The First American Army (47 page)
Read The First American Army Online
Authors: Bruce Chadwick
Despite his numerous escapes, John Greenwood had yet to learn his lesson about the dangers of sailing on privateers. Upon his return to Boston, he sought out more privateers and signed on as a seaman on the
Aurora
with his former captain, David Porter, at the helm, for an expedition to Port-au-Prince that nearly resulted in his death. This time it was not at the hands of the British or local jailers, but misfortune.
The
Aurora
sailed to Port-au-Prince without incident, but an explosion in port sunk her. Private Greenwood, ill, had earlier taken medicine that made him groggy. Unable to work any longer, he had climbed into his hammock, below deck and near a cannon port hole, and fell asleep. The roar of the explosion awakened him. He opened his eyes and felt his body sliding toward the other side of the boat. He looked toward that side and saw the boat begin to roll away from him. The cannon on that side crashed into the port hole and water gushed in. He saw that water was coming into every port hole on the far side of the ship and felt her start to sink. He rolled out of the hammock, grabbed the cannon next to him and climbed up its barrel, out of the port hole and scrambled off the ship to save his life.
The tragedy was quickly followed by comedy. Back in Boston a few months later, Greenwood signed on with the
Race Horse,
captained by Nathaniel Thayer, bound for the West Indies. In the middle of the night, serving as watch, he saw a ship sailing toward him. He summoned the captain, who always feared capture, and the commander ordered sails rigged for a getaway. It turned out that the vessel was a prize captured by the British and captained by a woefully inexperienced sailor trying to bring her to a port. The ship had been floating around the Caribbean for days, completely lost. Captain Thayer seized the ship himself, promising the grateful British officer that he would get his crew to Barbados and release them.
He told Greenwood to serve as the new captain and take five crewmen to bring the ship to port. That night Greenwood nearly ran into a huge British man-of-war sailing nearby. He knew he could neither outfight or outrun the ship, but might trick her commander. In the dark, their captain knew just as little about “Captain” Greenwood as the American knew about him. The novice captain had a man-of-war trumpet on the ship and a single, small, swivel-gun cannon. He sounded the trumpet and shouted with convincing bravado that he would sink the British ship if its commander did not heave to and surrender. There was no response from the man-of-war’s captain, trying to figure out what ship was out there in the dark, and if it was in range for his guns.
Greenwood then loaded the tiny swivel gun with two cannonballs and a strong gunpowder charge and fired in the direction of the ship. The sound was similar to that of a large cannon and it was loud enough, and menacing enough, to scare the British captain, who turned and sailed away as quickly as the night wind could carry his vessel. He must have thought he had engaged John Paul Jones himself.
On board Greenwood’s ship there was a combination of fright and laughter. The charge and double load had blown the small gun out of its locks and sent it sailing across the deck, crashing into everything in its way. When Greenwood related the story to the captain of his mother ship, whom he met in port, the captain howled with merriment.
“Captain Greenwood,” who had recently turned twenty, decided to become a real captain just a few weeks later. He took the money he had earned from privateering and with a ship’s mate, Myrick, purchased a schooner in Baltimore and won a contract to carry a load of corn to an ironworks on the Patapsco River, nine miles southwest of Baltimore on the Chesapeake Bay.
The two rookie captains then embarked on one of the most inept cruises of the Revolution. They were supposed to sail behind another schooner to the ironworks, but left port late when Greenwood lingered too long at a nearby tavern. Lost in the middle of the Chesapeake, the sailing “expert” had to ask directions to the mouth of the river from the captain of another schooner that passed by them, much to the embarrassment of Myrick.
No sooner did they start up the river when, according to Greenwood, a “monstrous” storm arose. Instead of heading for a safe inlet on the river, or simply anchoring and lowering their sails to ride out the furious winds, the two captains tried to sail through it. They soon lurched into each other on the deck when the ship ran aground on a sandbar. Greenwood was determined to keep sailing. Instead of waiting for the light of morning and the tide to attempt to move off the sandbar, he rode out in a flat bottomed boat they had secured on deck in the pitch black night. Thunderclaps boomed and lightning crackled all about him. He brought a coil of rope along, intending to pull the larger craft back into the river with his small boat. As soon as he yanked on the thick rope, his boat overturned and he was unceremoniously pitched into the river.
