CHAPTER 8

Enter the Outraged Conqueror of Charleston

General George Washington went back to the business of getting his army ready to meet another attack. He was more and more convinced that General Wilhelm von Knyphausen planned to make a second lunge for Morristown. He requested a careful head count of all the regulars “fit for action.” He told militia general Nathaniel Heard to find “three or four very trusty horsemen” to patrol each of the passes through the barrier mountains. In Elizabethtown he replaced the impetuous Lord Stirling with the more cautious Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben.

The militia continued to skirmish fiercely with the British all around the perimeter of their camp. Along the Elizabeth River they dragged a cannon close enough to fire several rounds, one of which knocked the flagstaff out of the hands of a German color bearer.¹ The report of Hannah Caldwell’s death guaranteed a high level of militia enthusiasm and a steady flow of volunteers.

After two days of stalemate, Washington grew even more worried about Knyphausen’s intentions. He warned West Point commander General Robert Howe to be ready for a surprise attack. The German general might be trying to pin down the main American army while launching a surprise assault on this key fortress.

Proving himself more than a little prescient, Washington wrote, “’Tis probable Clinton with the whole or a part of the troops under his command is momently expected at New York.” The British commander might be planning “to [push] immediately up the North River.” The American commander rushed another express rider to General George Clinton and his New York brigade, sent north to fight loyalist and Indian forays from Canada.² This American Clinton was told to get back to West Point as soon as possible to frustrate his British counterpart.

Washington also tried to use the situation to recruit regulars to fill his understrength regiments. He complained to a Connecticut correspondent, “The country seems to be in an unaccountable state of security and to be sunk in the greatest supineness.” He could only hope that the loss of Charleston and the “insulting manoeuvre” Knyphausen had just executed in New Jersey might arouse it. But he confessed it pained him to think only calamities could stir his countrymen.³ Knyphausen’s force was “inconsiderable” but still too large for the American army to meet in battle.

The Americans’ aggressive sniping, patrolling, and cannonading kept the British and Germans under the illusion that they confronted a superior force. They got so jittery that they built a pontoon bridge from Elizabethtown Point to Staten Island to guarantee a rapid retreat. A German officer saw this precaution as justified: “the militia alone of the Rebel hordes, because of their imagined success, had grown in this short time to a force of seven thousand men.… It is inconceivable how these people, without being supplied with food, have stuck together and are as steadfast as the Continental troops.”⁴ The enemy was learning how committed militia could be when bolstered by a regular army.

On June 13 the weather turned rainy. Water poured through the makeshift huts the British troops had thrown up on Elizabethtown Point using their blankets. The army’s morale drooped. Even in the rain, the militia managed to get off enough shots to kill or wound several men. In the absence of human targets, they fired at the British horses.⁵

Washington was doing his utmost to make their accommodations even more unpleasant. He ordered a militia brigadier to collect “all the horses and cattle (except for a few milch cows absolutely necessary for family use) within five miles of the water from Newark to Amboy.” He would send the animals on to the Continental commissary. He was making sure that Knyphausen could not console himself with another grand forage.⁶

Washington rushed a letter to Major General Robert Howe at West Point, telling him that if the enemy tried another smash toward Morristown, “you may be useful to us by making a demonstration in your quarter.” He told Howe to collect boats “sufficient for two thousand men” and to put the garrison “under moving orders with three days’ provisions.” Howe should also circulate the idea that the local militia might be called at any moment. The purpose was to give the enemy “some alarm.” The commander in chief also recommended the dispatch of an “emissary” (a double agent) to New York to spread “these particulars.”⁷

In his regular army, Washington had another worry: desertions. He issued strict orders against straggling from the area assigned to each regiment for camp. No one was to enter “the vicinity of the enemy” without orders. Anyone caught outside the chain of sentinels around the camp without permission would get thirty lashes. The general also forbade “transient persons” to pass through the encampment after dark. Those who tried were to be confined until morning.

Despite all this vigilance, a discouraging twenty men fled to the British lines. Only one, Thomas Brown of the 2nd New Jersey Regiment, was caught. He was condemned to death and hanged on June 16. James Thacher, the Massachusetts regimental surgeon who kept a vivid diary of the war, wasted no pity on him. He noted that Washington had pardoned him for a previous desertion attempt three weeks earlier.⁸

A lot of stragglers were not attempting to desert but searching for food. The regulars were not eating much better in the Short Hills than they had in Morristown. Private Joseph Plumb Martin of Connecticut told of going off guard duty with nothing to eat for forty-eight hours. In his desperation Martin cadged the liver of a slaughtered ox—the best cuts of the carcass had gone to the general officers. The thing was so tough, it almost killed him.⁹

By this time the British had been camping on Elizabethtown Point for twelve days. Washington became more and more concerned about a surprise attack. His best intelligence officer, Major Benjamin Tallmadge, who operated north of New York, reported his agents had picked up word that the British planned “some sudden movement… most probably up the North [Hudson] River.”¹⁰ This only increased Washington’s uncertainty.

