Band of Giants_The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence Read online

  “They ran like a Torrent,” Gates later reported, “and bore all before them.”20 He decided to ride on ahead of the soldiers and rally them at the camp they’d left the night before. Even there, with the sound of the guns a distant rumble, the men would not cohere into a fighting force.

  Gates now knew that the worst had happened. Soon the British cavalry would come charging along the road to scoop up the fleeing rebels. If they could capture a general of Gates’s stature, the blow to the American cause might be fatal. He must pull together a new army. To do that, he must survive. To survive, he must put distance between himself and the scene of the cataclysm. Gates and a small group of aides took off. By nightfall they had covered the distance to Charlotte, sixty miles from the scene of the action. Cold military logic dictated Gates’s decision, but leaving a battlefield where his men were still hotly engaged would indelibly stain his reputation.

  After Gates fled, the fight continued. De Kalb actually believed he was winning. The smoke and disorder kept him from perceiving the collapse of the militia. His Maryland and Delaware men had rushed at the Tories opposite. They attacked “with great alacrity and uncommon bravery, making great havock” among the enemy.21 They took fifty prisoners. The reserve battalions stepped forward to try to cover the yawning gap on the left.

  But de Kalb’s six hundred could not stand against two thousand. His horse collapsed bleeding. A saber stroke opened his scalp. He fought on. The battle grew elemental: men looked each other in the eye, grappled, swung muskets as clubs. De Kalb mounted one last bayonet charge. He and his troops surged ahead, stepping over heaps of dead men. He fell, mortally wounded. “After that last effort of the continentals,” Tarleton reported, “rout and slaughter ensued in every quarter.”

  Defeated armies of the day often managed a more or less orderly retreat. Sometimes they surrendered. Only rarely was an armed force utterly obliterated. This was the fate of Gates’s grand army. By noon that hot day, 650 Americans had been killed or wounded, 300 captured. The rest had scattered to the winds.

  Having failed to designate a fallback position for his men, having established no base in Charlotte, Gates felt his only option was to continue all the way back to Hillsborough. He was desperate to start rebuilding a force that could keep the enemy from sweeping through that state and into Virginia. “I proceeded,” he wrote, “with all possible Dispatch.”22 He covered the two hundred miles in three days.

  Horatio Gates was no coward, but in the wake of Camden he was both reviled and ridiculed. “Was there ever an instance of a general running away, as Gates has done, from his whole army?” young Alexander Hamilton sneered.23 The unfortunate general was berated for his “military absurdity.” The loss of another entire army barely twelve weeks after the disaster at Charleston brought the hopes of patriots crashing down.

  In November, Gates learned that his beloved twenty-two-year-old son Robert, young Bob, his only child, had died of illness a month before. His aides had not dared add to his suffering by telling him earlier. He was devastated. “None but an unfortunate soldier, and a father left childless,” an officer wrote, “could assimilate his feelings.”24 In December, amid the weeping willows, a stricken Gates turned over the southern army to Nathanael Greene and headed home to his Virginia farm. All hope of glory was gone. He made no excuses, simply stated an eternal truth of war: “The fate of battle is uncontrollable.”25

  * * *

  Prospects had not looked so bleak for Washington since the dark days at the end of 1776. Now, well into 1780, he was struggling just to hold his meager army together. Even during the summer, his troops were forced to survive on short rations. Except for Anthony Wayne’s stroke at Stony Point, the commander in chief had no recent victories to boast off. He had not commanded troops in battle since Monmouth, two years earlier. The interim he had spent waiting, worrying, and frantically working to keep his army intact. His hope that the entry of France into the war would bring a quick resolution had faded. The grinding stalemate frustrated him beyond measure.

  The state of civilian society was even more depressing. An officer spoke of “the dreadful gloom which now overspreads the United States.”26 Continental currency was “fit for nothing But Bum Fodder.” A hat cost $400, a horse $20,000. Lacking buying power, the army was forced into outright confiscation of civilian property. But confiscation crippled the people’s morale. Unable to sell crops for cash, farmers had no incentive to produce a surplus.

