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

  It was not a major battle. Again British casualties outpaced those of the Americans. Yet the loss cast Greene into a funk. “I am much afraid these States must fall,” he wrote.27 He again worried that his reputation was at risk. He cast blame on his subordinates. He remained downhearted until, three weeks later, word arrived that Rawdon had abandoned Camden and pulled his battered force back to Charleston. The American general breathed new confidence.

  Writing to a French envoy following the engagement, Greene stated, “We fight get beat rise and fight again.”28 The succinct description summed up not only Greene’s strategy in the southern campaign, but the American experience throughout the war. What had been true at Bunker Hill was true at Hobkirk’s Hill. Determination and perseverance were the Americans’ most important resources. Get beat. Rise. Fight again.

  * * *

  As spring progressed into summer, Greene reduced the British outposts one by one. Lee’s Legion worked with Francis Marion’s and Thomas Sumter’s partisans to capture isolated forts. The success gave patriots in the state hope. Greene’s movements were “critical and dangerous,” he recognized, “and our troops exposed to every hardship. But as I share it with them I hope they will bear up under it.”29 To a North Carolina officer, he commented, “Don’t be surprised if my movements don’t correspond with your Ideas of military propriety. War is an intricate business.”30 Once an avid student of warfare, the general was now a master writing his own rules.

  Nathanael Greene was appalled by the viciousness that continued to flare between patriots and their loyalist neighbors. The two sides pursued each other like “beasts of prey.” To Caty he wrote, “My dear you can have no Idea of the horrors of the Southern war.”31 He issued proclamations urging restraint. “We have a great reason to hate them,” he admitted, but winning loyalists away from the British cause should be done by “gentle means only.”32

  With the arrival of high summer, marching in suffocating heat appealed to neither side. In June, Greene took his men to the High Hills of the Santee, a twenty-four-mile-long plateau north of Charleston and south of Camden where they could rest away from the malarial miasma of the lowlands. During the next six weeks, he rebuilt his depleted force while Lee, Marion, and Sumter continued to harass the enemy. Marion waged a classic guerrilla war, hitting his opponents and dissolving into the swamps, never camping in the same place twice.

  By the end of August, having gathered two thousand men, Greene was ready to come down from the hills. British colonel Alexander Stewart had taken over from Rawdon, who had worn himself out and fallen ill chasing after Greene. Stewart came out from Charleston with a force equal to Greene’s. The American caught up with him at the hamlet of Eutaw Springs, about fifty miles from Charleston. A battle was inevitable.

  * * *

  When Nathanael Greene had first arrived in the South, barely nine months earlier, the enemy had been ascendant. The British had captured a major city and an entire American army at Charleston and had destroyed another army at Camden. They controlled all the territory south of Virginia. Loyalists were optimistic and under arms.

  During week after week of maneuvers, battles, raids, and sieges, the audacious, careful, asthmatic American general had achieved something wonderful. The British now held only Charleston and Savannah. Greene had strangled the substantial garrison forces piecemeal. Patriots could hold up their heads. The South was in American hands.

  Greene had outthought Cornwallis, the keenest of the enemy generals. He had applied patience, determination, and common sense to a situation of baffling complexity. “Without an army, without Means, without anything,” wrote his old friend Henry Knox, “he has performed wonders.”33

  Greene was not a Morgan, an Arnold, or a Wayne, who might have attempted a brilliant, risky stroke and ended the campaign earlier. He was instead an officer who understood the overriding importance of movement, logistics, and survival. He was a Washington.

