by Sarah Vowell
The subtle hills that framed Andrew Wyeth’s compositions were also pretty handy for concealing terrifying quantities of redcoats on the move.
After a dizzying morning of driving up and down the area’s winding roads in search of battle landmarks, I play hooky for a bit to duck into the Brandywine River Museum, housed in a converted nineteenth-century gristmill along the east bank of the creek near the spot where Henry Knox’s artillery corps was lobbing cannonballs at Knyphausen.
I can’t pass up the chance to get a glimpse of the museum’s collection of paintings by Wyeth as well as those of his father, son, and neighbors. Unaware of just how overwhelmed I have been by the crannies of this landscape, I hear myself exhale next to a painting by Andrew’s father, N. C. Wyeth, of Sacagawea giving Lewis and Clark directions. She’s standing on a ridge before a big Western landscape like the one I grew up in near the headwaters of the Missouri. I am suddenly smote with homesickness, partly because I miss Montana, but mostly because I pine for the clarity of altitude. Sacagawea looks like she can see for fifty miles in any direction, whereas the undulations and abundant tree clumps of the Brandywine Valley offer the outsider no such perspective.
Never getting the lay of the land around here was one of Washington’s biggest problems. And not just Washington’s—at one point a brigade of British grenadiers got lost in some woods and turned up in an entirely different location from where they had been ordered; luckily for them, there were plenty of rebel scum to shoot at where they ended up.
Washington received contradictory reports about Howe’s intentions and whereabouts all day long. Every time the general heard rumors of redcoats moving north—including sightings of the sort of visible-from-space dust clouds thousands of boots were bound to kick up—he either waved off the reports or assumed they were the result of fake-outs masterminded by Howe to lure unsuspecting patriots into ambushes. Having spent the previous six months second-guessing Howe’s plans, including much of the summer wondering where the hell the fleet was, Washington was suspicious of his opponent—just not suspicious enough. In keeping his guard up about Howe’s sneakiness, Washington underestimated the scope of Howe’s sneakiness.
That afternoon General Sullivan sent a message to the Ring house alerting Washington that Britain’s main army had crossed the Brandywine’s northern fords and turned south in a kind of buttonhook of doom. Sullivan fretted that British brigades were about to descend on his men.
This turn of events would have been worrisome for anyone, but for Sullivan and Washington the situation no doubt inspired a particularly humiliating feeling of déjà vu. They surely flashed back to the Battle of Long Island, when British and Hessian troops took Sullivan’s troops by surprise because Washington had left a crucial pass into Brooklyn undefended.
Lafayette, who had celebrated his twentieth birthday five days earlier, had been hanging around headquarters all day. He begged Washington to let him go lend a hand to Sullivan. A flummoxed Washington failed to weigh the consequences of tossing such a precious symbol of France into a Pennsylvania meat grinder. So he gave the boy permission. Lafayette galloped off toward Sullivan along with his aides Gimat and La Colombe. Lafayette’s concerns about finally taking his first crack at combat basically boiled down to Danger! Yippee!
Outfoxed, the Continental Army was cornered between Cornwallis and Howe’s nearly eight-thousand-man force at the rear and Knyphausen’s five thousand men at the front coming for them across the creek. Recalled one of the latter, “The water took us up to our breasts and was much stained with blood.”
A series of cramped firefights that Sullivan described as “muzzle to muzzle” and grubby fits of man-to-man combat erupted up and down the eastern banks and across the surrounding hills and fields. A British captain who had been marching with Cornwallis since four that morning witnessed “the balls ploughing up the ground. The trees cracking over one’s head. The branches riven by the artillery. The leaves falling as in autumn by the grapeshot.”
At five o’clock, Washington fired off an update to the president of the Congress, reporting, “At half after four O’Clock, the Enemy attacked Genl Sullivan at the Ford next above this and the Action has been very violent ever since. It still continues.” He noted, “A very severe Cannonade has began here too,” meaning near Chadds Ford, adding, “I suppose we shall have a very hot Evening.”
