Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence (23 page)

His officers expressed “blank amazement.” Not only were they to be on the march at three in the morning, but they would be taking a route that de Kalb had already ruled out. It was the most direct path to Camden, but it passed through barren territory thinly populated by loyalists. De
Kalb’s plan had been to circle west through an area of patriot farms, where they might scrape together provisions. A few officers protested the new route, but Gates was decided.

Off they went through sandy pine barrens. Nothing to eat—Gates’s promises that food would catch up with them were empty. Already foot-weary after their six-hundred-mile trek from New Jersey, the Continentals soldiered on, punished by the South Carolina heat, electrified by mosquitoes, sand flies, and ticks. They marched another 150 miles, “living on green apples and peaches, which rendered our situation truly miserable.”
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Gates’s men overtook and merged with the force of North Carolina militiamen on August 7. Twelve miles from Camden, Gates received reports of about two thousand British troops standing guard north of the city. In spite of his superior numbers, he ruled out a frontal assault. From long experience, he knew that the outcome of any battle is uncertain. No general could control all the unforeseen factors that dictated victory or defeat. He preferred a chess match, a war of maneuvers in which calculation and stratagem could shift the odds in his favor.

He continued his march, seeking a strong defensive position. He finally encamped, after seventeen hungry days on the road, at a place called Rugeley’s Mills. The British fell back toward their main camp just north of Camden. Encouraged by the enemy’s timidity, Gates remained confident. Seven hundred Virginia militiamen under General Edward Stevens arrived to swell his grand army. Because Rugeley’s Mills did not offer the solid defensive position Gates wanted, he decided to move to a more favorable spot along Sanders Creek, seven miles closer to Camden. He ordered his officers to have their men on the road at ten o’clock that night. Again they were dumbfounded. A march through the dark was a challenge for the most disciplined troops. Raw militiamen could easily fall into confusion and lose all cohesion. Gates asked no advice and would listen to no dissent.

Before they left, an aide informed Gates that a count of his effective rank and file stood at three thousand, not the six thousand that, with the influx of militiamen, he had assumed were under his command. The general stated simply, “These are enough for our purpose.”
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Under a sky of silver-rimmed clouds, the men headed off. Fingers of moonlight illuminated the carpet of pine needles under their feet. At two in the morning, the troops had only a mile to go before they reached the ridge where they could dig in. Suddenly, a startled shout broke the lukewarm stillness. A rifle crack. A rumble of horses’ hooves. Men’s hearts bounded.

They had collided with the enemy in the dark. Danger crackled around them. British cavalrymen thundered ahead. Gates’s outnumbered horsemen gave way. American riflemen opened up. The five-minute fire-fight ended almost as suddenly as it had begun. Both groups of startled soldiers fell back.

Told that he faced a substantial force commanded by Cornwallis himself, Gates’s “astonishment could not be concealed.” One of the most experienced of all American commanders was suddenly rattled.

Gates could only guess what had happened. Cornwallis, hearing of the Americans’ approach, had galloped north from Charleston to join his men. Figuring he would substitute surprise for numbers, he had put his force on the road that night at the exact moment Gates’s troops were stepping out. He planned to assault the American camp at dawn. The extraordinary coincidence brought the cavalry of the two ignorant armies together in the dark at a spot where neither commander had planned to fight.

Gates’s men hunkered down six hundred yards from the enemy. Calling a quick council of war, Gates at last asked his officers for advice. None wanted to risk his honor by advocating a retreat. Militia general Stevens suggested they fight—it was too late for anything else. In retreat the army would be vulnerable, especially to Tarleton’s dragoons. No one objected. Gates affirmed the decision. They would fight.

In spite of their numbing fatigue, few of the Americans slept. Sporadic gunfire punctuated the unholy hours. Before light, the men moved into position on the rolling ground under a cathedral of longleaf pines. The Continentals formed on the right under de Kalb. The North Carolina men stood in the center behind eight cannon. The Virginia militia, exhausted after their punishing forced march, held the left. Swamps protected both flanks. Two Maryland Continental regiments waited behind the lines as reserves.

