Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  The next thing the Americans knew, Martha received a note from Martha Mortier, widow of the former British army paymaster in whose New York home the Washingtons had stayed the spring of 1776. Mrs. Mortier made no bones about being informed of Mrs. Washington’s illness by way of “some Intercepted Letters.” Unasked, she also sent Martha Washington a considerable amount of “Necessary Articles.” To wit: a keg of medicinal tamarind seeds; two pounds of tea; four boxes of sweetmeats; a box of oranges and a box of lemons; two dozen pineapples; and two hundred limes, among other items.

  General Washington reacted quickly and decisively the moment he learned of Mrs. Mortier’s gift, sent up the Hudson to New Windsor by boat. No, he told his subordinates, do not allow a single item to be landed, they all must be sent back. He also wrote Mrs. Mortier a short note thanking her and saying that Mrs. Washington was “so perfectly recovered as to set out for Virginia in a day or two.” That being the case, he added, “General Washington hopes Mrs. Mortier will excuse his returning the several articles which she in so kind a manner sent up by the Flag [of truce], assuring her at the same time that he shall ever entertain a grateful sense of this mark of her benevolence.”

  Thus, noted Joseph E. Fields in his book “Worthy Partner,” The Papers of Martha Washington, “Old Fox” George Washington had forestalled possibly embarrassing charges, whether by Tories or Patriots, of accepting favors from the enemy.

  ***

  It was the kind of party that would have been a major media event these days—the guests carried downriver to the mansion on gaily decorated barges, bands playing all the while, and even a salute by warships in the harbor. And then at the party site, ceremonial jousts between the “Knights of the Blended Rose” and the “Knights of the Burning Mountain,” replete with broken lances, sword-play, and pistols. And next, the appearance of the young ladies represented by their knights—leading socialites dressed in fancy satins and silks, topped with turbans, feathers, and tassels.

  The ill-fated Captain John André was a chief organizer of the grand affair, called the Meschianza, based upon Italian phraseology for happy mingling. His lady fair for the evening was Peggy Chew, daughter of a prominent Philadelphia family. André later would be hanged for his role as Benedict Arnold’s contact man in their plot to betray the American fortress at West Point, and Peggy Chew would later marry an outstanding rebel officer, John Edgar Howard, a hero of the Battle of Cowpens, South Carolina, future governor of Maryland and U.S. senator from Maryland.

  After the outdoor entertainments of the afternoon at the Wharton family’s riverside Walnut Grove estate, the five hundred or so guests moved inside for dancing, refreshments, or gambling at a faro table. Around midnight came fire-works, followed by a sumptuous banquet served in 1,030 dishes by twenty-four housemen, while 108 musicians played 108 oboes, and lighting was supplied by 1,200 top-quality candles.

  The toasts were plentiful—to King George III, to General Sir William Howe (the guest of honor), and to Howe’s brother, Admiral Richard Howe of the nearby British fleet. And therein lay the reason for the party spectacular outside Philadelphia on May 18, 1778—General Howe was returning to England after resigning as commander of His Majesty’s forces in America. André and his fellow officers were determined to give the popular Howe an appropriate and memorable sendoff—a real blowout.

  And that it was; the dancing and gambling went on until sunrise the next day.

  To be sure, there were a few discordant notes to be recorded, as well as all the gaiety. For instance, the Whartons, owners of the estate, were being held prisoner that very evening in Winchester, Virginia, by Patriot forces. Then, too, more than fifty rebels held captive in Philadelphia by the British chose that night to escape by tunnel. In addition, the rebels attacked British outposts but with no real effect on the party.

  Meanwhile, another young Philadelphia socialite, teenager Peggy Shippen, had thrown fits that day because her father would not allow her to dress in the same finery as the other young ladies championed by the jousting “knights.” Peggy, of course, just a year later would marry American General Benedict Arnold.

  Document on the Move

  IF THE BRITISH HELD HIGH HOPES OF SEIZING THE ESTEEMED AUTHOR OF THE Declaration of Independence during the American Revolution (and they did), wouldn’t they have pined for that ever-so subversive document itself? In case they did, the American revolutionaries were careful to keep the precious piece of paper out of enemy hands.

