Searching for Revolutionary Charlotte

I was in western North Carolina when Hurriance Helene blew through at the end of September.

Fortunately for me, I was in Charlotte, away from the worst damage by wind and flooding.

After speaking at a convention, I’d planned to spend another day and a half in the Asheville area, just relaxing. Well, that became impossible.

I made new arrangements and saw more of Charlotte. In particular, I checked out the markers along what the city calls its Liberty Walk, obviously inspired by Boston’s Freedom Trail.

Signs, linked by tablets in the sidewalk, mark the locations of long-gone buildings and events. The walk doesn’t pass the sort of historic houses, churches, or civic structures that Boston has preserved. Instead, the city is quite new, with lots of construction and recent skyscrapers styled to recall earlier decades. To be sure, the Settler’s Cemetery, where I took the photo above, dates back to the eighteenth century.

About half of the markers along the Liberty Walk refer to one of two events:

• The Battle of Charlotte on 26 Sept 1780, in which Gen. Cornwallis’s forces seized the town after a short resistance by local militia companies under Col. William R. Davie.
• The so-called “Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence.”

In the battle, the markers say, the militia succeeded in delaying Cornwallis’s advance guard. However, there appears to have been no larger effect of such a delay. The Crown forces took the town, camped there, and left after learning that another part of the army had lost at Kings Mountain.

As for the Mecklenburg Declaration, that’s a myth that only people from North Carolina speak up for. Since it’s referred to on the state flag, though, everyone is brought up believing in it.

The strong historical consensus outside of North Carolina is that a Mecklenburg County convention on 31 May 1775 issued twenty radical resolutions, printed in newspapers that same year. There’s no historical dispute about that event, but it gets only one marker on the trail instead of several.

Imperfect memories of that gathering, tinged by later events, grew into a claim in 1819 that locals had made a full-throated declaration of independence from British government on 20 May 1775. There’s no contemporaneous documentation of that putative event. The reconstructed “Declaration” actually provides evidence that it was composed later.

The Liberty Walk has some other miscellaneous markers, such as one for a soldier of African ancestry named Ishmael Titus. However, I couldn’t find that marker, and the audio tour gave no details about what it called Titus’s “remarkable life” after he was born enslaved in 1759.

I therefore looked up information about Ishmael Titus after getting home. That webpage gives an earlier birth year and states that he lived to be about 112. In later life Titus lived in Savoy and Williamstown, Massachusetts. William Cooper Nell described him in The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution. That passage and an application for a Revolutionary War pension (rejected) are the two big sources on Titus’s life, and they don’t always mesh.

Most of the stops on the Liberty Walk are just metal or stone signs, such as one reporting that Gen. Nathanael Greene took command of the Continental Army’s southern forces in Charlotte.

But there is a fully modeled, though less than full-sized, statue of Queen Charlotte with two little dogs. A main avenue through the city still bears the name of Gov. William Tryon, who moved on to New York in 1771. So the royal government still has a presence in the “Queen City.”

Also in Charlotte, the university library where I spoke displays N. C. Wyeth’s painting of Patrick Henry bathed in heavenly inspiration.

What to Expect at the Battle of Camden

Later this month a new book will appear in the Emerging Revolutionary War series: All That Can be Expected: The Battle of Camden and the British High Tide in the South, August 16, 1780, by Rob Orrison and Mark Wilcox.

With the Battle of Camden, Britain seemed to find a strategy to win back the rebellious southern colonies. Crown forces took Savannah, Georgia, in the fall of 1779, then Charleston, South Carolina, in May 1780. The king’s army, which hadn’t penetrated far inland from the northern ports, now began to set up outposts in the Carolina backcountry.

The Continental Congress assigned Gen. Horatio Gates, victor at Saratoga, to rebuild its army in the south from Continental regiments in the middle states and militia from Virginia and North Carolina. He moved against Gen. Cornwallis’s troops near Camden, South Carolina. The two forces met on 16 Aug 1780.

The title of this new book comes from a report by Lt. Col. Benjamin Ford of Maryland: The British “have done all that can be expected of them; we are outnumbered and outflanked.” Gates’s career would never recover.

At 7:00 P.M. this Sunday, 6 August, Orrison and Wilcox will chat about All That Can be Expected with series editor Dan Welch live on the Emerging Revolutionary War Facebook page. The recorded conversation will be posted on the allied YouTube and Spotify a week later.

Ezekiel Price on “A Great & Glorious Event”

Yesterday’s posting raised the question of when exactly Boston heard about the American and French victory at Yorktown. The most immediate reaction would appear in people’s diaries, so I looked for my usual informants on daily events.

John Adams? In 1781 he was far away in Europe.

Merchant John Rowe? His surviving diaries end in 1779.

Printer John Boyle? He stopped compiling his “Journal of Occurrences” in 1778.

Shopkeeper and selectman Harbottle Dorr? He stopped collecting newspapers assiduously at the end of 1776, adding just a few issues from the next two years.

Robert Treat Paine was keeping his diary out in Taunton in 1781. Fortunately, the folks at the Massachusetts Historical Society have done the hard work of deciphering his handwriting and publishing pertinent entries in the Paine Papers. On 26 October, he wrote: “News came that Cornwallis had Surrendred to Genl. Washington, on 17th. Instant.”

I wanted more detail than that, and I wanted a voice from Boston. Fortunately, Harvard has preserved and digitized the 1781 almanac diary of Boston court official and insurance broker Ezekiel Price (1727–1802), who was a gossip sponge.

Price’s entry for 26 Oct 1781 appears on sequence 37–38 of the digitized version of this diary:

This Morning Mr. Thomas Hulbert [?] came to Town from Providence who brings a Hand Bill printed at Newport Yesterday in which is an Account that the afternoon before one Capt Lovett arrived there from York River who brot an account that Lord Cornwallis & his Army Surrendered Prisoners of War to Genl. Washington on the 18th. instant—

that Cornwallis had wth. him in Garrison 9000 Men with an immense quantity of Stores also that a 44[-gun warship] & one frigate & 100 Transports were Captured—

Mr. Winship who left Newport Yesterday tells me that he saw Capt. Lovett & his Mate who informed him that they say the British Flag lowered & the Continental & French Flags hoisted on the Forts at York Town—that he heard the Huzzas upon the Occasion—

they they saw the French Admiral go on shoar at the Fort that the American Vessells which lay below York Town went up to Town & that he went up so near the Forts that he could throw a Bisket on Shoar—

From all these Accts. it is beyond a doubt that Lord Cornwallis & his great Army with Vast quantities of Artillery & Military Stores are in Possession of our illustrious Genl. Washington & the Allied Army—A Great & Glorious Event—

On this Joyful occasion all the Bells in Town were rang most part of the day & the Sons of Freedom showed evident marks of their felicity. In the Evening the Coffee house was illuminated & Fireworks displayed.

