by Ron Carter
There was no time to protest. Gates pointed. “To your commands, gentlemen.”
In the first gray of dawn, the Americans in the front lines strained to see how the British were dispersed, and slowly they understood how Cornwallis had deployed his army.
The British left was led by Lord Rawdon, an experienced, excellent fighter, who had command of part of Tarleton’s infantry, Irish volunteers, and North Carolina volunteers. To Rawdon’s right were twelve hundred regular redcoats, seasoned, tough, ready, under command of Lieutenant Colonel James Webster. Behind in reserve rode Banastre Tarleton with the balance of his crack force of cavalry.
Positioned as they were, on the Charlotte Road, the flanks of both armies were confined by swamps; there would be no room for either side to circle for an attack from the rear. The battle would be fought head-on, face-to-face.
Dawn came hot and muggy with a haze in the air. Standing tall in his stirrups, Colonel Williams shaded his eyes and strained to see the British, and suddenly their red coats were there in the trees, marching in a column. Williams wheeled his horse about and kicked it to a gallop to haul it to a skidding stop twenty yards from Captain Anthony Singleton of the artillery.
He pointed. “They’re coming! Open on them at once!”
He reined his prancing mare about and drove his spurs home to race back to Gates’s command post to report. Chest heaving from his run, he exclaimed, “The enemy are deploying on the right, sir. There’s a good chance for Stevens to attack before they’re formed.”
Gates nodded. “Sir, that’s right. Let it be done.”
It was the last order ever uttered by Horatio Gates as an American general.
Williams jerked his horse about one more time and galloped back to the front lines, searching for Stevens. He saw him with his Virginia militia and galloped in, waving, shouting frantically, “Attack! Move forward! Before they form! Move forward!”
Stevens saw and heard and instantly raised his sword high. “Attack! Attack!”
From a distance Williams watched in shock. The Virginia militia faltered! A few moved forward in twos and threes, slow, sluggish, reluctant. Williams turned his head to see the British regulars spread from the column into a full battle line and surge forward. Too late! Too late! They’ve formed!
Desperately, Williams kicked his horse forward, screaming to those around him, “Follow me, follow me!” in a frantic attempt to draw fire from the Virginians to himself. Less than fifty men sprinted after him, and he shouted, “Take to the trees! Give them an Indian charge!”
They never reached the trees. A hail of shot from the British Brown Bess muskets came whistling, and the redcoats surged forward at a trot. Williams and his volunteers faltered and then started back, breaking into a full, running retreat.
From the back of his horse Cornwallis saw the faltering Virginia militia and sensed the fatal weakness in the American front line. Without hesitation he called orders to Colonel Webster.
“A bayonet charge! Now!”
Webster lowered his sword and set his spurs and shouted to his Welsh Fusiliers and West Riding Regiment, “Show them the bayonet! Follow me!”
A resounding “Hurrah!” came from the throats of a thousand British regulars as they ran forward, then stopped. Half went to one knee with the remainder behind them, standing, and they leveled their muskets and on command, blasted a volley that echoed for miles. Then, through the cloud of white gun smoke they came charging like a scarlet tidal wave, bayonets gleaming in the morning sun.
Only a handful of the terrified Virginians fired their muskets. Most of them turned in a panic-driven rout, throwing down their muskets to run the faster. Stevens rode among them, slapping them on their backs with the flat of his sword, trying to stop them, turn them, bring them to a stand to fight. “We have bayonets, too!” he shouted. “Don’t you know what they’re for?”
The bayonets he spoke of had been issued to the Virginia militia for the first time the day before. Not one among them had the faintest notion of how to use one. They dodged Stevens and ran.
To the right of Stevens and his Virginians, Caswell’s North Carolina militia watched in shocked horror as the British tore into the scattering Virginians with their bayonets and gun butts. For ten seconds the Americans stared wide-eyed at the mayhem and then their hearts failed them. As though by a silent signal, two thousand five hundred of them threw down their muskets and turned and ran pell-mell in any direction that gave passage—toward the swamps, through the trees, and on every trail or road they could find back to the north. They collided with the Maryland Brigade held in reserve behind them, scattering them, sweeping them along in their mindless, desperate retreat.
