Sergeant Greenman and his company were lashed by the same storm. It was one of the worst he had ever seen. He noted, “Continued raining and blowing very hard indeed all day. We continued . . . drawing cartridges and fixing our guns for they was in very bad order by the storm blowing down almost all of our tents.” The British ships had been pounded just as severely as the French and most of them sailed away in the following days. Howe left only a few ships in case they were needed to protect the British troops on the island.
Two entire days had been lost in the sea battle, delaying the American assault. The Americans finally moved into position to attack on August 15, north of Newport. “Pitched our tents in sight of the enemy about a mile and a half from their lines. Turned out a large picket and a large body of fatigue men, ordered to lay on our arms,” Greenman wrote.
The Rhode Islanders, black and white, laid on their arms for quite awhile.
Over the next few days, the Americans sat as British pickets and some artillery fired at them. Greenman told his men that the enemy would attack at any hour. He did not realize that d’Estaing, his ships in dire need of repair, had decided to leave the waters of Rhode Island and sail to Boston. There would be no French gunships to cover the American attack and no French troops landing on the western part of the city as reinforcements. They did see ships on the horizon, but they were British. The news of the French fleet’s departure caused panic among the New England militia troops and many deserted.
“It ruined all our operations,” wrote Nathanael Greene to George Washington.5 Greene wrote to General William Heath that if the French navy had not deserted the Americans, “we might have succeeded with great ease.”6 “The French fleet is leaving us,” Greenman wrote tersely in his diary, feeling just as abandoned by the French as other Americans would say long after the war ended.
Sullivan’s army, stranded now, found that the British had far stronger defensive earthworks on Newport than his spies and scouts had reported. He spent August 25, 26, and 27 rallying his troops, but on August 28 decided that an attack would fail and began a general evacuation.
At 7 p.m., orders came to strike tents as quietly as possible and wait. That done, the integrated Rhode Island regiment moved out with others. Shortly after 9 p.m., under the cover of darkness, they began to march northward to the tip of the island. They did not fool the British. The men were fired upon as they departed by two British ships in the channel. Several companies of Hessians were seen following them toward a small fort on Butt’s Hill.
The Americans barely made it inside the fortification atop the hill when Pigot and his entire force appeared in front of them, spread out in a long line, on August 29. There was more to be feared. Out in the channel, Sergeant Greenman observed yet more British ships. Three days before, word had reached Newport that a second British fleet had left New York for Rhode Island with transports carrying several thousand men. He assumed the ships he saw were part of that fleet and that his army would soon be attacked by a British army of nearly ten thousand men.
Fortunately, he was wrong. The British fleet was still an entire day away from Newport on Long Island Sound. Their only enemy was right in front of them, and the enemy would not go away. General Pigot sensed victory and threw all of his British regulars at the middle of Sullivan’s army and ordered his well-trained Hessians to charge against the right wing, where the black First Rhode Island regiment was dug in. The Hessians waited until after a heavy bombardment from the British ships created havoc in the American lines as shells exploded all around the soldiers and smoke filled the air. Pigot then sent his Hessians against the black regiment’s side.
The Germans were surprised, though. Their assault was stopped cold and their lines shattered by the 125 black troops behind the earthworks. They met “a more stubborn resistance than expected” and had to pull back, suffering high casualties. The regulars attacked the center of the American line at the same time that the Hessian charge began, but they were repulsed too. Greenman had to be pleased as he looked to his right to see the troops in the black regiment that he had helped to train turn back the ferocious Hessian assault.
The German commander was not pleased, however, and after his men had been stopped, shot up, and turned back, he ordered them to attack yet again. He was confident that the black troops could not hold off his veteran soldiers any longer. His second attack failed, as did a third. The Hessians could not dislodge the black troops from their position on the right. After four solid hours of fighting, the Germans ended their charges. Pigot’s regulars fared no better, turned back again and again by Greenman’s Rhode Islanders and the main force commanded by Sullivan. The British attacks ended as night fell; the Americans moved a short distance to another hill.
