by Jack Kelly
This second fight would last all afternoon. As summer pressed its hot palm onto the field, the British struggled forward and were repulsed. Men on both sides fired, reloaded, fired again. The air, Private Joseph Plumb Martin noted, was like “the mouth of a heated oven,” making it “almost impossible to breathe.”29 Many grew disoriented with the heat. Men’s minds disappeared down echoing tunnels. Dozens on both sides dropped dead with heatstroke.
Knox, sweating profusely, set up a battery and directed his gunners in holding off British advances with accurate shots. The thundering guns licked out blasts of flame and smoke that turned the hot air thick and sour. For a while, the gut-punching boom of artillery dominated the action. The stunning noise was louder than ears could hear. It was “the severest cannonade,” a newspaper correspondent observed, “that it is thought ever happened in America.”30
Around six in the evening, Clinton saw that he could neither break through nor outmaneuver his enemy. He decided to end the engagement. Wayne urged a counterattack, but Washington realized that his men were “beat out with heat and fatigue.” The troops slumped to the ground in their sweat-salted clothes, still in line of battle and muskets at the ready. Dead bodies lay where they had fallen.
Washington himself stretched out under a large oak tree just behind the lines. Lafayette shared his cloak. When the sky brightened, there was no one to attack. Clinton had kept his campfires burning as he slipped quietly toward safety in New York.
After Monmouth, Anthony Wayne found himself famous. Washington reported to Congress that all his officers had performed superbly, but singled out Wayne, “whose good conduct and bravery thro’ the whole action, deserves particular commendation.”31 Having dreamed of military glory since his days on the schoolyard, Anthony Wayne had finally achieved it.
Lee had led his men poorly, but having saved his command from destruction, he felt that he hardly deserved an ignominious dressing down from the commander in chief. He waited for Washington’s apology. When it did not come, he wrote a series of ill-considered, vituperative letters to his superior, labeling his Excellency’s most trusted advisers “dirty earwigs” and referring to Washington’s “tinsel dignity.” He demanded a court-martial to clear his name. Washington gave it to him. Lee’s fellow officers convicted him of disobeying orders, instigating a disorderly retreat, and disrespecting the commander. His punishment was a one-year suspension from the service. He would continue to hector Congress until the members dismissed him from the army altogether.
The Battle of Monmouth Courthouse, militarily a draw, had demonstrated the pride and discipline that Steuben’s drills had instilled into the American soldiers. They had stood in the open field against Britain’s best and acquitted themselves favorably. The winter’s ordeal had prompted Washington to trust, even to love, the ordinary soldiers who served under him. They had shown “incomparable patience and fidelity,” he wrote.32 His generals had also proven their growing capability. Washington had gathered around him a cadre of loyal and effective senior officers: Greene, Knox, Stirling, Steuben, Lafayette.
Now, after two long years of fighting, both armies had returned to almost the identical positions they had held in the autumn of 1776: the British fortified in New York City, the Americans hovering around them in the Hudson Highlands and New Jersey. Although none knew it at the time, Monmouth, the longest battle of the entire war, was to be the last major clash in the north. As Washington waited in a “disagreeable state of suspence,” the strategic axis of the conflict was about to shift.
Fourteen
The Boldest Conduct
1779
While forces in New Jersey battled at Monmouth Courthouse, George Rogers Clark led two hundred men recruited from isolated settlements in the West on one of the most quixotic and consequential expeditions of the war. It was a plan so audacious, so ambitious, that before they set off down the Ohio River in May 1778, Clark refused to reveal their objective. When they had gone as far as the Falls of the Ohio, present-day Louisville, he informed the men of their goal. He had already struggled to find volunteers intrepid enough to accompany him, and when he disclosed the objective, some of his men refused to continue on what seemed like a fool’s errand. Clark and about a hundred of the toughest pioneers, whom he named the “Big Knives,” plunged ahead into the wilderness. They were intent on nothing less than winning for the American cause the immense interior of the continent, from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi River.
