Stephenson M. Patriot Battles. How the War of Independence Was Fought

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balls (65 percent) would make hits at 200 yards; 36 (42 percent) at 400

yards, but only 6 (7 percent) at 600 yards.

These are hit patterns that

one would expect from a shotgun spread. (The balls spread to thirty-

two feet over the first 100 yards.)

At 80–100 yards (the effective range

of a musket) it would be reasonable to assume that the hit rate of

canister might have risen to at least 80 percent (44 balls). Theoretically,

a standard battery of six guns firing at this range would have delivered

264 balls on target, compared with the 188 of a 500-musket battalion

(the guns being 71 percent more effective). Even if we take into account

men hit by multiple balls, no such level of casualties was inflicted by

canister in any American battle (perhaps because there were few such

concentrations of guns on the battlefield). The effect of concentrated

case shot, however, could be withering. In 1793 near Tournai (in what

is now Belgium) the Coldstream Guards were caught unawares by a

French battery firing case at close range: “The fire was so sudden that

almost every man by one impulse fell to the ground—but immediately

got up again and began a confused fire without orders—The second

discharge of the French knocked down whole ranks.”

At Waterloo

men and horses fell “like that of grass before the mower’s scythe.” An

artillery officer at Waterloo described “four or five men and horses piled

up on each other like cards, the men not even having been displaced

from the saddle, the effect of canister.”

Spherical shell was the lob shot of eighteenth-century warfare. It

was usually fired from short-barreled howitzers and mortars. (Regular

cannons could not elevate their barrels sufficiently.) The skill of the

gunner lay both in setting the trajectory and in trimming the fuse

(which was lit automatically by the cannon’s flash) to achieve either an

airburst just above enemy troops or an explosion as the ball bounced

into the enemy’s lines.

If the fuse or trajectory was miscalculated, the

shell would fizz on the ground and could be extinguished by an intrepid

soldier, but it was a hair-raising business. Tolstoy in War and Peace

describes the (highly) disconcerting effect of a fizzing shell, pregnant

with destruction, “whirring like a bird in flight . . . spinning like a top.”

When it went off it made “a splintering sound like a window-frame

being smashed” followed by “a suffocating smell of powder.” Some

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gunners firing shell were true master-craftsmen and could place their

projectile with unnerving accuracy. The Continental army regimental

surgeon Dr. James Thacher reported from Yorktown in October 1781:

It is astonishing with what accuracy an experienced gunner will

make his calculations, that a shell shall fall within a few feet of

a given point, and burst at the precise time, though at a great

distance. When a shell falls, it whirls round, burrows, and excavates

the earth to a considerable extent, and, bursting, makes dreadful

havoc around. I have more than once witnessed fragments of the

mangled bodies and limbs of the British soldiers thrown into the

air by our bursting shells.

Attacking infantry typically had to pass through three killing

zones, characterized by the three types of artillery ammunition usually

employed. When the enemy was about 1,000 yards out, the medium

guns (mainly 6- and 9-pounders) would engage, as would the howitzers

with their shells. It would take the infantry about four to five minutes

to make it to the 400-yard mark, during which time each gun could

have fired about twelve to fifteen times. At 400 yards the attackers

would also start to receive canister in addition to solid shot. It would

take about three minutes for the attackers to get to the 100-yard mark,

the start of the final and most intense killing zone, which would bring

them into musket range as well as more canister and shot.

The patriot cause had few artillery pieces at the beginning of

hostilities: forty-one cannons of various calibers, fourteen mortars, and

three howitzers. A substantial number of guns, particularly of the larger

sizes, had fallen into American hands with the capture of Ticonderoga

and Crown Point in May 1775. They remained there until Henry

Knox, that extraordinary autodidact bookseller who became the head

of Continental artillery, managed to transport thirty-nine brass and

iron cannons, fourteen mortars (three of which weighed over a ton),

and two howitzers by sled through the wild winter terrain in one of

the most extraordinary efforts of the war. (It ranks alongside Arnold’s

march to Canada as a feat of staggering endurance.) More pieces were

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picked up when the British evacuated Boston, and another forty-nine

guns when Burgoyne surrendered in October 1777. On the debit side,

however, many guns were lost with the defeat at Long Island and the

subsequent surrender of Forts Washington and Lee, where 146 pieces

were taken by the British.

