Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence (14 page)

Leaving behind a small force to make noise and keep campfires burning along the creek, he quietly led his army onto a country road and hurried them toward Princeton. A sudden invasion of bone-chilling air froze the mud and allowed the Americans to lug their cannon along the rutted lane.

By morning, they were approaching the village of Princeton, home of one the colonies’ premier colleges. The limpid day was “bright, serene, and extremely cold, with a hoarfrost that bespangled every object.”
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Washington led the main force along the back road, intent on surprising the British in the village. General Hugh Mercer, his physician friend, veered left with 350 men to secure a bridge on the main road. Before Mercer reached his objective, a flash of light alerted the Americans. It was the glint of the rising sun on the bayonets of British reinforcements hurrying down the turnpike toward Trenton.

Rushing to secure the high ground, Mercer’s men smashed directly into two enemy regiments commanded by British colonel Charles Mawhood. Neither force had time to dig in or to array in formal battle lines. They mingled in a wild, hand-to-hand melee as the crystalline morning erupted in violence.

During the fighting, a cannonball shattered the leg of Mercer’s horse. A British infantryman swung his musket butt and knocked the general to the ground. Mercer refused to yield and was fatally bayoneted by British soldiers. Delaware colonel John Haslet, who had earned a master of divinity degree in Glasgow, Scotland, stepped up to rally the American forces. A musket ball struck him in the head and killed him.

“The ground was frozen,” one observer noted, “and all the blood which was shed remained on the surface.”
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The rising sun turned the battlefield into a sparkling crimson horror. British troops charged with bayonets. Mercer’s men retreated. But now American soldiers were turning back from the road to Princeton village and rushing onto the field of
battle. Henry Knox’s gunners began to rake the enemy with cannon blasts. A thousand untrained Pennsylvania militiamen could not form a line until Washington himself cantered in among them on his white horse. “Parade with us!” he screamed in his reedy voice. “There is but a handful of the enemy, and we will have them directly!” His words trumped fear. He waved his hat. The men rushed forward. The tide of battle turned. Providence again preserved the general amid the flying bullets.

Cornwallis, realizing that Washington had gulled him, rushed his men from Trenton back toward Princeton. By the time they arrived, the Americans had already left.

Washington wanted to hurry on to Brunswick, sack the enemy’s main supply depot, and “put an end to the war.” But his men were entirely spent. He led them to the high ground around Morristown, where they could safely spend the winter.

“Lord Cornwallis is, I believe, a brave man,” a British officer commented, “but he allowed himself to be fairly outgeneralled by Washington.”
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The battles at Trenton and Princeton had deep consequences. They forced the British to pull back to a shrunken perimeter around Brunswick. Foraging parties that ventured farther into New Jersey were set upon by roaming patriot militia units.

“Our affairs at present are in a prosperous way,” Washington wrote with a sigh of relief. “The country seems to entertain an idea of our Superiority—Recruiting goes on well.”

He would never be a military genius, but when it mattered most, his Excellency had cast off indecision, taken a heart-stopping risk, and conquered. He had met his crisis. He had stood by his country and repulsed the enemy. In a bemused afterthought, Washington concluded, “a Belief prevails that the enemy are afraid of Us.”
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Ten

A Continual Clap of Thunder

1777

Far from being afraid of Washington’s feeble army, the British were now determined to crush the rebellion during the 1777 fighting season. Conciliation had not worked. The overwhelming British victories at Long Island and New York had not convinced the rebels to yield. Only unrelenting violence would decide the matter.

General John Burgoyne had convinced the ministry in London to adopt a bold plan. He would haul men and guns down from Canada, overwhelm the fortress at Ticonderoga, continue on to Albany, secure the Hudson-Champlain corridor, divide the New England rebels from the rest of the colonies, and thus “do the business in one campaign.”

