WEBVTT NOTE 49. The End of the War in the North 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:10.000 Vol. 4, Part VII. The Military History of the Revolution, 1778-1781. 2 00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:15.000 Vol. 4, Chapter 49. The End of the War in the North. 3 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:23.000 After the Battle of Saratoga and French entry into the war, British war strategy changed. 4 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:32.000 No longer was a quick victory looked for. Instead, Clinton was to base himself at New York City in nearby areas. 5 00:00:32.000 --> 00:00:42.000 From there, he and the Navy were to conduct a war of harassment and terror raids, blockading, burning, raiding. 6 00:00:42.000 --> 00:00:49.000 An open and direct confrontation with Washington's army was to be sought, but not counted upon. 7 00:00:49.000 --> 00:01:12.000 In the West, the British were to lead Indian terror raids on the frontier and try to capture the land west of the Appalachians, but the main theater of war was to shift to the South. Lightly populated and filled with Tories and restive slaves, the South was now seen as the Achilles heel of the United States. 8 00:01:12.000 --> 00:01:21.000 Starting with southernmost Georgia, the plan was to roll north, attracting new governments by resurgent Tories as they went. 9 00:01:21.000 --> 00:01:29.000 New England and other northern states would thereby be isolated, cut off from the great export staples of the south, 10 00:01:29.000 --> 00:01:36.000 blockaded, starved out, and forced into surrender, or at least subordination to Great Britain. 11 00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:46.000 As in the earlier years of the war, the plan relied on an overestimation of Tory strength and effectiveness. 12 00:01:46.000 --> 00:01:54.000 But with this difference, whereas Britain had previously overlooked the need to organize Tories because of overconfidence, 13 00:01:54.000 --> 00:02:00.000 now they relied excessively on Tory forces as against their own. 14 00:02:00.000 --> 00:02:22.000 In doing this, the British found that since the masses support the revolution, as in other battles against revolution, that counter-revolution must reduce to sporadic raids against the people and rely increasingly on naked terror against their persons and property. 15 00:02:22.000 --> 00:02:31.000 The remainder of the Revolutionary War in the North followed essentially this pattern of indecisive skirmishes and sorties. 16 00:02:31.000 --> 00:02:37.000 The most important thrust occurred after a cessation of fighting of almost two years. 17 00:02:37.000 --> 00:02:48.000 Clinton moved up the Hudson with 6,000 men at the end of May 1779 to capture forts at Stony Point and Verplanks Point. 18 00:02:48.000 --> 00:02:58.000 Washington was stationed in a ring around New York City and Clinton tried to draw him into a general action or else into leaving his camp exposed. 19 00:02:58.000 --> 00:03:11.000 He sent expeditions on terror raids into Connecticut to burn the coastal towns, specifically New Haven, East Haven, Fairfield, Greens Farms and Norwalk. 20 00:03:11.000 --> 00:03:20.000 Particularly exuberant in inflicting terror and devastation was the former New York royal governor, William Tryon. 21 00:03:20.000 --> 00:03:25.000 But in all this, Washington was not lured into coming to Connecticut's defense. 22 00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:31.000 Instead, he cleverly decided upon a surprise attack to retake Stony Point. 23 00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:38.000 Washington sent on the expedition a newly formed elite corps of riflemen and light infantry, 24 00:03:38.000 --> 00:03:46.920 Infantry, the American Light Infantry. Headed by General Mad Anthony Wayne, these 1200 men 25 00:03:46.920 --> 00:03:53.840 boldly and successfully stormed Stony Point on July 15. Although Wayne had to withdraw 26 00:03:53.840 --> 00:03:59.500 from Stony Point when Clinton approached, Clinton soon had to conserve men by evacuating 27 00:03:59.500 --> 00:04:06.820 the two forts. Giving the command of the Light Infantry Unit to Wayne was eloquent evidence 28 00:04:06.820 --> 00:04:13.540 Presence of the Shabby Way in Which Washington Treated His Best Officers 29 00:04:13.540 --> 00:04:21.740 Lee, broken, court-martialed, disgraced Gates, the victor of Saratoga, vindictively given 30 00:04:21.740 --> 00:04:27.820 petty assignments and sent into virtual retirement after 1778 31 00:04:27.820 --> 00:04:35.460 Arnold, confined during 1778 to the inactivity and petty administrative duties of military 32 00:04:35.460 --> 00:04:50.460 And now, the guerrilla fighter Dan Morgan. The obvious choice for commander of the light infantry, he was deliberately passed over by Washington for the post he wanted so much. 33 00:04:50.460 --> 00:05:00.460 The obvious choice for Commander of the Light Infantry, he was deliberately passed over by Washington for the post he wanted so much. 34 00:05:00.460 --> 00:05:19.460 Despite his enormous services to the Revolution, Morgan, too, was forced into virtual retirement during 1779 when Washington summarily removed him from the Continental Army and sent him down to the Merrick Colonelcy of a Virginia Infantry Regiment. 