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Chapter 3

A River Red with Blood

Not one but two “September 11ths” darken the chronicles of American history. The often-forgotten one happened in 1777, when the trouncing of George Washington’s army at the Battle of the Brandywine marked the military nadir of the Revolution.

Philadelphia was then the largest city in America, and to defend it seemed imperative. Armies attacking from the south would have to cross the Brandywine, a formidable barrier with steep-sided hills and strong watery currents. And so it was on the banks of the Brandywine that Washington drew his defensive line in September 1777 as a British invasion force approached—having landed at the head of the Chesapeake Bay and marched north. The bucolic countryside settled by peace-loving Quakers was about to witness what is said to have been the largest and longest land battle of the Revolutionary War, with some thirty thousand soldiers engaged as Generals Washington and Howe faced off in their only head-to-head matchup.¹

This may have been the most titanic battle ever fought in this hemisphere prior to the Civil War—and yet the mighty contest is little known today. Compare it to Gettysburg, fought three counties to the westward, eighty-six years later: preserved land there comprises six thousand acres, whereas at Brandywine there are only fifty acres officially preserved at Chadds Ford, with most of the rest of the battlefield in private hands and, thanks to recent sprawl, often cluttered with housing developments. Gettysburg has a thousand markers and monuments; Brandywine has just a handful. Of course Gettysburg was a much bigger spectacle, with five times more soldiers on the field. But the biggest difference is that the American army was defeated at the Brandywine, and defeats rarely get commemorated.

The American rout was the result of one of the more ingenious flanking maneuvers in military history—“a capital stratagem,” novelist Washington Irving later called it. As Howe’s army approached, some eighteen thousand strong, Washington, with about fifteen thousand tattered troops, failed to identify all the Brandywine fords upstream from his position at Chadds Ford (see Plate 4). Moreover, someone fed him the false information that there were no fords at all above a certain point. The British took brilliant advantage of his ignorance. The portly, toothless Howe was that day “at his very best,” according to the great British military historian Sir George Otto Trevelyan, not his sometimes sluggish self but “the high-mettled warrior who had stormed the redoubt at Bunker’s Hill.”²

As Howe’s massive army neared the Brandywine on the foggy morning of September 11—their ultimate objective Philadelphia—he sent a small group to strike Washington’s center at Chadds Ford, purely as a distraction. At the same time, the main body of the British army went left by back roads to cross the Brandywine upstream from Washington’s army at Jefferis’s Ford, a locale the American commanders were unaware of. The Continentals were closely guarding the Brandywine fords they knew about—seven crossings from Pyle’s Ford north to Buffington’s Ford—but unfortunately not the ones higher up (see Appendix). Local loyalists made the flanking maneuver possible by guiding the British, at whose head rode General Charles Cornwallis, erect in the saddle, an awesome sight to farmers who, forgetting their haymaking, stared in astonishment as history passed their door: “His rich scarlet clothing loaded with gold lace, epaulettes &c occasioned him to make a brilliant and martial appearance.”³

At midday, Washington finally realized he had a huge enemy force advancing across the hills toward his vulnerable right. He swung his troops into action, and fighting was fierce around Birmingham Meetinghouse. But as the hot day ended, his army was fleeing in disarray. The defeated Americans would spend the winter camped in near-starvation conditions at Valley Forge on the Schuylkill River northwest of Philadelphia, the very trough of the young nation’s fortunes.

Bayonets Bright as Silver

Before the battle, Washington, then age forty-five, made his headquarters at farmer and miller Benjamin Ring’s house, now reconstructed at the state park. Here he conducted his councils of war, and here he got the chilling word that the British were suddenly on his right. All his storied officers were gathered in the Ring parlor, including Charles C. Pinckney, later U.S. ambassador to France and a presidential candidate, and Casimir Pulaski, making a striking American debut with his moustache and snappy hussar uniform.⁴

Nearby still stands Lafayette’s Headquarters: the Gideon Gilpin House, a quaint old place built of stone and occupied at that time by an innkeeper. The Marquis de Lafayette was only nineteen and little-known, having just arrived from France that summer to assist the patriots’ cause, but the events of the day would bring him boundless fame and help knit American and French hearts permanently together. In the havoc after the battle, the Gilpin House was plundered, its owner later putting in a claim to the federal government for lost cows, oxen, sheep, and swine, plus fifty pounds of bacon, a history book, and a gun.

