On February 20, 1778, the British government dispatched the warship Andromeda with draft copies of Prime Minister Lord North’s conciliatory bills. Fresh off the press and not yet even passed by Parliament, this legislation promised to end British taxation of the American colonies; Americans would always be given preference for colonial offices; the bills even held out the possibility of colonial representation in Parliament. As soon as a livid George III and his government had learned (via their spy in the American embassy in Paris) of the as-yet-unannounced Franco-American alliance, Prime Minister Lord North had redoubled his legislative efforts to engineer a credible counteroffer. But already the London papers put their finger on the deeper political and emotional implications of the Franco-American alliance: “Are rebels, and traitors our brethren, and fellow-subjects?” asked the Morning Chronicle. “Are they not now aliens, and enemies…joined with Frenchmen, and Papists?”¹

The Andromeda raced the French frigate Sensible, bearing Simeon Deane, the brother of Benjamin Franklin’s diplomatic colleague Silas Deane, along with copies of the Franco-American treaty signed earlier that month. The Sensible arrived first, on April 13, but because the frigate had had to circumvent British warships, she put in far north, at Falmouth, the town in modern Maine that the Royal Navy had shelled at the start of the war. Deane then set out overland for York, a small, mostly German-speaking town four days from Philadelphia, where the Congress was sitting because the British were still occupying the capital. On April 14, the Andromeda reached New York, where Governor Sir William Tryon, as he remained in imperial eyes, immediately published the conciliatory bills and forwarded copies to American authorities.

Within just eight days of the Andromeda’s landing in New York, Congress unanimously rejected Britain’s conciliatory proposals. The majority of delegates saw them as a ruse to manipulate the emotions of Americans and sow divisions among them. The sine qua non for any negotiations, Congress insisted, remained that Britain either recognize America’s independence or withdraw all armed forces unconditionally. It was a daring gamble, given the state that Washington’s army was in after the trying winter at Valley Forge, where hundreds of soldiers had died of disease, malnutrition, and the sheer cold, and the fact that the British were still occupying America’s largest city. No one in America knew that in mid-March the French ambassador had informed the British government that France had officially recognized the United States and that shortly thereafter Britain had declared war on France. While they put up a united public front, some U.S. legislators were privately discussing the possibility of seeking reconciliation with Britain.²

Then, on May 2, just as Congress had adjourned for the weekend, Simeon Deane arrived in York, “express from France,” to present the president of the Congress, South Carolina’s Henry Laurens, with signed copies of the February treaties. Laurens immediately reconvened Congress to consider the treaties all weekend; they were ratified unanimously on Monday, May 4. At Valley Forge, General Washington ordered fireworks and thirteen-gun salutes as 12,000 republican soldiers cheered, “Long live the King of France!” and each man received a gill of rum (a measure equal to four fluid ounces). On Tuesday, Congress sent six separate copies of the signed treaties on six different ships back to France to maximize the chance that at least one would make it. When the alliance was announced to the people of the United States the next day, Congress urged them to “treat the subjects of France as those of a magnanimous and generous Ally” in their “war with a powerful and cruel enemy.” Frenchmen were now, strikingly, “their brethren,” a term previously reserved for Americans’ fellow subjects in Britain.³

Daniel Berger, 1. General Washington. 2. General Gates. 3. Dr. Franklin. 4. Präsid Laurens. 5. Paul Jones. (1784). Credit 38

Congress immediately followed up its announcement with a much more elaborate and emotionally powerful “Address to the People of the United States,” to be read out by the clergymen of all denominations after services in communities across the thirteen states. As they had done at many a critical juncture since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Congress yet again focused Americans’ minds on Britain’s systematic cruelty: “The course of their armies is marked by rapine and devastation [and] the wanton conflagration of defenceless towns. Their victories have been followed by the cool murder of men, no longer able to resist.” Urging steadfast commitment to America’s cause, the Congress held out the prospect of liberty and independence in perpetuity, warning that any negotiated settlement with Britain would ultimately lead to “the most humiliating slavery.” With the French alliance secured—a French battle fleet would soon be sailing for New York—Congress rallied Americans back to arms: “Arise then! To your tents, and gird you for the battle! It is time to turn the headlong current of vengeance upon the head of the destroyer.”⁴

[Britannia toe] Amer[eye]ca (London, May 1778). Political satire in the form of a rebus was a popular genre in the eighteenth century. The two letters refer to America’s alliance with France and the British peace commission.

Translation: “Britannia to America. My dear daughter, I cannot behold without great pain your headstrong backwardness to return to your duty in not opposing all the good I long intended for your sole happiness, and being told that you have given your hand to a base and two-faced Frenchman, I have sent you over five wise men, the greatest of all my children, to put you to rights and hope you will listen to them and mind what they say to you. They have instructions to give you those things you formerly required. So be a good girl, discharge your soldiers and ships of war, and do not rebel against your mother. Rely upon me and do not trust to what that French rascal shall tell you….N.B. Let not hate take too much hold of your heart. I am your friend & mother.” Credit 39

[America toe] her [miss]taken [moth]er (London, May 1778).

Translation: “America to her mistaken mother. You silly old woman, that you have sent a dove to us is very plain, to draw our attention from our real interests, but we are determined to abide by our own ways of thinking. Your five children you have sent to us shall be treated as visitors and safely sent home again….If you are wise, follow your own advice you gave to me. Take home your ships [and] soldiers. Guard well your own trifling and leave me to my self, as I am at age to know my own interests without your foolish advice, and know that I shall always regard you and my brothers as relations but not as friends. I am your greatly injured Daughter Amerik.” Credit 40

On June 4, George III’s fortieth birthday, and a full month after the Congress had ratified the French alliance, a British peace commission finally arrived in America with Parliament’s official offerings. Laurens was unimpressed with the didactic seal on the package that contained the official British acts: a mother embracing her returning offspring. He responded bluntly that America would enter negotiations only if and when the king was sincere about offering terms appropriate to “the honor of independent nations.”⁵

