Fusiliers (36 page)
A few hours before Cornwallis’s departure, during the afternoon, Major General Gates had summoned his commanders into the big barn at Rugeley’s Mill. They filed in; Brigadier General Stevens, commander of a brigade of Virginia troops that had joined two days before; Major General Caswell, who led the North Carolina militia; Major General Baron Johann de Kalb, commanding the Continental Division (Bavarian-born, he had long service in the French army, joining Washington as a volunteer), and several other officers of note, leaders of various detachments of light troops. The commander of the Southern Department outlined his plans. The army would march at 10 p.m., making its way to a position 5 miles south that had already been reconnoitred. It was a plateau on some sandy uplands, overlooking Sander’s Creek. The stream was too deep to be forded, and if the enemy were engaged after they crossed the causeway over the creek (and swamp that surrounded the waterway), they would have to fight with this obstacle to their rear.
Other aspects of Gates’s plan also showed that he had considered the forthcoming operation carefully. Detailed orders were given for flanking parties of light troops to be pushed out 200 yards on each side of the main column as it took the road south that night. Gates had also given some thought to the dangers of taking raw militia into battle, and he issued a stern warning that any man who opened fire without orders would be executed on the spot.
There were some shortcomings in Gates’s plan, but it is only worth mentioning here the most alimentary. The general had already ordered the men to be served a special meal, rounded off with sweet molasses and dumplings. Even before they marched that night, many men were seized with stomach cramps, dozens falling out of their columns to
drop their breeches by the roadside. Troubled by this and countless minor obstacles, the Americans trudged off south into the darkness, little knowing that Cornwallis had departed Camden at almost exactly the same time, heading north up the same route.
It was in the first minutes of 16 August that two forces spotted one another. ‘The moon was full and shone beautifully,’ wrote an American officer, ‘not a breath of air was stirring, nor a cloud to be seen.’ The American Scouts were moving down the gentle slope towards Sander’s Creek, a party of light infantry on the left of the road, sixty cavalry of Colonel Armand’s Legion on the road itself and some Virginian infantry on the right under Colonel Charles Porterfield, an officer who had made his reputation as a commander of light troops and this night was in overall charge of Gates’s advance guard.
The British, cavalry and infantry of Tarleton’s Legion, were already across the creek and had passed Sutton’s House, allowing them to debouch on both sides of the road. The landscape they moved across was a sandy incline dotted with pine trees. Much of the area close to the road had no undergrowth – it had been grazed away by cows – but further out, several hundred yards away, thicker vegetation could be glimpsed.
Colonel Armand’s scouts, riding ahead of their troop, were the first to see the British and instantly fired a pistol shot, rending the night air. Moments later, Armand received a verbal report, galloped over to Colonel Porterfield and told him in an audible whisper, ‘There is the enemy sir – I must charge him!’ Porterfield kept his reply to the point: ‘By all means sir.’ But during the interval between pistol shot and conversation, Lieutenant Colonel Tarleton had formed his own resolution, ordering his horsemen to charge:
Tarleton … and his men came on at the top of his speed, every officer and soldier with the yell of an Indian savage – at every leap their horses took, crying out, ‘charge, charge, charge’ so that their own voices and the echoes resounded in every direction through the pine forest.
Porterfield, seeing the British horse coming up the road, ordered his infantry to turn to face that route, and as the Legion galloped past, ambushed them with a volley. The Legion went swiftly to the right about, cantering back to their supports. Each side now engaged several hundred men in the contest, with crackling musketry fire from soldiers trotting forward, using the trees for cover. After some minutes of this
fusillade, Porterfield was hit in the left leg, shattering the bone, and he slumped forward on his horse. Moments later, another burst of fire, from some British just 30 yards away, brought down Porterfield’s mount.
It did not take long for the Legion to send the Americans to flight, the light troops falling back to Gates’s main body several hundred yards to the rear. The American general was close to his intended fighting position in any case, but the British, crucially, were across Sander’s Creek and deploying their whole army for battle in the moonlight of the early hours. One officer of the Volunteers of Ireland described their situation: ‘Day was near three hours off and all the time we remained among the dead and dying, in anxious suspense for the morning.’
