Sergeant Lamb's America

  The hour is now very nigh in which this affair will be brought to a crisis. The resolutions we expect are by his time upon the water, which are to determine the fate of Great Britain and America. We have great confidence in the spirit and pride of our countrymen, that they will not tamely suffer such insolence and disobedience from a set of upstart vagabonds, the dregs and scorn of the human species; and that we shall shortly receive such orders as will authorize us to scourge the rebellion with rods of iron. Under this hope have we been hitherto restrained, and with an unparalleled degree of patience and discipline have we submitted to insults and indignities, from villains who are hired to provoke us to something that may be termed an outrage, and turned to our disadvantage; but these are all treasured up in our memories against that hour in which we shall ‘cry havock, and let slip the dogs of war’. Excuse my indignation, I cannot speak with patience of this generation of vipers. If any troops should be ordered from Ireland with officers of distinction, I should beg your interest to procure me some recommendations.

  You must not believe implicitly the reports that are spread of the deaths and desertions among the troops; there have been some, and some regiments have been more unlucky than others; but it is very trifling, when you consider that no pains or expenses have been spared to seduce our men. Our regiment, nevertheless, has not lost more than we usually have done in the same length of time in Great Britain. The weather is delightful beyond description, and we are in perfect good health and spirits.

  Wishing the same to all friends at home,

  I am, dear Sir,

  Your ever affectionate,

  W. G. E.

  Dean Evelyn died in his Dublin residence a few days before I sailed for America and Captain Evelyn did not long survive his parent. On August 27th of the same year he led the British advance in the battle of Long Island, being with the Brigade of Light Infantry, and took five American officers prisoners who were sent in advance to observe the motions of our army in the direction of Jamaica Pass. The overwhelming victory of that day was in great measure due to this capture. He was mortally wounded at the skirmish at Throg’s Neck two months later.

  Chapter IX

  THE AMOUNT of troops for which General Gage called staggered the Ministry. They had already voted him a reinforcement of ten thousand men, which had been thought more than handsome: and the troops now actually stationed in Boston amounted to about four thousand. The Earl of Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty, refused to believe that the threat was so serious as was made out. He pronounced the Americans cowards (though unknown to him personally) and regretted that there was no probability of our troops encountering without delay two hundred thousand of such a rabble, armed with old rusty firelocks, pistols, staves, clubs, and broomsticks; and of exterminating them at one blow Colonel Grant, in the Commons, agreed with the noble Lord: ‘the colonists possess not a single military trait and would never stand to meet the English bayonet’. He had been in America, he said, and disliked their manner of speaking equally with their way of life, and held them to be ‘entirely out of humanity’s reach’. Colonel Grant was taken up by Mr Cruger, an American-born member, and reminded that his own services in the Alleghany mountains had been of no very triumphant character. (The speaker called Mr Cruger to order before he could say more.) However, Lord North considered these views too sanguine; and since it was impossible to send the troops that General Gage demanded, without stripping the whole Empire, he made a new attempt at conciliating the Americans. He undertook to exempt from taxation any province which would of its own free will make a reasonable contribution to the common defence of America and provision for the support of the civil government.

  The Whig Opposition had encouraged their friends in America to believe that England could not or would not make war on them, the country in general being so averse to this, or at least would not venture more than a short campaign. It was true that England stood to lose by the conflict immensely more than she could gain; for the prosperity of the manufacturing towns in the North of England depended largely on the continuance of close relations with the colonies, and the London merchants alone were owed close on a million pounds by their American customers. The chief Opposition speaker, Mr Fox, now assured the House that the Americans must and would reject Lord North’s offer with contempt. To accept exemption from a tax, as an indulgence, and on condition of performing an act equivalent to paying it, would be to admit a principle of liability which every American would oppose with his life’s blood. In the Lords, the Earl of Chatham, the gout still heavy on him, spoke of the disdain with which the whole world and Heaven itself regarded the forces entrenched behind Boston Neck: ‘An impotent general and a dishonoured army, trusting solely to the pick-axe and the spade for security against the just indignation of an injured and insulted people.’

  But Lord North’s offer of exemption from taxation came too late in any case; for the first skirmish of the war had already been fought, with the loss of many lives, and from either side complaints of barbarities done contrary to English usage. This was the Lexington affair and it gave an interesting foretaste of the style of fighting that our armies might expect when the campaign began in earnest.

