Best Little Stories from the American Revolution Read online

  Copyright © 1999, 2011 by C. Brian Kelly and Ingrid Smyer

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  Cover image © The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, 17th June 1775, c.1815-31 (oil on canvas) by John Trumbull (1756-1843) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA/ Gift of Howland S. Warren/ The Bridgeman Art Library & © Shutterstock

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  Kelly, C. Brian.

  Best little stories from the American Revolution : more than 100 true stories / C. Brian Kelly ; with Ingrid Smyer.—2nd ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. United States—History—Revolution, 1775-1783—Anecdotes.

  2. United States—History—Revolution, 1775-1783—Biography—Anecdotes. I. Smyer-Kelly, Ingrid, 1927-II. Title.

  E209.K44 2011

  973.3—dc23

  2011025225

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  VP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Dedicated to Our Grandchildren

  Chandler, Larkin, and Clemme;

  Kristin and Daniel;

  Sophie and Will;

  Ben and Will;

  Aven, Blake, and Carleigh;

  Mabry and Ingrid (“Fanny”)

  Contents

  Introduction

  Early Stirrings

  The First American Revolution

  To Prevent Civil Insurrection

  Rising Hope of Virginia

  Meanwhile, Another George

  To Pay the Bills

  Take This Job And…

  Early Internet

  America’s Man in London

  “I Am an American!”

  The Well-Suited Cat

  1775 Lexington, Concord, and Menotomy

  Orders from General Gage

  Alarums in the Night

  Take You There

  “First Blood Drawn”

  Rough Road Home

  His Aim Was Death

  Biggest Battle of the Day

  Tar and Feather

  Start to Famous Career

  Gentleman from Georgia

  Two Hills Known as One

  Letter to Martha

  A Feat Like Hannibal’s

  Son Unlike Father

  “Most Arbitrary Usurpations”

  Generally Speaking

  First Salute

  Personal Glimpse: Tom Jefferson

  “Royals” of America

  How Far Would They Have Gone?

  Menace to All

  Players for the Crown

  George Washington’s Day

  “A Most Violent Gust”

  Black Patriots

  Riders All

  1776 Independence Declared, Battles Won & Lost

  Stand Forth, Ye Patriot!

  No Retreat Really Necessary

  Torturous Path to Allegiance

  Jefferson Writhed

  Time Out for Another War

  They Signed

  They Didn’t Sign, But…

  Battle of Long Island

  Fought Like a Wolf

  Escape from Brooklyn

  Pamphleteer, Soldier, Politician

  New York Lost

  Stolen from History

  Deadly “Turtle” at Large

  “Strange Mode of Reasoning”

  The Morning Charles Lee Dallied

  Chosen with Purpose

  1777–1779 Settling Down to War

  Civil War in the South

  Rogue Warriors

  Begged Not to Fight

  Deadly Duel in Georgia

  Prince’s Heroine in America

  The Barley Did Prickle

  Murder Most Foul

  Hero’s Path to Betrayal

  “Push Along, Old Man!”

  Log Hut City

  Deliverance by a Prussian Gentleman

  Lifted the Horse

  Personal Glimpse: Betsy Ross

  Generally Speaking 2

  Worst of All Winters

  Sleeping Here and There

  POWs in America

  From Slaves to Soldiers

  Incidental Intelligence

  At Large in England

  Personal Glimpse: Lafayette

  Many Moments of Truth

  1780–1781 On to Yorktown

  “Bloody Ban” Tarleton

  Andrew’s Rage

  Shooting Uphill

  Man in a Red Shoe

  Hysterical Wife

  Two Brave Men Hanged

  Cruelties of War Contemplated

  Personal Glimpse: Nathanael Greene

  Death by His Own Sword

  German Ally at Yorktown

  Drums Covered in Black

  From Slavery to Freedom

  Inventing a Navy

  Killed in “Paltry Skirmish”

  Perils of George (Cont.)

  Final Throes

  Battles Sometimes Overlooked

  Spies in from the Cold

  Frontier Standoff

  Fears of Cowardice

  Personal Glimpse: Simon Girty

  Odds and Ends

  Document on the Move

  No Retirement for This Rogue

  They Also Fought

  Last Glimpses

  Final Orders

  Flagpole Greased

  Farewell to “His Grieving Children”

  Soldier and Observer

  The Word Did Spread

  Casualties

  Hero of Another Revolution

  Settling Down

  Blanket from Bunker Hill

  Contributions Finally Recognized

  Two Who Rode

  Washington’s Generals

  Financing a Banquet

  A Legend Grows

  Back to England

  “Old Hickory”

  Meeting George III

  George Washington “in Extremis”

  What’s in a Name?

