The Glorious Cause, page 66
The battle opened with both ships on the same course, the Serapis off the Richard’s starboard bow. Early in the fight two of the Richard’s old eighteen-pounders burst with terrible effect on the crew serving them and on the entire heavy battery. This event convinced Jones that in order to win the battle, he would have to grapple with the Serapis and board her. The Bonhomme Richard was outgunned even before her eighteen-pounders exploded and, since it was unsafe to use the four that remained, could not win by trading salvos with her enemy. Had she been nimbler, Jones, a resourceful seaman, might have used her quickness to escape a heavy battering while punching the Serapis with the 28 twelve-pounders. But the Richard was anything but quick, and a heavy slugging match could only send her to the bottom. Captain Pearson, in contrast, attempted to maneuver in such a way as to bring his superior firepower to bear while keeping the Richard away.
Just after the eighteen-pounders burst, Jones tried to board Serapis on her starboard quarter. By skillful ship-handling he brought the Richard close, but the boarders were driven off by the English sailors. Pearson then tried to bring Serapis across the bow of the Richard, only to have Jones put his vessel’s bowsprit into the stern of the Serapis. It was apparently at this moment that Pearson called to Jones asking if he wanted to surrender, and received Jones’s magnificent reply, “I have not yet begun to fight.”
More intricate sailing followed by both ships with topsails backed and filled, vessels falling back, darting ahead (in the case of the Serapis), or lumbering in either direction (in the case of the Richard). At a crucial juncture, the Serapis ran her bowsprit into the Richard’s rigging and a fluke of her starboard anchor caught on the Richard’s starboard quarter. The two vessels were now locked together, starboard to starboard, with their guns pounding away. Below decks the advantage belonged to the Serapis; her batteries did terrible damage to the Richard. But on the open deck and in the topsails the Richard clearly had the upper hand. Jones’s French marines used their muskets to deadly effect, and the American sailors hanging above them poured fire and grenades down onto the Serapis. Before long only her dead remained above deck, and her crew serving the batteries below gradually gave way to the bullets and grenades that came from overhead, as the Americans worked their way onto the English topsails.
Several times, both ships caught fire and the shooting fell off as their crews attempted to put them out. Serapis took a frightful blow when William Hamilton, one of the bravest of the Richard’s sailors, dropped a grenade through one of her hatches into loose powder cartridges. The explosion that followed killed at least twenty men and wounded many others. This blast may have shattered Captain Pearson’s resolve; if it did not, the prospect of losing his mainmast shook him to the point of yielding. Jones had directed the fire of his nine-pounders against the mainmast—and had helped serve one of the guns himself.
It was now 10:30 P.M. The Richard was filling with water; her crew had suffered heavy losses; but her captain would not strike his flag, though several of his men begged him to give up. On the Serapis the condition of the crew was no better though the ship was in no danger of sinking. Pearson’s courage, however, trickled away with the blood of his men, and he himself tore down his ensign.
John Paul Jones had carried the fight to his enemy and had won through courage, spirit, and luck. Grappling with the Serapis had, in fact, been accidental though of course he had badly wanted to close with her. On the other hand, luck had also served the Serapis, for Captain Pierre Landais of the Alliance had decided to enter the fight early in the evening—against his own commander. The result was the delivery of three broadsides at close range into the Bonhomme Richard. Somehow Jones shook off these blows and everything that the Serapis could hit him with.
The casualties were dreadful on both sides—150 killed and wounded out of a crew of 322 on the Richard, and about 100 killed and 68 wounded out of 325 on the Serapis. Two days after the battle Jones abandoned the Richard. She was a gallant old vessel, but she could not be saved. Jones transferred his flag to the Serapis, and joined by the Pallas, which had taken the Countess of Scarborough, sailed for friendly waters.
Nothing in Jones’s career ever equaled his magnificent performance of September 23. He left Europe in December of the following year, leaving behind an admiring France and coming home to countrymen who acclaimed him. They needed heroes, and they found a great one in John Paul Jones.