Mr. [John?] Marston tells me that a French Gentleman acquainted him he had received a Letter from a Person who was in York Town at the time of the Surrender & adds that Genl. Washington had ordered 1200 Horse to the Reinforcement of Genl. [Nathanael] Greene.

Price recorded additional information on 27 and 31 October. He came to date Cornwallis’s surrender to the 17th, like Paine. That was when the British general first raised the white flag. It wasn’t until the 19th that the commanders signed surrender terms and the Crown troops gave up their arms, but we now treat that date as the significant one.

British Policy and the Backlash

In 1991, Sylvia Frey published Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age, mostly about the last years of the Revolutionary War.

During those years the British army operated under a policy that Gen. Sir Henry Clinton declared in the Phillipsburg Proclamation of June 1779:

I do most strictly forbid any Person to sell or claim Right over any NEGROE, the property of a Rebel, who may take Refuge with any part of this Army: And I do promise to every NEGROE who shall desert the Rebel Standard, full security to follow within these Lines, any Occupation which he shall think proper.

In other words, any enslaved American who made it to the British lines and claimed to have escaped from a rebel could become free, and could even help the British military forces against the Americans.

Clinton acted out of pragmatism, not ideology. He and his subordinate generals hoped that measure would encourage slave owners to remain loyal (the proclamation didn’t address Loyalists’ slaves). They wanted to harm rebel planters’ wealth and disrupt their society.

But the result, Frey argued, was that white colonists became more frightened and resentful. Men who had been mild Patriots became militant, and men who had been neutral joined the Patriots—enough to tip a largely even battle in the southern countryside in favor of the Americans. Ultimately the result was Gen. Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown. Clinton’s proclamation thus came back to bite him in the arse.

In 1999 Woody Holton’s Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia highlighted a similar dynamic earlier in the war. As Frey documented in an early chapter, whites in Britain’s slaveholding colonies constantly feared an uprising by the people they held in bondage. Throughout 1775 there were rumors that Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, was encouraging enslaved people to rebel against the rebels. And toward the end of the year, Dunmore made those rumors true!

While promoting a new book covering the entire Revolution, Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution, Holton has been using Twitter to share many bits of evidence about those fears in 1775 and how they affected people’s thinking. He argues that white southern leaders’ fear about royal policy on slaves alienated them from the Crown and turned a significant number of them in favor of independence by early 1776.

Or in the words of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s “1619 Project” essay: “…one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

Now I think that the context of that sentence in Hannah-Jones’s essay indicates she relied more on the idea that anti-slavery sentiment in Britain was a major factor and less on military developments in America. I don’t see evidence that American colonists really worried about Granville Sharp’s few followers. But many colonists, especially in the areas with large enslaved populations, did worry that royal officials would make reckless decisions that threatened their wealth and their lives. That was part of the stew that led to the July 1776 vote for independence. And later to the military victory that cemented independence.

Ferling Reputations for Clinton and Cornwallis

I claim only a basic knowledge of the southern campaigns of the Revolutionary War, but I’ve long had the impression that these are the standard assessments of two British commanders:

• Gen. Lord Cornwallis, despite losing at Yorktown, was a competent commander dealing with a nearly impossible mission and undercut by lack of resources from New York.
• Gen. Sir Henry Clinton was a whiny, self-justifying subordinate who wheedled his way into being commander-in-chief; he was then over his head and bears the blame for not sending Cornwallis enough resources.

John Ferling has just written a new book about that part of the war which, according to Thomas E. Ricks in the New York Times Book Review, turns those judgments on their head:

In WINNING INDEPENDENCE: The Decisive Years of the Revolutionary War, 1778-1781 (Bloomsbury, $40), the veteran historian John Ferling sets out to redeem the reputation of Sir Henry Clinton, the British general who lost that war. As Ferling notes, the conventional view is that Clinton was “capricious, indecisive, overly cautious, muddled and confused, persistently inactive, lacking a strategic vision or a master plan and fatally inhibited by his subliminal sense of inadequacy.” The enjoyment of reading this huge volume is watching Ferling make his case that Clinton was instead “an accomplished, diligent and thoughtful commander.”

Writing with admirable clarity, Ferling contends that Clinton’s “Southern strategy” of shifting the focus of British military operations to Georgia and the Carolinas was an intelligent move. It might have succeeded, he calculates, had Gen. Charles Cornwallis, who led that effort in the field, not been both mendacious and insubordinate.

Had the Southern gambit worked, Ferling states, the British might have been able to retain much of the South in a peace settlement — perhaps holding on to Georgia, Florida and the Carolinas — and so whittle down the new United States into a precarious position for survival. But Cornwallis undercut Clinton’s strategy by disregarding orders and marching off to Virginia and then getting trapped there, at Yorktown, by the arrival of a French fleet. In the clumsy hands of Cornwallis, Ferling charges, the South became “a quagmire for the British.”

As I recall, many traditional assessments of Cornwallis went on to point out that he was a competent commander in India later in his career. I wonder if wider regret about British imperialism in India makes that seem less of an accomplishment.

Underwater Archeology off Yorktown

This Daily Press article out of Newport News about marine archeology in the York River near Yorktown speaks to human perseverance in a couple of ways.

First, it runs down all the ways Gen. Cornwallis tried to drive off the French fleet at the river’s mouth so that he could evacuate instead of surrendering.

He sets a few of his own ships afire and tries to drift them into the French warships. No luck.

He tries to slip away, loading his men into small boats to make for Gloucester, but a storm roars in and swamps the attempt.

Finally, he resorts to a tactic that’s been used by others: He sacrifices his own fleet.

Cornwallis sends a line of his ships toward the Yorktown beach until they run aground, forming a barrier he hopes will stop the French from landing troops.

To keep the rest out of his convoy out of enemy hands — as well as block the river with wreckage — Cornwallis issues orders to scuttle. Holes are drilled or chiseled in hulls and the vessels sink.

Which left a lot of ships’ hulls in the river.

The article also talks about the archeologists’ persistent efforts to investigate those wrecks since the Bicentennial period as public funding for such endeavors was being scuttled. The investigation is led, as was the one in the 1980s, by John Broadwater, then Virginia’s state underwater archeologist.

