Later, Jouett served in the Virginia Assembly as a Kentucky settler and in Kentucky’s own legislature when Kentucky became a state. Among his friends and associates was future President Andrew Jackson, even though Jouett was married to Sallie Robards, sister of Rachel Jackson’s first husband, Lewis Robards.
Oddly, Jouett “was mainly responsible for the passage of an act [in the Virginia Assembly] authorizing the courts to determine whether grounds for divorce [of the Robards couple] existed,” recalled Virginia newspaper editor and historian Virginius Dabney in an article for the Ironworker magazine of Lynchburg, Virginia (summer, 1966).
Apparently misinformed as to what the legislators had done, Jackson and Mrs. Robards then married—but she wasn’t really divorced after all. Unhappily, the mix-up and their seemingly hasty marriage led to wide criticism, insults, and duels.
Washington’s Generals
THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS GAVE GEORGE WASHINGTON A TOTAL OF TWENTY-nine major generals and forty-four brigadiers during the Revolutionary War. Of the majors, six were dead by the end of the war in 1783, seven had resigned, and one, Benedict Arnold, had gone over to the enemy as a traitor. What fates awaited Washington’s best-known officers?
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Only a short time was left for the man who probably was Washington’s best—and favorite—general, Nathanael Greene, commander of the Southern campaign that brought Lord Cornwallis into Virginia and disaster at Yorktown, that subsequently reduced the remaining British outposts throughout the South, one by one.
Greene briefly returned to his native Rhode Island after the war but soon ran into financial difficulties. His family foundry business had not done well in his absence, and he was stuck with the debts of a cheating army supplier in the South who died bankrupt. Selling out in Rhode Island, he moved south, to a departed Loyalist’s estate, Mulberry Grove, a gift from the state of Georgia for his wartime services.
Still struggling financially, he took ill one day in June 1786 after walking about a friend’s rice plantation in the heat. Whether it was sunstroke, a heart attack, or a more commonplace stroke is unknown today, but Greene, only forty-four, died shortly afterward, leaving his wife, Kitty, a widow with five children to raise.
A few years later, incidentally, their Mulberry Grove plantation would be the site at which Eli Whitney invented his revolutionizing cotton gin.
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William Alexander, otherwise known as the colorful, brave, and loyal “Lord Stirling”—and as a heavy drinker—wasn’t well enough to join Washington in the march to Yorktown. He stayed behind as commander of the Northern Department of the Continental Army, was bedridden by Christmastime of 1782 and died on January 15, 1783, in Albany, New York, at age fifty-seven.
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New Hampshire’s ramrod-straight General John Stark, a hero at Breed’s Hill, victor in the Battle of Bennington, Vermont, and a key player at Saratoga as well, returned home to his farm and lived until 1822. When he died that year at age ninety-three, he may have been the last surviving general of the entire war.
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Controversial John Sullivan, also from New Hampshire, a combative lawyer, early member of the Continental Congress, and one of George Washington’s earliest generals, resigned from military service in late 1779 and by 1780 was back in his congressional seat. Also active in politics back home, he would serve as president of post-revolutionary New Hampshire, and then as a federal judge appointed by his old commander in chief, President George Washington. Not always successful in battle, Sullivan by then was drinking to excess. In 1795, he would die young, at age fifty-five.
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Daniel Morgan, considered a brilliant, if untutored, battlefield tactician, French and Indian War veteran, a hero both at Saratoga and Cowpens, was forced into retirement before Yorktown by ill health, but bounced back to lead a light infantry corps from Virginia in Pennsylvania’s Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. The “Old Wagoneer,” as he liked to call himself, held a seat in the U.S. House in 1797, but retired two years later, again because of ill health. He died in 1802 at the age of sixty-six.
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British-born Charles Lee, once the second in command of American forces in the Revolutionary War, retired to his estate in future West Virginia after a court-martial stemming from his dismissal by Washington in the Battle of Monmouth, New Jersey. Never to command troops again, Lee died at age fifty-one in a visit to Philadelphia in 1782. Buried in that city’s Christ Church cemetery, his remains possibly were obliterated or scattered during a later street-widening project.