Not easily deterred, the commissioners still hoped to persuade American leaders that theirs was a generous offer. They especially trusted in the additional concessions that the king had authorized them to make in person: Britain would no longer keep standing armies in America, provided the colonies maintained a self-defense force of their own. And no Americans would be sent to Britain to stand trial for treason. But the Congress did not budge; Britain’s envoys failed to secure a single meeting with American officials.⁶

No one in America could yet know it, but Britain and France had already begun fighting naval battles off the Brittany coast. The conflict that started in America had now expanded into a worldwide war. The British would have to juggle the demands of safeguarding the homeland against invasion, attacking French interests in the Caribbean, and protecting British outposts from the Mediterranean to West Africa and India. There were signs that Spain might enter the war as well. The Virginian Richard Henry Lee predicted confidently (and wrongly): “Great Britain has its choice now of madness, or meanness. She will not war with the house of Bourbon and N. America at the same time.” Briefly in the spring the king and the prime minister had in fact considered pulling all troops out of America, but that drastic option was rejected: British leaders continued to feel a duty to protect the Loyalists, and they still thought the war was winnable. The Empire instead rebalanced its forces between North America, other overseas theaters of war, and the homeland. In the process, Britain Americanized the war in North America, giving greater weight to Loyalist forces, especially in the South. With the stakes rising, Britain’s emissaries in America, separated from London by many weeks of postal time, needed to seize the initiative, even if it meant operating without formal instructions from the capital.⁷

After a frustrating summer spent lobbying individual congressional delegates to little effect, and driven by “a deep sense of the insults they have received,” the commissioners adopted a more pugnacious stance. They would appeal over the heads of congressmen directly to the state assemblies and to the people of America. At the beginning of October, the commissioners, who now included Howe’s successor as commander in chief, General Sir Henry Clinton, published a “Manifesto and Proclamation” to all Americans. Their Congress, they argued, emboldened by the American victory at Saratoga and the unnatural alliance with a Catholic power, had rebuffed the generous British Empire. America had one final chance. All Americans willing to return to the imperial fold would be granted amnesty. Appealing to common Anglo-American values and interests, and recapitulating for the benefit of “our fellow-subjects the blessings which we are empowered to offer,” the commissioners again promised the colonists everything they had previously demanded, short of independence. Thus far, they said, British benevolence in a conflict among fellow subjects had prohibited any extreme measures. But after the carrot came the proverbial stick. Should Americans not accept this gracious imperial gesture, “the whole contest is changed.” If America persisted with a course “not only of estranging herself from us, but of mortgaging herself and her resources to our enemies,” the commissioners threatened, “the question is, how far Great-Britain, may, by every means in her power, destroy or render useless a connection contrived for her ruin.”⁸

British officers in the field did not unanimously support the unlimited warfare that this new proclamation seemed to imply. But while some still viewed unrestrained violence as counterproductive, others applauded moves towards a more aggressive counterinsurgency—such as the raids recently led by Major General Charles Grey. Grey’s troops had overrun and burned most of New Bedford and Fairhaven, Massachusetts, before moving on to Martha’s Vineyard, where they seized 10,000 sheep and 300 oxen: two weeks’ worth of meat for the entire British garrison in New York. Grey then set his sights on New Jersey, and the horrific news of what transpired there reached Americans at almost precisely the same time as the British commissioners’ manifesto.

No-Flint Grey

At one in the morning on September 28, 1778, near present-day River Vale, New Jersey, General Charles Grey gave his several hundred redcoats the order to march. The 2nd Battalion of Light Infantry, the 2nd Regiment of Grenadiers, the 33rd and 64th Regiments, and several dozen dragoons would close in on their intended target—an elite light cavalry unit of the Continental Army—around three a.m., the ideal time for a surprise attack. The enemy’s guards would be struggling to stay alert, while their soldiers would be slow to waken. It would make for an easy rout.⁹

General Grey was reacting to a rare opportunity. His forces were part of a much larger mission to forage, observe enemy movements, and support an expedition to Egg Harbor, New Jersey. The previous day, Grey had learned that a unit of General Washington’s Continental Army was nearby, most likely intending to intercept Grey. The Continentals were now encamped for the night near a bridge over the Hackensack River, about a mile and a half southwest of Old Tappan. As a battle-hardened veteran officer, Grey grasped that, in one short night’s work, he could eliminate an elect American fighting force. And he would go about it his way, as he had done before, and with devastating effectiveness.

Grey was well aware of the vexed debate among political leaders and the public back home about when to follow the conventional rules of war. Even British officers in America argued vehemently about how Britain should fight the war with her American fellow subjects. Grey belonged to those who had earned their spurs in imperial counterinsurgency thirty years earlier, during the slaughter of the Scottish Highlanders. Why treat those “damn’d American rebels,” as he and his fellow officers routinely referred to them, any differently?

Previous experience had taught Grey that night attacks were risky. They were perhaps best fought with bayonets to maintain silence and the element of surprise. Fighting with bayonets also reduced the risk of friendly fire when visibility was poor and battlefield awareness limited. Preparing soldiers for night battle, Grey’s options were either to forbid soldiers to prime their muskets or to order them to put in the priming charges and close the firing pans but remove the flints. If necessary, soldiers could then prime or reinsert the flints, opening fire as a last resort. But that night the general took no chances: he ordered both the charges and the flints taken out.