In 1988, a 20-page spread in National Geographic detailed their accomplishments — more than 5,000 relics recovered for posterity from one wreck alone, a ship named Betsy.

But state budget cuts came shortly after, and Broadwater’s position was axed. Work stopped on the project, and relics went into storage — many of them uninspected, which led to a scramble just last year, when live hand grenades from The Betsy were discovered sitting on shelves at the Department of Historic Resources in Richmond.

Now, at 75 years old, Broadwater has come home. He’s working with volunteers — some from the old Betsy days. Most of their equipment is donated. Most expenses are covered by the partners’ own money.

On the plus side, it looks like new technology has made locating wrecks easier than it was before. The picture above, coming from the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences, shows a “side-scan sonar image” of a newly found wreck. Of course, the team needs access to that technology and more.

“A meticulously researched study unspoiled by pedantry”

The Journal of the American Revolution has just shared a very nice review of The Road to Concord from the spring 2018 issue of Army History.

J. L. Bell’s The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War tackles a familiar subject—how Thomas Gage’s attempts to prevent a revolution ended up provoking one—but makes the story feel fresh by revealing how drastically the theft of four brass guns from Boston affected the British general’s judgment. . . .

The Road to Concord is a rare treat—a meticulously researched study unspoiled by pedantry. . . . The admirable standard that he has achieved in his first book augurs well for the other Journal of the American Revolution-sponsored books set to follow in its wake.

Check out those titles here.

The reviewer is Prof. Gregory J. W. Urwin of Temple University, who has written about several American wars and is currently researching a social history of Gen. Cornwallis’s campaign in the south.

Through some economic magic, Amazon is currently selling the hardcover edition of The Road to Concord at a discount of 60%. Heck, at that price I bought four copies for myself (the maximum available to any one customer.)

Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy’s Massachusetts Tour

Prof. Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy of the University of Virginia will give two public talks in Massachusetts next week, both on his book The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the Revolutionary War and the Fate of Empire.

Here’s a précis of the book:

The loss of America was a stunning and unexpected defeat for the powerful British Empire. Common wisdom has held that incompetent military commanders and political leaders must have been to blame, but were they? O’Shaughnessy dispels the incompetence myth and uncovers the real reasons that rebellious colonials were able to achieve their surprising victory.

On Tuesday, 10 April, O’Shaughnessy will kick off the American Antiquarian Society’s Spring Public Lecture Series. That free event starts at 7:00 P.M. in Antiquarian Hall, 185 Salisbury Street in Worcester.

On Wednesday, 11 April, he’ll deliver the Lexington Historical Society’s Cronin Lecture. This free talk is co-sponsored by the Friends of Minute Man National Park and His Majesty’s 10th Regiment of Foot. The evening starts at 6:00 P.M. with a reception in the Lexington Depot, and the lecture is scheduled for 7:00 P.M.

At both events copies of The Men Who Lost America will be available for sale and signing. The book has won many awards, including the George Washington Book Prize, the New-York Historical Society Annual American History Book Prize, The National Society Daughters of the American Revolution Excellence in American History Book Award, and the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award.

It’s also a handsome, nicely packaged book. I’ve started to read it multiple times, and I keep running into the problem that Prof. O’Shaughnessy and I have fundamentally different ideas about how to use commas. But obviously other readers haven’t been stopped that way, and sooner or later I’ll try again.

“An officer told Lord Cornwallis not long ago…”

On 11 Dec 1781 the Pennsylvania Packet newspaper published some news under the dateline “London, July 28.” That was the usual signal to readers that the following items were copied from the latest London newspaper to arrive in Philadelphia.

Then after a bit of white space came this item:

Extract of a letter from an officer in Charles-Town, to his friend in London, dated May 20th.

“The retrograde progress of our arms in this country, you have seen in your news-papers, if they dare tell you the truth. This precious commodity is not to be had in the government paper which is printed here, for a fell licenser hangs over the press, and will suffer nothing to pass but what is palatable, that is, in plain terms what is false. Our victories have been dearly bought, for the rebels seem to grow stronger by every defeat, like Antæus, of whom it was fabled, that being the son of the goddess Tellus, or the earth, every fall which he received from Hercules gave him more strength, so that the hero was forced to strangle him in his arms at last. I wish our ministry would send us a Hercules to conquer these obstinate Americans, whose aversion to the cause of Britain grows stronger every day.

“If you go into company with any of them occasionally, they are barely civil; and that is, as Jack Falstaff says, by compulsion. They are in general sullen, silent, and thoughtful. The king’s health they dare not refuse, but they drink it in such a manner, as if they expected it would choak them.

“The assemblies which the officers have opened, in hopes to give an air of gaiety and chearfulness to themselves and the inhabitants, are but dull and gloomy meetings; the men play at cards, indeed to avoid talking, the women are seldom or never to be persuaded to dance. Even in their dresses the females seem to bid us defiance; the gay toys which are imported here, they despise: they wear their own homespun manufactures, and take care to have in their breast knots, and even on their shoes, something that resembles their flag of thirteen stripes. An officer told lord Cornwallis not long ago, that he believed if he had destroyed all the men in North-America, we should have enough to do to conquer the women.—I am heartily tired of this country, and wish myself at home.”

This article was reprinted in 29 Dec 1781 Boston Evening-Post and the 31 Jan 1782 Salem Gazette, as well as other American newspapers. In early 1782 American printers began to label the letter as having appeared in a London newspaper, as the layout in the Packet had merely implied.

In 1860 Frank Moore transcribed that article with reasonable accuracy into his Diary of the American Revolution, citing the Packet.

The penultimate sentence, as it appeared in Moore’s book, is undoubtedly the source of the passage from Mary Elizabeth Springer in 1896 that I quoted yesterday: “A British officer once remarked to him [Cornwallis], ‘If we destroy all the men in America, we still would have enough to do to conquer the women.’” And Springer’s article in turn gave birth to slightly different versions of the line, down to the present day, when some authors attribute that statement to Cornwallis himself.

TOMORROW: Who wrote this letter?

Cornwallis and the Women of America

While Ben Franklin’s World host Liz Covart was at Mount Vernon recently, an interpreter gave her a paper with this quotation attributed to Gen. Cornwallis: “We may destroy all the men in America, and we shall still have all we can do to defeat the women.”

That line appears in Cokie Roberts’s Founding Mothers, which says Cornwallis wrote it during the war. However, most other recent sources, including a couple of textbooks, state the words came from a British army officer speaking or writing to Cornwallis.

