Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence (22 page)

Sullivan’s men first admired, then destroyed. All of it—the houses, the fields of grain, the stands of fruit trees—they hacked down and set aflame. The Indians, acutely aware of the invaders’ progress but unable to match their strength, kept melting into the forests.

Through the Finger Lakes and ever westward, the expedition carried out its mission. Sullivan was wary of ambush, but none came. By early September, he arrived at his final objective, the town known as Genesee Castle on the opposite side of the Genesee River south of present-day Rochester. After destroying the town, Sullivan turned back. The lateness of the season that resulted from his long delay, along with his personal lack of initiative, kept him from ever coming near the British stronghold at Fort Niagara.

By the end of September, all his men had returned to their base at Tioga. They had leveled forty villages and destroyed 160,000 bushels of corn. Only three dozen soldiers had been killed in the operation. To the west, Colonel Brodhead had managed to destroy Seneca settlements along the Allegheny, also with few losses.

Had the expedition been a success? On the surface, yes. “I flatter myself that the orders with which I was entrusted are fully executed,” Sullivan boasted.
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Deprived of food and shelter, the Iroquois were forced to congregate along the Niagara River by the hundreds, hoping for British handouts. Many died during the ensuing bitter winter.

But Sullivan, with a third of the Continental Army at his disposal, had managed to capture almost no prisoners. He brought back no hostages who could be held pending the cessation of Indian raids. The hostile Iroquois were now even more dependent on British gifts and trade goods, but they were not vanquished by the destruction of their property. “We do not look upon ourselves as defeated,” a sachem proclaimed, “for we have never fought.”
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New war parties ventured east as early as February 1780. Raids continued for two more years, as Indians and loyalists inflicted the same destruction on the homes, barns, and mills of patriots that Sullivan had visited on the Iroquois towns. An American officer put it succinctly: “The nests are destroyed, but the birds are still on the wing.”
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Sullivan’s expedition loomed over the future. His men spread the word about a new and tantalizing territory in western New York. Some of them settled there after the war, pushing the dispirited Iroquois west. The tenor of the campaign—the wanton destruction of civilian homes, the girdling of peach trees—presaged the increasingly toxic relations between Native Americans and European settlers that would dominate the next century and beyond.

The expedition did not nullify Iroquois power—the Indians would not be broken until their British allies sold them out in the peace treaty four years later. But for Sullivan, the campaign of 1779 was the end. He had carped and complained and criticized too often. Congress dismissed him from the service.

* * *

Americans would remember the winter of 1779–80 as the coldest they had ever experienced. Indian refugees suffered at Niagara—patriots shivered in New Jersey. Snow fell every few days and winds whipped drifts twelve feet high. American soldiers, undersupplied as always, huddled in log cabins outside Morristown. “Poor fellows, my heart bleeds for them,” an American officer noted, “while I Damn my country as void of gratitude.”
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By comparison, the Valley Forge winter had been balmy.

On Christmas Day 1779, General Henry Clinton and his staff boarded a warship in New York Harbor. A large portion of his redcoats were already crowded onto transports. They sailed out and disappeared across the gray, snow-flecked ocean. Even the captains of the ships did not know their destination until they opened sealed orders on the high seas.

For George Washington and the patriots, the worst year of the war was about to begin.

Fifteen

The Fate of Battle

1780

In the early months of 1780, George Washington found out where British general Henry Clinton was headed. Charleston, the South’s major port and the nation’s fourth-largest city, was suddenly in peril. Still camped north of New York City, his Excellency could do nothing to counter the threat. He had few troops to spare. He had to depend on his commander in the South, General Benjamin Lincoln.