The arrival of Light Horse Harry Lee and his legion of green-coated cavalrymen cheered the American commander. They were among the few regiments in the American army with complete uniforms. Dr. James Thacher admired their elegant horses and martial appearance. Washington expected “important service” from them. They had been on their way south and had responded swiftly to the general’s order to return. With them in his ranks, Washington need not worry about the British 17th Dragoons’ carving up his militia regiments unopposed.¹¹

But Lee’s presence did not solve the commander in chief’s other horse problem. Washington desperately wanted to move the army’s artillery and stores in Morristown to the west side of the Delaware River. But he still faced a catastrophic shortage of horses and wagons. The quartermaster corps, harried by a stream of letters, scraped together every available horse in Morris County, but only a few of those irreplaceable guns got on the road.¹²

On Sunday, June 19, Washington got the news he had been dreading. Coast watchers in Monmouth County reported a large fleet sailing into New York Harbor. They counted no fewer than thirty-five ships passing the bar at Sandy Hook.¹³ Sir Henry Clinton and his southern army, the conquerors of Charleston, had arrived.

A desperate Washington rushed a letter to the president of Congress, begging him to do something about his depleted army. “Not a single draft” from any of the states had joined the ranks, while the year’s recruits numbered barely two hundred. “A very alarming scene may shortly open,” Washington wrote. “It will be happy for us if we can steer clear of some grievous misfortune.”¹⁴

THE AMERICAN commander might have felt a little better if he had known his British counterpart’s state of mind. Consternation best describes Sir Henry Clinton’s reaction on discovering that General von Knyphausen had invaded New Jersey.

In a fury, Clinton castigated this “ill-timed malapropos move.” He had expected to find “Mr. Washington,” as Clinton persisted in calling him, “in a state of unsuspecting security in his camp at Morristown and the bold persevering militia of that populous province quiet in their respective homes”; instead, “the whole country was now in arms.”¹⁵ Knyphausen blamed everything on the loyalists of New York, particularly William Franklin, who had assured him New Jersey was ripe for capitulation.¹⁶

For Clinton, the problem was what to do next. Reviewing the army on Elizabethtown Point on June 19, he found their situation “very unpleasant and mortifying.” Meanwhile his Carolina troops were disembarking on Staten Island. They had been on the crowded ships for three weeks and needed to get their land legs again. No longer in love with his original plan to send two columns lunging toward Morristown from Amboy and Elizabethtown, Clinton pondered his options.¹⁷

There were other possibilities. West Point was a key to Washington’s defensive strategy. He would move swiftly to defend it if he thought it under attack. A feint in that direction might lure the main American army out of the Short Hills into northern New Jersey, where Clinton could trap it between the Carolina army and Knyphausen’s force. Or Knyphausen might manage to bull through the weakened defenses around Hobart Gap and reach Morristown.¹⁸

Washington was soon deluged with reports from spies warning him that Clinton was about to make a half dozen different moves. Perhaps the most worrisome came from a very reliable Staten Island spy, who said Clinton’s army was advancing toward the Amboy ferry and British boats were assembling at the mouth of the Raritan River. That sounded like the start of a lunge toward Morristown.

In the American lines around the British camp in Elizabethtown, the situation suddenly deteriorated. Baron von Steuben asked to be relieved of his command. The undisciplined ways of the militia were driving the Prussian drillmaster crazy. The baron complained that he had found two of the advanced posts abandoned, the men gone home. The militia’s overall numbers had dwindled to about five hundred—a desertion rate of 66 percent.¹⁹

To complete Washington’s headaches, he learned from a friend in the New Jersey legislature that the local solons were about to draft militia to fill the gaps in the state’s Continental regiments. To forestall resistance, they were to serve as full companies, under their own officers. An appalled Washington rushed a letter to Governor William Livingston, warning that such a law would unravel the regular army. The governor persuaded the politicians to abandon the idea. That left the ranks unfilled.

IN NEW York, Sir Henry Clinton was at work on a plan even more ambitious than the strike against Morristown. He had learned from a spy in the American camp that the long-expected French fleet and expeditionary force would arrive in Rhode Island in about three weeks. The spy was none other than the hero of Saratoga, Major General Benedict Arnold. The widowed general had recently married beautiful twenty-year-old Peggy Shippen of Philadelphia, daughter of a family that included both patriots and loyalists. Lovely Peggy had secretly persuaded Arnold to switch sides, convincing him that he had a brighter future in a British uniform than he would ever have in the disintegrating American army.

Clinton decided to put the French on his military menu. He would execute his pincer movement in New Jersey, smash Washington’s army in a day’s hard fighting, and then put his men aboard transports and head for Rhode Island, where he would finish off the French in the same fashion. With no organized armed force left on the rebel side, the war would be over.