Fort Ticonderoga, the mighty “Gibraltar of the north,” had been left vulnerable when the British destroyed Arnold’s fleet the previous autumn. Burgoyne’s engineers hauled several cannon up a nearby mountain, forcing American general Arthur St. Clair to abandon the poorly located fort without firing a shot. Early in July, the Americans snuck out of the bastion in the middle of the night and headed south. The loss, a rattled George Washington wrote to Schuyler, was “an event of chagrin and surprise not apprehended nor within the compass of my reasoning.”
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As the Americans fled Ticonderoga, the Green Mountain Boys, now incorporated into the Continental Army, took up a rearguard position at the Vermont crossroads of Hubbardton. Ethan Allen, their former leader,
had earlier been captured by the British. Vermont farmer Seth Warner, almost as large as Allen but of quieter demeanor, now led the Boys. He and his men fought a sharp battle that slowed the British pursuit.

Slowed but did not stop. Burgoyne marched on. When King George heard of the capture of Ticonderoga, he blustered, “I have beat them! I have beat all the Americans!”
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Having expected a long siege at Ticonderoga, Burgoyne was as confident as his king. In Skenesborough, at the southern tip of Lake Champlain, the invaders paused to regroup. Burgoyne decided to continue overland rather than backtrack to Ticonderoga, where he could have portaged his artillery and supplies to Lake George. A few days’ march would bring him to Fort Edward. He would follow the Hudson River south and, in a few days more, arrive in Albany. The war would be as good as won.

Celebrating his impending victory, Burgoyne ordered choice bottles drawn from his traveling wine cellar. The man whom Horace Walpole called “General Swagger,” who saw war as a grand drama, cavorted with his mistress, his mind fizzing with champagne.
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He had already decided that he would not accept a mere knighthood, like the ones awarded to generals Howe and Clinton. Only a hereditary title, a baronetcy, would suffice. He wanted to be a lord.

* * *

It hardly seemed that the death of one young woman could play a major role in derailing his dream. Yet two days before Burgoyne reached the Hudson at Fort Edward, Indians allied with the British killed twenty-five-year-old Jane McCrea, known as Jenny.

The young woman had lived with her older brother outside Fort Edward. He was a patriot; Jenny and some of her other siblings were loyalists. Such divided families were not unusual in northern New York, where sentiment was sharply split between Whigs and Tories.

The lovely Jenny—her beauty purportedly enhanced by long reddish hair—had fallen in love with and become engaged to a local man named David Jones, also a loyalist. Jones had traveled to Canada and signed on to fight with Burgoyne. Now a lieutenant in a provincial battalion, he was marching south with the invasion.

As Burgoyne approached, Jenny’s brother fled with other patriot refugees. Jenny stayed behind at the home of an older woman. When the British came close enough, she planned to join her fiancé and be married.

McCrea’s brother had good reason to depart. A month earlier, in Burgoyne’s camp at Skenesborough, soldiers had fired a salute to welcome five hundred Indian warriors. Some were Mohawks, the fiercest fighters
among the Iroquois. Others were strapping Ottawa warriors, who had come from as far away as the upper Great Lakes, drawn a thousand miles by the promise of scalps, prisoners, and booty. The Canadian Indians who had come south with Burgoyne averted their eyes when they encountered these large, ruthless men from distant forests. To settlers, they were demons from Hell.

The details of what happened to Jenny McCrea would never emerge entirely from the fog of legend. On July 27, Indians abducted her and her hostess. The women became separated. Two chiefs may have argued about whose prisoner Jenny was, each coveting the expected ransom. One of them shot or tomahawked the young woman. One of them slit her scalp with a knife and ripped off her hair with his teeth. One of them stripped her, mutilated her body, and tossed her into a ditch. One of them headed back to camp with her scalp. As her killer, oblivious to sentimentality, danced around the fire with his prize, her horrified lover recognized the distinctive hair.