According to the quasiscientific humoral theory widely accepted in the eighteenth century, Lincoln’s personality was of the phlegmatic type: affable and steadfast, but potentially slow and diffident. Contemporaries described the forty-seven-year-old Lincoln as “judicious,” “very gracious,” and “exceedingly popular” with his militiamen. Friends referred to his “composure and self-possession.”
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The “uncommonly broad” Lincoln dressed plainly. “His speech was with apparent difficulty” due to an impediment.
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All his life he suffered from the condition we now know as narcolepsy, which left him liable to drop off to sleep “in the midst of conversation, at table, and when driving himself in a chaise.”
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A phlegmatic type might make a good farmer, which was Lincoln’s profession before the war, but he was perhaps too easy-going to be a stellar general. He certainly did not lack the will. The very day that violence broke out at Lexington, Lincoln marched his corps of volunteers the fifteen miles to Cambridge from his home in Hingham, Massachusetts. A
year later, the state made him a general of militia. He commanded troops at White Plains during Washington’s 1776 retreat from New York.

During the controversial promotions of February 1777, Congress vaulted Lincoln over generals like Benedict Arnold and John Stark, raising him to major general in the Continental Army in spite of his limited experience. Sent north to help stop Burgoyne, he cooperated with the resentful Stark during the maneuvering before the Battle of Bennington. Afterward, he commanded the fortifications at Saratoga. He saw no action there except during a patrol, when he was shot in the ankle.

On recovering from his wound in the autumn of 1778, he took command in the South just as the British shifted their attention in that direction. Washington warned that the region suffered from “internal weakness, disaffection, the want of energy.” South Carolina authorities were stingy with supplies and tried to dictate Lincoln’s every move. He hoped he would not be driven to “altercating with the civil power.”
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Altercation was not Lincoln’s style.

The British had attacked Charleston twice before 1780. In 1776, Colonel William Moultrie, with some help from General Charles Lee, had prevented a British fleet from entering Charleston Harbor. Three years later, the enemy, having captured Savannah, made another attempt on Charleston. Lincoln was able to fend off this raid, in spite of civilian leaders’ impulse to capitulate.

In September of 1779, French admiral Charles d’Estaing arrived at the port with a powerful fleet, six thousand soldiers, and a plan to cooperate with Lincoln to retake Savannah. The joint operation collapsed during a brutal hand-to-hand melee in the trench before the town. The allies lost one of their bloodiest fights since Bunker Hill. A discouraged Lincoln returned to Charleston.

* * *

By the end of 1779, Henry Clinton had decided to shift even more of the focus of the war to the South. He hoped to spark a loyalist uprising, the perpetual British panacea for curing the rebellion. In the South he would not face the bulk of Washington’s annoying Continental Army. He would also be closer to Britain’s valuable West Indies territories should the French launch an attack there. In preparation, he had withdrawn the men who had been idling in Rhode Island since Clinton had captured Newport in 1776. Then he embarked 8,700 soldiers and sailed away, leaving New York under the command of General von Knyphausen.

After a rough passage, Clinton and his men landed just south of Charleston. The city lay on a peninsula between two rivers, the Ashley
to the west and the Cooper to the east. Fort Moultrie, whose guns had thwarted Clinton’s first attack back in 1776, still protected the mouth of the harbor.

The city’s location offered opportunities for a spirited defense. Lincoln had sufficient time to complete its fortifications as Clinton crept forward, his men’s minds haunted by tales of wolves, venomous snakes, and sixteen-foot “Crocodiles.” It was not until March 29 that British troops crossed the Ashley and began to fortify the neck that joined the city to the mainland, preparing for a slow strangulation.

The amiable, round-faced Lincoln had no use for military affectation—he wore his gray hair unpowdered and lived the frugal, pious life of a New England Puritan. In spite of his rank, he wielded a shovel on the earthworks to set an example. The state had pressed six hundred slaves into the effort, but white citizens remained reluctant to perform manual labor. Nor would they listen to proposals to enlist blacks into the army in exchange for freedom. Moreover, the coastal planters’ chronic conflict with poorer inland residents prompted the backlanders to ignore state requests for aid and militia service.

