Fusiliers (58 page)

75 ‘
The Halifax armament, 9,300 men borne in 130 ships
’: the details of these movements can be found in
CO
5 files at
TNA
, however Piers Mackesy in his
War For America 1775–1783
, London 1964 does a masterful job of pulling it all together.

— ‘
For a major of brigade like Mackenzie
’: in
The Diary of Frederick
Mackenzie
, 2 vols, Cambridge
MA
1930, there are various tables and returns as well as his pithy observations about Smith and others.

76 ‘
The assistance of foreign troops will be highly politick
’: Evelyn of the 4th.

— ‘
The English have been clothed according to the hot climate
’: Anon. ‘Letter of a Hessian Officer’ cited above.

77 ‘
the common British soldier is swift, marches easily’: A Hessian Diary of the
American Revolution
, by Johann Conrad Dohla, translated and edited by Bruce E. Burgoyne, Norman OK 1990.

— ‘
some Scottish recruits
’: destined originally for the 26th, they were waylaid by the Secretary at War, Howe notified in
PRO
30/55/2, arriving with the 42nd at Staten Island, i.e., before Long Island.

— ‘
A further twenty-five men
’: letter in
TNA: PRO WO
4/98.

— ‘
Eighteen men had been attracted
’:
TNA: PRO WO
4/93.

— ‘
in addition to the German-
speakers
’: details of their embarkation in
PRO
30/55/2 in a letter of 27 May 1776, a party that seem likely to have arrived before Long Island.

— ‘
Nine men, for example, came to the 23rd
’: the 65th men are listed as joining on 25 June 1776 in
TNA: PRO WO
12, and the 69th on 10 June.

78 ‘
the forty men who came on the Clyde transports
’: the number is given in a General Order of 6 August 1776. I found it in
RWF
8187, a copy of Howe’s Orderly Book for the summer of 1776. No published, complete set of General Orders for 1775–7 exists. Instead I have pieced together the whole from Stevens, Kemble, the record mentioned here and
TNA: PRO
30/55/106 and 107.

— ‘
A serjeant should … be able to instruct
’: Williamson. Details of Grimes’ promotion from
TNA: PRO WO
12.

78 ‘
honesty, sobriety, and a remarkable attention to every point of duty
’: Cuthbertson.

— ‘
the ignominy of having the knot ceremonially cut
’: this ceremony is described by Roger Lamb in his unpublished scrapbook, and was communicated to me by Don Hagist. Lamb evidently considered his own breaking from the rank of corporal in Ireland to be deeply humiliating.

79 ‘
he is confined and not likely to get better
’: Hutcheson letter of 23December 1775.
TNA: PRO WO
12 records list Barnard sick throughout this period, and relevant returns in co 5 generally leave blank the ‘lieutenant colonel’ box for the 23rd, showing he was not serving with his regiment.

— ‘
by the 12th had died aged just 22
’:
TNA: PRO WO
12/3960 for death,
TNA
:
PRO WO
27 for his age.

— ‘
that Irishman chose to remain in England
’: Blakeney was elected to the Irish parliament in 1779, sitting with an anti-war faction, he also had his MP, who voted against the Ministry on American matters, make representations on his behalf. The story of how Blakeney shirked his duty and of Howe’s annoyance is found mainly in
TNA: PRO WO
1 and wo 4 files and will be told later.

— ‘
The state of the regiment in every military point of view
’: Roger Lamb (ed. Hagist). Lamb states authoritatively that the regiment improved under its next lieutenant colonel, but these must have been the opinions of old sweats because Lamb himself did not arrive until after that new CO was installed in 1778.

80 ‘
a reputation for corruption on a grand scale
’: exposed early in Hutcheson’s letters from Boston but also referred to by Mackenzie.

— ‘
he had given lavish parties
’: Hutcheson, who also mentions Baptiste the cook.

81 ‘
would never dare to face an English army
’:
Gentleman’s Magazine
, vol. 45, 1775.

— ‘
if a good bleeding can bring those Bible-faced Yankees
’: Grant’s letter of 2 September 1776 in
General James Grant of Ballindalloch
, by Alistair Macpherson Grant, privately published 1930.

— ‘
Brigadier General Grant directs our Commander-
in-chief
’: Percy’s letter of 7 January 1776. — ‘
For Major General William Alexander
’: details from his letter of 29August to Washington in
The Life of William Alexander, Earl of Stirling
, by William Alexander Duer, New York 1847.