35 00:05:19.460 --> 00:05:29.460 No important military battles took place in the North after Monmouth, even the Stoney Point fracas being a minor skirmish of little importance. 36 00:05:29.460 --> 00:05:33.460 The British captured and held the port of Castine, Maine. 37 00:05:33.460 --> 00:05:42.460 Newport changed hands when Clinton evacuated the town in late 1779 to release more men for the southern campaign. 38 00:05:42.460 --> 00:05:49.460 The French, under Comte de Rochambeau, occupied Newport in July 1780. 39 00:05:49.460 --> 00:05:58.460 Washington hoped to unite with him in an assault upon New York, but the superior British fleet bottled up the French at Newport indefinitely. 40 00:05:58.460 --> 00:06:05.460 More important were the British terror raids, such as the burning and destruction of the Connecticut towns, 41 00:06:05.460 --> 00:06:14.960 The Burning of New Bedford, Massachusetts, and the Murder of Unarmed Men in a Night Raid on Little Egg Harbor in New Jersey. 42 00:06:14.960 --> 00:06:22.960 The main effect of these raids was to embitter the Americans further and stiffen their resolve for victory. 43 00:06:22.960 --> 00:06:33.960 Actually, the worst problem facing the American cause in the North was the progressive disintegration of Washington's Continental Army. 44 00:06:33.960 --> 00:07:02.960 The Americans, as a nation of revolutionaries, were not equipped to linger on for years like a conventional army in enforced idleness, yet this was what Washington was demanding, but the main source of the soldiers' distress was the mammoth and increasingly runaway inflation caused by the indiscriminate printing of continental paper money. 45 00:07:02.960 --> 00:07:18.960 This cascade of new money caused the paper to depreciate at an accelerated pace against species, engendering cries of a scarcity of money and pressure for even greater use of the printing press. 46 00:07:18.960 --> 00:07:26.960 Since the Continental soldiers were paid in continentals, they were being paid in increasingly worthless paper. 47 00:07:26.960 --> 00:07:37.960 Their hardships were greatly aggravated, furthermore, by the attempts of the states to enforce maximum price controls to check the runaway rise in prices. 48 00:07:37.960 --> 00:07:55.960 By attacking the symptoms, prices, rather than the cause, the money supply, the governments did not halt the inflation, but only disrupted market supplies more by shutting off the flow of supplies to areas where maximum control was enforced. 49 00:07:55.960 --> 00:08:12.960 This was particularly true in an economy where farmers and artisan manufacturers could easily consume their own produce or engage in local barter when price controls discouraged them from participating in the market economy at all. 50 00:08:12.960 --> 00:08:28.960 This combination of inflation, depreciation, price controls and continued idleness caused a massive and increasing hardship, resentment and a diminishing of the Continental Army. 51 00:08:28.960 --> 00:08:38.000 Thus, the winter camp of 1779-80 at Morristown, New Jersey, far surpassed the winter at Valley 52 00:08:38.000 --> 00:08:44.520 Forge for misery and adversity among the American soldiers. 53 00:08:44.520 --> 00:08:51.480 In mid-December, an empty commissary led Washington to despair of a total break-up of the army 54 00:08:51.480 --> 00:08:53.240 within a fortnight. 55 00:08:53.240 --> 00:08:59.360 The soldiers were forced to loot local farmyards, and supplies were increasingly confiscated 56 00:08:59.360 --> 00:09:04.720 from the populace. Their problem was not a shortage of food in the area, but rather that 57 00:09:04.720 --> 00:09:11.980 the New Jersey farmers were understandably reluctant to sell their produce for near-worthless 58 00:09:11.980 --> 00:09:18.920 continental currency. Angry over lack of food, clothing, and arrears in salary that would 59 00:09:18.920 --> 00:09:29.920 The money would be paid in worthless paper to Connecticut regiments mutinied at the end of May 1780 demanding food or permission to go home. 60 00:09:29.920 --> 00:09:35.920 They were only subdued with the arrest of the ringleaders by a veteran Pennsylvania brigade. 