Burgoyne resolved to execute the offending brave. Cooler heads prevailed. Such a penalty, the general was warned, would prompt the Indians to desert. On their way home, they would kill many more white settlers. Burgoyne, who needed a cloud of Indian scouts to feel his way through the forest, relented. He granted the warrior a pardon. In war, “we must wink at these things,” a British officer said about the murder.
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The crime was one of hundreds of atrocities committed by Burgoyne’s native allies. Indians had butchered an entire local family just two days before the McCrea killing. Yet it was the girl’s fate that most ignited the imaginations of patriots. Americans were infuriated that she had been “scalped and mangled in a most shocking manner,” as Horatio Gates wrote, while “dressed to receive her promised husband.”
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Her lovely hair, said to trail to the ground, instantly found a place in settlers’ gossip and nightmares. Her death “caused quite an uproar” even among Burgoyne’s own troops. The event, an American captain noted, “added much to the numbers of the American Army.”
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Although General Henry Clinton had earlier spoken of the need “To Gain the Hearts and Subdue the Minds of America,” British officers often acted in ways certain to do the opposite.
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Word of the incident, spread through lurid newspaper accounts, curdled the hearts and ignited the minds of settlers across the northern frontier.

* * *

John Stark was one who could understand Jenny’s plight. He had become intimate with violence long before he led his New Hampshire troops into
the inferno at Bunker Hill. In his twenties—he was now nearly fifty—John and his older brother William, along with two companions, had traveled deep into the Indian country of northern New Hampshire to hunt. A band of Abenaki Indians had emerged from all sides and taken him prisoner. He could still remember the “sharp, hissing sound” they made, “as of a snake.” They had killed one companion and captured another—William escaped.
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Back at their village, the Indians forced Stark’s friend, Amos Eastman, to run a gauntlet. Lines of young braves with sticks and paddles beat him severely as he stumbled between them. When urged toward the same punishment, Stark, who had known Indians from childhood, grabbed a paddle from one of the men and began swinging. He boldly swore he would “kiss” all their women. According to the often-told story, this show of impertinent courage impressed the tribe’s sachems. So did Stark’s refusal to labor in the fields, his shunning of “squaw’s work.” After holding him for several months, the Indians exchanged him for a ransom.

Later, during the French and Indian War, Stark fought with the charismatic Robert Rogers. Rogers’s Rangers attacked Indian style, ambushing French war parties in the forest. Stark became Rogers’s right-hand man and acquired a reputation across the New England frontier as a fierce fighter. After playing a critical role at Bunker Hill, he led a regiment to Canada, faced the Hessians at Trenton, and battled the British at Princeton. Returning home to rest, he quite naturally expected a promotion for his strenuous efforts.

Congress had other ideas. In February 1777 they handed out brigadier general commissions to several officers, but Stark was not among them. New Hampshire’s generalship was allotted to Enoch Poor, a younger man with less experience than Stark but more political clout. Stark could not ignore the implied insult. A month later, “extremely grieved,” he resigned from the Continental Army. “I am bound on Honour to leave the service,” he declared, “Congress having tho’t fit to promote Junr. officers over my head.”
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Such fits of pique were common among officers in an army where favoritism and regional interests played a role in decisions about rank. Officers were forever parsing distinctions of precedence and merit. There was no avoiding this touchiness. Their individual sense of honor was what spurred them to fight—or to find quarrel in a straw.

To some, the failure of an expected promotion was enough to drain their faith altogether. Stark’s brother William, initially a patriot, had joined the British after being passed over for promotion. The two never spoke again. Stark’s old leader Robert Rogers had also sided with the Tories and had briefly led a regiment of Queen’s Rangers against his countrymen.
Stark, still committed to the cause, returned to his New Hampshire farm, to his wife, Molly, and to his lumber business. Like Achilles, he chose to brood in his tent.

* * *

Now the Champlain Valley, which Stark knew well from the French war, had become the route of an invasion that threatened all of New England. The blow that Benedict Arnold had deflected with last year’s delaying action was falling with full force on the northern frontier.