  Last Gasp

  What’s in Another Name?

  Select Founding Mothers

  Preamble: “Who Can Be a Silent Spectator?”

  Martha Dandridge Custis Washington

  Abigail Smith Adams

  Mercy Otis Warren

  Lucy Flucker Knox

&n
bsp; Catherine Greene

  Appendix: Declaration of Independence

  Chronology of Events

  Select Bibliography

  About the Authors

  Introduction

  Many years in the making, eight long and rough years in the resolution, it was an incredible moment in the course of American history, a drama to rival the later Civil War and opening of the American West.

  Not merely survival, but the very birth of a nation at stake, it was—in a sublime way, it still is—the American Revolution.

  Just how incredible, how dramatic this Revolution was and is really lies in the details, as we’ve rediscovered in the course of writing this book. And we plead guilty to ignoring or forgetting many of those details until engaging in that recent exercise. We’re just wondering, though, could we be the proverbial Everyman (or woman) in that regard? It’s our sneaking suspicion, with all the historical attention devoted to the Civil War, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, 9/11, and various other historical events, that many of us tend to take the Revolutionary period for granted. Or is it just us?

  Oops, recast that question, please. Was it just us?

  In any case, we were well aware that there was the original settlement of the New World, the development of thriving colonies on the eastern shelf of a vast and still mysterious continent. Thirteen such colonies, of course. And then came…the Revolution!

  No mystery there, naturally. Cataclysmic event of American history, even of world history. That moment in time when some pretty amazing and farsighted Founding Fathers got together and invented a new government…a new form of government. One dedicated to independence collectively and to liberty individually. That moment when an inspired colonial populace rose up in righteous anger, smote the wicked, and successfully fought the Mother Country…war over, end of story. Move on from there.

  As we of course rediscovered, there was more, a great deal more, to the great drama than just that. And what a thrill to discover, to begin apprehending, the true drama of it all! What excitement for two ex-journalists to find one story after another just begging for rediscovery. Hard, glittering gold!

  As in the case, for instance, of the little-known, mysterious American on a white horse who rode against the British the day of Lexington and Concord. And every time he lifted his rifle, said an early local history, “His aim was death.” For that matter, the really major battle of that historic day in Massachusetts was neither Lexington nor Concord, but a place then called Menotomy and today known as Arlington, Massachusetts.

  Details, details. The story is in the details. It’s one thing to know, as any schoolchild surely does, that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, but how many of us are likely to recall that he did so as a member of a legislative committee just like the congressional committees of today (only smaller), that the committee included John Adams and Ben Franklin among its members, and that they made suggestions and even changes?

  Picture the still young, publicly reticent Jefferson having to sit by as Adams, the head of the committee, managed the proposed document on the floor of the Continental Congress. Imagine the esteemed Jefferson groaning inwardly as the membership of the whole made one change or deletion after another in the great document we revere today.

  Then, too, there was that stoic (some even suggest, wooden) figure, the Father of Our Country. Always resolute, correct? Overall, yes, but George Washington surely had his…more human moments. Picture the usually unflappable Virginian one day in 1776 at the future intersection of Forty-Second Street and Lexington Avenue on Manhattan Island, New York. Picture him shouting, yelling, hurling his hat on the ground in frustration as his militiamen turned tail and ran from the advancing British, as they threw their equipment to the ground and streamed past, paying little heed to their furious leader. It happened.

  Fortunately for his fellow Revolutionaries, his fortunes gradually improved, but we all tend to forget the many perils he survived both before and during the war. Fortunately for the future nation, he skated past a bout with deadly smallpox; a plunge in an icy, rushing river; and the pre-Revolutionary massacre of British General Edward Braddock’s column marching against the French and their Indian allies near the site of today’s Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Then, during the Revolutionary War itself, never one to shirk the battlefield, he survived one perilous situation after another.

  More than any other figure, we must confess, George Washington appeals as the very symbol of that war’s successful outcome. Not merely as the widely respected commander in chief, but for the unexpected and very human detail one can discover watching this gentleman farmer from Virginia in action. Doing his wartime “sleeping” in more than one hundred different venues, seemingly always on the move, he left his beloved Mount Vernon plantation on the Potomac one day in 1775…and didn’t darken its door again for six long years.

  Don’t we all forget that history is only yesterday’s headlines? That it wasn’t all dry and dusty doings by wax-museum figures? Indeed not. These were real people doing the things—in great moments and small—that real people do. Thus, we can easily imagine the combined fury and embarrassment George Washington must have felt in dealing with Benedict Arnold’s young, hysterical, and scantily clad wife the day that Arnold openly deserted the American cause.