Among the publications describing the statement is a 1965 government booklet for people becoming U.S. citizens titled “Our Government.” So the quotation certainly appears to have authority behind it—governmental if not historical.

I went looking for an early appearance, one which specifies the speaker or the specific circumstances or the documentary source for these words. The first appearance of the exact quotation that I could find was Camille Benson Bird’s article “Women of Revolutionary Times in New England” published by the Daughters of the American Revolution in the American Monthly Magazine in 1908.

However, back in 1896 that same magazine had published Mary Elizabeth Springer’s “Men and Women of the Revolution,” which rendered the quotation slightly differently:

While the British held Charleston, the women wore homespun, disdaining to wear foreign manufactures, and furthermore they displayed their patriotism by wearing on their breasts ribbons and bows resembling the flag with thirteen stripes. They would have nothing to do with the English officers, and Cornwallis’s proud boast that he would bring the Southern beauties to time was not accomplished. A British officer once remarked to him, “If we destroy all the men in America, we still would have enough to do to conquer the women.”

Versions of the quotation are thus over a century old. But those versions are also still a century removed from the Revolutionary War. Furthermore, neither of those appearances offer any documentation to show the quotation is authentic.

I was thinking about a posting on the evolution of the tradition from 1896 to now and the various ways authors have used it to bolster different causes or interpretations. But then I found a lead that got me all the way back to 1781.

TOMORROW: An actual contemporaneous source!

“With great zeal I went to Genl Washington”

Elias Boudinot (1740-1821) was a Continental Congress delegate from New Jersey, eventually president of that body, and later a U.S. Congressman and director of the U.S. Mint. He was brother-in-law of Richard Stockton twice over (i.e., each married the other’s sister).

For a considerable period of the war Boudinot was the American commissary of prisoners, meaning he was responsible for feeding and supplying captured British and Hessian soldiers. As such, he often worked closely with the Congress, local authorities, and Gen. George Washington.

Boudinot left behind a manuscript in which he explained:

A great many interesting anecdotes, that happened during the American Revolutionary War, are likely to be lost to Posterity, by the negligence of the parties concerned, in not recording them, so that in future time they may be resorted to, as throwing great light on the eventful Crisis, of this important Æra—I shall therefore without any attention to order, but merely as they arise in my memory, set down those I have had any acquaintance with, attending principally to the TRUTH of the facts.

That manuscript was published in 1890 as Boudinot’s Journal or Historical Recollections of American Events during the Revolutionary War. It’s not really a journal since he didn’t record events as they happened; indeed, most of the stories aren’t tied to specific dates. But they’re valuable nonetheless.

Here’s one example:

In [April] 1777 Genl [Benjamin] Lincoln, was surprised at the Dawn of Day in his Quarters at Bound Brook. by Lord Cornwallis. who had marched from Brunswick passed his out Centinels captured or destroyed his main guard, and was at the Genls Quarters before he knew anything of it. He had but just time to escape out of a back door. Several men were killed and one or two pieces of ordnance taken.

It was sometime a mystery how this had been effected with so much secrecy, till I was well informed by a Gentn of note who was with the Enemy at Brunswick, that a certain Farmer whose name he mentioned and who lived in the midst of our Camp had communicated to Lord Cornwallis our Countersign, by which he had accomplished his intentions,

My spirit was very much aroused ags this Traitor and with great zeal I went to Genl Washington with the information, stating the substance of it. but keeping back the name of my informant; as he had assured me his life depended on my prudence & faithfulness to him; I urged the Genl, (to give) orders to sieze the Culprit without delay & make an Example of him. The Genl did not immediately answer me. on which I repeated my request.

He then said. did not you tell me that the life of your informant depended on your secrecy,—would you take up a Citizen & confine him without letting him know his crime or his accuser.—No—let him alone for the present: watch him carefully. and if you can catch him in any other crime. so as to confront him by witnesses. we will then punish him severely.——

My mortification was very great. to think. that I who had entered the Army to watch the Military & preserve the civil rights of my fellow citizens. should be so reproved by a Military man, who was so interested in having acted otherwise I recd it as a severe lecture on my own imprudence

When I read that story, I thought that the interaction with Washington could have come right out of the television show Turn: Washington’s Spies, given how it presents the commander’s character.

I’ve been reviewing the final season of Turn for Den of Geek; you can find my assessments here. Gen. Washington, played by Ian Kahn, remains one of the decidedly best parts of the show.

More to See at Saratoga and Camden

Two important Revolutionary War battlefields have recently been augmented with more land, according to news reports.

However, in both cases that land was already owned by an organization devoted to environmental and/or historical preservation. So these additional acres don’t appear to have been in danger of being built or paved on.

The New York History Blog reported:

Saratoga National Historical Park finalized the acquisition of 170 acres of historically significant land in April, after 10 years of collaboration with the Open Space Institute (OSI). After a minor administrative boundary adjustment to the park in 2016, Saratoga successfully secured funding from the Land and Water Conservation Fund to provide for the transfer of the property from OSI.

The property, located in the Town of Stillwater at the northeast end of the park on State Route 4, is a key portion of the historic site of the Battles of Saratoga, considered by many to be the turning point of the American Revolution. In September of 1777, this parcel was surrounded by the British Army to the north and the American Army to the south. When the British broke camp and advanced upon the American positions, General [John] Burgoyne and his troops occupied the high ground on this property, making it the “high water mark” of the British Army’s advance southward from Canada toward Albany. A road cut diagonally across this parcel and a fortification was built on the hilltop to block the road.

The land, purchased by OSI in 2005, also included a segment of the historic Champlain Canal, along which a region-wide effort is underway to construct a trail, known as the Champlain Canalway Trail, which runs for 62 miles between Whitehall and Waterford. In 2014 the town of Stillwater received a Consolidated Funding Application grant to complete the segment of the path that runs through the property, and in 2016 OSI donated that portion of the property to the Town of Stillwater. Navigating the administrative logistics of funding, boundary revisions, and coordinating environmental analysis and appraisals was finally complete to ensure the protection of this treasured landscape.

The Battle(s) of Saratoga was of course a major American victory, and that area has been preserved and celebrated for a long time.

It’s harder to find support to preserve the sites of major American defeats. In Camden, South Carolina, the local Chronicle-Independent newspaper reported on a portion of the battlefield where Gen. Horatio Gates lost big-time to Gen. Cornwallis:

The Palmetto Conservation Foundation recently transferred ownership of the 476-acre core battlefield to the Historic Camden Foundation. The battlefield is recognized as a National Historic Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. . . .

