Band of Giants_The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence

by Jack Kelly

  Most in Britain were sure of the outcome. Benjamin Franklin, serving as a colonial envoy in London, had overheard an army general claim “that with a thousand British grenadiers he would undertake to go from one end of America to the other and geld all the males, partly by force and partly with a little coaxing.” Gage was not so sanguine. He felt that the inhabitants of America had been infected by the “Disease” of rebellion. “Now it’s so universal there is no knowing where to apply a Remedy.” He wrote to London for reinforcements. “If you think ten thousand men sufficient, send twenty.”10

  In September 1774, he set out to secure Crown gunpowder supplies so that they could not fall into the hands of the seething colonists. He sent 260 British redcoats rowing up the Mystic River from Boston to remove a large supply of the explosive from a powder house north of the city. They faced no opposition.

  But Gage had batted a hornet’s nest. The action incited wild rumors up and down the colony: War was at hand. Six militiamen had been slaughtered. British ships were bombarding Boston. In response, thousands of armed men took to the roads. The rumors stunned the delegates at the First Continental Congress, then meeting in Philadelphia. “War! war! war! was the cry,” John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail back in Boston. He imagined “scenes of Distress and Terror.”

  The armed men, and later the Congressional delegates, soon found that the rumors were false. But for General Gage the instantaneous mobilization was an ominous sign.

  In October, the government forbade the importation of gunpowder and weapons into the colonies. New Hampshire patriots promptly broke into a local fort and removed ninety-seven barrels of gunpowder and fifteen light cannon. Rebels grabbed royal armaments in other cities up and down the New England coast. In February 1775, Gage sent troops to Salem, Massachusetts, to confiscate yet more war supplies. Forty armed militiamen and a crowd of tough fishermen from nearby Marblehead stood in their way. Tense negotiations narrowly averted violence.

  “Civil government is near its end,” Gage wrote. “Furthermore, conciliation, moderation, reason is over; nothing can be done but by forcible means.” Yet Honest Tom’s actions remained tentative. “Timid and undecided,” a subordinate wrote of him. “Unfit to command at a time of resistance, and approaching Rebellion.”11

  * * *

  On April 19, 1775, the spring breeze brought to Henry Knox’s ears the distinctive, ominous rumble of cannon fire from the west. Word quickly reached Boston of an outbreak of violence at the villages of Lexington and Concord, about fifteen miles northwest of the city. That evening, a parade of bloody redcoats limped into town. The fight that Henry Knox, Nathanael Greene, and thousands of others had dreaded and prepared for had arrived.

  It had begun as another powder raid. Gage sent a brigade of grenadiers and light infantrymen into the countryside to confiscate war supplies at Concord. He also instructed them to arrest the notorious rabble-rousers Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who were correctly reported to be in the area. They were preparing to attend the Second Continental Congress.

  Reaching the village of Lexington, the seven-hundred-man British force encountered fifty armed patriots assembled on the Common. The militia captain, farmer John Parker, wisely ordered his men to disperse. The next instant, shots rang out. “Without any order or regularity, the light infantry began a scattered fire,” a British officer reported.12 Eight Americans died, most shot in the back. Nine lay wounded. In this casual manner, on a bright spring morning, a war began.

  The British troops marched on to Concord, where patriots had already removed most of the arms. Three British companies tried to secure North Bridge over the Concord River. Hundreds of angry militiamen confronted them. A sudden firefight left six patriots and a dozen regulars dead or wounded. To the surprise of the militiamen, the vaunted British redcoats ran back toward Concord village.

  The British commander, the fat, slow-thinking lieutenant colonel

  Francis Smith, showed “great fickleness and inconstancy of mind.” He marched his men pointlessly around Concord, then took time out for brandy and food at a local tavern. After lunch, he put his troops on the road for the perilous return march to Boston. As the tired troops stepped warily along the dirt road, militiamen kept up a hot fire from behind trees and walls. “Cowardly,” a British officer called them. “Concealed villains.” However, the patriots made up in initiative what they lacked in discipline, and for the British, the march turned into a desperate scramble to reach safety.