61 00:09:35.920 --> 00:09:47.920 Washington's army had now been reduced from 27,000 the previous autumn to 10,000 men of whom fewer than 4,000 were fit for duty 62 00:09:47.920 --> 00:09:52.960 and these chronically hungry, cold and embittered. 63 00:09:52.960 --> 00:10:01.160 Into this disintegration on June 6, Clinton sent General Wilhelm von Nippelsen with 5,000 64 00:10:01.160 --> 00:10:06.600 men from Staten Island to Elizabethtown in New Jersey. 65 00:10:06.600 --> 00:10:12.720 Here the British showed that they still failed to comprehend that revolutionary warfare is 66 00:10:12.720 --> 00:10:16.200 waged by a people in arms. 67 00:10:16.200 --> 00:10:21.440 They could not understand that the real power of the American force lay not in the visible 68 00:10:21.440 --> 00:10:27.240 nucleus of the Continental Army, which was truly in bad straights, but rather in the 69 00:10:27.240 --> 00:10:33.240 invisible hordes of the armed American people, the rabble in arms. 70 00:10:33.240 --> 00:10:38.480 Resorting to brutal terror on the New Jersey march, the burning and plundering of villages 71 00:10:38.480 --> 00:10:44.540 ordered by General Tryon only served to harden the American resolve. 72 00:10:44.540 --> 00:10:49.980 Nipphausen as Burgoyne in his march found himself eventually surrounded by erupting 73 00:10:49.980 --> 00:10:57.980 and rapidly gathering militia, so Nipphausen was soon confronted by large bodies of suddenly 74 00:10:57.980 --> 00:11:04.700 materializing militia, which forced him to turn back at Springfield. 75 00:11:04.700 --> 00:11:10.980 Later in June, Nipphausen again tried to march toward Springfield, but the highly able Nathaniel 76 00:11:10.980 --> 00:11:18.100 General Greene, with fewer than 2,000 men, stopped him cold at Springfield. Realizing 77 00:11:18.100 --> 00:11:24.820 that every mile of his future march would be no less obstinately resisted, Niphausen 78 00:11:24.820 --> 00:11:30.420 withdrew from New Jersey, pausing only to burn Springfield to the ground. This was the 79 00:11:30.420 --> 00:11:37.100 end of New Jersey operations by the British. Greene's victory at Springfield marked the 80 00:11:37.100 --> 00:11:42.900 The return to the field of yet another brilliant commander whose talents had been wasted for 81 00:11:42.900 --> 00:11:47.140 two years in the post of quartermaster general. 82 00:11:47.140 --> 00:11:54.820 Throughout the year 1779, the Americans had been deprived by Washington's mismanagement 83 00:11:54.820 --> 00:12:01.180 and personal peak of the services of their best military officers, and Green was one 84 00:12:01.180 --> 00:12:02.180 of them. 85 00:12:02.180 --> 00:12:10.180 Moreover, Green was now returned to his quartermaster post, from which he resigned, but was reinstated 86 00:12:10.180 --> 00:12:13.660 in a dispute with the Continental Congress. 87 00:12:13.660 --> 00:12:19.780 An understandably severe blow to the morale of the American troops was the discovery of 88 00:12:19.780 --> 00:12:24.300 the treason of Benedict Arnold in the fall of 1780. 89 00:12:24.300 --> 00:12:31.260 Soon after taking up his post as military commandant of Philadelphia in 1779, the embittered 90 00:12:31.260 --> 00:12:38.580 Arnold married the aristocratic Tory belle Peggy Shippen. Finding it difficult, amid 91 00:12:38.580 --> 00:12:44.000 the pleasures of Philadelphia, to support a way of life to which he and his bride were 92 00:12:44.000 --> 00:12:50.980 becoming accustomed and encouraged by her, Arnold decided to make a deal with the British. 93 00:12:50.980 --> 00:12:58.280 Maneuvering to obtain the command of the fort at West Point, Arnold agreed to sell its surrender 94 00:12:58.280 --> 00:13:04.280 to the British for the municipant sum of 10,000 pounds. 95 00:13:04.280 --> 00:13:11.680 However, the British liaison with Arnold, Major John Andre, a friend of Peggy Arnold's, 96 00:13:11.680 --> 00:13:17.000 was captured with incriminating documents on September 23. 97 00:13:17.000 --> 00:13:22.440 Arnold himself was barely able to escape to New York City, where he was handsomely rewarded 98 00:13:22.440 --> 00:13:26.480 by the British and made a general on the British side. 99 00:13:26.480 --> 00:13:33.280 So shocking a blow was this to the Americans that Benedict Arnold became a veritable synonym 100 00:13:33.280 --> 00:13:40.720 for traitor. For his part, Major Andre was hanged by Washington as a spy. Disliked and 101 00:13:40.720 --> 00:13:47.320 distrusted by the British, Arnold ironically found the same complaint in their ranks he 102 00:13:47.320 --> 00:13:54.960 had suffered at home. He did not receive a command at all worthy of his military talents. 