Prelude to Glory, Vol. 6
Page 1
© 2002 Ron Carter.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Deseret Book Company, P.O. Box 30178, Salt Lake City Utah 30178. This work is not an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of the Church or of Deseret Book. Deseret Book is a registered trademark of Deseret Book Company.
All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carter, Ron, 1932– The world turned upside down / Ron Carter. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1-57008-841-1 (alk. paper) 1. United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.A7833 W67 2002 813'.54—dc21 2002005286
Printed in the United States of America 18961-30016 R. R. Donnelley and Sons, Crawfordsville, IN
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
This series is dedicated to the common people of long ago who paid the price
To the French, including but not limited to King Louis XVI, Lieutenant-General Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur Rochambeau, and Admiral François-Joseph-Paul, Comte de Grasse, who made their promise, and delivered. Only with their help were the American forces able to defeat the British at Yorktown, end the Revolutionary War, and secure independence and liberty
Table of Contents
The World Turned Upside Down
Preface
Chronology of Important Events Related to This Volume
Part One
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
Part Two
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
The World Turned Upside Down
They came marching sullen from Yorktown to the open field of surrender—the British in their crimson tunics, the Germans in their blue—angry, some weeping. By the rank, they laid down their weapons; some broke their muskets while others smashed their cartridge boxes. Drummer boys set their drums in October grass and kicked in the drumheads. None could accept the harsh truth that the ragtag American rebels had somehow beaten them.
They turned away from the growing stacks of surrendered arms to march back, tears streaming, while their marching band repeated the strains of a familiar, old English folk song, “The World Turned Upside Down.”
If ponies rode men, and if grass ate the cows,
And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse,
If summer were spring, and the other way ’round,
Then all the world would be turned upside down.
Preface
* * *
Following the Prelude To Glory series will be substantially easier if the reader understands the author’s approach.
The Revolutionary War was not fought in one location. It was fought on many fronts, with critical events occurring simultaneously in each of them. It quickly became obvious that moving back and forth from one event which was occurring at the same moment as another, would be too confusing. Thus, the decision was made to follow each major event through to its conclusion, as seen through the eyes of selected characters, and then go back and pick up the thread of other great events that were happening at the same time in other places, as seen through the eyes of characters caught up in those events.
Volume 1, Our Sacred Honor, follows the fictional family of John Phelps Dunson from the beginning of hostilities in April 1775, through to the sea battle off the coast of England in which the American ship Bon Homme Richard defeats the British ship Serapis, with Matthew Dunson navigating for John Paul Jones. In volume 2, The Times That Try Men’s Souls, Billy Weems, Matthew’s dearest friend, survives the terrible defeats suffered by the Americans around New York and the disastrous American retreat to the wintry banks of the Delaware River. Volume 3, To Decide Our Destiny, leads us across the frozen Delaware River on Christmas night, 1776, with Billy Weems and his friend Eli Stroud, to take the town of Trenton, then Princeton. Volume 4, The Hand of Providence, addresses the tremendous, inspiring events of the campaign for possession of the Lake Champlain–Hudson River corridor, wherein British General John Burgoyne, with an army of eight thousand, is defeated by the Americans in one of the most profoundly moving stories in the history of America, at a place on the Hudson River called Saratoga. Volume 5, A Cold, Bleak Hill, leads us through two heartbreaking defeats in the summer of 1777, one at Brandywine Creek, the other at Germantown, and then into the legendary story of the terrible winter at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
Volume 6 now brings us through the realization by the British King and Parliament that they have underestimated the strength of the Americans in the northern colonies. Upon the resignation of the commander in America, General William Howe, they order General Sir Henry Clinton to take command and move the war effort to the South. The French and Spanish join forces with the United States, and the entire course of the war changes.
Away from the battles, we find General Benedict Arnold and his wife, Peggy, entering into their treason with British Major John André, resulting in the arrest and death of John André, while Benedict Arnold escapes to become a British officer.
In this volume, the British conquer Savannah, Georgia, then Charleston, South Carolina, and General Cornwallis, given command of the British forces in the South by General Clinton, begins his march north. Crucial battles are fought at Camden, then King’s Mountain, and at Guilford Courthouse, with General Nathanael Greene commanding the American forces in a delay-hit-run-delay tactic that slowly exhausts the British forces. General Cornwallis moves his beleaguered army to Yorktown, Virginia, protected by the guns of the British navy while he refits his men. But when the French navy engages them and drives the British ships away, General Cornwallis is landlocked, and General Washington makes his historic march from New York to Yorktown. With French soldiers assisting, the Americans place the British under siege, and ultimately General Cornwallis must surrender his entire command.