Historic Camden Foundation also owns and manages the related Revolutionary War site, “Historic Camden,” south of the modern downtown. Historic Camden, which includes the original colonial village site, is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is recognized as a National Park Service affiliate. . . .

Plans for the property transfer began in earnest last fall. Historic Camden reviewed documents and reports from PCF, including “Battle of Camden Development Report, 2016,” compiled by the Olde English District tourism agency. Historic Camden provided legal and financial documents for PCF review. Both PCF’s and Historic Camden’s boards of directors gave final approval in late winter for the real estate transaction. . . .

PCF acquired the battlefield in 2002 when Katawba Valley Land Trust and Historic Camden asked for help to protect the battlefield from private sale and development. The organizations first negotiated a conservation easement with property owner Bowater Inc., a pulp and paper corporation. The easement protected 310 acres of the battlefield’s core. . . . Because Bowater wanted to sell rather than own property with a conservation easement, PCF purchased the 310 acres. Five years later in 2007, PCF purchased 161 adjoining acres owned by Crescent Resources, which was a subsidiary of Duke Energy. Both acquisitions were funded through the South Carolina Conservation Bank. The Daughters of the American Revolution also transferred to PCF the 6 acres they had protected since 1907. Katawba Valley Land Trust continues to hold the property under permanent conservation protection.

After assuming ownership, PCF conducted archaeological research to locate and protect graves and cultural resources, curated artifacts for public display in the Camden Archives and Museum, and replanted longleaf pine to help restore the battlefield landscape. As a trail-builder, PCF also constructed three miles of walking trails with interpretive signage, a podcast of battle history, and a digital topographic map.

Historic Camden plans to continue PCF’s work, and strengthen the connection between Camden’s history and the larger Southern Campaign that won the War for Independence.

People can see that “core battlefield” land by driving on Flat Rock Road 2.2 miles off U.S. Highway 521. The newspaper adds, “The remaining 824 acres where the Battle of Camden was fought are privately owned.”

The Crucial Days After Trenton

The Battle of Trenton on 26 Dec 1776 was just the beginning of the Continental Army’s strike back against the British in central New Jersey after a very rough campaign season.

Revolutionary New Jersey, the Crossroads of the American Revolution, explains:

After ferrying their Hessian prisoners across the Delaware to Pennsylvania on December 26, Washington’s troops returned to New Jersey to engage the British at Trenton once again on January 2, 1777. Fighting along the Assunpink Creek ended at dusk. During the night, Washington led his troops along a back route to Princeton, where he attacked General Cornwallis’ rear guard on the morning of January 3, 1777.

While the second Battle of Trenton (also known as the Battle of the Assunpink) had no military outcome, it enabled another American victory, at Princeton. In the ten days succeeding Christmas, Washington had engaged the enemy in three battles and by winning two had restored belief in the possibility of ultimate victory.

The Ten Crucial Days organization offers videos, maps, and other information about those events. Its tours cover the Washington’s Crossing sites on both sides of the Delaware, the Old Barracks Museum in Trenton, and the Princeton Battlefield.

The small local publisher Knox Press, linked to Ten Crucial Days, offers David Price’s book Rescuing the Revolution: Unsung Patriot Heroes and the Ten Crucial Days of America’s War for Independence.

(Above is Boston’s own slice of Washington’s crossing, “The Passage of the Delaware” by Thomas Sully at the Museum of Fine Arts.)

The House of Lords Considers the Declaratory Act

The Rockingham government’s strategy to extricate itself from the unenforceable Stamp Act and yet maintain Parliament’s authority was to couple the repeal of that law with the Declaratory Act.

That act stated outright that Parliament’s laws were binding in British colonies. No other legislature in the empire could be more powerful than the Parliament in London. That would become part of the constitution of the British Empire.

In an undated letter to Lt. Gov. Cadwallader Colden of New York, Maj. Thomas James, who went to London after an anti-Stamp mob destroyed his house on 1 Nov 1765, described the Lords’ debate on the law this way:

the House of Lords in point of Question; whether the Mother Country has a Right to lay an Internal Tax upon the Americans? and whether the Colonies are not subject to the Decrees of King Lords and Commons.

Given by 125 to 5 That the Colonies are subject to the Laws of Great Britain; and that the Acts of the House of Commons are binding throughout all the Colonies of America

The 5 in favour of America were Cambden — Paulet — Torrington — Cornwallis — Shelburn — The first made a very Good Speech upon a Wrong Cause But the Lord Chancellor [the Earl of Northington] Cut Him to pieces; and observed; He wonderd how Lord Cambden could attempt to support so bad so dangerous and so unjust an Argument, with so serene a Countenance;

The Commons have resolved that the Colonies ought to be subject to the Laws and Decrees of Great Britain; they are softening all Resolves with a firmness, that they shall be permanent. The Repeal of the [Stamp] Act will be the last Resolve. I believe it will be softened—

Of the five peers who voted against the Declaratory Act, Baron Camden succeeded his nemesis Northington as Lord Chancellor later that year. Camden continued to advocate for American rights even more than his colleagues in the short-lived Chatham administration. His speech against the Declaratory Act indirectly led to the phrase “No Taxation without Representation.”

Charles Powlett, the Duke of Bolton, committed suicide in July. Not even Horace Walpole knew why. His brother succeeded him, switching from the opposition in the House of Commons to supporting the government until 1778, when he got sick of how the American War was going.

Viscount Torrington was a young man, only twenty-four. He married a daughter of the Earl of Cork in July, and they had several children. He voted for less strict policy toward America at a couple of other important moments but doesn’t appear to have been a vocal political leader.

The Earl of Shelburne became prime minister late in the American War and completed the 1783 Treaty of Paris to end it. Under his next and higher peerage, Marquess of Lansdowne, he was the recipient of Gilbert Stuart’s famous full-length portrait of George Washington.

And finally there’s Earl Cornwallis (shown above), in 1766 a lieutenant colonel in the army as well as a peer. We know what he had to do in the Revolutionary War. Afterwards, Cornwallis went on to a more successful career building the British Empire in India.

American Revolution Conference in Williamsburg, 22-24 Mar.

America’s History, L.L.C., is sponsoring its second annual Conference on the American Revolution in Williamsburg, Virginia, on 22-24 March. Although there are academics on the list of speakers, this conference is not designed for academic scholars and job-seekers but for independent researchers and history buffs.