103 00:13:54.960 --> 00:14:00.960 Although he was permitted to launch only a few raids, he was nevertheless fated to conduct 104 00:14:00.960 --> 00:14:07.120 the last engagement of the war in the North and against his old birthplace in southeastern 105 00:14:07.120 --> 00:14:14.200 Connecticut. In early September 1781, Arnold organized a large terror raid against the 106 00:14:14.200 --> 00:14:20.520 port of New London, Connecticut, a base for privateers that contained a large quantity 107 00:14:20.520 --> 00:14:27.920 of Military Stores. On capturing the garrison, his men slaughtered almost the entire body 108 00:14:27.920 --> 00:14:36.520 of 150 prisoners and systematically burned the towns of Groton and New London. 109 00:14:36.520 --> 00:14:42.560 Conditions in Washington's winter camp of 1780-81 were as bad and for basically the 110 00:14:42.560 --> 00:14:49.040 same reasons as the previous winter. Most aggrieved were the Pennsylvania soldiers, 111 00:14:49.040 --> 00:14:54.560 The three years of duty for which they had enlisted were now up, and yet the military 112 00:14:54.560 --> 00:15:01.280 authorities insisted that they must stay until the end of the war. Especially outraged was 113 00:15:01.280 --> 00:15:08.280 the brigade of Pennsylvanians stationed near Morristown under the command of General Wayne. 114 00:15:08.280 --> 00:15:16.480 On the night of January 1, 1781, the men of Pennsylvania line mutinied, killed one officer, 115 00:15:16.480 --> 00:15:20.740 and wounded two others and captured the artillery. 116 00:15:20.740 --> 00:15:25.540 The men were now determined to run their own lives, and unlike the Connecticut mutineers 117 00:15:25.540 --> 00:15:30.980 of the year before, they refused to be awed by higher authority. 118 00:15:30.980 --> 00:15:37.980 Led by Sergeant William Bonsar, six full regiments of Pennsylvanians demanded discharges for 119 00:15:38.240 --> 00:15:45.240 all who had served for their three years, as well as payment of the wages in arrears. 120 00:15:45.240 --> 00:15:59.240 They set out to march on Congress in Philadelphia to present their grievances there, thus placing justice and their liberty higher than the fetish of military subordination and obedience. 121 00:15:59.240 --> 00:16:06.240 Congress was wiser than to try to treat these men as traitors and mutineers. 122 00:16:06.240 --> 00:16:12.920 A committee headed by Pennsylvanian Joseph Reed, now President of the Congress, was sent to 123 00:16:12.920 --> 00:16:17.200 Princeton to negotiate with the mutineers. 124 00:16:17.200 --> 00:16:22.640 There an agreement was hammered out by the end of January that yielded to the demands 125 00:16:22.640 --> 00:16:25.400 of the Pennsylvania line. 126 00:16:25.400 --> 00:16:30.640 Congress agreed to discharge all those who had served for three years and to pay the 127 00:16:30.640 --> 00:16:55.640 While negotiations were in progress, General Clinton saw an opportunity to profit from this discord and sent two Tory emissaries to Princeton to offer back pay and full pardon if the mutineers would join the British cause. 128 00:16:55.640 --> 00:17:02.320 The incensed mutineers seized the messengers and turned them over to General Wayne, who 129 00:17:02.320 --> 00:17:09.280 promptly hanged them as spies. Remarkably, when Wayne offered the mutineers a reward 130 00:17:09.280 --> 00:17:17.580 in gold for their fidelity, Sergeant Bonsar nobly spoke for his men in declining the offer. 131 00:17:17.580 --> 00:17:24.960 The men, he argued, were not entitled to any other reward but the love of our country. 132 00:17:24.960 --> 00:17:30.880 Pennsylvania's example inspired the New Jersey regiments of the Continental Army stationed 133 00:17:30.880 --> 00:17:38.360 at Pumpton, New Jersey to do the same thing. On January 20, parts of three New Jersey regiments 134 00:17:38.360 --> 00:17:46.560 began to march toward Trenton. But this time, Washington, who had wanted to crush the Pennsylvanians 135 00:17:46.560 --> 00:17:53.200 but was wary of fighting eight regiments, treated the men as his authoritarian instincts 136 00:17:53.200 --> 00:18:12.200 General Robert Howe was sent with a unit of New England Continentals to surround and disarm the New Jersey units. He selected mutinous leaders from each of the regiments, tried several at court-martial, and had two shot by a firing squad made up of other rebel leaders. 137 00:18:12.200 --> 00:18:21.200 As Washington snarled, unless this dangerous spirit can be suppressed by force, there is an end to all subordination in the Army. 138 00:18:21.200 --> 00:18:21.700 Army.