83 ‘
Alexander’s forces in place topped 1,000
’: a difficult thing to calculate, but this is based on figures in
The Delaware Continentals 1776–1783
, by Christopher L. Ward, Wilmington 1941. This is also the source for ‘Delaware Blues’.

— ‘
men of honour, family and fortune
’: Mordecai Gist quoted in Ward.

— ‘
justly supposed to carry no small terror to the enemy
’: Washington used these words in a General Order of 24 July 1776. A letter of 27 January 1776 from Col. Smallwood of the Maryland Regiment advocates hunting shirts for practical reasons, and can be found in Peter Force, 5th series, vol. 4.

83 ‘
General Grant’s division, 2,650 men
’: An embarkation return of 22 August puts the 4th Brigade at 1,087 men, and the 6th at 1,166. To this I have added the 49th Regiment, 320 and a suitable number of men for the four artillery pieces. The return is in don. Contrast the 2,500–2,600 Grant had with him at the outset of this battle, to the 5,000 given to him by American historians (e. g., Christopher Ward,
The War of the Revolution
, 2 vols, New York 1952, a standard work) who evidently want to make much of Alexander’s resistance.

— ‘
Grant deployed his men into battle formation
’: British sources drawn upon include Grant’s letter of 2 September, Private Sullivan, Captain Bamford, Major General Vaughan (see below) and ‘Letter from an officer of the 17th Foot’ in the September 1776 issue of
Scots Magazine
.

— ‘
The enemy
’: Attlee’s journal dated 27 August, reprinted in Thomas W. Field,
The Battle of Long Island
, Brooklyn 1869, which is in general an excellent fusion of various, principally American, sources.

85 ‘
the
23rd
Regiment signalised themselves
’: Sullivan who, being with the 49th, the baggage guard, may not have observed this in person.

— ‘
the Hessians gave very little quarter to any
’: Vaughan’s journal is in bl
EGERTON MS
2135.

— ‘
One Hessian returned the compliment
’: Anon. ‘Letter from a Hessian Officer’.

— ‘
receiving, as we passed
’: Attlee’s journal.

86 ‘
Howe would not allow this
’: Howe’s refusal to press on with the attack is notably referred to in Clinton’s
American Rebellion
, but is also in several letters written shortly after the battle, for example by Captain Harris of the 5th Grenadiers (in Lushington).

— ‘
They were not so dreadful as I expected
’: a letter from Captain William Dansey of the 33rd to his mother, 3 September 1776. The Dansey letters are now in the possession of the Delaware Historical Society, but this passage and many others quoted subsequently can be found in old copies of
Iron
Duke
, the regimental journal of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, which printed extracts in issues 79–88.

— ‘
under strict orders to receive the enemy’s first fire before rushing in
’: Percy in a letter home, 1 September 1776.

87 ‘
the Americans had all fired too high
’: Anon. ‘Letter from a Hessian Officer’.

— ‘
With its large waterfront warehouses
’: my description of New York is based on an engraved panorama
A View of the City of New York from Brooklyn
Heights foot of
Pierrepoint
Street 1798
. The quotation about the roofs comes from Dohla.

— ‘In the early evening of 15 September’: this passage relies on Mackenzie’s diary.

89 ‘
Thomas Watson was taken to the provost
’: the details making up his narrative come from
TNA: PRO WO
71/83, court martial records.

89 ‘
John Hunter, a deserter
’: General Orders (
RWF
8187) suggest that a soldier of the 42nd named Hunter was hung on 12 August, on which date his regimental Muster Rolls mark him as ‘deceased’.

— ‘
Another man, Private John Winters
’: Mackenzie’s diary, 11 September 1776. He also records the men of the 57th charged with rape.

92 ‘
the ravages committed by the Hessians
’: Kemble’s journal, 4 October.

— ‘
The Commander-
in-chief is greatly disappointed
’: General Order 19October 1776.

— ‘
The general therefore recommends … to the troops
’: General Order 13 September 1776,
RWF
8187.

93 ‘
an American captain who had been captured on 21 September
’: this was Captain Nathan Hale, see Walter Harold Wilkin,
Some British Soldiers in
America
, London 1914.

