by Jack Kelly
Sullivan had the qualifications that might have made him an effective officer. Intelligent, educated, and principled, the thirty-nine-year-old New Hampshire lawyer had dedicated four years of his life to the American cause, all at the highest level of command. Nathanael Greene had once called him “sensible, active, ambitious, brave, and persevering in his temper.”12
Yet the knack of leadership eluded Sullivan. Lapses in judgment combined with sheer bad luck to plague him at nearly every step. He had failed in his effort to reinforce the wavering American army in Canada. Commanding the line on Long Island, he had allowed the enemy to rout his men and take him prisoner. At Brandywine Creek outside Philadelphia, he had again fallen short as the British turned his flank and nearly destroyed the Continental Army.
At the end of 1778, Sullivan had commanded an effort to retake Newport, Rhode Island, the nation’s fifth-largest city, which had been snapped up by the British two years earlier. He was to cooperate with French general Charles d’Estaing, who commanded a powerful fleet and an army of 4,500 men. This was the first French-American joint operation. But when a British armada was spotted nearby, d’Estaing hurried away to give battle. An intervening tempest scattered both fleets and d’Estaing did not return. Sullivan’s men, abandoned by their allies, were forced to retreat. Then, to the annoyance of George Washington and Congress, Sullivan lambasted the French and insulted d’Estaing in a manner that threatened to overturn the alliance entirely.
As a young man, Sullivan, whose parents had come from Ireland as indentured servants, had purchased mortgages at a discount and dunned the debtors for payments. He had so enraged his neighbors that they fired musket balls into his home. His manner of defending himself during the controversy over the Newport campaign prompted Nathanael Greene to comment, “General Sullivan I find has turnd Lawyer again.”13 The qualities of a lawyer—exacting, contentious, and blameful—may have worked to Sullivan’s advantage at times, but they cramped his mind and kept him from coming into his own as a warrior.
Ten months after the Rhode Island disappointment, he found himself in command of fully one third of the Continental Army. He was about to set off on one of the most extensive offensive operations of the war. The responsibility would rest entirely on him. Once he trekked into the wilderness, he would pass beyond the possibility of advice, reinforcement, or resupply.
Washington and his staff had grown increasingly skilled at intelligence and planning. They gathered facts about the terrain and the forces Sullivan might encounter. To keep the enemy off balance, American forces would approach Indian territory from three directions. Sullivan would lead the main force up the Wyoming Valley from the south. General James Clinton would bring a smaller corps from the Mohawk Valley down the Susquehanna to meet him. Another war party, under Colonel Daniel Brodhead, would venture from Pittsburgh and ascend the Allegheny River.
Washington needed to be sure that the British would not withdraw Canadian troops to counter Sullivan. He ordered Colonel Moses Hazen to begin building a military road through Vermont for an invasion of Canada. Even Hazen did not know that this effort was a stratagem—no invasion was planned. But the road had the intended effect, and British troops in Canada stayed put.
Sullivan’s expedition entailed plenty of risks. If he were to be ambushed deep in the wilderness, the whole of the frontier would become vulnerable and Washington could lose some of his best troops. By detaching such a large force, the commander was leaving his remaining troops vulnerable if British general Henry Clinton decided to seize the Hudson Highlands. Washington sweated over the preparations, then placed his faith in the luckless John Sullivan.
Sullivan studied the intelligence and the plans. The commander in chief had assigned him reliable Continental regiments under seasoned officers like Saratoga veterans Enoch Poor and Henry Dearborn. As the forces gathered, Washington gave Sullivan detailed instructions: travel light; move fast; do not listen to peace proposals from the Indians until you’ve destroyed their villages; if the opportunity arises, drive the British from Fort Niagara.
Weeks passed—Sullivan remained at his base in Easton, Pennsylvania. He was, Alexander Hamilton wrote, “in his usual pother.”14 Finally, his main force marched to the Wyoming Valley, the edge of Indian territory. Again they waited—for boats, supplies, arms, more men. Washington knew firsthand how baggage could slow a wilderness expedition and was impatient for Sullivan to get moving. Nathanael Greene thought that Sullivan was oversupplied. “I hope his success,” he noted, “will be equal to the preparation.”15
For another month, the force marked time at Wyoming. To pass the midsummer hours, Sullivan debated theology with his officers. A deist and even an atheist earlier his life, the general had become a believer “by fair and impartial reasoning.” He was inspired to write a lawyerly thirty-page treatise “to prove the existence of a Supreme Being.”16 Meanwhile, his troops consumed the provisions intended to sustain them in the wilderness and time slipped by.
* * *
While Sullivan prepared, British general Henry Clinton saw an opportunity. He sent troops sailing up the Hudson, where they captured two posts on opposite sides of the river. Stony Point and Verplank’s Point, barely a thousand yards apart, were the terminals of King’s Ferry, an important link between New England and the rest of the colonies. Loss of the ferry required a five-day detour to cross the river. The seizure deflated patriot morale and added to Washington’s anxiety.