  Just past nine o’clock on the morning of September 8, 1781, under an incandescent sun, the two armies arrayed for battle outside the British camp at Eutaw Springs, South Carolina. Greene again put his militia, including Francis Marion’s Carolina partisans, in the first line. He held back his Continentals. The men gulped down their hearts as the concussion of artillery shook the ground. The air shivered with the painful rattle of musketry. The British attacked. The stalwart militiamen fired. The blasts came like waves breaking on a stormy coast. Some men got off seventeen shots. The redcoats pressed, the militia faltered. The Continentals pushed back, the British buckled. Stewart brought up his reserves. The Americans retreated in disorder. The redcoats charged. Greene sent more Continentals forward. A British volley crippled Lee’s cavalry. William Washington’s horsemen tried to break into the rear and were cut down. Washington was wounded and captured. The fighting in the center became sheer muscle. Officers clashed “hand to hand and sword to sword.” Men slashed with bloody blades. They screamed in their enemies’ faces and killed each other with simultaneous bayonet thrusts. The heat grew suffocating. Lips turned black with thirst. Cannon blasts pounded men’s skulls. The British line disintegrated. The American light infantry “rushed furiously” ahead. They crashed into the British grenadiers. Bodies lurched out of control, yanked by puppet strings of bellowed orders. The enemy tumbled backward “in utter confusion.” Only one British regiment fought stubbornly on. The Americans grabbed two enemy guns, took three hundred prisoners. At last, a decisive victory loomed. Greene ordered up his own cannon to secure the field. In their camp, the British still held a fortified brick house. Artillery could not dislodge them. Greene’s militia, even some of his Continentals, paused. The sun blistered them to madness. The men broke open barrels of British rum. They drank. They celebrated. Too soon. Stewart rallied his men. His cavalry came drumming back. The counterattack swept the confused patriots from the camp. The British captured the American guns. Greene ordered a retreat. Again a retreat.

  Yet the British held the field only briefly. Badly mauled, they slogged back to Charleston, leaving their wounded for the Americans to succor. The toll for the four-hour battle was agonizing: hundreds dead, hundreds stretched in pain, men mangled, lacerated, prostrated, tormented. It was a “most Obstinate fight,” Greene wrote, “by far the hottest action I ever saw.”34

  The battle was technically a British victory, practically a draw. Yet as one British officer observed about Greene, “the more he is beaten, the farther he advances in the end.” Greene could not be blamed for calling the fight a “complete victory.”35 He had wiped away more than a third of Stewart’s fighting force. He had ruined all British hopes in the South.

  It was one of the most violent, bloody, heartbreaking fights of the entire conflict. More than that, Eutaw Springs was the last pitched battle of the Revolutionary War.

  Eighteen

  America Is Ours

  1781

  During the spring of 1781, while Greene was maneuvering in the Carolinas, the Marquis de Lafayette, twenty-two years old, was on his way to Virginia with 1,200 Continental troops. His quarry was Benedict Arnold, who had compounded his betrayal by assuming the rank of brigadier general with the British. Although terrified of being captured and hanged, Arnold had raised a force of loyalists and taken them to Virginia to raid on a large scale. Washington, hurt and enraged by Arnold’s disloyalty, had directed a French fleet to cut him off from resupply by sea. He sent Lafayette to bag him.

  It didn’t work. The fleet was repulsed off Chesapeake Bay by a stronger British armada. British commander Henry Clinton dispatched General William Phillips and an elite force of two thousand redcoats from New York to reinforce Arnold. The combined force was perfuming the Virginia landscape with the smoke of burning tobacco warehouses, destroying one of the colonies’ most important sources of hard currency. More crucially, they were capturing and wrecking supplies and armaments intended for Greene’s beleaguered
force in the Carolinas.

  Lafayette’s army was weak. Anthony Wayne was still trying to equip a portion of the Pennsylvania Line to join him, but he had yet to come south. Lafayette had purchased hats and boots from his own purse for his ragged and restless troops. Yet desertions continued to erode his force. Lafayette ordered one captured deserter hanged, pardoned another, and told his troops that anyone who wanted to leave would have one chance, and one chance only, to do so. Thus challenged, the men stayed. “From that hour, all desertions ceased.”1

  Steuben had been able to recruit only a few hundred new Continentals to add to Lafayette’s force. Virginia militia had not turned out in sufficient numbers, and Governor Thomas Jefferson had done little to help protect the Old Dominion. Lafayette arrived in Richmond at the end of April and saved the city from further destruction, but he could do little to counter the British raiders rampaging through the countryside.