Even though colonial America manufactured 30,000 tons of pig iron

a year, making it the seventh largest producer in the world, there had

been little call before the war to create domestic cannon-foundries, and

those guns that were made tended to be of heavier caliber, more suited

to defense installations rather than smaller and mobile infantry support

weapons. In early 1776 congresses began to encourage and finance

foundries in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut,

but it proved slow going. Many of the cannons were substandard (due

mainly to inferior metallurgy) and had to be rejected, and then there

was the old monkey-on-the-back of a depreciating Continental dollar,

which quenched the mettle of even the most patriotic ironmasters.

The Sanguinary Business

WOUNDS, DISEASE, AND MEDICAL CARE

arfare is not chess or a TV reality show. It is about killing

and disabling as effectively as possible, and its history is

a steeply rising graph of lethality. We are now very good

at killing and, in an obverse and perverse way, very good at rescuing

and repairing the soldiers who have fallen into the ever-more-efficient

meat grinder. It is as though a black angel and a white angel contested

the battlefield. By way of illustration: In World War II 4.5 percent of

hospitalized American soldiers died. In the Korean War that figure

dropped to 2.5 percent, and in Vietnam it fell to 1.8 percent.

In the

War of Independence about 25 percent of hospitalized casualties died.

This is known as progress. Eighteenth-century warfare was not a

particularly efficient killing machine, but neither was it equipped to

deal with the victims of its crude weaponry. In our age the black angel

and the white hover close together over the battlefield. Back then, they

were far apart.

Musketry accounted for approximately 60 percent of battle casualties

during the War of Independence, although the soldier stood a much

higher chance of dying from disease, which accounted for perhaps 80–

90 percent of all casualties. During the Seven Years’ War, soldiers dying

from disease outnumbered those who succumbed to weaponry by 800

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percent. Although the musket was a strikingly inefficient killing tool,

when its heavy ball did find a target at anything close to its effective

range, the damage was extensive. A wound profile test of a 0.69-caliber

lead ball (about the same as a Pennsylvannia-Kentucky rifle) shot into 10

percent ordnance gelatin (simulating flesh) at 540 feet per second shows

a surprisingly deep penetration of seventy-three centimeters (twenty

nine inches), which is comparable to the penetration of a conical bullet

fired from a modern 0.45 automatic pistol.

The large contact surface of a musket ball (almost three-quarters of

an inch in diameter) would have inflicted an extensive area of damage

through what in wound ballistics is known as crushing (the initial

impact), but, unlike the modern bullet, it would not have “yawed”

on penetration. Although the modern military rifle bullet has great

aerodynamic integrity in flight, its delicate balance is literally knocked

for a loop when it hits flesh. It enters the body point forward, but after

traveling for approximately five inches (the distance will vary depending

on the bullet model), it will tumble 180 degrees as its center of mass, the

base, shifts to the front. It may also fragment.

Both of these characteristics, “tumbling” and fragmentation, create

extended areas of damage or, in the euphemism of the ballistics expert, are

extremely “disruptive of tissue.” The entry wound is characteristically

small, but the exit wound large (stellate is the ironically poetical technical

term). By comparison, a large musket ball, because it cannot tumble,

will do most of its damage “up front” through crushing. And assuming

it does not hit bone that will cause the ball to fragment, it creates a

relatively straightforward wound profile. It depends, of course, where

the ball hits. “Elastic” tissue, such as muscle, skin, bowel wall, or lung,

is good at absorbing the kinetic energy of the projectile; tissue in bone,

or the walls of the arteries, or the liver, is another matter altogether.

(A misconception is that high velocity is necessarily more lethal than

low velocity because more kinetic energy is delivered to the target. The

critical factor is where in the body that energy is delivered and how the

projectile behaves on entry.)

A man hit in the stomach or head by a musket ball at full velocity

almost invariably died. (Belly wounds, if not immediately fatal, usually

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led to peritonitis when food in the punctured intestine was released.)

Corporal Roger Lamb of the 23rd Foot was with Burgoyne’s advance

to Saratoga when “a man, a short distance on [Lamb’s] left, received a

ball in his forehead which took off the top of his head.”

Others were

luckier. Also at Saratoga, Dr. James Thacher recounted: “A brave

soldier received a musket-ball in his forehead, observing that it did

not penetrate deep, it was imagined that the ball rebounded and fell

out; but after several days, on examination, I detected the ball lying

flat on the bone, and spread under the skin which I removed. No one

can doubt but he received his wound while facing the enemy, and it is

fortunate for the poor fellow that his skull proved too thick for the ball

to penetrate.”

