Band of Giants_The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence

by Jack Kelly

  That night, the British commander tried another, more desperate tactic. He planned to embark his entire army and row them across the river to Gloucester. They would smash through the allied lines there and escape north through the Virginia countryside. Traveling without baggage, they could keep ahead of their pursuers and live to fight another day.

  With the number of vessels available, the crossing would take three trips. After the first wave landed, a sudden squall blew up on the river, threatening the open boats. By the time the waters calmed, the approach of daylight exposed the maneuver. Cornwallis ordered his men who had made it to the north shore to return. Tarleton put it succinctly: “Thus expired the last hope of the British army.”31

  * * *

  As the sun came up on October 17, the dreadful cannonade recommenced. “The whole peninsula trembles,” Thacher wrote, “under the incessant thunderings of our infernal machines.”32 A German on the receiving end noted, “Early at the break of day, the bombardment began again from the enemy side even more horribly than before; they fired from all the redoubts without stopping.”33

  At ten o’clock in the morning, a courageous drummer climbed onto the British parapet and beat a lonely tattoo. No one could hear him over the cannonade, but gunners in the American and French batteries saw him and ceased firing. A thrill of recognition ran through the allied ranks. The signal was “parley.” The guns fell silent.

  A minute later, an officer emerged, waving a white handkerchief. American soldiers blindfolded him and led him to Washington’s tent a mile behind the lines. He delivered a letter from Cornwallis suggesting a twenty-four-hour armistice during which terms for surrender could be worked out. Washington replied that Cornwallis must first deliver a written proposal. He gave him two hours to comply.

  The document that came back was unacceptable to Washington, but the American commander decreed that he would hold his fire and try to work out an agreement the following day. He was wary of a stall that would give Clinton time to relieve his subordinate. That night, “a solemn stillness prevailed,” a militia officer wrote. “The night was remarkably clear, and the sky decorated with ten thousand stars. Numberless meteors gleaming through the atmosphere afforded a pleasing resemblance to the bombs.”34

  Just as sublime celestial bodies had replaced the “fiery meteors” of the artillery, so at dawn music substituted for the crash of the big guns. First the plaintive wail of bagpipes from the British. Then the answering strains of the French band. Men who had labored for weeks to kill each other crowded the tops of both parapets to stare at their enemies for the first time.

  A pair of officers from each side worked all day and into the night to hammer out the details of the surrender. The British, Washington insisted, would receive no better terms than those they had afforded to Benjamin Lincoln following the siege of Charleston. They would not be allowed the honors of war, nor would the troops be permitted to return to England as requested. Cornwallis complained, but he had no choice.

  * * *

  Friday, October 19, dawned clear and cool, a glorious autumn day under a cobalt sky. The soldiers of the allied armies lined the road that led to a large open field, the Americans on the right, the French on the left. Washington, Rochambeau, and other high officers sat on horseback at the end of the mile-long gauntlet. Crowds of spectators congregated to view the event of a lifetime.

  The defeated enemy marched out, their colors cased, their drums beating carelessly with a “strain of melancholy.” Cornwallis skipped the ceremony, pleading illness. His second in command, General Charles O’Hara, trotted his mount toward Rochambeau to surrender his sword. A French officer told him, “You are mistaken. The commander in chief of our army is on the right.” He pointed toward Washington. The commander in chief would not accept the proffered symbol, but indicated General Lincoln beside him, who touched and returned the sword.

  The British officers, one observer noted, pouted, cried, and generally “behaved like boys who had been whipped at school.”35 Many were drunk. The hired Germans accepted their fate with iron dignity. The defeated troops, having stacked their muskets in a field ringed by armed dragoons, marched back to their camp and into captivity. Perhaps with a smile on his face, Washington penned his laconic message to Congress: “A Reduction of the British Army under the Command of Lord Cornwallis, is most happily effected.”36

  That night, as was the custom, Washington invited the top British officers to dine with him and his allies, making a conspicuous exception of Tarleton. Cornwallis preferred to sup with a French nobleman. At Washington’s table, the French officers were more gracious to their British enemies than to the Americans. The reason, it was explained, was that these men, all from the upper echelons of their respective societies, shared “good upbringing and courtesy.”37 They had no affinity with a farmer like Benjamin Lincoln, a tanner like Anthony Wayne, a bookseller like Henry Knox, or even a poorly educated one-time surveyor. But besides their breeding, the French and British officers shared another quality: all were subjects of a king. Washington and his officers, along with the people for whom they had fought, answered to no man who claimed a divine right to rule. They had won their liberty. They were free men.

  In any case, snubs meant little. Among the Americans, “every countenance beamed with satisfaction and joy” at the surrender. The officers and soldiers “could scarcely talk for laughing,” an American recorded, “and they could scarcely walk for jumping and dancing and singing as they went about.”38 When the news reached a band of Virginia militiamen, they shouted: “America is ours!”39

  “Your success in Virginia is brilliant, glorious, great and important,” Nathanael Greene wrote to Henry Knox, the friend with whom he had chatted about military theory at The Bunch of Grapes tavern back in 1774.40 Washington singled out the one-time Boston rowdy for praise, noting that, as always, “the resources of his genius supplied the deficit of means.”

