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This British Officer Developed a Revolutionary Rifle Whose Worth He Was Never Able to Prove in Battle

John Miles — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 13:30:00 +0000

It was 1760, in the midst of the Seven Years’ War, and 16-year-old Cornet Patrick Ferguson was having the time of his life. He and another young officer were on horseback a few miles out in front of the British army when they ran afoul of a party of French-allied German hussars. Deciding it prudent to retire, they turned and spurred their mounts. As his horse jumped a ditch, Ferguson dropped one of his pistols. The naive lad, thinking it improper for an officer to return to camp without all his weapons, recrossed the ditch in the face of the pursuing enemy and dismounted to recover his pistol. The hussars, perhaps surmising a British dragoon wouldn’t be so foolhardy unless he had spotted friendly reinforcements, halted in their tracks. They looked on warily as Ferguson remounted, jumped his horse back over the ditch and joined his companion. The fortunate young men regained the British camp undisturbed.

Though Ferguson seemed to lead a charmed life in uniform, such reckless behavior in action would one day catch up to him.

Patrick Ferguson was born in on June 4, 1744, in Pitfour, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, the son of a titled and well-connected lawyer. The Fergusons had a long tradition of military service, and from childhood Patrick resolved to pursue a career in the army. Accordingly, when the boy reached the tender age of 12, his father sent him to a military academy in London. At that time in European history a gentleman desiring to be an officer in the military could purchase his commission from a regimental commander. From there he might earn merit-based promotions, but he could also purchase ranks in turn. Ferguson’s father purchased his son’s first commission, as a cornet in the 2nd (Royal North British) Dragoons (aka “Royal Scots Greys”), when Patrick was just 14. Dragoons were mounted infantry, who rode horses into battle and then fought on foot. In 1760 Ferguson’s regiment deployed to continental Europe, where he got his first taste of combat in Flanders and Germany and lived to tell of his close encounter with hussars.

Patrick Ferguson holding his rifle.

In 1768, though Ferguson had cut his teeth with eight years of service, his father again purchased a commission for him, as a company commander in the 70th (Glasgow Lowland) Regiment of Foot, then serving in the West Indies. Late that year Captain Ferguson sailed to join his company in Tobago. Attuned to the well-being of his men, he had them take advantage of the tropical climate and grow vegetables as a supplement to their usual provisions of salted beef. While there, however, Ferguson himself contracted what was probably extrapulmonary tuberculosis. Related tubercular arthritis racked his knees with pain for the remainder of his life. After a brief stopover in the North American colonies, Ferguson returned to Britain in 1774.

By then it was clear that unrest with oppressive taxation and domineering British governance was approaching a breaking point in the American colonies. When British officers spoke among themselves, one oft-discussed point of concern was the colonials’ possession of precision hunting rifles—not in terms of numbers of weapons, which was not great, but because in the hands of skilled marksmen they were deadly at long range. In the event of war, of course, British officers would be the favored targets of such sharpshooters.

The standard long arm in the British military of the era was the “Brown Bess” muzzle-loading smoothbore flintlock musket, though it was notoriously inaccurate. An 1841 Royal Engineers test of the Brown Bess (in service from 1722 till 1838) recorded hits on man-sized targets at 150 yards only 75 percent of the time. Beyond that range the musket failed to hit even larger targets. Its point-blank range—the distance at which a round remains on a horizontal line of flight—was just 75 yards.

The muzzle-loading Brown Bess flintlock musket, the standard British long arm of the era, was notoriously inaccurate. Ferguson resolved to make a better gun.

The rifle, while more accurate, also had its drawbacks. Foremost was its slow reload time. While an adept soldier with a musket could fire some three to five rounds a minute, with a rifle he might manage only one or two shots a minute. Most rifles also had no means of attaching a bayonet, at a time when bayonet charges often proved decisive.

In set-piece battles of the day opposing armies lined up opposite one another, approached within effective range, fired by volley, then reloaded and repeated. Given the unlikelihood of scoring a hit, the line infantry drilled to reload as fast as possible and put more lead in the air, improving their odds. This madness continued until one side or the other appeared vulnerable, at which point the side sensing an advantage would launch a bayonet charge to finish the fight. Thus muskets, given their rate of fire and the ability to mount a bayonet, remained the long arm of choice for the rank and file. Realizing the limitations of his weapon, each soldier generally aimed at an enemy formation and hoped to hit someone, anyone. But soldiers tasked with reconnaissance and surveillance, such as the German Jägers, preferred rifles. Tasked with observing and reporting on the enemy from a distance, they required a weapon with long-range accuracy. God help them were they in bayonet range.

On his return to Britain in 1774 Captain Ferguson resolved to develop a faster-loading service rifle than those in use. If he could do so, it would eliminate the hidebound British military’s primary reasons for retaining the wildly inaccurate smoothbore. European gunmakers started experimenting with rifling as early as 1498, originally applying grooves to the insides of barrels in order to collect fouling. The black powder propellant of the era left a tremendous amount of residue, about 80 percent of the powder in each charge remaining behind to foul the weapon. Stabilizing the bullet was a happy and unexpected side effect of adding the rifling. If Ferguson could conceive of a faster action and add a bayonet lug to his new rifle, all the better. After searching for technological advancements and examining a range of existing weapons, he settled on a breechloader.

Breech-loading rifles had been in regular use for decades prior to Ferguson’s interest. What he did do was use his force of will, coupled with his family connections as minor nobility, to oblige senior military officers to listen to his proposals. Using family money, the captain contracted with the head armorer at the Tower of London to design a breechloader according to his specifications. After a period of trial and error, the Ferguson rifle was born. It centered on an innovative screw breech. With a working model in hand the inventor again wielded his political connections to arrange a demonstration for Lord George Townshend, master general of the Ordnance, and senior British officers. After winning them over, Ferguson was invited to Windsor Castle to demonstrate the rifle before King George III himself.

Ferguson’s rifle with its clever screw breech depicted here, had been dispersed to other units.

During his tests Ferguson was able to fire between four and six shots a minute and hit the bull’s-eye consistently at 200 yards. He was also able to reload his breechloader from the prone position, an impossibility for musketeers, as they had to at least kneel to pour powder down the barrel and manipulate a ramrod to force a ball down the muzzle. Ferguson simply rotated the trigger guard to open the screw breech and poured in powder, all from the ground. In a further demonstration of his rifle’s merits, he doused the loaded breech with water. In the black powder era a soggy charge wouldn’t fire—hence the expression, “Keep your powder dry.” To remove a wet charge from a musket, its owner had to thread a steel screw on the end of his ramrod, drive it down the barrel until it hit the ball, twist the screw into the soft lead, pull out the ball, dump the wet powder and then reload. The tedious process required the assistance of another person, to either hold the musket or manipulate the ramrod. In the midst of combat such fumbling might well prove fatal. Ferguson was able to screw open his breech, tap out the damp charge, add dry powder and screw it closed, again while remaining prone.

Duly impressed, his superiors placed an order for 100 Ferguson rifles and assigned the captain command of a light infantry unit, to be armed with his breechloader and employed in the American colonies, by then in open rebellion against the Crown. The men in his command would be volunteers, drawn from the assorted regiments already serving in the colonies.

While Ferguson prepared to ship overseas, a complication arose. As the Industrial Revolution remained in its earliest stages, Britain lacked factories able to mass produce firearms. Each weapon had to be produced individually by a gunsmith. Furthermore, fabricating the lands and grooves inside a rifle barrel was labor intensive, taking far longer to complete than the smoothbore barrel of a musket. Even with multiple gunsmiths working to create Ferguson’s rifles, there were nowhere enough to complete the 100 ordered weapons before he embarked.

In the end only 67 of Ferguson’s rifles were ready by the time he left in March 1777 to join Maj. Gen. Sir William Howe’s army in North America. On arrival the captain traveled among the various regiments to demonstrate the rifle and recruit 100 soldiers for his command. Finally, he began training his enlistees how to operate as light infantrymen armed with rifles. Due to the shortage of his namesake gun, Ferguson had to arm the remainder of his troops with traditional muzzle-loading rifles already in use; the remaining 33 Ferguson guns shipped from Britain that June. When he deemed his men ready, Ferguson was assigned to Hessian Lt. Gen. Wilhelm von Knyphausen’s command, then in New York.

Then-Captain Ferguson performed admirably at the Sept. 11, 1777, Battle of Brandywine, Penn., but only 100 examples of his namesake rifle were in use. The British above are using Brown Bess muskets.

The Ferguson rifle was about to get its trial by fire.

On Sept. 11, 1777, during the British campaign to capture Philadelphia—then capital of and largest city in the nascent United States—Howe’s British army met General George Washington’s Continental Army near Chadds Ford, Penn. The subsequent Battle of Brandywine was the second longest single-day battle of the war, with continuous fighting lasting 11 brutal hours. More troops fought at Brandywine than at any other battle in the North American theater of the war. Marching in the vanguard, Ferguson’s rifle corps was tasked with screening the main British army, so American forces couldn’t get a clear picture of Howe’s plans. The resulting British victory enabled Howe to capture Philadelphia two weeks later, prompting the Continental Congress to flee, first to Lancaster and then York, Pa.

Although his rifle corps performed its tasks admirably at Brandywine, Ferguson had been struck by a musket ball that shattered his right elbow, a wound that sidelined him from active duty for some months as he recovered. All things considered, he was fortunate. In the days before orthopedic trauma care, a wound such as he’d received would often lead to amputation, or at least medical retirement from the military. Ferguson refused to have his arm amputated, and he quite literally wouldn’t surrender his officer’s sword. Since the shattered elbow cost him full use of his arm, the right-handed major taught himself to wield his saber left-handed. It was such single-minded dedication and dogged determination that earned Ferguson the nickname “Bulldog.”

Brandywine was uniquely linked to Ferguson for another incident—one that proved among the most remarkable and enduring stories (or perhaps legends) of the war.

In a possibly apocryphal account from Brandywine, Ferguson allowed two American officers to ride within view unmolested. A post-battle conversation convinced Ferguson the lead officer had been General George Washington.

While he and his men were engaged in screening duties far in advance of British lines, Ferguson observed two American officers conducting a similar reconnaissance of the British. One was mounted on a bay horse and wore an especially large bicorne hat. The officers appeared unconcerned, as they remained well out of musket range. They were not out of rifle range, however, and Ferguson ordered three of his men to prepare to fire. Harboring reservations, Ferguson thought it advantageous to try and capture the American officers. Thus, he stepped into the open and called for them to ride toward him and surrender, or he would have his men shoot. At that, the Continentals simply turned their horses to ride away. Being out of musket range, they didn’t even feel it necessary to spur their mounts beyond a walk. Before Ferguson could give the order to fire, he again had second thoughts. The American officers posed no immediate threat to the British, and it certainly wouldn’t be sporting to have them shot in the back, so he had his riflemen stand down.

Later that day, when Ferguson was at the field hospital getting treated for his elbow wound, he struck up a conversation with a British surgeon who had also treated several wounded American officers. From details the surgeon gleaned from the wounded captives it seemed the two officers Ferguson had spared were none other than General Washington and an aide-de-camp. Lieutenant John P. de Lancey, Ferguson’s second-in-command, who had seen Washington before the war, later suggested the enemy officer in the cocked hat had been Brig. Gen. Casimir Pulaski, the Polish volunteer credited as the “father of American cavalry.” Whether it was Pulaski or Washington, and Ferguson had missed his chance to end the war on the spot, he later wrote that he didn’t regret his decision.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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While the Bulldog was recovering from his injury and mourning the death of his father back in Britain, the British were formulating a new strategy for their campaign in North America. The first few years of the war had primarily been fought in New England and mid-Atlantic colonies, and though the British had won most of the battles, they had yet to deliver a knockout blow. Meanwhile, the populace back home had grown increasingly weary of sending off their sons and spending their tax money to fight a seemingly endless war. Thus, in late 1778 Lt. Gen. Sir Henry Clinton launched a campaign in the South, hoping to spark an uprising of Loyalists, colonists born in North America but remaining loyal to the Crown. Were that successful, Clinton hoped to force the Americans to capitulate. The campaign began auspiciously enough with the capture of Savannah, Ga., that December 29, which the British successfully defended in October 1779. The day after Christmas Clinton and his second-in-command, Lt. Gen. Charles Cornwallis, left Knyphausen to garrison New York City and sailed for Savannah with a substantial army.

Having recuperated enough by then to return to active duty, Ferguson was commissioned a major in the 70th Regiment of Foot and embarked with the expedition. In the absence of its dynamic founder, however, Ferguson’s rifle corps had disbanded, its men returning to their original regiments, their rifles either put in storage or parceled out to other units. The major returned to service without a command to lead.

Regardless, his superiors recognized Ferguson’s leadership ability, and Cornwallis gave him command of a battalion of provincial Loyalist militia. In that capacity Major Ferguson would participate in the largest all-American battle of the war.

The Overmountain Men got word of Ferguson’s approach and surrounded his men at Kings Mountain.

From Savannah the British army marched north to Charleston, S.C., which Clinton captured on May 12, 1780, after a six-week siege. He then returned to New York, tasking Cornwallis with subjugating the Carolinas. By summer Cornwallis had pushed north to Charlotte, N.C., and was concerned about protecting his flank. The threat he envisaged came from “Overmountain Men,” hardscrabble frontiersmen from west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the leading edge of the Appalachian Range. Cornwallis assigned Ferguson’s battalion to counter the threat posed by the Patriot riflemen. The stage was set for the Battle of Kings Mountain.

Resolving that the best defense was a good offense, Ferguson departed Charlotte for the Appalachian reaches. According to American sources, en route Ferguson captured a Patriot and had the man relay a message to the “Backwater Men,” as the British called their foes west of the Blue Ridge. They were to lay down their arms in surrender, Ferguson warned, or the British would burn their farms and villages and hang their leaders. Whether those were truly Ferguson’s words or shrewd Patriot propaganda is unknown. As the message wasn’t written down, it cannot be proved or disproved. Regardless, at word of the threat the Overmountain Men mustered a superior force to repulse Ferguson’s militia. On September 30 Patriot deserters brought word of the onrushing American force. Ferguson gave the order to fall back on Cornwallis’ main army at Charlotte. He made it as far as Kings Mountain, straddling the border of North and South Carolina some 30 miles west of Charlotte.

The “Bulldog’s” refusal to admit defeat finally caught up to him at Kings Mountain when he rejected a suggestion he surrender and was ultimately shot from the saddle.

Ferguson is buried where he fell, beneath the stone cairn behind this marker at Kings Mountain National Military Park, near Blacksburg, S.C. He shares the grave with one “Virginia Sal,” possibly a camp follower.

On Oct. 7, 1780, an advance party of 900 Overmountain Men on horseback surrounded Kings Mountain and attacked Ferguson’s command. Though caught by surprise and soon in desperate straits, the major rode back and forth among threatened points, repeatedly leading his men in bayonet attacks to repel the determined frontiersmen, who fought independently by detachment. Despite being severely wounded and having multiple horses shot from under him, Ferguson continued to fight and animate his men by example. Toward the end of the battle his second-in-command earnestly recommended the major surrender. Ferguson refused and in short order received a fatal rifle shot to the chest. Survivors later counted seven bullet wounds on his body. It was an abrupt end to a promising military career at age 36. In a battle that lasted just over an hour, 290 of Ferguson’s Loyalists were killed, 163 wounded and 668 captured, while the Patriots suffered 28 killed and 60 wounded. In its wake Cornwallis abandoned his ambitions in North Carolina and withdrew south.

Patrick Ferguson was buried on the spot along with a female companion named “Virginia Sal,” who was possibly his mistress. Their shared grave was marked by a stone cairn that still stands in present-day Kings Mountain National Military Park.

Retired U.S. Marine Colonel John Miles writes and delivers lectures on a range of historical topics. For further reading he recommends Every Insult and Indignity: The Life, Genius and Legacy of Major Patrick Ferguson, by Ricky Roberts and Bryan Brown; Biographical Sketch: Or, Memoir of Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Ferguson, by Adam Ferguson; The Philadelphia Campaign: Vol. 1: Brandywine and the Fall of Philadelphia, by Thomas J. McGuire; and Kings Mountain and Its Heroes, by Lyman C. Draper.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Military History magazine.

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Precision vs. Propaganda: Some Painters Meticulously Researched Their Masterworks — Others Not So Much

Jon Guttman — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 13:30:00 +0000

The earliest depictions of war served one purpose: to emphasize the invincible might of the leaders who commissioned them. A stroke of accuracy might be useful toward establishing credibility, but only so long as it served the warlord’s purposes. Pharaoh Ramses II, for example, employed what amounted to a private propaganda bureau to back up his claims to godhood. Witness Egyptian depictions of his 1274 bc victory at Kadesh. His Hittite opponents commemorated it as their victory, though in reality it ended in an inconclusive standoff. Over the subsequent millennia war artists have wrestled with the matter of balancing accuracy and the lionization of their subject, who was very often the supporting patron.

However effective a depiction of battle may be in its own time, posterity often brings out the nitpickers. Often even the most well-meaning attempts at accuracy miss something. Just as often errors, accidental or deliberate, can be glaring. In any case, the advocates of historicity have their own leg to stand on in their conviction that a true act of valor can and should stand on its own merits.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Military History magazine.

One of French First Consul Napoléon Bonaparte’s military coups was his spring 1800 crossing of the Alps to surprise the Austrians in Italy. In 1850 Paul Delaroche, aided by Adolphe Thiers’ 1845 account of the crossing, depicted a sensible, if not terribly heroic, Napoléon picking his way through Great St. Bernard Pass on a sure-footed mule appropriated from a convent at Martigny and led by a local guide. Contemporaries critiqued Delaroche’s realistic approach for having failed to capture its subject’s spirit. Ironically, he ended up selling a smaller copy of the painting to Queen Victoria of Britain, who presented it to husband Prince Albert on his birthday, Aug. 26, 1853.

Between 1801 and ’05 one of the future emperor’s most devoted admirers and propagandists, Jacques-Louis David, painted five versions of the crossing, all showing Napoléon atop a rearing charger behind an outcrop carved with his name and those of his illustrious martial predecessors Hannibal and Charlemagne.

German muralist Wilhelm von Kaulbach’s epic 1868 canvas The Naval Battle of Salamis reflects a recurring problem whenever artists weigh accuracy against epic—namely, fitting everyone into the available space. Painted for display in Munich’s palatial Maximilianeum, his depiction of the 480 bc clash squeezes in Themistocles, Xerxes, Artemisia of Caria and even a few Greek gods. “The Sea Battle of Salamis 480 BC”. Painting, 1862/64, by Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1804–1874). Oil on canvas, approx. 5 × 9m. Munich, Maximilianeum Collection.