The smaller of the two British forces, sent to attack the American center, was commanded by Lieutenant-General Wilhelm von Knyphausen, a Prussian officer with a livid saber scar from eye to chin. The first shots of the battle rang out as his troops reached Kennett Meeting on today’s U.S. 1. Washington supposed the British would cross the Brandywine directly in front of him, facing cannon fire from Colonel Thomas Procter’s Artillery on a knoll behind today’s Sanderson Museum in Chadds Ford. But Knyphausen pushed only briefly across the ford, then fell back as Americans retook the west bank under command of Captains Porterfield and Waggoner and then General Maxwell. Again, only the British knew that their assault was merely a feint.⁵

Procter’s Artillery consisted of four brass cannon pulled up behind a hastily built breastwork of earth and logs in front of an orchard. It looked across blooming fields of buckwheat toward the creek—“Meadow Ground” on the General Weedon map, drawn that day and the only American cartography that shows the battlefield. This battery fired all day at Knyphausen in one of the really spirited artillery duels of the war. The cannonading could be heard like distant thunder as far away as Philadelphia—by Congress then meeting at Independence Hall and by Thomas Paine, who wrote to Benjamin Franklin in Paris, “I was preparing Dispatches for you when the report of cannon at Brandywine interrupted my proceeding.”⁶

At noon, Washington rode up and down the American line, stopping off at the Chads House. James Parker, a Loyalist from Virginia, was secretly observing him from a British battery on the far heights, across the Brandywine. He watched as the general left the house accompanied by officers and two white flags, climbing the hill behind it to view the battlefield with a spyglass. Parker had the British fire their cannon, and “my prayers went with the ball that it might finish Washington & the Rebellion together.” As the shells whistled down, Washington said calmly to some civilians who were tagging along, “Gentlemen, you perceive that we are attracting the notice of the enemy. I think you had better retire.” Thus did Washington narrowly escape being killed, which might have changed the whole future history of the North American continent—and the world.

Meanwhile the British were executing their stealthy flanking maneuver. After wading across the West Branch at Trimble’s Ford (today, southeast of the intersection of Camp Linden and Northbrook roads), the main Redcoat force made its way to obscure Jefferis’s Ford on the East Branch. Farmers watched in astonishment at the sight, never to be forgotten, of “the army coming out of the woods into the fields belonging to Emmor Jefferis on the west side of the Creek above the fording place.” As young local Joseph Townsend later recalled, “In a few minutes the fields were literally covered over with them, and they were hastening towards us. Their arms and bayonets being raised, shone as bright as silver, being a clear sky and the day exceeding warm.”

For four hours Cornwallis’s huge army splashed across at Jefferis’s Ford—“horse and foot, artillery, baggage, provision wagons, arms and ammunition, together with a host of plunderers and rabble.” Rousted from his farmhouse, the terrified farmer Emmor Jefferis was forced to guide General Howe through the confusing lanes of the countryside east of the river. As the battle fully erupted, the Quaker ducked bullets that whizzed nearby. “Don’t be afraid Mr. Jefferis, they won’t hurt you,” Howe said with amusement. Meanwhile British troops ransacked Jefferis’s house. They rolled kegs of liquor out of the cellar, knocked off their heads, and got drunk on his lawn.⁷

After wading across at the ford, the Crown forces marched through a “terrible defile” into the hamlet of Sconneltown—the Americans could have ambushed them in the ravine, had they only known they were coming. They passed Strode’s Mill on Plum Run, where soldiers’ rude graffiti on beams and rafters would be pointed out for generations. Finally they paused at high Osborne’s Hill after many miles of rapid march. (A marker on today’s Birmingham Road at Country Club Road indicates the spot.) The view across the fertile fields and forests of September was lovely, and a British officer told young Townsend, “You have got a hell of a fine country here.”

