01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, June 20, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

Sir Henry Clinton faced a logistical nightmare as he moved his 11,000 British troops from Philadelphia across the sandy plains of New Jersey to New York. His baggage train held 1,500 wagons -- a line of men, wagons and horses that stretched for 12 miles.

The passage across New Jersey was slow going, with wagon wheels churning the sand into a floury mix, slowing the horses and men; an oppressive heat wave sank over New Jersey -- hot sun and humid air.

As Clinton rolled along, Gen. George Washington's troops followed like a pack of predators looking for a weakness to exploit. The American Army that left Valley Forge -- 8,000 veterans plus 4,000 new recruits -- was much stronger than the one that had retreated there from Germantown. They were better disciplined, better fed and backed by France.

Joseph Plumb Martin, a 17-year-old private chasing the British across New Jersey, recalled:

"We had ample opportunity to see the devastation the [British troops] made in their rout; cattle killed and lying about the fields and pastures, some just in the position they were in when shot down, others with a small spot of skin taken off their hind quarters and a mess of steak taken out; house hold furniture hacked and broken to pieces. . . ."

As he dogged Clinton's steps, Washington asked his own generals what he should do about the British army's slow march through New Jersey; 9 of the 12, led by Gen. Charles Lee, urged Washington to let Clinton's troops pass unmolested.

A minority of three, including Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene, strongly disagreed. In a protest Greene told Washington:

If we suffer the enemy to pass through the Jerseys without attempting anything upon them, I think we shall ever regret it. . . . We are now in the most awkward situation in the World. We have come with great rapidity and we got near the Enemy and then our courage failed us. . . . People expects something from us and our strength demands it.

Washington agreed.

'Galled' by retreat

That morning, June 28, 1778, Gen. George Washington rode a beautiful horse, a white charger given to him by the governor of New Jersey; that evening, after a day of extreme heat and bloody battle, he sat astride a chestnut mare having rode the charger to death.

At noon the sun, near the summer solstice, hung straight overhead, casting a harsh white glare. The temperature that day climbed to near 100 degrees Fahrenheit, without even a ghost of a breeze.

From camp, Washington and Greene expected to hear the sounds of muskets blasting 3 miles away, where Gen. Charles Lee had been sent to attack the rear of Clinton's 12-mile-long wagon train. Although Lee had argued against the attack, he had accepted command of the 4,100 soldiers who were to begin it. Great things were expected of this detachment, Greene wrote of Lee's advanced troops.

Greene waited with Washington and the main army of 8,000 men poised, Greene wrote, for full March to support General Lee in case he began the Attack.

Private Martin was with Lee's advanced troops under the command, he recalled, of a captain "belonging to the Rhode-Island troops, and a fine brave man he was; he feared nobody nor nothing. 'Now,' he said to us, 'you have been wishing for some days past to come up with the British, you have been wanting to fight, -- now you shall have enough fighting before night.' "

Martin recalled waiting at the edge of a field for the battle to begin: "The sun shining full upon the field, the soil of which was sandy, the mouth of a heated oven seemed to me but a trifle hotter than this ploughed field; it was almost impossible to breathe."

At the main camp, Washington and Greene could probably hear the big booms of artillery, but not much in the way of musketry; these were not the sounds of the attack that Washington had ordered. Tipped off by a young fifer that American troops were retreating, Washington rode his white charger through the heat toward Monmouth to see what was happening. Though he habitually affected a cool, diffident demeanor, Washington could flash a nasty temper. And Lee was about to get a dose of it.

As he rode toward the line, Washington saw that his troops were not attacking, as ordered -- they were, as the fifer said, retreating.

Private Martin -- who was "galled" by the order to retreat, watched as Washington "crossed the road just where we were sitting."

Martin heard Washington ask, "By whose order are the troops retreating?"

"Being answered, 'by Gen. Lee's,' he said something," Martin wrote, " . . . those that were nearer to him, said that his words were 'd--n him' . . . he seemed at that instant to be in a great passion, his looks if not his words seemed to indicate as much.

"After passing us, he rode on to the plain field and took an observation of the advancing enemy; he remained there for some time upon his old English charger while the shot from British Artillery were rending up the earth all around him."

Washington caught up with Lee and, according to Washington's aide, Tench Tilghman, asked him: "What is the meaning of this?"

Lee stammered, "Sir, sir," then allowed that the entire attack "was against his opinion."

Tilghman observed: "General Washington answered, whatever his opinion might have been, he expected his orders would have been obeyed, and then rode on to the rear of the retreating troops."

That was Lee's last battle. A court-martial later ruled, among other things, that he'd been disrespectful to the commander in chief; he and his dogs were sent packing.

Molly Pitcher

Washington rallied retreating troops behind a hedgerow, where they held off the British until the main army -- with Greene commanding the right wing -- marched up to help.

The commander in chief was everywhere, Greene observed, his presence gave Spirit and Confidence and his command and authority soon brought every thing into Order and Regularity.

With help from a local lieutenant who knew the ground, Greene set cannon atop Comb's Hill. From here he enfiladed the enemy; as the guns blazed hot in the 90-degree day a woman named Mary Ludwig Hayes, a tobacco-chewing wife of a private, lugged water from Wemrock Brook to help the gunners slake their thirst. The soldiers dubbed her "Molly Pitcher."

"One little incident happened, during the heat of the cannonade, which I was eye-witness to, and which I think it would be unpardonable not to mention," Martin wrote in his memoirs. "A woman whose husband belonged to the Artillery, and who was then attached to a piece in the engagement, attended with her husband at the piece; while in the act of reaching a cartridge and having one of her feet as far before the other as she could step a cannon shot from the enemy passed directly between her legs without doing any other damage than carrying away all the lower part of her petticoat, looking at it with apparent unconcern, she observed, that it was lucky it did not pass a little higher, for in that case it might have carried away something else, and ended her and her occupation."

The British pressed their attack for hours. Despite the deaths of 100 men, the American battle line -- comprised of three forces led by Greene, Lafayette and Gen. William Alexander -- held.

Around 5 p.m., Clinton withdrew his troops toward Monmouth Courthouse, leaving his dead for the Americans to bury, traditionally an honor, or a chore, left to the victor. Washington counted 249 English and Hessian buried by American troops -- 62 dead of heat stroke. About 100 Americans died, 37 of exertion; horses, too, fell from the heat, including Washington's charger. Alexander Hamilton's horse fell and crushed him nearly to death; the Rhode Island regiments under James Varnum suffered, too: Simeon Thayer, a hero of fights at the Delaware River forts, lost an eye, and Capt. Thomas Arnold of East Greenwich lost a leg. Well into the 19th century, Arnold hobbled on a wooden leg through his hometown, where generations came to know him as Monmouth Tom.

Both sides claimed victory at Monmouth, and they both staked a just claim: when the smoke cleared, Washington's troops held the battlefield, and Clinton rolled on toward Sandy Hook, which had been his objective all along. From there he moved his troops by transport ships to New York, in preparation for a French invasion. But the French ships, some of them three decks high, drew too much water to pass over the bar at Sandy Hook, so they left New York alone.

Instead the French sailed north to attack the British occupying Nathanael Greene's home state of Rhode Island.

gcarbone@projo.com / (401) 277-7434

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