Fusiliers (17 page)

Watson stood and told his tale of woe. He had gone off drinking with Jacob Jones, of the same company, and Jones’s brother, who was a civilian living near Boston. Having boozed away several hours, they staggered to the quay where Private Jones’s brother was going to take a rowing boat back across the bay to Dorchester where he lived. Watson told the court he had been knocked down, tied up in the boat, and his captors, ‘clapping a pistol to his head, swore that if he made a noise they would shoot him’.

The story of the following months, as told by Watson, was one of his trying to rejoin his regiment, failing to get through the Boston lines and then, once the city was evacuated, subsisting through a series of jobs while he lamented his fate. Watson had gone to White Plains in Connecticut and worked in his old trade as a miner before finding his way down to New York and trying by various desperate measures, including canoeing out to the fleet off Staten Island, to rejoin the Fusiliers. All the time he had been hidden in the house of one Mr Smith, a true friend to the government.

Mary Smith, the daughter-in-law of that loyal New Yorker, was called into the room. Members of the court began their cross-examination and it was soon apparent that they had not believed Watson’s story:

‘Do you know him to have been in the rebel army?’ asked one of the redcoated officers.

‘All I know of that is that the prisoner came one day into my house with Jones, who was a Drum Major in the rebel army,’ Mary Smith began her answer. Jacob Jones was the fellow 23rd deserter. Evidently, he had joined the rebels, as had his brother. Miss Smith remembered Watson had cursed Jacob Jones for getting him into his predicament.

‘When did you see [Watson] last in the rebel uniform?’ she was asked. Why, he had been wearing it until the British arrived in New
York, when Watson had asked her to carry a letter to the royal Governor’s house, asking how he might rejoin the King’s army. It was afternoon, so the court adjourned for the day.

Watson’s meditations that night in jail can only be imagined. The court was clearly examining whether he should be facing the additional capital charge of bearing arms with the enemy. While the redcoats knew of many instances of clemency being shown to deserters, this additional crime was a matter unlikely to be forgiven. The case of Winters of the 59th, hanged just a couple of weeks before, had exhibited almost identical circumstances.

On the morning of 4 October, the court martial resumed its session and Mary Smith was recalled. The officers seated behind their table wasted little time, and immediately began asking her about whether weapons had been in the house with Watson. The charge of ‘bearing arms’ had to be proven as a fact, for wearing the rebel uniform was not enough to send the defendant to the rope. Watson signalled the president that he wished to ask the witness a question, as was his right.

‘Did you not hear me say that I would rather die by [the hands of] my own regiment than stay in the country with the rebels?’

‘Indeed,’ replied Mrs Smith, and once the British had arrived in New York she heard Watson say that, if he were to be restored to his regiment, he wished immediately ‘to be engaged with the rebels that he might have satisfaction of them’.

Another witness was called who had also seen Watson in rebel uniform. Had he been armed? She, like Mrs Smith, could not say that they had ever seen the prisoner carrying a weapon. The witnesses furthermore testified to his desertion from the rebel army when it quit New York and to his attempts to enlist the Governor’s help in returning to the army.

The court considered its verdict.

While the general court martial sat, General Howe’s army pressed ahead with its campaign against the Continental Army. Inspired by the victory of Long Island and capture of New York, the redcoats yearned to catch up with the rebels and destroy them. This new-found ardour produced frustration both with a commander-in-chief who seemed unable to match this desire for speed and, often, with the local inhabitants upon whom troops cooped up for months on transport ships had been let loose.

On the second day of Watson’s trial, Major Kemble, the Deputy Adjutant General, wrote in his journal, ‘The ravages committed by the Hessians, and all ranks of the army, on the poor inhabitants of the country make their case deplorable; the Hessians destroy all fruits of the earth without regard to Loyalists or Rebels.’ Kemble, American born and connected to a prominent loyalist family, could easily see how counterproductive this might be. It had already become clear that soldiers were allowed by their officers to forage for supplies on lands owned by noted rebels – but how could they tell who owned some stray cow, and did the average soldier even care whose fence he pulled down for firewood?