The soldiers in the First Rhode Island felt both relief and pride at the end of the day. “Balls, like hail, were flying all around me. The man standing next to me was shot by my side,” said a Doctor Harris, reportedly one of the troops in the black regiment, whose brother was killed in the Revolution. “They attacked us with great fury, but were repulsed. They reinforced and attacked us again, with more vigor and determination, and were again repulsed. Again they reinforced, and attacked us the third time, with the most desperate courage and resolution, but a third time were repulsed. The contest was fearful. Our position was hotly disputed and hotly maintained.”7
The commanders at Butt’s Hill marveled at the courage of the white troops and especially the bravery of the black soldiers. The British encountered “chiefly wild looking men in their shirt sleeves, and among them many Negroes,” wrote one. Lafayette called the stand at Butt’s Hill “the best fought action of the war.” General Sullivan heaped praise upon his black troops and cited the entire regiment for honors in his report on the battle to George Washington. Nathanael Greene, who watched the black regiment up close, agreed. Discussing the men under him, including the blacks, he wrote to Washington, “We soon put the enemy to rout and I had the pleasure to see them run in worse disorder than they did at Monmouth.” He added that the troops fought with “great spirit” and “great honor” and “stood the fire of the enemy with great firmness.”8 A Rhode Island historian wrote later that “it was in repelling these furious onsets that the newly raised black regiment, under Col. Greene, distinguished itself by deeds of desperate valor.”9
The Hessians, who suffered the most that day, agreed. “No regiment is to be seen in which there are not Negroes in abundance; among them are strong able bodied and brave fellows,” wrote one.10
The following day, August 30, the Americans evacuated, departing across the channel on small craft. They had suffered 211 casualties in the battle versus 260 for the British. There would have been far more if Sullivan had been trapped on the island or waited to evacuate; the British fleet arrived the following day with five thousand troops.11
Americans everywhere were relieved. “I never in general saw people more anxious than my acquaintances under the present suspense,” wrote Henry Laurens about the pullback.12 There was a sense of loss by some, such as congressional delegate James Smith, who wrote forlornly that perhaps a victory at Newport “would have put an end to the war.” The country’s top propagandists, such as Richard Henry Lee, dismissed naysayers like Smith and told one and all that the Americans at Newport had actually won the battle and had given the British “a drubbing.”13
The First Rhode Island, mobilized in February of 1778, fought on until the victory at Yorktown in the fall of 1781, participating in numerous engagements, providing one of the longest service records in the Continental Army. It was led by Colonel Greene throughout the war until he was killed in a British ambush in the spring of 1781.
The states honored their promise to give freedom to all of the five thousand slaves who served as soldiers and sailors during the Revolution, as well as land that had been guaranteed to some. The victory in the Revolution did not bring about the end of slavery in America, as the black soldiers had hoped. No one freed their slaves to
celebrate victory at Yorktown or the signing of the peace accords in 1783. The new Constitution, approved in 1789, did not eradicate slavery either. In fact, the booming cotton market meant an even greater increase in slavery in the southern states in the years following the war.
Life was often harsh for blacks in the North as well as the South after the Revolution. Black veterans awarded their freedom for military service had an even harder time finding work than whites. In 1796 one, Pomp Peters, unable to make ends meet, sold the one hundred acres of land the United States had given him as his bounty to fight for his country for just $20 in order to pay his bills.14 Another, George Knox of New Hampshire, faced such financial woes that in 1784 he and his wife gave up their freedom and became indentured servants for five years in order to be given food and shelter and to collect a promised $100 worth of land or cattle at the end of the term.
Black private Michael Sudrick, who enlisted and reenlisted five different times and fought until the very end of hostilities in 1783, spent the rest of his life in such terrible financial shape that he was constantly sued for nonpayment of bills.15 Another army veteran, Prince Light, who fought at Saratoga, had such financial trouble in the years following the war that when he died in 1821 his recorded estate was worth just $2.20.16 Some, such as Joseph Mun of Connecticut, felt betrayed. His owner, and the Connecticut legislature, agreed to free him if he served the full threeyear term in the army. Mun suffered a broken arm in a battle and had to be discharged short of his three years. The Connecticut courts ruled that he had to go back into slavery because he had not served his full term.17
An ironic footnote to part the black soldiers played in the Revolution, and the smashing of their dream of universal freedom at its end, was the story of the three grown sons of Jude Hall. Black freedmen James, Aaron, and William Hall, of New Hampshire, were all mistaken for runaway slaves or deliberately kidnapped by groups of slave catchers traveling through New England in the early nineteenth century, taken South, and sold into bondage. Their father, Jude Hall, had fought for eight years in the Revolution, longer, in fact, than George Washington, certain that the war would bring an end to slavery in America.18
That would not come for another eighty years and yet another war.
Chapter Twenty-Six
JOHN GREENWOOD, PRIVATEER
Two years after he left the army in January 1777, following the crossing of the Delaware and the victory at Trenton, private John Greenwood felt “uneasy” and wanted to fight in the Revolution again. He had spent three months of 1778 with the Boston Light Infantry when they were assigned the duty of guarding some of the British soldiers captured at the battle of Saratoga. There, he worked once more as a fifer, not as an infantryman. Now, in the winter of 1779, Greenwood turned his back on the army and decided to go to sea to do what he could to win the war. It was a natural choice. Young Greenwood, who had just turned nineteen, had spent most of the previous two years working in Cape Cod fisheries in Falmouth, Massachusetts. He had been on boats constantly and befriended many seaman, some of whom had sailed on the American privateers that preyed on British shipping in the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.
Privateering was a lucrative industry. Congress had no navy when the war began. By the summer of 1775, Rhode Islanders had transformed two ships into warships by adding some guns and Congress had ordered the refitting of several more, but that was a meager fleet.1 America needed a substantial sea force to combat Great Britain’s hundreds of ships and their flotillas of merchant ships carrying millions of dollars worth of supplies to and from America and ports in the West Indies. British privateers also preyed on American merchant ships. The English vessels were equipped with “avarice and enmity,” congressional delegate Richard Henry Lee charged, and America needed the privateers to “clear our coast” of the British villains.2 Building new ships was incredibly expensive and time consuming, so in order create an “instant navy” Congress authorized private shippers that did not already carry cannon for protection to refit their vessels with them to prey on English boats. The refurbishing was completed in American harbors such as Boston, Marblehead, and Newburyport in Massachusetts, New London, Connecticut, or in Caribbean ports.