The war is over. It remains only to quell a few British who will not accept defeat, before moving on to the signing of the peace treaty.
Volume 7 will move the reader through the tumultuous days in which all that had been gained threatens to slip away between 1781 and 1787. Then, desperate leaders realize they must either institute a new form of government, or accept the fact that their precious liberty is to disappear in wars between the thirteen states. They convene in Independence Hall in the summer of 1787 and behind locked doors go through the world-changing battle of putting together a government that will guarantee the liberty for which so many had paid such a high price.
Chronology of Important Events Related to This Volume
* * *
1778
February 6–M
ay 4. France recognizes the independence of the United States and enters into the Treaty of Commerce and Alliance.
February 17–November 27. Lord North’s Conciliatory Acts and the Earl of Carlisle’s Peace Commission fail to gain support from the Americans.
March 7–May 8. General Sir Henry Clinton relieves General William Howe as commander in chief of British forces in America.
June 17. France formally declares war on Britain.
December 29. American General Benjamin Lincoln surrenders his entire army to British General Sir Henry Clinton at Savannah, Georgia, and the British establish a base in the deep South.
1779
May 10. Benedict Arnold begins treasonous negotiations with John André; Arnold’s wife, Peggy, is his accomplice.
June 27. Spain declares war on England.
1780
December 23, 1779–January 26, 1780. Benedict Arnold’s court-martial results in conviction on two of four counts of wrongful abuse of his authority as military governor of Philadelphia. He continues his treasonous negotiations with the British.
February 11–May 12. British General Sir Henry Clinton defeats American General Benjamin Lincoln and occupies Charleston, South Carolina.
March 23. French Admiral François-Joseph-Paul, Comte de Grasse sails from France with a fleet to assist the Americans, arriving in Martinique in the West Indies in late May.
April 28. French General Lafayette returns from France with promises from King Louis XVI to assist America with soldiers, warships, and money.
May 23–31. French Lieutenant-General Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur Rochambeau arrives at Rhode Island to establish his permanent camp with 5,500 French infantry to assist the Americans.
July 10–September 26. Benedict Arnold completes his plan for delivery of Fort West Point to the British through Major John André.
August 16. American General Horatio Gates, the reputed hero of the pivotal battle of Saratoga, engages British General Charles Cornwallis near Camden, South Carolina, and is defeated; he loses his entire army and flees 210 miles to Hillsboro, North Carolina, a coward.
October 2. British Major John André, having been captured in the act of completing the treason with Benedict Arnold, is hanged.
October 10. Americans engage British troops at King’s Mountain, South Carolina, and defeat them decisively. The battle signals the end of the power of the British in the South.
1781
January 17. American General Dan Morgan engages British Colonel Banastre Tarleton at Cowpens, South Carolina, and, through a brilliant military stratagem, soundly defeats the infamous Tarleton, destroying nearly his entire regiment.
March 1. The Articles of Confederation are ratified.
March 15. Americans under command of General Nathanael Greene engage British soldiers at Guilford Courthouse, where the Americans are defeated; however, the British losses are high, and the British are seriously crippled in their southern campaign.
September 5–8. French ships sent by King Louis XVI under command of Admiral de Grasse to aid the Americans, engage and defeat the British fleet in Chesapeake Bay. With the loss of the British navy for support, General Cornwallis, with his entire army at Yorktown, is landlocked and subject to attack by the Americans under General Washington and French General Rochambeau.
September 28–October 19. General Sir Charles Cornwallis is placed under siege by American and French forces, who pound him with cannon for weeks. October 19, 1781, Cornwallis surrenders his entire army to save his soldiers. The surrender essentially concludes the fighting in the Revolutionary War.
Part One
Boston
Mid-May 1778
CHAPTER I
* * *
For Margaret Dunson, the safe, proper, predictable world of the Boston Town that she had known for twenty-five years was gone in one day—vanished forever the night Tom Sievers brought her husband home from the battle at Concord, April eighteenth, 1775, with a heavy .75-caliber British musketball lodged in his right lung. John died the following day, in his bed, with his children gathered around, standing white-faced, beyond terror, groping to understand that their father, the anchor of their home and their lives, was gone.