On June 22, Clinton ordered his Carolina army back on their transports to form the northern arm of his pincer. To help Knyphausen deal with the New Jersey militia, he assigned him the best loyalist regiment in the British army, the Queen’s Rangers, commanded by a master of partisan warfare, Lieutenant Colonel John Graves Simcoe. Clinton also gave Old Knyp the 42nd Regiment, tough Scottish Highlanders fighting in America since 1776. These 800 experienced soldiers raised Knyphausen’s strength to over 6,000.²⁰

Meanwhile the Americans were devoting strenuous efforts to a new crisis. West Point was alarmingly short of food. Washington had organized a train of wagons loaded with enough flour to guarantee them the ability to withstand a siege. Taking the Pennsylvania and Connecticut brigades with him, he planned to personally escort the resupply to the fortress.

To replace the militia-maddened Baron von Steuben at Elizabethtown, Washington chose his most capable general, Nathanael Greene. His mission, Washington wrote, was “to cover the country and the public stores.” He was referring to the magazines and artillery still sitting like beached whales in Morristown. He urged Greene to “use every precaution in your power to avoid surprise.”²¹

Washington left two brigades of regulars with Greene. One was General William Maxwell’s New Jersey brigade, which barely numbered 650 men. Brigadier General John Stark, the laconic, steely-eyed hero of Bunker Hill and Bennington, commanded the second, comprised of three skeleton regiments, one from Rhode Island, one from Connecticut, and the other from Massachusetts. The label “brigade” was almost a courtesy: the unit numbered only 461 men. Greene also retained Lee’s Legion, about 400 men, half cavalry, half infantry. With a putative 1,500 militia, Greene had less than 3,000 rank and file.

Down on Elizabethtown Point, Simcoe’s green-coated Queen’s Rangers added new vigor to the British outposts. One of their lieutenants made a foray over the stone bridge across the Elizabeth River into American territory and retreated with the Americans in hot pursuit. In a wood just beyond the bridge, a company of the 17th Dragoons waited to cut the pursuers to pieces. But the Americans stopped on the safe side of the bridge, and the ambush failed to come off.

Undiscouraged, that night the Rangers teamed up with the Jaegers to attack another American outpost and bring in four prisoners. From them they learned that Washington had marched two nights ago for West Point and left the rest of the army and militia at Springfield. This was what the British wanted to know. Clinton’s trap was ready to be sprung.²²

Pondering their maps in their Staten Island headquarters, Clinton and Knyphausen noted a potential weakness in the American position. Clinton ran his finger up the Vauxhall Road on the right of the Galloping Hill Road to Springfield. One column would go up Vauxhall, which looped around the northeastern edge of Springfield before plunging through Hobart Gap. The other column would use the Galloping Hill route, which they had followed in their June 7 foray. Could the Americans, outnumbered two to one, defend both roads? Not likely. If the British broke through on either road, they could encircle the defenders of the other road and cut them to pieces at leisure.

What if Washington’s army swung around the northern tip of the Watchung Mountains just west of Newark and struck at Knyphausen’s flank to relieve the pressure on Springfield? Clinton smiled grimly. If the American commander tried it, the war might end tomorrow. He would have the 4,000-man Carolina army well up the Hudson River on transports, waiting for such a move. The moment Washington showed himself east of the mountains, these seasoned troops would come ashore to cut off his retreat. At the very least, if Washington did not try to help his cadres in Springfield, the British could look forward to smashing them up and wrecking the militia’s morale for a long time to come.²³

For a moment, Sir Henry must have been almost cheerful. There was a very good chance that he could be sitting in Newport in two weeks, waiting to inform the French commander when he landed that American resistance had collapsed. That meant Monsieur had two alternatives: surrender or die.

While these not-so-unrealistic dreams bemused the British high command, a very nervous American spy appeared in Nathanael Greene’s headquarters in Bryant’s Tavern, just west of Springfield on the road to Morristown. He insisted on seeing General Greene immediately and told an alarming story. He had slipped away from the British camp at 3:00 P.M., after learning that Clinton was planning a surprise attack on Washington’s army as it marched to West Point. They had hired him as a guide and ordered him to rendezvous with them on the road to Aquackanock (now Passaic) that night.

The more the man talked, the more Greene suspected that he was a double agent. Despite these doubts, common sense required that he warn Washington. In the letter he reported that Light Horse Harry Lee, whose horsemen were patrolling the shores of the Hudson, picking up information from everyone and anyone, thought the British would strike at West Point. Except for some minor skirmishing, all was quiet at Elizabethtown.

At 10:00 P.M., Greene wrote again. He was growing jittery. He now began to think the British might indeed strike at Washington, hoping to break through for a march to Morristown. Doubling back on his doubts, Greene now believed the spy was “sincere.” Washington’s force might well be the main target.²⁴

Greene was probably right the first time. The spy’s information stopped Washington’s march to West Point, holding him in position to snap at the bait of Knyphausen’s attack. But Greene did not change his mind enough to march his two thin brigades toward Washington, leaving the road to Morristown open. He kept them in the Short Hills above Springfield.

AT 5:00 A.M. on June 23, the British army, led by the Queen’s Rangers and Skinner’s Greens, also known as the New Jersey Volunteers, stormed out of the camp on Elizabethtown Point and swiftly overran all the advanced American positions inside Elizabethtown, capturing three cannons and a number of prisoners. The fleeing survivors warned Scotch Willie Maxwell’s New Jersey brigade, camped just west of the town. What little resistance the Americans offered came from the outnumbered regulars. Baron von Steuben’s warning that the militiamen were going home without waiting to be relieved had gone largely unheeded.

