navies. As they began seizing unwary British shipping, a real prize was the British Oxford, carrying two hundred Highlander soldiers.

  Barron next would have commanded a full-size, twenty-six-gun frigate being built for the Virginia navy at Portsmouth, but a sudden British strike in 1779 destroyed dozens of Chesapeake vessels and the shipyard at Portsmouth just before his frigate was to be launched.

  A year later, Governor Thomas Jefferson officially named James Barron commander of the state navy. Barron responded by raiding Tangier Island in the bay, destroying Loyalist materials and making off with five prize vessels. That October, however, discretion was the word when a British fleet of fifty-four ships carrying 5,000 troops briefly came to rest in the Hampton Roads area. The Virginia navy went into hiding. Barron’s own flagship Liberty was stripped of her masts and sails and sunk out of sight in the Nansemond River.

  When the British armada left, Liberty was refloated and refitted for duty. In December, however, the British were back in the area with thirty-one ships and 1,800 troops under Benedict Arnold. Most of the Virginia navy’s vessels were caught and bottled up in the James River, although Liberty and Nicholson were relatively free to sail in and out of the York River as carriers of dispatches and supplies. Joined by another 2,000 troops under General William Phillips in March 1781, Arnold’s force ranged up and down the James as far as the state capital of Richmond, destroying boats, ships, and shipyard facilities in the process. It now appeared the Virginia navy was out of business.

  But stubborn James Barron still had the Liberty and Nicholson at his disposal as the Siege of Yorktown began in the fall of 1781. The French fleet effectively barred the Royal Navy from coming to the rescue of Lord Cornwallis—but the tiny Virginia navy did its part in achieving final victory as well. With sixteen thousand American and French troops ringing the British in Yorktown for days on end, a steady supply of foodstuffs was a critical need. Coordinating with the Continental Army�
��s commissary officials, Barron rounded up a fleet of small boats, barges, and craft as small as canoes from up and down Tidewater Virginia’s waterways to collect and deliver the tons of provisions needed to feed the French and American armies.

  After the British surrender at Yorktown, Barron’s remaining navy of four vessels continued to patrol the waters of the Cheasapeake to keep them clear of enemy ships—and even pirates—until the official end of hostilities in 1783.

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  Additional Note: Which was the real American navy? It could be argued that young America’s 1,100 or more privateers were as much a navy on war footing as the official but fledgling Continental Navy. After all, they are credited with seizing more than six hundred British ships carrying an estimated $18 million in goods during the eight-year war. Their masters, though, were a notoriously unruly lot who, by definition as privateers, planned their own missions without much regard for any grand, coordinated strategy. And their ships, manned by equally adventuresome, resourceful crews, quite naturally took those same men away from the manpower resources available to the official navy.

  Killed in “Paltry Skirmish”

  FATHER AND SON—POLITICIAN-DIPLOMAT AND HEROIC SOLDIER, RESPECTIVELY—Henry and John Laurens of South Carolina were destined to be captured by the British in the year 1780…but quite separately. One would survive the revolutionary period, and one would not.

  Aristocrats of the Patriot leadership in the 1770s and 1780s, they played dramatic and historically important roles in the Revolutionary cause—Henry as onetime president of the Continental Congress, his son John as a staff aide to George Washington. Indeed, Henry at one point would languish as a prisoner in the Tower of London for more than a year. His son would be present for the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown—he would be instrumental in dictating the British surrender terms, with his father that very moment still held in the Tower. Ironically, the Constable of the Tower by title, although some distance removed, was none other than Lord Cornwallis. Himself now a prisoner, Cornwallis later would be exchanged for a ranking American prisoner—Henry Laurens himself.

  Henry Laurens was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1724, with son John following suit just thirty years later. Their wealth came from a profitable import-export business and extensive landholdings. The elder Laurens served in his colony’s House of Assembly for eleven years and was a militia officer in an early Cherokee War. With the revolutionary storm looming, he became president of the South Carolina Provincial Congress in the 1770s, then headed the Council of Safety.

  With the departure of Royal Governor William Campbell, Henry Laurens became the former colony’s executive. Joining the Continental Congress in 1777 as a delegate, he was elected president of the body just three months later, succeeding John Hancock in the post.

  His would be a tumultuous stewardship, since Congress had to vacate its Philadelphia seat for safer quarters in York, Pennsylvania, as the British advanced on Philadelphia in the fall of 1777. It was at this makeshift capital, with Laurens as presiding officer, that the Congress made further history by adopting the Articles of Confederation, which served the onetime colonies as a governmental framework until the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788. The same Laurens-led Congress approved a treaty with France recognizing American independence and promising military aid in the war against Great Britain.

  Son John, in the meantime, returned to North America from law studies in London in 1775 to join the revolutionary cause as an officer. He saw combat at Brandywine and Germantown in late 1777, and at Valley Forge became an aide to General Washington.

  He also fought at Monmouth, New Jersey, in 1778, and later in Rhode Island and at Savannah. His capture came about with the British seizure of his own Charleston in 1780, but he soon was exchanged. He turned up in Paris as a special envoy at the side of Benjamin Franklin, employing his fluent French in helping Franklin obtain a $2 million loan.