The war to this point had been fought near the Atlantic seaboard and along the Hudson-Champlain waterway. But Americans had long been gazing west. If the conflict on the coast was about the past, the inland war was about the future. One fight was over issues of political supremacy that had festered for a generation, the other about dreams of settlement in a boundless promised land.
Although related to two prominent Virginia planter families, Clark was a natural frontiersman. Keen of intellect but too restless to sit long in a schoolroom, he had, like Anthony Wayne and George Washington, learned the craft of the surveyor. In 1772, at the age of nineteen, he picked up a copy of Euclid’s Elements and a rifle and headed west.
He joined pioneers like Daniel Boone, who were drawn to the wondrously fertile lands of Kentucky, then a western county of Virginia. These trailblazers had established some of the early settlements west of the Appalachians. The land, Clark felt, was “more Beautiful than any Idea I could have formed of a Country.”1 In 1775, Clark, tall and stocky, loud and pugnacious, took the news of Lexington and Concord to the frontier. He became the political leader of the scattered patriots who populated the region.
While the war in the East raged, the Kentucky frontier at first remained calm. But Shawnee Indians resented the encroachment on their vast hunting territory and saw the Revolution as an opportunity for redress. In 1777, they began to raid frontier settlements, endangering the Americans’ fragile hold on the region. The British encouraged the natives’ bellicosity. Clark advocated a forceful response. Virginia authorities made him a lieutenant colonel of militia and authorized him to cross the territory along its rivers to two distant outposts. The fort at Kaskaskia, which looked across the Mississippi toward Spanish territory just south of St. Louis, was the westernmost British bastion in North America. The stockade at Vincennes lay further east on the Wabash River. Capturing these lightly defended posts would position Clark to attack Detroit, the heart of British power in the region.
Having traveled down the Ohio River and across the Mississippi, Clark’s men surprised Kaskaskia on July 4, 1778. A master of plain, eloquent speaking, Clark convinced the local Indians and the mostly French population of whites to support him. Knowing that Indians respected only strength, he bluffed and blustered, explaining to them that the Revolution had shifted power from the British to the Americans.
The reputation of the Big Knives persuaded the inhabitants of Vincennes, a trading post on the Wabash River 180 miles east of Kaskaskia, to ally with the Americans as well. Clark sent a small force to occupy the old French fort there.
The British could not countenance these rebel toeholds in the future states of Illinois and Indiana. At Detroit, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Hamilton, a career soldier known as “Hair-buyer” for his encouragement of Indian raids on Kentucky and Ohio settlements, gathered a force of about five hundred regulars, militia, and Indians. In October, these men tramped and floated 450 miles to Vincennes and took the decrepit fort from Clark’s force without firing a shot. When spring came, Hamilton planned to lead his Indian allies to retake Kaskaskia as well.
What to do? Clark had little hope of reinforcements. His options were unclear. Bluff and audacity had so far served the twenty-six-year-old well. He decided, in the dead of winter, to attack. “I considered the Inclemency of the season, the badness of the Roads, &c. as an advantage to us, as they would be more off their Guard.”2
He set out with 130 men and twelve
pack horses on the fourth day of February 1779. They would walk almost two hundred miles. Another forty-six men, with two small cannon, ammunition, and supplies, headed down the Mississippi on a keelboat. These troops would work up the Ohio, then up the Wabash to rendezvous with Clark at Vincennes.
For February, the weather was mild and rainy. Clark’s men lacked tents. They spent much of their time wading ankle-deep through drowned flatlands. They fought fatigue, hunger, cold, and wet all the way. Each night, Clark encouraged one company to host a “feast” for the others, serving what game had been killed that day. The men told stories, sang songs, performed war dances, and laughed. On the march, Clark cantered up and down the line, encouraging them. Like Arnold’s trek over the Maine Mountains, the Vincennes expedition tested the men’s capacity to face and overcome unrelenting hardship.