The fewer than five hundred militiamen on duty scattered as fast as their legs could carry them when they saw the whole British army coming. Maxwell covered the Galloping Hill Road with one of his New Jersey Continental regiments and ordered Lee’s Legion to cover the Vauxhall Road. The enemy, according to plan, had split into two columns and was using both roads. The Americans fell back, hard-pressed by the Rangers and the Greens.²⁵

On the heights of Springfield, the Old Sow boomed, and the signal beacon blazed its fiery message into the dawn. But few militia responded. Everyone presumed that the men on duty would do the fighting. No one knew most of them had gone home. For the first hour, the situation looked far worse than it had on June 7.

At Bryant’s Tavern, Nathanael Greene, exercising an independent command for the first time, ordered his men to rip up the planks on the two bridges across the Rahway River, one on the Galloping Hill Road, the other on the Vauxhall Road. Greene had positioned his infantry and artillery in echelons to force the British to make not one but a series of attacks. He ordered Elias Dayton’s New Jersey Continental regiment and whatever militia he could gather to make a first stand in Connecticut Farms. As they fell back, the 2nd Rhode Island Regiment under Colonel Israel Angell would cover their retreat. These men from Greene’s home state received the post of honor—defense of the Galloping Hill Bridge over the Rahway River.

The 2nd Rhode Island was down to 160 men but had a fighting record equaled by few American regiments. Its men had bled in every major battle of the war. In 1777 they had defended the Delaware River forts against weeks of bombardments and assaults by the British and Germans. The forty-year-old Angell was one of the coolest, most competent commanders in the American army.²⁶

Behind Angell, on higher ground commanding a stone bridge over the west branch of the Rahway River, Greene posted portly Israel Shreve and his 2nd New Jersey Regiment. Behind them he positioned Major General Philemon Dickenson, finally on duty with his militia, and as many of his part-timers as showed up. To defend the Vauxhall Bridge, he dispatched Colonel Mathias Ogden and his 1st New Jersey Regiment. For a reserve, on the summit of the hills behind Bryant’s Tavern, Greene placed Maxwell and the rest of the New Jersey brigade, plus John Stark with the two remaining regiments of his brigade.

Simultaneously, he rushed a messenger to Washington with the grim news. “The enemy are out on their march toward this place in full force, having received a considerable reinforcement last night.” Greene might have felt a little more hopeful had he known that most of that reinforcement—five regiments—was staying behind to protect the British rear on Elizabethtown Point against roving militia. Even without these men, Knyphausen still outnumbered Greene five regulars to one.²⁷

At Rockaway Bridge, eleven miles northwest of Morristown, Washington must have felt a twinge of anguish when Nathanael Greene’s morning message arrived. He was too far away to come to his aid. At best he could fire his signal guns, order the men to cook two days’ provisions, and get his half of the army on the road to Springfield as soon as possible. Ahead of him he sent one of his aides with a troop of cavalry to reconnoiter the roads from Elizabethtown to make sure the British were not coming in his direction.²⁸

In Springfield, the civilians were panicky, with good reason. The charred ruins of the houses in Connecticut Farms provided stark warning of carnage to come. As in the Farms, Springfield’s thirty-seven houses were scattered along Galloping Hill Road for several miles. Almost every house had an orchard and pasture lands nearby, as well as barns and other outbuildings.²⁹

Some Springfielders were eager to fight. Joseph Tooker, an ensign in the militia, joined regulars at the defile in Connecticut Farms, while his wife threw the family silver down the well and hid blankets and other bedding in a nearby field of rye.³⁰ Other locals preferred to flee. George Ross, the town’s glazier and shoemaker, abandoned almost 150 panes of glass and over two dozen boots and shoes. He also left behind his gun. Joseph Horton, the town silversmith, hid most of his wares but was unable to find any takers for “3 good guns.”³¹

The civilian panic contrasted with the grim calm of the regulars. Massachusetts doctor James Thacher painted the scene at dawn in his diary. “At six o’clock… the alarm guns were fired and the drums… beat to arms, announcing the approach of the enemy; the whole army is instantly in motion, the scene to my contemplation is awfully sublime, yet animation and composure seem to pervade every countenance.”³²

Once more James Caldwell mounted his horse to arouse the militia. His inspiration was badly needed. The amateurs were already tired of the war. A farmer named Bishop in nearby Mendham was stacking wheat with the help of several hired men when the alarm guns boomed. He ran to get his musket. Not one of the hired men followed. They let him trot off alone to the rendezvous point.³³

Most of the men who responded were young. Eighteen-year-old Ashbel Green showed up again to join the men of Colonel Sylvanus Seeley’s Morris County regiment. So did sixteen-year-old Nathan Elmer, who wanted to be a cavalryman and groaned at the thought of marching his feet off again to get over the mountains to Springfield. Some were ex-regulars, like Samuel Elston, who had served a year in the Jersey line in 1776, fighting in Canada. He wore his red hair in a long ponytail hanging down his shoulders. His militia-mates called him “Carrot.”³⁴

