The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 Part 9

The percentage of Virginians who fought in the Continental Army and who supported the stronger national government of the Federal Const.i.tution was high. These were men who experienced and remembered the embarra.s.sments and inadequacies of a weak national government during the Revolution. They did not want to see the experience repeated.

Perhaps the best Virginia field general and the prototype of the inventive, untrained American general was Daniel Morgan. A wagon master from Frederick County, Morgan had fought in the French and Indian War. He raised the first unit of Virginia Continentals, a company of Valley riflemen, and took them to Boston in 1775. He and his men fought brilliantly in the near victory of General Richard Montgomery at Quebec on Christmas 1775. Captured along with the equally bold Benedict Arnold, Morgan was exchanged. Developing effectively the Virginia riflemen into mobile light infantry units and merging frontier tactics with formal warfare, Morgan showed a real flare for commanding small units of men.

His greatest moments were at Saratoga in 1777 and later in his total victory over Colonel Banastre Tarleton at Cowpens, South Carolina in 1781. The wagon master progressed steadily from captain to colonel, to general, and became one of the genuine heroes of the Revolution.

The total number of Virginians who fought in the Continental Army is difficult to determine. Records were poor, lengthy service infrequent, and troop strength constantly overestimated. There were possibly 25,000 Virginians in the Continental Army at one time or another, although the number in the field at any one time was much smaller. Another 30,000 to 35,000 might have joined the Virginia militia. In an era when European armies went into winter quarters and did not fight at all, the unorthodox Continental Army won some of its greatest victories in the dead of winter, yet it too tended to suffer from winter desertions and unauthorized leaves. Still the shriveled army always seemed to revive in the spring as the men returned to the ranks.

Troops, even continental units, tended to serve near home. Northern troops were rarely found in the deep southern colonies and vice versa.

Yet Virginians, because of their proximity to all fighting zones, fought from Quebec to Charleston, contributing heavily to the units fighting to hold the middle states in 1777 and 1778 and the Carolinas in 1780 and 1781.

The Indian Wars

The Revolution reopened the long series of Indian wars along the western frontiers. Encouraged and financed by the same British agents who had once acted in behalf of the former colonists, the Cherokees and Shawnees, particularly, seized upon the unsettled conditions to strike back at the steadily advancing waves of settlers moving southwestward along the Clinch, Holston, French Broad, and Watauga Rivers. Throughout 1775 and 1776 Virginian, North Carolinian, and Georgian frontiersmen fought the Cherokee in a series of b.l.o.o.d.y battles. The culminating attack by 2,000 riflemen under Colonel William Christian destroyed the major Cherokee villages and compelled the Cherokees to sign "humiliating" treaties with the southern states in 1777. The determined Cherokee chieftain, Dragging Canoe, moved westward, regrouped his warriors at Chickamauga, and launched another series of frontier raids. North Carolina and Virginia riflemen under Colonel Evan Shelby in 1779 and Colonel Arthur Campbell in 1781 battled the undaunted Cherokees. Finally, in 1782, the Indians yielded their territory to the frontiersmen. Little noticed, this series of battles involved a high percentage of the western Virginians in nearly constant battle readiness.

George Rogers Clark and the Winning of the West

In the Kentucky, Ohio, and Illinois country the Revolution was a continuation of the long series of b.l.o.o.d.y battles, ambushes, and deceptions which the Indians and whites had been perpetrating against each other since the settlers had pushed over the mountains in the early 1770's. The British had merely replaced the French as the European ally of the Indians. The princ.i.p.al opponents were the tough, well-organized Shawnees who had been the main targets of Dunmore and Colonel Andrew Lewis during Dunmore's War in 1774. The Shawnees were joined by the Miami, Delaware, and Ottawa Indians. These Ohio Indians needed little encouragement from Lieutenant Colonel Henry Hamilton, the British commander at Fort Detroit. Amply supplied with munitions, guns, and money for patriot scalps received from Hamilton, known among the frontiersmen as the "Hair Buyer", these Indians swarmed across the Ohio River in 1775, 1776, and 1777. No quarter was asked by either side; none was given.