Clark led by example. “I myself and my principal officers conducted ourselves like woodsmen, shouting now and then and running through the mud and water the same as the men themselves.”3 At times, an observer would have seen only a row of heads and arms, hands gripping rifles, wading through frigid water.
At one flooded river, they made rafts for their supplies, swam the horses, and struggled across the channel, singing comic songs as they went. The sight of a drummer boy floating on his drum elicited laughter. When they reached the Wabash, they found it swollen five miles across. The men waited two days without provisions, hoping in vain for the keelboat carrying the remaining men and supplies to appear. They managed to corral two drifting dugout canoes. The next day they waded into the icy, armpit-deep water. When they reached the land they had seen in the distance, they found that it was an island surrounded by yet more flood water.
Discouragement set in. Clark took some dampened gunpowder, blackened his face with it, and screamed a war whoop. Ordering his men to follow, he plunged onward. Finally, they came onto land a few miles south of Vincennes, where the British had just finished rebuilding the fort. Clark knew that his small force was vulnerable. They could not penetrate the stockade walls without cannon, and they did not know when British reinforcements might arrive. Ever resourceful, Clark again fell back on pretense and flagrant courage. “Nothing but the boldest conduct,” he declared, “would ensure success.”4
First, he issued a proclamation to the town’s French inhabitants, promising that “friends of liberty may depend on being well treated.” It was a tour de force of bravado. He marched his men toward the town, staying behind hillocks and waving many banners on long poles to give the appearance of a force of hundreds. “I cannot account for it,” he later wrote, “but I still had inward assurance of success.”5
By the time the patriots reached the village at dusk, the British were secure in their fort and the inhabitants had chosen to side with Clark. They provided his men with food and ammunition.
Clark urged his men to be “as Darring as possible.” He aligned the riflemen on three sides of the fort and ordered them to keep up a steady fire. The frontier marksmen managed to pick off some of the enemy through cannon embrasures. Rotating shifts maintained a steady loud crackling. They accompanied the rifle blasts with a stream of catcalls, insults, and laughter, unnerving the British troops and Canadian militiamen inside.
During a truce, Clark demanded that Hamilton surrender unconditionally. If forced to storm the fort, he declared, his men would have no mercy. The British commander refused. More bullets tore into the walls. A white flag rose over the fort. The British would surrender, Hamilton declared, if given the honors of war and allowed to return to Detroit. Clark refused. Surrender must be unconditional.
Just then, a dozen Indians appeared on the horizon, a war party returning from raiding American settlements. They led two prisoners. Clark ordered a company of his men to walk out and greet them, hoping to gull them into a trap. The ruse worked. Whooping and yelling a welcome, the Virginians managed to come close enough to the warriors to fire on them point blank, killing half of them. Some escaped; six were brought to a clearing in front of the fort.
Indian bands like this one, encouraged by the British, had murdered friends and family members of the Americans—even now they carried fresh scalps. Clark’s men were not inclined toward mercy. With the British looking on, Clark ordered the Indians to sit in a circle. Knowing what was coming, the braves began to sing their death songs. Someone, perhaps Clark himself, systematically crashed a tomahawk into the head of each man. Like the Half King’s act at Jumonville Glen, the butchery was a gesture, a piece of theater. The immediate audience was Hamilton and his men, but Clark was also sending a message to the Indians who might continue to oppose him.
The spectacle rattled Hamilton. He knew the Indians personally and had sent them on their mission. He later claimed that when he came out to negotiate, he found a vision of savagery: a wild-eyed Clark, his hands and face “still reeking” with human blood. The ploy worked. “After such a scene we had little hope of being very secure in capitulation,” Hamilton later wrote.6 Nevertheless, he had no choice but to turn over the fort to the Americans. The British prisoners were sent marching under guard to Virginia. George Rogers Clark, a master of stratagem and show, had become the hero of the West. “Great things,” he wrote, “have been effected by a few Men well Conducted.”7
Although none of his repeated attempts to attack Detroit succeeded, Clark later claimed with some justification, “I have given the United States half the territory they possess,” referring to the vast tracts which Britain would cede to the new nation.8 After the war, Clark was considered for an exploratory mission farther west, but that duty fell to his younger brother William, who would join Meriwether Lewis on the groundbreaking Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804.