  As a veteran of the Monongahela debacle, Gage must have felt a sickening sense of déjà vu when he received reports of the fighting. He sent out a relief column under General Hugh Percy, who met Smith’s beleaguered force east of Lexington. The energetic Percy got most of the troops back to Boston. The British suffered 73 men killed and more than 170 wounded. Percy noted of his opponents that day, “Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob, will find himself much mistaken.”13

  * * *

  General Gage had long known of Henry Knox’s Whig sympathies. Early in 1775, he had given orders that the young bookseller was not to be allowed to leave the city. Boston’s location on a peninsula connected to the mainland by a 120-yard-wide, fortified isthmus simplified control. Getting out presented a problem for Knox, who was well known and, at 260 pounds, conspicuous.

  But the conflict had now turned serious, and Knox knew that if he was to contribute to the patriot effort he had to leave Boston. Shortly after the outbreak at Lexington, Lucy sewed Henry’s sword, an emblem of his militia command, into the lining of her cloak. The couple escaped in a small boat, risking prison or hanging if they were discovered fleeing the city. Henry’s brother William, then nineteen, took over the bookshop. Lucy fretted that she might never see her family again.

  The excitement outside Boston more than matched the apprehension inside the city. Militiamen from all over New England, a total of twenty thousand, were camping in surrounding towns. Military matters were no longer questions of theory and drill. This was real. Men’s lives would hang on decisions made by inexperienced officers. Yet it was the age of amateurs. In a time when a retired printer like Benjamin Franklin could make breakthrough discoveries in science, it didn’t seem impossible that soldiers armed with book learning could challenge an empire.

  Knox was astounded to see his friend Nathanael Greene ride into the bustling bivouac at Cambridge at the head of 1,500 Rhode Island soldiers, his troops among the best dressed and most disciplined of any of those gathering around Boston. Some mysterious alchemy had transformed Greene, a militia private a few weeks earlier, into the commanding general of his colony’s “Army of Observation.” Was it his political influence? His calm confidence? His book knowledge? No matter. Greene, whose limp had barred his way in the militia, would soon be appointed the youngest brigadier general in the Continental Army. From private to general in a month—his dizzying ascent was a sign of the desperate times.

  Moving with energy, Knox designed fortifications to protect the growing patriot army should the British decide to rush out and attack in force. Men set to work piling earthen breastworks and constructing small forts, known as redoubts, in the village of Roxbury, directly opposite Boston Neck. They fortified their camp in Cambridge, on the far side of the Charles River. Knox began training gunners to operate the twelve cannon that Rhode Island patriots had sent.

  On June 12, General Gage commanded all the rebels to lay down their arms and swear allegiance to their king or be branded traitors. The zealots outside the city ignored the threat. Charged with an electric sense of anticipation and possibility, they steeled themselves for war. Now blows would indeed decide.

  Three

  The Predicament We Are In

  1775

  It took time for the sound of the shots fired on April 19, 1775, to be heard round the world, but the news flashed through the colonies like a thunderclap. A post rider left at ten o’clock that
morning to alert the citizenry of the slaughter at Lexington. He reached Hartford, Connecticut, that night. Word arrived in New London on April 20 and in New York City one day later. The Massachusetts Spy, on May 3, was reporting that British troops, had “wantonly and in a most inhuman manner fired upon and killed a number of our countrymen.”1

  Word reached John Stark in New Hampshire at midday on April 20. Within six hours, he was able to recruit four hundred armed men. They responded to his call because of his reputation as a gritty wilderness ranger during the last war. Now a forty-seven-year-old farmer and sawmill owner, Stark hurried his troops to the outskirts of Boston by the morning of April 22. He recruited another four hundred volunteers from those who had raced to the scene of the action on their own. Men from the town of Nottingham had covered the fifty-seven miles to Cambridge in twenty hours, “having run rather than marched.”