A more likely explanation for this soldier’s reprieve was

that the ball was spent when it struck.

A soldier of the Napoleonic era described the pitiful reaction of

men hit by a musket ball.

I have observed a Soldier, mortally wounded, by a shot through

the head or heart, instead of falling down, elevate his Firelock

with both hands above his head, & run round & round, describing

circles before he fell, as one frequently sees a bird shot in the

air . . . Men, when badly wounded, seek the shelter of a stone or

a bush, to which they betake themselves, before they lie down, for

support & security, just as birds, or hares do, when in a similar

state of suffering.

The heavy cavalry saber was capable of inflicting frightful wounds.

Dr. Robert Brownsfield described the aftermath of Banastre Tarleton’s

infamous attack at the Waxhaws, South Carolina, on 29 May 1780.

A furious attack was made on the [American] rearguard,

commanded by Lieut. Pearson. Not a man escaped. Poor Pearson

was inhumanly mangled on the face as he lay on his back. His nose

and lip were bisected obliquely; several of his teeth were broken

out in the upper jaw, and the under completely divided on each

side . . . Capt. John Strokes . . . was attacked by a dragoon, who

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aimed many deadly blows at his head, all of which by the dextrous

use of the small sword he easily parried; when another on the right,

by one stroke, cut off his right hand through the metacarpal bones.

He was then assailed by both, and instinctively attempted to defend

his head with his left arm until the forefinger was cut off, and the

arm hacked in eight or ten places from the wrist to the shoulder.

His head was then laid open almost the whole length of the crown

to the eye brows. After he fell he received several cuts on the face

and shoulders.

For good measure, poor Stokes was then bayoneted several times.

Eventually, he had his wounds roughly dressed by a British surgeon,

who filled them “with rough tow, the particles of which could not be

separated from the brain for several days.” Against all the odds, he

survived and went on to live a full and successful life.

Because medical services were crude for both armies, the extrication

of the wounded from the field could take many hours. The British

lieutenant Thomas Anburey described the scene after the battle of

Freeman’s Farm on 19 September 1777.

[The] friendly office to the dead, though it greatly affects the

feelings, was nothing to the scene of bringing in the wounded; the

one was past all pain, the other in the most excruciating torments,

sending forth dreadful groans. They had remained out all night,

and from the loss of blood and want of nourishment, were upon

the point of expiring with faintness; some of them begged they

might lay and die . . . some upon the least movement were put in

the most horrid tortures and all had near a mile to be conveyed

to the hospitals . . . These poor creatures, perishing with cold and

weltering in their own blood, displayed such a scene, it must be a

heart of adamant that could not be affected by it.

If Anburey could have looked into the American lines, he would

have seen a mirror image. Samuel Woodruff fought at Bemis Heights on

7 October 1777 (the follow-up battle to Freeman’s Farm) and recorded

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that once the fighting had petered out (about 8:00 a.m.), the American

wounded were brought in: “About two hundred of our wounded men,

during the afternoon, and by that time in the evening, were brought

from the field of battle in wagons, and for want of tents, sheds, or any

kind of buildings to receive and cover them, were placed in a circular

row on the naked ground. It was a clear, but cold and frosty, night.

The sufferings of the wounded were extreme, having neither beds

under them nor any kind of bed clothing to cover them.”

By the next

morning, over a third of them were dead.

At the finale of Bemis Heights, the British wounded were in a

pitiful state. Without adequate shelter and under constant fire they had

to endure the sort of horrors Goya would later depict in his Disasters

of War etchings. Baroness von Riedesel, the wife of the Hessian

commander, cowered with her young children in the cellar of a house

while cannonballs smashed through it.

Eleven cannon balls went through the house, and we could plainly

hear them rolling over our heads. One poor soldier, whose leg they

were about to amputate, having been laid upon a table for this

purpose, had the other leg taken off by another cannon ball, in the

very middle of the operation. His comrades all ran off, and when

they again came back found him in one corner of the room, where

he had rolled in his anguish, scarcely breathing.

After Cornwallis’s self-destructive victory at Guilford Courthouse

on 15 March 1781, a British participant reported that “the cries of the

wounded and dying who remained on the field of action during the

night, exceeded all description. Such a complicated scene of horror and

distress, it is hoped, for the sake of humanity, rarely occurs, even in a

military life.”

