O’Donnell - Washington’s Immortals : the untold story of an elite regiment who changed the course of the Revolution

WASHINGTONS
IMMORTALS

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WASHINTONS
IMMORTALS

The Untold Story of an
Elite Regiment
Who Changed the Course
of the Revolution

Patrick K. ODonnell

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright 2016 by Patrick K. ODonnell

Jacket design by Carlos Beltrn/Big Dot Design

Cover photograph Mary Evans Library

Author photograph by Nick Lockett 2015

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-8021-2459-3

eISBN 978-0-8021-9071-0

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

To the men and women of the Revolution who sacrificed everything
for an ideathe United States. You are the greatest generation.

Contents

: Gentlemen of Honour, Family, and Fortune

: Smallwoods Battalion and the Birth of an Army

: Girding for War

: Americas First Civil War

: The Otter

: The Armada

: Maryland Goes to War

: The Storm Begins

: The Battle of Brooklyn

: Escape from Long Island

: Manhattan

: When Twenty-Five Men Held Off an Army

: Fort Washington

: The Crisis

: Victory or DeathThe Gamble at Trenton

: Princeton

: Brandywine

: Waynes Affair

: Mud Island

: Valley Forge and Wilmington

: A Damned Poltroon

: Light Infantry

: Despots

: The Gibraltar of America
The Midnight Storming of Stony Point

: Interlude

: The March South

: A Jalap and a Night March

: Camden

: Lay Their Country Waste
with Fire and Sword

: Washingtons Best General

: The Ragtag Army

: Hunting the Hunter

: Cowpens

: To Follow Greenes Army to
the End of the World

: Saw Em Hollerin and
a Snortin and a Drownin

: The Race to the Dan

: Guilford Courthouse
A Complicated Scene of Horror and Distress

: Hobkirks Hill

: Ninety Six

: Eutaw Springs

: Conquer or DieYorktown

: The Last Battle

: Omnia Reliquit Servare Rempublicam

Preface

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

Here lie buried 256 Maryland soldiers

Who fell in the Battle of Brooklyn

August 27, 1776

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

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

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

Close up! Close up!

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

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

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

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

Defying the carnage unfolding around them, Gists men closed their ranks over the bodies of their dead comrades, and still turned their faces to the foe.

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

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

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

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