Jacob Ritter was the son of German immigrants who volunteered for one of the Pennsylvania militias after a stirring patriotic sermon by his Lutheran minister. He later recalled of Brandywine, “Towards evening . . . our battalion was ordered to march forward to the charge. Our way was over the dead and dying, and I saw many bodies crushed to pieces beneath the wagons, and we were bespattered with blood.”
Ritter was so appalled by the day’s patriotic gore that he had an epiphany: “It was contrary to the Divine Will for a christian to fight.” Therefore he refused to take a shot at “my fellow-creatures.” Later, he joined the Society of Friends, becoming a minister. It says something about the ugliness of September 11, 1777, that this boy woke up a Lutheran and went to bed a Quaker.
Lafayette, a descendant of Christian warriors stretching back to the Crusades, cheerfully belly flopped into the bloodbath. When he caught up to Sullivan, he noticed that the general “had barely enough time to form a line in front of a thin wood,” when suddenly “Lord Cornwallis’s troops advanced in perfect order across the field, his first line firing cannons and muskets.” Even though the rebels returned “a murderous barrage of musketfire,” Sullivan’s right and left flanks got spooked and started running away, allowing the redcoats to “concentrate all their fire on the center of our line.” Oh, if only that was the last time in America that the extreme left and extreme right broke down and made a mess of things, leaving everyone in the center to suffer.
While Washington’s Fabian strategy allowed for considered, tactical retreats to keep the army together, random rattled fleeing was not what he had in mind. “The confusion,” Lafayette recalled, “became extreme.” Frantically struggling to put the toothpaste back into the tube, he rode back and forth to block the runaways, shaking his sword. At one point he jumped off his horse to clutch at the limbs of evacuees to literally hold them in place. And he succeeded, sort of, for a bit. “Whilst endeavoring to rally them,” he later wrote to his wife, “the English honoured me with a musket ball, which slightly wounded me in the leg.” What with the noise and chaos, Lafayette couldn’t be bothered to slow down. Eventually, his aide Gimat spotted blood leaking from his left boot and helped him back onto a horse.
It started getting dark. With patriot losses at more than two hundred killed, five hundred wounded, four hundred captured, and a few precious cannons left behind during the day’s withdrawals, Washington pulled the Fabian plug so his leftovers could live to lose another day. Having shrewdly held back in reserve a couple of divisions commanded by General Greene, Washington called them into service to provide cover for the army’s relatively dignified retreat to the town of Chester, about thirteen miles to the east. An aide to Howe conceded that Greene and his men “fought very bravely.” Months later the Fighting Quaker would brag, “I think both [Washington] and the public were as much indebted to me for saving the army from ruin as they ever have been to any one officer in the course of the war.”
At midnight, Washington sent the president of Congress a message from Chester. “Sir,” he wrote, “I am sorry to inform you, that in this day’s engagement, we have been obliged to leave the enemy masters of the field.” After enumerating a few of the recent calamities, he nevertheless reported, “I am happy to find the troops in good spirits; and I hope another time we shall compensate for the losses now sustained.” He then added, “The Marquis La Fayette was wounded in the leg.”
At Chester, Lafayette got his leg patched up. One of the men helping Gimat and La Colombe take care of him was the nineteen-year-old captain of a regiment of Virginia r
egulars, James Monroe, the future president who would invite Lafayette back to America in 1824. Another future president showed up and made arrangements for Lafayette to be transported to Philadelphia to recuperate. As Lafayette recalled years later, Washington ordered his surgeon, “Take care of him as if he were my son.”
Howe would be criticized later for permitting Washington’s retreat and not finishing off the patriots then and there. But after the day’s four a.m. wake-up call and fourteen-mile hike, John André confided in his journal, “Night and the fatigue the soldiers had undergone prevented any pursuit.” While around ninety redcoats died, nearly five hundred were wounded. The Brits commandeered Birmingham Friends Meetinghouse to use as a makeshift hospital.