The scheduled program is:

• Edward G. Lengel: “Revolutionary Rivals: Horatio Gates and George Washington”
• Douglas Cubbison: “Man on a Mission: John Burgoyne and the Campaign of 1777”
• Joshua Howard: “The Swamp Fox: Francis Marion, Revolutionary War Hero of South Carolina”
• James Kirby Martin: “Benedict Arnold: Revolutionary America’s Heroic General”
• Andrew O’Shaughnessy: “Fighting with Friends and Enemies Simultaneously: Sir Henry Clinton”
• Jim Piecuch: “Frustrated Ambitions: “Light Horse Harry Lee’s Conflicts On and Off the Battlefield”
• John V. Quarstein: “Closing the Door on Cornwallis: The Battle of the Capes September 1781”
• Glenn F. Williams: “Lord Dunmore’s War: Training Ground for Continental Officers”

As you see, there’s an emphasis on military commanders this year rather than, say, politics, battles or other events, ordinary soldiers, social movements, technology, &c.

There will also be two panel discussions: “The Best and Worst Military Commanders of the Revolutionary War” and “A Revolutionary War Bookshelf: What You Should Own and What Books Will Be Published Soon.”

The conference package costs $225 and includes lunch, two breakfasts, and refreshment breaks. There are rooms available at the Williamsburg Hospitality House, which I think is also the site of the sessions. On the Friday afternoon before the conference begins, there’s an optional bus tour of Petersburg and other sites led by William Welsch of the local American Revolution Round Table; that costs $95 extra. I hadn’t thought seriously about going to Virginia next month, but two feet of snow has a way of making me reconsider.

America’s History offers a range of other tours and events this year, including sessions on “Religion, Rebellion, and the Founding Fathers” in Pennsylvania with John Fea; "Defending the Highlands” in Newburgh, New York, with Bill Welsch and Bruce Venter; “Braddock's Campaign to Fort Duquesne” in Pennsylvania with Doug Cubbison; and “Burgoyne’s Campaign of 1777” in conjunction with the 10th annual American Revolution Seminar at Fort Ticonderoga.

Worse Than Bunker Hill

The British army’s worst day during the American War was the first pitched battle and its first victory, Bunker Hill, which we commemorated last week. Out of about three thousand Crown officers and enlisted men sent into the fight, more than one thousand were casualties: 226 killed and 828 wounded.

But was that the worst British loss of the global conflict? I was surprised to learn that it wasn’t. We never hear of the more costly battle in American history because it didn’t take place in America.

After France and Spain declared war on Britain in 1778 and 1779, respectively, the three empires started to spar all over the world. For example, for almost four years Spain and its French ally tried to wrest Gibraltar back from Britain. The garrison survived that siege, a hugely important campaign for the British government. Yet hardly any Americans were involved, so we don’t study it.

India was a relatively new battlefield for the rival European empires, and the region’s kingdoms were still strong enough to tip the scales by allying with or resisting those outside powers. That produced another theater of war for the British military during the Americans’ fight for independence. The British East India Company, backed by the imperial government, attacked the French outpost at Mahé.

The French had a powerful ally in Hyder Ali, ruler of Mysore, who declared war on the British. In the Battle of Pollilur, on 10 Sept 1780, an army commanded by Hyder’s son, Tippu Sultan, met the British forces and inflicted a devastating defeat. As the Tiger and the Thistle website explains, the British fielded 3,853 men. The officers were mostly European, the enlisted men mostly locals, or sepoys. And the casualties at the end of that day?

Of the 86 European officers, 36 were killed or died of wounds, 34 were taken wounded, and only 16 taken unhurt. The whole of the sepoy forces [over 3,300 soldiers] were either killed, captured or dispersed, and only about 200 Europeans, most of them wounded, were taken alive by the enemy.

Even if most of the British sepoys survived by deserting, that army was simply erased. And the casualty rate among the group the Crown paid the most attention to—European officers—was over 80%.
In 1784, the Treaty of Mangalore ended the Second Mysore War, a clear victory for Tippu Sultan. (He had come to power after his father died from a carbuncle or cancer on his back.)

But the British Empire came back in 1790 and forced Tippu to give up half his territory two years later. The successful commander in that Third Mysore War was Gen. Cornwallis, making up for his surrender to French and American forces at Yorktown.

Storms with Revolutionary Consequences

The September 1775 hurricane that got dubbed the “hurricane of independence” didn’t actually affect the course of the Revolutionary War. But other storms did.

Boston, 5 Mar 1776. Having spotted the new Continental Army artillery batteries on Dorchester Heights, Gen. William Howe ordered an amphibious assault on that peninsula. But, as Boston selectman Timothy Newell recorded, “a Hurrycane, or terrible sudden storm,” arrived, battering the boats and rendering firelocks useless. The general called off the attack. By the time the weather cleared, the American position was too strong, and Howe chose to evacuate Boston, ending the war’s oldest campaign with an American victory.

Trenton, 25 Dec 1776. Because of freezing temperatures and a mix of sleet, snow and icy rain, the Hessian troops at Trenton felt secure enough to pull back their picket sentries. Desperate for a victory, Gen. George Washington led columns of Continental Army soldiers across the icy Delaware River under cover of that same storm. Though not all the American forces managed to get across, those that did routed the Hessians and broke a long string of demoralizing battlefield losses.

Newport, 11-12 Aug 1778. A French fleet and an American army were supposed to collaborate on driving the British military out of Rhode Island. Adm. d’Estaing chose instead to engage the British fleet. Then a heavy storm hit the area, scattering and damaging the French ships. D’Estaing headed to Boston for repairs rather than try another attack, and the British drove back an American advance at the end of the month. Newport remained in British hands.

Yorktown, 16-17 Oct 1781. In a desperate move, Gen. Cornwallis started to have men ferried across the James River from Yorktown to Gloucester Point to counterattack the French and American forces. But after the first trip, the general wrote, “the weather from being moderate and calm, changed to a most violent storm of wind and rain,” and scattered the British boats. With no other options, the next day the British commander opened negotiations with Gen. Washington to surrender.

And there are probably other examples as well, especially when it came to the war at sea. Plus, long-term meteorological or environmental events, such as famine in India, the loss of good farmland in New England, and a dip in the “little Ice Age,” probably had even bigger long-term effects.

TOMORROW: The biggest storm of all.

[The portrait of D’Estaing above comes from this webpage describing how Haitian soldiers fought alongside Americans at Savannah.]