The entreaties of Kemble and others produced a General Order from Howe. ‘The Commander-in-chief is greatly disappointed’, it noted, ‘that the repeated orders … for the suppression of plundering and marauding, have not been attended to by the troops, as he had a right to expect.’ Howe, though, was speaking to his men with two voices. He was ready to try soldiers for serious crimes and at the same time hinted to them that rebel lives and property were forfeit.

In September an order from the Commander-in-chief had recorded that, since his assault tactics had won the day at Long Island, ‘The general therefore recommends … to the troops an entire dependency upon their bayonets, with which they will ever command that success their bravery so well deserves.’ Captain Frederick Mackenzie drew the following conclusion in his journal several weeks later: ‘In the several attacks lately made on the rebels by the troops under Gen Howe, very few prisoners have been taken. The soldiers generally made use of their bayonets.’

Even some of the more liberal tracts of the time acknowledged that a rebel had lost the right to life and property. Such summary justice had been visited upon the Scots after their rising in 1745 and, a generation before, the Duke of Marlborough’s army had used ‘devastation’ of enemy lands as a deliberate tactic. The Ministerial policy in America, however, was that those who had been seduced into a misguided and unnatural rebellion against their lawful sovereign would be dealt with humanely and allowed every chance to return to their just allegiance.

This desire to communicate a double message – both of mercy and of a desire to crush the rebellion – conditioned Howe’s behaviour towards the inhabitants of New York. There would be no executions
or repression of Patriot civilians, most of whom had left the city in any case. The general did, however, send to the gallows an American captain who had been captured on 21 September in plain clothes, undertaking a spying mission. He was strung up the following day without the benefit of even a general court martial – evidently Howe wished to send a strong message.

As for the conduct of operations, when the army pushed beyond New York, it may be that having liberated the spirit of the unstoppable charge within his army, Howe did not wish to check it. In a series of amphibious operations beyond New York this aggression had carried the day, even if it looked, at times, that it might get out of hand. The 42nd, the Black Watch, and Light Infantry had suffered a costly rebuff on Harlem Heights, north of New York, on 16 September. At Pell’s Point one month later, the defenders exploited British haste to lay a series of ambushes. These actions brought caustic comment from Hessian officers who believed the British emphasis on speed meant formation was often lost and ambushes too easily sprung. They also allowed the Whig news-sheets to find something that might encourage their dispirited partisans.

The overall course of the war in October and November was, though, moving as the King would have wanted. Washington’s army was driven away, first to the north, to White Plains, where Howe missed another opportunity to bring him to battle, and then south and west, to the Jerseys.

In this harrying of the Americans, the British general was at least wearing them down through horrendous desertion. Following the humiliations of this campaign, it was the Patriots who began to detect the hostile glances in villages they passed through, wondering whether locals would feed their enemy with intelligence. One general marching through the Jerseys reported to Washington, ‘Tories are in my front rear and on my flanks – the mass of the people is strangely contaminated – in short unless something which I do not expect turns up we are lost.’

On 16 November, Fort Washington, which the American commander had unwisely left behind on Manhattan Island, was taken with the loss of more than 2,800 men. The failure of generalship in reinforcing a surrounded post for which there was little hope caused dissension among the Continental Army’s senior ranks.

In the coffee houses and across the tables in headquarters, the fall of
Fort Washington prompted a different debate among British officers. Some of the most violent opponents of rebellion argued that the surrender of the doomed garrison should not have been accepted and that, instead, the whole should have been put to the sword. Their argument was that such a massacre would have given the death-blow to the rebellion as a whole. Such views did not hold sway with many though.