  Through the thick and thin not only of that war, but others still to come, the Declaration survived one peril after another.

  Incidentally, the handwritten document approved by the Continental Congress the evening of July 4, 1776, is not the same piece of paper hermetically sealed behind bulletproof glass at the National Archives these days.

  The original sheet, sent to printer John Dunlap the very evening of its approval and then run off with minor typographical errors, has long since disappeared. Thomas Jefferson’s own, hand-marked rough draft does still survive—but that, too, is not the official Declaration of Independence.

  The one and only document that counts is the engrossed (hand-copied) yellowed parchment prepared after July 4, 1776, and placed before the signers on August 2 of that year. John Hancock, as president of the Congress, signed first, followed by all those others who pledged lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.

  If some of those so pledging faced real perils as a result, so did their famous document. In its lifetime of two centuries, the document has been moved twenty times. It has traveled by horsedrawn wagon, by ship, by train, by truck, and even by tank-like armored vehicle. It “fled” from three wars, including one in the twentieth century. Its repositories ranged from a gristmill outside of Washington to sturdy Fort Knox, Kentucky.

  The first war to be eluded, of course, was the Revolutionary War. If, as historians assume, the document stayed with the Continental Congress during that period, it would have accompanied the legislative body at sittings in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Lancaster, and York, Pennsylvania; Princeton, New Jersey; and Annapolis, Maryland.

  It “came home” to Washington, the new capital city, in 1800 after further sojourns in Trenton, New Jersey; New York; and Philadelphia once again.

  The journey to Washington was by ship, via the Delaware River, the Atlantic Ocean, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Potomac River.

  During the War of 1812, State Department clerk Stephen Pleasonton hid the document in a gristmill at the Virginia end of the Chain Bridge crossing of the Potomac, then moved it to a minister’s empty home in Leesburg, Virginia. The British at the moment were sacking public buildings in Washington, thirty-five miles away.

  Later, and now endangered by its own keepers, the document hung on a wall opposite a sunlit window in the old Patent Office Building (today, the National Portrait Gallery) for thirty-five unhelpful years. Still later, it resided for another seventeen years in a State Department cabinet in a library accessible to smokers and containing an open, smoking fireplace. After added years locked away in a safe, the Declaration and the U.S. Constitution were transferred, in 1921, to the Library of Congress. Three years later, both documents went on public display in suitable casings.

  Just three weeks after Pearl Harbor, however, they were on their way to the U.S. gold depository at Fort Knox for safekeeping. They traveled in a Pullman railroad car guarded by armed secret service agents. By 1944, with the war danger receding, they were back on public display in Washington.

  Their final move, together, was to the National Archives in Washington in 1952. Joined by the Bill of Rights, they normally reside there today, sealed from outside air in a thermopane glass unit filled with humidified helium for preservation and shielded from ultraviolet light rays by special filters of laminated glass—except when briefly removed for repairs and improvements under way at the vault, as was the case at this writing.

  All three documents are fully visible by day, but at night they sink from sight into a twenty-foot
vault below the display cases, with interlocking leaves of metal and concrete closing over them.

  As for the armored vehicle, that’s how they traveled the short distance from the Library of Congress to the Archives Building—courtesy of the U.S. Marine Corps.

  No Retirement for This Rogue

  THE END OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR IN 1783 MEANT RETIREMENT OF ONE SORT or another for most of the adversaries. But not for the Whig partisan fighter Philip Alston of Moore County, North Carolina. This murderer in Patriot’s clothing was not yet done with his scheming or violent ways.

  The Patriot cause at last triumphant, Alston briefly became a regional kingpin…despite his many enemies among the rebels themselves. In that vein, fellow militia officer Robert Rowan once said of Alston, “a greater tyrant is not upon the face of the earth according to his power.”