Driving the Battle of Brandywine

Last year I had the pleasure of following this Battle of Brandywine driving tour. Although there’s a Brandywine Battlefield Park, with a nice gift-shop staff, that land is only a small part of the area in southeastern Pennsylvania where the British and American armies fought on 11 Sept 1777. You need a car to take it all in.

The Battle of Brandywine involved 29,000 soldiers, more than any other land battle during the Revolutionary War. Both armies were personally led by their commanders-in-chief, Gen. William Howe and Gen. George Washington. The battle resulted in the British army taking Philadelphia, the U.S. of A.’s largest city and de facto capital (despite John Adams’s confidence that wouldn’t happen). After that, sixty percent of the Continental Army melted away, and Washington had to find winter quarters at Valley Forge.

Obviously, the Brandywine battle was a very significant event. So why doesn’t the park contain more of the battlefield? Why isn’t it a federal park? Why don’t we hear more about the Battle of Brandywine?

Well, the Americans lost. Big. Howe completely outmaneuvered Washington by sending Gen. Cornwallis north to cross the Brandywine at places that Loyalist scouts knew (one of them shown above) but that the American commanders had overlooked. The driving tour is a great way to understand the scope and geography of that move.

There are a few historical monuments along the way: obelisks raised where American officers fell, or a division held out for an hour, or troops made a heroic retreat. But at the end of the day there wasn’t much for the Continentals to celebrate. They had lost a lot of their artillery. Gen. Nathanael Greene estimated that his side suffered about 1,350 men killed, wounded, and captured (compared to the Crown forces’ 600). But even that casualty figure is an estimate; the Americans seem to have been so demoralized and disorganized by the battle that they never made a careful count of their losses.

TOMORROW: Samuel Adams’s reaction in Philadelphia.

Calculating Richard Stockton’s Losses

In mid-1776, when he was elected to the Continental Congress, Judge Richard Stockton was living on his estate in Princeton, New Jersey, which his poetically inclined wife Annis had named Morven. The picture above shows the mansion at the center of that land. In the eighteenth century its wings were only one storey tall, and those classical porches are undoubtedly additions as well, but it was still a big, handsome house.

I’ve been discussing Stockton’s experience after being captured by Loyalists in late 1776. What happened to his house? The British army was marching down through New Jersey that fall. On 29 November, the Ten Crucial Days timeline says, Princeton College closed and Stockton left town. According to his entry in the Biography of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, he moved “his wife and younger children“ into another county. Elizabeth Ellet’s profile of Annis Stockton in The Women of the American Revolution says, “His eldest son, Richard, then a boy twelve years of age, with an old family servant, remained in the house.” The “servant,” according to modern historians, was probably enslaved. This genealogy webpage lists Richard’s siblings, including some older sisters.

The American army retreated through Princeton in the first week of December, and the British arrived on the 7th. A week later, Gen. William Howe ordered his British and Hessian troops to go into winter quarters where they were. According to Washington’s Crossing, by David H. Fischer, a group of dragoons (mounted infantry) took over Morven. Presumably young Richard had rejoined his mother and siblings by this point, but that’s not clear.

Gen. George Washington led the American forces in a surprise counterattack at Trenton on 25-26 Dec 1776, changing the military situation in southern New Jersey. Gen. Cornwallis arrived at Morven late on the night of 1-2 Jan 1777 and slept a few hours there—just long enough that it gets remembered as “Cornwallis’s headquarters.” There was another battle at Trenton, and on 3 January the two armies met at the Battle of Princeton. The British lost and moved to New Brunswick, eventually leaving most of the state.

The Stocktons apparently returned home to Morven in January, finding widespread damage. The earliest source on damage there that I’ve found is a letter from the couple’s son-in-law, Dr. Benjamin Rush, stating that the judge had been “plundered of all his household furniture and stock by the British army.” However, before the Battle of Princeton some Americans had heard rumors of Stockton swearing loyalty to the king. Might some of the looting have been done by resentful Continental troops?

In any event, the damage to Morven became a big part of the Stockton family’s memory of the war. In speaking to historians, they emphasized how much property the judge had lost. The Biography of the Signers, written in the early 1820s, stated:

His fortune, which had been ample, was greatly diminished, both by the depreciation of the continental currency, and the wanton depredations of the British army. His papers and library, one of the best possessed by any private citizen at that period, were burned; his domestic animals, (particularly his fine stock of horses,) and almost all his personal property, were plundered or destroyed, and his farm laid waste.

Mr. Stockton now found himself the proprietor of a little more than his devastated lands, and was compelled to have recourse to the temporary aid of some of his friends, whose losses had been less extensive, for a present supply of such articles of necessity as were essential to relieve the pressure of absolute suffering.

Ellet’s history, published in 1840, adds more detail:

The house was pillaged, the horses and stock were driven away, and the estate was laid waste. The furniture was converted into fire-wood; the old wine, stored in the cellar, was drunk up, and the valuable library, with all the papers of Mr. Stockton, committed to the flames. The house became for some time the headquarters of the British general.

The [silver] plate and other valuable articles belonging to the family had been packed in three boxes and buried in the woods, at some distance from the mansion. Through treachery—it is said—the place of concealment was discovered by the soldiers, and two of the boxes were disinterred and rifled of their rich contents. The remaining one escaped their search and was restored to the family. The daughter of Mrs. Stockton residing in Princeton, has in her possession several pieces of silver that were in this box, and are now, of course, highly valued.

She has also two portraits—one of Mr. Stockton and the other of his wife, which were in the house when occupied by the British, and found among some rubbish after their departure. Both were pierced through with bayonets. Some years since, they were entirely restored by the modern process, and now occupy their honored place in Mrs. Field’s house. The portrait of Mr. Stockton is a very fine one, and understood to have been painted by [John Singleton] Copley.

Those descriptions are no doubt the basis of modern statements about Stockton’s financial suffering—but those statements go even further. For instance, in 2000 Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote, “His family lived on charity for the rest of their lives.” (Yes, I found a copy of his essay online.) The Morven Institute of Freedom, which is named for Stockton’s estate but has no connection to it, states that Stockton

died a pauper as the British had destroyed and burned most of his wealth. It only was after the war that his family regained the land where stood the home that had been lost by their father.

His UShistory.org biography says:

He lost all of his extensive library, writings, and all of his property during the British invasion. He died a pauper in Princeton at the age of 51 [actually 50].