  General Gage, having been informed that an important quantity of military stores had been collected by the revolutionaries at Concord, about twenty miles from Boston, decided to seize these by the sudden secret descent of a large body of troops. At ten o’clock on the night of April 18th 1775 a contingent of some seven hundred picked men, namely, the flank companies (the Grenadier and Light Infantry companies) of the twelve or thirteen battalions of the garrison were rowed over in boats with muffled oars from the town, and up Charles River for a mile or two. They were there disembarked and began a silent march on Concord. Though they proceeded with the greatest caution, securing every person whom they met, in order to prevent the alarm being spread, they soon found by the continual firing of guns and ringing of bells that they were discovered. By five o’clock in the morning they had reached Lexington, after a march of fifteen miles: where militia and minute-men (troops so-called from their readiness to rise to arms at a minute’s notice, though continuing meanwhile at their ordinary trades) were drawn up on the green to oppose them.

  Major Pitcairne, who commanded the advance guard, rode forward and called on them in the King’s name to disperse. But they would not. At this moment some shots were fired from a house facing the green, wounding one man and striking the Major’s horse in two places. The Americans, however, declare that the Major fired first, with a pistol, and that the English in consequence were to blame for the sequel. Our people at once returned the fire, killing and wounding eighteen of the militiamen, who broke and fled. The march to Concord was then resumed, where the advance guard found no muskets or ammunition, but spoilt some barrels of flour, knocked the trunnions off three old field-pieces, and cut down a Liberty pole – a sort of May pole which was used by the Sons of Liberty as a standard and rallying point of rebellion. There then ensued a sharp skirmish for the possession of a bridge over a river beyond the town. Many Americans and British were killed. It was declared by our people, and furiously denied by the other side, that some of the dead and wounded were scalped by Americans who had adopted this savage and singular custom from the Red Indians. If this was indeed so, it was not remarkable. The Government of Pennsylvania, of which the respectable Governor Penn and Dr Benjamin Franklin were members, had, but a few years before, offered a bounty for Indian scalps, male and female. Also there was precedent for the taking of white scalps: many had been lifted from Frenchmen in the late war by the Rangers of Connecticut, an act which they glorified.

  Here I may interpolate a few remarks upon scalp-taking. The Indians set so much store upon the taking of scalps that it was regarded as of less honour to kill three men in battle and leave them undespoiled than to take the scalp of one, even if he had fallen to another’s tomahawk. It was not, as is supposed, the general practice of the scalper to remove
the whole fleece of hair, but only the central lock. This, twisted and grasped in the left hand, gave the needed purchase for scaring and scooping from around it, with a knife, a little piece of the skin, about the size of a priest’s tonsure. Should the victim be bald, however, or short-haired, the Indians would rip off more, often using their teeth to loosen the skin from the bone. If the scalp were taken in revenge for some injury, as was almost always the case, that of a woman or child was prized more highly than that of a man. A wounded person who has been scalped very often recovers, though the hair never grows again on the crown of the head. I observed one or two scalped men in the back parts of Virginia when I was in captivity there, and lodged with a settler who proudly showed me a pair of scalps that he had himself ripped from Cherokee Indians that he had shot. He had dressed them in Indian fashion by sewing them upon a hoop with deer sinews, and painting them red for the sake of show.

  On their retirement from Concord, after two hours’ halt, the British troops were shot at, the whole length of the march, by Americans concealed behind stone walls, of which there were many in the cleared land, or behind trees in the uncleared parts, and taking every advantage that the face of the country afforded them. They never showed themselves in bodies of more than a few men at a time, and immediately retired when any movement was made against them, yet persisted about the column like a swarm of mosquitoes. The column being confined to the road and unable to extend to protect their flanks, because of the continual obstacles of stone walls, dense woods, and morasses to be encountered, suffered very heavily. A minute-man, supported perhaps by a single neighbour or kinsman, would conceal himself behind a bush at fifty paces from the road, and as the tail of the column was passing would discharge his single shot, his companion holding his fire in case there were retaliation. Then they would lie still until the danger had passed.

  These countrymen were bred to the musket or rifle-gun from boyhood, and their experience of fighting against the Indians, or of stalking bears, deer, and other game, had taught them a mode of fighting which to our people seemed mean and skulking; but it certainly caused us much damage and themselves very little and transgressed no rule of civilized warfare. In Europe, to be sure, armies advance towards each other in solid mass, the lines perfectly dressed, with standards flying, drums beating; and tear away at each other with disciplined and simultaneous volleys. But that manner is only a custom of warfare, not a rule; and the Americans saw no reason why they should adopt it to their own disadvantage. Whenever during the war their Continental Line, who were trained in European style, dared to engage our people in a pitched battle they were almost invariably routed; for the British Army was second to none in the formal manner of fighting.