21
Outside the Campaigns
What happened on the water affected what happened on the land, and both affected the lives of civilians as well as those of soldiers and sailors. The “inside” of campaigns in other words had consequences for the “outside,” the civilian society which sustained the war. This distinction between the inside and the outside of the campaigns is to some extent deceptive, of course, and even false. Civilians, for example, participated directly in the campaigns, providing supplies and sometimes carrying the baggage of the armies. They also served as guides and scouts; black slaves and white freemen dug entrenchments; camp followers did laundry and nursed the sick and wounded. These examples of civilian participation can be multiplied.
Since the fighting occurred in America, the Americans suffered the physical destruction that usually accompanies war. In the opening battle of the war, in April 1775, a part of Concord burned. Two months later the battle of Bunker Hill saw almost all of Charlestown, Massachusetts, destroyed by a fire set off by British shelling. In the next seven years, towns and villages in every part of America absorbed severe losses of buildings of all sorts. South Carolina and Georgia were ravaged late in the war; there as elsewhere crops and livestock were lost to the armies of both sides along with fences, pulled down by soldiers for firewood, and farm buildings of all kinds—especially in the West. To the east, Charleston, South Carolina, received a heavy battering before Clinton captured it in May 17801
Near the end of the war, as Washington and Rochambeau squeezed Cornwallis into Yorktown, Clinton set Benedict Arnold in motion against the Connecticut coast, supposedly to divert the American army from its mission in Virginia. The citizens in these towns must have known what was coming, for General William Tryon had struck their coast in 1777 and again in 1779. In an early raid Danbury, though an inland town, lost nineteen houses and twenty shops to Tryon’s torches. Two years later over two hundred buildings in Fairfield, about half of them houses, were burned. Tryon tried to burn Norwalk three days after Fairfield went up in smoke, and although he met some opposition he succeeded in destroying much of the town. The towns hardest hit in September 1781, when Benedict Arnold assumed Tryon’s role, were New London and Groton at the mouth of the Thames. Near Groton at Fort Griswold, Connecticut militia cut down almost two hundred of Arnold’s infantry before surrendering; the British forces retaliated by killing most of the garrison after they laid down their arms. This slaughter—the word is appropriate—was followed by abuse of the wounded. Groton itself also paid with the loss of buildings, but the cost was light compared with New London’s, where most structures—houses, stores, warehouses, barns, a church, the courthouse, and wharves and ships which had not been able to escape—were reduced to smoldering rubble.2
Destruction brought one kind of pain. Less dramatic but no less deeply felt was the loneliness those at home endured. Women bore most: besides being alone with the anxiety of not knowing whether those they loved had survived battles, they had to worry about holding the family together. Life for them dragged on, with days often heavy with loneliness or darkened by dullness and unease. These feelings are clear in the letters Sarah Hodgkins wrote her husband Joseph while he was with the army.3
The Hodgkinses lived in Ipswich, Massachusetts. He was thirty-two years of age in 1775; she, twenty-five. When the war began, they had two children (he had five children by his first wife), a girl, born in 1773, and a boy, born in March 1775. Joseph Hodgkins’s militia company joined the forces besieging Boston immediately after Lexington. Thus began his and Sarah’s ordeal, lasting until he left the army in June 1779.