Similarly, in his 1849 painting The Conquest of the Teocalli Temple by Cortés and His Troops (Aztec Temple in Tenochtitlan, 1520) German-American painter Emanuel Leutze had many points to make, historicity being beside the point.

In his 1770 work The Death of Wolfe Benjamin West depicts mortally wounded British Maj. Gen. James Wolfe achieving martyrdom as he learns of his victory at Quebec. Joining Wolfe’s nattily dressed officers is a contemplative British-allied Indian, though none were present.

Rendered in 1851, Leutze’s iconic Washington Crossing the Delaware, with its all-inclusive crew of Continentals and Patriot volunteers setting out to attack the Hessians at Trenton, N.J., on the morning of Dec. 26, 1775, transcended several egregious errors. For example, there was no Stars and Stripes flag until June 1777; the crossing was made around midnight amid a snowstorm over a narrower stretch of river; and General George Washington’s men crossed in larger, flat-bottomed Durham boats.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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Painted for the U.S. Navy in 1962, Vladimir Zveg’s Battle of the Virginia Capes, 5 September 1781 is forced by space constraints to close the combatant ships to point-blank range. Another gaffe is the Union Jack, whose red Cross of St. Patrick was not added until 1801.

Henry Arthur McArdle was obsessed with the March 6, 1836, Battle of the Alamo and tried to have things both ways—capturing the fight down to the most minute detail, but succumbing to the urge to glorify the Texians’ last stand. The artist’s 1905 Dawn at the Alamo depicts Jim Bowie (at left with knife in hand, though he was bedridden at the time) battling Mexican troops alongside David Crockett (in shirtsleeves at right) and William Barret Travis (larger than life atop the battlements).

Few battles have been so widely painted as George Armstrong Custer’s Last Stand at the Little Bighorn (known by American Indian victors as the Greasy Grass), but only in recent years have reasonable renditions emerged. Painted the year of the battle, Feodor Fuchs’ version includes such hokum as a fight on horseback (the soldiers were dismounted), the use of sabers (not taken) and Custer’s fancy dress jacket (vs. buckskin).

This Ethiopian depiction of the March 1, 1896, Battle of Adwa—the first decisive African victory over a European power in the 19th century—lacks perspective and depicts a set-piece battle, complete with an intervention by Saint George. Missing are such details as the Italian blunder of having split their army in three. Another mistake is the green, yellow and red Ethiopian flag, colors not adopted until 1897.

In Charles Hubbell’s depiction of the April 21, 1918, death of German fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen the all-red Fokker Dr.I is correct, but by then the flared Maltese cross had been replaced by the straight-armed Balkenkreuz. Of course, Canadian Sopwith Camel pilot Roy Brown never got that close. Regardless, the bullet that killed the Red Baron in fact came from a Vickers gun fired by an Australian foot soldier.

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Abigail Adams Persevered Through Siege and Smallpox to Support the Revolution

Jon Mael — Tue, 02 May 2023 12:30:00 +0000

On June 17, 1775, a vicious battle rocked Bunker Hill in Charlestown, Mass. That first major engagement of the Revolution saw British Commander in Chief William Howe lead around 2,000 Regulars in what Howe expected to be a quick victory over 1,200 colonists commanded by Colonel William Prescott. Howe guessed wrong. The fierce, bloody fighting raged through the night. From a hillside miles away, Abigail Adams, 30, and son John Quincy, 7, watched with excitement and anxiety.

The Adams family lived in Braintree, a small coastal town 12 miles south of Boston. Abigail’s husband, John, a lawyer and key figure in the insurrection, had been gone since April, when he left on a meandering journey, eventually arriving in Philadelphia to attend the Second Continental Congress that convened May 10. John’s departure began a long separation that left Abigail Adams and their four children in one of the most dangerous places on earth—a city under siege—for nearly two years. She would have to run the family farm, keep her children safe, and husband the family’s finances. Abigail’s letters to John during this time, some of the most reliable accounts of significant early events in the Revolution, influenced decisions being made in Philadelphia that shaped the nation.

The Whites of Their Eyes. Colonel William Prescott, in red waistcoat, readies his patriot militia for approaching British troops during the Battle of Bunker Hill.

John Adams and Abigail Smith met in 1759. He was 25, living with his parents in Braintree; she was 15, also at living at home in Weymouth, just to the south. Writing was the easiest way to communicate, and when they began courting in 1764, the two established themselves as exuberant letter writers. Honest, poetic, tragic, joyful, and deeply thoughtful letters flew back and forth between the young romantics. He nicknamed her “Portia,” for the independent-minded heroine of The Merchant of Venice, and that was how she signed some letters. The couple married on October 25, 1764, when John was 29 and Abigail 19. They welcomed their first child, Abigail—nicknamed “Nabby”—the following year. By the time John left for Philadelphia in April 1775, John Quincy, Thomas, and Charles had arrived.

Like her husband, Abigail firmly believed in the American experiment and staunchly opposed slavery. She relished the Boston Tea Party. After Lexington and Concord in April 1775, she wrote to John and many friends and acquaintances, expressing joy and anxiety. In a letter to rebellious Plymouth playwright Mercy Otis Warren, Abigail described her emotions following the fighting. “What a scene has opened upon us since I had the favor of your last!” she wrote May 2. “Such a scene as we never before experienced, and could scarcely form an idea of. If we look back we are amazed at what is past, if we look forward we must shudder at the view.”

this article first appeared in American history magazine

Rebel Bostonians, having stepped collectively into the unknown, feared for their future. Abigail found a tonic for unease in her excitement at seeing the patriotism she had long advocated taking root and spreading. “Our only comfort lies in the justice of our cause,” she wrote. She urged Mercy not to leave Plymouth for relative safety inland, adding, with the characteristic vehemence that often outdid her husband’s: “Britain Britain how is thy glory vanished—how are thy annals stained with the Blood of thy children.”

As Abigail was writing to Mercy, John, now in Hartford, Conn., was writing to Abigail. He knew that in wartime even agrarian Braintree was bound to suffer. “Our hearts are bleeding for the poor People of Boston,” he wrote May 2. “What will, or can be done for them I can’t conceive. God preserve them.”

In that letter, John told Abigail he had purchased books on military strategy and said that if his brothers were interested, he’d be able to train them to be officers. “Pray [sic] write to me, and get all my friends to write and let me be informed of every thing that occurs,” he wrote.

Abigail took his request seriously. In a lengthy May 24 letter, she recounted an incident in Weymouth the previous Sunday morning. She awoke at 6:00 and learned the Weymouth bell had been ringing, that cannoneers there had fired three shots to sound an alarm, and that drums had been beating. Abigail hurried the three miles to her hometown and found everyone, even physician Cotton Tufts, “in confusion.” She described a wild scene, the result of four British boats anchoring within sight of Weymouth Harbor.

According to Abigail, a rumor had spread that 300 Redcoats had landed and were about to march through town. Residents began scrambling to fight or run. Abigail’s family fled. “My father’s family flying, the Dr. in great distress, as you may well imagine,” she wrote, “for my aunt had her bed thrown into a cart, into which she got herself, and ordered the boy to drive her off to Bridgewater which he did.”

Abigail was describing the “Grape Island Incident.” According to her letter, 2,000 local men gathered to fight, but the British never sent troops ashore. Instead, on Grape Island, a minor land mass in Boston Harbor, they stocked a barn with hay. The Weymouth men procured a small boat, intending to torch barn and contents. “We expect soon to be in continual alarms, till something decisive takes place,” Abigail wrote.

Though not decisive, Bunker Hill was a British victory, earned at great human cost and a boost to patriot morale because neophyte freedom fighters had stood their ground and were not overrun. The battle personally touched Abigail and John. Their good friend and physician Joseph Warren (no relation to Mercy) had died in action. “God is a refuge for us.—Charlestown is laid in ashes,” Abigail wrote to John on June 18. “The Battle began upon our intrenchments upon Bunkers [sic] Hill, a Saturday morning about 3 o’clock and has not ceased yet and tis now 3 o’clock Sabbeth [sic] afternoon.”

In a passage of the same letter written June 20, Abigail lamented her inability to gather quality intelligence for John about the battle. “I have been so much agitated that I have not been able to write since Sabbeth day,” she wrote. “When I say that ten thousand reports are passing vague and uncertain as the wind I believe I speak the Truth. I am not able to give you any authentic account of last Saturday, but you will not be destitute of intelligence.”

In reality, Abigail had a knack for threshing fact from fiction—over the years she heard many rumors of John’s death by all manners, including poisoning, but never believed any. Regarding Bunker Hill, she was able to assemble and recount a reasonably detailed narrative of events there, and she assured John that news of Warren’s death was true.

On the same day as the battle, George Washington was named commander in chief of the Continental Army. He rushed to Boston, intent on forcing the British to evacuate. Abigail first met him July 15, 1775, less than a month after Bunker Hill, with the city still under massive financial and military stress. The next day, she wrote that the appointments of Washington and General Charles Lee to positions of command had given locals “universal satisfaction,” but she also pointed out that the people would support leaders only as long as they were delivering “favorable events.” Washington displayed “dignity with ease, and complacency, the gentleman and soldier look agreeably blended in him,” Abigail wrote. “Modesty marks every line and feature of his face.” By the time that note would have reached John, he was going through a grave embarrassment—one threatening both his budding political career and worldwide geopolitics.

In the summer of 1775, many members of Congress believed war with Britain was still avoidable. On July 8, Congress signed the “Olive Branch Petition.” Written by John Dickinson, a Pennsylvania delegate, the document was a final reach for peace. That outcome was a long shot, but the British intercepted an inflammatory July 24 letter from John Adams to Colonel James Warren, Mercy’s husband. In that communique, Adams suggested to Warren that by now the colonists should have “completely modeled a constitution,” “raised a naval power and opened all our ports wide,” and “have arrested every friend to government on the continent and held them as hostages for the poor victims in Boston.”

Circulation by the enemy of these statements sank all hopes of diplomacy. After that episode, Abigail resumed signing letters “Portia.”

Through eight months of siege, Abigail’s updates became steadier and her commentary sharper. “Tis only in my night visions that I know anything about you,” she wrote October 21, needling John for his laggard epistolary ways but also reporting a wide range of goings-on around Boston. A wood shortage meant bakers would only be able to work for a fortnight. Biscuits had shrunk in size by half. The British were constructing a fort near the docks, and the Continental Army was short on provisions.

In that letter, Abigail also commented on Dr. Benjamin Church, a supposed patriot who had been caught passing coded information about the forces surrounding Boston to the British. Locked up by Washington’s men, Church had been dumped as the Continental Army’s “Director General” of medicine and was awaiting arraignment. “It is a matter of great speculation what will be [Church’s] punishment,” Abigail wrote. “The people are much enraged against him. If he is set at liberty, even after he has received a severe punishment I do not think he will be safe.”

Abigail was in mourning. Her mother, Elizabeth Quincy Smith, had died in Weymouth October 1. In his grief, Abigail’s father, Parson William Smith, had lost “as much flesh as if he had been sick,” she wrote, adding that her sister Betsy looked “broke and worn with grief.” She regretted John’s chronic absences, estimating that in 12 years of marriage, they had only actually been together six.

Washington’s troops quietly ringed Boston in a martial noose, placing cannons on high ground that forced the British to depart by sea at the end of March 1776. The warships and transports that carried the enemy away, Abigail wrote on March 17, amounted to the “largest fleet ever seen in America;” she likened the bristle of masts and billows of sails to a forest. Washington allowed Howe’s men to leave unmolested on the proviso that the Redcoats not burn the city. The foe was as good as his word, though some Britons looted like pirates on holiday. Dirty tactics notwithstanding, though, their exit thrilled locals, Loyalists excepted.

Abigail told John she felt the burden of the British presence merely to be changing location but admitted to being happy that Boston had not been totally destroyed. The city’s escape exhilarated John, a fiend for independence. On March 29, he wrote to Abigail about his joy at learning Boston was free, even as he moped that he knew few details and so awaited her accounts with “great impatience.” He wanted Boston Harbor made impregnable. Abigail had neither the ability nor the desire to command troops, but John often discussed strategic ideas with her and greatly valued her opinion of them.

Most of the time.

The most famous look into Abigail’s politics arose from Patriot celebrations of the British retreat. Abigail only reminded John that he “Remember the Ladies” after she had unleashed a condemnation of Virginia. “I have sometimes been ready to think that the passion for liberty cannot be equally strong in the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow creatures of theirs,” she wrote March 31, 1776. “Of this I am certain that it is not founded upon that generous and Christian principle of doing to others as we would that others should do unto us.”

The letter gained fame because in it Abigail forcefully characterizes women’s second-class status in the colonies. Law and custom barred women from owning property and assigned any wages they earned legally to their husbands. “All men would be tyrants if they could,” and if a Declaration of Independence was coming, it would be shrewd not to put all of the power in the hands of one sex, Abigail argued.

She dusted her broadside with drollery. “The ladies,” she said, were prepared “to mount a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or representation.” The letter also conveyed notes of optimism, originating as it did in one finally assured she could plant seeds on her farm or go for a walk without hearing cannonades.

But that optimism evaporated. John dismissed his wife’s adjuration to “Remember the Ladies.” In an April 14 note, he pooh-poohed Abigail’s thoughts as “saucy”—implying that she was straying from her designated societal role and venturing into arenas she should eschew. John’s shrugging response irked his wife. She wrote to Mercy Otis Warren asking if they should compose another appeal to Congress. Frustrated with John’s lackadaisical mien, she and the family faced a stout new challenge just as the absent man of the house was taking on unprecedented responsibilities in Philadelphia.

Smallpox had been blistering indigenes and colonizers in disfiguring, deadly waves around North America since the Europeans first arrived. In 1775-76, British occupiers and Continental Army soldiers besieging them loosed a particularly severe outbreak. Abigail first mentioned the pox in her March 17, 1776, letter to John celebrating the city’s survival. As the British were withdrawing, the port was still battling the latest epidemic. Only the previously infected were even being allowed into town, a category that would have included John Adams, who in 1764 had undergone a controversial procedure—inoculation.

To inoculate against the pox, a doctor opened a small wound and into that cut or scrape inserted matter intentionally tainted with exudate from a person with smallpox. The idea was to trigger a mild case of pox from which the recipient emerged in a few weeks enjoying lifelong immunity, as occurred with survivors of full-on cases like George Washington. By summer 1776, inoculation had become en vogue. The “Spirit of Inoculation,” as Abigail labeled it, finally achieved such critical mass that city authorities legalized the procedure.

Writing on Sunday, July 7, Abigail invited John Thaxter, who was her cousin and John’s law clerk, to “come have the small pox with my family” that Thursday, July 12. As a clinical setting Abigail’s cousin Isaac Smith Sr. provided his sprawling Boston home. Abigail, Thaxter, the Adams children, and nearly 20 others, including Abigail’s sister Betsy Smith Cranch and her family, as well as strangers like Becky Peck, crammed the mansion to await inoculation by Dr. Thomas Bulfinch. The doctor was charging 18 shillings per week for what he estimated would be three weeks of sequestration while inoculation did its work. During that time those inoculated could expect to experience smallpox symptoms to a greater or lesser degree.

The next day, Abigail wrote her first letter to John since June 17. The children had undergone inoculation “manfully,” she reported. She wished John could have joined them, she wrote, but the opportunity had arisen on short notice, and most residences around Boston were at and beyond capacity. The group had been lucky to book a house.

That year’s hot summer would have had the city resonating around the clock with coughing and the house redolent of rotting flesh—two noxious and prominent smallpox symptoms. Abigail wrote that the children “puke every morning,” complaining to John that a maid she had hired was useless, the girl’s lone qualification being immunity conveyed by a case of the pox.

Owing to a leisurely postal system Abigail’s graphic letter about those events was not the means by which John learned his family had been inoculated. Letters reporting the coup from Isaac Smith Sr. and young Boston attorney Jonathan Mason reached Philadelphia first, stunning John. In a letter to Abigail dated July 16, beset by worry that colleagues would think him a cad for ignoring his loved ones in their hour of need, he poured out his heart. His feelings were “not possible for me to describe, nor for you to conceive my feelings upon this occasion.” He remained steadfast in his commitment to press on with the Congress. “I can do no more than wish and pray for your health, and that of the children,” he wrote. “Never—never in my whole Life, had I so many cares upon my Mind at once […] I am very anxious about supplying you with money. Spare for nothing, if you can get friends to lend it to you. I will repay with gratitude as well as interest, any sum that you may borrow.”

Abigail’s letter of July 13-14 arrived July 23. By then, the effects of inoculation had begun to take hold. Abigail experienced only one “eruption”—a pustule signaling infection. Nabby and John Quincy had gotten sick, but without eruptions. Thomas and Charles showed no symptoms, so she had them re-inoculated. Around this time, she got her first intimate look at the real disease. On July 29, she wrote, fellow inoculant and temporary housemate Becky Peck had symptoms of smallpox “to such a degree as to be blind with one eye, swelled prodigiously, I believe she has ten thousand [pustules]. She is really an object to look at.”

Lags between letters consigned John to anticipating past events. He wrote that Abigail’s accounts had convinced him that Charles had not yet taken the smallpox virus. By the time that news reached Abigail, she had had Charles inoculated a third time, and Nabby a second. Hundreds of pea-sized pustules covered almost all of Nabby’s body. In one letter, John referred to her as his “speckled beauty.” Abigail’s ordeal ground on until September 4, 1776, when she and Charles returned to Braintree. A treatment advertised as lasting three weeks had stretched into seven.

During her siege by inoculation, Abigail occasionally slipped away briefly. She left the family lodgings on July 18 to attend the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence. She stood in a large crowd below the balcony of the Massachusetts State House on Boston’s King Street to listen to the words her husband and his committee had helped draft. Writing to John she described a scene of great joy punctuated by church bells and celebratory gunfire. She, however, attended the fete in a state of disappointment.

In her July 14 letter, Abigail had reacted sourly to a rendering of the finished declaration that John, copying it himself, had sent. “I cannot but feel sorry that some of the most manly sentiments in the Declaration are expunged from the printed copy,” she wrote. “Perhaps wise reasons induced it.” She likely meant an earlier draft Thomas Jefferson had written and shown to John. That version denounced slavery, a sentiment expunged from the version made public. It is reasonable to hypothesize that, reading the version in her husband’s handwriting, Abigail thought that John had composed the entire document and that he himself had eliminated the statement on slavery.

During the inoculation interlude, Abigail was on tenterhooks anticipating John’s return; he had asked her to direct a man with two horses to fetch him in Philadelphia. However, on June 12, John was named president of a new Committee on War and Ordinance, recasting him as a one-man defense department in charge of organizing a military, allocating that force’s finances, supplying Washington’s men, and more. Just as Abigail was preparing to return home to Braintree from the Smith house, John intuited that New York City was to be the war’s next battleground. He would have to stay in Philadelphia to nurse the infant country he had just helped found. Often in correspondence he fretted about his health.