Six hundred yards behind the front lines, General Horatio Gates watched the entire American left and center fold and collapse, and then they were coming at him like a blind horde, overrunning everything before them. He stood mesmerized, unable to form a coherent order, watching dumbly as his army disintegrated and was being ripped to shreds.
At the front lines, Billy saw the American lines scatter and disappear like fall leaves in a wind. Stunned, mind reeling, he realized that of all the Americans in the battle, he and his Massachusetts volunteers were part of the only command standing its ground, under the leadership of General de Kalb. Instantly he searched for the general, picked him out of the chaos, and shouted to his men, “Follow me!”
He led them to form around de Kalb and Mordecai Gist, both still mounted, rallying their men. The faithful came, six hundred of them, to form a phalanx around the two officers as they squared with the oncoming redcoats and ordered a bayonet charge. Billy lowered his musket and plunged forward into the redcoats, bayonet thrusting, driving the startled British back, leading his men after them. Behind him, to his left, Sergeant Turlock shouted his men on.
Three times the British rallied, and three times the courageous de Kalb, outnumbered two to one, led his men to turn them, drive them back. Gun smoke cut visibility to less than forty feet in the mad chaos of the brutal, bloody, face-to-face, hand-to-hand fight. From twenty feet Billy heard the sharp scream of a stricken horse and saw de Kalb’s dapple gray stumble and go down. De Kalb hit the ground rolling and came to his feet swinging his sword. A British saber laid open a six-inch gash in his head, and he shuddered and shook off the blood and fought on.
Behind them, General Gates backed up to a wagon to avoid the blind stampede of his disemboweled army as they thundered past him. He opened his mouth to shout the order to stop, but realized it was useless in the deafening roar of terrified men and muskets. He seized the reins of the horse he had tied within reach—a tall, deep-chested bay thoroughbred, reputed to be the fastest horse in the American army—and pulled himself up into the saddle. He took one last look at the tiny knot of men gathered around de Kalb, turned the animal to the north, and drove his spurs into its flanks. The horse hit stampede pace in three jumps, and Gates never looked back.
De Kalb, bleeding profusely from his head, stood shoulder to shoulder with his men, swinging his sabre as one possessed. Thirty feet to his right, Billy and Turlock had formed their men in a semicircle to protect de Kalb’s flanks, and were using their bayonets and muskets like clubs, swinging, slashing at the oncoming redcoats. A musketball slammed into De Kalb’s hip, and he grunted and went to one knee. Another broke his shoulder. Two punched into his chest. He struggled to his feet and fought on.
Cornwallis watched the stubborn, bloody battle from his horse and turned to shout his next order.
“Highlanders, attack!”
The Scots came screeching in their kilts, swinging their feared Claymores, knowing no fear. What was left of the six hundred Americans stiffened and once more they stopped the two thousand British regulars swarming around them. The British muskets blasted, and de Kalb shuddered and went to his knees, then toppled over. Billy saw him go down and started to his side when Cornwallis came charging on his horse, through his own men, scattering them, to dismount and kneel beside
de Kalb. For several moments he stared at the fallen general, aware that the unconscious warrior was perhaps the most courageous, valiant enemy he had ever faced. He removed his tricorn in respect, then turned his head to shout, “Get a litter! Bind his wounds!”
With the arrival of Cornwallis in the pandemonium of the battle and his attempt to save de Kalb, the British regulars slowed in their attack, and in those moments Billy did not hesitate. “Follow me!” he shouted, and drove north through the redcoats, with what was left of his men following. A few survivors of other companies fell in behind them as they ran for the woods. Billy held the pace until the sounds of battle were far behind, and then he stopped beside a small stream flowing south to Saunders Creek. Those with him dropped in the grass, chests heaving, sweat running, hair plastered to their foreheads. Billy remained standing, looking for officers, and there were none. He was in command.