Conditions became especially critical in 1777 when the Indians were angered and embittered by the foolish and senseless murder of Cornstalk, the captured chief of the Shawnees.

Complicating any military solution to the western fighting were the old rivalries among the states for control of the western lands. Virginia had to establish county government in Kentucky in order to head off North Carolinian Richard Henderson's bid for that region in 1776.

Pennsylvanians and Virginians still quarrelled over Pittsburgh and the Upper Ohio. Aid from the Continental Congress was obstructed by the claims of at least four states to Ohio and the jealousy of the landless states toward the landed states.

Then in 1777 a 23 year-old Virginian, George Rogers Clark, found the solution. Virginia should go it alone, raise and equip a small army of riflemen, and in a lightening move take the Indiana and Illinois region from the British. Clark reasoned that the British were trying to hold a vast tract of land with a few troops, a handful of Tories, and the Indians. The British posts at Kaskaskia, on the Mississippi, and Vincennes, on the Wabash, were former French forts manned by men with no allegiance to Britain. Clark's enthusiasm convinced Governor Henry and the Council of State that victory was possible if the operation was conducted secretly. Support from George Mason, Thomas Jefferson, and George Wythe was solicited and gained. The a.s.sembly, without knowing the purpose for the authorization, gave Clark permission to raise troops and released the needed gunpowder.

In June 1778 Clark with 175 riflemen, far short of his hoped-for complement, set out from the Falls of the Ohio (Louisville). The small number can be attributed to the fact that the men, like the a.s.sembly, had to sign-on without knowing their destiny. A few slipped away after they learned Clark's true plans. Those who stayed were dedicated warriors. On July 4, after floating down the Ohio, Clark's men appeared outside Kaskaskia. The fort surrendered without a shot being fired. As Clark suspected, the French inhabitants welcomed the Americans. On July 6 another former French town, Cahokia, 60 miles northward, capitulated. And on July 14 Frenchmen from Kaskaskia persuaded their fellow countrymen at Fort Sackville in Vincennes to surrender. On August 1 Clark occupied the fort.

Clark's plan had worked to perfection. But he was now faced with the same problem which had enabled him to seize the region--he could not hold three forts scattered over several hundred miles (Vincennes is 180 miles east of Kaskaskia). Therefore, when Governor Hamilton moved south from Detroit in December with his own make-shift army, Clark's men had to abandon Vincennes and flee west to Kaskaskia. All seemed lost.

Again the refusal of the Americans to follow European military conventions paid off. Clark, ignoring the tradition to go into winter quarters took Vincennes in the dead of winter with less than 130 men, many of them French. It was the most remarkable single military feat of the Revolution. Only men who had lived in the frontier wilderness could have endured the march. Despite wading waist-deep through flooding rivers and swamps in freezing February snowstorms, going days without warm food, poorly clothed, and carrying only the minimum supply of gunpowder and shot, Clark and his men reached Vincennes determined to fight. Learning that he had arrived undetected by the British, Clark ordered great bonfires lit, both to warm his frozen men and to deceive Hamilton.

Watching dancing shadows of seemingly countless men whooping and shouting in front of the fires, Hamilton concluded he was hopelessly outnumbered.

The next morning, February 24, 1779, the bold Clark demanded Hamilton's surrender. At first the governor refused, but a series of well placed rifle shots took the fight out of the defenders. Then Clark ordered several Indians, caught in the act of taking scalps into the fort, tomahawked in full view of the fort. Hamilton agreed to surrender. Clark sent Hamilton under heavy guard to Virginia, pa.s.sing through the Kentucky settlements his Indians had hara.s.sed. Ignoring protests from the British, Governor Jefferson refused to exchange Hamilton, keeping him in irons in the Williamsburg jail until November 1780 when the prisoner finally agreed to sign a parole not to fight against the Americans or to go among the Indians.[43] Clark was treated shamefully by the Virginia a.s.sembly after the war and was never fully reimbursed for his personal expenses in the west.