— ‘
caustic comment from Hessian officers
’: Anon. ‘Letter from a Hessian Officer’ again, also Johann Ewald,
Diary of the American War
, translated and edited by Joseph P. Tustin, New Haven and London 1979.

— ‘
Tories are in my front rear and on my flanks
’: Lee to Gates, 13 December 1776, Lee Papers.

94 ‘
the whole should have been put to the sword
’: this issue was discussed, for example, at breakfast in England on 13 January 1777 by Major Nisbet Balfour (Howe’s ADC at the time) and Lord Polwarth. The peer’s note of the conversation suggests Balfour had been told by ministers that they ought to have stormed the place. Polwarth Papers,
LBRO
l29/214.

— ‘
Whig sympathies led Howe to let Washington off the hook
’: such views get repeated airing in Ewald’s journal.

— ‘
they were making too much money from it
’: see Bamford for example.

95 ‘
Browning was acquitted of the capital charge
’: General Order of 14 July 1776,
RWF
8187. By coincidence, the officer he was alleged to have struck, Lt Wragg of the Marines Grenadiers, was the one killed by the Maryland Blues when he mistook them for Hessians at Long Island. Browning’s return to the 23rd,
TNA: PRO WO
12/3960.

96 ‘
the reprieve followed representations from the victims’ families
’: the outcome of these two cases is referred to by John Peebles, an officer of the 42nd, in his journal, 24 December 1776,
John Peebles’ American War
1776–1782
, edited by Ira D. Gruber, Stroud 1998.

— ‘
the fate of many who suffer indiscriminately
’: Peebles.

— ‘
The fresh meat our men have got here
’: Lord Rawdon’s letter of 5 August 1776 in Bickley.

— ‘
for a woman this poor boy ventured his existence
’: Harris in Lushington.

97 ‘
cruel to such a degree as to threaten with death
’: Kemble’s journal for 7 November 1776.

— ‘
Repeated orders was given against this barbarity
’: Stuart’s letter of 4 February 1777 (in Wortley).

98 ‘
There is no record of whether the lashes … were ever inflicted
’: I have not found, in all the letters, records, and journals used for this book any firsthand account of a British army flogging in America during these campaigns. It must be possible therefore that these punishments were simply never carried out. Corporal punishment of Hessians, on the other hand, is recorded in several places.

100 ‘
As the rascals are skulking about the whole country
’: an epistle of Captain James Murray, 57th, of 25 February 1777, in
Letters From America 1773 to
1780, Being the Letters of a Scots Officer, Sir James Murray, to his home
during the War of American Independence
, edited by Eric Robson, Manchester 1951.

— ‘
made it absolutely necessary for us to enter into a kind of
“petite guerre”’: Stuart letter of 29 March (in Wortley).

101 ‘
Robert Donkin, who had been responsible
’: according to Cary and McCance.

— ‘
harass and ruin the enemy’s troops
’: these quotes on
petite guerre
come from an essay he wrote in late 1776 or early 1777 and printed at the back of his book
Military Collections
.

— ‘
It was under the command of Captain Thomas Mecan
’: the establishment given here applied was stipulated in a General Order of May 1776, except that the order stipulated thirty-nine rank and file whereas Muster Rolls,
TNA: PRO WO
12/3960, suggest that at the beginning of 1777 Mecan’s company was short of four or two rank and file.

— ‘
only 12 were Light Company veterans who went back to 1773
’:
TNA: PRO
WO
12/3960.

102 ‘
in the hottest part of this action
’: Lord Rawdon put them there in a letter of 3 November 1776 (in Bickley).

— ‘
the most dangerous and difficult service of this war
’: Dansey letter of 15 March 1777,
HSD
.

— ‘
Hamilton was one of the best men that ever was
’: Hunter.

— ‘
the chance of serving as a “gentleman volunteer” in the light infantry
’: this seems to have been the general rule although Richard Veale served with the battalion companies of the 23rd.

— ‘
Charles Hastings was a lieutenant in the 12th Regiment
’: Hastings’s story is pieced together from Rawdon’s letter of 3 November 1776, Lord Barrington’s letter to William Howe of 24 June 1777 in
TNA: PRO WO
4/273, Hastings’s letters to Earl Percy of 17 April 1777 and 16 May 1778 in
DON
.

103 ‘
Francis
Delaval
was the bastard son
’: see
Those Gay
Delavals, by Francis Askham, London 1955.