That Grey’s men were willing to follow him into a night operation relying solely on their bayonets spoke well of his reputation as a leader. It may also reflect the men’s expertise in the art of such surprise attacks. Some had perfected their skills during a highly controversial affair the previous year when they overran a large Continental Army encampment and inflicted very heavy casualties on their stunned enemy. The Battle of Paoli in Pennsylvania had resulted in a much higher ratio of killed to wounded than was the norm for encounters in the Northern theater at that time. Grey’s men had probably not been instructed to deny quarter. But a congressional investigation found afterward that it was extremely likely that American soldiers had been attacked, wounded further, and killed even after some had given up resisting. How else to explain the fact that a number of soldiers suffered a dozen or more wounds? Or that some Americans had apparently chosen to burn to death in their booths—structures built of brush, leaves, cornstalks, straw, and fence rails—when the British set them alight? Some commentators at the time, and some historians today, would argue that the codes of war for granting quarter did not apply to nighttime attacks. It was now a year since Paoli, but the mere mention of that night still had the power to terrify Patriot soldiers.¹⁰

The attack at Paoli had earned the general the nickname “No-Flint Grey,” and it was as No-Flint Grey that he now went into battle. Grey’s redcoats used a socket bayonet. First invented by the famous French military engineer Vauban in the late seventeenth century, it attached to the musket via a collar that slipped around the barrel. Its triangular, pointed blade had a flat side towards the muzzle of the musket, and two outer fluted sides some fifteen inches long. With the full force of a soldier’s body behind it, a bayonet could cause terrible damage to tissue, arteries, and bones. The challenge was that the closer the soldier got to the enemy, the more psychologically difficult it became to kill him. The British military worked hard to teach its soldiers how to overcome that reluctance, explaining to new recruits that “in the hands of men who can be cool and considerate amidst scenes of confusion and horror,” the bayonet is, by far, “more safe to those who use it, as well as more destructive to those against whom it is used, than powder and ball.”¹¹

That might have been true, but it was still difficult to get a man to thrust that bayonet into an enemy’s body at close quarters. Bayonet drill then, and to this day, exploits aggression. It might have helped that, from as far back as Lexington and Concord, the rebels’ fighting methods had been portrayed as an insult to any professional soldier serving His Britannic Majesty. Firing from hidden emplacements, making feigned requests for quarter, picking off sentries, pickets, messengers, even officers, with snipers—these were all tactics more worthy of frontier savages than the soldiers of civilized nations. A British spy characterized Washington’s troops not as the self-described “respectable body of Yeomanry, fighting pro aris et focis; but a contemptible band of vagrants, deserters and thieves.”¹²

Grey was also keenly attuned to psychological advantage: American troops had an intense horror of bayonet attacks. This seemed to be in part because they were much less accustomed to bayonet combat than European armies of the time. The bayonet, the embodiment of British martial professionalism, was to Continental soldiers what the tomahawk and scalping knife were to many redcoats—a weapon of terror.¹³

First, Grey and his soldiers had to get within striking range. As usual on such missions, Grey was meticulous in his preparations. He had timed his approach for the dead of night to maximize the surprise effect. For another two hours, as they closed in on the Americans, the operation would proceed silently. Grey’s men needed to move undetected through largely unknown terrain, a task that depended on local intelligence and guides. Luckily, there were strong pockets of Loyalists in the region. These were men who bore a deep grudge. For several years, they had been suffering persecution, dispossession, and worse at the hands of their Patriot neighbors. They wanted revenge, and tonight, hopefully, they would get it. At least a dozen local Loyalists assisted Grey’s column—men like Wiert C. Banta, a nearly illiterate carpenter in his mid-thirties, whose Revolutionary neighbors in Hackensack had picked him up as “a dangerous Tory” at the start of the war. For that supposed crime, he had languished for ten months in an Albany jail. When he escaped, he lost no time in offering his services as a spy and guide for Loyalist and British forces. It was Banta’s Loyalist clique who ensured that Grey’s troops found a safe and speedy passage along paths where they were unlikely to be spotted.¹⁴

By three a.m., Grey was within one mile of Old Tappan. Intelligence suggested that the American officers were quartered in two or three houses along Rivervale Road. Six troops of dragoons were thought to be sleeping in half a dozen nearby barns. Grey detached several companies of light infantry to encircle the enemy. The Loyalist guides led Major Turner Staubenzie’s six companies along narrow pathways and lanes to the rear of the American positions from the west. Six more companies under Major John Maitland completed the encirclement; their orders were to prevent any guards or patrols they might come across from warning the encampment and to cut off their target from any American forces in the region that might try to come to their rescue.

The American privates keeping watch on a bridge near their leaders’ makeshift headquarters were huddled in their coats and took turns complaining to their superiors about the bitter frost. In the moonless night, preoccupied with their own discomfort, they never saw their attackers coming. Grey himself led a small group of soldiers towards the house where the top American officers were sleeping. Methodically, and mostly silently, they dispatched several guardsmen with their bayonets.

Grey next had to ensure that the American officers wouldn’t be able to communicate with the troops in the barns. On his signal, Staubenzie’s troops attacked the American headquarters in the house of Cornelius Haring. Inside, Colonel George Baylor and his regimental major, the military intelligence agent Major Alexander Clough, heard a commotion, realized that something was wrong, and found a few seconds to react. With nowhere else to go, they tried to conceal themselves by climbing up the large Dutch chimney. Why, Baylor must have been wondering with a sense of foreboding, had his guards not sounded the alarm?

The redcoats entered the house. Apparently the Continentals did not know that just a year before, local Patriots had arrested Haring as a disaffected person. Perhaps the owners now let Grey’s men in; perhaps they forced their entry. Searching the property, they soon detected the two American officers hiding in the chimney. Ferociously jabbing upward with their bayonets, they wounded Major Clough, who had climbed after his colonel. Baylor tried to hold on but was easy prey. Three powerful stabs to his thigh and groin dropped him. Someone slashed a broadsword across his hands. As he lay on the floor in excruciating pain, he spotted his adjutant, Cornet Robert Morrow, in a corner with seven stab wounds to his body; he was also “excessively bruised in his Head,” explaining the awful sound of musket butts against a skull that Baylor had heard moments earlier. Clough was already mortally wounded.

Whether they were aware of it or not, Grey’s men had just bagged a significant prize. Baylor, the twenty-six-year-old scion of a leading Virginia family, was a protégé of George Washington. He had served as the general’s first aide-de-camp. After distinguishing himself at the Battle of Trenton in January 1777, and bearing the captured Hessian standard to Congress, Baylor became the commander of a regiment newly raised and paid for by Virginia, the proud 3rd Continental Light Dragoons. Now that regiment was in grave danger.