  The third week in May, Cornwallis arrived from the south and assumed command of the British force in Virginia. He was still smarting from his blistering encounter with Greene’s troops at Guilford Courthouse. Another 1,500 reinforcements from New York brought the total British force in Virginia to 7,200. Even with his militiamen, Lafayette had fewer than half as many troops under his command. He could do nothing but retreat, allow the British their way in the state, and hope for reinforcements of his own. Cornwallis sent Tarleton’s Legion galloping west to Charlottesville, intent on capturing rebel legislators who had taken refuge there. All but seven lawmakers managed to flee. Tarleton’s dragoons next rode down on Monticello, forcing the author of the Declaration of Independence to scurry out the back door just in time to avoid capture.

  Cornwallis grew sanguine about destroying Lafayette’s hodgepodge army. “The Boy cannot escape me,” he bragged.2 The Boy was keenly aware of the threat. “To speak plain English,” he wrote to Alexander Hamilton, who was almost exactly his own age, “I am devilish afraid of him.”3

  Schooled by Washington, Lafayette knew that his role was that of the fox. He had to slip away and draw Cornwallis’s pack of hounds farther from their maritime base. He had to avoid battle to avoid disaster. “Independence has rendered me the more cautious,” he told Hamilton, “as I know my warmth.”4 But an abject retreat risked dispiriting the citizens of Virginia. The art of maneuvering, shifting position, and fighting skirmishes without falling into a major battle was a delicate one. To Washington, Lafayette admitted, “I am not Strong enough even to get Beaten.”5 His mentor had confidence in him. Command in Virginia, he wrote “cannot be in better hands than the Marquiss.”

  Like Washington and Greene, Lafayette was a learner. “I read, I study, I examine, I listen, I think,” he explained to his father-in-law.6 He kept his aggressive nature in check with regular doses of “common sense,” an intuition about when to gamble and when to proceed with caution.

  Washington understood that the young man was a rare genius. “He is a prodigy for his age,” Johann de Kalb had said of the marquis, “full of courage, spirit, judgment, good manners, feelings of generosity and zeal.”7 Exuberant, guileless, and big-hearted, Lafayette had a singular ability to lead men in battle. “He possesses,” Washington declared, “uncommon Military talents.”8

  * * *

  Anthony Wayne struggled to bring his Pennsylvania men to the rescue. Following their January mutiny, they remained recalcitrant. They balked at orders to march toward the disease-ridden South. They wanted the pay still owed them. The grumbling, the talk of another mutiny, went too far. One man was heard to say, “God damn the officers, the buggers.” To restore discipline, Wayne found him and five others guilty under the Articles of War. Executioners blew the heads off four of the men with close musket fire. Two were pardoned. A few days later, as the troops began their march, twelve more men refused orders, saying they were not “to be trifled with.” Furious, Wayne instantly had them court-martialed and executed. He was afraid to give the rest of the troops access to ammunition or bayonets. His eight hundred reluctant men marched southward, “Mute as Fish.”9

  Wayne joined Lafayette on June 10, 1781. A few days later, William Campbell, who had led the attack on Kings Mountain, showed up with six hundred mounted fighters. Lafayette appealed to the ailing Daniel Morgan, who had become his close friend, to raise a force to protect his home state. Morgan rallied once more, appearing with a unit of tough backwoods riflemen. “What a people are these Americans,” Lafayette marveled, “they have reinforced me with a band of giants.” Helping foil an attack by Tarleton’s cavalry, the riflemen “ran the whole day in front of my horse without eating or resting.”10

  Morgan himself, now forty-five, could no longer summon such stamina. Afflicted with “the infirmities of age,” he caught a cold, grew steadily sicker, and had to return home a second time. “I am afraid I am broke down,” he wrote to his friend Nathanael Greene.11

  Lafayette now led a force of nearly 4,500 men. Cornwallis, long out of touch with General Clinton in New York, began to pull back toward the sea to receive orders. Lafayette shadowed him at about twenty miles distance, shifting position daily, spreading out his army to make the force appear larger. Still too weak to fight a major battle, he stuck close to Cornwallis “to give his movements the appearance of a retreat.”12

  During the first week in July, Cornwallis led his men southeast from Richmond, down the peninsula formed by the James and York Rivers, both of which drained into Chesapeake Bay. He was following an order from a nervous Clinton to send three thousand of his men to New York to beef up the defenses against a combined French and American army gathering on the outskirts. Cornwallis’s men were to embark from Portsmouth, on the south bank of the James.