Sarah Hodgkins did not conceal her loneliness and anxiety from her husband. On Thanksgiving in 1775, she confessed that the day seemed “lonesome and dull,” and a few weeks later she came as close to self-pity as she ever did—”I look for you almost every day but I don’t allow myself to depend on anything for I find there is nothing to be depended upon but trouble and disappointments.” She repeated “I want to see you” many times in the next three years and repeated too that she feared that her husband would not survive the war.4
Reading these confessions did not destroy the morale of Joseph Hodgkins; in fact they may have given him comfort even as they distressed him, for they were expressions of his wife’s love. Sarah also declared her love openly though usually her letters were matter-of-fact in tone. Matter-of-fact but moving was this postscript: “give regards to Capt. Wade [Hodgkins’s commanding officer] and tell him I have wanted his bed fellow pretty much these cold nights.. . . ” Joseph Hodgkins replied: “I gave your Regards to Capt. Wade But he Did not wish that you had his Bed fellow But I wish you had with all my heart.”5
News from home was always welcome. Sarah Hodgkins filled her letters with tidbits about the children, of relatives, and of Ipswich. When she was especially lonely, she was not above reminding Joseph that she was alone with their children—”I have got a Sweet Babe almost six months old but have got no father for it.” She also did not hide her opposition to Joseph’s re-enlistment in 1776. He was to serve almost another three years despite her protests.6
Sarah Hodgkins’s love for her husband helped sustain her in these years. The love found its place in her faith that Providence would see them through to happiness, if not in this world, at least in the next. Her heart, she told Joseph, “akes for you” when she thought of the difficulties and fatigues he endured. Her faith in God and in God’s plan helped her keep her balance; as she said, “all I can do for you is to commit you to God . . . for God is as able to preserve us as ever and he will do it if we trust in him aright.”7
Sarah Hodgkins endured the separation from her husband, and in June 1779 he returned home. Her feelings at the separation found echoes in his. But as he told her, he fought in a glorious cause, a cause which gained intensity through the pain and suffering borne in its service.
Sarah Hodgkins did not have to face redcoated soldiers at her door. She did not lose cattle and crops to marauders; no soldier put a torch to her house or cut down fruit trees in the yard or tore apart the fences and the sheds of the farm for firewood. Of course, she lived in fear for Joseph’s life, but at least she did not have to worry that the enemy would take her own.
Other women had no such certainty. For example, there was Mary Fish Silliman of Fairfield, Connecticut, who, dreading the possibility that her husband, Gold Selleck Silliman, would be kidnapped, actually saw it happen late one night in May 1779.8 While the couple were in bed, a group of Tories broke into their house and took Silliman, at this time a brigadier general in the Connecticut militia. He was held by the British army in New York until spring 1780, when he was exchanged for a Tory judge, Chief Justice Thomas Jones of the Superior Court.
Mary Fish Silliman had not been an eager patriot when the crisis with Britain began. Born in Stonington, Connecticut, in 1736 to Rebecca Fish and her husband Joseph, a Congregational minister, she was a mature woman with four children when the first Continental Congress met. Someone gave her a copy of the resolutions passed by the Congress and she read them with a growing interest in the conflict between Britain and America. Her father, a conservative in theology and in political attitude, played a part in her awakening to the crisis. The Reverend Mr. Fish had opposed the great religious revival that struck New England thirty years earlier, and he had always felt pride in the colonies’ place in the British Empire. He evidently did not say much to his family in the years of crisis in the 1760s. The Coercive Acts, however, were too much for his traditional loyalties, and in the spring 1774 he wrote Mary of his fear that Britain and King George III seemed determined to enslave the colonies.
During the years leading up to the Coercive Acts and the First Continental Congress, Mary Fish Noyes, as she was then, contended with the problems of an epileptic husband, her children, and in 1767, widowhood. She was by nature a calm, reflective woman, not given to anger or to passionate outbursts, nor did she give way to them when she read of Congress’s call for boycott and nonimportation. She gave up tea but, according to her biographers, did not do anything else, but then there was not much more that she could have done.
Mary Fish married Gold Selleck Silliman in 1775, about a month after the beginning of the war at Lexington. A lawyer before the war and a widower, he was a colonel in the Connecticut militia, and soon to become a brigadier general. The issues arousing colonial opposition had affected him early in the crisis, and he did not hesitate to indicate his displeasure with “our Red Coated Gentry.” Mary Silliman probably never shared his anger, but after the Battle of White Plains, in which her husband fought, she found in Silliman’s coat pocket a musket ball that had torn through the cloth before lodging there. That simple event—the discovery in a most dramatic way, that Silliman might have been killed or wounded—acted to seal her opposition to Britain. In her quiet way, Mary Silliman had become a self-conscious American patriot. The kidnapping of Silliman in 1779 by a rough crew of marauders of Tory sympathies reinforced her new attachment. When General Silliman gained his release the next year, she had long since concluded that there was no going back. She was a New Englander and a free American.
