Revolution! America – Chapter 7 – The Brick Chronicle

General Clinton’s new British strategy was to gain control of the southern states, where it was believed loyalist sentiment was high. Savannah and Augusta were captured easily and, by early 1780, royal civilian government had been reestablished in Georgia. Then in February, Clinton lead an invasion force of ninety ships carrying fourteen thousand troops against the South’s largest seaport, Charleston, South Carolina. Banastre Tarleton’s mounted troops were immediately dispatched to cut off the city’s supply lines from the north.

Reinforcements arrived to defend the city before it was surrounded, but the 2,650 soldiers and 2,500 militiamen could do little but hold out for weeks as they exchanged artillery fire with the British. Their eventual surrender on May 12 was a disaster for the United States, as 6,684 soldiers and sailors were captured along with 154 cannons and tons of gunpowder and supplies. Many of the soldiers would suffer and die in the dismal conditions of British prison ships, but thousands of militiamen were freed after taking an oath of allegiance to the King.

With the fall of Charleston, Continental forces in South Carolina were thrown into disarray and began traveling north to regroup. On May 29, Lieutenant Colonel Tarleton lead a cavalry unit composed mostly of local loyalists against a Continental Army force of about four hundred, led by Abraham Buford. Buford ordered his men not to fire until the cavalry charge was only thirty feet from them. The result was a deadly volley that felled several attackers, but left several of Buford’s men crushed under the weight of toppled horses.

In chaotic close-quarters fighting, many of the Continentals lay down and attempted to surrender, and Buford sent out a white flag. But Tarleton had been toppled from his horse and did not receive the message. Thinking their commander had been attacked after a false surrender, the loyalists became outraged and, in what many later described as a massacre, 113 rebels were killed by sword and bayonet, and another 150 maimed, many so badly that they died soon after.

The wounded were dragged to a nearby church where they were tended to by locals including the mother of thirteen-year-old Andrew Jackson, who later recalled that Banastre Tarleton once rode his horse so close “I could have shot him.” The brutality of the attack earned Tarleton such nicknames as “Bloody Ban” and “Ban the Barbarian.” Reports of his offering the Continentals “no quarter” (i.e., no mercy) spread and prompted many who had stayed neutral to rise up as militiamen to resist the British.

Such fresh recruits made up the majority of the 3,700-man army lead by Horatio Gates, the victorious general at Saratoga, as they went into battle on August 16 against General Charles Cornwallis’s army of 2,100, which included 600 loyalists and volunteers. From the first British volley and bayonet charge, the rebel militiamen panicked, broke ranks, and fled—General Gates with them. In what quickly became a rout, the British killed or wounded nine hundred and captured another thousand as prisoners.

Major General Johann de Kalb’s attempts to hold his ground and rally the Continentals ended when his horse was shot out from under him. Before he could stand, he was shot and bayoneted multiple times. Tarleton’s cavalry pursued the retreating Continentals, inflicting further casualties. General Gates escaped, but was fully blamed for the humiliating defeat. “Was there ever an instance of a general running away, as Gates has done, from his whole army?” mocked Alexander Hamilton.

While the British solidified their hold on the South, the French finally landed six thousand soldiers on American soil at Newport, Rhode Island, establishing a naval base there. After years of supplying crucial military aid, France was now actively engaged in a mutual struggle against British power. Washington traveled to Connecticut to meet the French general, Count Rochambeau, and the two discussed the feasibility of a joint recapture of New York, with Rochambeau agreeing to move his army to join Washington’s within striking distance of the city.

On the return trip from that meeting, Washington planned to share a meal with Major General Benedict Arnold, who had been put in charge of the fort at West Point, defending the Hudson. That very morning, however, Arnold was informed of the capture of British officer John André, who was carrying papers that implicated Arnold in a plot to hand over West Point to the British. Leaving everything behind, Arnold fled by boat to New York where he joined the British army as a brigadier general and was given a significant monetary reward despite the West Point plot having failed.