From nowhere Turlock was beside him, flecks of blood spattered on his sweat-soaked shirt, beard dripping with sweat. “Well, sir,” he panted, “it’s time to give some orders.”
Billy looked at him for a moment. Never had he felt more strongly the surge of relief that arose at the sight and the sound of the steady little sergeant. “North?”
Turlock shrugged. “Sounds right.” He jerked a thumb to point over his shoulder. “Things is a little tight down there to the south.”
The sun had passed its zenith when General Horatio Gates pulled his sweated, lathered mount to a stop in Charlotte, sixty miles north of Camden. He grained the horse and rested through the night, arose before dawn, and continued his run to the north. He did not stop until he reached Hillsboro two days later, two hundred ten miles north of Camden. Never in the history of the Continental Army had a general run further or faster from the scene of his utter defeat.
It was weeks before Gates was to learn the cost of his cowardice. Thirty-three officers and one-third of his army dead or captured. The survivors scattered all over the south, never again to assemble under a single command. Every wagon, every cannon, all his stores, supplies, gunpowder—everything—destroyed or captured, leaving the despised Banastre Tarleton and his cavalry free to track down and kill the fugitive Americans, huddled in the woods and swamps.
Gates had been sent down by an adoring Congress to redeem the loss, by General Lincoln, of the American army at the battle of Charleston. Instead, he had succeeded in losing the second American army, smashed, devastated, gone forever. There was no organized American force surviving in the Southern Campaign; the British had the Southern states in the palm of their hand.
The third day following the rout, the heroic Major General Baron Jean de Kalb died of eleven wounds, both musketball and bayonet. To his everlasting credit, General Lord Cornwallis and his entire staff, with tricorns under their arms and heads bowed, assembled to give full military and Masonic honors at the funeral of the gallant general.
To the north, Billy led his small band of survivors deep into the forests and the swamps, away from roads and towns. He traveled in the dark hours and hid his men during the killing heat of the day. To stay alive, they roasted snake meat on spits and ate half-ripe peaches stolen from orchards and corn just coming into the full ear taken from fields.
Beneath the broiling noonday sun, sitting under a green canopy of palmetto trees with his back against a rotting log, sweat running to drip from his beard, Billy dealt once more with the burdens of command that rode him day and night.
Where are we? Which direction do we go? Where is an American camp? When will they send someone down from the north to find us? Who will they send?
For the first time a thought struck him, and he leaned back.
Will they send anyone at all? Or are we abandoned?
He pushed the thought from his mind. Abandoned or not, lost or not, he had to make his men believe he knew where he was going, and why, and he would do it. Without a map or a compass, without food or medicines, he would do it.
He closed his eyes to sweat out the day and get ready for the night march through the muck and stink, the snakes and alligators and insects, and the uncharted swamps and thick forests.
Notes
The “sickly season” in South Carolina was August through November, in which diseases incident to heat and humidity brought on more deaths among the population than any other season (Edgar, South Carolina: A History, p. 157).
The battle of Camden is set forth herein correctly, with the Americans moving south from Rugeley’s Mill, and the British coming north from near Camden, to meet by accident just north of Saunders Creek. General Gates arranged his American forces with the left of the line entirely manned by inexperienced militia who fled at the first British attack. The American front collapsed, and almost instantly the entire American army was thrown into a chaotic retreat. General de Kalb fought bravely with his men, and did in fact sustain eleven wounds of which he died three days later. British General Cornwallis paid de Kalb the highest honors. Cowardly General Horatio Gates mounted the fastest horse in the American army and fled, leaving his men far behind, thus losing his entire army with all supplies and munitions. He stopped about 210 miles to the north, in the town of Hillsboro. On the motion of John Mathews of South Carolina, and Whitmill Hill of North Carolina, Congress voted to strip Gates of command of the Southern Department. He was never given another command (Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, pp. 359–60; Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783, p. 343; Leckie, George Washington’s War, pp. 528–38; and see map of battle, 534; Lumpkin, From Savannah to Yorktown, pp. 57–67, with illustrations therein).