Only a handful of Essex County militia joined Colonel Elias Dayton’s Continentals at Connecticut Farms;³⁵ the amateurs no longer had any appetite for head-on clashes with the bayonet-wielding British regulars. But bands of militia were active along the British line of march. At its tail, in the very center of Elizabethtown, several militiamen sprang from behind a house and seized a wagon carrying the baggage of a lieutenant colonel of the Guards. They put a gun to the head of the Negro driver and quietly told him they would blow out his brains if he did not guide his horses into a nearby barn.³⁶

The exploit made them local heroes but had no real impact on the juggernaut that was heading up the Galloping Hill and Vauxhall Roads toward Nathanael Greene and his men. The sun was rising steadily in the summery blue sky when the leading companies of Skinner’s Greens and Queen’s Rangers appeared at the eastern end of the Connecticut Farms defile. They paused to take a good look at Dayton’s Continentals. A howl of mutual contempt leaped from hundreds of throats, followed by the ugly crash of musket fire.³⁷

Virtually every man on both sides was American, and most were from New Jersey—a vivid depiction of the Revolution as a civil war. The Greens led the way up the slope of the defile, dodging Continental bullets, blasting back from behind trees and bushes, both sides fighting Indian-style. Despite their ferocity, the Greens made little real progress. Outnumbered, they soon began looking over their shoulders for the Queen’s Rangers.

Colonel John Graves Simcoe coolly studied the situation for another minute and decided not to commit his men to the confused struggle in the defile. He ordered them to close ranks and follow him down the Galloping Hill Road without firing a shot.³⁸ Simcoe’s maneuver achieved total surprise. Neither Dayton’s regulars nor their supporting militiamen realized what was happening until the Rangers were in their rear.

Simcoe barked another order, and the Rangers wheeled left, opened ranks, and charged the militiamen, who were clustered in an orchard beside the road. The militia general in command took one look at what was coming and bellowed, “Retreat!” With the general leading the rout, the militiamen fled across the open fields, Ranger bullets whistling after them. They did not stop running until they had crossed the Rahway River.³⁹ Several Continentals, isolated by their sudden departure, flung down their guns and surrendered to the Rangers.

In the defile, Colonel Dayton realized his left flank had collapsed. He had no alternative to a swift retreat. But the Continentals’ withdrawal contrasted starkly with the militia’s flight. There was no panic, even though Skinner’s Greens began a hot pursuit, whooping in triumph. Dayton took personal command of the rear guard. Musketry blasts kept the Greens at a respectful distance, while the head of the little column pegged shots at Simcoe’s Rangers on the other side of the road.

Simcoe wisely ordered no pursuit. He realized Dayton’s men were only the first line of the American defense and did not want his men tired out on a hot day before they reached the main body of Greene’s army. He waited in the road for Knyphausen and the rest of the British army to reach him.

The German general soon arrived and sent the Rangers, the Greens, the Guards, and most of the British regiments up the Vauxhall Road, hoping to outflank the Americans defending the Galloping Hill Bridge over the Rahway. Knyphausen headed for this bridge with the Jaegers, two British regiments, and the German regiments. At the head of his column he placed the Jaegers and six cannons.⁴⁰

Defending the bridge was the single skeletonized 2nd Rhode Island Regiment. Its men were not encouraged by the sight of the militia’s racing headlong across the landscape, soon followed by the winded, sweat-soaked Continentals of Dayton’s regiment, who passed through their ranks to the rear. Captain Stephen Olney, commanding one Rhode Island company, expected them to be annihilated. “I never had so much difficulty reconciling my mind to the fate contemplated,” he later wrote. It looked like a suicide mission.

Knyphausen’s six guns soon opened fire on the Rhode Islanders. To answer them, the Americans had a single cannon. For two hours, while the flanking column moved into position to attack the Vauxhall Bridge, the single American piece dueled the British guns at a range of 1,000 yards with little visible damage on either side. The Rhode Islanders remained stolidly indifferent to the balls hissing past them.

At 11:00 A.M., a messenger from the flanking column arrived. It was ready to attack. Knyphausen barked an order. His column came down the hill toward the Rhode Islanders around the bridge, the British regiments in the lead. With murderous accuracy, the single American cannon sent a ball smashing through their ranks, leaving a swath of dead and dying. The men broke for cover, wailing with fright. Their officers grimly reformed them, and they went forward again. This time the Americans fired a “ricochet,” striking the ground just in front of the column, cutting an even deadlier swath. Again the men broke and had to be reformed. They came on a third time and got a blast of grapeshot. Once more the lone American gun shattered the British charge.

Knyphausen ordered his six guns to advance five hundred yards. At this range, they were exposed to American fire and took some casualties. But they swiftly decimated the American gun crew and smashed the gun. A final shot amputated both legs of the artillery captain in command of it.

