Volume Ii Part 13 (1/2)
AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE REVOLUTION
[1775-1781]
It would be foolish to say that the Revolutionary soldiers never quailed. Militia too often gave way before the steady bayonet charge of British regulars, at times fleeing panic-stricken. Troops whose term of service was out would go home at critical moments. Hards.h.i.+ps and lack of pay in a few instances led to mutiny and desertion. But the marvel is that they fought so bravely, endured so much, and complained so little.
One reason was the patriotism of the people at large behind them.
Soldiers who turned their backs on Boston, leaving Was.h.i.+ngton in the lurch, were refused food along the road home. Women placed rifles in the hands of husbands, sons, or lovers, and said ”Go!”
The rank and file in this war, coming from farm, work-bench, logging-camp, or fisher's boat, had a superb physical basis for camp and field life. Used to the rifle from boyhood, they kept their powder dry and made every one of their scanty bullets tell. The Revolutionary soldier's splendid courage has glorified a score of battle-fields; while Valley Forge, with its days of hunger and nights of cold, its sick-beds on the damp ground, and its b.l.o.o.d.y footprints in the snow, tell of his patient endurance.
At Bunker Hill an undisciplined body of farmers, ill-armed, weary, hungry and thirsty, calmly awaited the charge of old British campaigners, and by a fire of dreadful precision drove them back. ”They may talk of their Mindens and their Fontenoys,” said the British general, Howe, ”but there was no such fire there.” At Charleston, while the wooden fort shook with the British broadsides, Moultrie and his South Carolina boys, half naked in the stifling heat, through twelve long hours smoked their pipes and carefully pointed their guns. At Long Island, to gain time for the retreat of the rest, five Maryland companies flew again and again in the face of the pursuing host. At Monmouth, eight thousand British were in hot pursuit of the retreating Americans. Square in their front Was.h.i.+ngton planted two Pennsylvania and Maryland regiments, saying, ”Gentlemen, I depend upon you to hold the ground until I can form the main army.” And hold it they did.
Heroism grander than that of the battlefield, which can calmly meet an ignominious death, was not lacking. Captain Nathan Hale, a quiet, studious spirit, just graduated from Yale College, volunteered to enter the British lines on Long Island as a spy. He was caught, and soon swung from an apple tree in Colonel Rutgers's orchard, a corpse. Bible and religious ministrations denied him, his letters to mother and sister destroyed, women standing by and sobbing, he met his fate without a tremor. ”I only regret,” comes his voice from yon rude scaffold, ”that I have but one life to give for my country.” It is a shame that America so long had no monument to this heroic man. One almost rejoices that the British captain, Cunningham, author of the cruelty to Hale, himself met death on the gallows, in London, 1791. How different from Hale's the treatment bestowed upon Andre, the British spy who fell into our hands.
He was fed from Was.h.i.+ngton's table, and supported to his execution by every manifestation of sympathy for his suffering.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Portrait.]
John Paul Jones.
The stanch and useful loyalty of the New England clergy in the Revolution has been much dwelt upon--none too much, however. With them should be mentioned the Rev. James Caldwell, Presbyterian pastor at Elizabeth, N. J., who, when English soldiers raided the town, and its defenders were short of wadding, tore up his hymn-book for their use, urging: ”Give them Watts, boys, give them Watts.”
No fiercer naval battle was ever fought than when Jones, in the old and rotten Bon Homme Richard, grappled with the new British frigate Serapis.
Yard-arm to yardarm, port-hole to port-hole, the fight raged for hours.
Three times both vessels were on fire. The Serapis's guns tore a complete breach in the Richard from main-mast to stern. The Richard was sinking, but the intrepid Jones fought on, and the Serapis struck.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Hand-to-hand fighting; a sh.e.l.l explodes in the background.]
Fight between the Bon Homme Richard and the Serapis.
As the roll of Revolutionary officers is called, what matchless figures file past the mind's eye! We see stalwart Ethan Allen entering Ticonderoga too early in the morning to find its commander in a presentable condition, and demanding possession ”in the name of Almighty G.o.d and the Continental Congress ”--destined, himself, in a few months, to be sailing down the St. Lawrence in irons, bound for long captivity in England. We behold gallant Prescott leisurely promenading the Bunker Hill parapet to inspirit his men, shot and sh.e.l.l hurtling thick around.
There is Israel Putnam--”Old Put” the boys dubbed him. He was no general, but we forgive his costly blunders at Brooklyn Heights and Peekskill as we think of him leaving plough in furrow at the drum-beat to arms, and speeding to the deadly front at Boston, or with iron firmness stemming the retreat from Bunker Hill. Young Richard Montgomery might have been next to Was.h.i.+ngton in the war but for Sir Guy Carleton's deadly grape-shot from the Quebec walls the closing moments of 1775.
Buried at Quebec, his remains were transferred by the State of New York, July 8, 1818, to their present resting-place in front of St. Paul's, New York City, the then aged widow tearfully watching the funeral barge as it floated past Montgomery Place on the Hudson.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Portrait.]
General Anthony Wayne.
During a four years' apprentices.h.i.+p under Was.h.i.+ngton, General Greene had caught more of his master's spirit and method than did any other American leader, and one year's separate command at the South gave him a martial fame second only to Was.h.i.+ngton's own. In him the great chief's word was fulfilled, ”I send you a general.” A naked, starving army, an empty military chest, the surrounding country impoverished and full of loyalists--these were his difficulties. Three States practically cleared of the royal army in ten months--this was his achievement. He retreated only to advance, was beaten only to fight again. One hardly knows which to admire most, his tireless energy and vigilance, his prudence in retreat, his boldness and vigor in attack, his cheerful courage in defeat, or his mingled kindness and firmness toward a suffering and mutinous army.
John Stark, eccentric but true, famous for cool courage--how stubbornly, with his New Hamps.h.i.+re boys, he held the rail fence at Bunker Hill, and covered the retreat when ammunition was gone! But Stark's most brilliant deed was at Bennington. ”There they are, boys--the redcoats, and by night they're ours, or Molly Stark's a widow.” Those ”boys,” without bayonets, their artillery shooting stones for b.a.l.l.s, were little more than a mob. But with confidence in him, on they rush, up, over, sweeping Baume's Hessians from the field like a tornado. The figure of General Schuyler comes before us--quieter but not less n.o.ble, an invalid, set to hard tasks with little glory. His magnanimous soul forgets self in country as he cheerfully gives all possible help to Gates, his supplanter, and puts the torch to his own grain-fields at Saratoga lest they feed the foe.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Several soldiers on horseback, fighting with swords and pistols.]
The Encounter between Tarleton and Colonel Was.h.i.+ngton.
And matchless Dan Morgan of Virginia, with his band of riflemen, tall, sinewy fellows, in hunting-s.h.i.+rts, leggins, and moccasins, each with hatchet, hunter's knife, and rifle, dead sure to hit a man's head every time at two hundred and fifty yards. It was one of these men who shot the gallant Briton, Fraser, at Bemis's Heights. Morgan became the ablest leader of light troops then living. How gallantly he headed the forlorn hope under the icy walls of Quebec, where he was taken prisoner, and at Saratoga with his shrill whistle and stentorian voice called his dauntless braves where the fight was thickest! But Cowpens was Morgan's crowning feat. Inspiring militia and veterans alike with a courage they had never felt before, he routs Tarleton's trained band of horse, and then, skilful in retreat as he had been bold in fight, laughs at baffled Cornwallis's rage.