  As the British general ferried his advance guard and baggage across the river, Lafayette thought he saw a chance to catch and rough up the enemy rear guard. He arrayed his force along the swampy coastal plain a few miles from Jamestown, where the British had established their first permanent settlement in the New World in 1607. Lafayette sent Wayne and his Pennsylvanians down a road corduroyed with logs between two morasses to scout the British position.

  Cornwallis had outsmarted the Boy. Anticipating Lafayette’s maneuver, he was waiting along the river bank with almost his entire force, ready to attack. As Wayne came on, the British commander ordered Tarleton to feign a retreat, drawing the Americans into the trap. At the last minute, Lafayette spotted the massed enemy and realized he had blundered. He had earlier written to Hamilton that he was “afraid of myself as much as of the Enemy” because of his impulsive nature. His duty was to avoid risking too much, and he had risked too much. He galloped forward to try to salvage the situation.

  Anthony Wayne, when he saw his five hundred men suddenly outnumbered five to one, faced “a choice of difficulties.” Stay and see his troops enveloped on both flanks—or retreat and have them cut down in a swamp. He instantly and instinctively chose another course: he ordered his men to charge.

  War is an affair of the spirit as well as the body. Under heavy musket fire and the lacerating spray of grapeshot, Wayne’s men fired their own cannon and rushed forward, “making a devil of a noise of firing and huzzaing.” They fell into a blistering firefight, hammering the enemy from sixty yards away. Now it was Cornwallis who was brought up short. The unexpected charge made him wonder if Lafayette, now in the center of the maelstrom, commanded a more formidable force than he had imagined. He hesitated. Wayne took advantage of the pause and with the coming of evening extricated his men from the death trap. He had to give up two field guns, but he managed to escape. Lafayette put the best face on the near disaster, praising “the Glory of Genl. Wayne” for attacking the whole British army with “a reconnoitring Party only.”13

  “Madness,” one exasperated patriot wrote after hearing of the incident. “Mad A——y, by G— I never knew such a piece of work.”14 Mad Anthony. Sketchy evidence indicates that one of Wayne’s neigh
bors, the eccentric Jimmy the Drover, had earlier referred to the general as mad when Wayne would not intervene to free him from a civilian jail. The anecdote circulated, the nickname gained currency, the wild charge on the James made it stick. Mad Anthony Wayne it was.

  Cornwallis completed his crossing. At Portsmouth, new orders awaited him. A dithering Clinton no longer wanted the reinforcements. Cornwallis should stake out a position on the north side of the peninsula and be ready for anything—resupply, reinforcement, or withdrawal. Cornwallis selected a location where the broad York River narrowed to barely half a mile. Lafayette, still hovering near him, was puzzled by the enemy activity. In the oppressive heat of August, the British were constructing fortifications around an out-of-the-way village on a bluff overlooking the river. The village was then called York. History would know it as Yorktown.

  * * *

  George Washington, graying as he approached fifty, had aged during six years of unrelieved responsibility, frustration, and trial. His troops and his wife, Martha, called him the Old Man. To backwoodsmen he was Old Hoss. It had been almost five years since his audacious winter attack on Trenton. Now, in the summer of 1781, Washington had to decide whether he should again stake everything on a single move.

  After the disasters of 1780, hope for the American cause, John Adams admitted, “hung upon a Thread.” In May, Washington met again with the Comte de Rochambeau to talk over the coming campaign. The French ally afterward observed that “these people here are at the end of their resources.”15

  When Rochambeau finally marched his five thousand men to join Washington’s army near White Plains in July, his officers were appalled by the shabby dress and bare feet of the troops there. They chuckled when an amateur American officer, not thinking of soldiering as a permanent profession, asked his French counterpart “what his trade was in his own country.”16