  It was surprising that our men escaped as they did. They had already marched twenty-five miles, with smart fighting thrown in, and on empty stomachs, too, for their provision carts were captured. When they reached Lexington again, where a force of eight hundred men, including the main body of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, came hurrying up to their relief, they had expended all their ammunition; and their tongues were hanging out, like dogs’, for thirst and weariness. There were two six-pounder field-pieces with the newly arrived troops, which were used with deterrent effect against the Americans; who were by now treading close on the heels of the exhausted column, groaning in derision, ‘Britons Strike Home!’ and uttering their war-cry of ‘King Hancock for Ever!’ Despite these guns, the Americans continued with irregular shooting from flanks, front, and rear. Our men threw away their fire very inconsiderately and without being certain of its effect; for many of them were young soldiers, who had been taught that quick firing struck terror into the enemy. But, on the contrary, doing so little execution, it emboldened the Americans to come closer. The noise of battle now brought up fresh reinforcements of Mohairs (as these soldiers without uniforms were contemptuously called in the English ranks) from all the surrounding countryside; and the fatigued column must run the gauntlet of successive companies of cool marksmen, who were often commanded by the Congregational minister of their township, dressed in his preaching clothes. It is said that for want of material these warlike men of God had suffered their religious books to be converted into wadding for their cartridges, especially the hymnals of Dr Isaac Watts. Then: ‘Put a little Watts into ’em, Brethren’ was a catchword of the day.

  The firing was now heavy from the houses on the roadside, and the British were so enraged at suffering from an unseen enemy that they forced open many of these buildings and put to death all the defenders; in some cases, seven or eight men. Often they found these houses apparently deserted; but soon as the march was resumed, the defenders climbed out of their hiding-places and the popping shots began again from the rear. Before the day was out the enemy numbered some four thousand men, yet no more than fifty were ever seen together at a time, out of respect for the six-pounder guns. No women and children were, I believe, encountered during the day, all such having doubtless been removed from the neighbourhood at the first warning of battle; certainly none were deliberately killed in the houses, as the American leaders alleged against us to incite the vengeance of their followers. It is true that, notwithstanding the efforts of the officers, a few soldiers carried off small articles of plunder from the houses thus broken into; but the day was too hot and the men too weary for the practice to become general.

  At length the straggling column reached Charlestown Neck, near Boston, where the guns of the men-of-war anchored close by protected them, and the rebel fire ceased. The Grenadiers and Light Infantry had marched forty miles and eaten nothing for a day and a night; and it was past midnight of the 19th before they reached barracks and bed. Our casualties were near three hundred men killed and wounded, including a number of officers; the Americans lost only a third of that number. Many providential escapes from death were reported. The Earl of Percy, who commanded the relieving force, lost a button shot off his waistcoat; a man of my acquaintance had his cap blown three times off his head and two bullets through his coat, one of these carrying away his bayonet. Lieutenant Hawkshaw of the Fifth Fusiliers received a bullet through both cheeks, which also removed several teeth; but did not by any means regard this as a providential escape. He had been accounted the greatest beauty in the Army and was now bitterly mortified in the sad alteration to his appearance.

  The affair at Lexington animated the courage of the Americans to the highest degree, insomuch that in a few days their army amounted to twenty thousand men and was continually increasing. Congress appointed George Washington to be Commander-in-Chief of the American armies. His fighting service had ended sixteen years previously, nor had he ever commanded above twelve hundred men. He was chosen chiefly as being a wealthy aristocrat from Virginia, in order to flatter the South into common action with the revolutionary North. John Adams proposed his name. He first enumerated the high qualities that a commander-in-chief should possess, and then remarked that, fortunately, such qualities resided in a member of their own body. At this ‘King’ Hancock was all satisfaction and smiles, believing that the speaker could only be pointing at him, and Mr Adams afterwards wrote that never in his life had he seen so sudden a change on any man’s face as on John Hancock’s when George Washington’s name was mentioned in place of his own. Samuel Adams seconded the nomination, which was passed unanimously. General Washington, in accepting, declined to take any payment for his services: which gave him much popularity.

  Boston was now completely invested and those critics were confounded who held that a regiment or two could force their way through any part of the continent, and that the very sight of a grenadier’s cap would be sufficient to put an American army to flight. The news was especially gratifying to Colonel Hancock, who was to have been charged on the day of the battle with defrauding the customs by smuggling to the tune of half a million dollars. The lawyer he had briefed for his defence was Samuel Adams.

  There was worse to come: the battle miscalled that of Bunker’s Hill. About th
e end of May 1775 reinforcements of British troops arrived in Boston under the command of Generals Howe, Clinton, and Burgoyne, whose services in the preceding war had gained them great reputation: bringing up the number of troops in the town to some seven thousand men. A few days later General Gage issued a proclamation to the Americans who ‘with a preposterous parade of military arrangement affect to hold the Royal Army besieged’: in which he offered pardon to all who would lay down their arms, and thus stand separate and distinct from the parricides of the Constitution The only persons excepted from this pardon were Colonel Hancock and Mr Samuel Adams. No revolutionaries offered their submission in reply.