Fusiliers (26 page)
After the capitulation of Saratoga in October 1777, the captured men had been marched 200 miles east to Boston. The Convention under which they had ‘piled their arms’, not ‘surrendered’ – the distinction was important given what subsequently happened – stated that once they were in Massachusetts, they would be put on board British ships for home.
Corporal Roger Lamb of the 9th (the same regiment as Reeves and Buchanan) described conditions in the clapboard shacks on Prospect Hill that winter:
It was not infrequent for thirty or forty persons, men women and children, to be indiscriminately crowded together in one small, miserable, open hut; their provisions and fire wood on short allowance; and a scanty portion of straw in their bed, their own blankets their only covering.
Lamb, twenty-two years old at the time, was one of eleven children from Dublin. He left this description of himself:
I was about five feet nine inches. I had a cadaverous countenance full of cavities and projections and a body as thin, and straight as a lath, and in spite of the meekness of my name I was neither gentle by nature nor polished by
education, I was rough and active with the voice of a lion, and a long black head of hair tied behind.
This Irish corporal had yearned for a life of adventure at sea, but joined the 9th in 1773. He had lost his money gambling but was too frightened of his father to tell him about it. The breach with his father became one of the defining moments of the young man’s life.
As a literate, intelligent fellow, Lamb had been made a corporal by the age of nineteen but had risked his new-found status by the heavy drinking and gambling that preoccupied officers and men of the Irish garrison at that time. Broken back to the ranks once, Lamb suffered the indignity of having his shoulder knot off cut off in front of the regiment. Shamed by the experience, he resolved to reform himself.
Engaged in the game of chance that is war, fighting his way towards Saratoga, Lamb had turned his back on vice. He became instead one of those smart soldiers upon whom captains or colonels of the time relied to do the company accounts or help with other administrative duties. Ambition or yearning for self-improvement had taken hold, for Lamb began assisting the regimental surgeon, a part-time duty that could lead to promotion in the medical line or even an officer’s commission.
It might be observed that the hardships Lamb and the others suffered on Prospect Hill were mild compared to those endured by American prisoners on the prison hulks in New York. However the redcoats’ privations were lessened once the Americans hit upon the idea of getting the British to be responsible for the welfare of their own prisoners, providing rations for their prisoners, as well as maintaining the men’s pay. This allowed the captured redcoats to buy all manner of extras, including drink of course, from the local people. This particular violation of the Saratoga Convention cannot have bothered the British, since the Americans would have experienced all manner of difficulties feeding them, but as the months went on it became clear that there was a more fundamental question playing itself out.
Major General Horatio Gates had negotiated the Convention after fighting Burgoyne’s army to a standstill, and surrounding it. Gates’s concern about British attempts to link up from New York made him do a deal quickly. After receiving the glorious fillip to the cause of this British capitulation, many politicians in the Continental Congress decided that Gates had been too generous by far. After all, if Burgoyne’s regiments were shipped back to England or Ireland, wouldn’t that simply free others to replace them in America?
So while the British government was sufficiently convinced by American good faith even to send a fleet of transports to its base at Rhode Island, in readiness to collect the so-called Convention Army, the Americans had changed their mind about letting them go. This, of course, exacerbated the widespread prejudice among British soldiers serving in America that the rebels were untrustworthy – guilty of one lie or hypocrisy after another.
For the brighter men like Lamb, this violation of principle was important. If Burgoyne’s regiments had not actually surrendered, would escape constitute desertion from their own army? Initially, British officers had insisted precisely that, but as the spring of 1778 arrived in Boston, American behaviour caused minds to change. ‘When I saw’, wrote Lamb, ‘that the American rulers had no intention of allowing British troops to return to England, I determined on attempting my escape into New York.’
Colonel Henley and men of his ilk had no desire to make such flight any easier and, early in April 1778, the Convention Army was marched more than sixty miles inland to Rutland County, New Hampshire. During the move, Lamb became involved in a confrontation with local authorities.
