Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  George Rogers Clark, incidentally, was the much older brother of William Clark, who with Meriwether Lewis, also a native of Albemarle County, Virginia, formed and led the famous exploratory Lewis and Clark Expedition west in 1804 and 1805 from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific Ocean.

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  After Spain joined France as an American ally in 1779, Bernardo de Galvez, the thirty-two-year-old governor of Spanish Louisiana, took up the revolutionary crusade with American agent Oliver Pollock at his side. After subduing the British garrisons at Baton Rouge and Natchez, they turned on British-held Mobile and Pensacola and captured them, too.

  The enthusiastic governor’s army was a mix of Spanish regulars, French Creoles, free blacks, American settlers, and Indians. It may never have numbered more than two thousand or so men all told, yet it kept an equal or greater number of British troops busy protecting the Crown’s sparsely populated and highly vulnerable Florida flank, which at the time encompassed a huge territory today consisting of the state of Florida and big chunks of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Until Galvez came along, Pensacola had been capital of British West Florida, while St. Augustine was the center of activity in British East Florida.

  Often forgotten today is the fact that even before Spain officially jumped into the American Revolutionary War, Galvez had been coordinating with Pollock to ship military supplies up the Mississippi River in bargelike boats flying the Spanish flag. He also funneled major loans of money through the same Irish-American, who was based in New Orleans.

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  Which other future president—other than General George Washington, of course—fought in the Revolution as an American officer? Not John Adams, busy in the Continental Congress. Not Thomas Jefferson, busy serving as governor of Virginia, although very nearly captured by Banastre Tarleton at Charlottesville, true.

  And, no, not James Madison, fourth U.S. president, busy at first helping to develop a Virginia constitution and later serving as a Continental Congress member.

  Andrew Jackson, future hero of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812 and a future president, was briefly a prisoner of the British, but he was only an angry teenager at the time, not an officer during the Revolution itself.

  All of which leaves James Monroe, fifth U.S. president, 1817 to 1825, but first, during the revolutionary period, a young officer who took part in the Battles of Trenton, Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth. Monroe, in fact, nearly died at Trenton when struck in the shoulder by a musket ball that severed an artery. Fortunately, a doctor on the scene was able to stop the bleeding in time to save his life. Earlier in the same battle, he had crossed the Delaware with George Washington’s troops, then, with Captain William Washington, led a charge against Hessian soldiers trying to set up a pair of cannon for use against the attacking Americans.

  Later in the war, he served as an aide-de-camp and then adjutant to brigade commander “Lord Stirling” (William Alexander). His scouting reports before the Battle of Monmouth contributed to the effective deployment of the American troops before the British attacked.

  Although Monroe later (and unsuccessfully) tried to raise commands at home in Virginia, he also was busy studying law under Jefferson, then serving in the Virginia legislature and, eventually, the Confederation Congress. He took time out to travel southward in 1780 to set up communication links between Virginia authorities and military units to the south. The idea was to provide warning if and when it appeared the British would be advancing toward Virginia borders…which a year later they did.

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  They called this man “Sure Shot Tim,” and perhaps he really did shoot John Burgoyne’s key frontline general at Saratoga…and Burgoyne’s aide-de-camp as well.

  It may really be that his own General Daniel Morgan briefed a group of sharpshooters and told them to look for British General Simon Fraser in the pending battle. It may also be that Morgan told his marksmen, Timothy Murphy among them: “That gallant officer is General Fraser. I admire and honor him, but it is necessary he should die—victory for the enemy depends upon him.”

  It may be that Murphy’s third shot from two hundred yards away did pull down General Simon Fraser, who indeed was fatally wounded in the two-step Battle of Saratoga, New York, in October of 1777. On the same day as Fraser’s fatal wounding, October 7, Sir Francis Carr Clerke, aide-de-camp to the overall British commander, General (“Gentleman Johnny”) John Burgoyne, also went down with a gunshot wound. Clerke died that night and Fraser the next morning.

  Who was this Murphy—half man, half legend?