In Braintree Abigail struggled. Farm workers were scarce. Most men had enlisted in the Army, taken up privateering, or, as Loyalists, had fled with fellow Tories. Tea, which soothed her headaches, was at least as scarce as farmhands; John did send a tin that the courier delivered to Elizabeth Adams, his second cousin Samuel’s wife.

In November 1776 John escaped the revolution’s gravitational pull and joined his family for their first significant reunion since April 1775. The children had survived. He and Abigail had gained the independence they had sought together for years. Abigail had been the keystone, communicating crucial information to the Congress, guiding the household through smallpox, and uplifting John through good times and bad. Always appreciative of his spouse’s integral part in his public life, he wrote of his feelings for her to a friend the day after he had signed the Declaration. “In times as turbulent as these, commend me to the ladies for historiographers,” John Adams wrote July 5, 1776. “The gentlemen are too much engaged in action. The ladies are cooler spectators….There is a lady at the foot of Penn’s Hill, who obliges me, from time to time with clearer and fuller intelligence, than I can get from a whole committee of gentlemen.”

Jon Mael is a high school teacher and author from Sharon, Mass. He has been fascinated by Abigail Adams for decades. Follow him on Twitter @jmael2010.

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Revolutionary War Soldiers Slated for Reburial 243 Years After Battle

Jonathan Lehrfeld — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 18:48:47 +0000

The rediscovered remains of American Revolutionary War soldiers who died in South Carolina more than 240 years ago are set to be reinterred this weekend in a ceremony to honor their sacrifice to a budding nation.

Archeologists excavated the skeletal remains of 14 individuals in fall 2022 at the Camden Battlefield, the site of a 1780 British victory during America’s fight for independence.

“Honoring these heroes in a respectful manner and ensuring the permanent protection of their remains continues to be the mission of this effort,” Doug Bostick, CEO of the South Carolina Battleground Preservation Trust, said in a release.

The reburial of the unknown soldiers will honor some of America’s earliest fallen and advance current understanding of how the important battle unfolded.

Recovering remains of history

Some of the soldiers’ remains were first discovered during the past few years by looters searching for artifacts, Bostick said in an interview with Military Times.

A team of archeologists and anthropologists launched an ensuing excavation in September 2022 and uncovered even more remains. Some remains discovered during the eight-week search were found in shallow graves less than six inches below ground.

An initial examination of the soldiers concluded 12 of the bodies are likely Patriot Continental soldiers from either Maryland or Delaware, one is likely a North Carolina loyalist and another served with the British 71st Regiment of Foot, Fraser’s Highlanders, the nonprofit said in a release.

Forensic anthropologists are continuing to craft biological profiles for each of the troops.

At least five of the Continentals were determined to have been teenagers, while the oldest soldier is estimated to have died when he was between 40 and 50 years old. Some possess clear evidence of battle injuries from musket balls and buck shot.

The Scottish Highlander is the only soldier who appears to have been carefully laid to rest, face up with his arms crossed. Others were found face down or overlaying each other. Based on the historical record, the Highlander’s identity has already been narrowed to three potential candidates, Bostick said, but it will only be confirmed when a DNA analysis is complete.

Researchers are collecting DNA so that individuals with a suspected connection to the soldiers can provide a sample to help the identification process, though that undertaking can take some time, Bostick said.

The loyalist militiaman is thought to have Native American ancestry and is not a part of this weekend’s events. Instead, he is scheduled to be honored in a private ceremony with local tribes.

The August 16, 1780, Battle of Camden was a devastating defeat for the Americans in the early stages of the British military offensive in the south. It did, however, usher in changes in the rebellious colonists’ military leadership that eventually altered the war’s course.

The recent recovery of remains in South Carolina comes on the heels of a similar discovery during summer 2022, when scientists uncovered a mass grave in New Jersey with as many as a dozen German soldiers, called Hessians, who fought alongside the British.

Honoring early heroes

The full slate of weekend festivities — a funeral procession at Fort Jackson, historic reenactments, a military flyover and more — is expected to draw lawmakers, foreign troops and public spectators.

Historians are looking to keep the burial as authentic to the time period as possible. The soldiers’ coffins are handcrafted in an 18th-century design using hand-forged nails and wood from longleaf pine trees thought to have grown not far from where the historic battle took place.

At the conclusion of the funeral service and military honors, the soldiers will be reinterred in the seven locations where they were found on the battlefield.

“The work we are doing honors their sacrifice by shedding light on details that are not yet documented in the historical record,” archeologist James Legg said in the release. Legg added that the marked graves will now allow “for the contemplation of battlefield visitors.”

Originally published on Military Times, our sister publication.

These 7 Foreigners Helped Win the American Revolution

Claire Barrett — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 16:04:23 +0000

Sure, we’ve all heard the tales of George Washington’s exploits, Paul Revere’s famous “one if by land, two if by sea” ride, Benjamin Franklin’s role in well, just about everything. But what about the foreign fighters that served with distinction, nay, may have even saved the revolution?

Here are seven foreigners who freely joined the fight for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

1. Baron von Steuben: Fraud Turned Hero

Baron Steuben at Valley Forge, 1778.

The Prussian’s resume was impressive. America’s diplomats in Paris, Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane, claimed he was once the major general and quartermaster general in the Prussian army, as well as a one-time aide-de-camp to the legendary warrior-king Frederick the Great. But Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin von Steuben, or Frederick William Augustus, Baron de Steuben, was a fraud. He had been none of those things.

And yet in America, he became a hero.

“[M]ore than any other individual,” writes historian Paul Lockhart, Baron von Steuben “was responsible for transmitting European military thought and practice to the army of the fledgling United States. He gave form to America’s first true army — and to those that followed.”

Despite his bolstered resume, the 47-year-old was a career soldier and did in fact have a keen military eye. He brought to the Continental Army a wealth of European military experience to rally an ill-clothed, starving and poorly trained army at Valley Forge into a professional force. There, von Steuben introduced discipline, putting Washington’s entire army through Prussian-style drills. He noted to Washington that short enlistments meant constant turnover at the expense of order. There was no codified regiment size and different officers throughout the Continental Army used different military drill manuals meant chaos if other units attempted to work with one another.

“[It was] Steuben’s ability to bring this army the kind of training and understanding of tactics that made them able to stand toe to toe with the British,” historian Larrie Ferreiro told the Smithsonian.

Appointed inspector general of the Continental Army in May 1778, von Steuben’s methods categorically transformed the fledgling patriots before going on to write “Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States,” the first military manual for the American army.

2. Casimir Pułaski: NO ENGLISH, ALL COURAGE

Casimir Pułaski

“In the 13 months since the United States had declared its independence from Great Britain, the Continental Congress had been unable to develop an effective mounted force or find men who could organize, lead and train one,” writes Ethan S. Rafuse. Yet in December 1776, after numerous defeats and retreats, Gen. George Washington called on the Continental Congress to change that.

“I am convinced there is no carrying on the War without them,” he wrote to John Hancock, “and I would therefore recommend the Establishment of one or more Corps…in Addition to those already raised in Virginia.”

Enter Casimir Pułaski.

Born into Polish nobility, Pułaski had made a name for himself under the Knights of the Holy Cross — the military arm of the Confederation of the Bar that opposed Russian rule.

As a cavalry commander, Pułaski earned widespread acclaim for his 1771 defense of the hallowed monastery of Częstochowa against 3,000 Russians.

However, the Pole was soon forced to flee and found himself in dire financial straits in France. He was soon offered a lifeline by Benjamin Franklin, who agreed to pay for Pułaski’s trip to America in June of 1777.

According to Rafuse, Franklin wrote to Washington lauding Pułaski as “an officer famous throughout Europe for his bravery and conduct in defense of the liberties of his country against the three great invading powers of Russia, Austria, and Prussia” and suggesting that he might “be highly useful to our service.”

First an aide to Washington, Pułaski was soon made brigadier general in the Continental cavalry — where, despite not speaking a word of English, soon proved his mettle.

By 1778, Pułaski was awarded command of the “Pulaski Legion,” an independent cavalry unit composed of American and foreign recruits. The following spring Pułaski and his Legion made their way south to defend the besieged city of Charleston. In October that year, Pułaski was mortally wounded by a grapeshop while leading a cavalry charge during the Siege of Savannah. The 34-year-old’s heroic death established him among the American Revolution’s most famous foreign volunteers and earned him the moniker as the “Father of American Cavalry.”

3. Michael Kováts: HE WAS HUNGARY FOR BATTLE

Michael Kováts

While Pułaski might be known as the Father of American Cavalry, Michael Kováts de Fabricy shouldn’t be overlooked.

He arrived in America four months prior to Pułaski after declaring to Benjamin Franklin, “I am a free man and a Hungarian. I was trained in the Royal Prussian Army and raised from the lowest rank to the dignity of a Captain of the Hussars.”

“Kováts had an even more impressive military record than Pułaski,” according to Rafuse. “Born in Karcag, Hungary, in 1724, Kováts belonged to a noble family whose history of service to the Hungarian crown went back centuries. In Hungary as in Poland, cavalry was the most important element of the army, and for the same reasons: the country’s open plains and acquisitive neighbors — in Hungary’s case, Habsburg Austria and the Ottoman Turks.”

Kováts forged a fiercesome reputation as a brave and effective officer, declaring that he rose through the ranks, “not so much by luck and the mercy of chance than by the most diligent self-discipline and the virtue of my arms.”

As a mercenary soldier, Kováts found himself training participants in Poland’s nascent patriot movement, which included members of the Pułaski family. Like Pułaski, Kováts soon found himself in France and then on a ship to the fledgling nation of America to offer his services to the revolution.

Despite struggling to gain a commission, Kováts eagerly began training men within the Pułaski Legion in April 1778. In his new unit, writes Rafuse, Kováts “particularly emphasized the ‘free corps’ concept popular in Europe in the 1740s and 1750s. To preserve the strength of their rigorously drilled and tightly disciplined battalions of infantry, Eastern European military leaders began accepting into their service units of light forces to operate around the fringes of their armies.” It was here that, under Pułaski, Kováts was able to organize and train one of the first hussar regiments in the American army.

Kováts was mortally wounded by a rifle shot during a clash with the British on May 11, 1779, in defense of Charleston.

4. Tadeusz Kościuszko: LOSER IN LOVE, WINNER IN WAR

Tadeusz Kościuszko

Commissioned a colonel by the Continental Congress in 1777, the 30-year-old Kościuszko soon established himself as one of the Continental Army’s most brilliant, and much needed, combat engineers — all thanks to an unsuccessful attempt to elope with a lord’s daughter back in Poland.

After discovering his brother had spent all the family’s inheritence, Kościuszko was hired to tutor Louise Sosnowska, a wealthy lord’s daughter. The pair fell in love and attempted to elope in the fall of 1775 after Lord Sosnowski refused Kosciuszko’s request. According to the Smithsonian, “Kosciuszko told various friends, Sosnowski’s guards overtook their carriage on horseback, dragged it to a stop, knocked Kosciuszko unconscious, and took Louise home by force.”

Broke, heartbroken, and perhaps fearing repercussions for his actions, Kościuszko set sail across the Atlantic in June 1776. Upon arriving in Philadelphia, John Hancock appointed him a colonel in the Continental Army that October, and Benjamin Franklin hired him to design and build forts on the Delaware River to help defend Philadelphia from the British navy, writes the Smithsonian.

The Pole oversaw the damming of rivers and flooded fields to stem a British pursuit following their victory at Fort Ticonderoga in 1777. This action bought time for the patriots to regroup and prepare for their first major victory of the war — Saratoga. Fortifying Bemis Heights overlooking the Hudson, Kościuszko’s design contributed to the surrender of General John Burgoyne and precipitated the French’s entry into the war.

From there, Kościuszko’s oversaw the defense of West Point, with his fortifications so thorough that the British never deigned to attempt an assault.

At war’s end he was promoted to brigadier general with Thomas Jefferson praising the Pole, “As pure a son of liberty as I have ever known.”

5. Johann de Kalb: Died doing what he loved — Fighting Brits

Johann de Kalb

Who hated the British most during this time period? The French yes, but Germans were a close second.

Born outside the Prussian city of Nuremberg, Baron Johann de Kalb entered the service of France and fought in the Seven Years’ War against the British. He eventually rose to officer rank and was made a Knight of the Royal Order of Merit, according to the American Battlefield Trust.

When the Revolutionary War broke out, the veteran soldier saw a chance not only to fight for the ideals of the Enlightenment but to strike a blow to his old foe the British.

Initially denied a commission, a furious de Kalb was making his way back to France when he learned that the Marquis de Lafayette had influenced Congress to appoint him as major general. De Kalb survived the infamous winter at Valley Forge with George Washington and Lafayette, before taking command of 1,200 Maryland and Delaware troops in the war’s Southern theater in 1780.

His command would, alas, be short.

On the morning of August 16, 1780, Gen. Horatio Gates deployed to meet Lt. Gen. Charles Cornwallis in the now famous Battle of Camden. When Gates and his inexperienced militia broke ranks and began to run only de Kalb was left to defend against Cornwallis.

De Kalb and his infantry refused to retreat. Yet somewhere in the midst of melee, de Kalb fell — downed by some 11 wounds, the majority from a bayonet. Taken as prisoner by the British, de Kalb survived for three more days before supposedly telling a British officer: “I die the death I always prayed for: the death of a soldier fighting for the rights of man.”

6. Bernardo de Gálvez: Our Spaniard in LouisianA

Bernardo de Gálvez

A best friend is one with deep pockets — especially when you’re trying to win a war. And although Bernardo de Gálvez was never a soldier in the Continental Army, he certainly had the means to help supply the revolution.

As governor of the Spanish province of Louisiana, Gálvez, according to American Battlefield Trust, “began to smuggle supplies to the American Rebels — shipping gunpowder, muskets, uniforms, medicine, and other supplies through the British blockade to Ohio, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia by way of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.”

When Spain joined in the war effort against the British, Gálvez didn’t miss a beat and began planning a military campaign against the British where he eventually captured Pensacola, Mobile, Biloxi and Natchez — all four formerly British ports.

However, Gálvez is best remembered for his role “in denying the British the ability to encircle the American rebels from the south by pressing British forces in West Florida and for keeping a vital flow of supplies to Patriot troops across the colonies,” during the rocky beginnings of the war.

Gálvez was officially recognized by George Washington and the United States Congress for his aid to the colonies during the American Revolution and remains one of eight people in history to receive honorary citizenship.

7. The Marquis de Lafayette: You Know This Guy

Marquis de Lafayette

Last but certainly not least, Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette. The skinny, red-haired 19-year-old had a family tradition of fighting against the English.

Three hundred years before he was born, writes James Smart, “a Gilbert Motier had ridden beside Joan of Arc as a marshal of France. In 1759, when Lafayette was two, his father had been cut in half by a cannonball at the Battle of Minden during the Seven Years’ War. In the newly declared and still embattled United States of America, Lafayette probably hoped to run across William Phillips, the officer who commanded the artillery that killed his father.”

Despite a growing feeling of irritation among the Continental Congress due to the high number of French officers applying for commission, the wealthy Lafayette was willing to serve without a salary and pay for his own expenses.

Wounded while commanding a fighting retreat at the Battle of Brandywine on Sept. 11, 1777, Lafayette soon earned the trust and admiration of George Washington.

In November of that year, Congress voted Lafayette command of a division, where the boy general served with distinction at the battles of Gloucester, Barren Hill and Monmouth.

Lafayette was instrumental in rallying crucial support in France for the patriot cause. By 1781, the then 24-year-old had grown out of his moniker as “boy general” and took command of an army in Virginia, playing a pivotal role in the entrapment of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781, that eventually led to the conclusion of the Revolutionary War.

The general remains beloved in America to this day, with numerous streets, statues, and buildings erected and named throughout the United States in his honor.

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He Was Shot in the Face and Bayoneted by the British. But This 78-Year-Old Patriot Refused to Die.

Claire Barrett — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 18:25:14 +0000

It is said that old soldiers never die. In the case of Samuel Whittemore, he refused to fade away.

Capt. Whittemore was a 78-year-old farmer living on the outskirts of Concord, Massachusetts when on April 19, 1775, he awoke to the sound of marching British troops and the “shot heard round the world.”

According to an 1864 account by Minister Samuel Abbot Smith, Whittemore’s wife, Esther, began packing up their home so she and her husband could wait out the imminent violence at her stepson’s home.

She assumed her aging husband, a former member of the British Royal dragoons, would accompany her. Instead, according to Smith, Whittemore was found “oiling his musket and pistols, and sharpening his sword.”

“Often… (colonists) acted simply as guerilla fighters, whenever they felt like it,’’ author Arthur B. Tourtellot in “Lexington and Concord” wrote, “and unquestionably took part in the very early fighting of the war.’’

As the British retreated to Boston through the Whittemores’ town of Menotomy on April 19, the aging dragoon was determined to eke out his pound of flesh on the British. Crouching behind a wall near his home, the farmer shot two soldiers to death and possibly killed one more, according to the Journal of the American Revolution.

British soldiers quickly tracked down the less-than-mobile guerilla soldier and enacted a savage revenge.

Whittemore was shot in the face at point-blank range, bayoneted no less than six times and clubbed in the head with the butts of the British soldiers’ muskets.

Left for dead, Whittemore again lived up to the old soldier’s motto and refused to die — an act the Journal of the American Revolution called an “epic demonstration of New England stubbornness.”

He lived another 18 years.

(4/5) Whittemore was shot through the face by a 69-caliber bullet, knocked down, and bayonetted 13 times. He was later found by colonial forces trying to load his musket to resume the fight. He was taken to Dr. Cotton Tufts of Medford, who thought Whittemore was as good as dead. pic.twitter.com/JwBjBIXSc3
— Dr Lindsey Fitzharris (@DrLindseyFitz) August 20, 2018

Villagers brought Whittemore to a nearby tavern, and a doctor — albeit believing it futile — dressed the some 14 wounds.

According to Boston.com, genealogy of the Whittemore family, written by Bernard Bemis Whittemore, claims the senior soldier recovered “in about four hours,’’ but another Whittemore family account, as relayed in the Benjamin and William Richard Cutter history, says it took a few weeks before he could “recognize his family.’’

At this point, he was asked if he regretted his actions.

“No,’’ he said. “I should do just so again.’’

Whittemore’s heroics that day became part of state lore, and in 2005, he was officially proclaimed the hero of Massachusetts.

Yet Whittemore’s devotion to the cause of American independence far predated the historic events of April 19, 1775.