In an open letter to the American people, Arnold defended his actions, portraying the Congress as duplicitous and tyrannical, and criticizing their alliance with the Catholic French, “the enemy of the Protestant faith.” Left behind at West Point, Arnold’s beautiful young wife and coconspirator Peggy, feigned madness in a state of partial undress, leaving Washington, Hamilton, and Lafayette believing her innocent. She was given safe passage to be put in the care of her father, but eventually reunited with Arnold.

Because John André had been captured while dressed as a civilian and using a false name, he was convicted of being a spy and sentenced to death. Washington made an attempt to offer him back to the British in return for Arnold, who was with General Henry Clinton in New York, but Clinton refused. André’s request to Washington that he be executed by a firing squad as befits an officer was also refused, and so on October 2, 1780, the handsome, cultivated, and charming André was hanged to death on a gallows.

Ethan Allen, who had been captured by the British at Montreal in 1775, finally returned home after a prisoner exchange in 1780 to find that his brother Ira and other local leaders had declared the disputed territory between New York and New Hampshire as an independent republic named Vermont. Their constitution was the first in North America to abolish slavery. When the Continental Congress showed reluctance to admit Vermont as a state, the Allens conducted secret negotiations with the British over the possibility of Vermont becoming a royal province. Such talks continued inconclusively until the end of the war.

In the absence of the Continental army in South Carolina, revolutionary insurgents like Francis Marion pioneered guerilla warfare tactics to wear down the enemy with continuous nighttime raids, arson, ambushes, and sniper fire. Marion’s men were always on the move, avoiding roads and trails and traversing swamps to elude the British. “As to this damn old fox,” complained Banastre Tarleton, “the devil himself could not catch him,” giving rise to Marion’s nickname, the Swamp Fox.

Frontiersmen living west of the Appalachians banded together and crossed the mountain range to oppose the British. In recruiting loyalists to defeat them, Major Patrick Ferguson denigrated these “Overmountain Men,” calling upon locals to take up arms lest they be “pissed upon by a set of mongrels.” On October 7, 1780, 900 of the Overmountain Men surprised Ferguson and his 1,100 loyalists, surrounding their position on King’s Mountain in South Carolina and attacking from behind rocks and trees.

Waving his sword, Ferguson attempted to rally his badly shaken men, but was shot off his horse. With their commander dead, many of the loyalists laid down their arms to surrender, but were mercilessly cut down under cries of “Give ’em Tarleton’s quarter!” After just over an hour of fighting, 157 loyalists lay dead and another 163 badly maimed. Ferguson’s dead body was stripped and urinated on.

Over the next several days, the Overmountain Men held drumhead trials for many of the 668 men they had taken prisoner. Some were men who had once fought on the side of the revolutionaries and had switched allegiances. Convicted of treason or desertion, nine of the prisoners were hung as the rest were forced to watch. The bodies of the dead left on the battlefield were eaten by wolves and pigs.

As the cold of winter set in, Washington’s army was once again beset by a severe lack of basic provisions, and this time his unruly troops took to robbing and plundering the houses of their fellow countrymen. Sympathizing with their plight, but not with their dishonorable conduct, Washington had a soldier named David Hall executed in front of his men as warning to other would-be plunderers. But as winter wore on and conditions worsened, defection and mutiny were a constant threat.

On January 1, 1781, 1,300 underfed, under-clothed, and unpaid Pennsylvania troops defiantly killed several of their own officers, then took up arms and marched toward Philadelphia to confront Congress with their grievances. Washington moved New Jersey soldiers to keep the mutineers from entering the capital. Bypassing Congress, he made a desperate appeal to the states to provide emergency money and supplies. Though he hated to negotiate with disobedient soldiers, Washington agreed to discharge or furlough and compensate the men.

