Fusiliers (61 page)

181 ‘
It was already dark
’: Calvert’s memoir
CHT
, 9/111.

— ‘
[He] stated how particularly cruel it was
’: Stuart’s letter of August 1779 (in Wortley).

182 ‘
No doubt in such excursions many scenes occur
’: Lamb’s 1809
Journal of
Occurences
.

— ‘
a grievous case of desertion that July
’: the facts of the Mason/Watson/ Smith desertion come from
TNA: PRO WO
71/83; Smythe’s opinion, for example, is revealed in his testimony.

184 ‘
While in London, Balfour had brokered a deal
’: the Innes and Watson deal is revealed in a letter from Balfour to Clinton, 4 September 1780, Clinton Papers,
WLCL
.

— ‘
The Irish major in particular proved unforgiving
’: see, for example, Mecan’s letter of 21 December 1779 to ‘Mr White of the Barrack Office’, flaying him for sending soldiers to stay in a store belonging to the 23rd. In Clinton Papers,
WLCL
.

185 ‘
celebrated for her beauty, wit, and accomplishments
’: these quotations about Marie Phillips come from the ‘Loyalist manuscript’ printed in Sargent. The Smythe/Phillips wedding was recorded in the
New York Gazette
, 8 September 1779.

186 ‘
many of those staying behind said they were well off out of it
’: Ewald.

— ‘
no doubt remained, that the inactivity of the summer
’: Calvert,
CHT
9/111.

— ‘
An older officer of the
23rd
wrote home
’: this was Lieutenant Thomas Barretté, to Lord Dartmouth, 16 December 1779, Dartmouth Papers,
SRO D
(
W
) 1778/11/1900.

— ‘
All the sailors had lost their heads
’: Ewald.

— ‘
Scarcely a day during the voyage passed
’: Clinton,
American Rebellion
.

187 ‘
the Fusilier Brigade did not always come off best
’: Ewald suggests a party of twenty or so men of the 7th and 23rd was virtually wiped out during one of these combats, but the official casualty return shows only four Welch Fusiliers wounded and none killed during the entire siege.

— ‘
Our batteries opened
’: Ewald.

188 ‘
the regiment more than 400 strong
’: return of 8 March 1780 in
TNA: PRO
CO
5/99.

— ‘
120 men under Major Mecan
’: they were detached on 17 March according to the journal of Archibald Robertson.

189 ‘
in perfect health, except the amusement of a few muskettoes
’: letter to Lewis of 15 May 1780,
LOC
, which is also the source of the date that Balfour resumed command of the 23rd, and location of its inland bivouac.

— ‘
a remark he made to the earl, disparaging William Howe
’: Clinton himself reveals this in
American Rebellion
.

— ‘
Lord Cornwallis never writes an answer
’: from ‘Sir Henry Clinton’s Journal of the Siege of Charleston 1780’, edited by William Bulger,
South Carolina
Historical Magazine
, vol. 66, no. 3 July 1965.

190 ‘
the camps fired a
feu de joie
upon this occasion
’: I should point out that the firing was taking place at camps in Dublin, where Fitzpatrick was serving by that time; his letter to Fox, 8 June 1780,
BL ADD MS
47579, Fox Papers.

191 ‘
On 22 May, he invited the lieutenant colonel to discuss this perilous
mission
’: from Clinton’s journal of the siege.

193 ‘
I see [the] infernal party still prevails
’: ibid.

— ‘
small brigade of 580 under his command
’: Balfour talks about the composition of this force in his letter to Cornwallis, 20 May 1780,
TNA
:
PRO
30/11/2.

— ‘
by late 1780 there were about
7,500
under arms
’: this figure is based on a return of loyalist corps of 15 December 1780, Clinton Papers, wlcl. I have included officers and men on command, but excluded prisoners and sick.

194 ‘
Clinton had, for example, limited the power of general courts martial
’: Clinton to Cornwallis, 1 June 1780,
TNA: PRO
30/55/24, ‘I do hereby approve of the sentences of such courts in all cases not capital, if in your judgement the case should require it; excepting only the reduction of commissioned officers except under very singular circumstances’.

