Fields of Battle by John Keegan

Author:John Keegan [Keegan, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82858-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

The War in the South

After Monmouth Courthouse there were to be no more major battles in the North and indeed scarcely any more serious fighting in the Revolutionary War. During 1779 the British mounted a counteroffensive in the lower Hudson, designed to interrupt the flow of supplies from the Revolution’s main bases in Massachusetts and Connecticut to Washington’s army at White Plains. They took Stony Point, just short of West Point, which Kosciusko had been fortifying with chains and redoubts since April 1778, but it was recaptured by Anthony Wayne, a young Pennsylvanian tanner turned general, in July; an attempt to surrender West Point to the British in September 1780 by Benedict Arnold failed when his papers were found on Major John André. André was hanged as a spy; Arnold, the disgruntled Faust of the Revolution, its most ferocious soldier and most ambitious zealot, escaped to the British, who granted him general rank. He escaped to fight another day against the Americans’ French allies in the West Indies.

There was also to be a long passage of arms in the wild Old Northwest, south of Lakes Michigan, Erie, and Ontario, which had been so fought over by the French, British, and Americans in King George’s and the French and Indian Wars. The American loyalist Sir John Johnson, son of the Sir William who had terrorised the borders of French Canada in the 1750s, took up the terrorisation of the Mohawk River region, with his Indian ally, Joseph Brant, during 1778–81, causing Washington to detach a force under John Sullivan to pacify the region by counterterror in an expedition up the Susquehanna River in 1779. A little earlier the remarkable American patriot George Roger Clark had embarked almost single-handed on an effort to wrest the Ohio country from the British and their Indian allies. Starting from the Forks of the Ohio (Pittsburgh) in May 1778, he was to carry war against the British and their Indian allies as far away as St. Louis, at the junction of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, seven hundred miles from Philadelphia, where independence had been declared, and Vincennes on the Wabash, one of the Ohio’s great tributaries that rises south of Lake Erie. Vincennes had been taken by a British party under Henry Hamilton, who led it down from Detroit on a winter march of seventy-one days—worthy of the French and the Americans at their toughest—in October–December 1778. Clark, who was acting on the authority of the state of Virginia, which regarded the Ohio as part of its dominion, had already been in Vincennes, after boating the length of the Ohio from Fort Henry (Wheeling, West Virginia), and had gone on to take the former French forts of Chartres, Kakaskia, and Cahokia, the latter now a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. Hearing of Hamilton’s arrival, Clark, believing the British “could not support … we should be so mad as to attempt to mark 80 Leagues through a Drowned Country in the Debth of Winter,” led his

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.