— ‘
One satisfaction I have in America
’: Dansey, 17 February 1777,
HSD
.

— ‘
The march under Colonel
Harcourt’s
command began at 11 p.m.
’: this account is pieced together from Ewald’s diary, Peebles’s journal and Dansey’s letter of 20 April,
HSD
.

106 ‘
The place was ransacked and plundered
’: Ewald.

— ‘
three pieces of cannon, a major of artillery
’: Dansey, 20 April letter,
HSD
.

— ‘
It was well conceived and conducted masterly
’: Howe’s letter of 25 April. It is not clear to whom it was sent, but the fact that the extract from which this paper was taken is in Fortescue’s royal papers suggests it was read by the King.

107 ‘
We have learned from the rebels
’: Dansey letter of 20 April,
HSD
, one of several in which he offers insights into light infantry or skirmishing tactics.

— ‘
a day’s
Yankie
hunting is no more minded than a day’s fox hunting
’: Dansey of 15 March 1777,
HSD
.

— ‘
They had definitively dropped the old system
’: an interesting guide to the tactics of the 1st Battalion Light Infantry can be found in the notes of an anonymous officer, item no. 111 in Sol Feinstone Collection,
DLAR
.

— ‘
Light Bob officers often sought volunteers
’: the calling forward of volunteers while under fire is described in one of Dansey’s letters,
HSD
.

108 ‘
Grab was a favourite expression
’: Hunter.

— ‘
Then honest Whigs, make all your cattle fat
’: I have produced half of the poem which I found in the
DON
. It is on a scrap of newsprint and although it is not clear exactly when it was published, I surmise it to have been prior to the 1778 campaign, and quite possibly sent by Lionel Smythe who wrote many letters to Percy at this period.

— ‘
Damn my eyes, painted wood burns best
’: Lionel Smythe to Earl Percy, 21January 1778,
DON
.

— ‘
as it will not be in [the
commander’s
] power
’: Donkin’s
Military
Collections
.

109 ‘
men who pretend to be acquainted with military matters
’: this is from
Treatise of the Duties of Light Troops
, by Colonel Ehwald, published in English in 1803. This is, of course, the same jaeger officer as the diary-writing Ewald above, but I will cite ‘Ehwald’ to denote quotations from that specific work.

— ‘
to attack a large American magazine at
Danbury
in Connecticut
’: the main sources for this are
Archibald Robertson, His Diaries and Sketches in
America 1762–1780
, edited by Henry Miller Lydenberg, New York 1930, and the report in
Scots Magazine
, June 1777.

110 ‘
of the confusion that surrounded the high command of William Howe
’: the best description of Howe’s woeful inability to decide on a strategy is in Mackesy.

— ‘
Clinton and Percy, in common with many others, thought it extremely
unwise
’: Clinton’s views were recorded in
American Rebellion
, Percy’s letter (above) of 28 July 1775 extolled the Hudson strategy and a letter after Saratoga from Francis Hutcheson to the earl (in don) credits him with always believing Howe should link up with Burgoyne.

111 ‘
The risk which all armies are liable to was our hindrance
’: Stuart letter of 10 July 1777 (in Wortley), a very prescient text.

— ‘
General Howe wanted … to get two strikes
’: this is certainly the implication of Nisbet Balfour’s letter of 13 July 1777,
LBRO
l30/12/3/2.

— ‘
All the county houses were in flames
’:
The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell
1774–1777
, Nicholas Cresswell, New York 1924.

— ‘
In the early hours of 26 June
’: Ewald’s diary is a good source on this.

111 ‘
They will not ever allow us to come near them
’: Balfour cited above.

112 ‘
There would be no tents
’: the light infantry were ordered to give up their tents by a General Order of 24 August 1776 (
RWF
8187); Ewald says the policy was extended to the rest of the army.

— ‘
marched the whole campaign on foot
’: Ehwald says Howe often used to talk about this during these later campaigns.

— ‘
sell their nags to the mounted troops for ten guineas each
’: Ewald.

— ‘
Howe went aboard the
Eagle’: details of embarkation from Andre's
journal.
An authentic record of the movements and engagements of the British Army
in America from June
1777
to November 1778 as recorded from day to day
by Major John Andre
, edited by Henry Cabot Lodge, published Boston
MA
1903.