In another house nearby, one of the overpowered officers demanded to know which corps had attacked them. Told it was the British Light Infantry, he despaired: “Then we shall all be cut off.” Grey’s orders were holding. The enemy’s commanders were disabled, any communication with their men severed. Now it was time to see to the rebel troops in the barns.¹⁵

The 104 men sleeping in the barns were the mounted troops of Baylor’s regiment, also known as Lady Washington’s Horse. Most were Virginians, among them the sons of some of the colony’s finest families; all were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six. They were proud to be serving under Washington’s favorite. Recently, the general had even attached part of his elite household guard to the regiment with his own nephew, Captain George Lewis, as their lieutenant. Their routine duties had consisted of carrying out scouting missions, pursuing scattered enemy troops after a battle, and conducting the occasional raid. For the past four days their assignment had been to assist the Bergen County militia in a cattle drive to get local herds out of reach of British raiding parties known to be in the area.

As they did every night, the soldiers had posted guards along the perimeter of their camp, although their level of preparedness would later come under scrutiny: the area was known to be infested with Loyalists, but the 3rd seems not to have investigated properly. William Bassett, then twenty-four, testified half a century later that, in their experience, “the Inhabitants of the place pretended to be very friendly to the cause of the Americans, and some of them made parties for the American soldiers and furnished large quantities of spirits of the choicest kind for the troops—and the American soldiers supposing themselves safe and in the hands of these friends became merry to excess.” As they bedded down near their unsaddled horses, many were inebriated. Indications were that soon, perhaps even the following day, they would attack the invaders, who like locusts were foraging their way through the American countryside.¹⁶

The sleeping dragoons woke suddenly to the sound of screams. Trying to get their bearings in near-total darkness, some attempted to reach their pistols or sabers; others sought to hide farther back in the barn. Bassett failed in his attempt to wake two men sleeping under the same cover with him. They remained in a blissful sleep, “insensible through drinking.” Those sober enough to respond had no way of telling the size or nature of the assault force that was about to overrun them, although they soon realized that their guards must have been taken out. Whoever had done that was likely approaching with silent weapons. Did they think of Paoli, or flash back to the Battle of Long Island two years earlier, when it was said that Continental riflemen had been “spitted to the trees with bayonets” by their attackers?¹⁷

A crescendo of men screaming and boots stomping yanked them back into the present. Southward Cullency and his comrades from Baylor’s 1st Troop decided resistance was futile. They stumbled out of their barn into the frosty night to surrender honorably. But instead of granting them quarter, the British soldiers instantly set upon the dragoons. In a matter of seconds, Cullency sustained twelve stab wounds to his chest, stomach, and back. The redcoats left him lying on the ground, probably assuming he was dead. Cullency could hear the command “[T]ake no prisoners” ring through the air and the crack of musket butts trying to shatter skulls.

The dragoons of 2nd Troop, who had been sleeping in a neighboring barn, were awakened by the confused cries of 1st Troop. They realized that they, too, were surrounded, but apparently had no idea what had happened to their comrades. Expecting to be “treated as prisoners of war,” they demanded quarter. Thomas Benson observed that his comrades were instead greeted with insults and stabs, and so “did not ask quarter for himself, believing it in vain.” No sooner had Benson stepped out of the barn than he found himself cornered by numerous redcoats, who stabbed him a dozen times in the back, shoulders, arms, and hip. During the confusion that ensued, Benson somehow still managed to heave his badly mangled body over a fence in the yard.

Back inside the barn, Julian King and George Willis (or Wyllis) observed that, on their own initiative, the British soldiers were now sending for orders from one of their officers, passing along the question to Captain Ball: “What [were] they…to do with the Prisoners?” Were they really supposed to coldly kill a defenseless enemy who was asking for mercy, appealing, in their own language, to their shared ancestors and to the same God? Maybe they were hoping they could just leave them there and move on, or take them into custody. But after an anxious few minutes of waiting, the order came: “[K]ill every one of them.”¹⁸

The British started to bayonet their defenseless victims, crushing bones and leaving gashing wounds in the men’s stomachs, chests, backs, and limbs. Withdrawing the blade, as much as plunging it in, tore muscles, arteries, and organs. When the British moved out, Julian King had sixteen wounds, including eleven in his breast, side, and belly; George Willis had sustained between nine and twelve wounds, some in his back. At first, it seemed that Thomas Talley would escape this wave of the bloody assault; he was taken prisoner. British soldiers had moved him outside and stripped him of his breeches, when his captors received orders to kill him, too. They took Talley back inside the barn and lethally jabbed him half a dozen times.

In those barns that the British had not yet reached, men startled from their sleep were frantically trying to make sense of what was going on in the surrounding darkness. Sergeant James Sudduth of 5th Troop was torn from his slumber by bellowing of “kill them kill them,” then the cries of men begging for quarter. Sudduth peeked out of the barn door to see the outlines of soldiers emerge from the structure nearest his own, “unarmed and with intent to surrender themselves prisoners of war.” The British offered quarter. But next, Sudduth witnessed how “the Enemy bayonetted them, & five of them were killed after they came out of the barn.” After a British officer had ordered “his Men to put all to Death,” he asked, “if they had finished all?”

Different British officers seemed to be giving somewhat different instructions, heightening the unpredictability and confusion. One American overheard a Captain Ball inquire how many of the enemy had been killed thus far. When learning the tally, he ordered “all the rest to be knock’d on the head.” His men now “muttered about it, and asked why they had not been made to kill them all at once.” Perhaps this killing of unarmed enemies was beginning to take a physical and mental toll on some of them. As the British men vacillated between aggression and restraint, the situation became even more terrifying for the Americans trying to survive that night. It also seemed to entangle their British assailants more explicitly in the dilemmas of war than they might have been accustomed to as ordinary soldiers. Still, orders were orders. The redcoats returned to the gruesome business of finishing off the wounded. Lying on the ground, some men turned their heads when they saw the blow coming; the musket butt cracked their skulls.