— ‘
Those men who were guilty of what were normally capital offences
’: Cornwallis to Balfour 7 January 1781 in
TNA: PRO
30/11/84 sets out these punishments for prisoners under capital charges. Clinton’s ban on capital punishment was respected within the army – although there were of course cases of locals who broke their parole being executed, as we shall see later. However, there are two key lessons, first that Cornwallis achieved his great prodigies of marching and fighting without the threat of capital punishment and second that the rule of the British army was not quite as brutal as some Patriots liked to claim. I have found only one example of a British military execution in the Carolinas in 1780–81, although Clinton later gave Major General Leslie power to execute men in Charleston, and there is evidence that this may have happened in 1782.

194 ‘
The great object of his Majesty’s force in this country
’: from a General Order of 5 October 1780 in ‘A British Orderly Book 1780–1781’, A. R. Newsome,
The North Carolina Historical Review
, vol. IX, 1932, nos 1,2 and 3.

— ‘
desired that I should be civil to Lt Calvert
’: Cornwallis’s note is undated but was probably written early in 1781. It is in
TNA: PRO
30/11/5.

195 ‘
they exchanged in their letters knowing and complicit remarks about
Ferguson
’: revealed by some letters in
TNA: PRO
30/11/2, for example, Balfour to Cornwallis 24 June, where he describes Ferguson’s behaviour as ‘ridiculous’, or Balfour’s letter of 6 June which suggested Ferguson had been cowed by a letter from Cornwallis reminding him Balfour was in charge.

— ‘
I have a thorough confidence in your ability
’: Cornwallis to Balfour of 13 June 1780 in
TNA: PRO
30/11/77.

— ‘
I beg you to continue to mention your opinions freely to me
’: Cornwallis to Balfour, 11 June,
TNA: PRO
30/11/5.

— ‘
The more difficulty, the more glory
’: Tarleton to Lt Haldane (one of Cornwallis’s ADCs) 24 December 1780,
TNA: PRO
30/11/4.

196 ‘
Tarleton jotted a note of enemy casualties
’: it remains in his handwriting, dated 29 May 1780 in
PRO TNA
: co 5/99.

— ‘
get the leading men to be answerable
’: Balfour to Cornwallis, 24 June 1780,
TNA: PRO
30/11/2.

197 ‘
Balfour, from the start, was dubious about the idea of embodying them
’: Balfour to Cornwallis 20 May 1780,
TNA: PRO
30/11/3; Balfour writes, ‘the idea of getting a militia to take arms and join &c &c immediately is to me a very extraordinary one’.

— ‘
made inroads into this province with large plundering parties
’: Balfour to Cornwallis, 12 July 1780,
TNA: PRO
30/11/1.

— ‘
I find the enemy exerting themselves wonderfully
’: Balfour to Cornwallis, not dated, but marked ‘between the Enoree and Tyger rivers’ suggests early June 1780, a very early and astute diagnosis of the rural insurgency; no wonder Cornwallis urged Balfour to offer advice just after this. In
TNA: PRO
30/11/2.

— ‘
the emigrants from Ireland were in general
’: Clinton to Germain, 23 October 1778,
TNA: PRO
30/55/13.

198 ‘
more savage than the Indians, and possess every one of their vices
’: George Hanger,
The Life, Adventures and Opinions of Col George Hanger, written
by Himself
, 2 vols, London 1801.

198 ‘
many prominent
Caledonians
… saw in the war a chance for rehabilitation
’: the most striking example of this was Simon Fraser. His father, Lord Lovat, had been executed for his part in the 1745 Rebellion, yet Simon restored the family fortunes by serving the King, raising the 71st for service in the American Revolution.

— ‘
Pattinson had a reputation as an inefficient drunk
’: Mackenzie, diary.

— ‘
I know you will say that you would rather go
’: Cornwallis to Balfour, 17 July 1780,
TNA: PRO
30/11/78.

199 ‘
one of the newly formed militia battalions had defected
’: Cornwallis to Clinton, 6 August,
TNA: PRO
30/55/26. The Patriot officer, Lt Col Lisle, was one of those who had been pardoned at Clinton’s behest. Cornwallis and Balfour agreed their commander-in-chief had been quite mistaken in this policy, and this letter from Cornwallis put the matter quite aggressively directly before Clinton.

— ‘
Gates may attack me tomorrow morning
’: Rawdon to Cornwallis, 11 August 1780,
TNA: PRO
30/11/63

200 ‘
Confident … that we should drive the enemy
’: Seymour’s journal is in the Peter Force Papers,
LOC
.