  The younger Laurens, brave to the point of recklessness in battle, had proposed creation of a small slave army to fight the British. He would have financed one such regiment of blacks himself and eventually granted them their freedom, it seems, but none of the states went along with his idea of sending slaves into battle. As for his courage, he was so zealous in battle, it is said, some cavalry officers refused to ride with him.

  He and his father possibly might have enjoyed a brief reunion in Europe in 1780, since Henry Laurens, no longer congressional president, was on his way to Holland in the late summer to seek a treaty with the Dutch and a $10 million loan for the American war effort. Just off Newfoundland, however, a British patrol craft captured his ship—and Laurens himself.

  To make matters worse, the British recovered the papers Laurens heaved overboard in a weighted sack—among them a draft of the proposed treaty with the Dutch. As a result, England declared war on Holland, and Laurens wound up in the Tower of London “on suspicion of high treason,” there to languish for fifteen months.

  His son John, meanwhile, reached the rank of colonel and rode with Washington and his entourage through one campaign after another, up to and including Yorktown. There, he joined Lafayette, Colonel Alexander Hamilton, and others in taking the Rock Redoubt in a key night of action just before the British surrender. Colonel Laurens then had the pleasure of joining the surrender “commissioners” dictating terms to the vanquished British—making sure they met the same conditions imposed upon American General Benjamin Lincoln in the seizure of Charleston the year before.

  This was not the end of the war for young Laurens, especially with the British still holding New York, Savannah, and Charleston. He soon was back in South Carolina with the Patriot forces harassing the British at Charleston. By August of 1782, the enemy had been forced to give up Savannah. To the north, in South Carolina, the British were hemmed in on Charleston Neck by the forces of General Nathanael Greene, but they still had bite. Leading his men against a British foraging party along the Combahee River that August, Laurens ran into an ambush near Tar Bluff. As the British rose from hiding places in the tall grass and fired, he went down in the first volley—killed, finally, in what Greene would call “a paltry little skirmish.”

  Released from the Tower of London earlier that year, Henry Laurens had joined Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay in the Paris peace treaty negotiations destined to bring the Revolutionary War to an official close in 1783. The elder Laurens was one of those who signed the preliminary peace terms in November 1782—the same terms as those in the officially ratified treaty of September 3, 1783.

  The elder Laurens, returning home to a war-wracked plantation, his health also affected by his many trials, would live until 1792.

  Perils of George (Cont.)

  BEFORE THE REVOLUTION, YOUNG GEORGE WASHINGTON HAD SURVIVED HIS bout with smallpox, frontier fights with the French and their Indian allies, and a plunge into an icy wilderness river. Now, he and his country were at war with probably the world’s most powerful nation. Still, as commander in chief of the American forces, he had many protective buffers between himself and the various perils of war, did he not?

  Not exactly. As the general in charge of forces in outright rebellion, he could be hanged if captured. Moreover, Washington was no deskbound general; throughout the Revolutionary War, he faced one peril after another.

  To review events briefly, in early summer 1776, about the time Congress was adopting the Declaration of Independence at Philadelphia, he was in New York City awaiting a widely expected British blow. Indeed, British warships already filled the waters off lower Manhattan Island. The city was tense; rumors of desertions, betrayals, infiltration by Tories were rife. So was talk of an assassination plot against Washington, allegedly by poisoning. Whether that detail was true, a ring of traitors was rounded up—their apparent leader, a deserter named Thomas Hickey, was court-martialed, convicted of “mutiny, sedition and treachery”…and was hanged on June 28 before twenty thousand onlookers.

  The Briti
sh, meanwhile, began landing thousands of men on Staten Island on July 3. They next assaulted Long Island and defeated Washington’s forces in front of the Brooklyn Heights by means of an unexpected flank attack. In the nighttime withdrawal of all his men—a transfer by boat across the East River to Manhattan—General Washington, himself, was perhaps the very last to climb into one of the departing boats.

  The British, of course, followed. The day the redcoats landed on Manhattan Island, at Kips Bay on the East River, Washington rushed to the scene of action, screamed and yelled in frustration as his amateurish militia fled the British regulars, and then had to be led away by an aide before the redcoats could reach him.

  For the commander in chief of the Patriot forces, there naturally was peril attending almost his every move…for the duration. Battle is battle, after all, and Washington never was one to stay behind in the “war room” while his men went forth to fight. Some situations, though, were more dangerous than others. And so it was that famous Christmas night of 1776, when Washington crossed the Delaware River in harsh wintry conditions together with his men—battling ice floes in open boats—to mount their audacious attack against the Hessians at Trenton the next morning.

  There would be many times when the revolutionary fortunes were low—Valley Forge, remember?—with ultimate and final defeat a real risk…but the resolute Virginian in command always managed to rebound and overcome all such perils of war, always ready to join his men at the crisis point. In the Battle of Brandywine Creek (September 1777), when the British once again turned his flank, General Washington immediately took to his horse and galloped to the point of unexpected attack, jumping farm fences and urging on his local guide, “Push along, old man, push along!”

  Even on the verge of victory, George Washington was willing to take risk after risk. In the Siege of Yorktown, September–October 1781, he did not shrink from those areas under steady, often deadly bombardment. One time, a cannonball struck so close by that it covered a companion’s hat with sand. Washington merely advised his companion, a chaplain, to take the spent ball home “and show it to your wife and children.”