Heartened, the British infantrymen renewed their charge. Blasts of Rhode Island musketry stopped them at the bridge, which the Continentals had stripped of its planks. A courageous British sergeant and two privates tried to get across on the runners and were shot into the water. The Jaeger commander, Colonel Johann von Wurmb, put a stop to these heroics. He sent his four hundred green-coated riflemen racing upstream and downstream, where they splashed across the shallow river unopposed and assaulted the Rhode Islanders’ flanks. The British infantrymen opened their ranks and forded the river on either side of the bridge under cover of their artillery.⁴¹

A wild firefight exploded on the west bank of the Rahway, swirling around orchards, barns, and houses on Springfield’s outskirts. Captain Olney ruefully admired the cool courage displayed by one Jaeger officer. “It seemed no ball would stop [him]; he came on, firing regularly.” Olney was also leading a charmed life, as he walked up and down, encouraging his men. “The wind of their balls would at times shake the hair of my head,” he said later.⁴²

For almost a half hour, the Rhode Islanders fought five times their number to a standstill. Clouds of gun smoke shrouded the battlefield. The soldiers’ faces were darkened by gunpowder. Their overheated muskets left the flesh of their hands raw.

Suddenly, from one end of the American line to the other, a cry went up: “Wadding. More wadding.” Regulars added paper around the ball to steady it in the barrel and give the crude gun better aim. A frantic messenger raced to the rear. On the road he met James Caldwell. “I’ll get you more wadding,” the pastor said, putting spurs to his horse.

In minutes he rode back through the gun smoke and flung down dozens of hymnbooks. Isaac Watts, an English clergyman, had written most of the songs. “Give ’em Watts, boys,” Caldwell roared and thundered back to the Springfield church for another load.⁴³

The words created an instant local legend but did little for the Rhode Islanders. More and more of them crumpled under British fire at point-blank range. Other pockets succumbed to bayonet charges. A bullet smashed Stephen Olney’s arm. He calmly tied a handkerchief around the wound and walked from tree to tree, telling his men he “thought it best to retreat.” Carrying a half dozen badly wounded men with them, they fell back minutes before the 37th Regiment stormed down a road in their rear to cut them off.⁴⁴

With one out of four men dead or wounded, the Rhode Islanders retreated to a second bridge over another branch of the Rahway. Here they found the 2nd New Jersey Regiment and some New Jersey militia waiting with guns primed and ammunition pouches full. This branch of the river was little more than a creek. The British charged across it and began another firefight with these fresh troops. The Americans slowly gave ground. General Greene’s battle plan did not call for last stands on the low ground along the river. He planned to do his serious fighting on the steep slopes of the Short Hills, beyond the town limits of Springfield.

The 38th British Regiment tried to work its way around the American flank. Suddenly it caught a blast of fire from a swarm of militiamen who had gathered unnoticed on this part of the battlefield. Simultaneously about thirty Continentals fired from the window of a stone house. The British recoiled, with two dozen dead and wounded. But the wide-ranging Jaegers then caught the militia from all sides and sent them fleeing into the middle distance, dragging their wounded with them.

British artillery now fired on the 2nd New Jersey. The British and Jaegers swarmed its flanks. General Greene sent orders to retreat to the high ground. The Americans would have to abandon most of Springfield to the enemy.

A few minutes after he gave this order, Greene sent a pessimistic report to Washington. He vowed to dispute the British attempt to crash through Hobart Gap “as far as I am capable.” But he worried about the second British column fighting its way across the Vauxhall Bridge. The Vauxhall Road snaked into the hills to join the Galloping Hill Road at Hobart Gap. If the British broke through at the bridge, they would cut off Greene’s retreat. “The militia to our aid are few,” he wrote. “And that few are so divided as to render little or no support.”⁴⁵

While Greene worried, Major Henry Lee was playing Horatio at the Vauxhall Bridge. He scattered his men in small parties through the nearby fields and woods to present less tempting targets for the British artillery. He had only the men of his legion, most of them fighting as dismounted cavalrymen, and a detachment of regulars under Captain George Walker from the 1st New Jersey Regiment—in all about six hundred soldiers. On his flank hung a sizable but indeterminate number of militia under the command of Brigadier General Nathaniel Heard. Neither group had artillery.⁴⁶

Major General Edward Mathew’s largely British column spent an hour bombarding Lee’s position. When Knyphausen’s cannon boomed at 11:00 A.M., signaling the attack, the New Jersey Volunteers and the Queen’s Rangers surged forward, wading the river on both sides of the bridge. For several minutes an all-American civil war raged again, replete with howls of defiance and roars of detestation. Muskets boomed, and ex-neighbors spilled each other’s blood.

As the rest of the British column poured over the bridge, Lee ordered a slow retreat. Firing steadily, the regulars and militia fell back to the upper branch of the Rahway River. Like Greene, Lee positioned his small force in echelons so they could concentrate their fire on the road. Colonel Simcoe countered this tactic by ordering the Queen’s Rangers into an attacking line.