Townsend’s reminiscences form one of the most striking eyewitness accounts of any battle during the war as he revisited, years later, with intense clarity what had plainly been the most extraordinary day of his life: the youthful wonder at seeing the magnificent soldiers who seemingly materialized out of nowhere; the spectacular uniforms; the sea of scarlet across the green landscape; the innumerable spurs and swords and shiny boots. At Osborne’s Hill the ground was strewn with heaps of blankets and baggage as the troops readied for their grim advance. Cornwallis, wrote the historian Trevelyan, now “deployed his whole force as coolly and methodically as if he were in Hyde Park,” and in stately, awesome formation they began to march forward, a scene one of their officers called “the most Grand & Noble Sight imaginable.” It was about 4:30 in the afternoon. So thrilled was Townsend by the beautiful spectacle, it came as an astonishing shock when a thousand guns suddenly began blazing and scarlet-clad warriors pitched forward into the dust.⁸

A Most Infernal Fire

Across Street Road and up the slope toward Birmingham Meeting came the Redcoats, both British and Hessians, and the Americans could see how deftly they had been flanked. That stone structure for Quaker worship had been erected in 1763, replacing an earlier building. Hopelessly outnumbered Virginians fired at the British from behind the graveyard wall. As they fell back, a battery on the hill to the south fired furious volleys of grapeshot down the road in front of the meetinghouse, shredding the roadside hedges, and British soldiers scrambled for shelter behind the wall. Others struggled up the slopes toward the meetinghouse. A lieutenant recalled, “There was a most infernal fire of cannon & musketry—smoak—incessant shouting—incline to the right! incline to the left!—halt!—charge!”⁹

At a fork in the road south of the meetinghouse, an old cannon installed in 1877 commemorates the American battery that blasted away at the British from the hilltop behind it. Washington himself belatedly rushed there to direct the fighting, trying to turn around what one historian calls his worst battlefield performance of the war. Just getting from the Ring House to the battle scene proved difficult; an American officer forced an aged Quaker named Brown, on threat of running him through on the spot, to jump onto a charger and guide the top commander over hill and dale. Washington’s horse galloped at Brown’s flank, leaping fences, the Father of His Country constantly shouting, “Push along, old man!”¹⁰

It took almost two hours for the British to take the heights, American general John Sullivan reported. “The hill was disputed almost muzzle to muzzle in such a manner that General Conway who has seen much service says he never saw so close and severe a fire…. We were obliged to abandon the hill we had so long contended for, but not till we had almost covered the ground between that & Bremingham meeting house with the dead bodies of the enemy.” The left fork in the road, to Dilworthtown, wound through woods and crossed Sandy Hollow. Fighting was intense on both sides of the road here. Cannon and musket fire tore through the forest in some of the most vicious fighting of the entire Revolution. “A cannon-ball went through Captain Stout,” a New Jersey soldier said, “and through a sergeant that stood behind him.”¹¹

South of the road, young Lafayette galloped up and tried to stem the rout, the fighting happening in what he later remembered as being “in front of the thinly wooded forest.” Dismounting, he shouted to the men to fix bayonets, and he shoved them in the back if they tried to turn and flee. But the American line collapsed, and a bullet tore through the Frenchman’s left calf. Lafayette’s aide-de-camp hoisted him onto the saddle, and he escaped—with the patriotic wound that would make him instantly famous and beloved among all freedom-loving Americans. Among those who tended his injury, it is said, was young James Monroe, future American president, one of a whole roster of famous men who were on the battlefield that day, including Nathanael Greene, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Knox—and John Dickinson, supposedly the only signer of the Declaration of Independence to experience combat during the war. Here too was Lemuel Cook of Connecticut, who would live to see the Civil War—last survivor of all Revolutionary War veterans.¹²

