The First American Army (40 page)

Washington placed Anthony Wayne’s regiments, with some two thousand men, just arrived, on a second line of defense farther back up the slope and repositioned the first cannon that he could find on the knoll Rhea had designated. Regiments were stationed along the edges of woods to the right and left of the main force to prevent any flanking movements by the British.

Seely noted that what followed was “a great severe action in which the enemy lost several officers of distinction and left about two hundred men dead on the grounds. Numbers died on both sides.” On the other side of the battlefield, Sergeant Ebenezer Wild of the First Massachusetts had been marching with brigades under the Marquis de Lafayette for several days. Washington had at first put Lafayette in charge of the attack, but later changed his mind because he felt that Lafayette’s troops were not in the proper position and because the obstinate Lee insisted on being given that job as second in command.

Wild, who always spelled Lafayette’s name as “Markis Delefiat,” had been drenched in the thunderstorm that broke over the region two nights earlier. Lafayette’s brigades slept in the field each night as they moved closer to intercepting the British, with no protection from the elements. Wild wrote, “We took our lodgings in the road, without anything to cover us, or anything to lodge on but the wet ground and we in a very wet condition.”

The First Massachusetts marched five more miles the next day, June 27, that Wild said was “excessively hot,” and then, on June 28, reached Monmouth Court House just before 2 p.m. He had arrived at the opposite side of the battlefield from Seely and his militia. The Massachusetts men found the fighting severe as soon as they tried to hold a position on top of the slope where Washington had repositioned his army. Wild wrote, “Our division formed a line on an eminence about a half a mile in the front of the enemy and our artillery in our front. A very smart cannonading ensued from both sides.”

The Massachusetts men had marched into the middle of the fury and were unable to make much movement. Shells exploded all around them in what one newspaper called “the severest cannonade [that] ever happened in America.”
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Wild wrote, “We stayed here till several of our officers and men were killed and wounded. Seeing that it was of no service to stand here, we went back a little ways into the woods; but the cannonading still continued very smart on both sides for about two hours.”

Arriving earlier with Lee was the Second Rhode Island, with Private Jeremiah Greenman. The Rhode Islander, like everyone at Monmouth, complained of the heat, which he described as “hot and sultry.” The pullback ordered by Lee that morning was seen from many perspectives. The soldier’s view was that of a soldier facing the brunt of the English force directly in front of him. Greenman and his comrades were awed by the size of the British army. He wrote, “They formed in a solid column then fired a volley at us. They being so much superior to our numbers, we retreated. They began a very heavy cannonading and killed a few of our regiment.”

The men, scrambling back and away from the lines of Redcoats, found some protection behind a wooden fence, where they made another stand. He noted, “Light horse advanced against us. We fired very heavy. Then the footmen rushed on us.” Greenman and his men continued to fight as General Lee panicked. The Second Rhode Island seemed pinned down. “After firing a number of rounds, we was obliged to retreat,” Greenman wrote.

Greenman noted with alarm that many of the men running from the British on that unbearably hot day simply collapsed on the field and died of heatstroke. The entire battlefield was covered with men who died from the heat on both sides. “Left the ground with about a thousand killed and wounded, on our side about two hundred killed and wounded and died with heat.”

It was during that retreat that Private Greenman’s men were turned around by George Washington and ordered to attack the oncoming waves of the enemy. They did. This time they had assistance from sixteen American cannon opening up on each side of them. Amid the bursting shells and the volleys of musket balls in the warm air, Jeremiah Greenman was shot in the thigh and went down.

The American lines held against the constant bombardment of British cannon. Their fire was eventually muted by the return fire of the line of American cannon. The American batteries were not destroyed by the British howitzers, as planned, because the shells continually landed short of their marks. The American infantrymen held off a succession of British charges, large and small, that afternoon. Colonel Stephen Olney’s regiment had lost several men during the retreat, but they stopped and formed a solid line when they heard the American cannon erupt behind them and someone arrived, shouting encouragement to them. Olney wrote, “At this instant our main army came up, commanded by Washington himself, and commenced a heavy fire with our artillery and the British found they had got a fresh army to contend with.”
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The charge that Washington ordered late in the day pushed the British back. The Americans were proud of their work. “Drove the proud King’s Guards and haughty British Grenadiers and gained immortal honor,” wrote Major Joseph Bloomfield of his men in the Third New Jersey.
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The Americans fought with all the appearances of a fine European army as they were trained to do so at Valley Forge by von Steuben. Late in the afternoon, Britain’s General Clinton launched a classic flanking movement, but following their Valley Forge training in maneuvering, the American line swung over to stop it and halted the Redcoats in their tracks. That force, led by Anthony Wayne, remained exceedingly cool under the heavy British advance that began just five hundred feet away. Wayne and the officers had the men hold their fire until the last possible moment; then they opened up with a thunderous volley that stopped the attack. The Continentals began to chase the British. A group of Redcoats, pinned down in an orchard, were driven back by Americans and then shredded by Continental cannon as they tried to flee. The army had become, just as Washington had dreamed, a professional force capable of holding its own against, and even defeating, any army in the world.
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The intensity of the battle that day was best described by Washington himself in a letter to Congress. He wrote of the British that “they were bravely repulsed and driven back by detached parties of infantry . . . General Wayne advanced with a body of troops and kept up so severe and well directed a fire that the enemy were soon compelled to retire.”