  A taste for luxury on the part of many patriots had become a sickness. “Speculations, peculation, and an insatiable thirst for riches seem to have got the better of every other consideration and almost of every order of men,” Washington lamented. He called profiteers and hoarders “pests of society and the greatest enemies we have to the happiness of America.”27 In Philadelphia, leading citizens enjoyed expensive feasts while fighting men went hungry.

  Congress had exacerbated supply problems by unwisely turning the responsibility over to the states. Nathanael Greene protested that the representatives were simply multiplying problems. They responded by removing him as quartermaster general. Fortunately for the American cause, they did not dismiss him from the army altogether.

  The country, Greene said, was allowing “an Army employed for the defense of every thing that is dear and valuable, to perish for want of food.” Writing to Steuben, Washington lamented, “The prospect, my dear Baron, is gloomy and the storm thickens.”28

  One glimmer of hope. On July 15, 1780, a French fleet sailed into the harbor at Newport, Rhode Island, and disembarked 6,500 soldiers. With these professional troops under his command, Washington was determined finally to attack Clinton and regain New York. He would endeavor “by one great exertion to put an end to the war.”29

  Henry Knox suggested besieging the city. Lafayette favored a direct assault. The French commander, the Comte de Rochambeau, remained wary. A large British fleet had just arrived to protect New York. Washington’s small army and shaky finances appalled the Frenchman. “Do not trust these people,” the Comte wrote back to Versailles.

  Direct talks between the allies were essential. In mid-September 1780, Washington traveled with Knox, Lafayette, and a guard of twenty horsemen to the small village of Hartford, Connecticut, to meet Rochambeau. Washington was reluctant to leave his own army, partly for security reasons—he remembered Charles Lee’s capture in 1776—and partly because his presence kept the beleaguered force from succumbing to desertion and discouragement. But now he entrusted the troops to Nathanael Greene and rode off. Crossing the Hudson, he lunched with Benedict Arnold, who had for the past month commanded the Hudson Highlands and the army’s important fort at West Point.

  The American officers could not convince Rochambeau to cooperate in an attack on New York. The tough, mistrustful French soldier had more military experience than all of them combined. The meeting established some rapport between the two commanders, but it was clear that Rochambeau, nominally under Washington’s authority, was not to be commanded. The meeting left Washington discouraged. “I see nothing before us but accumulating distress.”30

  Ever wary, Washington led his entourage back by a roundabout route that brought him to Fishkill, a village and supply depot along the Hudson. The next day, he would ride south to dine with Arnold and his wife at their mansion on the east side of the river and to inspect the crucial fortifications at West Point.

  The group rose early on Monday, September 25, and trotted their mounts through a pristine late-summer morning. Stopping to look over some defensive positions along the way, Washington sent two aides ahead to let Arnold know they would be late for breakfast. He noted Lafayette’s impatience—his young colleagues were all in love with Mrs. Arnold, Washington joked. He was referring to Peggy Shippen, the lovely twenty-year-old daughter of a Philadelphia loyalist. Arnold, while commander there, had played Othello to her Desdemona, wooing the petite, clever blonde with his g
allantry and tales of military exploits. They had married against her father’s wishes, and she had recently borne him a son.

  On arrival, the group learned that General Arnold had already crossed to West Point. After breakfast, Washington and his aides were rowed across the river themselves to examine the complex of forts that protected the crucial narrows of the river. No salute or welcoming party greeted them, only a handful of surprised guards. Arnold was not there. Washington later noted that, “the impropriety of his conduct, when he knew I was to be there, struck me very forcibly.”31

  Washington’s puzzlement turned to alarm as he toured the site. Arnold had assured him that he was restoring West Point from its weakened state. Yet the undermanned fortifications were clearly vulnerable to attack.

  Disconcerted, Washington and the others went back across the river. If the British were to take the Highlands, cutting the link between New England and the southern colonies, it was unlikely the Revolution could survive. It would be the crowning disaster in a year of sinking fortunes.