[43] For a dramatic, but not inaccurate, account of the expedition and Clark, read John Bakeless, Background to Glory: The Story of George Rogers Clark (Lippincott: Philadelphia, 1957.)

For Clark the capture of Vincennes was to be a prelude to taking Detroit.

In both 1779 and 1780 he planned marches to the center of British western power. Neither time could he bring off a coordinated attack. The frontier was under too heavy pressure from the Ohio Indians led by Tory Henry Bird and the infamous renegade, Simon Girty. Instead, Clark concentrated on Indians closer to Kentucky. In August 1780 with 1,000 riflemen he destroyed the princ.i.p.al Shawnee towns of Chillocothe and Piqua, but could not break the Shawnee strength. The invasion of eastern Virginia in 1781 ended hopes for the Detroit project, drew men from the west, and opened the way for the Ohio Indians to go on the offensive. Bitter fighting continued in the west after Yorktown. Clark's troops finally broke the Shawnees in November 1782 when they again leveled Chillocothe and Piqua.

Hostilities and the British presence in the Northwest Territory remained a contentious issue until after the War of 1812.

The War and Eastern Virginia, 1776-1779

Initial British war strategy did not call for a direct attack on the Chesapeake states. They were too hard to hold once conquered. There were no towns to occupy, no natural defense positions, too many rivers to cross, too little to be gained in comparison to New York, Philadelphia, or Charleston. Furthermore, there was no sizeable loyalist population to rise up and a.s.sist the British as in the Carolinas and the middle states.

The war effort was men, material, and money. Under Governor Henry the executive branch functioned reasonably well. There were no emergencies, no need for quick decisions which only the executive can make, and little sapping of morale which a long, inconclusive war can bring. Still, Henry recognized the restrictions placed on the governor, whom he called a "mere phantom". Fortunately for him, he left office in June 1779 before the inherent weakness of the executive branch became apparent. Jefferson was not to be so fortunate. From time to time in the administrations of Henry, Jefferson, and Thomas Nelson, Jr., persons talked of making the governor a "dictator" (in the Roman use of this word, not the modern connotation). These were mostly speculative discussions, not serious attempts to change the government. Only in the dire crises of Summer 1781 was it even a remote possibility.

The most direct threat to Virginia in these early years was on the seas.

To meet that threat Virginia established a state navy in 1776. Eventually the Virginia navy had "72 vessels of all cla.s.ses, including many ships, brigs, and schooners; but apparently most of them were small, poorly manned, and lightly armed; and were used largely for commerce."[44] Never intended to meet the British fleet in combat, the Virginia navy did succeed in establishing regular patrols, clearing the Bay of privateers, and protecting merchantmen trading in the West Indies.

[44] Gardner W. Allen, A Naval of the American Revolution, 2 volumes (Boston, 1913), I, 40-41.

By January 1779 the British army came into Piedmont Virginia in a totally unexpected manner. Congress declared the "convention" (treaty of surrender) by which Burgoyne had surrendered his troops at Saratoga to be faulty and ordered some 4,000 Hessian and British soldiers imprisoned in Albemarle County. Settled along Ivy Creek, the prisoners, mostly Germans, lived in hastily built huts generously called "The Barracks". Several of their chief officers, among them Baron de Riedesel and General William Phillips, lived in comfort and close contact with their near neighbor, Governor Jefferson. Phillips was shortly exchanged and went to New York.

The conditions under which the troops lived steadily deteriorated, although the prisoners were so inadequately guarded that hundreds walked away. In November 1780 Governor Jefferson concluded that the convention troops should be moved from Virginia to get them away from invading British troops. The British troops moved first toward Frederick, Maryland, with the Hessians following. Again many of the prisoners drifted off into the forests never reaching Frederick.

Black Virginians in the Revolution

One particularly difficult question for the government was whether to utilize the black population in the military. Only a few thousand of the nearly 230,000 black residents were free men. The remainder were slaves.

There was a constant fear that arming free blacks would incite their slave brethren to revolt. This fear was strongest in 1775-1776 when Dunmore had encouraged slaves to flee their masters and join his troops.

