Fusiliers (48 page)

The night before the surrender ceremony, officers throughout Cornwallis’s army had drawn lots to see who would march into captivity and who would be free to leave with their general. Slips of paper with words denoting whether they would stay or go were screwed up and placed in a hat or bucket. Given the years of enforced
idleness experienced by the Saratoga captives, there was trepidation as each man picked his slip. One captain was needed to command the regiment’s party, the duty for the 23rd falling to Thomas Saumarez. The subalterns then chose. ‘It was my lot to be on this service,’ wrote Lieutenant Calvert, who was joined by a couple of fellow subalterns.

Those officers who had better luck with the draw were free to go. Captain Peter, who had been sick through most of the siege, was well enough to travel. As acting commanding officer, he was determined to deny the enemy one particular triumph over the Fusiliers. Peter detached the 23rd’s two colours from their staffs, those flags that symbolised the regiment and the royal cause for which it had fought so earnestly those six and a half years. He and another officer each wrapped a flag around his body, concealed beneath their uniforms, before boarding a transport, the
Earl of
Mulgrave, that was destined for Charleston and New York. It was to prove a stormy and difficult journey, so there must have been times when Peter envied Apthorpe and Champagne, who chose to travel overland to New York.

The walking remains of the regiment left Yorktown on 21 October, under the escort of the Virginia militia. Serjeant Lamb was not with them. The Irishman had every reason to fear captivity, for he had escaped from it before and there might be consequences if he was recognised. He volunteered to do duty at the hospital, putting his skills as an occasional surgeon’s mate to good use.

One month later, Lamb went to the head of the British hospital to resign, saying he intended to try and catch up the prisoners’ column. He took some pay he was owed and donned a private’s uniform, before slipping out of Yorktown while the American guard was changing. During the days that followed, he made his way north.

It was late November so the seasons were changing; somehow he would have to steer clear of American patrols and find his way hundreds of miles back to New York, crossing several great rivers on his way.

During his trek, Lamb came across several American farmers who were prepared to shelter him at night – more through a sense of Christian pity than sympathy for the British. Several of these good Samaritans had other thoughts in mind too, for the economy of rural Virginia, battered by years of war, had a dire shortage of labour. Every kind of inducement was held out to Lamb and other stragglers or escapees to desert the King’s service, making a new life. One American offered Lamb a partnership: he would build a school house in his
township and the literate Fusilier serjeant would become schoolmaster. Another offered Lamb a grant of 300 acres to farm in the new Kentucky settlements. ‘I was determined to die rather than serve any state hostile to Great Britain,’ wrote Lamb, explaining his rejection of these proposals. ‘Indeed I could not even patiently support the idea of remaining a prisoner among them.’

Lamb’s liberty was curtailed after just a few days. He and two other British escapers were arrested in Fredericktown in Maryland, less than halfway to New York. His fears of being recognised as a previously escaped prisoner from Burgoyne’s army were realised, and the serjeant passed many cold nights in dark cells before being reunited with his colleagues from the 23rd whom he joined in Winchester, Virginia, during the dying days of 1781.

The mood of the Yorktown prisoners was little improved by the fact that some of their guards were recognised as former British soldiers. The serjeant major of the 33rd spotted John Shaw, the man who had fallen into American hands with Tattersall of the 23rd just before the battle of Guilford Courthouse, in American uniform and denounced Shaw as a damned rebel. Dozens – although still a small minority – had made accommodations like Shaw’s, succumbing to the same blandishments that Lamb resisted so indignantly. In Shaw’s case, meeting and marrying an Irish Catholic had spurred him to discard the red coat, serving in a Virginia regiment before settling in the country.

In January 1782, the 23rd were moved to a large detention compound near Lancaster in Pennsylvania. It was a gruelling winter’s march for many of the men, but from Lamb’s point of view, at least, it got them closer still to New York. Arriving in their new surroundings, the Fusiliers were ordered to build their own stockade, the pen of wooden posts that would serve for their confinement. Not far away, what remained of the regiments of Burgoyne’s Convention Army had settled themselves rather more comfortably, with wooden huts sleeping six men each, vegetable plots and a church. The Yorktown prisoners soon nicknamed their quarters ‘Camp Security’ and those of the Saratoga men ‘Camp Indulgence’. For Lamb, the early joy at meeting some old comrades from the 9th, in which he formerly served, soon gave way to a sort of contempt for those who had passed four and a half years in captivity. The proud, motivated men, like Lamb himself, had long since escaped, leaving the feckless or those who dared not abandon the local girls they lay with.

Many of the Saratoga prisoners had found themselves jobs with Pennsylvania farmers. Americans seeking some hired help were required to deposit a bond with the authorities and could then take their new man 25 or even 30 miles away to work. Quite a few redcoats were happy enough to pocket two or three dollars each month hunting wolves or mucking out stables while clocking up British pay all the while. Those officers like Saumarez or Calvert of the 23rd, who had accompanied the soldiers into captivity, were there in large part to prevent the soldiers succumbing to offers of permanent local employment. So while they could do nothing to stop men taking jobs, they held back their soldiers’ pay in the hope that many would remain loyal, dreaming of the large sum due to them when their confinement ended.

For the officers themselves, captivity was crushingly tedious. Since they had given their parole to remain there, escape would have violated their sense of personal honour. Attempts to do so were extremely rare, although officers of the 23rd might have recalled that one of their number had done so in 1778. Thomas Eyre was an American-born subaltern who, captured during the skirmishing in the Jerseys early in 1777, said he was horribly mistreated, prompting his flight to British lines in Philadelphia. Eyre’s escape embarrassed General Howe, and he was soon sent to another regiment. The great majority of officers knew that it was best not even to attempt to flee.