Almost Cut to Pieces

As the battle thundered at Birmingham, the British finally attacked the American center to finish off the distracted Continentals. Knyphausen, wrote Trevelyan handsomely in the 1890s,

sent his infantry across Chads’s Ford in a dense succession of regiments, distinguished one from another by numerals which are all of them so many titles of honour in the estimation of an old-fashioned Englishman. The Fourth Foot, the Fifth Foot, the Seventy-first Glasgow Highlanders, and the Twenty-Third Fusiliers splashed through the water, scrambled up the bank, ran over the ditch and parapet, and captured a hostile breast-work with many of the defenders, and all the cannon. They drove the Republicans before them, in a running fight…. The Americans were exactly in the same plight as the Austrians at Sadowa, and the French at Waterloo.¹³

It was about 5:30 in the afternoon when that assault on the ford began. Some troops waded across at the main ford, under fire from Procter’s battery who “raked the ferry … with grape.” The grapeshot “did much execution,” one of the Queen’s Rangers said; “The water took us up to our breasts, and was much stained with blood.” The Redcoats were dangerously exposed as they marched in a column down the road east of the ford, hemmed in by “the Morass on their Flanks,” and were “galled by Musketry from the Woods on their right and by round and grape Shot.” Others waded “up to our middle” at Chads’s Lower Ford, about where today’s railroad bridge stands, and took hits from a fourgun American battery on Rocky Hill, near where the N. C. Wyeth Studio is now.¹⁴

As the soaked army of invaders advanced through fields and orchards eastward of the Lower Ford, American soldiers “rallied afresh and fought Bayonet to Bayonet,” a British sergeant recalled. The powerful Redcoat force made short work of the Rebels. One group trapped “in a Buck Wheat field was totally scivered with the Bayonets before they could clear the fence round it” and escape. Among the Third Virginia Regiment eyeing the rout from the hills above Chads’s Ford was Captain John Marshall, future supreme court justice. The moment, however discouraging, was significant for patriotic symbolism: the Seventh Pennsylvania Militia who fought Knyphausen flew a red banner with a red-and-white stars-and-stripes canton, perhaps the first iconictype “American flag” ever seen in battle.¹⁵

Attack on the river. Chads’s Lower Ford came under fire from an American battery on Rocky Hill as British soldiers splashed across, in an imaginative 1940 depiction by Andrew Wyeth, who grew up on the distant slope.

Now the British overran all the Continental positions along the Brandywine, and artillerist Procter’s black horse was shot out from under him as he fled. In the mayhem, Colonel Samuel Smith of Maryland—later a U.S. Senator—was separated from his unit and feared capture in the night. He pounded on a Quaker’s door and demanded to be taken to Chester, toward which Washington’s army was hastening. “If you do not conduct me clear of the enemy,” Smith bellowed, “the moment I discover your treachery I will blow your brains out.”¹⁶

Also escaping was Colonel John Cropper, one of many Virginians on the field that day—including “Light-Horse” Harry Lee, the father of Robert E. Lee, himself the architect of some Civil War flanking maneuvers of an audacity that recall Brandywine. Stories of the battle long echoed in the South: Cropper’s grandson, Henry A. Wise, later a Confederate general, recalled fondly of his boyhood,

The children would never tire of hearing [Cropper] relate the story of the bloody fight at Brandywine, when the Seventh Virginia, the command of which had devolved upon him, was almost cut to pieces, and he himself was wounded by bayonet thrust; and how when the ensign had been killed and the colors captured, he drew a ramrod from a musket, tied his red bandanna to the end, and hoisted it as a flag.¹⁷