For Lois Crary Peters, the wife of Captain Nathan Peters of the Massachusetts militia and later the Continental Army, life was harder than for Mary Fish Silliman. Her husband went off to war immediately after news arrived of the battles at Lexington and Concord. She was twenty-five years old, married five years before, with one child, William, about a year old. The Peters family lived in Preston, Connecticut, where Nathan had earned his living making and selling saddles. Thrown on her own resources, Lois Peters attempted to maintain the “trade,” as she called it, but had a difficult time of it. Leather was scarce, and for some months after the war began, her business seems to have consisted of attempts to collect money owed her husband. The fluid circumstances of the war offered many in the colonies an opportunity to run out on their debts. Lois Peters’s reaction to such conduct was simple and direct: “I think,” she wrote her husband, [that] “such men ought to pay all their just Debts and Then be Hanged.”9
The need for money seems to have been a constant in most of the families whose husbands and fathers were in the army. Lois Peters felt this need, but she found ways of coping—in carrying on the trade, making her own and her children’s clothing, keeping a cow, and making cheese. She also managed to send Nathan shirts and stockings, which she made herself, and occasionally cheese; and at least once a barrel of cider. He in turn sent money home to her.
Whatever concern Lois Peters felt about getting and spending, she invested her feelings much more powerfully in Nathan, her infant son William, and her daughter Sally, born when Nathan was with the army outside of Boston. She fought her principal struggle against loneliness and the dark fears that sometimes accompanied it. She wrote Nathan that friends of doubtful character and little judgment had told her “Many Times Since you went in thee army that you Did not Care for your wife and family at home but [I] hope that is Not the case.” A Mr. Safford, a post rider who sometimes carried her letters to New York when Nathan Peters was there, told her “a Terrible Story about the army at [New] York that they have almost all a Lady at their Pleasure and heard that almost the whole of our army was under the Salivation,” that is, under a treatment for venereal disease. The letter with this news brought a prompt denial from Nathan Peters of the implied charge that he was unfaithful. Lois in turn insisted that she had never “had a thought of that kind Enter my heart” and that “the account Mr Safford Gives of the army it is Not the Least Troubel To mee.”10
We may doubt that Lois Peters felt no unease about the behavior of her husband. But it is clear that, though she was often desperately lonely, she shared his commitment to the Revolution. The news of the campaigns arrived slowly and often left her fearful of whether or not he still lived. When Washington’s army was on the run across New Jersey in fall 1776, she wrote of her worry.
My only Comfort is at Present in the Dear Littel Pledges of our Love. when I see them I see my Dear. Must I Deny My Self the pleasure of him. I was Going To Say no I must refuse my self that Pleasure when So Glorious a Cause Calls him from My arms. My Country O My Country Excuse My Love the anguish of A Soule that has you allways painted before her.11
On the surface it seems that Sarah Hodgkins, Mary Fish Silliman, Lois Peters, and others like them, were acted upon by the Revolution, rather than being agents of it. The Revolution called into being their sacrifices and their personal independence; they did not create it. There is truth in this judgment, but it ignores the fact that these women, among many others, also played active parts in bringing on the Revolution. They demonstrated their initiative in their actions long before independence.
In the years before the war boycotts of British-made goods or commodities, such as tea, called women into the resistance. When nonimportation was resorted to, women had still another opportunity to act, for women were not only consumers, they also frequently framed the patterns of consumption in their families. The popular slogan of the resistance in the Townshend crisis, “Save your money and you save your country,” appealed to women as well as men, and in several cities both women and men signed agreements promising not to consume prohibited goods. Tea in 1767 and 1768, and in 1773 and 1774, evoked the adjectives “baneful” and “noxious.”12