  Born in 1751 in the Delaware Gap section of New Jersey, then raised in Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley, he came to the Revolutionary War untutored in letters but wise in the ways of frontier life. He served with the Americans besieging Boston in 1775, and was present for the subsequent Battles of Long Island, Trenton, and Princeton, plus George Washington’s campaign of 1777, until joining Virginia’s Daniel Morgan and his newly formed Rifle Corps at Saratoga.

  There, in addition to his alleged shootings of two key Burgoyne officers, Murphy is said to have captured another British officer right in his own tent. He returned to Pennsylvania in time to spend the winter of 1777–1778 with Washington and his troops at Valley Forge. The next June, after the Battle of Monmouth, Murphy and three companions captured a British general’s coach nearby.

  Next came the frontier-raised soldier’s turbulent career as a famous but often merciless Indian fighter in the western reaches of New York and Pennsylvania. In 1778, he and a companion assassinated a Tory who had helped Loyalist raiding parties. That same year, he also helped burn down an Indian town in reprisal for an earlier Indian attack. He barely escaped capture or death several times over the next two years.

  After serving in General John Sullivan’s punitive Indian expedition of 1779, Murphy was with a party of twenty-four that was ambushed while scouting an Indian town. Only Murphy and one other man escaped. The lieutenant leading the scouting party and a sergeant were captured, tortured, and beheaded. Another time, in 1780, Murphy and another companion were actually captured by eleven Iroquois and tied up together. But the two prisoners managed to slip their bonds during the night and quietly kill all but one of the Indians. And he fled.

  Later that year, Murphy was at the Middle Fort in the Schoharie Valley of upstate New York when it came under siege by the Tory Sir John Johnson and a mixed force of nearly two thousand British redcoats, Loyalists, Indians, and even a few Hessians. Inside the stockade of logs and dirt embankments were about four hundred soldiers and militiamen under Major Melanchthon Woolsey.

  When his light artillery failed to breach the fort’s walls, Johnson sent forward an officer under a white flag of truce with a surrender demand. Murphy and constant companion David Elerson immediately fired upon the flag-bearer, stopping him in his tracks. Woolsey then ordered Murphy’s arrest, but not a man moved toward the frontiersman.

  In a second and a third attempt to make contact with the fort, Johnson’s emissaries were still thwarted by Murphy’s fire. Finally threatened with death by his own commander, Woolsey, Murphy told him, “Sooner than see that flag enter this fort, I’ll send a bullet through your heart.”

  Not only Murphy, but the militiamen siding with him well knew that he, and perhaps the entire garrison, could expect unusually brutal treatment from the Indians if the fort did surrender. As events turned out, Woolsey stepped down from command, and the Johnson raiders moved on after a desultory, failed attack on a nearby fort.

  Later, in 1781, Murphy was in Virginia for the Marquis de Lafayette’s clash with Lord Cornwallis near Jamestown on July 6 and for the siege of Yorktown in October of that year. He then went back to Indian fighting on the New York frontier until the official end of the Revolutionary War in 1783.

  Final Orders

  THE FINAL BRITISH LEAVE-TAKING OF NEW YORK, THE FINAL BRITISH BASTION in the former American colonies, would not take place until November 1783, bu
t as early as April 15, 1783, Sir Guy Carleton, commander of all British forces remaining in North America, issued this order:

  It is the Commander in Chief’s orders, that the following Extract, from the Seventh Article of the Provisional Treaty, between Great Britain and the United States of America, be STRICTLY, attended to and COMPLIED with, by all Persons whatsoever, under his Command, And his Britannic Majesty shall, with all convenient Speed, and without causing any Destruction or carrying away any Negroes, or other Property, of the American Inhabitants, withdraw all his Armies, Garrisons, and Fleets from the said UNITED STATES. [Italics and capitalization his.]

  Flagpole Greased

  THE BRITISH EVACUATION OF NEW YORK (MANHATTAN ISLAND, ACTUALLY) ON November 25, 1783, ended seven years of occupation by the enemy. The time set for the official relinquishment of British power in the city was high noon, and, at first, all seemed to be going well…and more or less on schedule.