Seven years earlier, the town of Cambridge (which Menotomy was a part of) elected Whittemore to a committee to fight the Stamp Act. That same year, writes the New England Historical Society, Cambridge voters elected him as a delegate to the Massachusetts Committee of Convention, which objected to Parliament’s revenue acts and the quartering of troops in Boston.

Later, in 1772 — less than three years before the farmer lost his cheekbone to a musket ball — the then-76-year-old Whittemore was again elected to the town’s Committee of Correspondence. The committee fervently objected to the Tea Act.

“Rather than one discrete act, Whittemore’s heroic stand was a single point in a continuum of action,” writes the Journal of American History.

The tales of Whittemore’s heroics and “uncommon longevity” have long endured, and in the end, it was the old soldier who had the last laugh. Whittemore died at the age of 96 on February 2, 1793 — long enough, according to his obituary, “to see the complete overthrow of his enemies, and his country enjoy all the blessings of peace and independence.’’

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He Fought With Washington At The Siege Of Yorktown—And Wrote About The Experience

Joseph Plumb Martin — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 16:48:12 +0000

The voices of ordinary American soldiers who took part in the Revolutionary War are seldom heard today. One exception is Joseph Plumb Martin, born in 1760 in Massachusetts and raised in Connecticut. Martin plunged into the war at age 15 in June 1776, serving in the Connecticut state militia and eventually the 8th Connecticut Regiment of General George Washington’s Continental Army.

Martin’s memoirs, first published in 1830, reveal the war through the eyes of an “average patriot” present virtually throughout the war at some of the momentous events during the struggle for American Independence.

Among the most significant of these was the September-October 1781 Siege of Yorktown, Virginia, in which Martin, then a 20-year-old sergeant, took part, including one of the most famous actions of the battle. Serving in a unit of sappers, Martin helped dig a line of entrenchments, parallel to the British trenches, which paved the way for Washington’s troops to assault and capture the British strongpoint at Redoubt No. 10 as the French simultaneously attacked and captured Redoubt No. 9. Washington was desperate for this attack to succeed and to show the strength and martial skill of American troops at this stage in the Revolutionary War to prevent Britain from falsely claiming Yorktown was merely a “French victory.” Therefore, the the actions of Martin and his sapper unit were crucial.

The assault and seizure of the redoubts put overwhelming numbers of American and French siege artillery cannon within point-blank range to batter British forces into total submission, thereby compelling the British to reluctantly but inevitably surrender. Martin, present at the surrender, noted that the British appeared two hours late to the surrender ceremony and were visibly downcast—albeit seething at the French—when they finally appeared. Ungraciously, the British commander, Lieutenant General Charles, Earl Cornwallis, claiming illness, refused to attend the surrender and sent his deputy instead.

“The British did not make so good an appearance as the German forces; but there was certainly some allowance to be made in their favour; the English felt their honour wounded, the Germans did not greatly care whose hands they were in,” Martin noted. “The British paid the Americans, seemingly, but little attention as they passed them, but they eyed the French with considerable malice depicted in their countenances.” The British capitulation at Yorktown was the last major engagement of the war from October 1781 to the September 1783 Treaty of Paris which ended the American Revolution.

In the following passage, excerpted from Memoir of a Revolutionary Soldier, by Joseph Plumb Martin, taken from Chapter VII: “The Campaign of 1781,” Martin describes pivotal events at the siege that brought victory and independence.

The Soldier’s Story Begins

We now began to make preparations for laying close siege to the enemy [the siege of Yorktown, Virginia, September-October 1781]. We had holed him and nothing remained but to dig him out. Accordingly, after taking every precaution to prevent his escape, settled our guards, provided fascines and gabions [troop movement obstacles], made platforms for the [artillery cannon] batteries, to be laid down when needed, brought on our battering pieces [cannon], ammunition, &c; on the fifth of October we began to put our plans into execution.

One third part of all the [American patriot and French allied] troops were put in requisition to be employed in opening the trenches. A third part of our Sappers [fortification assault specialists] and Miners [tunnelers] were ordered out this night to assist the Engineers in laying out the works. It was a very dark and rainy night. However, we repaired [moved] to the place and began by following the Engineers and laying laths of pine wood end to end upon the line marked out by the officers, for the trenches.

A Mysterious Stranger

We had not proceeded far in the business, before the Engineers ordered us to desist and remain where we were, and be sure not to straggle a foot from the spot while they were absent from us. In a few minutes after their departure, there came a man alone to us, having on a surtout [protective overcoat], as we conjectured, (it being exceedingly dark,) and enquired for the Engineers.

We now began to be a little jealous of our safety, being alone and without arms, and within forty rods [about 650 feet] of the British trenches. The stranger enquired what troops we were; talked familiarly with us a few minutes, when, being informed which way the officers had gone, he went off in the same direction, after strictly charging us, in case we should be taken prisoners, not to discover to the enemy what troops we were. We were obliged to him for his kind advice, but we considered ourselves as standing in no great need of it; for we knew as well as he did, that Sappers and Miners were allowed no quarters [no mercy], at least, are entitled to none, by the laws of warfare, and of course should take care, if taken, and the enemy did not find us out, not to betray our own secret.

In a short time the Engineers returned and the aforementioned stranger with them; they discoursed together sometime, when, by the officers often calling him, “Your Excellency,” we discovered it was Gen. [George] Washington [commander of the 8,000-strong Continental and militia American soldiers at Yorktown].

Had we dared, we might have cautioned him for exposing himself so carelessly to danger at such a time, and doubtless he would have taken it in good part if we had. But nothing ill happened to either him or ourselves.

Washington Digs In

It coming on to rain hard, we were ordered back to our tents, and nothing more was done that night. The next night, which was the sixth of October, the same men were ordered to the lines that had been there the night before. We this night completed laying out the works.

The troops of the line [regular infantrymen] were there ready with entrenching tools and began to entrench, after General Washington had struck a few blows with a pickaxe, a mere ceremony, that it might be said “Gen. Washington with his own hands first broke ground at the siege of Yorktown.”

The ground was sandy and soft, and the men employed that night “eat no idle bread,” [are always active; waste no time] (and I question if they eat any other,) so that by daylight they had covered themselves from danger from the enemy’s shot, who, it appeared, never mistrusted that we were so near them the whole night; their attention being directed to another quarter. There was upon the right of their works a marsh; our people had sent to the western side of this marsh a detachment to make a number of fires, by which, and our men often passing before the fires, the British were led to imagine that we were about some secret mischief there, and consequently directed their whole fire to that quarter, while we were entrenching literally under their noses.

A British Bulldog

As soon as it was day they perceived their mistake, and began to fire where they ought to have done sooner. They brought out a fieldpiece or two, without [outside] their trenches and discharged several shots at the men who were at work erecting a bomb-battery; but their shot had no effect and they soon gave it over. They had a large bull-dog, and every time they fired he would follow their shots across our trenches. Our officers wished to catch him and oblige him to carry a message from them into the town to his masters, but he looked too formidable for any of us to encounter.

I do not remember, exactly, the number of days we were employed before we got our batteries in readiness to open upon the enemy, but think it was not more than two or three. The French, who were upon our left, had completed their batteries a few hours before us, but were not allowed to discharge their pieces till the American batteries were ready. Our commanding battery was on the near bank of the river and contained ten heavy guns; the next was a bomb-battery of three large mortars; and so on through the whole line; the whole number, American and French, was, ninety-two cannon, mortars and howitzers. Our flagstaff was in the ten-gun battery, upon the right of the whole.

I was in the trenches the day that the batteries were to be opened; all were upon the tiptoe of expectation and impatience to see the signal given to open the whole line of batteries, which was to be the hoisting of the American flag in the ten-gun battery.

The Star-Spangled Banner

About noon the much wished for signal went up. I confess I felt a secret pride swell my heart when I saw the “star spangled banner” waving majestically in the very faces of our implacable adversaries; it appeared like an omen of success to our enterprize, and so it proved in reality.

A simultaneous discharge of all the guns in the line followed; the French troops accompanying it with “Huzza for the Americans!” It was said that the first shell sent from our batteries, entered an elegant house, formerly owned or occupied by the Secretary of State under the British government, and burst directly over a table surrounded by a large party of British officers at dinner, killing and wounding a number of them; —this was a warm [dangerous] day to the British.

The siege was carried on warmly for several days, when most of the guns in the enemy’s works were silenced [knocked out]. We now began our second parallel [a subsequent trench line, dug closer to and aligned along the enemy position], about halfway between our works and theirs. There were two strong redoubts [anchoring forts] held by the British, on their left. It was necessary for us to possess those redoubts, before we could complete our trenches. One afternoon I, with the rest of our corps that had been on duty in the trenches the night but one before, were ordered to the lines. I mistrusted [suspected] something extraordinary, serious or comical, was going forward, but what, I could easily not conjecture.

We arrived at the trenches a little before sunset; I saw several officers fixing bayonets on long staves. I then concluded we were about to make a general assault upon the enemy’s works; but before dark I was informed of the whole plan, which was to storm the redoubts, the one by the Americans [Redoubt #10] and the other by the French [Redoubt #9]. The Sappers and Miners were furnished with axes, and were to proceed in front and cut passages for the troops through the abatis [wooden obstacles], which are composed of the tops of trees, the small branches cut off with a slanting stroke which rendered them as sharp as spikes. These trees are then laid at a small distance from the trench or ditch, pointing outwards, and the butts fastened to the ground in such a manner that they cannot be removed by those on the outside of them; —it is almost impossible to get through them. Through these we were to cut a passage before we or the other assailants could enter.

“Rush On Boys”

At dark the detachment was formed and advanced beyond the trenches, and lay down on the ground to await the signal for advancing to the attack, which was to be three shells from a certain battery near where we were lying. All the batteries in our line were silent, and we lay anxiously waiting for the signal. The two brilliant planets, Jupiter and Venus, were in close contact with the western hemisphere, (the same direction that the signal was to be made in,) when I happened to cast my eyes to that quarter, which was often, and I caught a glance of them, I was ready to spring on my feet, thinking that they were the signal for starting.

Our watchword was “Rochambeau,” [Marshal de France, Jean-Baptiste, Comte de Rochambeau, 1725-1807] the commander of the [8,000-strong] French forces’ name, a good watchword, for being pronounced Ro-sham-bow, it sounded, when pronounced quick, like rush-on-boys. We had not lain here long before the expected signal was given, for us and the French, who were to storm the other redoubt, by the three shells with their fiery trains mounting the air in quick succession. The word up, up was then reiterated through the detachment. We immediately moved silently on toward the redoubt we were to attack, with unloaded muskets [to prevent musket-firing from alerting the enemy defenders, although bayonets were fixed].

Just as we arrived at the abatis, the enemy discovered us and directly opened a sharp fire upon us. We were now at a place where many of our large shells had burst in the ground, making holes sufficient to bury an ox in; the men having their eyes fixed upon what was transacting before them, were every now and then falling into these holes. I thought the British were killing us off at a great rate. At length one of the holes happening to pick me up, I found out the mystery of the huge slaughter. As soon as the firing began, our people began to cry, “the fort’s our own!” and it was “rush on boys.”

The Sappers and Miners soon cleared a passage for the Infantry, who entered it rapidly. Our Miners were ordered not to enter the fort, but there was no stopping them. “We will go,” said they; “then go to the d—l [devil—considered a curse word in that era],” said the commanding officer of our corps, “if you will.”

I could not pass at the entrance we had made, it was so crowded; I therefore forced a passage at a place where I saw our shot had cut away some of the abatis; several others entered at the same place. While passing, a man at my side received a ball in his head and fell under my feet, crying out bitterly.

“By The Light Of the Enemy’s Musketry”

While crossing the trench, the enemy threw hand grenades, (small shells) into it; they were so thick that I at first thought them cartridge papers on fire; but was soon undeceived by their cracking. As I mounted the breastwork, I met an old associate hitching himself down into the trench; I knew him by the light of the enemy’s musketry, it was so vivid.

The fort was taken, and all was quiet in a very short time. Immediately after the firing ceased, I went out to see what had become of my wounded friend and the other that fell in the passage—they were both dead. In the heat of the action I saw a British soldier jump over the walls of the fort next the river and go down the bank, which was almost perpendicular, and twenty or thirty feet high; when he came to the beach he made off for the town, and if he did not make good use of his legs I never saw a man that did.

All that were in the action of storming the redoubt were exempted from further duty that night; we laid down upon the ground and rested the remainder of the night as well as a constant discharge of grape and canister shot would permit us to do; while those who were on duty for the day completed the second parallel by including the captured redoubts within it. We returned to camp early in the morning, all safe and sound, except one of our Lieutenants, who had received a slight wound on top of the shoulder by a musket shot. Seven or eight men belonging to the Infantry were killed, and a number wounded.

What Is The History of Eggnog?

Zita Ballinger Fletcher — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 14:41:40 +0000

A peculiar drink materializes across the United States every winter holiday season—at Christmas parties, in grocery stores, and at family gatherings for example. It is eggnog. As its name suggests, it contains eggs, along with milk, sugar, and heavy cream, plus spices such as nutmeg, vanilla or cinnamon. Alcoholic spirits, like whiskey, rum or bourbon, can also add some zing to eggnog.

The creamy drink is a weird mix, and it tends to divide opinion. Maybe the mere sight of it is enough to make you duck for cover…or alternatively you might be called an eggnog hog. How did this strange beverage find its way into our lives in the first place?

Medieval Remedy

There are debates about how exactly eggnog came to be. However, most people who have probed its mysterious origins agree that it seems to have morphed from an English drink called “posset.”

Posset was used as a remedy in England as far back as the 15^th century. One early reference to it is Russell’s “Boke of Nurture,” which dates from about 1460. Posset’s main ingredient was milk, which was heated, flavored with alcoholic drinks, and curdled before being sweetened with the same types of spices used for eggnog—namely, nutmeg and cinnamon.

It was considered a healthy and comforting drink, and was thought to help people recover from various colds and illnesses. Posset varied and evolved over time; it could include ingredients like egg yolks, and sometimes breadcrumbs. Wealthier people who had more dairy products on hand—and who could afford to make more frivolous use of them—whipped up possets as desserts. Sets for making possets were popular gifts among the well-to-do.

Posset might have been “the medieval eggnog,” according to Smithsonian Magazine. It made several cameo appearances in the writings of William Shakespeare, including being used as a Mickey Finn by Lady Macbeth on two unsuspecting guards.

George Washington And The Eggnog Riot

It is likely that eggnog sprung up as a colonial cousin of posset in British North America. It was generally easier for ordinary people in the American colonies to make their own versions of “posset” due to entrepreneurial spirit and sheer abundance of resources. Dairy farms were everywhere and there was no shortage of brewers of alcoholic beverages.

The term “eggnog” started popping up in North America in the late 1700s. As well as the name, the ingredients differ from what went into a traditional English posset, and are more or less the same as what we have now.

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Aside from being “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” George Washington is also rumored to be among the first Americans to publicize his own boozy eggnog recipe for Christmas parties. Yet contrary to popular belief, Washington is unlikely to have written his own eggnog recipe. The one commonly attributed to him contained rye whiskey, brandy, rum and sherry, but Mount Vernon claims the recipe has no tie to Washington.

Although it might not be linked to the first commander-in-chief, eggnog has an inglorious tie with the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The academy became the scene of the infamous Eggnog Riot of 1826, in which cadets revolted against a disciplinarian superintendent who attempted to ban them from drinking alcohol. The cadets got their hands on some strong eggnog and ran wild, smashing windows and attacking officers. The aftermath of the Eggnog Riot saw 11 cadets expelled and five more withdraw from West Point.

As to its funny name? Historical debates rage as to where it might have come from. It has been claimed that “nog” either derives from a primordial English ale cup called a “noggins,” or from the slang term “grog” (also known to mean rum, or booze in general to those of us who are less picky). Even if its historical mysteries go unsolved, eggnog remains an indisputable part of the American winter holiday season.

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‘The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy’ Review: Becoming a Superpower

Mike Oppenheim — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 14:30:00 +0000

In Four Ages, Michael Mandelbaum, Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins, compellingly traces America’s ascent from rebel colonies to world power, concluding that we have peaked. American foreign policy, he stresses, has been unusually ideological, unusually economic, and unusually democratic. The nation tries, with spotty success, to spread its basic ideas: liberty, human rights, free elections. Even as a military power, the United States has emphasized trade, trade sanctions, and foreign investment. Public opinion remains a dominant influence, especially regarding war.

Before the Civil War a weakling, the country capitalized on the Atlantic Ocean and foes’ priorities—Britain always worried more about France than the U.S.—such that by 1860 America had more wealth than most European nations. Civil war ushered the nation into the clique of great powers. By 1900 the world’s biggest economy, America helped win the Great War more with money and manufacturing than manpower. When World War II began, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did what he could to support the Allies but it took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to banish the public’s isolationism. By war’s end, America was an atomic superpower whose economy dwarfed all others.

WWII birthed a competing superpower. Hindsight shows the Soviets’ shambling economy to have been a fraction the size of America’s, but the massive Red Army and Marxist cant that world revolution would bury capitalism conjured a facsimile of a true rival.

The Cold War produced a few hot wars and much anxiety over nuclear Armageddon but ended with the 1991 Soviet breakup and America alone as a hyperpower.

America’s 1990s were deeply satisfying, but its 21st century has been a wreck. Terrorism, by nature a police matter, unhinged leaders who expanded our military and plunged into wars and quasi-wars worldwide.

Mandelbaum closes his narration in 2015, but his case still holds. The chaos after the 2016 election and China’s relentless rise ended America’s splendid isolation. We may have the world’s largest military—but we need it because our forces are spread globally.

America the Hyperpower has become history. With four times the U.S. population and an economy vastly outmuscling the USSR’s, China seems reasonable in thinking to assume world leadership within a decade or two. —Mike Oppenheim writes in Lexington, Kentucky.

This book review appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of American History magazine.

The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hyperpower

By Michael Mandelbaum

Oxford, 2022

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How American Revolutionaries Ran This Wealthy British Loyalist Family Out of Philadelphia

Jonathan House — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 13:30:00 +0000

Fists banged on Grace Galloway’s front door early on the morning of Thursday, August 20, 1778. From the entryway where she and a servant had been awaiting unwanted visitors to her stately home at Market and Sixth Streets, a block from the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) in Philadelphia, Galloway shouted that she would not be admitting anyone.

Her callers, all male, circled the house trying every door, finding each locked. Using a scrubbing brush, the men stove in the kitchen door. Red-faced and short of breath, the intruders rushed to where Galloway stood.

First among the raiders was Charles Willson Peale, an artist and fervent American Patriot who that day was acting in his official role as a commissioner in charge of confiscating property from foes of the Revolution. Peale and companions had come to evict the Galloway family.