Greenwood spotted a farmhouse on shore when another bolt of lightning hit and illuminated it and went there to get help for his ship. The farmer would not go out into the storm and told Greenwood to sleep in his home. By morning, the tide had lifted the boat off the sandbar and the captains prepared to sail to the ironworks. The men soon discovered that they never secured the corn ears, which had now floated into the pumps and clogged them, preventing any movement. Finally, the corn removed and the pumps fixed, the ship limped upriver to the ironworks with its battered cargo and similarly battered crew. The voyage had been such a catastrophe that Myrick quit and sold his share of the boat to another man in Baltimore.
Private Greenwood made one last voyage and it should have been a calm one. He was the first mate for a repugnant captain on the
Resolution,
a six-gun schooner bound for St. Eustatius with a load of flour and orders to buy salt to bring back for Maryland merchants. The voyage took place without incident and upon his return Greenwood was happy to hear that the obnoxious captain had been fired and he had been given charge of the schooner for another run to St. Eustatius.
This trip was no pleasure cruise, however. In the middle of their passage between the islands of Antigua and Saint Bartholomew a large, fast ship bore down on them. Greenwood let out all of his sail in an effort to outrun the monster ship coming at him. “I let out the reefs of the mainsail and clapped her away four points free,” he wrote. “She sailed like a bird, but in two or three hours the pursuing vessel came up with us, firing, one after another, seven shots at us, and at last got so close that I could see the buttons on the men’s coats.”
The ship, the
Santa Margaretta,
looked fearsome. Originally a Spanish ship, the
Santa Margaretta
was a sleek, fast-moving, forty-four gun warship that carried two hundred twenty sailors, half of them musket men. She had been cruising up and down the Atlantic seaboard, bagging several prizes, before departing for the warmer waters of the Caribbean. Suddenly, the guns of the
Santa Margaretta
opened up.
“They then got ready a six-pound cannon from the quarterdeck loaded with grapeshot and fired point blank into us, cutting away our jib sheet blocks, forepeak tie, and other rigging forward,” a frantic Greenwood noted.
The
Resolution
had been turned into the wind and toward the British warship. Greenwood was certain that if he did not surrender, the huge ship would ram his, cutting the
Resolution
in half and sinking her and his crew. He struck his colors and gave up.
The captain and officers of the
Santa Margaretta
were a casual crew, far more interested in their prize cargo than prisoners. They let all of the crew of the
Resolution
go free when they anchored in Kingston, Jamaica. In fact, it was the British, not the Americans, who brought Greenwood home. The sailing master of the
Santa Margaretta
knew Captain Henry Nicholls, in charge of the British privateer
Barracouta,
headed for New York in a few days. He told him Nicholls would take him on as a passenger (probably for a price).
Several weeks later, “Captain” Greenwood said goodbye to the commander and crew of the
Barracouta
in New York and made his way back to Boston in the spring of 1783 on board one of the ships carrying prisoners to their homes as the war wound down.
Greenwood worked as a mate on merchant ships sailing out of Boston and was the captain of a schooner out of Baltimore on three trips during the last few months of the Revolution. The end of hostilities meant an end to privateering and, for awhile, the profitable merchant trade between New England and the West Indies. There was no work for the hundreds of wartime sailors like Greenwood, so he left Boston and traveled to New York. There, Greenwood, only twenty-three, planned to move in with his brother Isaac and, with him, take up dentistry, their father’s profession.
The veteran soldier and sailor left Boston just as he had arrived there eight years before, in the summer of 1775 at the age of fifteen, carrying fifes in his backpack, bragging to all at a roadside tavern where he entertained patrons with his fife that year that he was there “to fight for my country.”
He certainly had done so, and there was still one more chapter left in his story.
The War’s Worst Winter and Mutiny
The War
T
he Crown, determined to destroy Washington’s main army, sent more than six thousand troops up the Hudson toward West Point, where he was headquartered, in the spring of 1779. The British force seized and held Fort Lafayette and a garrison at Stony Point, both twelve miles south of West Point on the banks of the Hudson. In a daring nighttime raid, Anthony Wayne’s men retook Stony Point on July 16, ending the British threat against the army. A month later, on August 19, Light-Horse Harry Lee captured the British garrison at Paulus Hook (Jersey City).