  At a key barrier, American General Henry Knox, the former bookstore-keeper from Boston, was on hand at 8 A.M., but then had to wait, exchanging pleasantries with British officers also awaiting the turnover.

  Finally, at 1 P.M., the British withdrew their troops from their last posts. The Americans marched in, with General Knox in the lead. The new and only temporary occupation force included the Second Massachusetts Regiment, a single troop of dragoons, two artillery companies, and a battalion of light infantry.

  George Washington, of course, was very much in evidence that day as well.

  As the Americans took over, a parade formed, the new thirteen-stripe flag was unfurled, a thirteen-gun salute was prepared, bells rang, and pride and excitement reigned citywide. Throngs greeted the incoming troops—and Washington—with shouts and tears of joy.

  One woman later recalled the terribly moving scene: “We had been accustomed for a long time to military display in all the finish and finery of garrison life; the troops just leaving us were as if equipped for show, and with their scarlet uniforms and burnished arms, made a brilliant display; the troops that marched in, on the contrary, were ill-clad and weather-beaten, and made a forlorn appearance; but then they were our troops, and as I looked at them and thought upon all they had done and suffered for us, my heart and my eyes were full, and I admired and gloried in them the more, because they were weather-beaten and forlorn.”

  Despite all the excitement, there would be one small hitch. Down at the Battery was freshly evacuated Fort George, and in its parade ground, a tall flagpole—still bravely flying the British flag!

  Not only that, the halyards had been stripped away from the flagpole. The cleats had been removed. Further, the pole itself had been smeared over with grease. An American sailor tried to shinny up the pole three different times and simply couldn’t make it.

  With a ceremonial thirteen-gun salute scheduled to be fired from the fort, this would never do. The impasse was finally resolved with the application of tools allowing the Americans to cut themselves footholds in the pole, climb it, and remove the offending flag.

  The British did not entirely leave the area that very day, incidentally. It would be the first week of December before they vacated Governor’s Island and Staten Island; it would be December 4 before their troop ships sailed off; and not until December 5 did their last commander on American soil, Sir Guy Carleton, say his final farewells to New York.

  Farewell to “His Grieving Children”

  ON NOVEMBER 25, 1783, AS THE BRITISH BEGAN TO DEPART NEW YORK CITY, George Washington and his entourage passed by Kip’s Bay, the spot on Manhattan Island where he had shouted in despair and rage at his retreating men back in 1776. That had been a low point, a rare moment of visible emotion for the commander in chief.

  Now, in the last days of 1783, came a high point—at noon on December 4—a moment of high emotion, outright weeping, for the same George Washington.

  The clock was still striking its twelve beats when he stepped into the long room at Fraunces’ Tavern to address four of his generals and a crowd of lesser ranks. Emotions were running high. The grave, immovable George Washington they all knew so well started to speak, could not, turned away, reached for a morsel of food…and could not swallow.

  He reached for a glass of wine. So, too, stiff and silent, did his audience.

  That might have helped, but few actually sipped.

  Washington’s hand shook ever so slightly, his face was angled downward, and his expression was hard to see. His voice, when at last it issued forth, was not his normal voice. “Queer and choked” is the way twentieth-century author John Tebbel has imagined it to be. “Odd, tight,” is the description chosen by twentieth-century historian Bruce Lancaster. Both seem so right.

  The men in attendance that day were gathered in a tavern room boasting two fireplaces and five windows on the street side. The windows had been polished, the floors waxed and the tables set with linen cloth. They held decanters of wine, along with platters and dishes heaped with food for the buffet lunch about to be served. Once the De Lancey mansion, the building at the corner of Pearl and Broad Streets now was Fraunces’ Tavern; its proprietor was West Indies– born “Black Sam” Fraunces. He had hosted the Americans, George Washington among them, before the British occupied New York in 1776, and he then, until late 1783, had served the British in the same long room. Chances are that he also listened and spied for the Americans during the long British occupation.