On the Outs. Dedicated Loyalists had to be prepared to undergo rude searches, harassment, and much worse.

The city’s so-called commissioners for forfeited estates really were out to punish Grace’s husband, Joseph, a prominent politician who had aided the British army during its recent occupation of Philadelphia. When in recent months the army pulled up stakes, Joseph had fled. Peale had warned Grace on Wednesday that he would be coming to take possession of the Galloways’ Philadelphia home.

Face to face with Peale and his men, Galloway declared that “nothing but force should get me out of my house,” she wrote later in her diary.

One interloper said he knew how to deal with that: They would throw her clothes into the street. Onlookers, including friends of Galloway’s, appeared. After a while a carriage arrived for Galloway, and one of Philadelphia’s wealthiest women reluctantly walked out to join tens of thousands of Americans dispossessed by the Revolution.

A Woman of Wealth and Taste. Grace Galloway moved comfortably among the upper strata of colonial Philadelphia society, but the Revolution knocked her family for a loop.

Sparked by hated new taxes, hostility to Britain had emerged and spread rapidly in the Crown’s North American colonies in the decade before the colonies declared independence. But only about 40 percent of their 2.5 million inhabitants ardently desired independence. Another 40 percent were on the fence. About 20 percent, known as Loyalists or Tories, wished to remain part of Britain.

Not only were Patriots waging war against the world’s mightiest empire—they were conducting a campaign to bring along Loyalist neighbors, whether by persuasion or by violence. Patriots whipped up mobs, confiscated property, and forced Loyalists into exile.

Many Loyalists fought back in armed militias or in the British army. But in nearly any area lacking a sizable British military presence, zealous Patriots gained control of local government and stamped out dissent.

Grace Galloway’s diary and letters provide a window into the experiences of this internecine conflict’s losing side.

Privileged Background

A merchant’s daughter, Grace Growden married Joseph Galloway, an up-and-coming Philadelphia lawyer, in 1753. Upon their father’s death, Grace and her sister Elizabeth inherited multiple estates covering thousands of acres of property collectively valued at more than £110,000. Grace bore several children, but only one, also named Elizabeth, survived infancy. Joseph’s career took off. Elected to the Pennsylvania assembly, he served as that body’s speaker from 1766 to 1775, during which period onerous new colonial taxes prompted widespread rioting, attacks on symbols of British authority, and bans on British imports.

Charles Peale

When the colonies convened the First Continental Congress in 1774 to coordinate resistance, Galloway attended as a member of the Pennsylvania delegation. Decrying the new taxes but fearing a bloody, futile confrontation, he proposed converting the Congress into an American parliament with power to block British legislation affecting all the colonies. Congress, voting colony by colony, rejected Galloway’s plan by a single vote, opting instead for a comprehensive trade boycott.

To enforce that boycott, Congress created local committees. These bodies forcefully cracked down on attempts to sidestep the bans and gradually took over local militias and other functions of governance. Such hard line tactics alienated moderates like Galloway, who stayed away when Congress convened again in May 1775. The colonies hurtled toward a declaration of independence and the carnage he had predicted. A little over a year later, Galloway crossed over to the British side to offer his services, and when General William Howe occupied Philadelphia in September 1777, he made Joseph Galloway his chief of police.

Within the year, forced to reassign troops due to France’s entry into the war, the British had pulled out of Philadelphia. Soon, so had Joseph Galloway, taking daughter Elizabeth with him to New York. Grace stayed behind to try to protect their holdings. The commissioners for forfeited estates came calling to say they would be seizing these properties, many of which she had inherited from her father, and evicting her from her Philadelphia home.

Aided by powerful friends, Galloway appealed to the Pennsylvania Executive Council. The council replied that a wife automatically ceded to her husband ownership of property she brought into the marriage. Should a husband prove treasonous, the state could seize his holdings, with title reverting to his widow or her heirs following his death. On August 19, Peale gave Galloway until 10 the next morning to vacate her home.

Friends in Need

Joseph Galloway

The reality of eviction distressed Galloway but left her relieved that the protracted tussle had ended and hopeful that she would recover her property. She moved in with her friend Molly Craig and her husband, noting in her diary that after lunch they visited other friends. “I did not seem to be much concerned,” she wrote. Benjamin Chew, a former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania who had urged Galloway to fight her eviction as unlawful, advised her to sue the commissioners of forfeited estates, alleging illegal forced entry. Galloway demurred. At the end of her diary entry for that day she wrote, “I am just distracted, but glad it is over.” Still, her newly reduced circumstances chafed. “People are soon tired with intruders,” she wrote, adding later, “Mrs. Craig I think is tired and what she does is really through charity.” Her hosts’ own political divisions complicated the situation. Mr. Craig was a “strong” Patriot, Mrs. Craig a “violent” Loyalist. After two months, Galloway began bunking with her friend Debbie Morris. One evening, walking to Morris’s home, Galloway saw her former carriage pass by—a reminder of all she had lost. “My dear child came into my mind and what she would say to see her mamma walking 5 squares in the rain at night like a common woman and go to rooms in an alley for her home,” Galloway wrote in her diary.

In New York City, the hub of the British war effort, Joseph and Elizabeth Galloway were poised to sail for London. As they waited they corresponded frequently with Grace in secret, smuggling letters in pen quills and other hiding places. Patriot authorities, who sometimes expelled Philadelphians after intercepting messages residents had sent containing information deemed to be of military value, intercepted an affectionate farewell note Joseph Galloway had sent his sister and published the contents in local newspapers.

A Spouse’s Dilemma. Joseph Galloway had to flee his hometown for his life because he had sided with the Crown. He and his wife smuggled letters to one another.

“It did him no dishonour,” Grace noted in her diary, though the episode unsettled her. In an early letter to Grace, Joseph Galloway asked if her hardships were as he had heard them described, and, if so, urged her to come to New York. She refused, citing their daughter’s welfare. “Should I leave this place…then perhaps, my dearest child may become a beggar,” Grace wrote of Elizabeth. “Therefore, while I have the least shadow of saving something for her, I will stay.”

Hard Times

Her daughter’s absence tore at Grace. “My child is dearer to me than all nature and if she is not happy or anything should happen to her, I am lost,” she wrote in her diary. “Indeed, I have no other wish in life than her welfare.”

Joseph’s welfare, less so. It came to Grace that she didn’t miss her husband, recalling him as imperious and unkind.

“The liberty of doing as I please makes even poverty more agreeable than any time I ever spent since I married,” she wrote that November. “I want not to be kept so like a slave as he always made me in preventing every wish of my heart.”

As she grasped that his financial arrangements were making her life more difficult, her rancor grew. The state now controlled the Galloway holdings, but some tenants still paid her rent — except those with whom Joseph had made side deals. One man told her that at her husband’s request he had advanced him £400 in rent before Joseph left town.

“This unhappy man has ruined himself and I find he conceals all he can from me,” Grace wrote of her husband. “His base conduct with me when present and his taking no care of me in his absence has quite made me indifferent toward him.”

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Ill Health

Grace’s diary entries for late 1778 often cite health problems. Christmas Day was snowy and extremely cold, and Galloway noted her pleasure at having been able to procure firewood. She sat alone most of that afternoon, sleeping.

“Am so unwell can hardly keep up,” she wrote in her diary.

On New Year’s Day she summoned doctors. “Before they came, I was taken with a puking and found it was a true bilious colic,” she wrote. “By the time the doctors came, I got ease; but they all thought me in a dangerous way. Oh, my dear child, how did I then think of you…I got up in the evening and was better but continued ill for many days after.”

Mostly bedridden through February, she ignored her diary until March.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

Lonely, impoverished, and ill, Galloway relied for aid on a robust network of friends. Colonial-era America was a close-knit society, and among Philadelphia’s upper classes, personal history seems to have prevailed over current-day politics. Galloway’s diary frequently refers to meetings with friends, some of them such prominent Patriots as Continental Congress delegates John Dickinson and Elias Boudinot.

But wariness was afoot. Many in her circle hesitated to have Galloway in their homes, a harsh turn for a person of once exalted standing. Men of her acquaintance, especially, worried that receiving an accused traitor’s wife could raise community eyebrows.

“Why must I have people by dozens that will not get me to their houses but let me dine at home; so that I can give them a dish of tea tis all they care,” she wrote. “The whole town are a mean pack.”

Some friends grew standoffish.

A Fond Welcome. A 1783 print portrays steadfast Loyalists being greeted as they arrive in Britain after the Revolution.

Benjamin Chew, initially solicitous, became less willing to help with her legal troubles, and Galloway noted with disgust that Chew and family, despite their Loyalist sympathies, consorted with French officers and radical Patriots.

“I know [the Chews] are no friends to me and mine,” she wrote. “Chew is for keeping in [with] both sides but suspected by all.”

Meetings with friends offered a much-needed opportunity to vent frustrations.

“I told them I was the happiest woman in town, for I had been stripped and turned out of doors, yet I was still the same,” Galloway wrote after one such encounter. “It was not in their power to humble me, for I should be Grace Growden Galloway to the last…that if my little fortune would be of service to them, they may keep it, for I had exchanged it for content.”

Ranting brought her happiness, though she noticed one witness wincing. Sometimes Galloway worried in entries that she should show more caution. Shocked to discover in conversation that a friend was a Patriot, she worried afterwards that she might have said something improper to the woman.

“[I] am vexed about Sally Zanes,” she wrote. “I wish I could always be on my guard.” One night after a gathering at which she feared she had said too much, she awoke in a fright. “I dreamed I was going to be hanged,” she recorded in her diary.

Signed public oath of allegiance to the monarchy.

Whispers

Loose talk of Loyalist ideas could be dangerous. Patriots generally imprisoned and executed only individuals who aided the British war effort—which fate might have befallen Joseph Galloway had he remained in Philadelphia. A lesser but still horrifying punishment, tarring and feathering, involved stripping accused individuals bare and slathering them in molten tar topped with a coat of feathers, then parading the unfortunates through the streets. In May 1779, shortages of many basic goods in Philadelphia prompted rioting by Patriot militia and violence against Loyalists.

“A mob is raised in the town, and they are taking up Tories,” Galloway said in her diary. “I was much alarmed…We put away our valuable things thinking they will search the house for [flour] and stores.”

Rioters demanded that all Loyalists be expelled from the city.

“I am afraid to be sent away,” Galloway wrote.

A couple of months later, authorities advertised Galloway’s estate for sale in local newspapers. Galloway, who had been thinking of sailing to London to find Joseph and Elizabeth, agonized over whether to make a new claim on her properties or try to buy them back. She feared this could amount to acknowledgement of Patriot authority, risking charges of treason or wrecking her reunion plans.

Friends and acquaintance gave conflicting advice. Patriot authorities “knew they had no right to my estate, and that I would not ask that as a favour, which I had a right to command,” she wrote in her diary, “and that I never did or would acknowledge their authority, as I was an Englishwoman.”

Upon reflection a few days later, she wrote, “I am yet undetermined how to act. I think it best to leave it, but my child’s interest argues for buying…I am almost out of my wits.”

Merchant Abel James offered to buy a couple of Galloway properties being auctioned and hold the parcels in trust for her to preserve stands of trees—a valuable source of firewood. She gratefully accepted, but James was outbid.

Pledging Allegiance—To the King. Many colonists who fervently believed in the Crown signed public oaths of allegiance to the monarchy, above. These recorded displays of fealty sometimes meant that it was best for signatories to get out of town, left, when British armed forces retreated.

Through early 1780, Philadelphia newspapers carried notices of sales of Galloway properties. By now many prominent Loyalists had left town, their downtown mansions occupied by new owners. Executive Council President Joseph Reed was living in the Galloway house.

Deteriorating health forbade Grace to travel to London and smuggling missives had become difficult, but she continued to write letters to Elizabeth that she hoped to show her daughter one day. In one of the last, Grace Galloway wrote, “It is now going on three years since I was left in this dreadful situation, and my health now so impaired that I never hope to have it in my power to see my relations or native country more. Want of health and to save your inheritance alone detains me. If by it, I save my child, all will be right.”

She died on February 6, 1782. She was in her fifties.

The war was winding down. A decisive defeat at Yorktown in October 1781 prompted the British to begin negotiating with the Americans and withdrawing their troops. The crown maintained a strong sense of responsibility toward the faithful who had stood fast. Decamping from Charleston, Savannah, and New York City, British troops took with them tens of thousands of Loyalists who feared for their safety. During the war, at least 60,000 Loyalists fled the former colonies, mostly relocating in other parts of the empire.

The Peace of Paris signed on September 3, 1783, committed the Americans to ending persecution of Loyalists and returning their property. Initially authorities mostly ignored that mandate, as Elizabeth Galloway discovered when from London she began to try to recover her mother’s estate. But over the years Pennsylvania authorities allowed Elizabeth to gain ownership of most of the family properties. The state dropped any claim to the Galloway estate when Joseph Galloway died in 1803, 26 years after Grace Galloway’s eviction.

Choosing a Side

In their high stakes bid for independence, American Patriots, unwilling to tolerate potential enemies in their midst, made Loyalist neighbors choose: Change sides or leave. These efforts gained steam after the First Continental Congress in 1774. Patriot committees and mobs, and later state legislatures, required that citizens renounce the Crown and swear allegiance to their states of residence. Those who balked first suffered social and economic isolation and, if they persisted, physical attack and property confiscation. Eight states banished prominent Loyalists, threatening execution if they returned.

Hitting the Road. Neighbors’ ire and governmental pressure propelled many Loyalists out of their homes and into an uncertain future elsewhere.

This treatment spurred many Loyalists to flee, first to British-held areas such as New York City and after the war elsewhere in the empire. Men branded traitors often left behind wives and children in efforts to hold onto property otherwise apt to be seized. Sometimes authorities allowed wives to retain such property, or at least portions thereof. This apparently was what the Galloways were hoping for when Grace stayed in Philadelphia, though husband Joseph’s notoriety probably precluded any leniency toward Grace Galloway.

The largest number of émigrés went north to Quebec and Nova Scotia, where the British helped them resettle with free land, seed, tools, and provisions. Others went to Great Britain, where authorities started paying refugees pensions and offering compensation for their losses.

In 1783, Parliament established a commission in London to hear Loyalist claims. Before the evacuation of British troops and Loyalist residents from New York City that same year, commission representatives traveled there, as well as to Quebec, Montreal, St. John, and Halifax, to allow refugees to file for compensation. By 1788, a total of about £3 million had gone to more than 4,000 claimants.

One was Joseph Galloway, granted £500 a year. Galloway initially remained active in politics, advising the British government on policy toward its rebellious American colonies and writing pamphlets on the subject.

At a parliamentary inquiry into the conduct of the former head of the British war effort in America, William Howe, Galloway criticized Howe for neglecting to make more and better use of Loyalist civilians to reassert British control and of alienating disaffected colonists by failing to rein in his troops’ excesses.

This article appeared in the Autumn 2022 issue of American History magazine.

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Is the Medal of Honor Overrated?

Jerry D. Morelock — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 14:00:00 +0000

Today, sadly, a vast number of Americans seemingly have heard of only one valor award—the Medal of Honor. This narrow-minded focus unfairly diminishes the honors of Vietnam veterans and others awarded different valor medals. Ask the “person on the street” to name another medal awarded for heroism besides the Medal of Honor. Perhaps some people will think of “the Purple Heart,” awarded for wounds or death in combat. Only a few would be able to cite the armed services’ second-highest valor award, the Army’s Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy/Marine Corps’ Navy Cross, the Coast Guard Cross, or the Air Force/Space Force Cross.

U.S. military medals from the top, Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Stare, Distinguished Flying Cross, Purple Heart, Air Medal and Commendation Medal.

The Silver Star might vaguely “ring a bell” with some, but many would likely be hard-pressed to describe its significance and probably wouldn’t know it is the third-highest valor award for all military services. The military’s Bronze Star Medal and Commendation Medal with “V” (for valor) devices are arguably beyond the ken of most Americans.

Yet the heroism those awards represent is no less deserving of recognition than the valor of the celebrated few who have received the Medal of Honor. Although the Medal of Honor is appropriately placed atop the “Pyramid of Valor” all valor awards reflect the bravery, blood and sacrifice of America’s finest, often earned at the price of their lives in desperate combat with communist forces in Vietnam and other foes elsewhere.

As a result of the general public’s unfamiliarity with the military and a focus on the Medal of Honor, the carefully crafted Pyramid of Valor is collapsing into a single “all or nothing” award.

Some people believe that a service member’s heroism must be rewarded with the Medal of Honor to be properly recognized, and therefore the family or other advocates will call for a medal upgrade by claiming that the courage and sacrifice of someone previously recognized with the Distinguished Service Cross, Navy Cross or Silver Star is being unfairly denied the Medal of Honor.

Those whose knowledge of military awards is limited to the Medal of Honor think even the nation’s second-highest valor awards, the service crosses, are somehow insufficient recognition. Anything less than the Medal of Honor is considered an insult to the service member’s valor, an “injustice” or not equal to the heroic actions that took place. This attitude diminishes the true heroism of tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans whose valor was justly recognized by medals less prestigious than the Medal of Honor.

The Medal of Honor, created in 1861 during the Civil War, was first presented in March 1863 to six members of Andrews’ Raiders, who captured a Confederate train in Georgia in 1862, an action re-created in the 1956 film The Great Locomotive Chase. (Some acts of valor that took place prior to the Andrews’ raid were recognized with the Medal of Honor after the war.)

The Medal of Honor was the only valor award a heroic service member could receive and wear on his chest from the Civil War until the Distinguished Service Cross was established in January 1918 in the midst of World War I. The other valor recognitions during that period were limited to a “mention in dispatches” and a written “certificate.” Thus, if a medal was to be awarded, it had to be the Medal of Honor, regardless of circumstances and the degree of valor exhibited.

Of the 3,530 Medals of Honor awarded up to 2021, more than 2,000 of them were presented before World War I for a variety of acts such as capturing enemy flags, rescuing comrades under fire, standing steadfast in the face of an enemy attack and delivering dispatches through hostile territory. That wide range of heroics, ranging from true blood sacrifices “above and beyond the call of duty” to relatively mundane but nonetheless valorous acts, convinced U.S. military authorities that a hierarchy of valor recognition was necessary to ensure that a fair and equitable system of medals was created.

The Pyramid of Valor began to take shape just as the U.S. entered World War I when the military and Congress added not only the Distinguished Service Cross but also other awards for heroism that didn’t quite meet the Medal of Honor’s exceptionally high bar.

Second tier: The Distinguished Service Cross, created in 1918; Navy Cross, 1919; Air Force Cross, 1960.