While the New Jersey Volunteers skirmished with the militia, Simcoe’s men fought their way through a thicket-filled gully in a series of short, deadly hand-to-hand struggles. Soon they were pouring bullets into Lee’s left flank. For a moment a rout seemed imminent.⁴⁷

At this point, Greene’s aide, Lieutenant Colonel Francis Barber, galloped up, saw what was about to happen, and rushed back to headquarters for reinforcements. Greene ordered Brigadier General Stark’s two regiments forward on the double with a cannon. They arrived just as Lee’s men gave up the defense of the road and scrambled up the slopes of the Short Hills. The sight of another four hundred regulars deploying on this high ground with an artillery piece brought the British attack to an abrupt halt. Only the Queen’s Rangers tried to advance—until the cannon left two mangled corpses in their ranks.⁴⁸

To continue up the Vauxhall Road meant running a gauntlet of musket fire and grapeshot. Attacking the regulars on the heights would be an even costlier move. A jittery General Mathew, unnerved by the growing swarm of militia on his right flank and concerned about the possible reappearance of Washington and the rest of the American army, decided to take a road that forked from Vauxhall back to the center of Springfield.

It took some time for Mathew to get Simcoe and his men back on the road to serve as his rear guard. Meanwhile the British column stood in the road, a very tempting target. Most of the Americans in the hills fired high, but many bullets whizzed so close that one colonel of the Guards, Cosmo Gordon, reportedly advanced to the rear on his hands and knees behind a stone fence⁴⁹—an unforgiveable breach of conduct for an eighteenth-century officer. Gordon wound up defending himself before a court-martial board. He was acquitted, but his reputation was ruined.

In Springfield, General Knyphausen ordered General Mathew to clear the heights of snipers so the army could regroup, eat dinner, and decide what to do next. The German general could see no sign that he had broken the spirit of the American army. Moreover, he had to assume that the militia were rallying by the thousands from west of the Short Hills. Simcoe’s Rangers and the New Jersey Volunteers skirmished briskly with a mixture of militia and Continentals while the regulars dined.

Seeing some militia moving into swampy ground by the river, Simcoe took a company of the Queen’s Rangers into the same morass and stationed them in a thicket. They waited until the militia, led by Captain Nathaniel FitzRandolph, were within point-blank range, then rose and poured a volley in their faces. A dozen men went down. The survivors dragged the dying FitzRandolph out of the swamp and carried him home.⁵⁰

Dozens of other wounded men were being carried to the rear. The young militiaman Ashbel Green saw pools of blood on the dusty road down the mountain to Chatham. Angry, he and his friends implored their officers to let them attack the British. They also wanted to know where Washington and the rest of the American army was hiding.

Washington was marching for Chatham, carefully keeping the mountains between him and the British army. He did not show the slightest desire to come around Newark Mountain and fall on Knyphausen’s rear. He simply did not have enough men to give free rein to his aggressive instincts.

Even if he had made the move, Sir Henry Clinton was not poised to pounce on him. Admiral Marriot Arbuthnot had done a beautiful job of sabotaging Clinton’s plan. He had marched his Carolina army across Staten Island to Cole’s Ferry, where he expected to find transports waiting to take them up the Hudson River. Instead he found an empty harbor. Without bothering to tell Sir Henry, the admiral had decided to take his fleet to sea. After choleric complaints from Clinton, the transports finally returned. But it was dark by the time they ferried the army up the river, and a disgusted Clinton abandoned his pincer movement.⁵¹

General Knyphausen also decided to abandon his arm of the pincer. Rather than the boom of cannons, spurts of smoke and flames in Springfield announced his intentions. In a half hour, the town was an inferno. Some men in Greene’s army, seeing their homes in flames, went berserk and started down the mountain in a suicidal attack. Their friends restrained them.⁵²

Soon fire wreathed the Presbyterian church—with American wounded inside. A German soldier, Stephan Popp, noted in his diary that the wounded men’s pleas for life were moving but did them no good. Only four houses belonging to known British sympathizers were spared. Everything else—barns, sheds, outbuildings—was put to the torch. “Not even a pig-sty was left standing,” Popp wrote in his diary.⁵³

Covered by the smoke billowing from Springfield, Knyphausen began his retreat. The Royal Army moved in two divisions, one on the Vauxhall Road with the Queen’s Rangers as the rear guard, the other on the Galloping Hill Road with the Jaegers protecting its rear. Swarms of infuriated militiamen stormed after them. Nathanael Greene ordered two regiments of regulars to join them.

The Jaegers, low on ammunition and bitter about their losses earlier in the day, made only halfhearted attempts to defend their column. Militiamen raced past them to bushwhack the regulars along the line of march. Soon at least fifteen bodies lay by the side of the road, and the column was moving at a most undignified trot.⁵⁴ Passing Liberty Hall, Cosmo Gordon received a bullet in a part of his anatomy genteelly described in the Royal Gazette as his “upper thigh.”