  The dispute over abstractions, over taxation and representation, had given way to grim, bleeding-knuckle reality. All over New England, men threw themselves into the cause with astonishing fervor. The fifty-seven-year-old Israel Putnam heard the “momentous intelligence” the evening of April 19 as he was building a stone wall on his farm in northeastern Connecticut. A well-known fighter during the French and Indian War, Putnam had enhanced his reputation by donating a flock of sheep to struggling Bostonians during the British occupation. The grizzled veteran did not change his clothes. He rode all night, joining others outside Boston the next morning.

  None of the men knew what to expect. They just wanted to get at the soldiers who had so offhandedly shot down their fellow citizens. But the British troops did not deploy for battle. General Gage kept his men inside the city, isolated on a peninsula. On the mainland, the threatening mass of militiamen continued to grow.

  * * *

  Three days after Lexington, a Connecticut merchant named Benedict Arnold led his militia company to the New Haven powder magazine, where the colony’s arms were stored. He wrangled with one of the city’s selectmen, who denied him entry. “Regular orders be damned,” Arnold stormed, “None but Almighty God shall prevent my marching!”2 Cowed, the official handed him the keys. Arnold and his men armed themselves and hurried toward Boston.

  The enthusiastic volunteer stayed in the camp that surrounded the besieged city barely two weeks. The Massachusetts Committee of Safety, which now served as a provisional government for the colony, named him a militia colonel and sent him galloping westward. In doing so, they were putting into action an idea that Arnold had himself proposed. He was to gather fighters from the colony’s western hill towns and seize Fort Ticonderoga, the largest military bastion on the continent.

  On reaching the village of Williamstown, Massachusetts, Arnold learned that the notorious partisan Ethan Allen, leader of a vigilante band known as the Green Mountain Boys, had received exactly the same assignment from Connecticut authorities. The news alarmed Arnold. He left behind his recruiting officers and hurried on to look for Allen at the Catamount Tavern in Bennington, in the territory that would soon be Vermont. There, the patrons told him that Allen had already left. He was even now gathering his men on the east shore of Lake Champlain, opposite the mighty fortress.

  Arnold sped on, finally catching up with Allen on the afternoon of May 8, three weeks after the battle at Concord’s North Bridge. In a field beside Lake Champlain, two of the most striking personalities of the era came face to face. Allen was more than six feet tall, his massive physique draped in a green coat with oversized epaulettes and gold buttons. His intimidating manner and violent temper could make men cower. The fastidious Arnold wore a fancy scarlet uniform coat. Half a head shorter and cocksure in demeanor, he gazed at his rival with an icy, penetrating stare. Allen was a rough mountain man, Arnold a wealthy and sophisticated trader. An iron resolve and a surplus of self-regard were common to both.

  Fort Ticonderoga commanded the water route that led from Canada down Champlain, Lake George, and the Hudson River to New York City. In an era when moving by water was far easier than by land, this corridor was key to controlling the continent. During the last war, the British and French had struggled over the star-shaped fort at the narrow southern end of the lake. Americans understood that Ticonderoga would play a critical role in this conflict, as well. In addition, the patriots desperately needed the artillery and other military supplies stored at the fort.

  Arnold knew they had to act before reinforcements reached the remote post. Many members of the Continental Congress, still hoping for a peaceful resolution, hesitated to seize Crown property. But Massachusetts and Connecticut officials had decided simultaneously to order an attempt on the fort. Arnold’s credentials gave him greater authority, but Allen had more men. A clash of wills was inevitable.

  At first, Allen appeared to accede to Arnold’s authority. But he knew his men would not follow the outsider. When Allen’s troops threatened to go home, Arnold negotiated a joint command. Together they would launch the first offensive operation of the war.

  * * *

  Ethan Allen had grown up in a remote Connecticut town in the northwest corner of the state. His agile mind marked him as a scholar, but his father’s early death ended his studies. He opened an iron forge instead. By the time he was in his mid-twenties, he employed fifty men.