  Controversial or not, Alston wore many hats. A former representative in the North Carolina General Assembly, he now moved up the ladder to the more exclusive state senate. He also became a justice of the peace in newly formed Moore County, and remained the county’s leading aristocrat.

  It should be mentioned also that Alston briefly found time to serve as the new county’s clerk of court, in addition to all his other activities—and herein lies a grim tale of intrigue and murder.

  The time came, in the immediate post-Revolution years, when Alston desired to resign as clerk of court, but at the same time to “save” the post for his son James to take over when the young man was mature enough. The elder Alston made a deal—he thought—with Dr. George Glascock, himself a Revolutionary War veteran, to take over the post on a caretaker basis. That is, Glascock would serve as clerk for now, but on some future day he would step aside for Alston’s son.

  The reason Philip Alston wanted to resign was to take his newly acquired seat in the state senate on behalf of Moore County. No sooner had he done so, however, than he was accused of murder—the victim, a man named Thomas Taylor, had been a Tory during the recent hostilities, an active enemy. Alston was leading his militiamen against the Tories at the time. An Assembly committee investigating the murder charge not only recommended no prosecution but also proposed that Governor Richard Caswell officially pardon Alston.

  Hardly mollified, many leading citizens still felt that Alston could have taken Taylor into custody as a prisoner instead of killing him. Governor Caswell did issue the pardon, but later bowed to public protest and called for another Assembly investigation, which went no where. “Apparently the Assembly let the case drop, as there is no further record on the matter,” wrote Moore County historian Blackwell P. Robinson.

  Whatever the outcome, Alston had stirred up other troubles as well. Sitting on the bench at home as a county justice, he treated the new court clerk, George Glascock, “in a very abusive manner,” the court’s own minutes assert.

  After Alston was reelected to the state senate, Glascock joined with the county solicitor and a member of the state’s House of Commons in challenging Alston’s right to take his seat. “As a result of their depositions,” wrote Robinson, “the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections found that Alston stood indicted at the Superior Court of the district of Wilmington for murder.”

  In the end, Alston’s troubles simply piled up too high for him to overcome. He was ruled ineligible to take his senate seat. And at home, a citizens’ group protested his fitness to continue as a county justice, resulting in the state senate’s stripping him of that post as well.

  Not long after, Alston’s latest enemy, County Clerk George Glascock, was found dead—murdered. Could the perpetrator have been Alston, the most obvious suspect? By county “tradition,” said historian Robinson, Alston had established a pretty solid alibi—he gave a dance at his home the night of Glascock’s murder, inviting “the countryside” and remaining very much in view of his guests throughout the evening.

  How did he do it, then? He sent his slave Dave, it seems, and Dave was subsequently charged with the deed, then released on bail of £250—furnished by Alston of course. Dave then disappeared; he never appeared for trial, and Alston forfeited the bail money as a result.

  Which is not to say that Alston got off easy. None of this is an easy trail to follow, but historian Robinson cited records showing that Alston also had to post bond to release himself from jail in Wilmington, but later was remanded back to the same lockup. Then a newspaper account enters the picture…and focuses it. It was the Fayetteville Gazette’s issue of December 1, 1790, that carried a most significant tidbit of regional news—“Broke gaol [jail] on the 5th inst., Philip Alston, late of Moore County, committed as accessory to the murder of George Glascock.”

  No one really knows the final outcome. Alston had sold his home and plantation on the Deep River earlier in 1790. At the end of that year, he owed the state a judgment of more than £142. Almost a year later his son James was accepted as administrator of the estate left by the now-deceased Philip Alston.

  Deceased? Apparently so. “Tradition has it,” wrote Robinson, “that he fled the state, and was finally murdered by the same Dave.” More recent research, offered by the Moore County Historical Society, suggests that Alston was murdered in his bed in October 1791 after fleeing to Washington County, Georgia, on the heels of his jailbreak. This account makes no mention of the slave Dave or of his ultimate fate. And so ended the post-Revolution “career” of the man Robinson described as Moore County’s “most notorious citizen.”