The owners of every type of ship—brigs, schooners, sloops—refitted their vessels for high seas combat. Most of the sailors on these ships, guaranteed a portion of any booty, signed on when the ship became a privateer.3 The captains of these ships were given “letters of marque” that acknowledged that they fought for America but were entitled to the goods they captured. Some called it a patriotic license to steal.
The heavily armed merchant-turned-privateer vessels were necessary because neutral nations, such as Holland, were willing to trade with America. That meant American ships could sail to a Caribbean island, such as Dutch-held St. Eustatius and there trade their cargoes of tobacco and corn for gunpowder brought to the tiny island by Dutch captains. The gunpowder was essential to the American Revolution. But the laws of neutrality also permitted any belligerent nation (the British) to sink or capture any ship carrying arms for their enemy.4
Privateering became popular because there were so many cargoladen ships that could be taken on the high seas in a region that stretched from Halifax, Canada, all the way to the coast of Brazil; others sailed off the coasts of Ireland, Scotland, and England itself, using French ports as their home. About seventeen hundred American privateers put to sea, six hundred from Massachusetts alone, from 1776 until 1783. As many as 449 sailed at any one time. The privateers ranged in size from one to five hundred tons and carried between four and twenty cannon. Crew sizes averaged about one hundred men, half with muskets for armed engagements, but some ships carried as many as three hundred. The ships carried more than ten thousand seamen with them over the seven years of the war, captured or sank six hundred British vessels (American ships sunk or captured twice as many vessels as the British and five times the value in cargo) and seized goods worth between $18 million and $66 million, according to different records.5
Life on board the privateers could be very lucrative for the ordinary seamen. The ship’s owner received the largest share of the prize booty and the U.S. government received a small cut, but the captain and officers received shares and each seaman was awarded a share. A seaman’s percentage of the booty from a single voyage of a few months, if the prize ships taken were loaded with expensive goods, could provide him with an income for a year or more. The opportunity to make fast money attracted so many investors that merchants sold off shares of their ships. Some ships were owned by a dozen shareholders, but one merchant sold off 196 shares to eager subscribers.6
Newspaper advertising for sailors to serve on privateers emphasized the windfall profits to be earned on the rolling waves of the Atlantic. A Connecticut newspaper ad said that ship owners were looking for “all gentlemen volunteers who are desirous of making their fortunes in eight weeks,” and a Boston Gazette ad sought out “all those jolly fellows who love their country and want to make their fortune at one stroke.”7 Patriotic privateers also had the satisfaction of sinking or disabling one of Her Majesty’s ships or seizing supplies on their way to the British army, bringing the end of the war that much closer.
This combination of patriotism and profit made privateering quite attractive. One British officer held as a prisoner of war in Boston wrote that “Boston harbor swarms with privateers and their prizes.” America had gone privateering mad, crazed with the profit and wealth that privateering promised.
And the British knew it. The London Chronicle reported in 1777 that American privateers terrorized Scottish officials. “Our seas so full of American privateers that nothing can be trusted upon this defenseless coast,” one said.8 A British writer commented in 1778 that commercial British ship owners now had to employ a fleet of small combat ships just to protect their large, cargo-heavy merchant ships from attacks by Americans, adding “The coasts of Great Britain and Ireland were insulted by the American privateers in a manner whic
h our hardiest enemies had never ventured in our most arduous contentions with foreigners.” British and Scottish parents were so fearful of the American naval commander John Paul Jones that they told their children to stay away from the beaches for fear his crew would kidnap them.9
It was not just the safety of shipping near Great Britain that the Crown worried about, either. The privateers seemed to be everywhere in the Caribbean, too. The governor of British-held Jamaica reported “a constant track of American schooners” in his waters.10 And especially in the Caribbean, small fleets of American privateers set out to capture specific large British ships, often successfully. “A great number [of privateers] in these seas fitted out on purpose to take the Greyhound,” wrote Captain Henry Byrne of one large ship to the British Admiralty just before Christmas, 1776.11 The American raids became so successful that in one single week in Caribbean waters American ships captured fourteen British vessels.12
The ships were extraordinarily successful at harassing British merchant ships. John Adams wrote that the captains and sailors all deserved the fame that they had received. He noted, “Some of the most skillful, determined, persevering, and successful engagements that have ever happened upon the seas have been performed by American privateers.”13
Some American officials opposed the sanctioning of privateers because their owners could use their booty to pay sailors an average of five times what the Continental Navy could offer on its few ships. The privateers, some said, also took on board thousands of men who might have fought for the always recruit-desperate army. American general Charles Lee even suggested that no privateers should be allowed to sail until all army regiments were filled with men.14 The money made many congressional delegates also wonder about the sailors’ true patriotism. William Whipple wrote that the income earned on the privateers would bring about “the destruction of the morals of the people.” He said that sailors would “soon lose every idea of right and wrong.” 15
The First American Army Page 32