Cropper’s remnant troops spent the hours of darkness hiding in a newly felled wood before joining the headlong exodus toward the east. All during that hellish night, scores of wounded lay moaning on the battlefield: at least six hundred Americans were injured, and four hundred British. The dead numbered some three hundred on the patriot side, and an uncertain number of the king’s troops. Young farmer Townsend helped carry casualties to Birmingham Meeting, where doors were torn off and used for operating tables. Bodies and amputated limbs were dumped in a ditch in the graveyard. (Years later, in 1814, Townsend would offer medical aid to those who fell in the Battle of North Point at Baltimore, by which time he had become a leading Quaker of that city, noted for his devoutness and “tinge of quaint eccentricity.”) Other wounded were brought to the hamlet of Dilworthtown, where the British encamped for several days.¹⁸

Among the doctors who hastened to Dilworthtown under a flag of truce from Philadelphia was Benjamin Rush, who had helped bind up the wounded on the day of the battle and had almost been captured by the advancing British before escaping. Surgeon-general for the army and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Rush was struck by the politeness of the Redcoat officers and the commendable orderliness and discipline of their troops, compared with the Continentals. Ahead lay a brutal winter at Valley Forge, sixteen miles north, which would prove the ultimate test of these battered Americans’ resolve.¹⁹

As dusk fell on the night of the battle, George Washington was seen on the road to Wilmington, a mile below Dilworthtown, pointing his fleeing troops toward Chester in a scene that his namesake biographer Washington Irving would describe as “headlong terror and confusion…. The dust, the uproar, and the growing darkness, threw everything into chaos.” Hours later, a fateful letter was delivered to Congress:

CHESTER, September 11, 1777. Twelve o’Clock at Night. SIR, I am sorry to inform you that in this day’s engagement we have been obliged to leave the enemy masters of the field. Unfortunately the intelligence received of the enemy advancing up the Brandywine, and crossing at a Ford about six miles above us, was uncertain and contradictory, notwithstanding all my pains to get the best. This prevented my making a disposition adequate to the force with which the enemy attacked us on our right…. The Marquis La Fayette was wounded in the leg…. I have the honor to be, Sir, your obedient humble servant, G. WASHINGTON.²⁰

With his brilliant military stroke, General Howe had nearly destroyed Washington’s Army—and might have finally done so, had he pursued the foe vigorously. Instead, he distracted himself by occupying Philadelphia fifteen days after the battle —and then winter came, the Americans slowly regrouping to fight again.

The Quakers of Birmingham were left to repair the damage to their farms and homes. For generations they would grumble about the pillaging done by the invaders, the pilfering of valuable clocks and heirlooms. British campfires in the wheat fields had been stoked with costly mahogany furniture, even as nearby fence-rails were left untouched. Heavy rainstorms washed soldiers’ mangled bodies out of their shallow graves, Townsend recalled, and “beasts and wild fowls” picked at them until he and others undertook reburial, a ghastly chore. One descendant of local settlers remembered, “Grandmother asserted that great numbers were killed in the [Brandywine] … and that the farmers for several days afterward were fishing dead bodies from the water.”²¹

Downstream, Wilmington did not escape this epic military campaign entirely, even if the Crown forces never attempted their Brandywine crossing there, as Washington had expected some days before. After the battle, Howe sent nine hundred troops of the Seventy-First Regiment of Foot to seize the town and secure accommodation for the wounded; as Howard Pyle would evocatively write, they “stacked their muskets along the stony streets in the moonlight.” Soldiers broke into the home of Delaware’s top political leader, President John McKinly, in the middle of the night and took him prisoner. Offshore were the men-of-war Roebuck and Liverpool, shelling the panicked town of 1,250. A militia captain named Stidham, descendant of the family of Swedish settlers on the Brandywine, saw the Roebuck coming into the creek in pursuit of his soldiers: “The balls rained down upon the roof” of the old homestead. Then Hessians came ashore, chasing Stidham through the house; he narrowly escaped by hiding in a hollow oak tree out back where he had once played hide-and-seek as a boy.²²

Long Live Lafayette!