* * *
In the East, the war had bogged down. With the British fortified inside New York City, Washington did not feel he could do much more during 1779 than hold his position and wait. He did not have the force to take the city without the help of a French fleet. In July, British general Henry Clinton sent troops to raid the Connecticut coastal towns of New Haven, Fairfield, and Norwalk, hoping to lure Washington away from his strong positions in the Hudson Highlands and New Jersey. The American commander did not take the bait.
With the British in his front, Washington began to feel increasingly pressed by the loyalists and Indians in his rear. The six tribes of the Iroquois federation, whose territory abutted the settlements of the Americans, had played a complicated political game since before Washington’s alliance with the Half King. Now the confederacy was splitting. Four of the tribes, including the powerful Seneca at the western end of Iroquoia and the Mohawks at the eastern end, had sided with the British. Only the Oneida and Tuscarora had allied themselves with the patriot cause.
Beginning in the spring of 1778, raids against frontier villages in Pennsylvania and New York grew increasingly frequent. In June, Colonel John Butler led a force of four hundred loyalists and five hundred Seneca Indians from the British base at Fort Niagara on the western end of Lake Ontario down to the Wyoming Valley. This fertile bottomland lay along the Susquehanna River between two ridges of hills in northeastern Pennsylvania, near the site of present day Wilkes-Barre. The settlers there had built a series of small forts where they could seek refuge.
Butler’s war party surprised and captured several of these forts. Three hundred patriot militiamen gathered to march against Butler. In a hot firefight, the Indians got the best of the settlers and set on them with tomahawks and knives. Blood flowed—all but sixty of the patriots were killed or captured. Those taken prisoner had ample opportunity to envy the dead as the Seneca braves inflicted on them slow and imaginative tortures. Having taken 227 scalps, Butler ran the rest of the civilians out and burned more than a thousand houses, leaving the Wyoming Valley a wasteland.
The massacre terrified settlers across the backlands of New York and Pennsylvania. In October 1778, Walter Butler, John’s son, joine
d with Joseph Brant, a gifted Mohawk leader, to mount an assault on Cherry Valley, just south of the Mohawk River in New York State. The 200 rangers and 500 Indians approached the prosperous settlement, where New York officials had posted 250 Continental Army infantrymen for protection. The patriot colonel ignored warnings. The raiders descended, slaughtered him and his officers, killed thirty civilians, took forty prisoners, and put the town to the torch. Women and children were among the dead. “The bloody scene,” a white trader reported, “is almost past description.”9
Given the tense standoff around New York City, Washington had doubts about diverting part of his army to deal with the elusive natives. But by February 1779, Congressional representatives from New York and Pennsylvania were screaming for action. Congress passed orders to Washington, who began to plan an expedition for the “chastisement of the savages.”
This was not to be a raid but a major military operation carried out by experienced Continental soldiers and backed by artillery. The men would plunge into the largely unexplored territory with two objectives. One was to replicate the ruin the Indians and loyalists had visited on patriot settlers. The country was to be not “merely overrun but destroyed,” Washington ordered.10 The other was to abduct a large number of prisoners and hold them as hostages for the natives’ good behavior. As a bonus, Washington hoped his soldiers could capture the fort at Niagara, cutting the Indians’ source of supplies and putting an end to British incitement. Military protocol dictated that Washington offer this important command to Horatio Gates, his highest ranking subordinate. Gates begged off, claiming he lacked the “youth and strength” for a wilderness venture. John Sullivan was next in line. His assignment, Washington informed him, was to terrorize the Indians and “to carry the war vigorously into their own country.”11