Lion of Liberty (24 page)

Although George Washington warned Governor Jefferson of a possible British attack on the Virginia coast, Jefferson decided that, with the fall of Charleston, the British armies to the south posed a greater menace, and he sent 2,500 militiamen to the Carolinas. Meanwhile, Washington sent General Gates to take command of the Southern Army, and ignoring intelligence reports of a possible trap, Gates ordered his force to move against the British supply base at Camden, South Carolina. As the Americans approached Camden from the north on the morning of August 16, 2,400 British infantrymen under Major General Lord Cornwallis attacked from the south, while a company of ferocious British dragoons under the legendary Colonel Banastre Tarleton, galloped in from the rear. Tarleton's cavalry slaughtered nearly 900 Americans and captured 1,000.

With the American Southern Army in full retreat, Washington replaced Gates with Rhode Island's Major General Nathanael Greene, who shifted the direction of his army's retreat to the west—deep into the wilderness to stretch British supply lines too thin to follow. Greene's army retreated to within fifty miles of Henry's Leatherwood plantation. Knowing Henry was still Virginia's most influential figure, Greene sent Henry, as well as Governor Jefferson, an urgent appeal for help. “Our force is so inferior, that every exertion in the State of Virginia is necessary to help us,” he wrote to Jefferson. “I have taken the liberty to write to Mr. Henry to collect fourteen or fifteen hundred volunteers to aid us.”
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Henry and his son rode about the country, impassioning men to volunteer with a terrifying warning that the British were freeing and arming slaves to slaughter patriot farmers. As the cry went out that Patrick Henry needed men, nearly 2,500 Virginians streamed southward to bolster Greene's army and force Cornwallis to retreat into South Carolina, where he retired to winter quarters in Winnsborough, about 125 miles northwest of Charleston. The Cornwallis retreat ended the threat to Henry County and to
Patrick Henry's family, and, from then on, whenever Henry returned home, he made certain that if his wife was not already pregnant from his last visit, she most certainly would be by the time he left.

Apart from his evident passion to propagate, three factors spurred the phenomenal growth of his family: For one thing, the normally high infant mortality rate that decimated most families in eighteenth-century America—especially in the wilderness—would, for whatever reason, spare all but two of Henry's children.
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But another factor that impelled the growth of Henry's family was his and Dorothea's deep and genuine love of children. Both of them adored youngsters. He loved playing with them, telling them stories, strutting about playing his fiddle as they danced and jumped and sang in circles around him. His daughter Elizabeth remembered him as a “great laugher,” who taught his boys to ride, fish, and hunt. When they were small, he often took them riding on his own horse, with one boy behind him and the other riding in front. And a third factor that helped produce a big family was his genuine love of his wife. Unlike many planters, he had no liaisons with slaves or, for that matter, with any woman other than his wife. Somewhat unusual for his times, he embraced a strict moral code that kept him true to his marriage vows and away from drink and gambling.

In January 1781, Governor Thomas Jefferson paid the price of ignoring George Washington's advice to protect Virginia's waters, when 2,200 British troops under a new British commander—Brigadier General Benedict Arnold—sailed up the James River unopposed and burned Richmond.

To the south, however, General Nathanael Greene—bolstered by Henry's Virginia volunteers—set out with 3,600 men into South Carolina to harass Cornwallis. Although his force was too small to attack Cornwallis's main camp at Winnsborough, Greene sent Daniel Morgan, the heroic commander at Saratoga, with 800 riflemen to attack British supply lines. Cornwallis riposted by sending Tarleton and his fearsome dragoons to destroy Morgan's force. Morgan retreated northward, all but disappearing across a meadow called Cowpens, near the North Carolina border. When Tarleton spotted what seemed to be the American rear guard retreating at the far end of the meadow, he sent his colossal thoroughbreds thundering
across the tall grass—into the jaws of a trap. At Morgan's signal, his infantrymen and horsemen charged from the surrounding forest and shrubs into Tarleton's flanks and rear, whooping and shrieking as they set upon the hitherto unconquerable English cavalry with bullets and bayonets. “We made a sort of half circuit at full speed,” an American officer exulted, “[and] came upon the rear of the British line, shouting and charging like madmen. We were in among them with bayonets.”
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Brigadier General Benedict Arnold sold the plans of West Point defenses to the British and deserted to join the British army against his former comrades, leading a British force that burned Richmond, Virginia.
(LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

The British force panicked, their horses rearing and spinning, hooves flying, riders hurled to the ground, stumbling to their feet hysterically, and fleeing in all directions. Professionals all in traditional warfare, none had experienced what would later be called guerilla tactics. “Give them one more fire and the day is ours,” Morgan cried out to his men. And indeed it was.
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Hundreds of Redcoat horsemen—the perpetrators of the
Camden massacre—dropped their rifles and fell to the ground on their faces, some in fetal positions, others with their arms spread-eagled as they sobbed for mercy. Morgan all but eliminated Tarleton's 1,000-man cavalry as a factor in the South Carolina campaign, killing 329 and capturing 600 at a cost of fewer than 75 American lives.

Infuriated by the humiliation, Cornwallis pursued the elusive Morgan into North Carolina, where the American general linked up with Greene's main force at Guilford (present day Greensboro), about thirty miles south of the Virginia border. In the battle that followed, Cornwallis won the field, but lost nearly one-third of his men and had to retreat to his coastal base at Wilmington to let survivors lick their collective wounds.