  As Washington stepped into the long room on this December day, however, Samuel Fraunces quietly withdrew. No secrets were to be imparted, but still it was to be a very private affair, very personal…it was to be George Washington’s farewell to his officers.

  As the commander in chief finally regained his composure, he began: “With a heart full of love and gratitude, I now take leave of you. I most devoutly wish that your later days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.”

  He stopped and raised his glass. His officers raised theirs, sipped, shuffled, murmured, stammered…all paralyzed by the emotion of the moment. An odd silence took over for some moments.

  Finally, Washington managed to add a few words, the tears on his face fully visible. By all accounts, he stopped and stammered as he said, “I cannot…I cannot come to each of you but shall be obliged if each of you will come and take me by the hand.”

  First to step forward was General Henry Knox, who had been with Washington ever since 1775 outside Boston when the outcome of the rash American rebellion was totally uncertain. Now bulky Henry Knox, all of 280 pounds, moved forward extending his hand. “Washington started to take it,” wrote historian Lancaster, “but memories of the old years together swept over him and he threw his arms about his Chief of Artillery…”

  Added Tebbel’s account of the same moment: “Frankly weeping, he [Washington] embraced his Chief of Artillery and kissed him on the cheek.”

  Then, without a word spoken, according to Washington’s spymaster Benjamin Talmadge, each of the officers in the room—Baron von Steuben and Alexander McDougall among them—stepped forward to receive the same warm embrace.

  “Such a scene of sorrow and weeping I had never before witnessed, and hope I may never be called upon to witness again,” wrote Talmadge later. As he also wrote, the explanation was a very human one. “The simple thought that we were then to part from the man who had conducted us through a long and bloody war, and under whose conduct the glory and independence of our country had been achieved, and that we should see his face no more in this world, seemed to be utterly unsupportable.”

  Talmadge, of course, was entirely wrong in one respect—they soon would see George Washington back in New York, in residence at the temporary federal capital as the new nation’s first president. Tavern-keeper Samuel Fraunces, for that matter, would reappear as President Washington’s steward.

  But none of those embracing General Washington at Fraunces’ Tavern that emotional day could see into the future. All they knew was that this was fare
well to their leader before he left the city for home, rest, and respite, at his beloved Mount Vernon in Virginia.

  Nor did the moment last beyond endurance. “But the time for separation had come,” wrote the onlooking Talmadge, “and waving his hand to his grieving children around him, he left the room…”

  Even now, though, the “separation” for that one day was not quite done. Outside the tavern, a guard of honor and crowds awaited Washington as he made his way to Whitehall Ferry and an awaiting barge that would carry him across the Hudson to Paulus Hook as the first stage of his long trip home.

  “People along the way remembered as long as they lived his tense, set face, the convulsive throbbing of his jaw muscles…” wrote Lancaster.

  Following him from the tavern were his officers, unwilling as yet to turn for their own paths homeward. They followed, wrote Talmadge, “in mournful silence.”

  At the wharf, “a prodigious crowd had assembled to witness the departure of the man who, under God, had been the great agent in establishing the glory and independence of these United States.”

  The climax of the day came quickly. Washington took his seat on the awaiting barge. Recalled Talmadge also: “and when out in the stream, our great and beloved General waved his hat and bid us a silent adieu.”

  Soldier and Observer

  LEAVING NEW YORK WITH THE BRITISH ON NOVEMBER 25, 1783, WAS JOHANN von Ewald, one of the seventeen thousand Hessians—and thirty thousand German troops in all—who fought the American rebels on behalf of the British during the Revolutionary War. Serving in the Hessian Field–Jaeger Corps from October 1776 on, Captain Ewald distinguished himself in a number of ways; his was the lead unit in the British flanking movement against George Washington at Brandywine Creek; and he led the British occupiers into Philadelphia in the same fall of 1777. Usually fighting on horseback, he also appeared at Monmouth in 1778, at Charleston in 1780, with Benedict Arnold in Virginia, also in 1780, and with Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781.