Lincoln’s defenses included a stone “citadel” housing sixty-six cannon, a water-filled canal across the neck, and a fleet of three frigates and numerous gunboats to protect the harbor. He drew more troops into the city until 2,600 Continentals and more than 2,500 militiamen manned the works. Then it dawned on him that he had made a mistake.

On April 10, Clinton sealed the neck, trained his guns on the American fortifications and demanded that Lincoln surrender. Two days earlier, British ships had run past Fort Moultrie virtually unscathed to enter the harbor. Lincoln could feel the noose tightening.

His hope was that, like Washington at Brooklyn Heights, he could still escape. His small fleet kept British ships from the Cooper River. If he ferried his men and supplies across, he could preserve a formidable army in the South at the price of relinquishing the city.

Lincoln knew that he was in over his head. He had written to Washington about his “insufficiency and want of experience,” asking to be relieved.
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What was he to do? His honor would not allow him to surrender. Any hope of reinforcements arriving in time was a pipe dream. On April 13, 1780, the British guns opened up. Bombs rained on the houses and fortifications. Fires raged through the town. British sappers kept digging, preparing gun emplacements ever closer to American lines.

The time for escape was now. When Lincoln called a war council, he unwisely included representatives from the civilian government. They would not hear of a retreat. They told him that if he tried to abandon the
city they would burn his boats, throw open the town gates, and aid the British in destroying his army.

The chance to break out faded as the British established themselves east of the Cooper River. By May 8, Clinton had fourteen thousand men working on the siege. His guns kept pounding the American defenses. Lincoln saw that all hope had evaporated. He asked for a cease-fire to discuss terms. A blessed spell of quiet settled on the town, but Lincoln was in no position to bargain. Unconditional surrender was Clinton’s only offer. The American commander could not accept.

The next day, hostilities resumed. A tremendous cannonade erupted from both sides, two hundred guns firing at once. “It appeared as if the stars were tumbling down,” an observer reported.
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The apocalyptic fury pointlessly destroyed houses and killed more citizens and soldiers.

Now the residents of Charleston, anxious to save their town from utter ruin, petitioned Lincoln to surrender. On May 11, an American soldier ran up a white flag. Clinton would not let the defeated army march out of the city with the honors of war, their flags flying and the troops released on parole, as was the custom. More than 5,500 ragged and humiliated American troops headed for British prisons, where inhuman conditions killed almost half of them. Their sad departure from the city was known derisively as the “Lincolnade.”
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The loss at Charleston staggered patriots in all the colonies. An entire army captured: irreplaceable troops, four hundred cannon, thousands of muskets, valuable stores of gunpowder, three frigates. Across the Atlantic, joyful Britons greeted the news as an indicator that “a speedy and happy termination of the American war” was imminent.
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* * *

While celebrating his victory, General Clinton received word that a force of about 350 Virginia Continental soldiers under the command of Colonel Abraham Buford had come south to reinforce Lincoln. Forty miles from the city, they learned of Charleston’s fate and turned back north. Although the rebels had a hundred-mile lead, Clinton sent Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton to chase them down. The twenty-six-year-old Tarleton had cemented his reputation as a daring cavalry leader by capturing American general Charles Lee during the 1776 debacle in New Jersey. A natural warrior, Tarleton was praised for his “velocity.” Now he set out with his mounted 130-man British Legion, composed mostly of loyalists. Forty regular army dragoons rode with him. They galloped north at a punishing pace, commandeering fresh horses as their animals dropped under them.
They caught up with Buford at a settlement called Waxhaws on the North Carolina border.

Claiming he had more men than he did, the young cavalryman sent Buford a surrender demand under a white flag. Buford refused. The British horsemen and infantry swept toward Buford’s men on open ground. The American commander decided to stop them with a single volley of musketry. His men held their fire until the stampeding attackers were only ten yards away. The muskets exploded in unison. The shock of fire met the shock of hurtling horseflesh. The momentum of the cavalry prevailed. In an instant, the dragoons were in the midst of the rebels, slashing with razor-sharp sabers.