— ‘
They were 450 strong, had good clothing
’: Thomas Hughes, a prisoner of the 53rd saw them near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in
A Journal by Thos
Hughes, For his Amusement, and Designed only for his Perusal by the time
he attains the Age of 50 if he lives so long
, introduction by E. A. Benians, Cambridge 1947.

201 ‘
This is a mode of conducting war I am a stranger to
’: Gates to Major General Caswell, 3 August 1780. Gates’s papers reside at the
NYPL
.

— ‘his picture of British dispositions was hopelessly wrong’: Gates,
NYPL
, reveals these mistakes in a letter to Governor Nash of 3 August 1780.

203 ‘
We feel great concern in communicating the death … Mecan
’: Royal
Gazette
, New York, 20 September 1780.

— ‘
loss will be long felt and regretted in the regiment
’: Balfour to Clinton, 4 September 1780, Clinton Papers,
WLCL
.

— ‘
Champagne’s family was connected by marriage to an aristocrat
’: his sister Jane Champagne was married to Lord Paget, who put up money for one of Forbes’s promotions. On background, see Kirby.

— ‘
thirteen serjeants, eight drummers and 261 rank and file
’: Return of 15August 1780,
PRO TNA
:
CO
5/100.

— ‘
Harry Calvert, still only sixteen
’: it emerges from his papers,
CHT
9/102, that it was Peter’s company.

— ‘
Another lieutenant, Thomas Barretté
’: Barretté, unsurprisingly perhaps, was a great writer of begging letters or testimonials; details of his circumstances emerge in one of 16 December 1779 to Lord Dartmouth,
SRO D
(
W
) 1778/ 11/1900 and one of 18 December 1779 to Clinton, Clinton Papers,
WLCL
.

204 ‘
Several of these young Fusilier officers had strong religious feeling
’: Champagne was the son of a clergyman, as was Captain Smythe (serving in New York at that moment) who indeed was later to become a cleric. Calvert was known in family correspondence (Verney Papers in cht) to have a strong faith. It can also be assumed that Champagne, Barretté and another subaltern serving at Camden, Stephen Guyon, all shared a strong Protestant identity as Huguenots who had grown up in a predominantly Catholic Ireland.

— ‘
and there were also a few loyalist Americans
’: Charles Apthorpe, a New Englander and captain in the 23rd at this time during the later years of the war, Leverett Saltonstall (another New Englander), Philip Skinner (born in New Jersey), John McEvers and in the last months of the conflict Joshua Winslow.

— ‘
might have caused George III to splutter
’: the King was very pedantic about army promotion and precedence matters, for example he usually refused to let officers from the artillery or engineers (such as Lieutenant Haldane, one of Cornwallis’s ADCs) transfer into line infantry regiments. His adherence to the same policy vis à vis the Marines, was responsible in part for Barretté’s predicament, forcing him to resign his lieutenancy in that corps in order to serve in America.

205 ‘
Years before it was sent to America, he had trained it in light infantry
tactics
’: this is referred to by Lamb, but also the 33rd’s Inspection Return for 1773,
TNA: PRO WO
27/27, gives interesting details of the regiment’s tactical drills displayed at Plymouth.

— ‘
[Webster] wishes to make his Lordship believe there is not an officer
’: William Dansey letter of 16 May 1773,
HSD
.

— ‘
had employed the 33rd as a full regiment of light infantry
’: Peebles and Ewald, for example, both refer to the 33rd being used in that role.

206 ‘
Major General Gates had summoned his commanders
’: Otho Williams’s journal is the source of these details, ‘A Narrative of the Campaign of 1780’ in
Sketches in the Life and Correspondence of General Nathaniel Greene
, 2 vols, edited by William Johnson, Charleston
SC
1822.

207 ‘
The moon was full and shone beautifully
’: Guilford Dudley, a volunteer with the North Carolina militia, was with Porterfield and provides much detail in the narrative of the night action. His account has been reproduced in
An Officer of Very Extraordinary Merit
, a useful biography of Porterfield by Michael Cecere, Westminster
MD
, 2004.

208 ‘
day was near three hours off
’: the letter of an [un-named] officer of the Volunteers of Ireland to his friend in Glasgow, dated 25 August 1780, is reproduced in
Scots Magazine
, October 1780.

— ‘
Gentlemen, what is to be done?
’: this exchange is in Williams’s journal.