The humane treatment of prisoners was well established as a civilised norm for officers like Frederick Mackenzie. ‘Many are of the opinion that if Gen Howe had treated the garrison of Fort Washington with the severity which might have been inflicted upon them by the laws of war, it should have struck a panic throughout the Continent,’ Mackenzie recorded in his journal, before countering, ‘although the humanity hitherto shown to the rebels has not had the desired effect, I hope it may in the end; and I am of the opinion it is right to treat our enemies as of they might one day become our friends.’

Following the fall of that fort, Howe sent Earl Cornwallis with the army’s picked troops across the Hudson to New Jersey, where he made an attempt on Fort Lee, which was abandoned by its commander with huge loss of materiel. Cornwallis pursued this retreating garrison west inland and then south, as it struggled to unite with the remnants of the main force under Washington. This swift British advance excited the hope among many redcoats that they might be in Philadelphia, the rebel capital, by Christmas and the campaign finished.

General Howe did not see it that way, though. His concept of strategy was both thorough, in terms of its emphasis on logistic preparation, and plodding, in that he was often able to spot his opening at the scene of a battle but missed every cue on the grand stage of war. Seeing this slowness, some officers began to speculate that Whig sympathies led Howe to let Washington off the hook deliberately, others that their commanders did not want to wind up the war because they were making too much money from it.

By 20 December, Howe’s staff issued orders that the army should enter winter quarters – an accepted tradition in European warfare whereby the requirements of staying warm and fed would take over from those of war until the spring came. Several thousand British and Hessian troops were deployed in an arc in New Jersey, in which their scattered outposts enclosed dozens of rural communities, many thousands of citizens that might be reconciled to the restoration of royal rule.

When the court martial delivered its verdict on 4 October, it was brief and to the point. In his copperplate hand, the clerk recorded that Private Watson was guilty and the court ‘doth sentence the said Thomas Watson to receive seven hundred lashes on his bare back with a cat of nine tails’.

Members of the court had quickly penetrated Watson’s story, about struggling for more than one year to rejoin his regiment, assuming instead that he had joined the rebel army outside Boston with his messmate Jacob Jones and may even have fought the King’s troops. There was however no evidence of his bearing arms for the rebels, the particular that saved the Fusilier from a death sentence. It was also evident that Watson regretted his decision to join the American army.

The question of his liaison with a New York woman emerged in court, and may have explained his conduct, but she was not called as a witness, for it was incidental to the matter under examination. Instead the officers sitting under Lieutenant Colonel Gunning’s presidency had had to ask themselves to balance the punishment due a deserter with a desire to lure back scores of other men who had done the same thing in the months before war and might be experiencing similar doubts. Suspending Watson from the nearest gallows would simply have sent the message that there was no point trying to return to the King’s colours, for the witnesses had been clear on the point that Watson had attempted to arrange his surrender once New York had fallen.

So, the Fusilier had escaped the hanging suffered by Hunter or Winters. The prospect of 700 lashes, delivered by the regiment’s drummers, held terror for many men, but it was rare for such large tariffs to be served up in full. What any soldier locked up in the provost could have told Watson was that the British army in America rarely punished its men to the degree it was entitled to.

John Browning, for example, the soldier of the 23rd who had been clapped in irons for striking an officer at Halifax, had stood trial for his life on Staten Island in July. With evidence sketchy to back a lieutenant’s claim that he had been hit, Browning was acquitted of the capital charge but found guilty of insulting a serjeant, for which he was ordered to receive 200 lashes. However, General Howe reviewed the case and waived the corporal punishment, arguing that if Browning was acquitted of the more serious offence there was no point in chastising him at all. Despite being found guilty of insulting a serjeant, Browning was therefore allowed to return quietly to the 23rd
without sanction. Even when men were tried, awarded the ultimate penalty, and had the sentence confirmed by the commander-in-chief, clemency was usually granted. So, while Howe had proven during his first year as commander-in-chief in America to be a tougher disciplinarian than his predecessor, it was still the case that the majority of men convicted of capital offences, and many of those sentenced to corporal punishment, walked off scot-free.