Third tier: Silver Star, established in 1918 as the Army’s Citation Star, became the Silver Star in 1932 (available for the Air Force after it became a separate service); authorized for the Navy and Marine Corps, 1942.

Fourth tier: Distinguished Flying Cross, all services, for aerial achievement or valor, created in 1926, retroactive to 1918; Bronze Star, 1944, for meritorious achievements or valor.

Fifth tier: Purple Heart, created by George Washington in 1782 as the Badge of Military Merit for “meritorious action” but little used and converted in 1932 to a medal honoring the wounded and killed.

Sixth tier: Air Medal, established in 1942 for aerial achievement or valor.

Seventh tier: Commendation Medal, for meritorious achievement, service or valor, introduced in the Navy (and Marines) in 1944, in the Army in 1945 and the Air Force in 1958.

Medals that may be awarded for either achievement or valor (the Bronze Star, Commendation Medal, etc.) include a “V for valor” device when presented for heroism.

Medal of Honor Awards

3,530—Total Medals
3,511—Individuals
1,523—U.S. Civil War
110—Spanish-American War
126—World War I
472—World War II
146—Korean War
262—Vietnam War
20—Afghanistan War
8—Iraq War
Current as of June 30, 2022.

All of our Vietnam War heroes who earned any of those medals should be remembered for their courage and sacrifice—not simply the one in 10,000 whose actions resulted in an award of the Medal of Honor. The attitude that somehow the Medal of Honor is the only worthwhile valor medal is a regression to 1861 when it was just that: “one or none” and egregiously unfair to history and our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.

Don’t let a tunnel-like focus on the Medal of Honor lead us to unfairly ignore the valor of heroes whose bravery was recognized “only” with awards of the Distinguished Service Cross (or Navy, Air Force variants), Silver Star, Bronze Star/Commendation Medal with “V” device or Purple Heart. All those heroes must be celebrated and honored.

—Jerry Morelock is senior editor of Vietnam magazine.

Do you have reflections on the war you would like to share?
Email your idea or article to Vietnam@historynet.com, subject line: Reflections

This article appeared in the Autumn 2022 issue of Vietnam magazine.

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

Crypto Bros Tried to Buy the Constitution. Here’s Why Billionaire Ken Griffin Stopped Them.

Kirstin Fawcett — Fri, 19 Aug 2022 10:00:00 +0000

At stake was a crowdsourced $40 million — and the fate of one of modern history’s most important documents. So were the circumstances at Sotheby’s New York last November, in a do-or-die auction for a rare first printing of the U.S. Constitution that pitted populist-minded cryptocurrency and NFT buffs against traditionally wealthy parties.

The anonymous winner, who shelled out $3 million above a maximum bid from crypto-cabal Constitution DAO, was later revealed to be hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin. Motivating his purchase, he recently told The Wall Street Journal, was the fear that ConstitutionDAO — which intended to purchase the government charter “for the people” — wouldn’t take appropriate care of the historic treasure.

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down to the wire

Griffin, an art collector who favors works by Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning, isn’t exactly known for being a history lover in the way, of, say, private equity billionaire (and Magna Carta owner) David Rubenstein. Observers were naturally curious as to what compelled him to go head-to-head last year with the now-defunct ConstitutionDAO after the 17,000-plus member group raised more than $40 million to buy the Constitution. (For the uninitiated, “DAO” stands for “decentralized autonomous organization, a transparent, member-controlled entity with no central leadership.)

Griffin acknowledged ConstitutionDAO’s “impressive” public fundraising effort, which eclipsed Sotheby New York’s initial $20 million estimate by a landslide and might have succeeded in its goal if not for the billionaire’s deus ex machina (which involved a quick telephone call and just a few extra million).

However, he added, “there were important questions about whether a large decentralized group would be able to manage the responsibilities necessary to protect this rare document.”

Griffin said he did reach out to ConstitutionDAO following the auction to see if they wanted to co-fund the document’s display, or to decide where it’s shown half the time; after all, there are only a handful of surviving original copies. One of the group’s founding members, Graham Novak, said Griffin only offered to sell them its digital rights, and that the DAO hadn’t known anything about having a potential say in its showing.

For the people, by the people

One party who was interested, and ultimately successful, in displaying Griffin’s new/old artifact was Olivia Walton, niece of Walmart heir Alice Walton. She, too, tried to score this copy of the Constitution last November — and, as a consolation prize, managed to borrow it for her family’s art museum, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville, Arkansas. It’s there on display through Jan. 2, 2023, as part of a hybrid history-art exhibit on democracy, according to The Guardian.

As for Griffin, he now appears to have caught the history bug: According to the Journal, just five days after nabbing the Constitution, he splurged on a $1.5 million copy of the Amendments to the Constitution of the United States (later ratified as the Bill of Rights), which is also now on display at the Crystal Bridges Museum.

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Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution

Tim Queeney — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 13:30:00 +0000

Pirates but for a scrap of parchment, American privateers wreaked havoc on British shipping during the Revolution, contributing far more to victory at sea than the nascent U.S. Navy. Though exact records are not available, roughly 1,600 American privateers seized more than 1,800 British vessels. Privateering aligned with Americans’ spirit of free enterprise. Indeed, a mania erupted among American ship owners and sailors for taking British ships—and getting rich in the bargain.

Most naval history focuses on battles between national fleets, and so the swaggering history of the Revolution’s American privateers may have sailed past some readers. Eric Jay Dolin’s comprehensive effort helps correct that oversight.

A form of commerce raiding during the age of sail, privateering involved outfitting privately-owned ships, often converted merchantmen, with cannon, muskets, and cutlasses to “annoy” enemy commerce. The legal fig leaf for this thievery was the letter of marque—a document issued by a government giving a privateer an official commission. Seized ships, or “prizes,” were sold at special vice admiralty courts, the proceeds divvied among owners, captain, and crew. Privateer crews received a larger slice of prize sales than naval crews, making sailing on a privateer more attractive than enlisting. A single cruise could leave even lowly crewmen wealthy. Lucky privateer owners made fortunes. The privateer brig Holker of Philadelphia, dubbed “the swiftest sailing vessel…from America” by the British, took 10 prizes on one cruise. This haul was worth £2 million—today, roughly $300 million—including a sizeable profit for her owner, Irish-born merchant Blair McClenachan.

Besides examining privateer vessels, crews, and fights at sea, Dolin also studies how privateering fit American war aims, how the strategy’s popularity affected the strength of both the navy and the army, and how privateers’ successes buoyed public spirits. He also touches on how this freebooting practice discomfited certain American leaders. Benjamin Franklin, an early proponent, came to dislike privateering, calling the practice “…a remnant of the ancient piracy” and writing that it made war profitable and thus more likely.

The only drawback to Dolin’s fascinating effort might be an excess of detail on congressional political machinations and the Revolution’s general history and not enough on the exciting sea stories and battle accounts of these partisans-for-profit. —T

This book review appeared in the Autumn 2022 issue of American History magazine.

Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution

By Eric Jay Dolin
Liveright, 2022

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George Washington’s Hotheaded Aide Had a Brilliant But Brief Career in the Fight for Independence

Matthew T. Beazley — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 15:00:42 +0000

By early afternoon on Sept. 11, 1777, Gen. George Washington’s Continental Army had been fending off Hessian assaults across Chadds Ford for several hours. Having reconnoitered the advancing British army under Maj. Gen. Sir William Howe, Washington had chosen a strong defensive position on the east bank of Pennsylvania’s Brandywine River. If his men could hold the fords, the enemy would be unable to cross from the opposite shore to threaten Philadelphia.

But around 2 p.m., as Washington surveyed the situation at Chadds Ford with some satisfaction, members of his staff noticed movement to the north. Scouts soon reported the approach of ranks of soldiers in red coats. Having crossed unguarded Jefferis Ford, 5 miles to the north, the main British body, led by Lt. Gen. Charles Cornwallis, had unexpectedly arrived on the American right flank in force with some 8,500 men. Washington’s staff, who only moments before had been calm and confident of the day’s outcome, searched frantically for reinforcements to counter the British flank attack and stave off disaster.

Among the American commander’s harried subordinates was a young and enthusiastic South Carolinian named John Laurens, who had joined the Continental Army a month earlier. Well educated, well connected and fluent in French, he’d been appointed to Washington’s staff as an aide-de-camp. While three divisions under Maj. Gen. John Sullivan rushed to the right to confront the British flank attack, Laurens rode in the opposite direction, looking for Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene on the American left.

Artist Howard Pyle’s 1903 painting The Nation Makers immortalizes the Sept. 11, 1777, Battle of Brandywine, the first clash in which Laurens participated as an aide to George Washington.

As Greene’s reinforcing division pivoted to confront the British flanking force, it was inundated with panicked Americans from Sullivan’s crumbling divisions. Mustering the energy and determination for which he would become famous, Laurens rallied many of the fleeing men under fire. Greene and his ad hoc mixture of Regulars and militia then made their stand on high ground near the Birmingham Meetinghouse. Conspicuous among the combatants was Laurens. The young South Carolinian wasn’t the only brave man on the field that day, but he certainly inspired many others to stand and fight. The men on Birmingham Hill put up a stubborn defense against veteran British soldiers, thus allowing Washington’s army to conduct an orderly retreat. Although the Battle of Brandywine was a defeat for the Americans, and the British went on to capture Philadelphia, the bravery of Greene’s men and those Laurens had cobbled together had kept the withdrawal from turning into a rout. “It was not his fault that he was not killed or wounded,” quipped Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, of Laurens’ conduct during the battle. “He did everything that was necessary to procure one or t’other.”

And so began the inspiring and tragically brief military career of John Laurens.

BOrn to Wealth

Born on Oct. 28, 1754, in Charleston, South Carolina, Laurens was raised in affluence. His father, Henry Laurens, was one of the wealthiest plantation owners in the British province. But in childhood John was surrounded by death. Of Henry and wife Eleanor’s dozen children, only five survived to adulthood. John not only watched his siblings die, but also lost his beloved mother, in 1770 at age 15. Despite such emotional trials, John grew into a highly intelligent and capable young man. A year after his wife’s death, Henry Laurens moved to London with two of his surviving three sons (the third already resided there), leaving his daughters in the care of their Uncle James in Charleston. Henry gave John the best education money could buy, including personal tutors and some of the finest private schools in Switzerland and England.

By the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War young Laurens was studying to become a lawyer at London’s prestigious Middle Temple. It was around that time friends introduced him to the abolitionist movement. John attended many meetings and debates on the issue and soon became a strong proponent of the cause, a most unusual position for a Southern aristocrat whose father owned a half dozen plantations and one of the leading slave-trading houses in North America.

John Laurens

Like many of the soon-to-be American founders, Laurens read enlightenment philosophy, and in response to Britain’s heavy-handed tax policies and its refusal to grant the colonies direct representation in Parliament, he became convinced Americans should seek independence from the Crown. Indeed, the cause of American liberty became an obsession that would consume the remaining years of his life. When tensions in the colonies erupted into open rebellion, Laurens read with increasing alarm of the siege of Boston, the Battle of Bunker Hill, Washington’s flight from Long Island and other desperate actions. By then Henry Laurens had returned stateside to lend a hand to the political cause. Son John had made a life in London, in 1776 marrying Martha Manning, the English daughter of a prominent family friend. But as the bad news from home piled up, young Laurens also felt compelled to return home — to join the fight. So, in December 1776 he said his farewells to Martha (pregnant with their daughter) and boarded a ship bound for the colonies. He arrived in Charleston in April 1777 and traveled to Philadelphia, where Henry Laurens took a proffered seat in the Continental Congress and secured 22-year-old son John a position on Washington’s staff.

IN Battle

After defeating the Americans at Brandywine that September, the British captured Philadelphia. Leaving a 3,000-man garrison in the city, Howe then moved his 9,000-strong main army north to the nearby village of Germantown. Presented a chance to decisively defeat the British—much as he had the Hessians at Trenton earlier that year — Washington led four columns to converge on Germantown, marching overnight for what he hoped would be a surprise attack.

Just after 5 o’clock on the morning of Oct. 4 the undetected Continentals made contact with British pickets on the outskirts of town. Laurens was in the vanguard and took a musket ball to the fleshy part of his right shoulder during the initial engagement. Disregarding his wound, Laurens pushed forward with his fellow Continentals to Cliveden, attorney Benjamin Chew’s country estate, a stone structure packed with some 120 enemy troops.

Despite being outnumbered, the British stubbornly held their ground, shooting effectively from the second-story windows. An American officer under a white flag demanded the holdouts surrender, only to be shot dead for his trouble. The Continentals then brought a 6-pounder cannon to bear on the house, but the iron balls merely bounced off its sturdy walls. Laurens finally joined others in an effort to burn out the defenders. During the failed attempt he was badly bruised in the side by a spent ball. Washington had counted on surprise, but confusion due to heavy fog and the half hour delay at Cliveden gave the British plenty of time to form for battle and launch a counterattack that ultimately drove the Continental Army from the field.

Though the Patriots failed in their assault on the Chew estate and lost the broader Battle of Germantown, Laurens was noted for his courage and leadership in action.

Following the defeat at Germantown, Washington established winter quarters at Valley Forge. While encamped, Laurens conceived a plan to form regiments of slaves, who would be given their freedom at war’s end. The plan gained traction in the North and received the approval of both Washington and the Continental Congress, but it predictably fell on deaf ears down South. Laurens’ home state of South Carolina had an acute shortage of soldiers for its defense. But even after the British seized Savannah and threatened Charleston, the South Carolina Legislature still overwhelmingly vetoed Laurens’s attempt to raise slave regiments within the state. Undeterred, Laurens pursued the cause throughout the war. Though individual liberty, natural law and self-government were bedrock principles of the American Revolution, abolition proved too radical a cause for the age, at least in the labor-dependent plantation South.

Strike Opportunities

Following the British near upset at Germantown on Oct. 4 and Maj. Gen. John Burgoyne’s humiliating defeat two weeks later at Saratoga, New York, Howe resigned his command. He was replaced by Maj. Gen. Sir Henry Clinton, who abandoned the Northern strategy, evacuated Philadelphia in June 18, 1778, and moved to consolidate his forces in New York.

As the dispirited British army plodded south across New Jersey, it presented Washington another irresistible opportunity. On the morning of June 28, as the British rearguard began to decamp, the van of the Continental Army under Maj. Gen. Charles Lee struck near the county seat village of Monmouth Courthouse. On seeing the mass of British infantry before him, however, Lee lost his nerve and ordered a retreat. The order angered many of his subordinates, none more than Laurens, who tried vainly to reverse the tide of panic-stricken Americans.

Arriving on the field, Washington took command of what was left of Lee’s forces and formed a defensive line on the high ground atop Perrine’s Hill. As the Americans beat back several British attacks, reinforcements arrived to bolster the Continental line. The fighting under a hot summer sun went on for hours until both sides were exhausted. Throughout the struggle Laurens was consistently in the midst of the fighting with the van of Americans battling their way across a bridge that spanned a ravine at the base of the hill. During the fierce hand-to-hand confrontation with an elite British grenadier battalion, Laurens received a glancing wound from a musket ball when his horse was shot out from under him. With the coming of night the British retreated on the road to Sandy Hook, where ships waited to transport them to New York. The Battle of Monmouth went down on the list of lost opportunities for the Continental Army. In the wake of the fiasco Laurens challenged Lee to a duel and wounded the feckless general in the side with his first shot. The duelists’ seconds ended the affair before Laurens could reload.

Washington rallies Patriots at the June 28, 1777, Battle of Monmouth, N.J., another lost opportunity during which Laurens was wounded.

After Monmouth the British pursued a new strategy built around invading the Southern colonies. Their first move was the capture of Savannah on December 29. From there several thousand British troops marched northeast toward Charleston. With his hometown under threat, Laurens took leave from Washington’s army to join Maj. Gen. Benjamin Lincoln’s small army in the South Carolina Lowcountry. He soon found the action he craved during a May 3, 1779, skirmish along the Coosawhatchie River near Savannah. An incident there highlighted the young officer’s raw and often rash aggression.

Tasked with escorting a rearguard force of militia to Brig. Gen. William Moultrie’s main position, Laurens instead crossed the river looking for British to attack. He got more than he bargained for. Severely wounded in an enemy ambush, he nearly got himself and his whole outfit captured. Although his courage and fighting spirit were commendable, they sometimes led Laurens to make poor decisions. “Colonel Laurens was a young man of great merit and a brave soldier, but an imprudent officer,” Moultrie wrote in his postwar memoirs. “He was too rash and impetuous.” Thomas-Antoine de Mauduit du Plessis, a French artillery captain who fought alongside Laurens in the Continental Army, labeled the young American a “mad and rash fellow.”

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Back to It

After a short convalescence, Laurens returned to Lincoln’s army in time to participate in the October 1779 Franco-American siege of British-held Savannah. With French Vice Adm. Charles Henri Hector d’Estaing’s fleet blockading the harbor, ground forces launched the assault against British defenses on October 9.

In command of a mixed unit of South Carolina light infantry and dragoons, Laurens supported the main attack on a stiffly defended redoubt. Though repeatedly fired on by British defenders to their front and enemy artillery on either flank, the South Carolinians refused to retreat, but they were unable to surmount the parapet wall of the redoubt. A bayonet charge by emerging British troops degenerated into a brutal hand-to-hand fight that raged more than an hour. With mounting losses and no sign of victory or reinforcement, Laurens was compelled to retreat. His heroic recklessness spawned a number of legends. One account by John Church Hamilton, in a biography of famed father Alexander Hamilton, claimed that at the moment of defeat Laurens faced the enemy guns with arms spread wide in a Christlike pose, as if inviting death. Another spurious story had Laurens gazing down at fallen Americans outside the British redoubt, saying, “Poor fellows, I envy you,” before casting down his sword and withdrawing.

Attacks elsewhere along the line proved uncoordinated, and on Oct. 17 Lincoln and d’Estaing abandoned the siege.

In late March 1780 Clinton arrived on the outskirts of Charleston with his large army. Although more than a year had passed since the fall of Savannah, South Carolina was unprepared for the invasion, and Charleston’s defenses remained wholly inadequate. As the British laid siege to the city, Laurens was among the small number of Americans who rallied to its defense. They stubbornly held out for six weeks, surrendering on May 12 only when it became evident no reinforcements were coming. In keeping with the military etiquette of the day, Laurens and the other Continental officers were paroled, expected to sit out the fight till swapped in a prisoner exchange. In a letter to Washington two weeks later Laurens described the capitulation as “the greatest and most humiliating misfortune of my life.” Six months passed before the eager young officer was exchanged, after which he spent the better part of a year in France on a diplomatic mission. Congress had appointed him to the position, but he chafed to return to the fight. Laurens finally rejoined Washington’s army in Williamsburg, Va., on Sept. 18, 1781, just in time to participate in the siege of coastal Yorktown, occupied by a British army under Lord Cornwallis.