The battle proved the single most spectacular event ever to happen along the Brandywine—and remains so today. The historical associations that had already begun to cluster around the creek now found intense focus in this dramatic episode. At an early date, tourists came and reveled in historical memory here. The first were very illustrious: Lafayette himself, accompanied by a fellow officer, the Marquis de Chastellux. With a group of French friends from Philadelphia, they rode down to tour the battlefield in December 1780, even before the war was over.

They brought along a copy of the battlefield map by engraver William Faden, official geographer to King George III. Published at Charing Cross, London, in 1778, Battle of Brandywine in which the Rebels Were Defeated relied on military surveys made in the hours following the fight (including one by Lieutenant S. W. Werner, Hessian artillerist) but was nonetheless so inaccurate it ultimately sowed much confusion about the events of the battle, which historians are still trying to disentangle. The distinguished tourists also employed the services of an American major who had fought that day and now lived in a house on the battlefield. In the woods where the Virginians had fought and Lafayette was wounded, “most of the trees bear the mark of bullets or cannon shot,” the excursionists noted. But already, just three years after the battle, they expressed perplexity and disagreement about what had happened where.²³

More than four decades later, the elderly Lafayette undertook a triumphal tour of America amid hysterical enthusiasm for the last living superstar of the Revolution. He revisited the Brandywine on July 26, 1825, in the company of prominent locals, including Captain Jacob Humphrey, whose forehead was laced with a scar from a musket ball that grazed him in the Battle of Trenton. Lafayette rode up from Delaware in a barouche drawn by four gray horses, having spent the night with Eleuthère du Pont at Eleutherian Mills on the Brandywine; among the party was U.S. congressman and future secretary of the treasury Louis McLane, who owned a mill site on the river. On passing over the bridge at Chadds Ford, Lafayette remarked, “It could not be here we crossed. It must have been further up,” astonishing everyone with his accurate recall: the new bridge was in fact a little below the old ford. But specific memories of the battle had faded locally; when Lafayette asked where the “bridge of rails was across the Brandywine”—erected hastily during the campaign—nobody seemed to know.²⁴

Then he visited the dying Gideon Gilpin, with whom he had headquartered, before riding to Dilworthtown and Birmingham, followed by a huge crowd shouting “Long live Lafayette!” “Show me where is the meetinghouse,” he requested, and upon seeing it again he began to speak at length in French about the battle to du Pont and his other companions, pointing out where he had been wounded near Sandy Hollow, now Jacob Bennett’s cornfield. He lunched in the cannon-scarred Samuel Jones mansion north of the meetinghouse and was shown a collection of military relics dug up by farmer Abraham Darlington on the surrounding battlefield.

Then Lafayette went past Strode’s Mill to West Chester, escorted by volunteer soldiers. There were ten thousand patriots in the streets, it was said, and Lafayette smiled and exclaimed, “Happy people! Happy people!” He was treated to a dinner in the grand jury room of the court-house. He rose to speak of his memories, recalling how it was “my first action under the American Standard, and our great and good Commander-in-Chief, in company with your gallant Chester Countyman, my friend Gen. Wayne.” He called it an honor “to have mingled my blood with that of many other American soldiers, on the heights of the Brandywine.” Toasts followed, including one by banker-botanist William Darlington (who commanded the local troops during that festive commemoration) to “The fields of the Brandywine: irrigated, on the Cadmean system of agriculture, with the blood of Revolutionary patriots—the teeming crop must ever be Independent Freemen.” The Greek hero Cadmus had sowed dragon teeth in a field, from which brave soldiers sprang.

The next day, Lafayette left West Chester by going southward over Cope’s Bridge on the East Branch, continuing his American tour. In the District of Columbia and Virginia he would meet former and current presidents Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams; soon after, he returned to France on a new U.S. frigate named, in his honor, Brandywine, a ship that saw distinguished service up through the Civil War. As Andrew Wyeth liked to tell, when Lafayette was eventually buried, soil from the Brandywine Valley was sprinkled inside his coffin.²⁵

Turning up Bones