With a large portion of his army committed to the Sullivan venture, the American commander worried that Clinton might be preparing for an attack on the key fortress at West Point, fifteen miles north of King’s Ferry. He was not about to let the move stand. To lead the counterattack, he turned to Anthony Wayne, a national hero for his performance at Monmouth Courthouse the year before.
A revamping of military command had created a conflict between two of Washington’s most aggressive natural warriors, Wayne and Daniel Morgan. Washington had decided to phase out Morgan’s original rifle corps and establish an elite light infantry brigade of sixteen rifle companies manned by veterans picked from across the army. Morgan wanted to lead this unit and was a natural for the position. But because of its size, it required a brigadier general and Morgan was still only a colonel. Given the politics of rank, a promotion was not possible.
Anthony Wayne, already a general, also wanted command of the new unit. Washington handed him the assignment. Morgan, who had fought superbly for four years, could not accept being passed over. The Old Wagoner resigned his commission and returned to his farm in Virginia.
After two weeks of intense drills, General Wayne declared his 1,400 men ready. His plan was to surprise the enemy with a night attack. On the afternoon of July 15, Wayne’s men began a march through the rugged Highlands, circling well west of the river. By eight o’clock, they gathered a little over a mile from their objective.
Stony Point was aptly named, a rocky prominence separated from the mainland by a tidal marsh, with access along a narrow causeway. The British had labored to make the position impervious to an attack. They had constructed two rows of abatis—stacks of felled trees, their sharpened branches pointing outward. They had also built three strongpoints armed with cannon. They felt safe.
To emphasize the audacity of his assault, Wayne forbade his men to load their muskets. They would attack with bayonets only, just as British general Grey’s troops had swarmed Wayne’s men at Paoli two years earlier. Wayne was serious—when a nervous infantryman stopped and insisted on loading his musket, his officer killed him with a sword thrust. The only exception was a detachment of North Carolina troops who would advance up the causeway, shooting noisily to draw the defenders’ attention.
Wayne himself led the main advance to the south of the peninsula, wading waist-deep through the marsh. In the early hours of July 16, the North Carolina troops fired their muskets. Wayne and his men were able to get arou
nd the end of the first abatis. They charged through the dark, and scrambled up the steep, rocky slope, taking the British by surprise.
American axemen slashed an opening through the second abatis. A musket ball struck Anthony Wayne in the forehead. He dropped down bleeding. Witnessing his fall, his men surged vehemently into the ranks of British. In less than half an hour, the patriots had overrun the enemy, and the British soldiers had called for quarter. Wayne recovered quickly from what proved to be a blow by a spent bullet. The attack on Stony Point had been a brilliant coup. The troops had fought, Wayne declared, “like men who are determined to be free.”17
The Americans had no hope of holding onto the position in the face of British naval power. They demolished the fort, removed the guns, and left. Two days later, George Washington appeared to shake hands with every man who had joined the assault and survived—one hundred Americans had fallen.
“Our streets . . . rang with nothing but the name of General Wayne,” a Philadelphian reported.18 Patriot morale soared. Officers praised Wayne’s operation as a military classic. The child in him exulted.
* * *
John Sullivan continued to delay. July came and went. The first week in August, he proceeded to the rendezvous point at Tioga, just below the border between New York and Pennsylvania. While he waited for James Clinton’s force to come down the Susquehanna, his own men marched a few miles up the Chemung River to an Indian village of thirty homes and turned it into a “glorious bonfire,” killing fifty of the enemy. A lieutenant went looking for dead Indians and “skinned two of them from their hips down for boot legs.”19
When Clinton arrived, the combined force of 3,600 men finally headed into the unknown. They took eleven large cannon and twenty-seven days’ provisions. Three days later, several hundred Indians and loyalists made a stand along Sullivan’s route. They erected log breastworks and enticed his men forward so that a group hidden on a hill could descend on the Americans’ flank. The ambush failed and the Indians fled. To lighten his load, Sullivan sent most of his artillery back. With his men, he plunged onward.
Most of the Americans viewed Indians as savage barbarians. They were blind to the complex culture of America’s native tribes, knew nothing of their deep spirituality, and gave them little credit for their innate honesty, generosity, and courage. They imagined that the Iroquois lived a primitive life within a primeval forest. What they saw as they invaded the Iroquois homeland startled them.
In the century and a half since making contact with Europeans, the material lives of Indians had changed dramatically. They had grown accustomed to a steady stream of manufactured goods—pots, muskets, cloth, and rum. Their homes, as the invaders soon found, were not traditional bark-covered long houses but “were larger than common, and built of square & round logs & frame work,” some with brick chimneys and glass windows.20 They were as fine as or finer than the homes of most whites.
And situated in finer lands. The territory beyond the mountains was blessed with wonderfully fertile loam. Iroquois women planted vast fields of corn, which in places grew sixteen feet high. They raised squash and beans and cultivated ancient orchards that yielded apples, plums, and peaches. The lush crops astounded the inhabitants of the rocky, hardscrabble hills of New England.
Sullivan’s men first admired, then destroyed. All of it—the houses, the fields of grain, the stands of fruit trees—they hacked down and set aflame. The Indians, acutely aware of the invaders’ progress but unable to match their strength, kept melting into the forests.