Also wishing to send a message to the rest of the army, Washington approved a harsh punishment for twelve of the revolt’s recalcitrant ringleaders. They were lined up on a farm field and executed by firing squads made up of their fellow mutineers. “The fence and even the heads of rye for some distance within the field,” noted one witness, “were covered with the blood and brains.” When one victim was seen to have survived, a soldier was ordered to bayonet him to death.

A smaller mutiny in New Jersey later that month was put down by force and its leaders also executed. To solve the problem of Congress’s lack of funds that lay at the heart of the deplorable condition of the army, Congressional President John Laurens was sent to France to work with Benjamin Franklin to secure a massive loan from the king. Meanwhile, in South Carolina, Daniel Morgan’s men managed a decisive victory over Banastre Tarleton, who fled the battle at Cowpens being taunted, “Where is now the boasting Tarleton?”

Overall commander of the British forces, General Henry Clinton, had returned to New York after the capture of Charleston. From there, he sent the turncoat Benedict Arnold with an army of 1,600 to Virginia, where he humiliated Governor Thomas Jefferson by looting and burning supply warehouses, foundries, and mills, and by liberating scores of slaves in the woefully unprotected capital at Richmond. Arnold then moved on to capture the coastal city of Portsmouth.

Washington responded by sending Lafayette with a thousand troops to Virginia to stop Arnold. They arrived at Richmond just before Arnold returned to capture the city with reinforcements that brought his army up to 2,500 men. Lafayette’s defense of the city spurned the attack. During a diplomatic exchange with one of Lafayette’s officers, Arnold is reported to have asked what the Americans would do if he were taken prisoner. “We should cut off the leg which was wounded in the country’s service,” replied the officer, “and we should hang the rest of you.”

After several indecisive skirmishes with Nathanael Greene’s army in the Carolinas, General Cornwallis moved his British army northward into Virginia to meet Arnold’s. Hearing that the Virginia Assembly was in session at Charlottesville, Cornwallis dispatched Banastre Tarleton and his cavalrymen to capture Thomas Jefferson at his Monticello home. Warned by Patrick Henry of Tarleton’s approach, however, Jefferson escaped. Irate, Cornwallis himself came to Monticello to plunder, slaughter Jefferson’s livestock, and take away thirty slaves who soon became infected with smallpox at the British camp and died.

Lacking inland supply lines, Cornwallis was forced to move his army to the Virginia coast and was harassed along the march by Lafayette’s men. On August 14, Washington learned of a large French fleet sailing north to Virginia from the French West Indies. Hoping to trap Cornwallis’s army, he and Rochambeau began a march south while using diversion tactics to give the false impression that an attack on New York was their intent.

Discovering Washington’s true intentions on September 2, Clinton dispatched nineteen warships to reinforce Cornwallis, who had fortified his men at Yorktown, Virginia, at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. But the British navy arrived to find twenty-eight French warships occupying the harbor, having just deployed three thousand new French troops to support Lafayette as he surrounded Cornwallis. The two armadas faced off on the open sea over the course of the next three days, with neither side gaining a clear advantage.

When a second French fleet of eleven warships arrived from Newport on September 12, the British fleet had no choice but to withdraw from battle. Washington and Rochambeau’s army arrived on the scene at the end of September, bringing the total allied forces besieging Yorktown to eighteen thousand. Cornwallis held out for weeks, but on October 9, a bombardment of his defenses began with Washington himself firing the first cannon. After British defenses were pulverized, the allies stormed the British positions with an overwhelming bayonet charge, leaving hundreds dead and hundreds more wounded.

Without hope of reinforcement by land or sea, and no way to escape, Cornwallis surrendered his army to the combined American and French forces on October 19, 1781, bringing an end to major hostilities in the Revolutionary War and securing the independence of the United States of America. Cornwallis feigned illness and did not attend the surrender ceremony. Eight thousand British troops lined up and laid down their arms as their musicians played a tune called “The World Turn’d Upside Down.”

Opening Quote

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Opening Quote