The British were now half an hour into the assault, and for another thirty-five minutes or so they would continue to bayonet and club their way through the grisly scene. Having watched their comrades being killed in the act of surrender, the dragoons’ only hope was to try to escape into the darkness. Some pretended to be dead and crawled off when they thought no one was looking, diving into a dense thicket nearby. Badly injured, Corporal Henry Rhore of 3rd Troop took the reverse course; he managed to crawl back into a barn, presumably hoping to wait out the onslaught; he would die there of his wounds the next day.

Samuel Houston Jr. assessed his situation. Realizing that his best chance to survive was to make a dash through a gauntlet of British bayonets, he endured thirteen jabs to jump a fence and swim away in a stream. William Bassett had asked for quarter but was told, “God damn your Rebbel soul we will give you quarter.” He eyed a fence when he was briefly left unguarded, but a British soldier closed in and plunged a bayonet into his back. Almost fainting from the deep wound near his spine, Bassett clawed his way to safety. He must have wondered whether his two drunken comrades back in the barn were being put to the bayonet, still curled up in their sleeping positions. More than half a century later, at age seventy-nine, Bassett could still feel the emotional scars, for “the horrors of that night will never be effaced from his memory.”¹⁹

Mangled Bodies, Moral Victory

In the waking morning’s stillness, British soldiers walked around with candles to examine the dead and wounded. Coolly robbing them of any valuables and even their clothes, they left the men half-naked in the autumnal air. Joseph Carrol, a man belonging to 6th Troop, had gotten dressed quickly as the British attacked. He had tried to escape with a horse but was surrounded. Begging for mercy, he was stabbed repeatedly in his breast and both arms to shouts of “there is no quarter for you” and “run him through.” Carrol was now pretending to be dead, even as British soldiers examined him close-up by the light of a candle and stripped his badly injured body down to his shirt.

John Robert Shaw, a seventeen-year-old British soldier, arrived at the scene just before dawn. His regiment had been stationed three miles off when “the cruel carnage” first began. As they approached, Shaw later recalled, “the shrieks and screams of the hapless victims whom our savage fellow soldiers were butchering, were sufficient to have melted into compassion the heart of a Turk or a Tartar.—Tongue cannot tell nor pen unfold the horrors of that dismal night.” The teenager, who spoke of “a most inhuman massacre,” with 250 killed or wounded, some “having their arms cut off, and others with their bowels hanging out crying for mercy,” had absorbed through common parlance the original meaning, in old French, of the word “massacre”—a butcher’s chopping block. Shaw, for one, knew that there was a price to pay: “Let Britain boast no more of her honour, her science and civilization, but with shame hide her head in the dust; her fame is gone; Tappan will witness against her.”²⁰

Rumors and reports of the massacre spread fast. By ten a.m. on September 28, local inhabitants had carried the news to the Continental general Charles Stewart, who was the first to inform George Washington at his headquarters in Fredericksburg, New York, northeast across the Hudson from Baylor’s devastated corps. All through the night and into the early morning, a captain, a sergeant, and a dozen soldiers who had escaped the massacre made their way to the Paramus camp of Colonel Otho Williams. By eleven a.m., Williams had heard and seen enough: “I am exceeding sorry to be the Author of bad News,” Williams wrote in a letter to Washington, “but lest a more imperfect account shod reach Head Quarters, I think it my Duty to acquaint your Excellency of the misfortune sustain’d by Coll Baylors Corps.”

Private Samuel Brooking had run four miles to Paramus with a bayonet stuck through his arm, which he had wrenched from the firelock, hearing British soldiers in pursuit yell, “skiver him!” That phrase, “skiver him” (“skewer him”), was repeated in the testimony of several survivors. Throughout the day, as rumors and vague reports traversed the New Jersey–New York borderland, additional letters were dispatched to Washington. By eight p.m., Major General Israel Putnam informed his commander in chief from Highlands, New York, that a sergeant of Baylor’s regiment had brought him intelligence of the assault. “It is probable he may exagerate a little,” especially in claiming that only he and two officers got away, “but I believe they have met with a verry severe blow.”²¹

Casualty figures were still vague, but the Patriot view as to the nature of the assault was forged early on. By the following week, regional newspapers were printing accounts of the “horrible murders,” most likely based on local hearsay and snippets picked up from survivors. All the evidence suggested that British officers had ordered their men to “give no quarter to the rebels” so that “a considerable part of the regiment unavoidably fell sacrifice to those cruel and merciless men. Several of our soldiers were murdered after they had surrendered.” Soon, Patriot newspapers were ready to claim with reference to intelligence from headquarters that all noncommissioned officers and privates had been “in the most barbarous and unheard of manner murder’d in cold blood.”²²

For George Washington, the blow was personal. Just two days before the assault, he had received Baylor’s most recent update from the vicinity of Tappan; now his protégé was presumed dead, Lady Washington’s Horse decimated. It would be another two weeks before Baylor had sufficiently recovered from his wounds (both American and British papers had declared him dead) to dispatch a letter to Washington about the “horrid Massacree.” By the thirtieth, Washington was referring to an event that “appears to have been attended with every circumstance of barbarity.” Four days later, Washington followed up with more specific casualty figures and his own assessment, still somewhat cautious, as to the nature of the assault: “I should estimate the loss at about fifty men and seventy horses. Major Clough is dead of his wounds. This affair seems to have been attended with every circumstance of cruelty.” Congress later had extracts of Washington’s letter published in the press.²³

As tales of an unprecedented massacre began to spread—along with British threats of unbounded war—the pressure mounted for an immediate inquest into what precisely had transpired at Old Tappan. As we have seen, Congress had already accumulated considerable experience in holding inquiries into Britain’s illegitimate use of violence and, by doing so, helped turn some of America’s lost battles, the trauma of her raped women, and her captives’ sufferings into moral assets for the Revolutionary cause. Now the families of Baylor’s recruits were demanding answers: Had their sons been captured, wounded, or killed, and under what circumstances? The “disagreeable suspense of all parents” had to be ended, and soon.²⁴