Through the Finger Lakes and ever westward, the expedition carried out its mission. Sullivan was wary of ambush, but none came. By early September, he arrived at his final objective, the town known as Genesee Castle on the opposite side of the Genesee River south of present-day Rochester. After destroying the town, Sullivan turned back. The lateness of the season that resulted from his long delay, along with his personal lack of initiative, kept him from ever coming near the British stronghold at Fort Niagara.
By the end of September, all his men had returned to their base at Tioga. They had leveled forty villages and destroyed 160,000 bushels of corn. Only three dozen soldiers had been killed in the operation. To the west, Colonel Brodhead had managed to destroy Seneca settlements along the Allegheny, also with few losses.
Had the expedition been a success? On the surface, yes. “I flatter myself that the orders with which I was entrusted are fully executed,” Sullivan boasted.21 Deprived of food and shelter, the Iroquois were forced to congregate along the Niagara River by the hundreds, hoping for British handouts. Many died during the ensuing bitter winter.
But Sullivan, with a third of the Continental Army at his disposal, had managed to capture almost no prisoners. He brought back no hostages who could be held pending the cessation of Indian raids. The hostile Iroquois were now even more dependent on British gifts and trade goods, but they were not vanquished by the destruction of their property. “We do not look upon ourselves as defeated,” a sachem proclaimed, “for we have never fought.”22 New war parties ventured east as early as February 1780. Raids continued for two more years, as Indians and loyalists inflicted the same destruction on the homes, barns, and mills of patriots that Sullivan had visited on the Iroquois towns. An American officer put it succinctly: “The nests are destroyed, but the birds are still on the wing.”23
Sullivan’s expedition loomed over the future. His men spread the word about a new and tantalizing territory in western New York. Some of them settled there after the war, pushing the dispirited Iroquois west. The tenor of the campaign—the wanton destruction of civilian homes, the girdling of peach trees—presaged the increasingly toxic relations between Native Americans and European settlers that would dominate the next century and beyond.
The expedition did not nullify Iroquois power—the Indians would not be broken until their British allies sold them out in the peace treaty four years later. But for Sullivan, the campaign of 1779 was the end. He had carped and complained and criticized too often. Congress dismissed him from the service.
* * *
Americans would remember the winter of 1779–80 as the coldest they had ever experienced. Indian refugees suffered at Niagara—patriots shivered in New Jersey. Snow fell every few days and winds whipped drifts twelve feet high. American soldiers, undersupplied as always, huddled in log cabins outside Morristown. “Poor fellows, my heart bleeds for them,” an American officer noted, “while I Damn my country as void of gratitude.”24 By comparison, the Valley Forge winter had been balmy.
On Christmas Day 1779, General Henry Clinton and his staff boarded a warship in New York Harbor. A large portion of his redcoats were already crowded onto transports. They sailed out and disappeared across the gray, snow-flecked ocean. Even the captains of the ships did not know their destination until they opened sealed orders on the high seas.
For George Washington and the patriots, the worst year of the war was about to begin.
Fifteen
The Fate of Battle
1780
In the early months of 1780, George Washington found out where British general Henry Clinton was headed. Charleston, the South’s major port and the nation’s fourth-largest city, was suddenly in peril. Still camped north of New York City, his Excellency could do nothing to counter the threat. He had few troops to spare. He had to depend on his commander in the South, General Benjamin Lincoln.
According to the quasiscientific humoral theory widely accepted in the eighteenth century, Lincoln’s personality was of the phlegmatic type: affable and steadfast, but potentially slow and diffident. Contemporaries described the forty-seven-year-old Lincoln as “judicious,” “very gracious,” and “exceedingly popular” with his militiamen. Friends referred to his “composure and self-possession.”1
The “uncommonly broad” Lincoln dressed plainly. “His speech was with apparent difficulty
” due to an impediment.2 All his life he suffered from the condition we now know as narcolepsy, which left him liable to drop off to sleep “in the midst of conversation, at table, and when driving himself in a chaise.”3
A phlegmatic type might make a good farmer, which was Lincoln’s profession before the war, but he was perhaps too easy-going to be a stellar general. He certainly did not lack the will. The very day that violence broke out at Lexington, Lincoln marched his corps of volunteers the fifteen miles to Cambridge from his home in Hingham, Massachusetts. A year later, the state made him a general of militia. He commanded troops at White Plains during Washington’s 1776 retreat from New York.
During the controversial promotions of February 1777, Congress vaulted Lincoln over generals like Benedict Arnold and John Stark, raising him to major general in the Continental Army in spite of his limited experience. Sent north to help stop Burgoyne, he cooperated with the resentful Stark during the maneuvering before the Battle of Bennington. Afterward, he commanded the fortifications at Saratoga. He saw no action there except during a patrol, when he was shot in the ankle.
On recovering from his wound in the autumn of 1778, he took command in the South just as the British shifted their attention in that direction. Washington warned that the region suffered from “internal weakness, disaffection, the want of energy.” South Carolina authorities were stingy with supplies and tried to dictate Lincoln’s every move. He hoped he would not be driven to “altercating with the civil power.”4 Altercation was not Lincoln’s style.