On the Vauxhall Road, the Queen’s Rangers exacted a heavy toll from the pursuing militiamen. The Rangers’ riflemen were all crack shots. Brigadier General Heard ordered his men to stay at a safer distance.⁵⁵ One of the pursuers, Ashbel Green, was disgusted with Heard’s caution. He and his friends called the brigadier a coward—typical of how militia criticized their officers. Years later, Green admitted that Heard’s prudence probably saved his life.⁵⁶

As Knyphausen’s column hurried through Elizabethtown toward the Point and safety, the disheartened Jaegers in his rear came apart. “There were only 300 riflemen [left] with whom I had to sustain a violent attack from all sides by all sorts of militiamen,” Colonel von Wurmb later recalled. He had lost another ten men along the road and was forced to ask Knyphausen to relieve his exhausted soldiers.⁵⁷

In a wood near the crossroads where General Stirling had become a casualty on June 7, the 37th Regiment fought a brief, savage battle with Essex County militiamen. The amateurs finally retreated,⁵⁸ clearing the road for the second column, which soon joined Knyphausen on Elizabethtown Point. At midnight the German general led his weary men over the bridge of boats to Staten Island.

The invasion of New Jersey was over. The adventure had cost the British and Germans 307 dead and wounded.⁵⁹ We can glimpse the effect on their morale from a single line in a report Colonel von Wurmb sent home to Hesse-Cassel: “I regret from the depths of my heart that the great loss of the Jaegers took place to no greater purpose.”⁶⁰

Even more costly to the British was the impression their two advances and retreats left on the Americans in New Jersey. With the revolutionary cause teetering, a British victory could well have been decisive. The aura of defeat Knyphausen left behind him revived the spirits of thousands of waverers.

Ashbel Green, like most militiamen, was exhausted by a hot day’s marching and fighting. When the last British soldier had reached the security of Elizabethtown Point, he and many friends sought shelter for the night in nearby houses. The next day he trudged home, “almost fatigued to death.”

His route led him over the battlefield. For the first time he saw “the yet unburied corpses of the victims of war.” Two or three dead British “stripped as naked as when they were born” lay on the western side of Springfield Bridge. Young Green realized these were “daring and determined soldiers”—the men who had charged across the runners of the bridge and “met instant death as soon as they reached the other side.”

Looking around him in the morning sunlight, Green saw nothing but “gloomy horror—a dead horse, a broken carriage of a fieldpiece, a town laid in ashes, the former inhabitants standing over the ruins of their dwellings, and the unburied dead, covered with blood and with the flies that were devouring it.” Filled with melancholy, he was ready to ask, “Is the contest worth all this?”

Just west of Springfield he saw George Washington on horseback coming down the road at a gallop, accompanied by a single dragoon escort. Something about how the tall Virginian sat his bay horse, the big hands in absolute control, communicated new purpose, new resolution, to the young militiaman’s troubled soul.⁶¹

THE BATTLES of Springfield and Connecticut Farms reminded many in the American army of the fighting that had convulsed Massachusetts in April 1775. The rush of militia to the battle from all parts of New Jersey made one man exclaim, “It was Lexington repeated!”⁶² Others did not view the outcome—the two British retreats—as victories. Hotheaded aide Alexander Hamilton was in despair. “Would you believe it,” he wrote to a friend, “a German baron at the head of 5000 men, in the month of June insulted and defied the main American army with the Commander in Chief at their head with impunity and made them tremble for the safety of their magazines forty miles in the country.”⁶³

Colonel Ebenezer Huntington of Connecticut wrote to his father even more vehemently about the weakness of the Continental Army, denouncing his “cowardly countrymen who flinch at the very time when their exertions are wanted.… I despise my country. I wish I was not born in America.”

George Washington took a larger view of the failed invasion. In his general orders he praised the regulars and militia extravagantly. He told the president of Congress that the militia particularly “deserve everything that can be said. They flew to arms universally and acted with a spirit equal to any thing I have seen in the course of the war.”⁶⁴ He could have added—but was wary of boasting—that they had given dramatic proof that militia would fight hard if supported by an army to look the enemy in the face.

Looking back on the battle of Springfield, which is barely mentioned in most histories of the Revolution, it is easy to see why some writers have romanticized the militia. From young plowboys to substantial farmers like Sylvanus Seeley and Nathaniel FitzRandolph, they raced from peaceful homes to bullet-filled fields. We tend to forget Washington’s bitter, hungry, ragged Continentals, who stood up to the British Sunday punches while the militiamen jabbed on the enemy’s flanks. The devotion of these regulars is much harder to understand than the response of the militia, who were fighting virtually on their own doorsteps to protect their wives and children, farms and houses. Only those who saw what the regulars endured could really appreciate them. “I cherish those dear ragged Continentals, whose patience will be the admiration of future ages and glory in blooding with them,” wrote one of Washington’s aides.⁶⁵

The war was far from over, but peace settled over most of New Jersey after the battle of Springfield. The enemy still conducted numerous raids along the shore but left the men and women of the interior mostly untroubled. A line from the diary of Sylvanus Seeley gives us a glimpse of this lovely quiet—and the way it was preserved. On July 12 his younger brother, Lieutenant Samuel Seeley, declared himself recovered from the wound he had received at Connecticut Farms. He was ready to return to the harsh life of the Continental soldier once more. Militia Colonel Sylvanus Seeley wrote in his diary, “Samal Seeley went for camp. Plowd my corn.”⁶⁶