As light leaked into a nervous sky, Cornwallis ordered his men ahead in columns, regulars on the right, Tory militia to the left. The arrangement of the armies put two of the best regiments of redcoats directly opposite the Virginians, many of whom had never seen an enemy soldier before that morning. General Stevens hurried back to Gates and excitedly suggested that his men could attack the British before they fully deployed into a line of battle. Gates said, “Let it be done.”
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The patriot artillery opened up. The guns’ detonations took the men’s breath away. The Virginians moved forward with timid steps. The well-drilled British regulars formed quickly. Their glistening bayonets floated toward the militiamen as if disembodied. From behind the
imperious prongs of steel roared the confident chant: “Hus-SAH! Hus-SAH! Hus-SAH!”

The Virginians stood awestruck. “We have bayonets, too!”
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Stevens screamed at them. The redcoats halted, shouldered their muskets, and fired a crashing volley. Some militiamen fell. The rest panicked. Most dropped their weapons without ever firing. They turned toward the reassuring rear. They ran faster than they had ever run, officers as well as men. The panic, one observer remembered, was “like electricity”—it operated instantly and was “irresistible where it touched.”
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The terror spread to the battalions of North Carolina militiamen. The troops of every regiment but one turned and sprinted away. One soldier ran because “everyone I saw was about to do the same. It was instantaneous.”
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Men tripped, fell, got up, ran on. By this time, the battlefield had become an inferno: the cannon pulverized the silence; great clouds of smoke clogged the motionless air; visibility shrank to a few yards; ears were assaulted by screams, shots, the tramp of feet and hooves, incomprehensible shouting, wails of pain, whizzing balls, and the otherworldly braying of gutted horses.

Gates ranged behind the lines, trying to gain control of his troops. To no avail. He cantered away from the lethal melee and continued to marshal the stampeding soldiers behind the line. The men, caught up in a fever dream, ignored him. The chaos brought to mind the scene on the Monongahela a quarter of a century earlier, where a young Horatio Gates had felt a sickening thud tear his chest amid a similar disaster.

“They ran like a Torrent,” Gates later reported, “and bore all before them.”
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He decided to ride on ahead of the soldiers and rally them at the camp they’d left the night before. Even there, with the sound of the guns a distant rumble, the men would not cohere into a fighting force.

Gates now knew that the worst had happened. Soon the British cavalry would come charging along the road to scoop up the fleeing rebels. If they could capture a general of Gates’s stature, the blow to the American cause might be fatal. He must pull together a new army. To do that, he must survive. To survive, he must put distance between himself and the scene of the cataclysm. Gates and a small group of aides took off. By nightfall they had covered the distance to Charlotte, sixty miles from the scene of the action. Cold military logic dictated Gates’s decision, but leaving a battlefield where his men were still hotly engaged would indelibly stain his reputation.

After Gates fled, the fight continued. De Kalb actually believed he was winning. The smoke and disorder kept him from perceiving the collapse of the militia. His Maryland and Delaware men had rushed at the
Tories opposite. They attacked “with great alacrity and uncommon bravery, making great havock” among the enemy.
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They took fifty prisoners. The reserve battalions stepped forward to try to cover the yawning gap on the left.

But de Kalb’s six hundred could not stand against two thousand. His horse collapsed bleeding. A saber stroke opened his scalp. He fought on. The battle grew elemental: men looked each other in the eye, grappled, swung muskets as clubs. De Kalb mounted one last bayonet charge. He and his troops surged ahead, stepping over heaps of dead men. He fell, mortally wounded. “After that last effort of the continentals,” Tarleton reported, “rout and slaughter ensued in every quarter.”

Defeated armies of the day often managed a more or less orderly retreat. Sometimes they surrendered. Only rarely was an armed force utterly obliterated. This was the fate of Gates’s grand army. By noon that hot day, 650 Americans had been killed or wounded, 300 captured. The rest had scattered to the winds.

