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  WASHINGTON’S

  IMMORTALS

  Also by Patrick K. O’Donnell

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  WASHINTON’S

  IMMORTALS

  The Untold Story of an

  Elite Regiment

  Who Changed the Course

  of the Revolution

  Patrick K. O’Donnell

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2016 by Patrick K. O’Donnell

  Jacket design by Carlos Beltrán/Big Dot Design

  Cover photograph © Mary Evans Library

  Author photograph by Nick Lockett © 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2459-3

  eISBN 978-0-8021-9071-0

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  To the men and women of the Revolution who sacrificed everything

  for an idea—the United States. You are the greatest generation.

  Contents

  Preface

  1774–75

  Chapter 1: “Gentlemen of Honour, Family, and Fortune”

  Chapter 2: Smallwood’s Battalion and the Birth of an Army

  Chapter 3: Girding for War

  Chapter 4: America’s First Civil War

  1776

  Chapter 5: The Otter

  Chapter 6: The Armada

  Chapter 7: Maryland Goes to War

  Chapter 8: The Storm Begins

  Chapter 9: The Battle of Brooklyn

  Chapter 10: Escape from Long Island

  Chapter 11: Manhattan

  Chapter 12: When Twenty-Five Men Held Off an Army

  Chapter 13: Fort Washington

  Chapter 14: The Crisis

  Chapter 15: Victory or Death—The Gamble at Trenton

  1777

  Chapter 16: Princeton

  Chapter 17: Brandywine

  Chapter 18: Wayne’s Affair

  Chapter 19: Mud Island

  Chapter 20: Valley Forge and Wilmington

  1778

  Chapter 21: “A Damned Poltroon”

  Chapter 22: Light Infantry

  1779

  Chapter 23: Despots

  Chapter 24: The Gibraltar of America—

  The Midnight Storming of Stony Point

  Chapter 25: Interlude

  1780

  Chapter 26: The March South

  Chapter 27: A “Jalap” and a Night March

  Chapter 28: Camden

  Chapter 29: “Lay Their Country Waste

  with Fire and Sword”

  Chapter 30: Washington’s Best General

  1781

  Chapter 31: The Ragtag Army

  Chapter 32: Hunting the Hunter

  Chapter 33: Cowpens

  Chapter 34: “To Follow Greene’s Army to

  the End of the World”

  Chapter 35: “Saw ’Em Hollerin’ and

  a Snortin’ and a Drownin’”

  Chapter 36: The Race to the Dan

  Chapter 37: Guilford Courthouse—

  “A Complicated Scene of Horror and Distress”

  Chapter 38: Hobkirk’s Hill

  Chapter 39: Ninety Six

  Chapter 40: Eutaw Springs

  Chapter 41: “Conquer or Die”—Yorktown

  1782–83

  Chapter 42: The Last Battle

  Chapter 43: “Omnia Reliquit Servare Rempublicam”

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  Notes

  Index

  Preface

  The sign is rusted and scarred. Its aqua-blue surface bears the fading words “MARYLAND HEROES.” Suspended from a piece of corroded iron, it marks a mass grave:

  Here lie buried 256 Maryland soldiers

  Who fell in the Battle of Brooklyn

  August 27, 1776

  I encountered that neglected piece of history in September 2010 during a walking tour of the neighborhood where the Battle of Brooklyn, also known as the Battle of Long Island, took place. Today it is a depressed area filled with auto repair shops and warehouses. The bright spot is a well-worn, decades-old American Legion post. Several blocks northeast are the elegant brownstones of Park Slope. Somewhere beneath the surface, perhaps under a garage or below a paved street, are the Marylanders’ undiscovered bodies. Their remains lie intermingled in what should be hallowed ground.

  In the revolutionary summer of 1776 these courageous patriots, known as “gentlemen of honour, family, and fortune,” gave their lives in a desperate series of bayonet charges against British troops, who were bunkered in a stone house that was still standing just a few blocks away from where I stood. Their assault on that house arguably remains one of the most important elite small-unit engagements in American history. It bought precious time for the Patriot cause, allowing hundreds of colonial troops to retreat through a gap in British lines.

  The lonely weathered placard nestled among the auto-body shops of present-day Brooklyn bears silent witness to the drama that once unfolded in this place and the extraordinary men who changed history.

  “Close up! Close up!”

  Over the crackle of musket fire and boom of cannon, the indomitable Major Mordecai Gist and many of the founding officers of the Baltimore Independent Cadets ordered their men forward.