  Arnold had not returned to his headquarters. Washington went upstairs to rest before dinner. His aide Alexander Hamilton brought him a packet of dispatches. One was a message from a Colonel Jameson, in charge of an outpost near the American lines to the south. A man calling himself Anderson, possibly a spy, had been taken there with suspicious documents hidden in his sock. Washington glanced through these papers. They contained detailed information about West Point and its defenses as well as minutes of a council of war that Washington had entrusted to the fort’s commander. The papers made clear that this “Anderson” was involved in a plot instigated by Benedict Arnold himself.

  He sent Hamilton to bring Lafayette to him.

  “Arnold has betrayed us!” a stunned George Washington told him. “Whom can we trust now?”32

  The very notion that the most accomplished general on the American side, the hero of Quebec, Valcour, and Saratoga, could turn traitor made the brain reel. Washington’s question hung in the air. If Arnold could go over to the enemy, which other wavering or disgruntled officers might follow?

  The commander in chief ordered Hamilton and another aide to chase after Arnold, who they learned had headed down the river by boat. In the surreal atmosphere, an even more bizarre scene was unfolding. Peggy Arnold had gone mad. One of Arnold’s aides had found her wandering the hallways, naked but for her morning gown, raving and hysterical. Washington went in to see her. He was not Washington, she said, but a demon come to murder her child. Arnold had gone, gone through the ceiling toward heaven.

  Learning that Arnold had received dispatches just before Washington’s initial arrival and had spoken with Peggy before hurrying away, the men were convinced that the sudden news of his treachery had driven his wife insane. The truth—that the delicate Mrs. Arnold had plotted with her husband from the beginning, had aided his treason, and was putting on a mad act to cover his escape—would not be accepted until much later.

  Still wary, Washington ordered the house sealed while he and his entourage ate dinner. “Gloom and distrust seemed to pervade every mind,” Lafayette wrote about that curious meal, “and I have never seen General Washington so affected by any circumstance.”33

  When Hamilton returned, he reported that Arnold had escaped to the British warship Vulture. Hamilton had advised Nathanael Greene to put the Continental Army under marching orders. Anthony Wayne’s brigade set out for West Point at once. Washington was afraid the British fleet might arrive at that vulnerable place at any moment. A hasty letter delivered from Arnold aboard the Vulture admitted that he was changing sides. Peggy calmed down. No fleet appeared. Washington knew that pure chance or “the interposition of providence” had prevented 1780 from ending in utter ruin.

  The story came out piecemeal. In June 1779, two months after his marriage, Arnold had sent “a tender of his services to Sir Henry Clinton.”34 He had asked Washington for the West Point command to further his treachery. After a year and a half of intrigue, the British commander had insisted on a face-to-face meeting with the turncoat. He sent his close aide and spy master, John André, up the river on the Vulture to meet with Arnold. André had come ashore to discuss the plan to turn over West Point and the money the American general was to receive in exchange.

  Arnold’s haggling prevented André from returning to the ship. Instead, he set out with a loyalist guide to cross the river and proceeded back through no-man’s-land on horseback, disguised and under an assumed name. Before reaching British territory near New York, he was accosted by a group of motley militiamen. André, equipped with a pass signed by Arnold, might have bluffed his way through and kept the plot alive. Instead, he lost his composure and said to the gunmen, “Gentlemen, I hope you belong to our party.”

  Both loyalist and patriot bands, irregular militiamen and bandits, roamed the area.

  “What party is that?” the wary man with the rifle asked.

  With the outcome of the war perhaps riding on his answer, André guessed, “The lower party,” meaning the British.

  “Get down,” the man said. “We are Americans.” He and his companions searched the stranger, found the papers, and refused a bribe to set André free. Their actions pulled the thread that caused the whole scheme to unravel. A panel of American officers tried André the following Friday and condemned him on Saturday. The elegant young man was hanged by his neck at noon on Monday.