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John Glover, of the Marblehead Mariners, a fisherman and community leader before the war, returned home after the hostilities and picked up where he left off, both in business and as a local judge and politician.
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Born in England, long an officer in the British army, and a survivor of General Edward Braddock’s defeat at the hands of the French and their Indian allies in 1755, Horatio Gates, the victor at Saratoga, did not take up permanent residence in America until purchasing his six-hundred-acre “Travellers Rest” estate in future West Virginia in 1772, on the very eve of the Revolution.
After Congress forgave his defeat at Camden, Gates returned home in March of 1783 to be by his dying wife Elizabeth Phillips Gates’s bedside. Three years after she passed away, no longer in military service, he remarried, to wealthy heiress Mary Vallance. He briefly served as president of the Virginia branch of the Society of the Cincinnati, then with his second wife moved to Manhattan Island, where he died in 1806 after a lingering illness, at age seventy-eight. Like Declaration signer Francis Lewis of New York, Gates was buried in the graveyard at Trinity Church at the top of Wall Street. Like that of signer Lewis, too, the American general’s actual gravesite no longer is known today.
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A particularly sad end awaited Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee in the postwar years, despite his service as governor of Virginia and a U.S. House member. In charge of the army sent to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion, the onetime commander of Lee’s Legion of cavalrymen suffered the humiliation of a year spent in debtors prison, was beaten and disfigured by an angry mob in Baltimore, then felt constrained to rebuild his health in Barbados, leaving his family behind in Virginia. After five years, he was on his way back home when he fell ill aboard ship, was taken ashore on Cumberland Island, Georgia, and died there at age sixty-two. His son, only eleven at the time, was Robert E. Lee, of Civil War fame.
It was Light-Horse Harry Lee, incidentally, who promulgated that famous epitaph to George Washington, “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”
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Perhaps the most bizarre fate awaiting any of the American military leaders was that of Henry Knox who, after serving as secretary of war under the “Confederation” government, continued in that post in the Washington administration under the newly adopted United States Constitution. He ended his twenty years of public service—both military and governmental—in 1794 and retired to his “Montpelier” estate in Maine. Like many of his wartime contemporaries, he then struggled to keep various creditors at bay, in part because of his own speculative risk-taking. He and wife Lucy produced twelve children, but only three lived beyond childhood. Still tall and portly, Knox, fifty-six, died suddenly in 1806—perhaps due to a burst appendix or from swallowing a chicken bone.
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Another to meet a sad and inappropriate end was George Rogers Clark, the hero of Vincennes—an alcoholic in his final years, stroke victim, and amputee (a leg). He was dead in 1818 at age sixty-five. “The mighty oak of the forest has fallen,” said eulogizer Judge John Rowan, “and now the scrub oaks sprout all around.”
Financing a Banquet
ANOTHER HERO OF THE REVOLUTION TO BE STALKED BY POVERTY AND ILL-FORTUNE was Friedrich von Steuben, the Prussian drillmaster who had brought order and real military training into the restless ranks of Continentals wintering at Valley Forge in early 1778. Hi
s lack of funds became evident as early as Yorktown, but first he had to settle an affair or two of “honor.”
At Yorktown, where he and Lafayette each commanded an American division, the two foreign-born leaders fell into dispute over whose division should be in charge of the trenches at the time of the British surrender. Shouldn’t the honor go to Lafayette, whose men were in the trenches when the British sent forth a flag of truce the morning of October 17, 1781? Or should the honor go to Steuben, whose men relieved Lafayette’s in the trenches at noon on October 17, then refused to make way for Lafayette’s division when normal rotation would have placed the Frenchman’s troops back in the trenches? It was Washington who decided the fierce little baron’s division could have the honor of occupying the trenches the afternoon of October 19, when the British marched out of Yorktown to surrender.