John Stark could not ignore the threat. Burgoyne could easily pivot his eight-thousand-man army toward the east and rampage into New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The rebellion had originated in the New England colonies and could be extinguished there. In July, the New Hampshire General Court, the state’s legislature, named Stark a general of the state militia and authorized him to raise as many men as he could. So popular was he that 1,500 men reported for duty over the next six days.

The new recruits were spurred on by more than just Stark’s popularity. The heartbreaking news of Jenny McCrea’s killing had been reported in graphic detail by almost every colonial newspaper. Settlers across the frontier were already primed for outrage by Burgoyne’s own statements. Before he captured Fort Ticonderoga, the British general had warned those in his path that cooperation was in their best interest. “I have but to give stretch to the Indian Forces under my direction,” he declared in a pompous proclamation, “to overtake the harden’d Enemies of Great Britain and America, (I consider them the same) wherever they may lurk.”
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Burgoyne hoped that the natives’ reputation would make wanton violence unnecessary. He privately said that he wanted to “spread terror without barbarity.” It was a fine distinction. The inhabitants of the region knew far more about Indian raids than the general did. His proclamation enraged patriots. They could hardly believe that a British officer, a civilized man, would unleash on them a horde of what they considered ungovernable savages. The death of Jenny McCrea confirmed their fears and proved that Burgoyne was unable to protect even loyalists from the Indians under his command.

* * *

It had taken Burgoyne an entire month to move his expedition the twenty-two miles from Skenesborough to Fort Edward on the Hudson River. Like General Braddock a generation earlier, he was dragging a massive train of artillery and supplies along rutted forest trails, moving through territory that offered little food or forage. He was also bringing thirty
additional wagons loaded with his fancy uniforms and fine china, his Madeira and champagne.

Directed by General Schuyler, the rebels did everything they could to hamper his movement: they downed trees, diverted streams, rolled boulders onto roads. Burgoyne’s men, “almost devoured by musketoes of a monstrous size and innumerable numbers,” had to work like devils to remove the obstacles. The delay gave the patriots time to catch their breath.

In early August, John Stark sent a thousand militiamen from New Hampshire to Manchester, Vermont, forty miles east of Burgoyne’s Fort Edward camp. They were to join other militiamen, along with those of Seth Warner’s Green Mountain Continentals who had survived the battle at Hubbardton, to oppose Burgoyne should he shift eastward. Stark ordered kettles, ammunition, bullet molds, cannon, wagons, and plenty of rum, “as there is none of that article in them parts where we are a going.”
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A few days later, Stark headed west himself.

In Manchester, the flinty New Hampshire general was amazed to see the men he had sent ahead parading under the orders of Benjamin Lincoln, a Continental Army general whom George Washington had sent to aid Philip Schuyler’s efforts. Desperate for troops, Schuyler had directed Lincoln, a fat Massachusetts farmer, to bring the New Hampshire militia to join him on the Hudson to block Burgoyne’s path south.

Lincoln was a political officer, five years younger than Stark. The steely-eyed veteran answered only to the New Hampshire legislature and would not serve under Lincoln or give up his troops. Lincoln recognized that Stark was “exceedingly soured and thinks he hath been neglected and hath not had Justice done him by Congress.”
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He diplomatically concurred with Stark’s plan to threaten Burgoyne from Vermont. Congress grumbled that Stark had become a rogue general, “destructive of military subordination.”

Stark didn’t care. He marched most of his men twenty-five miles south, placing them directly east of Schuyler. They would camp near Bennington, a small town just over the New York border in southern Vermont.

The patriots were still falling back—Schuyler’s men lacked tents and provisions, and they could muster only two artillery pieces. Burgoyne’s army, heavily supplied with cannon, continued to press them south along the Hudson River. “Desertion prevails,” Schuyler lamented, “and disease gains ground.”
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