Without time to reload, the Americans were helpless. Blades cut into men’s arms, tore their necks, sliced open their faces. Blood gushed. Buford tied a white handkerchief to his sword and ordered his men to ground their muskets. Tarleton’s troopers hacked those who stood and ran down those who fled.

“I have cut 170 Off’rs and Men to pieces,” Tarleton bragged afterward.
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As at the bloody battle at Paoli, it was not firearms but the more intimate edge weapons that decided the matter at Waxhaws. Patriots loudly proclaimed it a massacre.

They had a point. More than a quarter of Buford’s men were killed “on the spot.” Another 150 were wounded too badly to walk away. Buford himself escaped with about ninety others. Tarleton said his men acted with “vindictive asperity not easily restrained.” A British officer later wrote that “the virtue of humanity was totally forgotten.”
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Like the murder of Jane McCrea, the Waxhaws Massacre became a centerpiece of American propaganda. The British scored a tactical victory but enraged their enemies. For the rest of the war, the image of “Bloody Tarleton” fueled the patriot fighting spirit, and “Tarleton’s quarter,” meaning no quarter, remained the bitter catchphrase that excited American vengeance.

But the immediate outcome disheartened patriots: British control of South Carolina was now complete.

* * *

Washington had to respond to the Charleston catastrophe. In addition to Buford’s small contingent, he had already sent a corps of his best Continentals marching south. In Virginia they learned of the fall of Charleston. Leading these crack Delaware and Maryland troops was Baron Johann de Kalb. The son of Bavarian peasants, the fifty-nine-year-old de Kalb was,
like Steuben, a soldier of fortune and a dissembler. Not really a baron, he was something better: a hardened and expert warrior. Having come over with Lafayette in 1777, the tall, graying, broad-shouldered de Kalb had become one of the Americans’ most valuable foreign officers.

Hearing of Lincoln’s fate, de Kalb encamped his men in North Carolina. His regiments of Continentals were now the only obstacle preventing the British from charging all the way to Virginia. He formed a base at Hillsdale, near present-day Raleigh, and waited.

Congress turned to Horatio Gates, the “Victor of Saratoga,” to redeem patriot hopes. The former British officer had served as head of the War Board and had commanded in New England during the previous two years of relative quiet. He yearned for action.

Gates was still popular among New England congressmen, but his alleged plotting against Washington during the Valley Forge winter had left him out of favor with the commander’s allies. His friend Charles Lee, who had come a cropper at Monmouth Courthouse, warned him, “Take care lest your Northern laurels turn to Southern willows.”
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Gates arrived in de Kalb’s camp on July 26, 1780. The force Gates called his “grand army” was far from grand: 1,400 Continentals, six field guns, and a tiny remnant of cavalry. Gates had to depend on a North Carolina militia brigade already in the field and the hope that other militiamen would turn out. He admitted to “an army without strength—a military chest without money.”
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Food was scarce—the countryside had little to offer, and Tory farmers refused to supply rebels.

Administration and logistics were Horatio Gates’s strong suit. He might have spent time consolidating and rebuilding his army and prying supplies from Virginia and North Carolina authorities. But he knew that British general Cornwallis, whom Clinton had left in South Carolina with a substantial force of redcoats, presented a grave danger to the southern states. Intelligence reports suggested that if Gates rushed his men south within two weeks, he could manhandle the advance corps of the British at Camden, South Carolina, and capture a tempting supply depot as well. The time seemed right to strike.

Gates was an optimist. He had always believed in the ability of militia to carry the fight. “There is every Reason to Hope,” he told his men, “that this Campaign will decide the War.”
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The day after he arrived, he announced that the army would march toward the enemy—tomorrow.