In another contretemps involving the feisty baron, the Pennsylvania troops of Colonel Richard Butler filed into the vacated British trenches at one point on the day of the surrender to take charge of the entrenchments. This meant planting the regimental colors in a conspicuous spot as symbol of the change-over. The flag was carried by a young ensign at the head of the column—he was supposed to place it on top of the British earthworks, but Steuben seized the staff from him and planted it himself. Butler was so furious they almost settled the matter with a duel.
After the surrender ceremony came a series of dinners hosted by the victors at Yorktown, with the ranking British officers often appearing as guests. Steuben, though, was so short of funds he sold his best horse to raise money and still had to borrow from a friend to put on a banquet of his own. “We are constantly feasted by the French without giving them a bit of bratwurst,” he complained at one point. “I will give one grand dinner for my allies, should I eat my soup with a wooden spoon forever after.”
Before he could leave Yorktown on November 1, the apparently penniless Steuben asked Washington himself for a loan. “Strongly moved,” said Burke Davis in his book The Campaign That Won America, the commander in chief gave his old drillmaster twenty guineas and warned that Congress might not ever pay all that it owed for his services.
Steuben insisted on giving a sick aide his carriage and half the Washington loan before leaving Yorktown. The Prussian then hit the road for Philadelphia “with a single gold coin in his pocket.” While he would seek—and eventually win—government compensation for his services to the Revolution, it wasn’t, as Washington had warned, the full amount due. He should have been awarded $8,500 in cash, reported historian Davis, but instead Steuben received only $1,700.
The balance was paid, added Davis, “in the form of a Treasury Certificate at 6 percent interest—which the Baron later tried in vain to sell at ten cents on the dollar.”
Even then, he lost his money to unwise land speculations. In receivership at one point, he had to mortgage 16,000 acres of land presented to him by the state of New York. He won an annual pension of $2,500 from the first Constitutional Congress, but that sum failed to end his indebtedness.
The former inspector general of the Continental Army was living in a two-room log cabin when he died of a stroke in late 1794 at age sixty-four. His “blue book,” or training manual for American soldiers, remained in use for many years. He was a cofounder of the Society of the Cincinnati and an early proponent of the U.S. Military Academy, which came into being at West Point in 1802.
A Legend Grows
PILING LEGEND UPON LEGEND FOR THE REST OF HIS LONG LIFE WAS DANIEL Boone, frontiersman, scout, and Virginia legislator captured by Banastre Tarleton in his raid on Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1781. Even earlier, in 1778, Boone had been captured by Shawnee Indians on the Lower Blue Licks off the Licking River in Kentucky, but, typical of this larger-than-life figure, had escaped four months afterward. He would survive additional encounters with the British and Indians on the distant frontier as he fought in the last battles of the Revolution. Long after the war, he would remain a hunter, explorer, and frontiersman extraordinaire.
He lost two sons to Indian conflicts, but he was no Indian-hater; he, in fact, was “adopted” by the Shawnee.
After the war, the great pathfinder continued his treks into the western lands beyond the Alleghenies. He briefly served as a Virginia legislator for a second time; would lose his claims to as much as a million acres in the onetime wilderness lands for lack of the proper paperwork under newly enacted laws; would be robbed of $50,000 in cash he was carrying on behalf of fellow frontier homesteaders, then sell most of his remaining land to pay them back.
Throughout his adult life, Boone was in and out of financial difficulties, but he persevered as a wandering explorer, trapper, and woodsman until old age forced him to stay close to home. Before that, at age seventy-two, he encountered a grizzly bear, but managed to escape into his dugout.
He moved his family to Missouri in 1799, saying that the still sparsely populated Kentucky territory had become “too crowded.” Late in life, he lost his wife, Rebecca, who had borne their ten children. Seven years later, just short of his eighty-sixth birthday, Daniel Boone also died, his coffin resting next to his deathbed. His remains (and Rebecca’s) were disinterred from their Missouri resting place in 1845 and carried back to Frankfort, Kentucky, for burial there…but rumor later arose to suggest that the remains in Daniel’s grave were not really his.