  Pugnacious from youth, the huge, work-hardened Allen would strip off his shirt and challenge anyone who dared gainsay him. Yet inside his brawny body was a fierce intelligence. He rejected orthodox religious ideas—his rants about Jesus and Beelzebub led to a charge of blasphemy. A faulty business sense and endless legal disputes left him broke at the age of thirty. On a hunting trip to the north, Allen came under the sway of a new obsession—land speculation.

  A dispute about where the border between New York and New Hampshire lay had engendered confusion in the area we know as Vermont. Allen plunged into the controversy with gusto. He bought and sold land and formed an extralegal militia known as the Green Mountain Boys. If a resident sought to protect his claim by purchasing a New York deed, the Boys were likely to pay him a rough visit.

  Allen told people that he “valued not the Government nor even the Kingdom.” He walked a fine line, one biographer noted, “between self-aggrandizing land speculator and latter-day Robin Hood.”3

  The outbreak of rebellion in the colonies suited Allen perfectly. He held that his Boys were “a scourge and terror to arbitrary power.” The patriots’ open defiance had thrown all power into question. The “bloody attempt at Lexington to enslave America,” Allen wrote, “thoroughly electrified my mind.” As he had battled aristocratic New Yorkers, he would stand up to the British Parliament. “Ever since I arrived to a state of manhood, and acquainted myself with the general history of mankind,” he proclaimed, “I have felt a sincere passion for liberty.”4

  In the weeks after Lexington and Concord, Allen gathered perhaps a hundred of his Boys—hunters and trappers, a tavern owner, a poet, three African Americans, immigrants from Scotland and Ireland. Six of them were his brothers and relatives. By the time Arnold found him, he was ready to storm Ticonderoga. He was hopeful because the British, no longer standing guard on a border, had allowed the fort to fall into disrepair. Only forty-six regular soldiers, still ignorant of the violence near Boston, manned the outpost.

  * * *

  Benedict Arnold hailed from the prosperous city of Norwich, at the eastern end of Connecticut. His early life mirrored that of Henry Knox: His sea captain father had fallen on hard times and descended into penury and alcoholism. The family had apprenticed young Benedict to an apothecary. In addition to the intricacies of herbs, plasters, and powders, he had learned the complex strategies of international trade. Coming of age, he had opened up shop as “Druggist, Bookseller &c.” He expanded into trading horses and other goods from Canada to the West Indies. With a fleet of ships and a knack for smuggling, he had amassed a substantial fortune.

 
Now, Arnold and Allen stood in the dark on the eastern shore of the lake and prepared to make a “desperate attempt” to seize the Crown fort opposite them. A storm delayed the operation for hours. With few boats and barely time for two trips across, only 83 of their 250 men made it to the New York side. In the delicate darkness that preceded dawn, Allen cooed three owl hoots to signal the advance. They crept up to the entrance, where a sentry had drifted off to sleep. Arnold and Allen woke him as they rushed to be the first to enter. The guard lifted his musket and pulled the trigger—the gun did not ignite. A second soldier appeared and fired high. The resounding boom echoed through the sleeping fort. The guard thrust his bayonet at Allen, who parried the blow and hammered him on the head with the flat of his heavy pirate’s cutlass, knocking him down.

  Now all was shouting. The garrison staggered awake, the soldiers scrambled out. Allen acted like a man possessed. He rushed toward the officers’ barracks shouting, “No quarter! No quarter!” The fort’s commander remained locked in his room as Allen yelled, “Come out of there, you goddamn old rat!”

  A contemporary described Allen’s oratory as “a singular compound of local barbarisms, scriptural phrases and oriental wildness.”5 Allen claimed that a British officer had asked him by what authority he had broken into His Majesty’s fort. “In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!” Allen allegedly roared. If he said it, he was wrong on both counts. Neither the Hebrew deity nor the representatives meeting in Philadelphia had authorized any such action. Yet the fort was soon under his command.

  When the fireworks, such as they were, ended, the conflict between Arnold and Allen resumed. Arnold made a mighty attempt to stop the Green Mountain Boys from looting, but Allen’s men openly defied him. Like Washington at Fort Necessity, Arnold saw what happened when military subordination dissolved.