During the battle, patriot forces firing at team Cornwallis had hunkered down behind the rugged rock wall separating the meetinghouse from a burying ground where a mass grave would be dug to lay to rest some of the day’s American and British dead. Now called the Birmingham Lafayette Cemetery, its focal point is an ostentatious, eighteen-foot-high commemorative phallus engraved with a corny poem about “Lafayette, the brave.”
Unleashing a killing spree on Quaker property is a bit of a faux pas, a little like moseying into a Hindu temple with a wad of raw hamburger and plugging in a George Foreman grill. The Birmingham Friends’ response to the Lafayette shaft is a humble if passive-aggressive “peace garden” a few steps away, a small yard with a simple stone marker on the ground engraved with the words of conflicted hawk Dwight David Eisenhower. It reads, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”
A Quaker in a straw hat is standing next to that quote, so I say hello and we start shooting the breeze about Eisenhower. I mention that Ike also said, “All wars are stupid and they can be started stupidly.” I’m pretty sure the last time I made someone’s face light up like that was when I told my New Deal Democrat grandfather that I got a point taken off an elementary school test for failing to capitalize the word “Republican.”
Built in 1763, Birmingham Friends Meetinghouse is a stone building with the pitched roof and white shutters of a child’s drawing of what everyone but Quakers would call a church.
Inside, the Friends congregate in a quaint white room filled with rows of sturdy wooden pews. Quaker worship often takes place in silence, though anyone moved to say something is welcome to.
Maybe it’s because I’m a nonbeliever who used to work in radio, but the one Quaker meeting I had been to, at Arch Street Friends in Philadelphia, was like listening to a whole lot of room tone. I sat there for two hours and no one said a thing. Or rather I thought it had been two hours when in fact I lasted precisely fourteen minutes. Not because it was boring, but because it was the opposite of boring—tense, in fact. At one point I crossed my legs and the sound of denim on denim was so loud, my knees seemed to be plugged into some imaginary amp. Which did make me appreciate how growing up in this hushed Quaker atmosphere could make a person denounce war for purely acoustic reasons. If the noise of one antsy visitor squirming in her seat was that jarring, how evil must actual gunfire sound? In the meeting, I found myself wishing for something interesting to listen to that might also drown out the ambient sneezes, as well as something we could all look at to avoid the awkward eye contact. I left when I realized that sort of communal spiritual experience does exist. It’s called the movies.
When Nancy Webster, one of the members of Birmingham Friends, invites me to sit down in one of the pews to chat, I ask about the Quakers’ silent services. She describes them as “not so much the absence of talking as the presence of god.” Interesting. Hers is a more poetic, more profound description than what I call it: room tone. But a synonym for “room tone” is in fact “presence,” the sound of a room that audio engineers record for editing purposes. Every place on earth at any given moment has unique acoustics based on who and what is there. So actors, broadcasters, and musicians always have to stop and be still for a minute while a recording is made of what seems like emptiness but is actually the barely audible vibrations of life itself.
I am tempted to reveal to this perfect stranger I have known for less than two minutes that I will probably think of her and what she said about the presence of god every time I walk into a recording studio for the rest of my life. What I actually do is get on with the more prosaic business of broaching the subject of the “Fighting Quaker,” Rhode Island’s General Nathanael Greene.
Raised as a Friend, Greene was reprimanded as a youth by Quaker authorities for reading too many books about war. He said he was going to keep reading them. (Turns out I should have kept that anecdote in mind before stumbling into a den of Quakers and announcing my intention to write another war book.)
When Greene quit the faith, he really quit the faith, helping found a local militia, buying more war books from Henry Knox’s bookstore in Boston, and going on to become one of Washington’s most trusted generals in the Continental Army as well as a hero of the Battle of Brandywine.
“He left,” Webster quips of Greene. “He’s not our problem.”
She does want to talk about the hardships suffered by the local people. The armies passing through outnumbered the residents, and both sides ransacked regional farms. A week before the Battle of Brandywine, Washington issued general orders “to prevent our own army from plundering our own friends and fellow citizens,” asking, “Why did we assemble in arms? Was it not . . . to protect the property of our countrymen? And shall we to our eternal reproach, be the first to pillage and destroy?” It was a good point, but so was the complaint he sent to Congress a couple of months earlier. He griped, “With respect to Food, considering we are in such an extensive and abundant Country, no army was ever worse supplied than ours.” Looting ensued.