Although Dunmore's black troops numbered only several hundred nearly 10,000 slaves fled Virginia during the war. Most did not better their lot, ending up as slaves in the West Indies. Many did get to Nova Scotia where they lived as free men in the large loyalist colony there. Others settled in the British West African colony of Sierra Leone.

Negro troops were present at Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, and in the ranks of Washington's first Continentals. Quickly, however, under pressure from southern colonies, notably South Carolina, Congress adopted a policy of excluding blacks from further enlistment in the Continental Army. Although most states excluded slaves from service, they did not exclude free blacks from enlisting in the militia. Virginia allowed free blacks to enlist after July 1775. This enticed slaves to run away and enlist as free blacks, a practice the a.s.sembly tried to halt by requiring all black enlistees to have certificates of freedom. Then an odd reversal occurred after 1779 when the state began to conscript white males into the militia. Taking advantage of the provision in the draft law allowing draftees to send subst.i.tutes, some slave owners offered their slaves as subst.i.tutes. This was as far as the enlistment of slaves went. James Madison proposed in 1780 that the state purchase slaves, free them, and make them soldiers. The legislature rejected the plan. On the other hand, the state did buy some slaves to work in shipyards, on shipboard, and in state-run factories.[45]

[45] For a fuller discussion of black Virginians in the Revolution, see Luther P. Jackson, Virginia Negro Soldiers and Sailors in the Revolutionary War (Norfolk, 1944), and Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1961).

The actual number of black Virginians in the service is unknown.

Historians Luther Jackson and Benjamin Quarles suggest there were several hundred in the army and at least 140 in the small Virginia navy. Usually these men were orderlies, drummers, and support troops. In the navy they frequently served as river pilots. There were exceptions like freeman John Banks of Goochland, who fought as a cavalryman under Colonel Bland for two years, the well-known spy James Lafayette, who performed invaluable work for Lafayette in the closing days of the war, or John de Baptist, a sailor who served with distinction on the Dragon.

Peace did not bring freedom for the slaves in the services. The state-owned slaves were resold. Free men who had enlisted in the service were ent.i.tled to and did receive enlistment and pay bounties due all soldiers. Slaves whose masters had offered them as subst.i.tutes had a more difficult time. Some slave owners tried to reclaim them as slaves even though the Virginia law explicitly permitted the enlistment only of free men. Fortunately, Governor Benjamin Harrison was enraged by this duplicity at what he called a repudiation of the "common principles of justice and humanity" and prevailed upon the legislature "to pa.s.s an act giving to these unhappy creatures that liberty which they have been in some measure instrumental in securing for us."

Nevertheless, although white Virginians recognized the contradiction between that liberty which they enjoyed and the slavery which existed around them, they did not see a means whereby the ideal that all men were created equal could become a practical reality. Unlike later generations, however, the Revolutionary generation made no attempt to justify slavery or to accept its extension. In 1778 Virginia became the first state to prohibit the importation of slaves, and in 1782 pa.s.sed a liberal manumission law permitting masters to free their slaves without special legislative act. Many took advantage of this law. Virginia also determined that there should be no slavery in the western lands ceded to the federal government. Jefferson saw to it that a prohibition against slavery was written into the federal Land Ordinance of 1784 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Yet, what was earlier noted bears repeating--the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence were the beginning of a great governmental experiment, not the finished product.

The British Move South, 1780-1781

The British shifted their armies southward in 1779, hoping to cut off the lower southern states, break the morale of the rest of America, and force a negotiated peace. Their princ.i.p.al hopes rested on exploiting loyalist strength in the fiercely divided Carolinas where much of the fighting since 1775 had been colonial against colonial, patriot against Tory. In early 1780 General Henry Clinton sailed from New York with 8,000 troops, outmaneuvered General Benjamin Lincoln, and captured Charleston. The defeat was a severe blow to the Americans costing them their chief southern seaport, several thousand Continentals and militiamen from the Carolinas and Virginia, and Generals Lincoln and William Woodford.