Greene returned to South Carolina and, in the months that followed, his army captured one after another of the British posts across the state, gradually narrowing the British presence to the confines of Charleston.

In the meantime, Cornwallis grew convinced that control of the Carolinas would not be possible until he conquered Virginia, and, with his own troops refreshed and Tarleton's cavalry remanned and refurbished, he set out with 7,000 men to capture Richmond. Washington sent Lafayette with 1,000 regulars to defend the state capital, but the Frenchman's tiny force was no match for the huge British army. As Governor Jefferson and the rest of the Virginia government fled westward to Charlottesville, Lafayette and his band of Americans abandoned Richmond and retreated into the outlying forests. On May 23, 1781, the British seized the Virginia capital and, with Lafayette in full flight northward, Tarleton led a new, but no less fearsome, troop of horse westward unopposed to try to capture Jefferson and the rest of the Virginia government and end the war in that colony. In Henry's former home county of Hanover, they burst into one house in the middle of the night, found his half brother John Syme Jr., and took him prisoner. The following day, the horsemen thundered into Charlottesville and captured seven assemblymen before they could rise from their desks. Alerted by a breathless young Patriot officer, Captain Jack Jouett, Henry and the others fled over a narrow mountain pass into the Blue Ridge mountains, where frontiersmen and back-country hunters could use their long rifles to block any further British advance. Legend has it that Henry and two other legislatures stopped at a farmer's house for
food and drink, only to be rebuffed by the farmer's wife when they identified themselves as legislators fleeing the British.

“My husband and sons are just gone to Charlottesville to fight for you,” she shouted, “and you're running away? Ride on—you'll have nothing here.”

“But we were obliged to fly,” Henry snapped at the old lady. “It would not do for the legislature to be broken up by the enemy. Here is Mr. Speaker Benjamin Harrison; you don't think he would have fled had it not been necessary?”

“I always thought a great deal of Mr. Harrison till now,” the woman barked, “but he'd no business to run from the enemy.”

Harrison then pointed out Patrick Henry and said that he had fled with them.

“Well,” the woman concluded, “if that's Patrick Henry then it must be all right. Come in.”
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As Harrison and Henry bickered in the back country, Tarleton's horsemen rode into Charlottesville, sending Jefferson in full flight to his aerie at Monticello, where he sent his wife and two daughters to safety in another town. As he and two colleagues hurriedly sorted official papers to take with them, Jouett galloped to the door to warn that Tarleton's men were but five minutes away at the foot of the mountain. Jefferson barely escaped capture by riding off through the woods on the opposite side of the hill.

As Tarleton's dragoons terrified local farms, Cornwallis pushed Lafayette's little force northward to within sight of the Rappahannock River and Fredericksburg, where the sudden arrival of General “Mad” Anthony Wayne and 1,300 Pennsylvanians halted the British advance. After Wayne replenished, reclothed, and rearmed Lafayette's little army, the combined American force crossed the Rappahannock to attack. Far from his sources of supplies—his men exhausted in the stifling Virginia heat and humidity—Cornwallis had no choice but to begin a measured retreat to Chesapeake Bay and the safety of his ships.

Out of his depth in military matters, Jefferson decided to turn over his office “to abler hands” as he neared the end of his second term. He told Washington he believed that “a military chief” would bring “more energy,
promptitude and effect for the defense of the state.”
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The Assembly elected General Thomas Nelson, the owner of a large Tidewater plantation, to replace Jefferson and opened “an inquiry . . . into the conduct of the Executive of this state for the last twelve months.”
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Although Edmund Randolph scoffed at the inquiry as “the usual antidote for public distress,” Henry voted with the majority of the Assembly to investigate allegations that Thomas Jefferson had failed to make “some exertions which he might have made for the defense of the county.”
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Outraged by the proposed inquiry, Jefferson would never forgive Henry, although he admitted quite openly that his unwillingness to seek reelection stemmed directly from his inability to perform his gubernatorial duties properly at the time of the British invasion.

By June 22, Cornwallis's retreat toward the sea left Richmond back in American hands, with Lafayette's force following hard on the English rear guard, sniping first at one flank, then the other, and pouncing on foraging parties. At Richmond, 1,600 militiamen joined his force, and, as volunteers from plantations pillaged by Tarleton swarmed into camp, Lafayette's army swelled to more than 5,000 men—still too small for a direct engagement, but large enough for bolder strokes. With every step beyond Richmond, Lafayette sent patrols into the surrounding forests to channel the English vanguard onto the cape between the York and James rivers. He sent patrols to the opposite banks to prevent the British from leaving the cape, while his vanguard struck incessantly at the British rear and forced them inexorably toward Yorktown, at the end of the cape overlooking Chesapeake Bay.

In the North, meanwhile, an army of nearly 7,000 French troops at Newport, Rhode Island, marched southward to join Washington's 8,000-man Continental Army. On August 30, a French fleet of warships entered Chesapeake Bay and surrounded the cape at Yorktown to prevent any British escape by water. Two weeks later, the combined allied force marched into Williamsburg, and four weeks later, the American Continental Army charged through enemy redoubts. As shell bursts reduced British fortifications to rubble, Cornwallis made a vain counterattack, but on October 17, he sent a message to Washington proposing “a cessation of hostilities.”