  As soon as the surrender was signed, Knox sent his brother William galloping toward Mount Vernon, where Lucy was staying with Martha Washington. He was anxious, he wrote, “that I might be the first to communicate good news to the charmer of my soul.”41

  Nineteen

  Our Troops

  1782

  Like a man frantically climbing a ladder, who keeps reaching for rungs after he has arrived at the top, George Washington continued to prepare for war after Yorktown. He pleaded with Admiral de Grasse to accompany him with the fleet to Charleston, convinced that retaking the city would be the decisive stroke. He worried that the good news from Yorktown would lull the people and their representatives in Congress into a dangerous apathy. The days, months, and years of anxiety had worn him down. Too many defeats had weighed on him, too many betrayals and disappointments had wrung his soul. He could not believe the truth: that when silence fell over the field at Yorktown, the war was effectively over. America’s independence was won.

  For another year and more, Washington would wait nervously, afraid of the “haughty Pride” of the British, and “totally in the Dark” about enemy intentions.1 But the British had no intentions. They were fought out. They would not rebound from this surrender as they had from Burgoyne’s four years earlier. They would, finally, go home.

  In January 1782, Anthony Wayne took his Pennsylvania regiments to join Nathanael Greene in South Carolina. Greene sent his friend to keep watch on the British still occupying Savannah. Wayne’s men fought some skirmishes and defeated an uprising of Creek Indians. Wayne remained eager for accolades and glory, but now even he wrote to his wife, “I am satiated with this horrid trade of blood.”2

  Like Washington, Wayne was impatient with the “unworthy torpor & supineness” of those who considered the war as good as over. He agreed with an officer who wrote to him about “chimney corner soldiers,” who counseled the army to let down its guard while fifteen thousand redcoats occupied New York and ten th
ousand more did garrison duty in the South.

  But others could see the truth. “The play, sir, is over,” Lafayette wrote to the French foreign minister after Yorktown. “The fifth act has just been closed.”3 On hearing word of Cornwallis’s fate, Lord North, the British prime minister who had steered his majesty’s government through a tumultuous decade, exclaimed “Oh God, it is all over!” He took the news, it was said, “as he would have taken a ball in the breast.”4 King George huffed that “we can never continue to exist as a great or powerful nation after we have lost or renounced the sovereignty of America.”5 Yet in early 1782 British soldiers abandoned Wilmington, North Carolina. Peace negotiations began between the two governments in April. In July, the last occupiers left Savannah.

  At last the god of war appeared to be sated with blood, treasure, and destruction. The once delightful Virginia village of Yorktown, now an abject, stinking ruin, symbolized the conflict’s mad and wasteful frenzy. But someone always has to be the last to die.

  John Laurens, along with Hamilton and Lafayette, was one of the young luminaries of the revolution. The handsome, educated son of a prominent Charleston family had fought recklessly at Brandywine, had received wounds at Germantown and Monmouth, had been captured with the fall of Charleston, and, exchanged, had fought at Yorktown. He had found time to serve as an aide to Washington and an envoy to the French. His only fault, Washington said, was an “intrepidity bordering upon rashness.”

  At Yorktown, it was the gifted twenty-six-year-old Laurens who had negotiated the details of Cornwallis’s capitulation. He then returned to his home state to fight alongside Greene, harassing British patrols seeking food for the troops inside Charleston. Laurens, a fellow officer said, wanted “to gain a laurel for his brow previous to a cessation of arms.”6 In August 1782, he led his troops in an attack against an armed British forage party five times his numbers. He exposed himself unnecessarily and was shot dead. He left behind a widow and a young daughter.

  Barely four months later, on December 14, British troops sailed away from Charleston forever. General Greene gave Anthony Wayne the privilege of parading his Continental soldiers into the town. New York City remained the only bastion of British power in the thirteen colonies. Henry Clinton had gone home, handing over command there to Guy Carleton, whose spirited defense of Quebec in 1775 had saved Canada for Britain.

  * * *

  While the British wolf’s teeth had flashed nearby, the states had neglected to adequately support their men in the field. With the threat rapidly abating, they were even less inclined to open their coffers. During the two years that followed Yorktown, the army continued to suffer for want of basic necessities. General Greene begged Congress and the states for supplies. His men suffered from lack of clothing and food. Many still went barefoot.

