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The Brandywine. W. Barksdale Maynard
Читать онлайн.Название The Brandywine
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isbn 9780812290738
Автор произведения W. Barksdale Maynard
Издательство Ingram
The uncertain boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania had sometimes been contested with violence. To finally settle the matter, surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon arrived from England in 1763 and, with sensitive apparatus carefully packed atop a feather mattress, bounced in their wagons thirty-one miles due west of Philadelphia to a marker that had been laid on a prior survey in 1736. That stone lay near the farmhouse of John Harlan, which still exists, amazingly unchanged and quaintly unrestored, in rural seclusion on the West Branch of the Brandywine at Embreeville. Here the surveyors erected a wooden observatory and made astronomical measurements in bitter January cold before setting up the Stargazers Stone, which also survives. It was the start of what one historian calls “the most ambitious geodetic survey ever conducted,” one that would set all future standards for the world.27
From Stargazers Stone they ran a line fifteen miles south into Delaware—immediately crossing the coiling West Branch three times—to place the “Post Mark’d West,” the spot which determined the precise latitude of the Mason-Dixon Line. The industrious Mason and Dixon repeatedly returned to Harlan’s farm during their multiyear survey and spent the colder months there. Once they recorded a frigid temperature of minus twenty-two degrees, though the latitude lay south of balmy Naples. Dr. Benjamin Rush later called their measurement (January 2, 1767) the most intense cold ever noted in the Philadelphia region, remarkable even in that era—hardly conceivable today—when the Delaware River froze solid every winter and Philadelphia shipping was entirely suspended until early March.28
Mason and Dixon are famous for the line they drew, but the greater scientific achievement was their successful measurement of one degree of latitude, part of a larger contemporary effort to understand the true shape of the Earth. This took nearly five months to do, as they recorded the distance all the way from Harlan’s farm to the Nanticoke River in the swamps of southern Delaware. The process began at Christmas 1766, in a tent in Harlan’s backyard, where Mason set up a long-case astronomical clock that had been loaned to him by the Royal Society in London; already it had been used for scientific inquiry at faraway Saint Helena and Barbados and (by Dixon) to study the transit of Venus at the Cape of Good Hope. At Harlan’s, Mason watched the “immersion” of a moon of Jupiter as it passed behind the planet.
Before returning to England, the surveyors came back one last time to say farewell to John Harlan. Shortly thereafter, Harlan is said to have drowned in the Brandywine, which runs right in front of his door.29
The Mason-Dixon Line had ended the chance of bloody conflict between two great colonies. As the 1770s began, the Brandywine Valley seemed about the most prosperous and peaceful locale in the New World—but war clouds would eventually gather, and a huge invading army would soon be on these shores.
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,