Having failed to designate a fallback position for his men, having established no base in Charlotte, Gates felt his only option was to continue all the way back to Hillsborough. He was desperate to start rebuilding a force that could keep the enemy from sweeping through that state and into Virginia. “I proceeded,” he wrote, “with all possible Dispatch.”
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He covered the two hundred miles in three days.

Horatio Gates was no coward, but in the wake of Camden he was both reviled and ridiculed. “Was there ever an instance of a general running away, as Gates has done, from his whole army?” young Alexander Hamilton sneered.
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The unfortunate general was berated for his “military absurdity.” The loss of another entire army barely twelve weeks after the disaster at Charleston brought the hopes of patriots crashing down.

In November, Gates learned that his beloved twenty-two-year-old son Robert, young Bob, his only child, had died of illness a month before. His aides had not dared add to his suffering by telling him earlier. He was devastated. “None but an unfortunate soldier, and a father left childless,” an officer wrote, “could assimilate his feelings.”
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In December, amid the weeping willows, a stricken Gates turned over the southern army to Nathanael Greene and headed home to his Virginia farm. All hope of glory was gone. He made no excuses, simply stated an eternal truth of war: “The fate of battle is uncontrollable.”
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* * *

Prospects had not looked so bleak for Washington since the dark days at the end of 1776. Now, well into 1780, he was struggling just to hold his
meager army together. Even during the summer, his troops were forced to survive on short rations. Except for Anthony Wayne’s stroke at Stony Point, the commander in chief had no recent victories to boast off. He had not commanded troops in battle since Monmouth, two years earlier. The interim he had spent waiting, worrying, and frantically working to keep his army intact. His hope that the entry of France into the war would bring a quick resolution had faded. The grinding stalemate frustrated him beyond measure.

The state of civilian society was even more depressing. An officer spoke of “the dreadful gloom which now overspreads the United States.”
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Continental currency was “fit for nothing But Bum Fodder.” A hat cost $400, a horse $20,000. Lacking buying power, the army was forced into outright confiscation of civilian property. But confiscation crippled the people’s morale. Unable to sell crops for cash, farmers had no incentive to produce a surplus.

A taste for luxury on the part of many patriots had become a sickness. “Speculations, peculation, and an insatiable thirst for riches seem to have got the better of every other consideration and almost of every order of men,” Washington lamented. He called profiteers and hoarders “pests of society and the greatest enemies we have to the happiness of America.”
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In Philadelphia, leading citizens enjoyed expensive feasts while fighting men went hungry.

Congress had exacerbated supply problems by unwisely turning the responsibility over to the states. Nathanael Greene protested that the representatives were simply multiplying problems. They responded by removing him as quartermaster general. Fortunately for the American cause, they did not dismiss him from the army altogether.

The country, Greene said, was allowing “an Army employed for the defense of every thing that is dear and valuable, to perish for want of food.” Writing to Steuben, Washington lamented, “The prospect, my dear Baron, is gloomy and the storm thickens.”
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One glimmer of hope. On July 15, 1780, a French fleet sailed into the harbor at Newport, Rhode Island, and disembarked 6,500 soldiers. With these professional troops under his command, Washington was determined finally to attack Clinton and regain New York. He would endeavor “by one great exertion to put an end to the war.”
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Henry Knox suggested besieging the city. Lafayette favored a direct assault. The French commander, the Comte de Rochambeau, remained wary. A large British fleet had just arrived to protect New York. Washington’s small army and shaky finances appalled the Frenchman. “Do not trust these people,” the Comte wrote back to Versailles.

Direct talks between the allies were essential. In mid-September 1780, Washington traveled with Knox, Lafayette, and a guard of twenty horsemen to the small village of Hartford, Connecticut, to meet Rochambeau. Washington was reluctant to leave his own army, partly for security reasons—he remembered Charles Lee’s capture in 1776—and partly because his presence kept the beleaguered force from succumbing to desertion and discouragement. But now he entrusted the troops to Nathanael Greene and rode off. Crossing the Hudson, he lunched with Benedict Arnold, who had for the past month commanded the Hudson Highlands and the army’s important fort at West Point.