When dawn came, it revealed a panorama of military force, the Americans having arrayed their armies in battle order on the grazing lands above Sander’s Creek, the British spaced out in front, but their battalions still in column rather than line of battle. ‘We saw at a few yards distance our enemy drawn up in very good order,’ wrote Serjeant Lamb. There was no question of the British avoiding battle at this stage against Gates’s superior numbers; they were too close to break contact and would have to defile along the causeway across Gum Swamp (the soft ground around the creek) to their rear. Cornwallis, an aggressive general in any case, had no such intention.
As for Gates, the shock of finding his intelligence was at fault and a British army in front led him to call a council of war in the early morning. ‘Gentlemen, what is to be done?’ he asked his disconcerted subordinates. After an awkward silence, Brigadier General Stevens piped up, ‘Is it not too late now to do anything but fight?’ Of course he was right, because any force that turned its back towards characters like Cornwallis, Webster or Tarleton would simply have invited annihilation.
Major General Gates placed Caswell’s great horde of North Carolina militia to the left of the road, Stevens’s Virginians out beyond them, with some Virginia light infantry and Armand’s horsemen on the far wing. About 350 yards out from the road, the ground dipped down and was obstructed with thick undergrowth. Both sides assumed this to be the start of a swamp, an impassable area that would anchor their flank. On the (American) right of the road, space was more limited for
deployment; a thick wood with dense undergrowth and sloping ground also bounded this area. Here, Gates positioned the 2nd Maryland Brigade, with the Delaware Regiment attached. Two other elements of his deployment were worthy of note: a battery of eight artillery pieces (half of them 6-pounders and half lighter pieces) were placed in the centre, across the road itself, on the most obvious route of advance, and behind them, as a reserve, was the 1st Maryland Brigade of Continental troops.
Cornwallis’s deployment was quite similar. His right (i.e., opposite the militia) consisted of Webster’s brigade, with the 33rd extending from the road, the 23rd to their right and a small corps of about 150 light infantry furthest out, opposite the enemy light troops. The British left was under Rawdon, with the Volunteers of Ireland closest to the road, then Tarleton’s Legion infantry and a North Carolina Tory regiment. Cornwallis’s reserve, kept on or close to the road, was Tarleton’s cavalry and the two battalions of 71st Highlanders.
When the American artillery spotted some redcoated soldiers moving into line about 200 yards in front of them, they shattered the early morning quiet with cannon shot. ‘We immediately began the attack with great vigour,’ wrote Lamb, ‘and in a few minutes the action became general along the whole line.’ Webster marched his regiments forward briskly, while the enemy, seeing the attack on this flank, sent some sharp shooters to open up on them.
The 23rd extended ‘two deep with open files so as occupy as great a front as possible’. Their enemy, the North Carolina and Virginia militia, by contrast, were, due to their much greater numbers, packed four deep and shoulder to shoulder in the same space. But the militia were full of trepidation, which increased as they saw their first sporadic firing having no effect on the advancing British. Garret Watts, a North Carolina militiaman, later recalled, ‘I believe my gun was the first fired, notwithstanding the orders, for we were close to the enemy, who appeared to move in contempt of us.’
As if to emphasise that ‘contempt’, the Welch Fusiliers gave three cheers as they came on. Militiaman Watts’s comrades followed his fire with a spluttering discharge of musketry along the line, although many did not fire at all. It knocked down a handful of Fusiliers, but the regiment kept coming. The opposing forces, just 40 or 50 yards apart, could look into one another’s faces. The Fusiliers stopped, presented their loaded muskets and let fly a great crashing volley, ‘and immediately
rushed in upon them with our bayonets before they could load a second time’. Colonel Otho Williams, one of Gates’s staff who had gone to this flank, saw the redcoat attack and paid tribute to its effectiveness: ‘The impetuosity with which they advanced, firing and huzzaing, threw the whole body of the militia into such a panic that they in general threw down their loaded arms and fled, in the utmost consternation.’