The burial of the dead after battle followed a melancholy and time-

honored pattern. The common soldiery was simply tipped into pits, as

often were the officers (separate pits, but anonymous holes nevertheless).

After the battle of Bemis Heights Thomas Anburey remembered the

sloppiness with which the British dead were jumbled together with

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“heads, legs, and arms above ground.” Sometimes the dead would

not stay put. Anburey’s brother-in-arms at Bemis Heights, Lieutenant

William Digby, recorded that “during the night it rained heavy, and on

the 26th, many bodies not buried deep enough in the ground appeared,

(from the great rain) . . . and caused a most dreadful smell.” After the

battle of Kings Mountain the slain Loyalists also got short shrift. A

patriot, James Collins, described how the burial of the dead “was badly

done; they were thrown into convenient piles, and covered with old

logs, the bark of old trees, and rocks; yet not so as to procure them from

becoming a prey to the beasts of the forest, or the vultures of the air; and

the wolves became so plenty, that it was dangerous for anyone to be out

at night . . . also, the hogs in the neighborhood gathered in to the place

to devour the flesh of men.”

Although British officers killed at Bunker’s Hill were brought back

to Boston for individual burial, sometimes circumstances precluded the

perquisites of rank. Anburey recorded that after Bemis Heights “the

[British] officers were put in a hole by themselves. Our army abounded

with young officers, in the subaltern line . . . three of the Twentieth

Regiment [the East Devonshires] were interred together, the age of

the eldest not exceeding seventeen.”

Senior officers also suffered

their ignominies. At Kings Mountain Patrick Ferguson, the British

commander, was stripped naked after death by the less-than-deferential

soldiery, as was the American general Johann de Kalb at Camden. High

and low invariably shared the same fate.

But it was not as though this was a particularly callous age (far

from it, compared with the staggering scale of savagery of the twentieth

century). Even that crusty martinet Frederick the Great was responsive to

the appeals of humanity: “One army surgeon per battalion must remain

with the battle lines; the other, however, must stay with the regimental

surgeons in the wagenburg [wagon-park] so they can tend the wounded

properly and therefore better. Humanity and gratitude toward those who

have staked their lives . . . bid you care for them as a father.”

With some exceptions, the medical personnel of both armies

extended their care to friend and foe alike. Billy Lunsford, for example,

one of Colonel William Washington’s dragoons, was determined to

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shoot a British sentry so he could boast of having killed “one damned

British son of a bitch,” but he found the tables turned. The sentry shot

Lunsford clean through the body with “as pretty a shot as could have

been made in daylight.” The sentry then carried his would-be assassin

to the regimental doctor, who cared for him all through the night.

Lunsford eventually recovered.

The medical infrastructure of both patriot and royal armies was

woefully inadequate. In both there were attempts to establish centralized

organizations, but they often simply tightened the knot of bureaucratic

muddle. It was a classic and characteristic challenge for the Americans:

how to create a medical structure that had the coherence of centralized

control yet was flexible enough to meet demands across a widening

geographic involvement from Canada down to Georgia. It also needed

to be designed to meet the needs of soldiers requiring immediate care

close to the action at the regimental level as well as create cost-effective

general hospitals. It was the old problem of centralization versus

localism. And the patriot cause had to create its medical bureaucracy on

the wing, in the eye of the storm.

In July 1775 Congress drew up a sketchy plan for the Hospital

Department, to be controlled by a director general. Three of the four men

who held this post were not a resounding success. The first, Benjamin

Church (July–September 1775), was a traitor and was banished. (He

went down with his ship on his way to the West Indies.) The second,

John Morgan (October 1775–January 1777), not only was run ragged

by the unraveling of the war for the patriots in the first phase of the

conflict but was also unhinged by his paranoia and obsessive political

feuding. The third, William Shippen (April 1777–January 1781), was

urbane and politically well connected but attracted the enmity of two

powerful enemies: Dr. Benjamin Rush and John Morgan. Accused of

corruption, Shippen was court-martialed in June 1780 and although

acquitted was reprimanded for speculating in hospital supplies. The

last director general, John Cochran (January 1781 until the end of the

war), was probably the most efficient (and, ironically, the only one of

the four who had not earned an M.D.). At regular intervals throughout

the war, Congress reorganized the Hospital Department, as though