“This area gets stripped after the harvest,” Webster points out. “The army takes your animals, your wagons, what you harvested, even your seed. They just stripped everything. The British were here for five days after the battle, which gave them plenty of time to raid.”
On September 12, Thomas Paine was already labeling Howe “the chief of plunderers.”
Gideon Gilpin owned the house where Lafayette was supposedly quartered the night before the battle (though he was also said to have stayed with Washington in the Ring house instead). Gilpin went on to file a claim for the items the armies filched from his farm after the battle, including “10 milch cows, 1 yoke of oxen, 48 sheep, 28 swine, 12 tons of hay, 230 bushels of wheat, 50 pounds of bacon, 1 history book, 1 gun.”
As Webster and I talk, more and more of her comrades—mostly smiling, graying gentlemen wearing suspenders—keep filing in to sit in the pews and join the conversation. I tell them that I’m researching a book on Lafayette and that I’m planning to catch the Battle of Brandywine reenactment down the road. Turns out that’s why they all showed up today, to chat up war enthusiasts and make them feel bad. “It’s an opportunity,” Webster says, “to say that war is not the only solution.”
One of the other Friends introduces himself as Christopher Densmore, a curator at Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore, the nearby Quaker college. He says, “We understand our history as war.” It is pretty clear by the way he’s looking at me that by “we,” he means “you,” i.e., we non-Quaker Americans. The other Friends nod their heads in vexed agreement. Densmore laments, “If you go to the history section of the Barnes and Noble, it’s all war.”
First of all, let’s not forget about Cod. I checked, and the book subtitled A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World is in stock at the two nearby B&Ns in Exton and at the Concord Mall, and for good reason—it’s one of the better cod bios in print.
I do not think that there can ever be enough books about anything; and I say that knowing that some of them are going to be about Pilates. The more knowledge, the better seems like a s
olid rule of thumb, even though I have watched enough science fiction films to accept that humanity’s unchecked pursuit of learning will end with robots taking over the world.
While I have come to the Brandywine Valley to trace a soldier’s steps, I don’t think I see American history as war. I see it as a history of argument, a daily docket of estrangement and tiffs—big and grand like the Lincoln-Douglas debates, big and stupid like the impeachment of President Clinton, or small and civil like what is happening at this moment with these strangers in these pews.
When Densmore complains that all the books in the history section are devoted to war, I almost blurt out that if he finds that fact so repugnant, maybe he should get cracking on writing books about other things. But I don’t say anything, because every now and then I hear the voice of my nice church lady mother insisting that I mind my manners. For once, I actually regret holding my tongue. If I hadn’t, then perhaps Densmore would have told me about the book he wrote on the Seneca orator Red Jacket, along with countless scholarly articles with titles like “The Quaker Origin of the First Women’s Rights Convention.” Which I found out about when I looked him up later. From what I can tell, he’s one of the leading Quaker intellectuals of our time.
Densmore’s book on Red Jacket is itself an argument for more books. Saddled with the nickname “Cow Killer” by fellow Indians allied with the British during the Revolutionary War, Red Jacket supposedly boasted that the blood on his ax was that of an American patriot he had killed, when in fact it was cow’s blood. After that he was derided as a coward. Densmore writes, “The stories of Red Jacket’s cowardice came from Red Jacket’s political rivals . . . It is possible that they are overdrawn. Even allowing for bias, however, it seems clear that Red Jacket was no warrior. His later positions of leadership among the Seneca and the Six Nations reflect his political and oratorical skills, not his military merit.” This levelheaded accounting strikes me as rational and factual, but it also seems like a slightly Quaker point of view another author might not have. A Friend would see Red Jacket pretending to kill a human as superior to actually killing one, even though this folly, if it happened at all, defied the code of eighteenth-century manhood, native or otherwise.