None of those essays acknowledge Stockton’s oath of loyalty to the Crown. Instead, they stretch the sources to build up the legend of him as a martyr for American independence.

Stockton’s descendants didn’t describe long-lasting poverty. The Biography reported that Stockton needed “temporary aid” from friends immediately after his return, not that he lived on their charity for the next four years. Some of the books that say all of Stockton’s papers were burned also go on to quote from his letters. If Stockton suffered from the “depreciation of the continental currency” later in the war, that means he must have accumulated some of that currency along the way. Primary sources indicate that at the end of April 1777 Stockton was shopping for new furniture.

Furthermore, later Stocktons were just as proud to show off the nice things they had inherited from their Revolutionary ancestors as to imply that those ancestors had been wiped out by the nasty British. About that furniture? Thomas Allen Glenn wrote in Some Colonial Mansions and Those Who Lived in Them that in 1899 Maj. Samuel Witham Stockton of Princeton owned “Many rare old pieces of mahogany furniture, relics of Colonial Morven,...together with many of the family portraits.” So either some furniture from “Colonial Morven” was not burned, or the family had enough money after Stockton’s imprisonment to buy mahogany. (As for those portraits, they’re not by Copley; in the mid-1800s, practically every eighteenth-century American portrait got labeled as a Copley.)

All in all, it seems clear that there was looting and damage at Morven in December 1776 and January 1777, with books stolen or burned and the dragoons taking away all the good horses. But the Stockton family was rich, with lots of land and connections, so they had a financial cushion under them. They continued to enjoy an upper-class life.

The younger Richard Stockton graduated from Princeton College on 29 Sept 1779, delivering the English oration “on the principles of true heroism.” When the judge died in 1781, young Richard inherited Morven—which wouldn’t have been possible if the estate were tied up in debts. (The Morven Institute’s statement that the family reacquired the land must be based on trying to reconcile a belief that Judge Stockton lost everything with the fact that the family continued to live on that estate for two more generations.)

Morven was in such good shape that widow Annis Stockton hosted Gen. Washington there on 28 Aug 1781 and several times in 1783. She reportedly served dinner on “china, which is of the dark-blue willow-ware pattern” and remained in the family for at least another century.

And the mansion’s still there, as the photograph above shows. Morven served as the official residence of the state’s governors from 1945 to 1981, and is now “a museum and public garden showcasing the cultural heritage of New Jersey.”

COMING UP: Summing up Richard Stockton’s story.

Clinton and Cornwallis Trade Blame

“Victory has a thousand fathers, but nobody wants to recognize a defeat as his own.” Count Galeazzo Ciano wrote that in his diary in 1942, according to The Yale Book of Quotations. When John F. Kennedy repeated the observation after the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, he rendered the last part as “failure is an orphan.”

There’s no better illustration of that saying than the finger-pointing of British generals after the end of the Revolutionary War. When Gen. Cornwallis (shown at left) surrendered to the forces of Gen. George Washington at Yorktown, he wrote to Gen. Sir Henry Clinton, his military superior, in New York. That letter dated 20 Oct 1781 tried to explain how he’d found himself in such a fix:

I never saw this post in a very favourable light,...But being assured by your Excellency’s letters that every possible means would be tried by the navy and army to relieve us, I could not think myself at liberty to venture upon either of those desperate attempts [to withdraw]; . . .

receiving on the second evening your letter of the 24th of September informing that the relief would sail about the 5th of October, I withdrew within the works on the night of the 29th of September, hoping by the labour and firmness of the soldiers to protract the defence until you could arrive. . . .

Only one eight-inch [cannon] and little more than an hundred cohorn shells remained. A diversion by the French ships of war that lay at the mouth of York River was to be expected. Our numbers had been diminished by the enemy’s fire, but particularly by sickness, and the strength and spirits of those in the works were much exhausted by the fatigue of constant watching and unremitting duty.

Under all these circumstances, I thought it would have been wanton and inhuman to the last degree to sacrifice the lives of this small body of gallant soldiers, who had ever behaved with so much fidelity and courage, by exposing them to an assault, which from the numbers and precautions of the enemy could not fail to succeed. I therefore proposed to capitulate.

Since British reinforcements hadn’t arrived from Clinton’s post, Cornwallis felt he had no choice but to surrender. The implication of his last dispatch was clear: his commander was at fault for not sending help more quickly. This letter was later read in Parliament as part of the inquiry on why Britain had lost the war in North America.

Last month the Eighteenth-Century Reading Room traced what happened next. In early 1783 Clinton published his Narrative...Relative to his Conduct during Part of his Command of the King’s Troops in North America, complaining particularly of “the publication of Lord C.’s letter of the 20th of October, without being accompanied by my answer to it.” On 2 Dec 1781 he had written back to Yorktown:

As your Lordship is pleased, in your letter of this day [i.e., just received], to revert to the circumstance of your quitting Williamsburg Neck and repassing the James River, so contrary to the intentions I wished to express in my letters of the 11th and 15th of June, and those referred to by them, and which I thought they would have clearly explained. Your Lordship will, I hope, forgive me, if I once more repeat that I am of opinion, if those letters had been properly understood by your Lordship, you would at least have hesitated before you adopted that measure.

In other words, you didn’t follow my advice, so you got yourself into this mess. Of course, by the time Clinton was writing this, he knew that Cornwallis and his men were prisoners of war, so his letter was hardly helpful—except perhaps in offering himself a rear guard.

When Clinton’s book came out in London, Cornwallis published an Answer in pamphlet form. It contained more of the correspondence between the two men, and the earl wrote:

The perusal of this Correspondence will, I think, render not only the military, but every other reader a competent judge of the propriety of my conduct, either when I acted under positive orders, pressing contingencies, or discretionary powers.

In other words, I did the best I could; if you want to look for a reason for failure, look at the commander who didn’t do enough.

Clinton thereupon issued another pamphlet titled Observations on Some Parts of the Answer..., with some more transcriptions of letters and analysis of them. That publication concluded:

I shall now beg leave to conclude with an opinion, which I presume is deducible from the foregoing (I trust candid) review of circumstances. Which is, that Lord Cornwallis’s conduct and opinions, if they were not the immediate causes, may be adjudged to have at least contributed to bring on the fatal catastrophe which terminated the unfortunate campaign of 1781.

Clinton dated the last pamphlet 3 Apr 1783, which meant the whole exchange had taken place in a little over three months. Also notable is that all three publications came from the high-class publisher J. Debrett: he was making money from both generals as they tried to shift more blame to the other.