  They Also Fought

  LEST WE FORGET, HERE ARE A FEW OTHERS WHO FOUGHT THE GOOD FIGHT, THE memorable fight…the sometimes ruthless fight:

  Washington, Jefferson, George Mason, Patrick Henry—all six feet or more in height, were just a few of the Virginians noted for their imposing stature… but to that list add one more outstanding and tall Virginia revolutionary leader, George Rogers Clark.

  Often forgotten today, this native of Jefferson’s own Albemarle County achieved Herculean tasks on behalf of his future nation. A surveyor and frontiersman in future Kentucky when the Revolutionary War erupted, he had served as an officer in Lord (Royal Governor) Dunmore’s war against Native Americans resisting the white man’s incursions west of the Appalachians. Now, in 1776, he briefly returned to Virginia to obtain a load of gunpowder needed to help defend his largely uncharted territory—and to persuade Virginia authorities to create a “Kentucky County.”

  The tall, redheaded Virginian and his fellow frontiersmen spent the next year in the far-flung wilderness fighting off British-incited Indian attacks, but the dangers were only increasing rather than diminishing. The time soon came to mount an offensive, in Clark’s view. He returned to Virginia again in late 1777 to obtain Governor Patrick Henry’s approval for a strike against the British fort at Kaskaskia in future Illinois by an expeditionary force of 350 men.

  Keeping the formation of his minuscule army as secret as possible, newly appointed Lieutenant Colonel Clark of the Virginia State Line led a mere 175 men on a six-day march from the future site of Louisville through dangerous Indian territory to Kaskaskia, arriving on July 4, 1778. The fort quickly fell to Clark and his semi-starved men. In just weeks, Clark also took control of nearby Cahokia and Vincennes.

  In Williamsburg, the Assembly designated the vast Illinois territory another new county of Virginia.

  But the fight for control of the territory, then called the Northwest, was not yet over. Leaving his base in Detroit, British Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton struck back with a mixed force of British regulars, Indian allies, and suborned French settlers. In December of 1778, he recaptured weakly garrisoned Vincennes with hardly a fight.

  “At this point,” wrote Virginius Dabney in his 1971 history, Virginia: The New Dominion, “Clark performed one of the most memorable feats in the annals of war. It was midwinter, the rivers were high and much of the country was flooded. In the face of these apparently insuperable obstacles, Clark set out to recapture Vincennes 180 miles away.” That meant slogging through ice-cold wate
rs, sometimes shoulder high, and going for days at times without substantial food, since game animals had fled the flooded terrain. “As they neared Vincennes, many [of Clark’s men] became exhausted and had to be rescued by their companions from drowning.” All the while, the remarkable Clark was “in the van, encouraging and exhorting.”

  The one factor in Clark’s favor was surprise—the recent conquerors of Vincennes never dreamed the Americans could pose a threat in the prevailing wintry conditions of that late February of 1779. As Dabney also noted, “The sudden emergence from this waterlogged wilderness of Clark’s muddy, buckskin-clad warriors, with their flintlock rifles and tomahawks, took the Vincennes garrison so completely by surprise that the fort fell, after a brief struggle.”

  Thus were the Illinois and Kentucky Territories saved for young America; thus in the peace treaty of 1783 was America ceded its huge territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River. Clark, in the meantime, managed in 1780 to stop a British drive on St. Louis.

  In a visit to Virginia’s new capital of Richmond in 1781, Clark, with 240 “borrowed” militiamen, briefly took part in the fighting against Benedict Arnold’s invading force by ambushing the Queen’s Rangers, but Clark’s next real objective was the western British base at Detroit. While plans for a Detroit expedition were laid, they never became a reality for lack of men, funding, and the necessary coordination among the various Continental Army and state militia units that would be needed.

  By now a Virginia brigadier general, Clark continued to fight the British and their Indian allies west of the Appalachians from his base at Louisville until the peace treaty of 1783 at last ended the Revolutionary War. He at one point led a major expedition against Shawnee Indian villages in the Ohio country in retaliation for the massacre of Kentucky frontiersmen at Blue Licks in August of 1782.