— ‘
Both sides assumed this to be the start of a swamp
’: during a visit to the battlefield Charles Baxley, one of those leading the conservation efforts there, showed me clearly that there were no swamps on either side of the road. Participants from both armies nevertheless refer to the swamps on their flanks. The mistake may have occurred because these were areas marking the limit of cattle grazing where the vegetation suddenly became much more dense and the soldiers assumed that something squelchy must lie underfoot.

209 ‘
two deep with open files so as occupy as great a front as possible
’: Barretté’s letter to Clinton of 26 August 1780, contains much interesting detail. It also refers to a journal of the campaign being kept by that lieutenant, but which has not been found to date. Clinton Papers,
WLCL
.

— ‘
I believe my gun was the first fired
’: Garret Watts’s pension application. It can be found with many others in
The Revolution Remembered, Eyewitness
Accounts of the War for Independence
, edited by John C. Dann, London 1980.

— ‘
and immediately rushed in upon them
’: Barretté, Clinton Papers,
WLCL
. American witnesses such as Williams emphasises that the militia did not manage a single volley, Barretté is doubtless making the most of his story, but it is evident from Watts and Williams that some of the North Carolinians and Virginians did fire.

210 ‘
lightening themselves with the loss of their arms
’: Barretté, Clinton Papers,
WLCL
.

— ‘
The enemy surpassed us in artillery
’: letter in
Scots Magazine
, above.

— ‘
Our regiment was amazingly incited by Lord Cornwallis
’: ibid.

211 ‘
finding themselves in a situation ever to be guarded against
’: Barretté, Clinton Papers,
WLCL
.

212 ‘
Was there ever an instance
’: Hamilton to Duane, 6 September 1780, the Hamilton Papers, vol. II.

— ‘
The losses taken by the
23rd
on 16 August
’: casualty return in
TNA: PRO
30/55/26.

213 ‘
the
handsomest
and most complete affair
’: Peebles.

— ‘
the behaviour of His Majesty’s troops
’: Cornwallis to Germain, 21 August 1780, in Charles Derek Ross (ed.),
The Correspondence of Charles, First
Marquess of Cornwallis
, London 1859.

— ‘
Headquarters was on King Street
’: the building is still there, no. 27.

214 ‘
I don’t think it would be right for me to meddle
’: Cornwallis to Balfour, 24 August 1780, which reveals Balfour’s attempt to get Ross appointed to the 23rd,
TNA: PRO
30/11/79.

— ‘
Balfour chose that Scottish veteran Frederick Mackenzie
’: Balfour to Clinton, 4 September 1780, in
WLCL
.

— ‘
Richard Temple, who had spent the war recruiting at home, complained
loudly
’: Temple’s complaint and the adherence to the rule promoting officers in America are noted in Clinton to Secretary at War, 20 September 1781,
TNA: PRO
30/55/32.

— ‘
Balfour did not want it to be Champagne
’: Balfour to Clinton, 9December 1780,
TNA: PRO
30/11/4.

215 ‘
I find the ague and the fever all over this country
’: Cornwallis to Balfour, 13 September 1780,
TNA: PRO
30/11/80.

— ‘
the whole of the men are very different when Tarleton is present or absent
’: Cornwallis to Balfour, 1 October 1780,
TNA: PRO
30/11/81.

215 ‘
produced a very great change … in affairs here
’: Balfour to Clinton, 4 September 1780, in
WLCL
.

216 ‘
the old fatal delusion
’: O’Hara’s letter of 1 November 1780 in ‘Letters of Charles O’Hara to the Duke of Grafton’, edited by George C. Rogers Jr,
South Carolina Historical Magazine
, vol. 65, no. 3 July 1964.

— ‘
O’Hara … was one of those officers tied to Whiggish high society
’: in a letter from Major General Lee to Richard Fitzpatrick of 4 April 1778, Lee refers approvingly to O’Hara’s ‘liberal way of thinking’ about the American issue,
BL, FOX PAPERS, ADD MS
47,582. O’Hara’s hostility to the Tory Ministry is also evident from his fascinating letters to Grafton, above. ‘
fight, get beat, rise, and fight again
’: Greene to Luzerne, 22 June 1781 in
The Papers of Nathaniel Greene
, editor Richard K. Showman, 7 vols, Chapel Hill
NC
1976–1994.

— ‘
He realised that if he took them out of prison camps
’: papers in
TNA: PRO
30/11/82 show that Balfour released the 64th for service in November by this expedient.