  * * *

  What had prompted Arnold’s astounding reversal? During his three and a half years of service since leaving for Quebec, he had not once been paid. When the time came for a well-deserved promotion, he had been snubbed by Congress. The corruption that permeated the land both appalled and tempted him. He enjoyed the friendship of wealthy Philadelphia Tories. Having engaged in some shady business transactions, he had been hounded by the civil authorities in Pennsylvania, a “set of artful, unprincipled men,” he called them. A court-martial for some missteps had ended in a gentle reprimand from Washington, who deeply admired his enterprising subordinate. But the cause had turned septic for Arnold, and he was convinced it was as good as lost.

  “I daily discover so much baseness and ingratitude among mankind,” he wrote to his wife, “that I almost blush at being of the same species.”35

  That Arnold would be resentful was understandable. Many officers were frustrated by an inept Congress and a greedy populace. But Arnold had plotted to hand three thousand American soldiers over to death or imprisonment. He had casually betrayed the comrades who had followed him to Quebec and fought at his side. He had done it for money. No explanation or excuse could encompass such treachery.

  Some patriots saw Arnold’s perfidy as a symptom of the pervasive malaise. The love of money had replaced the love of country, had sapped the will of the friends of liberty. Arnold, “freedom’s champion,” had become “mammon’s sordid slave.”

  “Never since the fall of Lucifer has a fall equaled his,” Nathanael Greene said. Even loyalists were repelled by Arnold’s “horrid unnatural barbarity.”

  Arnold possessed the cold heart of a man of action. The quality had served him well through much of his life. Finally it led him astray. A British general who knew him commented, “Arnold does nothing by halves.”36 His words summed up the inner dynamic of the most heroic of battlefield generals and the most odious of traitors.

  * * *

  If that awful year needed a gloomy and dangerous cap, it came on January 1, 1781. Officers of Anthony Wayne’s Pennsylvania Line were celebrating at a meager New Year’s dinner in their camp in central New Jersey. They heard strange sounds and ran outside to find that their men had left their quarters, guns in hand. The soldiers refused orders to stand down. A skyrocket went up. The men “began to huzza.” When superiors imposed on them, they shot one officer dead, mortally wounded two, and beat others. They seized the unit’s artillery and fired the pieces as an alarm
. Wayne, who had been afraid to leave his sullen troops, as he usually did in winter, appeared on horseback. He could not calm them. “With inexpressible pain,” he reported to Washington that a “general mutiny and defection” had occurred. He alerted members of Congress to prepare to flee Philadelphia.37

  It was not the first mutiny in the Continental Army. The previous May, Connecticut soldiers had demonstrated against the intolerable neglect of enlisted men. Washington and some of the other officers sympathized. “The men have borne their distress with a firmness and patience never exceeded,” their commander had noted.38

  “Our soldiers are not devoid of reasoning faculties,” wrote Wayne. “They have served their country with fidelity for near five years, poorly clothed, badly fed and worse paid.”39 Slow recruitment and rapid inflation had compelled Congress and the states to offer bounties of $200, $300, even $1,000 to the new men who now stepped forward to join the army. The veterans, who had enlisted for the duration, resented the newcomers appearing in camp flush with cash.

  Now the Pennsylvania men had had enough. Fifteen hundred soldiers marched out of camp fully armed. They would, if necessary, proceed to Philadelphia and confront Congress. They observed the strictest military discipline on the march. They insisted they were not deserting. “We are not Arnolds.”40 They were only demanding what their country owed them.

  Apprised of the mutiny, something he had “long dreaded,” Washington worried that it could spread. He imagined that his troops would, like Arnold, join the enemy. Or they might ravage the land, taking what had not been provided for them. Or they might simply go home.

  The mutineers stopped at Princeton, New Jersey. Joseph Reed, now the president of Pennsylvania, rode out to negotiate with the sergeants. They reached an agreement that covered the payment of bonuses to those who reenlisted and the release of those who wanted no more soldiering. Many experienced fighters left the already undermanned army.