On October 6, Congress empowered William Livingston, the governor of New Jersey, to conduct an investigation into whether Baylor’s men had been “Bayonetted in cold blood.” Livingston understood from his previous experience with documenting war crimes that gathering reliable information wasn’t enough: it needed to be disseminated fast and for the greatest impact. He would eventually take eight depositions from survivors himself, in Princeton and Morristown. He also quickly reached out to army officers in the region, asking Lord Stirling as theater commander to coordinate the inquiry. Stirling—who had already given his views to Washington the previous week, saying that never had there been a “more determined Barbarous Massacre”—in turn recruited an expert in both human anatomy and the immortal soul, the army surgeon and chaplain Dr. David Griffith, to help him ascertain the truth about the allegations of the “many Acts of Cruelty [at] the horrid Scene.”²⁵

Griffith was a thirty-six-year-old New Yorker by birth who had received his medical training in Britain and been ordained in the Episcopal Church there. He was also a man who enjoyed Washington’s confidence; their acquaintance went back several years. The day after the attack, Griffith had obtained a British pass to care for the American wounded at Tappan. To that extent, at least, the British were playing by the conventional rules of war. General Cornwallis even upheld a polite custom among civilized enemy officers when he sent tea, sugar, wine, and lemons to the convalescent Colonel Baylor.²⁶

The British had left those prisoners who had been too wounded to march at the Reformed Church in nearby Tappan, New York, which became a makeshift prison and hospital. (Two years later, the British spy Major John André would be tried in the same place.) While seeing to their immediate medical needs, Griffith must have quietly made note, soldier by soldier, of the nature and number of their wounds. He talked to Baylor and with inhabitants of the area. He must also have seen some of the badly mutilated bodies of the dead. These soldiers had been butchered: some bore marks of ten, twelve, even sixteen bayonet wounds. So when Livingston and Stirling enlisted Griffith for the official congressional inquiry in mid-October, the doctor had probably already amassed considerable evidence. Methodical even in his anger, he interviewed a dozen or so survivors coherent enough to testify. By October 20, Griffith sent his report to Stirling, who forwarded it to Congress the next day.

When they combined all the testimony they had heard with the physical evidence they had seen, Griffith and Livingston concluded that there was overwhelming proof that British soldiers had outright refused to give quarter. They had, moreover, killed Americans even after assuring them of protection. In some cases, after requesting clarifying orders, they were commanded to bayonet and club to death any soldiers that they had already disarmed and disabled, even though these soldiers begged for mercy. Griffith’s summary, read out in Congress, confirmed that the nation’s political leadership were “not misinformed respecting the Savage Cruelty attending the surprize of Colonel Baylors Regiment.”²⁷

The evidence indicated strongly that British officers must have planned the atrocities. The fact that “the Charges were drawn from their Firelocks & the Flints taken out that the Men might be constrained to use their Bayonets only” offered further proof of the British approach. Grey’s subordinate officers, including Captain Ball, were listed as the “Principal Agents” of the bloody business, for it was their companies that were “at the Places where the greatest Cruelties were exercised.” The British officers had counted on their men’s violent anger once they were let loose on the Americans, and “none, of the British Officers, entered the quarters of our Troops on this occasion, that no Stop might be put to the Rage and Barbarity of their Bloodhounds.” But one officer at least, Captain Sir James Baird, was afterward observed to “swagger through the streets” with a “bloodstained bayonet hanging from his back.”

In the wake of Griffith’s thorough report, more precise casualty figures became available. Sixty-five minutes of frenzied killing and cold-blooded murder had left some thirty-five men dead or critically injured, of whom eleven had been killed outright. Four others would soon succumb to their injuries. Thirteen wounded had been left behind. Thirty-three were taken as prisoners to New York, including eight wounded. Most of the remainder had somehow managed to conceal themselves or escape under the cover of night. Including officers, the total casualty count stood at around seventy. In contrast, just one Briton was killed, apparently when some dragoons got off several pistol shots.

Given that some forty Americans had escaped, and that others were left wounded or taken prisoner, Griffith judged that, “[n]otwithstanding the Cruelty of the [British] Orders, it does not appear that they effected their Purpose so fully as they intended, or might have been expected.” The investigators singled out the sole British light infantry captain who had intervened with “feelings of remorse, & ventured to disobey his Orders” by giving quarter to Baylor’s entire 4th Troop: the magnanimous exception proved the merciless nature of the assault. Unfortunately “[f]or the Honour of Humanity,” that captain’s name remained unknown.

A week after Stirling, Livingston, and Griffith had forwarded their materials to Congress, their report, complete with survivors’ depositions, was already printed in full in the Pennsylvania Packet. The massacre at Old Tappan became a pivotal document in the Patriot atrocity narrative. Newspapers from New Hampshire to South Carolina used it to show that the Empire had descended to the rank of a barbarous nation. The Virginia Gazette excoriated the British “savages” who had “put to the sword, & butchered in the most cruel & rascally manner” their gallant Continental officers and troops. Grey in particular earned himself the enduring hatred and contempt of Americans. One American officer even hoped that, should he ever be captured, Grey would be “burnt alive, in a manner agreeable to the Indian custom.”²⁸

As the sun rose over Old Tappan on that crisp, cool morning, September 28, General Grey had already left the site. We do not know whether he observed close-up the results of the assault he had just orchestrated. Although he must have learned of the controversy raging over the event—not just among the rebels but, to an extent, within British ranks as well—he never publicly responded. His biographer surmises that, given Grey’s “awareness of the psychological factor in warfare, he probably dismissed the Americans’ pratings as exercises in propaganda and those on his own side as uninformed opinion-mongering.” He must have felt content in the knowledge of the laudatory reports that traveled up the British chain of command, from Cornwallis near Tappan via Clinton in New York, reaching Germain six to eight weeks later. His superiors praised Grey for having “conducted his march with so much Order & so silently” that he “entirely surprised” the dragoons, “and very few escaped being either killed or taken.” Thanks to his superb leadership and the “usual spirit and alacrity” of the British troops, they had lost only one soldier. Pro-government papers in Britain would widely print these official narratives; no reference was made to the contested nature of the nighttime attack.²⁹