Winning the war

Approaching Yorktown in late September, Washington’s Continentals and their French allies surrounded the British defenses with parallel trenchworks from which to bombard the enemy. Laurens was intimately familiar with the siege technique, having been on the receiving end of it at Charleston.

Before Franco-American forces could extend their trenches within mortar range of the main British position, however, they would have to capture two outer defenses that protruded from the enemy lines. The plan of assault called for French troops to assault Redoubt No. 9, while the Americans tackled Redoubt No. 10. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton would command the main assault on No. 10 while Laurens led a detachment around the rear of the redoubt to prevent the escape of any British soldiers.

In September 1781 Laurens returned from a diplomatic mission to France just in time to participate in a key assault on Redoubt No. 10 at Yorktown, Va.

A daunting obstacle, Redoubt No. 10 was ringed with sharpened log abatis, palisades and a moat and manned by nearly 50 veteran British and Hessian soldiers under Maj. James Campbell. Hoping to avoid detection by its defenders, Hamilton and Laurens waited until nightfall on October 14, a moonless night, to launch their assault. Once in position, Hamilton’s 400 light infantrymen rushed across the no-man’s-land between opposing fortifications. They managed to cross undetected and begin chopping through the abatis before British defenders sounded the alarm and commenced lobbing grenades and pouring musket fire into the attackers. Moving swiftly through the remaining obstructions, the Americans scaled the parapet and entered the redoubt. Simultaneously, Laurens’ detachment entered the redoubt from the rear, the young officer personally capturing Campbell. The rapidity of the assault mercifully limited casualties on either side.

With the loss of the redoubts, Cornwallis knew it was only a matter of time before he would be compelled to surrender. Four days later, when the terms were being negotiated, Laurens was given the honor of representing the Americans. Cornwallis wasn’t present, and he refused to attend the formal surrender ceremony on Oct. 19, citing illness.

The Death of Laurens

In the wake of Cornwallis’ surrender Laurens was transferred to Greene’s army near Charleston and ultimately given command of the general’s light troops, including the combined cavalry and infantry force formed by Maj. Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee. Known as “Lee’s Legion,” the tight-knit unit posed a leadership challenge, as its beloved namesake commander had recently retired, and the men regarded Laurens as something of an unwanted stepfather. Adding to their discontent, duties in the Lowcountry largely entailed uneventful patrols and picket duty. Idleness gave men plenty of time to ponder grievances. Thankfully, the occasional skirmish with British units still waging war served to keep the American troops’ surliness in check.

In August 1782, on learning of one such British foraging party marching up the Combahee River, Greene sent several hundred of his light troops to stop them. Laurens, though bedridden with a fever, rose from his sickbed and rode out to join the fight. On the morning of August 27 Laurens and a detachment of 50 foot soldiers split off toward a redoubt downriver, hoping to cut off the likely British escape route, while the main body of 150 cavalrymen sought battle with the enemy. Unknown to Laurens, the British had anticipated his movements and prepared a roadside ambush with 140 men.

When the British sprang the trap, Laurens did what he always did — attacked without hesitation. He could have awaited the arrival of the cavalry, which he knew would ride hard to join him. But such prudence was not in Laurens’ character. The “mad and rash fellow” instead led his outnumbered infantrymen into the very muzzles of the British muskets. Before reaching the enemy line, Laurens and a score of men fell to an enemy volley. Leaderless and outgunned, the surviving Americans wisely fled. The reinforcements covered their retreat and managed to recover Laurens’ body, which was temporarily interred at the nearby Stock family plantation. He was later buried in the family cemetery at Moncks Corner, South Carolina, north of Charleston.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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Laurens in ‘Hamilton’ and Beyond

Americans justly remember John Laurens as a national hero. An acquaintance of such seminal revolutionary figures as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton (he features prominently in the hit musical “Hamilton”) and the Marquis de Lafayette, he had expended much of his short life in the effort to wrest independence from Great Britain. Laurens believed with all his heart in the “unalienable rights” of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Unlike most propertied Southerners of his era, he also believed such rights should extend to slaves.

Although not a brilliant tactical leader, Laurens was fearless and embodied the spirit of American independence like few others. That he met his end at age 27 in an insignificant skirmish in the South Carolina Lowcountry is one of the many tragic ironies of the Revolutionary War. He nonetheless died doing what he loved most — fighting alongside and for his fellow Americans.

Matthew T. Beazley is a Georgia-based archaeologist and lifelong student of military history. For further reading he recommends John Laurens and the American Revolution, by Gregory D. Massey; and An American Soldier: The Life of John Laurens, by Sara Bertha Townsend.

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What’s Wrong With This Picture? ‘Washington Crossing the Delaware’

Dave Kindy — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 13:21:00 +0000

German immigrant Emanuel Leutze’s monumental painting Washington Crossing the Delaware is undoubtedly a stirring rendition of Continental Army Gen. George Washington and troops en route to capture Trenton from the Hessians on the night of Dec. 25–26, 1776. Historically speaking, however, it falls short, perhaps in part because Leutze painted the 149-by-255-inch oil on canvas in 1851—75 years after the fact.

Historians have flagged several mistakes, including the furled Stars and Stripes (Continental troops flew the Grand Union), the conditions (the crossing took place around midnight amid a snowstorm—albeit hard to capture), the vessels (Washington’s men crossed in larger flat-bottomed Durham boats) and the river (the Delaware is not as wide where they crossed).

The celebrated version on display at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is actually a duplicate. The original hung in the Kunsthalle Bremen art museum until destroyed by a 1942 RAF bombing raid during World War II. A privately owned 40-by-60-inch version displayed at the White House from the 1970s through 2014 was the highlight of a recent auction at Christie’s in New York, fetching just over $45 million, more than double its presale estimate.

Colin Powell on the Declaration of Independence

HistoryNet Staff — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 15:34:27 +0000

On July 4, 1997, Gen. Colin Powell, a Vietnam War Army captain who rose to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and later secretary of state), gave a speech to recently sworn-in U.S. citizens at Monticello, an event held annually at the home of Thomas Jefferson.

Here’s the entirety of Powell’s speech.

Founding Forger: How Benjamin Franklin Mastered the Art of Fake News

Henry R. Schlesinger — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 13:00:00 +0000

Accounts of Benjamin Franklin’s years in Paris describe a celebrated bon vivant, wily diplomat and aging lion prowling on behalf of the cause of liberty. None of these labels negates any other, but in focusing on them chroniclers almost always leave out the clandestine aspects of Franklin’s activities abroad. If the popular bespectacled grandfatherly image of Franklin, a genial gentleman given to aphorisms and electrical experimentation, seems at odds with the intricacies of espionage, all the better. Spycraft is never more effective than when practitioners seem unlikely to be engaged in it.

Arriving in Paris in December 1776, Franklin remained in the French capital until 1785. Operating from a well-appointed residence in Passy, a wealthy Parisian suburb, he included in his multifarious efforts on behalf of the American project the printing of official documents as well as surreptitious production of propaganda and misinformation.

SPYmaster Franklin

Franklin, of course, was no stranger to intrigue. As one of the original members of the Committee of Secret Correspondence, established in 1776 by the Continental Congress to communicate with sympathetic Britons and other Europeans, he was an early and active participant in the emerging nation’s first spy organization. And he had done clandestine printing. In Philadelphia he produced leaflets, folded to hold tobacco, incorporating a surreptitious message aimed at Hessian troops. The leaflets, distributed among the Germans’ camps, promised a prosperous and peaceful life in the new nation to mercenaries who deserted working for the British side.

There is also reason to credit Franklin with the mysterious document known as the “Sale of the Hessians Letter.” Dated Feb. 18, 1777, the purported communique ostensibly is from a fictitious Count de Schaumbergh in Germany to an equally fictitious Baron Hohendorf, supposedly the commander of Hessian troops in North America. The message, in French, requests that Hohendorf see to it that more Hessians die in combat or from denial of medical treatment to enhance the flow of mercenary revenue from Britain.

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FRANKLIN: PASSY FIST

Franklin, upon setting up housekeeping at Passy, quickly acquired a printing press and related equipment. Years of experience as a printer and publisher had schooled him not only in the skills those roles demanded but also the power of the printed word. Parisian print shops would have eagerly turned out whatever documents the colonial envoy required, but Franklin, who apprenticed as a printer in youth and mastered the trade, insisted on overseeing the printing himself and soon had brought his young grandson Benjamin “Benny” Franklin Bache into the operation.

His press, one of the finest available, was largely outfitted by the Fournier family’s type foundry in Paris. In addition to standard typefaces, the Fourniers supplied a typeface — Le Franklin— designed and cast for his exclusive use. Franklin also acquired type from British foundry Caslon, buying typefaces through a front company in the Netherlands. So that he could create his own typefaces, he also outfitted his shop at Passy with a small foundry, and for a while employed a multilingual compositor.

Franklin’s insistence on having his own press arose in part from his duty to produce passport blanks, loan certificates and other sensitive official documents. Maintaining end-to-end control over these items discouraged attempts at forgery. However, he also used his press and his skills to publish witty satirical essays he composed in French and English. These Bagatelles, as he called them, numbered a dozen or so, and went to close friends. The best known may be “A Dialogue Between Franklin and the Gout,” followed by the “Morals of Chess.”

Sneak Peek

In one notable instance, Franklin did rely on a French printer. In 1783, he arranged through a nobleman, Louis-Alexandre de La Rochefoucauld, to have the 13 American colonies’ constitutions translated into French for printing and distribution in his host country. In addition to offering French officials a preview of what the U.S. Constitution would likely include, the gesture marked an early appearance by the Great Seal of the United States, prominent on the volume’s title page. Since the document was to be circulated openly, Franklin went through official channels and hired Paris printer M. Pirres to print the edition. In June 1783, Franklin had the finished copies bound in an assortment of lavish calfskin and Moroccan leather covers. The first circulated went to King Louis XVI and his family.

The gesture seems to have gone over well. In a Dec. 25, 1783, letter to Thomas Mifflin, president of Congress, Franklin wrote, “It has been well taken, and has afforded Matter of Surprise to many, who had conceived mean Ideas of the State of Civilization in America, and could not have expected so much political Knowledge and Sagacity had existed in our Wildernesses. And from all Parts I have the satisfaction to hear, that our Constitutions in general are much admired. I am persuaded that this Step will not only tend to promote the Emigration to our Country of substantial People from all Parts of Europe by the numerous Copies I shall disperse, but will facilitate our future Treaties with foreign Courts, who could not before know what kind of Government and People they had to treat with.”

Revolutionary Fake News

Franklin’s masterpiece of disinformation and covert influence came late in the Revolution, when he forged a newspaper supplement whose contents effectively but falsely alleged that Native Americans, at the British army’s behest, committed atrocities against American rebels. The 1782 forgery represented itself as “A Supplement to The Boston Independent Chronicle.”

Franklin’s fake, measuring 14 5/16 inches by 9 1/8 inches, was a broadsheet in size and design. Posing as an addendum to a legitimate edition of an actual and widely read newspaper, the bogus two-pager incorporated phony real estate advertisements and a notice of a “stolen or stray Bay Horse.” These quotidian items, staples of the form, lent credibility to the main content.

Franklin also indulged in literary trickery intended to enhance his creation’s credibility. The field report, ostensibly written by “Captain Samuel Gerrish” of the New England militia, incorporates a letter by British agent James Craufurd to Colonel Haldimand, governor of Canada, detailing the Indian atrocity. Craufurd, purported to have been captured by Patriot troops, describes the scalps of men, women and children taken by Native American allies of the Crown. In an appropriately dispassionate military voice, the letter says that goods captured included “eight Packs of Scalps, cured, dried, hooped and painted, with all the Indian triumphal Marks.”

The Crauford missive also presents what purports to be a transcribed translation of a Native American speech paying tribute to King George and presenting the monarch with the grisly cargo. The three narratives’ specificity bolsters one another’s believability, suggesting this may not have been the first such macabre tribute the king had received.

The false story’s recitation of gruesome details sought to attract, repulse and outrage European readers and thereby influence peace talks with Britain, then entering a crucial phase. In an aside in the “Gerrish” letter Franklin introduces another character, a “Lieutenant Fitzgerald.” Granted leave to return to Ireland on a family matter, the fictional Fitzgerald has volunteered to detour to London with the scalps and “… hang them all up in some dark Night on the Trees in St. James’s Park, where they could be seen from the King and Queen’s Palaces in the Morning …”

In addition to his canny choice of format, Franklin took care to salt his fiction with familiar references. Indirectly invoking the French and Indian War of the 1750s, he had his characters contrast “Indian savagery” and the code of “civilized warfare,” echoing contemporaneous news reports and post-war memoirs. The passage also fit European assumptions regarding North America as a wild and untamed land.

As with all good propaganda and disinformation, the material played to existing beliefs and added accurate details. In composing his falsehoods Franklin ignored his own enlightened and moderate view of Native Americans, which he expressed in “Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America” (1784), also printed at Passy.

The flip side of the broadsheet was a letter purportedly written by American naval commander John Paul Jones to British Adm. Sir Joseph Yorke, then serving as ambassador at the Hague. “Jones” was protesting treatment of American seamen imprisoned by the British for piracy, a cause genuinely close to Franklin’s heart. At least some of the passports that Franklin printed were slipped to sailors who had escaped British prisons and reached France. And Franklin had funded a London operative smuggling escaped seaman out of England. A one-sided early run of the fake broadsheet, sans the “Jones” letter, was printed but does not appear to have been circulated.

“A pirate makes war for the sake of rapine. This is not the kind of war I am engaged in against England,” “Jones” writes to “Yorke.” “Our’s is a war in defence of liberty … the most just of all wars; and of our properties, which your nation would have taken from us, without our consent, in violation of our rights, and by an armed force. Yours, therefore, is a war of rapine; of course, a piratical war: and those who approve of it, and are engaged in it, more justly deserve the name of pirates, which you bestow on me.”

Getting the fake news out

Franklin did not personally distribute the Chronicle forgery but relied on credible but unsuspecting acquaintances to circulate it. Ideally, his agents would get the supplement to editors at trusted publications whose reputations would enhance the report’s credibility. Franklin sent copies to John Adams, now an envoy in Amsterdam, and John Jay, stationed in Madrid. Additional copies went to an American operative, Charles William Frédéric Dumas, a German national of Swiss parentage and trusted friend of Franklin’s who operated in Amsterdam, and James Hutton, a prominent congregant of the Moravian church in London.

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In an April 22, 1782, letter to Adams sent with a copy of the fake broadsheet, Franklin strongly hinted at the document’s true nature.

“I send enclosed a paper, of the Veracity of which I have some doubt, as to the Form, but none as to the Substance, for I believe the Number of People actually scalp’d in this murdering war by the Indians to exceed what is mentioned in invoice,” he wrote. “These being substantial Truths the Form is to be considered as Paper and Packthread. If it were republish’d in England it might make them a little asham’d of themselves.”

A May 3,1782, letter to Dumas also suggests the Gerrish report’s veracity and purpose.

“Enclosed I send you a few copies of a paper that places in a striking light, the English barbarities in America, particularly those committed by the savages at their instigation,” Franklin wrote. “The route may perhaps not be genuine, but the substanceis truth; the number of our people of all kinds and ages, murdered and scalped by them being known to exceed that of the invoice. Make any use of them you may think proper to shame your Anglomanes, but do not let it be known through what hands they come.”

Dumas was a particularly good choice as a collaborator. Not only had he gained experience in clandestine matters at the start of the Revolution, creating the first diplomatic cipher used by the Continental Congress, but previously planted stories in Dutch papers, such as the popular Gazette de Leyde in Leiden, Netherlands.

Too Good for his Own Good

As a typesetting propagandist and psychological warfare operative, Franklin was both meticulous and sloppy. He took care to give his fake broadsheet a genuine edition number — “Numb. 705,” issued on March 12, 1782 — and to refer in it to Nathaniel Willis, a well-known Boston newspaper editor. But the editor and the actual paper involved were not connected. Franklin’s forgery was supposedly the Boston Chronicle; Willisedited the Boston-based Independent Chronicle and the Universal Advertiser. Whether this mix-up was intentional or inadvertent is unknown.

Franklin also was over-enthusiastic with typefaces. As a matter of style and economics, a newspaper of the day would have kept font changes to a minimum in a given issue, but in laying out his fake broadsheet Franklin employed a variety of faces and fonts clearly beyond the means of even a prominent Boston newspaper. He also used the custom typeface the Fourniers had created for him. No one apparently blinked at the jumble of styles, nor noticed that the sheet used the faces he had employed in composing the Bagatellesand official documents.

Franklin’s prose also may have been too clever by half. British parliamentarian and noted author Horace Walpole, reading the forgery as reprinted in London’s Public Advertiser on Sept. 27, 1782, grew skeptical of the “Jones” letter. “Dr Franklin himself I should think was the author,” Walpole wrote to a friend. “It is certainly written by a first-rate pen, and not by a common man-of-war…The ‘Royal George’ is out of luck!”

Walpole was not alone. The editor of the London Public Advertiser called the letter to Yorke a work of “contemptuous insolence” and “the Production of some audacious Rebel.”

TRUE LIES

Misinformation’s impact is difficult to quantify, but the success of Franklin’s fakery shows in its durability. THe “Gerrish” atrocities report resurfaced multiple times, notable in the years preceding the War of 1812. The Reporter, whose circulation included Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, ran the fake report on its front page in December 1811, headlined, “British Warfare.” The editors’ introduction read, “At a time when it is notorious that English agents are actively employed in exciting the savages to commence war on the citizens of our western frontier, we consider it a duty we owe our country to give a place to the following account of some of the atrocities committed by the Indians in this state during the revolutionary war, to which they were excited by the ministry, of that idiot king, who we hope will live to atone, in some degree, in his own person, for part of the evils with which he has so long afflicted mankind.”

According to one historian, the Gerrish story was reprinted no less than 35 times with many periodicals simply copying it from other publications. To date, the earliest public confirmation of the forgery was by the State Gazette in Trenton, New Jersey, in that paper’s Oct. 4, 1854, issue.

Secrets he kept till his death

Franklin, who died in 1790, never commented publicly on his clandestine publishing career and left few clues to the extent of his disinformation activities. His grandson downplayed the press at Passy, writing, “Notwithstanding Dr Franklin’s various and important occupations, he occasionally amused himself in composing and printing, by means of a small set of types and press he had in the house, several of his light essays, bagatelles, or jeux d’esprit written chiefly for the amusement of his intimate friends.”