Within days, her eldest son, Matthew, tall, dark-haired and dark-eyed, intense, a highly skilled navigator, received a desperate letter. Less than a week later he was traveling north to join Brigadier General Benedict Arnold in a frantic, do-or-die attempt to stop twenty-five British gunboats from coming south down Lake Champlain to take General Washington’s beleaguered Continentals from the rear. The fifteen tiny American ships, built in just ninety days, stopped the British warships in their tracks, and Matthew was reassigned to a commercial schooner converted to an American gunboat to fight the British off the Atlantic coast. Letters from him arrived seldom, and where he was and whether alive or dead, Margaret did not know, and constant concern tore at her heart.
Caleb, just fourteen when he stood in the bedroom to watch his father die, embittered, consumed by rage, swore revenge against the British. At age sixteen, in the dark of night, he slipped away from home to take up a musket in the American cause. No letter, no word of him had arrived since he stole out the door and disappeared. The ache was with Margaret every minute of every day.
Life does not wait for the grieving.
Graying hair held back by a bandanna, Margaret stood at the kitchen cupboard, dicing mutton for supper on a cutting board. She called without turning, “Adam, fetch potatoes and carrots from the root cellar. Prissy, you peel and cut. Brigitte’ll be home soon and you have to help with supper.”
Adam, eleven years old and on the cusp of growth from boy to man, plucked a wooden bowl from the cupboard and walked out the back door into the fenced yard with its fruit trees, flower beds, and the great weeping willow, in the far corner, girdled by a bench. He lifted the outer door to the root cellar and descended into the gloom. He was close to the magic time when his face would lengthen and his arms and legs would become like sticks as they stretched to build the frame that would flesh out by the time he was eighteen. His neck seemed hardly able to support his lately huge Adam’s apple, and his voice had cracked for the first time last Sunday during the closing hymn of the morning services. He picked out four withered potatoes with sprouts growing from every eye, and six wrinkled carrots, all from last year’s garden.
Back in the kitchen, he set the bowl on the cupboard, and Prissy, his twin sister, picked up the first of the potatoes, knocked the sprouts off, washed them, and began the slow labor of peeling. At age eleven, Priscilla was all knees and elbows and large front teeth, just beginning the change from child to woman. Quiet and retiring, it was clear she would be attractive, but different than Brigitte, who at twenty had not yet learned to govern her own impetuous spirit.
They all started at the sound of the front door bursting open and the rapid click of Brigitte’s heels on the hardwood floor as she came trotting through the parlor, arm extended, a document in her hand.
Margaret jerked ramrod straight, holding her breath. Matthew or Caleb? Dead or alive? The blood drained from her face.
Brigitte thrust the worn envelope to her. “Matthew! A letter from Matthew!”
For a moment all the air went out of Margaret and she closed her eyes. With trembling fingers she reached for the letter and worked with the seal while the children stood in tense silence. She forced her hands to quit shaking as she read the familiar handwriting.
“February 24th, 1778.
Coast of Scotland.
My Dear Mother and Family:
I first state that I am uninjured and well.”
Margaret’s head rolled back, and she slumped into a chair at the parlor table while relief came surging.
“He’s alive—alive,” she murmured.
The children sat down at the table, silent, waiting, as she raised the paper and continued reading to them.
“I have enjoyed good health and good fortune since my last letter. I h
ave had good food, and eaten regularly. You are not to concern yourselves about me.”
Adam said quietly, “The letter’s two months old.”
Brigitte turned to him. “It had to cross the ocean.”
“Where’s Scotland?”
“A long way across the Atlantic.”
Margaret continued reading.
“I remain navigator with Captain John Paul Jones, aboard the Ranger. At times I also act as his First Officer. Captain Jones is a strict but brilliant officer and has done much for the United States. A short time ago we raided the harbor of Whitehaven, a seaport on the west coast of England, north of Liverpool. We succeeded in setting fire to at least three of their ships at anchor in the bay. We also sent a party ashore in Scotland and engaged a company of British soldiers, who soon fled in panic. We engaged British warships on the coast of Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and England, and have inflicted considerable damage. We have also sent landing parties ashore at three other locations and were successful in spreading confusion and fright among the military and citizenry. We later learned the British Parliament intends to dispatch a British squadron of warships to capture us, at such time as they are certain that France and Spain do not intend invading the English mainland. Have no fear. I am confident we can not be caught by any British ship, or ships.”
Adam broke in. “Did he say about the battle? The cannon?” In his mind he was seeing the tall ships side by side, obscured by white gun smoke as they blasted broadsides that riddled hulls and masts and shredded sails.