Officers, similarly, could not take work, for it would be ungentlemanly to do so. Some tried to use the time profitably to improve their French or German, but there was a shortage of suitable books. While British or Hessian officers were free to live outside the prison camps, they had to pay rent and for all of the other necessaries of life. Many soon found their pay could barely meet these expenses. The feeling of being hard-up for months at a time added to the general misery conveyed by one captive officer:

Of all the situations of life, that of having no pursuit is the worst … time hangs heavy and I scarcely know how to spin out the day. I generally lay til ten, go to breakfast and then down to the town to play billiards or pick up the news. Here I find a number of stupid beings as dull as myself – yawning and sauntering from room to room and cursing their ill stars for keeping them in such a vile hole.

Better-connected Yorktown officers, like those of Saratoga before, soon started writing plaintive letters to their friends or patrons, trying
to escape this confinement. The best hope was that the commander-inchief in New York might include them in an exchange of officers, swapping them for a captured American of similar rank.

For Serjeant Lamb and the rankers there were no such hopes of exchange, so after a couple of months recruiting his strength and waiting for the weather to improve, he was meditating another escape. Lamb, the organiser, soon found several others who wanted to join – among them Serjeant Charles Collins, a veteran of nearly ten years in the regiment and of many of its battles from Lexington onwards. Lamb told Captain Saumarez, the acting commanding officer, of their intentions and, by way of support, that officer advanced them some pay.

On 1 March 1782, the group of eight Fusiliers left their camp at Lancaster. They had availed themselves of a pass from their American commandant that entitled them to seek farm work anywhere within ten miles of the camp, but they soon passed this point of no return, pressing on towards New York. The journey took them three weeks, during which time they picked up another man who had previously deserted the 23rd but wanted to return and seek his pardon. There were numerous close shaves with American patrols and quite a few locals who shunned their appeals for food or shelter. But Lamb and his comrades eventually found their way to the loyalist underground, one farmer near Philadelphia furnishing them with a list of the ‘King’s Friends’ who would help them. Many other escaped redcoats had passed that way before, no doubt, so once in New Jersey, close to their destination, they found men willing to risk death in order to pilot them into British lines. During the last stage of the journey, the Fusiliers divided into two parties, Lamb leading one and Collins the other, in order to reduce their chances of capture.

On the evening of 22 March, a rowing boat pushed off the Jersey shore, heading towards Staten Island. In it were Lamb, two loyalists, and three other escaped Fusiliers. After days of hardships, one of Lamb’s party had dropped by the wayside, pleading he could not go on. His fate along with that of Serjeant Collins’ party were unknown as the oarsmen began battling against an increasingly strong wind. A storm was blowing up in the channel; the American boatmen feared that their little craft would be swamped. Lamb and the other redcoats left their loyalist friends in no doubt of their determination to persist or perish in the attempt. With driving rain soaking them to the skin, they battled the elements for two hours until they spotted a sloop
through the murk. The boatmen felt sure she must be an American privateer, but Lamb ordered them to row on. Water was sloshing about in the bottom of the boat. ‘To our unspeakable joy,’ he later wrote, ‘we saw British soldiers standing on the deck.’

The escapers were conveyed across Staten Island to New York where they were warmly received by Major Frederick Mackenzie. Lamb had succeeded in his second escape. In the days that followed Serjeant Collins and all the remaining Fusiliers came in too. By his initiative and determination, Lamb had reached that level where his superiors began wondering how they might gain him an officer’s commission. Mackenzie used his powers of patronage, first to line Lamb’s pockets with the allowances of secretary to the Commandant of New York and later to get him appointed adjutant to a loyalist corps in the city.

In early 1782, the 23rd was scattered across the continent. So it would remain until the peace universally expected by those in command of the army. Active operations had all but ceased. The Fusiliers’ main body, nearly 200 men under Captain Saumarez, languished in captivity in Pennsylvania; in New York the Grenadier Company remained with the 1st Battalion of those troops, but another company’s worth of recruits or escapees was soon formed under Captain Peter; and, to the south, in Charleston, a couple of dozen men recovered from the hospitals of Camden or elsewhere did duty under Captain Blucke, while Lieutenant Colonel Balfour remained as commandant.

During the same month that Lamb arrived in New York, William Dansey, the officer of the 33rd who had commanded its light company during the 1777 campaign, returned to the continent having married in England and been promoted to major. Appearing in Charleston he was placed in command of a battalion scraped together from waifs and strays of the 23rd, 33rd and Guards. His description of their situation provides a telling insight into the mood of those who had survived the epic campaigns of Camden and Guilford. ‘As to the situation of affairs here they are as bad as can be,’ Dansey wrote home from South Carolina. ‘A broken army of all manner of corps, of which the debris of Lord Cornwallis’s army are the most respectable amounting to about 300 wounded men and recruits that never joined. We are all much hurt at the seeming indifference at home concerning the fall of Yorktown. Great Britain will not see such an officer or such an army again soon.’

 

TWENTY-TWO

 

Or How the 23rd Left America

The Fusiliers’ imprisonment ended at 8 a.m. on the bright morning of 9 May 1783. Nearly three weeks had passed since they had learned of the conclusion of a peace treaty between Great Britain and the American states. ‘The joyful news’, wrote one private, soon brought ‘the long wished for and passionately awaited order, to begin our departure march.’