British newspaper readers were also treated to a widely published article that was even more flattering though full of errors and even more overtly partisan. Claiming to be based on the personal recounting of the assault by “an officer present in the Affair,” it, too, celebrated Grey’s effective and efficient action. Praising the quality of the American dragoons—“very well appointed Cavalry with extreme good Horses and neat accoutrements”—the paper gloated: “[O]ur troops dashed upon them with their bayonets to such effect, that only three of that corps escaped.” For this writer, the encounter at Old Tappan represented an unmitigated success.³⁰

In 1967, archaeologists sponsored by the Bergen County Historical Society followed leads from local oral tradition and undertook an excavation near Tappan. There they found the skeletons of six soldiers buried in three abandoned leather-tanning vats, some apparently half-naked, others lying near pieces of shorts, breeches, a waistcoat, and coat buttons. The skull of one dragoon (at center) shows a clearly outlined roughly oval fracture on the left side where a portion was punched into the cranial cavity. He suffered a similar fracture of the same size, but of lesser intensity, on the reverse side. Most likely, the soldier was first bayoneted and then, while he lay on the ground with his head turned, battered and likely killed with the butt of a musket. The dragoons’ remains were reinterred in 1972. The area, saved from suburban development, continues to serve as a county historical site as well as the final resting place for Baylor’s Dragoons. Credit 41

Such triumphalism sat uneasily with only a small minority of British officers, and those who did express remorse did so only in their private correspondence: “As they were in their beds and fired not a shot in opposition,” wrote the officer Charles Stuart to his father, the former British prime minister Lord Bute, the “credit that might have been due to the Corps that effected the surprise is entirely buried in the barbarity of their behaviour.” Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Kemble, who had been close to the former commander in chief, Sir William Howe, also felt moral qualms. He admitted to gratuitous violence on the part of the British: “[T]he 2d. Battalion Light Infantry were thought to be active and Bloody on this Service, and it’s acknowledged on all hands they might have spared some who made no resistance, the whole being completely surprised and all their Officers in bed.” These Britons, at least, understood all too well that their army’s perceived or actual cruelty was their enemy’s best recruiting agent.³¹

With hindsight, we know that the events of September 28, 1778, were unusual. Grey’s massacres—whether the more ambiguous proceedings at Paoli or the more egregious atrocities at Old Tappan—had not been ordered by HQ, although Grey’s superiors later condoned his actions. Nor would they turn out to be typical of a new approach to the war on Britain’s part. The actors on both sides, however, could not have known that at the time. Indeed, to American Patriots in 1778 it must have felt as if the British and their auxiliaries were rapidly escalating the levels of brutality. In March, British-Loyalist forces had killed several dozen unresisting New Jersey militia as well as nonfighting men sleeping in a private house at Hancock’s Bridge, New Jersey. At Crooked Billet in Pennsylvania that May, they had bayoneted some of General John Lacey’s militia after they had surrendered; they even burned wounded men in piles of buckwheat straw. And even while the Baylor investigation was under way, the Patriots alleged that another massacre had occurred not far from Old Tappan. As part of the Egg Harbor expedition, Captain Patrick Ferguson, a thirty-four-year-old Scottish officer today best known for his invention of a breech-loading rifle, led 250 men in a raid on Brigadier General Count Pulaski’s sleeping legion, killing some fifty and taking only five or six prisoners. In Ferguson’s widely published report to General Clinton, the Scotsman offered a dual excuse: during a “night attack, little quarter could, of course, be given”; besides, a Patriot deserter had (falsely) informed Ferguson that Pulaski had ordered his men not to give any quarter; hence, the same orders applied “against a man capable of using an order so unworthy of a gentleman and a soldier.” Like Howe earlier, Ferguson gestured towards recognition of the rules that ought to govern war even while, in the Patriots’ understanding, he was breaking them. Within two years, Ferguson would find a spectacularly violent end in a controversial battle in the South.³²

In their print media, the Patriots presented such atrocities as part of a broader pattern of British excessive violence. As they tended to their wounded warriors and buried their dead, they were also skillfully developing the forensic practices that would help justify their war—rendering mutilated American bodies with vivid anatomical detail and emotionally powerful rhetoric. British massacres thus became highly effective assets in the Patriots’ moral war: they helped them win the battle for the support of the American population while shaming Britain in the eyes of the world.

The Virginia Gazette, a newspaper from Baylor’s Dragoons’ home state, sarcastically juxtaposed the British peace commission with the intelligence received of the Baylor Massacre, where men were “butchered…by the British peace-seeking savages. O ye knight-errant Commissioners, ye sordid fallen patriots, ye shallow hearted politicians, get you home to Old England, & sing lullabies to the conscience of your bloody-minded King.” The commissioners had better tell their superiors that the severance of virtuous America from the evil British Empire was now irreversible: “the brightest diadem” had been broken, most definitively, from the British Crown.³³

In response to the British peace commissioners’ manifesto of early October, and under the cumulative impact of this wave of escalating brutality—Hancock’s Bridge, Crooked Billet, Old Tappan, Little Egg Harbor—the American Congress issued its own counter-manifesto on October 30. It came hard on the heels of their Baylor Massacre report, although Congress had been working on it intermittently since January. The closely argued single-side broadsheet, intended to alert the civilized world to the imperial outrage and to deter Britain from making good on its commissioners’ threats, hammered away at by now familiar themes. Any future illegitimate violence, Congress vowed, would be met with retaliation. Congress also subsidized the publication of 1,300 copies of a book-length pamphlet authored by its delegate Gouverneur Morris. In Observations on the American Revolution, Morris argued that Britain had finally shown its hand: since it could not conquer America, it would try to destroy it. Echoing Congress, Morris threatened attacks on the British homeland, raising the specter of unbounded war.³⁴