The truth of Franklin’s involvement and extent of his printing operations in France emerged in 1914 when Luther S. Livingston, a bibliophile and scholar, brought out “Franklin and his Press at Passy.” In that volume, published by the Grolier Club in a limited edition of 300, Livingston brought together the document’s text, technical aspects, letters and other evidence to paint a clear picture of not only Franklin’s involvement but also his intent.

“The sheet was circulated with a political purpose which was quite foreign to the light-hearted, philosophical or amusing ‘Bagatelles’ already enumerated, and though it has been called a ‘bagatelle’ by modern Franklin editors, I have not included it in my description of those pieces,” Livingston wrote.

Livingston had it right. The bogus supplement was neither satire nor whimsy. Unfamiliar with espionage jargon, he and other commenters to this day invariably call the spurious Revolutionary War-era broadsheet a “hoax.” In his Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Franklin, Carl van Doren labeled the escapade an instance of “gruesome propaganda.” Today Benjamin Franklin’s imaginative effort would be called “fake news.”

Henry R. Schlesinger is an author and journalist with a specialty in espionage. His latest book, Honey Trapped is available through The History Press in the U.K. and Rare Bird in the U.S.

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It Was the Shot Heard Round the World — and These Women Were There to Hear It

Mary Fuhrer — Mon, 23 May 2022 13:03:47 +0000

In the wee hours of April 19, 1775, long before dawn’s first glimmer, Jonathan Harrington of Lexington, Massachusetts, woke suddenly at his mother’s insistence. “Jonathan, Jonathan,” Abigail Harrington cried, rousting her 16-year-old. “The reg’lars are coming and something must be done!”

“I dressed quickly, slung my light gun over my shoulder, took my fife from a chair, and hurried to the parade near the meeting house, where about 50 men had gathered,” the grown Jonathan said years later. “Others were arriving every minute.”

Decades on, famous as the last survivor of the American Revolution’s opening battle, Jonathan Harrington often heard requests to recount the day’s events. What he recalled was his impassioned mother, urging her husband and first-born son to battle. To his dying day Harrington praised his mother as “one of the most patriotic women who ever lived.”

The resolution and bravery the Lexington militia showed on the town green that morning against veteran units of the world’s most powerful army are well enshrined. But Jonathan Harrington had in mind something more: the role of Lexington’s women. Long before sending their men into combat that April 19, the town’s wives and sisters and mothers had been protesting actively against Crown infringements on colonial rights.

By 18th-century norms, proper female behavior excluded political engagement. Society considered it unnatural for a woman to speak or to act in public; rather, she was to sequester herself in the domestic sphere. Yet women in Lexington embraced and acted on the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty—for much of that rhetoric was aimed directly at them. For 10 years before war broke out, Lexington’s women had been hearing exhortations to apply their domestic skills to political protest and resistance. In the name of tradition, they were being urged to rebel. And they answered that call in the affirmative.

Their main inciter was the town’s popular and influential Whig minister. Jonas Clarke shared the providential Puritan view that everything in life had a divine cause and meaning. As political unrest was mushrooming in the 1760s, Clarke preached of what he saw as discontent’s root cause: congregants’ greed and acquisitiveness, which base characteristics he saw bringing on the yoke of imperial slavery, as in biblical times. To redeem themselves and their political liberty, Clarke said, the faithful had to act to preserve their sacred and civic welfare. In this endeavor, as “Handmaids of the Lord,” women had a direct role, Clarke declared.

Clarke preached against excessive fondness for worldly goods—the getting and flaunting of imported attire and furnishings. This was woman’s realm. In his sermon “The Best Art of Dress,” the cleric inveighed against a rising fad for finery—“the great degeneracy of the present times,” he called it. “People are much for the fashion, and young people for those ornaments which they think are beautiful and excellent,” Clarke railed. “And they are apt to set much by them, and value themselves highly upon them, when obtain’d.” Clarke chivvied townsfolk to abandon “vanities and temptations” and to eschew “fashionable dress” for the “white robes of righteousness.” By substituting home-made goods for imported finery women could demonstrate piety—and become potent political actors.

By the mid-1760s, women’s domestic economy stood at the center of a political maelstrom. As Britain was trying to finance the French and Indian War by taxing imports to the colonies, American Whigs smelled a rat: an unconstitutional effort to refill the empire’s depleted coffers by impoverishing colonials. Many Whigs suspected a parliamentary conspiracy to tax the colonies into debt peonage. Lexington residents were articulating this fear as early as 1765 in response to the Stamp Act. In town meeting they complained of the act as “… a yoke too heavy for us to bear…. [I]t will quickly drain the Country of the little cash remaining in it, strip multitudes of their property, and reduce them to poverty in a short time … [O]f natural and freeborn subjects we shall become the most abject slaves.”

Clarke had reason to fear overspending and debt to British creditors. As Lexington matured into its third settled generation, townsfolk were buying more and producing less. Between 1740 and 1770, the value of luxury goods purchased in Lexington rose by a factor of 10. In the 1750s, Dr. Robert Fiske’s wife, Betty, had set her table with pewter, earthenware, and old knives and forks; a generation later, her son’s wife, Hepzibah, could boast of owning china, silver spoons, brass candlesticks, a coffee pot, and tinware. Similar creature comforts graced neighboring households.

When Lydia Mulliken’s husband, Nathaniel, died in 1768, his estate included a “bewfat”—also known as a buffet or sideboard—for displaying fine china; a portrait; a desk; cases of drawers; mirrors; a tea table; items of pewter and brass; and glassware. These all signified genteel taste. But they came from abroad, bought with cash.

Whig fears arose from economic reality: by mid-century, more Lexington farmers had gone in debt, and more were losing farms to creditors. Rising indebtedness reflected a demographic crisis of limits: after multiple generations of sons settling nearby, Lexington fathers were running out of land to hand down. By mid-century, many had borrowed to finance their sons’ settlement elsewhere. New taxes further stoked anxiety.

People complained that greedy rulers were making off with the fruits of the people’s labor; that such policies would impoverish them; that poverty would beget foreclosures, in which corrupt and tyrannical British lords seized their land. As Britain had done to the Irish, colonials would be returned to feudalism, with great lords taking over the countryside and independent farmers reduced to tenancy or serfdom.

To Clarke and other Whigs, there was a clear mandate: households must consume less and produce more. This was women’s work. Gathering the necessities of “going to housekeeping” and supplementing those basics with domestic comforts were the tasks of a young woman before marriage, and her business after. It was to women, then, that Rev. Clarke was addressing his ominous warning: consumption constituted a vanity that would lead—in both biblical and Whiggish rhetoric—to enslavement, figurative and literal.

In 1767, the year that Parliament passed the Townshend Duties, taxing a much wider array of goods, a cry went up to boycott taxed imports and fill the resulting household gaps with homemade goods. “If this savings is not made, Interest must rise,” Boston almanac writer Nathaniel Ames warned. “Mortgages cannot be cleared, Land will fall, or be possessed by Foreigners…” Were households to replace imports with homemade goods, “a whole Province will be saved from Slavery.” Women’s domestic economy would determine which eventuality was to be.

In 1768, Lexington town meeting adopted measures “to promote frugality and economy”—a campaign dictated by men but implemented by women. Letters in the Boston Gazette appealed directly to women. “Ladies, . . .I am convinced that at this present it is. . .in your Power, to effect more in favour of your Country, than an Army of an Hundred Thousand Men …” a correspondent importuned.

In 1768-69, politically minded women organized public “spinning bees.” In large groups, working outside sunrise to sunset, they spun yarn to show patriotism. To be seen in public in the act of spinning became a political act much celebrated in the press. One Boston 1769 broadside honored the women warriors at the wheel:

Boston, behold the pretty Spinners here,

And see how gay the pretty Sparks appear:

See Rich and Poor all turn the Spinning Wheel,

All who Compassion for their Country feel,

All who do love to see Industry live,

And see Frugality in Boston thrive.

The women of Lexington were not to be outdone. In previous decades, they generally had ceased spinning and weaving yarn in favor of imported fabric; now they needed to revive the ancient craft. Lexington’s wheelwright, militia captain John Parker, filled orders for 10 times the usual number of spinning wheels during the boycott years. On August 31, 1769, according to the Boston Gazette, Lexington hosted a “spinning party.”

Once a necessity, the spinning wheel became a symbol of women’s quest for independence. (Illustration by C.W. Jefferys)

Very early in the morning, the young Ladies of this town, to the number of 45, assembled at the house of Mr. Daniel Harrington, with their Spinning Wheels, where they spent the day in the most pleasing satisfaction: and at night presented Mrs. Harrington with the spinning of 602 knots of linen and 346 knots of cotton. If any should be inclin’d to treat such assemblies or the publication of them in a contemptuous sneer as thinking them quite ludicrous, such persons would do well first to consider what would become of one of our (so much boasted) manufactures, on which we pretend the welfare our country is so much depending, if those of the fair sex should refuse to “lay their hands to the spindle” or be unwilling to “hold the distaff.” Prov. 31:19.

Agitation over boycotted goods and “home manufactures” cooled in the early 1770s. Then Parliament brewed a fresh pot of tempest with the 1773 Tea Act, a piece of legislation that was intended to promote sale of imported tea at bargain prices—and to tax those purchases. Boston’s Whig leaders feared this ploy would beget a monopoly on trade and a new form of unconsented taxation. Calls arose for a tea boycott.

For women, this was a Biblically hard teaching. Tea drinking, with its rituals and equipage, anchored notions of female respectability and refinement. In Lexington homes, among the most common luxuries was the tea service, with its china cups and saucers, silver pots, and trappings of presentation and service. One Lexington historian noted that in local memory, “the greatest luxury of women was their tea, their greatest dissipation to make calls in the afternoon and have a dish of tea and to gossip over it.” Newspapers printed a lady’s lament at putting aside this ritual:

“Farewell the Tea-board with your gaudy attire,

Ye cups and ye saucers that I did admire;

To my cream pot and tongs I now bid adieu,

That pleasure’s all fled that I once found in you. . .

No more shall my teapot so generous be

In filling the cups with this pernicious tea,

For I’ll fill it with water and drink out the same,

Before I’ll lose LIBERTY that dearest name. . .”

In late November 1773 ships arrived in Boston harbor bearing the contested tea. Lexington citizens gathered immediately in town meeting and voted to oppose “the landing, receiving, buying or selling, or even Using any of the Teas.” Moreover, they unanimously declared, they would treat “with Neglect and Contempt” and would look upon “as an Enemy to this Town and to this Country” any person who did purchase or consume any tea. Gathering their household stocks of tea, townspeople paraded to the common and committed all to a giant bonfire. Men may have resolved to destroy the tea; however, that staple was under their wives’ control, part of the stores to which mistresses held the key. Lexington’s women had to consent to the seizure and immolation of their tea. And they did.

Whig papers lauded Lexington’s united front. A letter to the Massachusetts Spy declared, “The patriotic conduct of the town of Lexington is a matter truly worthy the notice and imitation of every town in the province, whose members are well-wishers to the cause of liberty.”

Three days after Lexington townsfolk publicly burned their tea, a group of men in Boston destroyed the noxious import in what is remembered as the “Boston Tea Party.” Parliament was not amused. In spring 1774, London retaliated by imposing the punitive Intolerable Acts: closing the Port of Boston, quartering British soldiers in private homes, stripping Massachusetts of self-government, and banning town meetings.

Afire with resistance, many municipalities signed covenants pledging a complete boycott of imported British goods—and woe betide those who did not comply. Reverend Clarke’s diary reported that his town met and pledged not to purchase English goods. It is not known if Lexington women signed this covenant, though women elsewhere famously did, to ridicule by British cartoonists who caricatured ladies’ participation in politics. But Clarke found the matter deeply serious. He preached that the colonies’ “troubles” were partly the fault of their inhabitants’ worldly and covetous behavior. “When a generation forsak[es] the Lord God of their fathers and serve[s] other Gods, alas. . .they are delivered. . .under the hands of the Spoilers to be spoiled. Yea, . . .from being a free and independent People, [they] are brought under the yoke of oppression. . .”

With matters aboil in autumn 1774, town representatives met in an extra-legal convention held at Concord and adopted radical and treasonous measures. The convention advised each town to raise money, men, arms, and ammunition for defense. Lexington complied.

Residents reorganized their militia, which started drilling regularly to “ensure military Discipline, and to put themselves in a position of defense against their enemies.” Enlarging the town’s stocks of gunpowder, balls, and flint and purchasing bayonets for training soldiers, along with a pair of drums “for the Use of the Military,” Lexingtonians voted to bring two cannon from Watertown “and mount them at the Town charge.”

The men did not act alone. Women’s hand in stoking the fires of martial resistance was noted by a Loyalist: “The Americans would certainly have abandoned the cause long ago and bowed to the yoke, but that a certain epidemical kind of phrenzy runs through our fair country women, which outdoes all the pretended patriotic virtue of the more robustic males. These little mischief making devils have entered into an almost unanimous association that any man who shall basely and cowardly give up the public cause of freedom, shall from that moment be discarded [from] their assemblies, and no future contrition shall be able to atone for the crime. This has had a wonderful effect, and not a little served to increase the provincial forces.”

When the alarm bell rang shortly after 1 a.m. on April 19, 1775, the women of Lexington saw their men off to battle, then undertook their own defensive maneuvers. Each attended to her traditional duties: to protect and care for children, household goods, and neighbors.

Women hastily secured their most valuable household possessions and, if their residences were in the path of battle, hustled offspring to safety. Captain Parker’s wife, Lydia, “took all the valuables and hid them in a hollow trunk of a tree standing some distance from the house,” then posted her 14-year-old son on the nearest hill as a look-out. Widow Lydia Mulliken and her teenage daughters, who lived along the main road, hurriedly concealed what they could of the family’s silver and other valuables in a wall near their clock shop, then fled to distant safety.

A romanticized image suggests women often wielded guns while men were off to battle, but such was not the case. (North Wind Picture Archives/Alamy Stock Photo)

Young Mary Sanderson also lived on the main road, with her husband, her infant, and a four-year-old girl she was caring for.

The couple gathered the children and, “taking such articles as they could hurriedly collect and carry in their arms, by the light of a lantern,” made their way to her father’s remote home, whereupon Mary’s husband took his leave. At their house, on the main road, Deacon Joseph Loring’s daughters scurried to hide the communion silver in a brush heap out back, then made tracks. Once Abigail Harrington had sent her husband and son to the confrontation, she took her younger children “down a lane back of the house across a meadow to the old place on Smock farm.” For some, flight was particularly difficult: four women were still in childbed, having recently given birth, and three were within a few weeks of delivering.

At the Clarke parsonage, the parson and Dolly Quincy—John Hancock’s fiancée and at the time a guest of the Clarkes—hurriedly hid “money, watches, and anything [sic] down the potatoes and up Garrett.” Meanwhile, mother Lucy Clarke bundled her children into a wagon headed out of range. These women sought, as was their custom, the company of their sisters and female neighbors, gathering together for mutual support. Francis Brown’s widow recalled that the day of the fight her house, somewhat off the main road, was “full of women and children weeping. They hid their silver and mirrors and many other things in Russell’s swamp beyond Munroe’s brook.” Their terror was heightened by rumors that freedom-seeking bondsmen were to rise and murder defenseless noncombatants.

Some women experienced the fight at close quarters. Daniel Harrington’s wife, Anna, did not have time to flee her house, which was on the common, as her husband and father mustered. She was on hand as her father fell in battle, died, and was brought to her house, where his corpse was laid out.

Next door, Ruth Harrington, her young son with her, watched the battle, saw her husband fall, and, legend holds, watched helplessly as he crawled to his front stoop to die in her arms.

If the morning of April 19 had been full of fear and flight for Lexington’s women, the afternoon was full of horror and fury.

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In the early morning, with her three small children, Anna Munroe had stayed in her husband’s tavern on the main road. But that afternoon, as harried Redcoats were retreating under fire toward Boston, peril came her way. From her windows she could see Regulars rapidly advancing on her home. Gathering the family silver and her children, she fled out the tavern’s back door. Daughter Anna, nearly five years old, recounted the story of that flight to her grandchildren. Anna said she “…could remember seeing the men in red coats coming toward the house and how frightened her mother was when they ran from the house. . .one of the soldiers started to fire on her, but an officer knocked his arm up and said, ‘Do not fire on a woman.’” Later, Anna would recite, her mother used to take her on her lap and say, ‘This is my little girl that I was so afraid the Red coats would get.’”

As the Regulars were making their way east through Lexington, they took out their frustration on abandoned homesteads. The rampant destruction of their household goods was calamitous for women, a loss of all they had produced, acquired, and stewarded, and one that they catalogued and remembered. Lydia Mulliken, whose house and clock shop across from Munroe’s Tavern were burned to the ground, lost everything except silver serving pieces hidden in the wall behind her home.

Rebecca Mulliken, 13, particularly mourned the fate of “a pocket which with great pride she had embroidered with crewels,” and of whose loss she often spoke with regret in later years. The women of Deacon Loring’s family lost everything, including all that the daughters had accumulated to present as marriage portions through extra labor at tailoring and teaching. Mrs. Muzzy returned to her home to find that British soldiers had broken her mirror and valuable crockery, shot up a wall, and left the floor striped with blood. When Anna Munroe returned to her tavern, she found the soldiers had piled her furniture, including a mahogany table that had been part of her wedding furniture, and set a fire meant to burn the house down.

Next to the Munroe Tavern stood the humble little residence of Samuel and Mary Sanderson. When Samuel returned, he observed “. . .his house sacked, many articles destroyed, and their cow, a part of Mrs. Sanderson’s marriage portion or dower, killed, and a wounded British soldier quartered upon them.” When Mary Sanderson heard of the depredations, “she was greatly exasperated, declaring she would not return home from her father’s house to harbor and take care of the British soldier.” When she did return, her state of rage so terrified the wounded man that he feared to eat food she served him until someone had tasted it, in case she had poisoned his portion. “When over 100 years of age, Mrs. Sanderson described with minuteness many articles of her wardrobe and household goods that were destroyed or missing, rarely failing to mention the cow, and that it was a part of her marriage portion.” Her gravestone reads, “A witness of the first revolutionary conflict, she recounted its trying scenes to the last.”

The women, as well as the men, long remembered the 19th of April ’75, and all that had prefaced it, for they, too, had played their part with religious and civic zeal.

Lexington’s women had agreed that “something must be done,” and urged their men into battle. Theirs was, as historian Linda Kerber points out, a distinctively female patriotism. They had been mobilized by intertwined sacred and civic claims on their sex, and their commitment became part of the town’s energizing moral resources. These women sent their men to war as a “surrogate enlistment in a society in which women did not fight.” But they went further. They reimagined their traditional duties to join in that fight.

this article first appeared in American history magazine