  Shots tore through the ranks of more than two hundred Marylanders. Undaunted, the men continued to surge toward an
old stone house occupied by British General Lord Cornwallis (Charles, Earl Cornwallis) and his Redcoats.

  A century earlier, the home’s massive walls had been built to fend off potential Indian attacks. Now, these same barriers that had shielded Americans were called upon to repel them. Cornwallis’s men trained a light cannon and musket fire on the advancing Marylanders, who launched a preemptive strike aimed at protecting their brothers-in-arms.

  The British “[continued] pouring the canister and grape upon the Americans like a shower of hail.” In the melee “the flower of some of the finest families of the South [were] cut to atoms.”

  Defying the carnage unfolding around them, Gist’s men “closed their ranks over the bodies of their dead comrades, and still turned their faces to the foe.”

  The boldness of the Marylanders’ charge initially unhinged Cornwallis’s defenses as his gunners nearly abandoned their artillery, but intense fire from the house and fresh reinforcements compelled the Marylanders to retreat and then mount yet another charge.

  From a distant hill, General George Washington watched the gallant display through his spyglass. As the Marylanders began to fall, he cried out, “Good God! What brave fellows I must this day lose!”1

  1. Their bravery and sacrifice gave rise to the Maryland nickname, the Old Line State.

  Yet not all was lost. Scores of Marylanders, led by Major Gist, held off the British long enough to help save a corps of Washington’s troops and arguably the bulk of the nascent American army from destruction. The Marylanders’ forlorn assaults delayed a British attack on American fortifications at Brooklyn Heights and allowed hundreds of Americans to escape to the temporary safety of their entrenchments. The soldiers who participated in that unorthodox assault would become known as the Immortals or the Maryland 400. With their blood, these men bought, in the words of one American, “an hour, more precious to American liberty than any other in its history.” Gist and several men in his group escaped to fight future battles that changed the fate of a nation.

  Reading the solemn words etched on that metal sign made me curious. I wanted to know what really happened to these men, who they were, and why citizen-soldiers—amateurs—fought and sacrificed their lives and fortunes to fight the most formidable army in the world. Over the years, I unearthed a hidden war buried in letters and diaries. Forgotten pension files bore testament to heroism and sacrifice, and even to betrayal by fellow Americans. It wasn’t the Revolution of famous men trapped in the amber of fading oil portraits, but an alive, boots-on-the-ground, brutally long conflict that pitted brother against brother in a war that America wasn’t preordained to win. These sacrifices by a small group of men—in the right place, at the right time—who were willing to march thousands of miles and endure years of unimaginable hardship, made the difference between victory and defeat.

  Their nine-year saga has remained untold for over 239 years and nearly forgotten, much like the mass grave in which their comrades now lie. Gist and hundreds of Marylanders from all walks of life became an elite corps that formed the nucleus of the greatest fighting regiments of the war. They helped to keep the Continental Army intact through the darkest days of the Revolution. It is also a story about close friends whose fellowship in battle kept them together in the most impossible circumstances, enabled their survival, and helped them emerge as some of the most decorated and successful battle captains of the war. This book is the first Band of Brothers–style history of the Revolution; rather than providing a regimental history, it focuses on the actions of these men. Facing tremendous adversity, these Americans were often called upon by Washington to play a pivotal role in the war’s decisive battles just as they did that day in Brooklyn.

  A pockmarked sign memorializes the beginning of an epic journey that started on a winter day in 1774.

  But a metal sign isn’t enough to commemorate a mystery, the unknown resting place of so many Americans who willingly gave their lives for a nation yet to be born.

  1774–75

  Chapter 1

  “Gentlemen of Honour,

  Family, and Fortune”

  Snow gently fell outside a Baltimore tavern on December 3, 1774, as thirty-two-year-old Mordecai Gist addressed the city’s social elite. On his own initiative, Gist had gathered together a group of freemen, merchants, shipbuilders, and businessmen who were interested in forming the first independent military company in Maryland to protect their rights and potentially to break away from Britain.

  At the time, Baltimore, one of the primary trading centers in the colonies, was a boomtown with a seedy, rough-and-tumble quality about it. One member of the Continental Congress described it as “infinitely, the dirtiest place I was ever in.” Another piled on the accolades and called it “the Damndest Hole in the World.”