Clinton sailed back to New York, leaving his troops with Lord Cornwallis.

The most daring of the British generals, Cornwallis decided to leave Charleston and invade the Carolinas. With excellent support from Colonel Banastre Tarleton, Lord Rawdon, and Major Patrick Ferguson he swept all before him. Tarleton, the best cavalry officer in either army, and Ferguson led partisan loyalist units. Tarleton's troopers, known as the British Tory Legion, needed no introduction to Virginians. They had slaughtered without quarter unarmed Virginians under Colonel Abraham Buford in May 1780 at the Waxhaws, south of Charlotte, North Carolina.

From then on he was known as "b.l.o.o.d.y Tarleton".

Congress elected Horatio Gates to replace Lincoln in the southern command. Gates hurried south with several thousand Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina militiamen and Continental troops. Stumbling into Cornwallis' army at Camden, South Carolina, he planned and executed a faulty battle plan. Cornwallis executed perfectly and completely routed Gates. For the only time in the war Virginia militiamen behaved badly, fled the field, and were a major contributing factor to the disaster. Not only did Gates lose 600 men, many of them battle-hardened Continentals, he lost two outstanding officers, General Jean de Kalb, the tough German officer, and Colonel Edward Porterfield from Virginia. Facing almost sure defeat in the Carolinas, Congress replaced Gates with Nathaniel Greene of Rhode Island, taking care not to embarra.s.s the Englishman who had given so much to Patriot cause.

Greene turned out to be the man to baffle Cornwallis. With a constantly underequipped and often inadequate army he managed to keep Cornwallis at bay. He was moved by one desire--to force Cornwallis into costly battles, but never expose his whole army to capture. Flee if necessary, but be able to fight another day. He was inventive and unorthodox. With an army much smaller than Cornwallis' he divided it into thirds, plus compelling Cornwallis to divide his own army. Greene knew that Cornwallis, victorious as he might have been, was detached from Charleston and had to live off the land. He would fight a war of attrition and wear Cornwallis down. His strategy worked, although not without fateful moments. He had great faith in his command officers and gave them considerable leeway.

They rewarded him with two stunning victories--King's Mountain, North Carolina in October 1780 and Cowpens, South Carolina in January 1781.

King's Mountain was a unique battle for it was fought almost completely between Americans, Major Ferguson and his South Carolina, New York, and New Jersey Tories on the British side and North Carolina and Virginia frontier riflemen under Colonels Isaac Shelby, fiery William Campbell, and John Sevier for the United States. Although Ferguson's position from the outset was nearly impossible, he refused to surrender, knowing what was in store if he did. He was correct. The hatred which only the Carolina civil war unleashed during the Revolution burst forth. Only the intervention of Shelby and Campbell kept the frontiersmen from annihilating Ferguson's Tories. As it was, the British lost 1,000 men, 700 of them captives. Ferguson was killed.

Cowpens was a personal victory for General Daniel Morgan who felt he had been slighted by congress. Greene gave him a full command and sent him off to find Tarleton. He found him at Cowpens, not too far from King's Mountain. Morgan utilized his riflemen, light infantry, and cavalry and Continental regulars in an unconventional manner. He thoroughly whipped Tarleton, who up until that time had been invincible. Morgan's men killed 100 British, captured 800, and seized Tarleton's entire supply train.

The combination of King's Mountain and Cowpens completely disrupted Cornwallis' plan and led him into the series of mistakes which ended at Yorktown.[46]

[46] Ward, American Revolution, II, 792.

Even when he suffered defeat or a stalemate, as he did at Guilford Courthouse (Greensboro, North Carolina) in March 1781, Greene made Cornwallis pay such a heavy price that the British general could not afford the cost of victory. Wandering aimlessly after Greene across North Carolina and unable to live off the barren countryside, Cornwallis retreated eastward to Wilmington. There in the spring of 1781, with only 1400 of his original 3,000 troops left, he decided to move north and join Benedict Arnold's troops who had invaded Virginia on December 30, 1781.

The Invasion of Virginia, 1781