Watts described it: ‘I confess I was amongst the first that fled. The cause of that I cannot tell, except that everyone I saw was about to do the same. It was instantaneous. There was no effort to rally, no encouragement to fight.’ Marching deliberately into the ground vacated by this stampede, the Fusiliers saw the backs of their enemy disappearing into the scrub to their right and front, ‘lightening themselves with the loss of their arms and packs which they threw away as they ran along’.
To the 23rd’s left, the 33rd had encountered something quite different. Their march was taking them, or at least the left wing of their regiment, towards the mouths of the American artillery. The Americans fired salvo after salvo, initially grape shot, but then, as the redcoats got really near, canister or case-shot spewing tins of musket balls in to the 33rd’s ranks. These discharges scythed down dozens of men, the hellish scene of wounding and death being completed by great billows of black smoke from the cannon that hung in the still morning air.
The American artillery similarly found the right of Rawdon’s Volunteers of Ireland to be within canister range and served them up the same hot stuff, one of their officers recording grimly, ‘The enemy surpassed us in artillery, and threw in horrid showers of grape.’ Rawdon’s Volunteers and the Royal North Carolina Regiment were soon coming under heavy musket fire too, from the 2nd Maryland Brigade to their front. The Continentals advanced, sending the loyalists falling back. Serjeant Major Seymour of the Delawares described how they went on ‘with great alacrity and uncommon bravery making great havoc among them insomuch that the enemy gave way’. This setback on the British left, combined with Webster’s success on the right, meant the whole line began to pivot.
Cornwallis, seeing the danger, rode into the smoke. One of the Volunteers of Ireland officers spotted him: ‘Our regiment was amazingly incited by Lord Cornwallis, who came up to them with great coolness, in the midst of a heavier fire than the oldest soldier
remembers and called out “Volunteers of Ireland, you are fine fellows! Charge the rascals – by heaven you behave nobly!”’
With the left stabilised and resuming its advance, Colonel Webster turned his attention to the Continental brigades whose right had been exposed by the militia’s flight. He wheeled the 23rd, who initially came up against a remnant of the North Carolina militia under Brigadier General Gregory that had been formed in a last attempt to protect the American’s hanging flank. These men were swiftly given a volley and the bayonet, Serjeant Lamb noting that Gregory was captured with two stab wounds, ‘and many of his brigade who were made prisoner had no wound except from bayonets’.
The 23rd pushed on, by this point almost at right angles to Rawdon’s Brigade; they had become Cornwallis’s hammer moving to smash de Kalb’s Continentals. Initially, the 1st Maryland Brigade formed to face Webster, at right angles to the 2nd, who were still engaged with Rawdon. But the 1st Brigade gave way after being charged by Webster’s men, who were flushed with success. As a result, the 2nd Maryland Brigade were herded back and a little to their right, into thicker woods on somewhat higher than their original position. They were being shot at from the front, then the volleys began from their left, then word began flying that some of Webster’s men were getting to their rear. Lieutenant Barretté of the 23rd evaluated the Americans’ crisis well enough through the smoke and trees. Knowing that any commander dreaded having an enemy fall on his flank, because an infantry line could not turn quickly enough to face the new threat, the Fusilier officer observed that the Continentals ‘finding themselves in a situation ever to be guarded against in any disposition of war … readily broke’.
Many of the Marylanders were now running back into the trees, trying to escape the completion of the British encirclement. Cornwallis unleashed Tarleton’s cavalry to seal their fate. ‘We were obliged to retire,’ wrote Serjeant Major Seymour, ‘and left the enemy master of the field, the enemy’s horse making great slaughter among our men as they retreated.’ Some of the Marylanders continued to fight on in groups in the woods, including one that formed around their general, Baron de Kalb. The redcoats put the bayonet to those who would not surrender, and the cornered general received several such thrusts, crumpling to the ground bleeding profusely. He was captured but would die shortly after the battle.
In little more than an hour of fighting, Gates’s army, around twice the size of Cornwallis’s, had been completely defeated, with its remnants dispersed. Several veteran regiments of Continental infantry were among the broken force. All of the American cannon were taken too. Colonel Williams noted bitterly, ‘Not even a company escaped in good order – everyone escaped as he could.’