  A second-generation Baltimore native, Gist was the son of a prominent surveyor who had helped lay out the city’s streets. His uncle, Christopher Gist, had served with George Washington in the French and Indian War, and on two separate occasions he had saved the future general’s life. The younger Gist had already established himself as a sea captain and merchant, dealing primarily in textiles and firearms, which had earned him a sizable fortune. He was also a widower. Four years earlier, his first wife had died during the birth of their daughter, who then perished in infancy. At six feet tall, he was a man of impressive stature for his day. Others described him as having a “frank and genial manner.” A natural leader known for his forceful opinions, Gist was among the colony’s first agitators for independence and later emerged as one of America’s most powerful Freemasons.

  In October he had participated in the burning of the Peggy ­Stewart. In an incident reminiscent of the Boston Tea Party, a captain had brought a ship loaded with tea into Annapolis harbor despite a colonial boycott. Outraged Marylanders gave the Peggy Stewart’s captain a choice: either burn his ship and all its cargo or be hanged at his front door. The captain chose to run his ship aground and torch it.

  The Peggy Stewart incident occurred ten months after the Boston Tea Party, in which American demonstrators, some disguised as American Indians, had dumped an entire shipment of tea from the East India Company into Boston harbor to protest taxes levied by the British on the tea. It echoed the American cry “No taxation without representation.” Many Americans demanded the right to elect the representatives who imposed taxes and passed regulations. The Crown had responded to the Tea Party swiftly with draconian measures that became known as the Coercive Acts or Intolerable Acts. Among other provisions, they allowed British officials to be tried in Britain for crimes committed in the colonies. Another of these acts required colonists to house and feed British soldiers in their homes.

  British troops led by General Thomas Gage disbanded the elected colonial government in Massachusetts and shut down the port of ­Boston, throwing thousands of men out of work. The crisis in ­Boston escalated and fomented discord throughout the thirteen colonies, resonating strongly in Baltimore, where trade was the lifeblood of the community.

  On that December night in the tavern, like-minded Patriots had gathered to hear Gist, whom they elected as captain of their company, read aloud the articles of incorporation for the Baltimore Independent Cadets. The charter called for sixty men—“a company composed of gentlemen of honour, family, and fortune, and tho’ of different countries animated by a zeal and reverence for rights of humanity”—to voluntarily join and tie themselves together “by all the Sacred ties of Honour and the Love and Justice due to ourselves and Country.”

  Gist’s gravitas and presence reverberated through the room as he read the articles:

  We, the Baltimore Independent Cadets, Impress’d with a sense of the unhappy [state] of our Suffering Brethren in Boston, the Alarming conduct of General Gage, and the oppressive Unconstitutional acts of Parliament to deprive us of Liberty and enforce Slavery on His Majesties Loyal Liege Subjects of America in General,

>   For the better security of our lives, liberties, and Properties under such Alarming Circumstances, we think it highly advisable and necessary, that we form ourselves into a Body, or Company in order to [learn] the military discipline; to act in defence of our Country agreeable to the Resolves of the Continental Congress.

  The cadets promised to march within forty-eight hours to the aid of any sister colonies that needed their help, to obey their elected commander, to purchase their own uniforms and equipment, and to submit to a court-martial for any default “contrary to the true Intent and Meaning of this Engagement.” However, as true gentlemen, they would not submit themselves to corporal punishment.

  The young merchant and the other newly inducted members of the company made history that day. Gist’s independent company was the first of its kind in Maryland, but similar companies soon sprang up across the colonies. Unbeknownst to them at the time, the men in that tavern would become one of only a few core units crucial to the continued existence of the entire Continental Army throughout the Revolutionary War. At key points, their participation made a difference that allowed the army to survive—often at an enormous price. Sickness and privation of the most severe kind (including marching barefoot for thousands of miles over many years), British bullets, and the hazards of imprisonment would take their toll. Very few of the men who gathered that night at the tavern or those who joined them later would survive eight years of war, multiple campaigns, and dozens of battles unscathed.

  The cadets, later quietly renamed the Baltimore Independent Company, formed a cadre that was incorporated into multiple companies and regiments that played a key role in many battles of importance during the American Revolution and fought in both the North and the South. Built on personal relationships with deep family ties that spanned decades, the Baltimore Independent Company was a tight-knit group of close friends who forged one of the most legendary units of the American Revolution.

  One of those men crucial to the company was twenty-three-year-old Samuel Smith. A born leader, Smith was first elected sergeant within the company and quickly rose through the ranks as an officer. Like many of the cadets, he had been trained in the classics, studying Latin and Greek at school. As a young man, he had worked in his father’s countinghouse and traveled to Europe on one of his father’s merchant ships. He proved to be charismatic and a natural battle commander. Eventually, he would assume command of the Baltimore Independent Company and many other units. In time, he became one of the finest regimental commanders of the war.