Accused by a publican of breaking glasses in a tavern, Lamb denied responsibility and refused to pay. He was ordered to suffer the gauntlet, being whipped with sticks by two lines of men he had to run between. After refusing again to pay, Lamb was forced to submit to the same punishment once more.
On arriving in Rutland, the redcoats were placed in a wooden fenced enclosure, given nails and planks and told to build their own camp. Lamb began to discuss his escape plan with a couple of other soldiers.
Travelling long distances through the American countryside was bound to be difficult. Everywhere there were committees of public safety, patrols and movements of Continental regiments along the roads. A small group of British soldiers wearing their uniforms could only cross such a land with the greatest difficulty. It was, however, not impossible, indeed some men had already achieved it, getting to New York, Rhode Island or Canada with the help of loyal Americans.
Faced with a slowly increasing trickle of British escapees and a constant fear of loyalists holding secret correspondence with the British army, Congress had enacted a new law on collaboration early
in 1778, and by the summer there were hangings galore of those accused of diverse offences. An extract from a letter by John Stark, whose success at Bunker Hill had gained him brigadier’s rank, will suffice to illustrate. ‘They do very well in the hanging way,’ he wrote of the Albany courts in June 1778. ‘They hanged nine on the 16th of May, and on the 5th June nine; and have 120 in jail of which, I believe, more than one half will go the same way.’ Many of these condemned men were ordinary criminals, but Stark was evidently worried about those with loyalist sympathies, saying he had ‘the enemy on my front and the devil in my rear’.
In dispensing summary justice, American courts martial or committees of public safety benefited from there being a poorly defined legal hierarchy and right of appeal. One English civilian who found himself accused of spying in Virginia noted that while travelling in the backcountry these proceedings were conducted in absentia: ‘I was arraigned, tried, condemned, and the sentence nearly put into execution before I knew anything about it.’ The court in this case suggested its prisoner would remain in jail until ‘convinced of [his] political errors’, but he eventually was released on parole. A rapid promenade to the gallows, though, was the fate awaiting many others, and it would not be stating matters too boldly to say that much of the American countryside was in the grip of terror at this time. In planning their escape, Lamb and his friends would therefore need to pool cash for bribes and trust that providence might bring them to some civilians willing to risk all in order to help them. While they made their preparations, the British main army was re-deploying, abandoning Philadelphia.
During early June, General Sir Henry Clinton’s army quickened preparations for its departure. Their stay in Philadelphia had lasted barely eight months but even in this short time men who are accustomed to perpetual motion will start to put down roots. Ten Fusiliers deserted in May and June 1778, the worst spate of absconding since the war had begun. A couple of others had gone in March and April, including Thomas Watson, the private courtmartialled in New York in October 1776 for his previous desertion. This time, Watson evaded re-capture, and the general presumption was that these men left because of attachments to local women whom they did not wish to abandon when the army marched and who then aided their desertion.
The same was seen in other regiments, amounting to a loss to the army totalling hundreds of men. The tender charms of American womanhood thus cost Britain’s commander-in-chief as many men in 1778 as Brandywine and Germantown combined had the previous year. Thomas Sullivan of the 49th was one such, deserting near the end of June. Sullivan wrote that he did it because of ‘the ill usage I received … and partly on account of my being married to a young woman who was born in America, whom I knew wished me to be clear of the army’.
In other cases, those women who had become tied to the British army left with it. Many families were evacuated along with the wounded by ships that sailed down the Delaware. Most of the merchant families who had entertained young officers at assemblies in their mansions decided to stay, gambling that their status would save them from harsh retribution. Others, such as Joseph Galloway, a prominent loyalist who had become the city’s chief of police under William Howe, decamped before the troops marched out.