The major battle between British and American troops in 1779 was the failed attempt by a combined American and French forces to recapture Savannah, seized by the British at Christmas, 1778. A September 1779 siege to take Savannah, aided by French troops who arrived with Admiral d’Estaing’s fleet, failed and residents complained that the Americans had destroyed half the town in the process. D’Estaing insisted that he could not stay and forced an early final assault on October 9 that was easily repulsed by the British.
British forces in Georgia captured several towns and then Augusta, and administered a devastating defeat to an American force that tried to reclaim it. In May, Redcoats in Virginia easily captured Suffolk, Portsmouth, and a naval shipyard at Norfolk, where they seized or wrecked 137 American ships.
Indian raids on rural towns in Pennsylvania and New York infuriated Congress, who had been courting tribal leaders. In the summer of 1779, Washington sent Generals John Sullivan and James Clinton and a force of thirty-seven hundred men to upstate New York and western Pennsylvania with orders to destroy the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederation and capture as many Indians as possible. Troops sent to the Pittsburgh area burned ten Indian villages while Sullivan’s main force campaigning through New York destroyed forty, including the entire community of Genesee, New York with its 128 buildings. The devastation of the communities made it difficult for the Indians to find much shelter for the coming winter. Sullivan’s men also ruined corn fields and apple orchards to make it impossible for the Iroquois to live off the land.
The alliance with the French had not been as productive as Congress had hoped. The massive numbers of troops promised by Paris had not arrived and those that did saw meager action. The French navy had so far contributed little to the American cause. Its admirals were strongly criticized for leaving the battle of Newport, refusing to attack New York, and leaving too soon in the aborted effort to retake Savannah. In 1779, the U.S. received some more international help when Spain declared war on England, seized several towns from the British along the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico and helped financially with some small loans. The Spaniards could not be convinced to contribute much needed troops, however, and a promised combined Spanish-French sea assault on the British navy in waters near England, to be followed by an amphibious attack, never materialized.
Sea battles between America, France, and Spain against England raged in the Caribbean throughout the year. American ships successfully harassed British warships and merchant task forces around Great Britain and in a much heralded battle, John Paul Jones’s
Bon Homme Richard
defeated the British
Serapis
in a lengthy battle off the coast of England.
The victory at Monmouth in the summer of 1778, the apparent end of the smallpox epidemics, and mild weather throughout 1779, plus more clothing, caused an increase in enlistments and a decrease in desertions for Washington’s army in the north.
It had been a year when Washington’s spy network, started in the early days of the war to provide him with solid information about the enemy, had grown to hundreds of informers. Spies had tipped him off to the exact route of the British toward Monmouth 1778 and in 1780 would once again prove invaluable.
Washington’s strategy had been to fight the British head-on when he could, such as at Monmouth and Brandywine, but to avoid confrontations when his prospects were not good. He needed to convince the British press and public that the Crown could not win what was becoming a lengthy war, and should quit. The plan began to pay off in 1779 as more and more British periodicals criticized the conflict, some publishing “body counts,” lists of the casualties, in their columns. Groups called “patriotic societies” were formed throughout England to protest the war in America and an increasing number of influential members of Parliament spoke out against it. The city of London refused to tax its residents for the war. One British army regiment had even mutinied when told they were going to fight in America. Even the prime minister, Lord North, began to consider shifting the focus of the war from America to Europe and the French and Spanish.
Still, there was no end to the war in sight. The British maintained posts in New York, Savannah, Charleston, and Newport and sent an endless supply of British troops and hired mercenaries, cannon, and warships to America. Their treasury appeared bottomless and King George III was determined to triumph.
Some thought that an American victory would only come if the British believed that they could never truly win, that they would fight for years with no result—and at great cost. Others were convinced victory for the rebels could only be realized if the conflict escalated into a full-blown world war, with Spain sending hundreds of ships and thousands of men to America, in addition to the promised French forces. Either way, the Continental Army and its thousands of enlisted men had to hold together as a fighting force. Their ability to do that was severely tested in the brutal winter of 1779–1780.