  But the story—both in today’s headlines and in history—often is about the “little” people rather than the leaders…and we hope that fact comes through in the details related after these introductory words. For instance, the heroes and the rogues who briefly emerged in the bloody civil war fought in the Carolinas, only to be largely forgotten in the centuries since. One was the horribly disfigured Loyalist David Fanning, another was his murderous Patriot rival, Philip Alston, both ranging the North Carolina sandhills famous today as the Pinehurst and Southern Pines resort area.

  Still another guerrilla fighter, an innocent at the start, was a mere teenager, a tailor’s apprentice who amused himself one lonely day making a suit for a pet cat, but who shortly thereafter was gathering intelligence for his Whig friends, then taking part in internecine battles and watching people kill other people, then rolling over the bodies to check the fallen’s bullet wounds.

  Another teenager who springs to view, incidentally, a resentful captive struck by a British officer’s sword, barely a survivor of smallpox, was future President Andrew Jackson. Already fatherless, he would lose two brothers and his mother to the vicissitudes of the Revolution.

  Speaking of mothers, women, as usual in our Best Little Stories series of historical books, the distaff side of our collaboration has added an illuminating section, even more stories of great and “little” people for sure, about the often-forgotten women of the Revolution. “Select Founding Mothers,” we call them.

  But we had better stop right here and now: before we get too carried away all over again, too ready to retell all those stories that make up the book that follows. No need for that, obviously…but one real need: Please, for further reading, keep our sources in mind, since we owe so many of our facts to others who have gone before us, whether as historians probing the primary research materials, or as participants telling their own stories in print.

  We owe thanks also to Garland Publishing’s encyclopedia, The American Revolution, 1775–1783; Country’s Best Log Homes magazine and Military History magazine for their respective permissions to reprint pieces contained in this book that first appeared in the pages of those publications. In addition, the stories on Thomas Paine and the adoption of the Declaration of Independence first appeared in the now-defunct Washington Star.

  Finally, the Garland compendium cited above has been a mainstay as both a factual source and fact-checking resource for many of the stories presented herein.

  Meanwhile, please read…enjoy. It’s been a thrill for us to rediscover the many, many stories of the American Revolution. We just hope a little bit of our own excitement rubs off on you, the reader.

  C. Brian Kell
y, Ingrid Smyer-Kelly

  Charlottesville, Virginia, April 2011

  The First American Revolution

  ASIDE FROM LOCAL GOSSIPS, HARDLY ANYONE IN COLONIAL VIRGINIA THOUGHT twice one spring day in 1674 when a young English gentleman stepped off a wooden sailing ship at Jamestown, bustling hub of the richest, most populous of the British Crown’s new American provinces.

  He had left England under a bit of a cloud, a tale of extortion, whether as a dupe or willing partner, trailing behind. Further, his wife’s father had disinherited her for marrying the squire’s son from Sussex.

  In Virginia, however, the young couple could seek their fortune, enjoy a fresh start unsullied by bad memories or damaged reputation, since here, apparently, nobody knew.

  More important, not even the principals of the pending historical drama had any idea what awaited them at the hands of Cambridge-educated Nathaniel Bacon Jr., then all of twenty-seven years. Instead, Bacon’s wealthy cousin Nathaniel Senior, prominent steward of the colony, and even the aging royal governor, Sir William Berkeley, hastened to welcome the slender, dark-haired young man and his wife, Elizabeth.

  If only they, if only someone, had been equipped with a crystal ball! Wouldn’t they, wouldn’t the entire colonial population of well over forty thousand, have been amazed—even the enigmatic Bacon himself?

  For in just two years’ time, it was the same frontier homesteader Bacon—now self-proclaimed “General, by consent of the People”—who was the virtual ruler of the colony, with Governor Berkeley driven off to a narrow coastal strip, the Eastern Shore. It was young Bacon who burned Jamestown, America’s first permanent village, first Virginia capital, first English settlement, to the ground; Bacon, who had become America’s first real Revolutionary, who rallied “the people” and declared himself their leader and their spokesman against oppressive rule.

  Risen, then fallen, like a comet across the colonial skies, Bacon instantly passed into U.S. history as one of its most bitterly debated—and now, today, most widely forgotten—hero-villains ever. On the latter point, take your pick. If you choose villain, you would be in estimable company. Future U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall, for instance, called him a “rabble-rouser.” But Bacon did have his defenders as well.

  It takes some searching, but in a Virginia courthouse, at Gloucester, there is a plaque on a wall proclaiming young Nathaniel “Soldier, Statesman Saint” (yes, someone forgot that second comma). He died not far away, of malaria apparently, and yet was not exactly buried nearby or in any other commonplace way. In fact, Bacon’s final resting place is as unknown today as it was shortly after his death in the fall of 1676.