General Gates considered Colonel Francis Marion and his band of fighters to be “burlesque,” a laughable concoction of ill-trained rabble. Gates was glad to send them on assignments that got them out of his presence (Edgar, South Carolina, A History, p. 235; Rankin, Francis Marion: The Swamp Fox, p. 58).
British Command Headquarters, New York City
Late August 1780
CHAPTER XXIII
* * *
The stilted British General Sir Henry Clinton peered once more at the map of the Hudson River spread on the huge desk in his New York command headquarters. He tapped a thick index finger on Manhattan Island that divides the river, then slowly traced the river north, up to the slow bend where the river angles to the west. Silently he mouthed the names of the detail and towns and forts as his finger passed them. Fort Lee, Fort Washington, Kingsbridge, Philipsburg, Tappan, Tarrytown, Haverstraw, Stony Point, King’s Ferry, Fort Clinton, Peekskill, Fort Montgomery, the Highlands, Fort West Point. He stopped at Fishkill, ninety miles above New York City, then moved his finger back and tapped the small, five-sided drawing of Fort West Point on the west side of the broad river.
“That’s the place,” he said quietly. “That’s where they’ll establish their supply depot.” He leaned forward on his elbows, chin resting on his folded hands, as he settled his thoughts. He glanced at the large French doors leading out to the terraced estate behind the mansion, then rose to clasp his hands behind his back and begin to pace. He stopped to draw back the lace curtains and peer upward at the dull, slate-gray clouds that hung dead over the city. He glanced at the clock on the carved mahogany fireplace mantel—nine-forty a.m.—and murmured, “Storm before noon.”
He returned to his chair and leaned back, working with his thoughts. For fifty minutes he concentrated, retaining the critical and discarding the trivia, slowly forcing experience, logic, and reason to form a conclusion. He reached for quill and paper to make notes, then once again reflected for several minutes before he called, “Aide!”
The door to the opulently furnished office opened at once, and a sparsely built, aging captain entered and came to rigid attention.
“Yes, sir.”
“Bring the Adjutant General at once.”
“Yes, sir.”
The door closed and Clinton carefully went over his notes while waiting for Major John André to arrive. Upon the departure of Major General Willi
am Howe, Clinton had been given command of British forces in America. It had not taken the ambitious, capable, quick-witted, ingratiating André very long to impress the dour, defensive Clinton that André was exactly what was needed to bring fresh young talent to his staff. In April of 1779, Clinton placed André in charge of the critically sensitive post of Director of British Intelligence, and like a meteor André rose to become Clinton’s indispensable favorite. On October 23, 1779, Clinton signed a commission elevating André to the rank of major, and changed his assignment. André became the de facto Adjutant General of British forces on the North American Continent. Seldom, if ever, had a young officer achieved such rank and status in so short a time.
A rap at the door brought Clinton’s head up. “Enter.”
André, sparkling in his spotless uniform, stepped into the room, amiable, pleasant. “You wish to see me, sir?”
“Yes. Be seated.” Clinton reached for his notes while André took an upholstered chair across from the commander’s desk.
“Reports indicate General Washington is gathering munitions and supplies for a major assault on New York.” He leaned forward to tap the map. “He is sensible enough to know that the principal rebel depot must be made at Fort West Point. It is the only location large enough to receive such a quantity of supplies and secure enough to defend them.”
He settled back in his chair. “We know that General Rochambeau and his French infantry at Rhode Island are preparing to support such an assault by General Washington. Combined, their forces could be formidable.”
André’s mind was leaping ahead, accurately calculating where Clinton was taking the conference.
“I have concluded that now is the time to take Fort West Point.”
André’s head nodded deeply, but he remained silent, attentive.