The general had nothing but admiration for the regular army and the several New Jersey militia units that had joined it. He declared, “The behavior of the troops in general, after they recovered from the first surprise occasioned by the retreat of the advanced corps, was such as could not be surpassed.”
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The Americans held the battlefield all night and awoke the next morning to find the British camp vacant. Clinton had had enough of the combined regular army and militia forces; he had departed and headed north, for New York, his original goal. Technically, the battle was a draw, but the Americans claimed victory because they had held the field. American losses were 356 killed and wounded; the British lost 358. More than sixty soldiers on each side died of heat stroke. Monmouth was a military success and a public relations coup for the American army and gave the rebellion new spirit.
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That spirit was muted for Sylvanus Seely and his militia company, though, because on the following day, another brutally hot one, he and his men were given one of the grim details of the war; they were told to bury the dead at Monmouth. There were so many dead Americans on the field near the courthouse that it took all day to dig their graves.

S
eely was under stress throughout the rest of 1778 and in the early days of 1779. He was trying to buy and sell goods for his store, keep the army supplied, run his militia company, and, at the same time, care for his wife Jane, who was nine months pregnant at Christmas and expecting her child any day. The baby finally arrived two weeks later, on January 11, 1779. Betsy Seely’s birth was a very difficult one, however, and Jane was bedridden and sick for weeks.

The militia leader, knowing how poorly she felt, had to leave for Philadelphia for three days shortly after the birth of his daughter to buy things for his store. “Left my wife very sick,” he wrote in his diary. He was pleased, though, to discover that she was “mending” when he came home. Jane, or “Jenny,” as he called her, was ill for the rest of the month and much of February. Seely did what he could to comfort her and in early February persuaded one of his relatives, a woman, to help him nurse his wife.

The weather improved in mid February 1779, which pleased Seely. He wrote, “We have had so warm a spell that the maple trees are in season and the elm buds are swollen and sundry other buds and the grass begins to start.”

The British were pleased with the mild weather, too, because they planned to sneak out of New York and raid Elizabethtown where they would kidnap Governor Livingston as he dined with friends there. The surprise attack came on February 25. The Americans were overwhelmed by the British, who burned the army barracks in that community, along with several residential homes. The governor was having dinner with some military officers and Seely. They were startled, but all managed to escape. David Little, a local freeholder, was not so fortunate. He was seized along with twenty other residents in another part of town.

It was one of a number of attempts by the British to kidnap highranking political and military officials. Some succeeded and some did not. They had captured Charles Lee in 1776 and held him for nearly a year and a half. Later, they would arrest Henry Laurens, one of the presidents of the Continental Congress, when they found him on an oceangoing vessel that they seized. The grand prize in these schemes was George Washington and one year later they would stage a raid deep into New Jersey, and into Seely’s backyard, in a bold attempt to capture the commander in chief.

Seely was also an eyewitness to another kind of history that winter. His close friend and Chatham neighbor, Shepard Kollock, had been talked into publishing his own newspaper by George Washington and Henry Knox. New Jersey had only one newspaper, the
New Jersey Gazette,
funded by the state legislature and published in Burlington, in the southern half of New Jersey and far from the population centers in the northern half. Washington wanted a newspaper that would be pro-army, a journal that was independent and respected, but one that he knew would praise the army and the country. Kollock, a lieutenant, was the nephew of William Goddard, one of America’s most respected editors. Kollock had edited a small newspaper in the West Indies and had recently worked on the newspaper in Burlington. Kollock was also eager to leave the army. Washington and Henry Knox met with the lieutenant and proposed that he become the editor of a new paper, the
Jersey Journal,
that would be subsidized by the army. He would keep any profits he made from advertising and circulation and the paper would be his when the war ended. He had to promise to promote the interests of the army in its columns.

Washington would also provide him with all the editorial material he needed, including copies of his letters to Congress and his orders, sermons by ministers that the general knew, and political columns and copies of bills in the New Jersey legislature provided by the commander’s close friend, New Jersey governor William Livingston.

The army would also provide couriers to deliver the newspaper not only in the Chatham–Morristown area, and to the army camp there, but to other army camps and to towns in New Jersey and New York not occupied by the British. Kollock would also receive an immediate honorable discharge from the army so that he could run the paper as a civilian, permitting him to return to his wife, who lived near Chatham, right away.

Kollock, a tall, large-framed man with shaggy eyebrows, a large nose, and grey eyes, agreed to the arrangement, one that would give him a career after the end of the war. Seely was there in Day’s Tavern, Chatham, when Kollock published his first issue and admired it along with his assistant, John Woods, and two young apprentices, Shelly Arnett and Matthias Day.
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There was something in Chatham that Seely admired more, though, and that was the lovely Mrs. Stephen Ball.