During the final days in the city, a peace delegation arrived from Britain to see the Americans. Their meetings, like those held on Staten Island two years earlier, did not produce a successful outcome. Although it was rumoured among British officers that the King’s commissioners would even offer to recognise American independence, the colonists were expecting the imminent assistance of a powerful French fleet and were inclined to press on with the war.
The failed mission of the peace commissioners and the preparations for departure underlined to the army just how dire was their national emergency. General Clinton knew that anything up to one third of the troops under his command would soon be taken away and sent south to defend British Caribbean possessions from French attack. Clinton, often a morose and lugubrious character, felt that the Ministry’s will to prosecute the American war had evaporated, even if the King still wanted it. The General felt helpless at being placed in charge: ‘Neither honour nor credit could be expected from it, but on the contrary a considerable portion of the blame … seemed to be almost inevitable.’ Surveying these gloomy prospects, one grenadier officer in Philadelphia exclaimed, ‘Alas Britain how art thou fallen.’
On 18 June the army marched, shedding the odd lovelorn member and pushing towards New York. This journey might be accomplished in as little as one week’s march if unopposed, but Clinton had every
reason to believe that General Washington would pursue him with the Continental Army, and that the Jersey militia would be alarmed everywhere to his front.
For the soldiers tramping forward with full equipment, overcast weather during the early days of the march gave way to scorching June heat, an additional and quite deadly enemy. In many places it became hard to fill up a canteen because the American militia filled in the wells. They also did their best to help Washington’s pursuit. ‘The enemy had all along’, wrote one of Clinton’s officers, ‘made some … attempts to obstruct or at least retard our march by pulling up the bridges thrown across small creeks and causeways, and felling timber across the roads.’
Ten days after leaving Philadelphia, on Sunday the 28th, with the British troops just a couple of marches from their destination, Washington caught up with them at a place called Monmouth. The American commander-in-chief knew that he would soon lose his chance to engage the British, so, early in the morning, he ordered his advanced guard under Major General Charles Lee to attack the British rear.
It was the middle of the day before Washington, riding forward, saw streams of fleeing men coming past, informing him that the British had counter-attacked and Lee was falling back in all places. Clinton had rounded on his pursuers. Sending one division to keep going towards New York (this included the 23rd under Lieutenant Colonel Balfour), he had rounded with another, under Earl Cornwallis.
Clinton and his divisional commander were concerting a plan when they spotted a group of enemy officers watching them from a hill. This party included Colonel John Laurens, a principal aide to Washington, and Major General Baron von Steuben, a Prussian émigré who, inflating his prior military credentials and social rank, had gained a position of some influence in the American general’s camp. Clinton mistook the figure of von Steuben, with his bejewelled star (denoting a European order of distinction), for the Marquis de Lafayette, Washington’s young French acolyte, and sent cavalry in pursuit of the enemy staff.
British light dragoons cantered towards the knoll, dividing into two troops so as to encircle the American officers. Had they caught von Steuben it would have been an embarrassment but not a fatal blow to his cause, for in the preceding months at Valley Forge, the German had already made his contribution, imposing uniform drill and inculcating
a more soldierly bearing among the ragtag regiments of the Continental Army. But the British were not in luck: Laurens, von Steuben and their comrades outran their pursuers and found their way back to Washington. They reported to their chief that Major General Lee had panicked, ordering a retreat after firing barely a shot. Washington found his advanced guard commander and dismissed him on the spot.
Clinton, seeing an opportunity to strike Washington’s main column on its head as it emerged from a series of passes or defiles in the hilly country, sent his grenadiers and Guards to the attack. They went racing forward, but men were soon dropping from the heat. The temperature was such that they could feel the hot sand through their shoes; after a few miles, fainting and expiring soldiers littered the way. One grenadier wrote home of ‘the sun beating on our heads with a force to be scarcely conceived in Europe, and not a drop of water to assuage our parching thirst; is it to be wondered that in these circumstances a number of soldiers were unable to support the fatigue and died on the spot.’