Dagger of France

When word of the manifesto that the British commissioners had issued without consulting London first reached the other side of the Atlantic in the winter of 1778, it triggered a political uproar. Opposition leaders in the House of Commons cautioned that it offended against British traditions of “humanity and generous courage” and violated Christian principles. It also risked undermining force discipline and threatened “to expose his Majesty’s innocent subjects…to cruel and ruinous retaliations.” Even former British commanders in America, such as Generals Howe and Burgoyne, counseled against cruel measures. And Edmund Burke, once again raising his voice as the conscience of the House, argued that the manifesto forewarned of nothing less than Britain abandoning its customary “lenity” and “humanity” as dictated by the laws of war. Instead, it held out the specter of inexcusable “extremes of war, and the desolation of a country.” In the House of Lords, one agitated earl exhorted the bench of bishops that, should they support such “unchristian-like measures,” they would be “up to their very necks in the blood of America.”³⁵

Government spokesmen in both houses defended the proclamation as an appropriate, morally and legally justifiable response to the circumstances in which the country now found itself. France, bent on commercial and maritime empire at Britain’s cost, needed to be stopped, by means consonant with the laws of wars. But the Earl of Shelburne, who as prime minister in 1783 would conclude peace with the victorious United States, denounced the “rapine, plunder, and wanton destruction” threatened by the proclamation. Other peers appealed to Britain’s sense of national pride: an international public was watching and would be disgusted by how their country conducted the war.³⁶

The tension in the House of Commons was palpable when the administration’s chief spokesman, Lord George Germain, finally rose to his feet. A series of impassioned indictments had put the government on the defensive, and the pressure on Germain was intense. He had been blindsided by the manifesto that he, as the responsible cabinet minister, now needed to defend. But if he played his cards right, perhaps he could turn the predicament into an opportunity to unite the country behind the vigorous prosecution of a war for which enthusiasm had been waning ever since Saratoga.

First, however, Germain had to calm the nerves of the House, assuaging his critics’ worst fears while defending the manifesto from censure. For the man many still ridiculed as the once court-martialed coward of Minden, it would be a make-or-break moment. Germain’s brief speech reads as an object lesson in political weaseling and psychological manipulation. Neither the king nor any Briton promoted “wanton cruelty,” he said. The government would never order a British army to commit barbarities, nor would (or should) any British army ever obey such orders. What the proclamation truly meant was that “the Americans, by their alliance, were become French,” Germain told the Commons, “and should in future be treated as Frenchmen.”³⁷

With just a few sentences, Germain had changed the terms of the debate. Previously redeemable rebels had now been lost irrevocably to the greater British family. It was an astounding argument, which, he knew, was also flawed. For, strictly speaking, the French (as other Europeans) were legitimate opponents falling under the protection of the laws of war, which colonial rebels as a matter of law did not. But Germain acknowledged the psychological and emotional power that Americans’ standing as fellow subjects had held in the minds of many of his colleagues and his countrymen. It had allowed the conciliators among politicians and in the army to keep the upper hand in the debate over harsher counterinsurgency measures. That imagined bond had to be cut, just as the American Patriots had done by declaring their independence two years before.

By identifying the rebellious Americans no longer as King George III’s wayward children but as allies of Britain’s historical enemy France—indeed, as Frenchmen—Germain had made it virtually impossible for anyone to speak up for America. Any member who did so now risked sounding unpatriotic. After all, as Lord Lyttelton helpfully put it, America had become “the dagger of France,” and “the instrument of the assassination of her parent!” Germain’s rhetorical sleight of hand was designed to prepare the nation to turn a page in the conflict; to suspend, if not sever, all emotional ties with America; and to brace itself for a new, unlimited kind of war.³⁸

No one seemed to rise to contradict Germain in the House of Commons chamber, although a long “protest” against the commissioners’ manifesto—signed by over twenty peers, including prominent opposition figures—was entered in the parliamentary record. The dissidents invoked the laws of nature and of nations as well as Christian principles, which forbade extreme warfare for mere expediency. The opposition felt obligated to hold the line that a civilized empire, even and especially when at war, must not cross. But once both Houses of Parliament had rejected the motions to censure the manifesto, it was clear that the British commissioners in America had created a new (rhetorical) reality.³⁹

In Paris, John Adams envisaged the consequences with a sense of foreboding: “Burn the sea coast and massacre upon the Frontiers, is now the Cry.” Britain’s objectives, both Adams and Franklin asserted, were now “entirely changed. Heretofore their Massacres and Conflagrations were to divide Us, and reclaim us to Great Britain. Now despareing of that End, and perceiving that we shall be fait[h]ful to our Treaties, their Principle is by destroying us, to make us useless to France.” In London, a large majority of the Robin Hood debating society affirmed the proposition that “an extreme rigorous war of short duration [was] more humane on the whole, than a lenient long one.” Ever since the Franco-American alliance had become known in February, Britain had been in response mode. But following the commissioners’ desperate act of rhetorical aggression, embraced retroactively by Germain, the Empire now seemed to pivot to a more forceful counterinsurgency.⁴⁰

Within weeks of the Baylor Massacre, the “British peace-seeking savages” were initiating their Southern campaign; before the year was out, they had captured Savannah, Georgia, and, barely six months later, Charleston, South Carolina. Most histories of the second half of the war look primarily to that Southern theater. But it was in the North that both the British and the Continental Armies launched virtually simultaneous campaigns of terror in the summer of 1779. John Adams’s predictions of burning coastlines and “massacre upon the Frontiers” would indeed come to pass. As far as frontier violence was concerned, however, Americans were about to become the aggressors as much as the victims.

John Lodge, A New and Correct Map of North America: in which the Places of the Principal Engagements during the Present War are accurately inserted (London, 1780). Credit 42