  With peace now casting its warm light across the nation, many civilians became convinced that it was republican virtue that had won the war. The Continental Army soldier, a hireling who had submitted to military discipline, was not a model of a free man. “Civilians could portray themselves,” historian Charles Royster has observed, “as the rescuers of the army at Valley Forge rather than the main cause of the army’s hardship.” In 1782 a Virginia official noted that “some how there is a general disgust taken place for [Continental soldiers].”7

  Now the distinction between summer soldiers and actual soldiers faded. Sunshine patriots emerged from the shadows. “There are too many of our Citizens,” Anthony Wayne had noted in the spring of 1781, “that would not hesitate, to wipe off the large debt due to the army, with a Sponge.”8

  As early as 1777, Daniel Morgan, in his usual blunt language, had given his opinion “that the War should not end until the Soldiery were provided out the Estates made by it and of such as had too much Property to their Share.”9 The reluctance of the people and the states to honor their debt to the fighting men had reached a crisis with the mutinies of 1781, when soldiers had felt they were “starving in detail for an ungrateful people who did not care what became of us.”10

  The officers, as Washington knew, had also spent “the flower of their days” fighting for a cause that often seemed hopeless. Like their men they had seen little pay. They nursed similar grievances. During the desperate months of 1780, with American hopes hanging by a thread, Congress had voted to give the officers half pay for life, the standard pension in the British army. In early 1783, as peace negotiations moved toward conclusion, the army’s leaders realized that the time to make Congress live up to this promise would soon pass. They changed the demand to five years’ full pay. They insisted that Congress amend the Articles of Confederation to allow the money to be raised through taxes.

  Events came to a head in March 1783. By this time, Horatio Gates, still serving as second in command, was overseeing the bulk of the troops outside Newburgh in New York’s Hudson Valley. One of Gates’s aides passed among the officers two anonymous circulars. They suggested that if Congress failed to agree to the officers’ just demands, the men should pursue one of two alternatives. If the war continued, they should refuse to fight and should lead the army westward, leaving Congress and the major cities to the mercy of the British. If peace was concluded, they should keep the troops under arms and march to Philadelphia to obtain what they deserved by force.

  The issue became part of a vitriolic debate. Opponents felt the war had been fought to get rid of just such special privileges as pensions, which might perpetuate an idle class of ex-officers at the expense of the yeomanry. Those who favored the officers’ position saw that these men had sacrificed eight years of their lives while others had tended their farms or made money in trade. They deserved recompense. What was at stake this time was no sergeants’ mutiny but a full-blown military coup that could snuff out the infant republic. Conversely, any officer who even tolerated talk of mutiny could be court-martialed and hanged.

  The disgruntled officers called a meeting for March 15, 1783, in the spacious central meeting hall of the camp. Washington had been alerted to the gathering in advance. He remained the moral keel of the army. The soldiers, one officer told him, “universally think and speak of you with love, pleasure, gratitude and applause.”11 He carefully planned his strategy, enlisting the help of Henry Knox. Like Washington, Knox sympathized with the officers’ plight but abhorred their attempt to bully the civil authority.

  On the day set, the grumbling officers filed into the great room. Gates opened the meeting. At the appropriate moment, Washington strode in, “visibly agitated,” to address his officers. He appealed to their sense of dignity and self-sacrifice. Their behavior, he hoped, would allow posterity to say of them, “Had this day been wanting, the World had never seen the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining.”12

  Washington’s rhetoric did not appear to sway the angry men. But he was not done. He had received a letter, he told them, from a member of Congress. It appeared to indicate that the officers’ demands were likely to be met. He begged their permission to read it. He began, then fell silent. He pulled from his pocket a pair of spectacles that he had recently begun wearing. Only a few close aides had seen them perched on his nose. As he slipped them on, he asked the officers’ forgiveness, “observing at the same time,” a witness recorded, “that he had grown gray in their service and now felt himself going blind.”13

  It was a consummate performance by a skilled actor. Many of the men, who had lived through all the horrors of war, now wept. By the time Washington had finished reading and left the hall, the mood had changed completely. After a half hour of debate, Knox offered a proposal condemning the threats contained in the anonymous circulars that had touched off the affair and affirming the officers’ loyalty. It passed unanimously. The so-called “Newburgh Conspiracy” was over.

  The affair had served its purpose. Members of Congress were sufficiently spooked to comply with most of the officers’ demands. U
rged on by Washington, they issued interest-bearing certificates for the five years’ pay and amended the Articles to allow for a modest tax.

  * * *

  Less than a month later, on April 11, 1783, came news of the official end of hostilities with Britain. The Treaty of Paris, in which “His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States . . . to be free Sovereign and independent States,” was signed September 3. Envoys John Adams, John Jay, and Benjamin Franklin had wrung for America terms better than most had dared hope for.

  It was time for the troops to go home. Many felt the pangs of parting from friends with whom they had shared so much, whom they had come to love. “We were young men and had warm hearts,” one of them later remembered.14 They knew their lives would never again be illuminated by such a noble cause, nor would their minds crackle with such intensity.

  General von Steuben planned a final, triumphant ceremony to precede the soldiers’ dismissal. It was not to be. The troops, as part of the agreement that ended the Newburgh Conspiracy, had been promised three months’ wages, a down payment on the back pay owed them. Congress could not find the money. Not for three months’, not even for one month’s pay. Only IOUs, and those of scant value.

  There would be no parade. The high command judged it imprudent to dismiss the men as a body—they might join together and pillage the country. Instead, most regiments were marched to their home states, then released under the fiction of a furlough so as to keep them under military discipline.

  The men who had “suffered and bled without a murmur,” Washington wrote, were dismissed “without a settlement of their accounts or a farthing of money in their pockets.”15