Back to England
AMONG THE BRITISH, MEANWHILE, LORD CORNWALLIS RETURNED HOME TO greetings as a hero…after blaming Sir Henry Clinton and the Royal Navy for the surrender at Yorktown. Cornwallis, only forty-two at the time of his defeat, later distinguished himself in dealing with rebellion in Ireland, in British campaigns in India, and as governor-general of the subcontinent, where he died in 1805 at the age of sixty-six.
The British general who did take much of the blame, fairly or unfairly, was Sir Henry Clinton, who had ordered Cornwallis into Tidewater, Virginia, in June of 1781 to build a naval base. It was Cornwallis, though, who chose the Yorktown site.
After the surrender in October, Clinton, true to his petulant and complaining nature, visibly found fault with the government in England. It wasn’t long—May 1782—before Clinton was replaced as the head of the British forces in America by Sir Guy Carleton. Clinton returned home, to find he was considered a chief villain among those blamed for the debacle in the former colonies. Out of favor for some years, he recouped much of his lost ground by the 1790s, winning reelection to Parliament, rising to full general and, in 1794, becoming governor of Gibraltar. He died the next year at the age of sixty-five.
British Admiral Sir Thomas Graves, who failed to relieve Cornwallis by sea, also lost favor as a result, served for a time in the Caribbean, and wasn’t recalled to England for nearly a year. When finally ordered home, he sailed on a ship that sank from damage suffered in a storm off Nova Scotia. Rescued after several hours spent in a small boat, he spent the next six years in a naval limbo—promotions, but no commands at sea. He finally redeemed his reputation by his actions against the French in 1794 as second in command of the British Channel Fleet—wounded in the same battle, known as the “Glorious First of June,” he saw no further active service.
After losing the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne returned to England in 1778 as a prisoner of war on parole. He never did return to America, but instead pursued a career in Parliament and as a playwright. Indeed, he attended a theatrical performance the night before he died after a bad attack of the gout in 1792 at the age of seventy.
Returning to bristling criticism in London in 1778 from the still-powerful Lord Germaine and his followers was General Sir William Howe. Victorious in most of his battles against the Americans, Howe was faulted on two counts.
First, he too often failed to follow up his victories with a final, crushing blow. Allowing Washington to evacuate his entire army after the Battle of Long Island was the prime example. Second, Howe was supposed to have moved up the Hudson River early enough in the summer of 177
7 to support General Burgoyne’s Canadian-launched expedition into upper New York, but Howe was more interested in pursuing Washington’s small army in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Howe finally settled for taking Philadelphia, the rebel capital, and wintering there…and never did go to Burgoyne’s help.
Scolded in dispatches from Germaine for the failure to help Burgoyne, among other faults, Howe resigned and returned to England in the summer of 1778. He spent some time defending himself in a Parliamentary inquiry and publishing an account of his activities in America. In 1782, as a signal that he still enjoyed the king’s favor, he was named lieutenant general of the Ordnance—later becoming a full general. He retired from the military in 1803, and died in 1814 at the age of eighty-five.
Finally, there was Thomas Gage, the first of the Revolutionary War’s British generals to be ordered home in disfavor for lack of success in suppressing the Colonials. Historically, too, Gage often is the scapegoat accused of triggering the war by sending his men to Lexington and Concord. To the contrary, Gage was only following orders from his superiors in England to take forceful steps against the rebels, in the expectation that the restless colonies would then fall into line.
Married to an American woman, Gage was understanding of, if not totally sympathetic with, the colonial grievances. Convinced the Americans would fight, he was caught between the rioting radicals on the one hand and a distant government calling for tougher measures on the other. He walked the proverbial tightrope trying to keep the two factions at peace with each other, but in the end felt constrained to obey orders from home. He acted as instructed, fully aware that he and his 3,500 troops in Boston faced a more and more rebellious populace of 400,000 in Massachusetts alone.
Best Little Stories from the American Revolution Page 46