Walking the Berkshires

"Seagulls Sing Your Hearts Away"

"Bring tea for the Tillerman
Steak for the sun
Wine for the women who made the rain come"

The grand encampment of Barker and Ogden kith and kin over the 4th of July weekend at Windrock involved so many friends and relations one needed a scorecard to keep track of them all.  Fortunately, my cousin John's wife Megan used her graphic design skills to collect and display two family trees with names dates and thumbnail photographs for practically everyone in 5 generations from my maternal great grandparents on down to a baby on the way.  Several of us provided the genealogical data and tracked down needed images, but the end result allowed us all to puzzle out such things as who went with whom and what a 2nd cousin once removed looks like.

I took fewer photographs of the festivities than I had intended, or rather I focused on recording certain stages while actively participating in others. I have no pictures of the extraordinary drip castles on the unexpected sand bar revealed by an unusually low tide, nor the swarms of children who helped to construct them or dig quahogs rooted out by searching toes.  I did not get pictures of the intergenerational baseball and soccer games that sprang up on the lawn.  I had many conversations with wonderful people, and so have no regrets on that score.

"Seagulls sing your hearts away
'Cause while the sinners sin, the children play"

There were some things that defied photography, like the phosphorescence that made the still waters glow for midnight swimmers, and the fireworks that erupted up and down the shore on both sides of the bay and behind Great Neck. 

No one, I believe, wanted any pictures of the most dramatic and terrifying event of the weekend, when the Angle of Death dipped so near we could feel the beating of its wings. My cousin Colin broke out in hives and soon went into anaphylactic shock in the water where quick heads, sound medical knowledge and other people's EpiPens kept him alive until the EMTs arrived.   My cousins John and Margaret happened to be with Colin when he collapsed and pulled him to shore, and they were outwardly shaking (as were we all inwardly) for hours afterward.  In our number there were an EMT, a doctor, and the head ER nurse at the local hospital (who as it happens is also Colin's mother).  My cousin Jay and my cousin Leila's husband Pete the EMT together had three EpiPens and it took two of these to have any effect.  But for them and the grace of God, we would have suffered a terrible tragedy.  The next morning when Colin walked toward us like Lazarus with his family as we laid my grandmother's remains in Earth, he was greeted with shining eyes and a round of spontaneous applause.  There was even more joy and thanksgiving in the church that Saturday from this largely secular family as we celebrated my Grandmother's life and our personal Passover.

"Oh Lord how they play and play
For that happy day, for that happy day"

There are three stones where my grandparents remains reside.  One of these is the veteran's stone that acknowledges Grandpop's service in the Pacific during WWII.  There is now another paired with it that lists Gran's full name and the Hebrew word "Mizpah", with which she used to close many a letter to loved ones away from home.  It may be translated:

"May the Lord watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another."

The third stone comes from Windrock itself and is newly etched with her first and maiden names and years of birth and death.  It says Barker on another of its faces, and on the top are two words - "Gone Fishing" - which are less irreverent than they seem.  My Uncle Rob, when a young boy, learned about the water table in school and decided that when people are buried they could go fishing there.  This so tickled my grandfather that he said he would like those words on his tombstone, and this was remembered many decades later and dutifully done. 

Those two inscriptions are fitting bookends for these two extraordinary lives, the earthy and the ethereal, and are streams that run deep in all of our veins.

"Oh Lord how they play and play
For that happy day, for that happy day"

                                  - Cat Stevens

Simple Gifts

This past weekend, our vast and extended families and lifelong friends gathered at Windrock on the shores of Buzzards Bay to honor the memory of my grandmother and reaffirm our devotion to each other.  Someone may have an accurate count, for we managed to feed a legion at least with food to spare, but I am certain we topped 100 on Saturday.  It was the sort of event that saw people pitch in at all levels, often seeing gaps and stepping in to fill them, like the elderly college friends of my eldest aunt who helped me fill three hundred baked stuffed clams.  There are many, many memories, and I'll write more about the gathering, but for the moment I want to share a few examples of the offerings of love and gifts of tremendous talent that were so evident this weekend.

My Uncle Rob crafted a box for my grandmother's cremated remains out of hemlock and ceder wood from our property.  My mother says there never was a tree that Gran didn't like, and these two woods were beautifully paired.  When my Grandfather died, Rob also made a lovely box for him, and the night before the internment a group of family members went around adding representative things to its contents - sand from the beach, paint chips from the house - and decided that the most appropriate place for it to remain that night was on the seat of the old antique tractor in the barn.  In Gran's case, her box rested on the mantle in the living room with the glorious views of the lawn and bay she so loved in life, with a few representative geraniums standing in for the phalanxes of flowers she habitually stacked several ranked deep before the picture windows.  At the graveside there was another red geranium, and a bowl of specially collected jingle shells from the beach that children added at the internment.  The sexton at the Agawam Cemetery made the hole with such precision that her box almost touches that of her beloved Bob, who predeceased her 17 years ago

As much as Gran loved flowers and trees, her eyes went joyfully to the skies, following every silver contrail or lingering sunset with fresh delight.  She and my Mom shared an unabashed love for birds, from chickadees at the feeder to darting tree swallows out by the garden.  Ospreys, though, had even greater meaning.  They mate for life, and at Windrock though they never established a nest on the pole erected for that purpose after Grandpop died, they hover and glide on the southwest breeze and our hearts lift with their wild cries.  My mother the quilter made this stunning creation of a pair of these marvelous birds and it now hangs in the living room at Windrock.  There is the bay, the mound of rocks that form the breakwater, and the bracken and scrub at the edge of the bluff.  She has absolutely nailed the birds, and the symbolism of the bird flying homeward into the frame to rejoin its partner so perfectly captures the hope of reunion, in this place for our family and in the next world for my grandparents.

Photographs do little justice to her tremendous  talent, but by all means click to enlarge.

This is a family that sings at the least provocation, and my Aunt Happy is always game to accompany a full-throated sing-along as evening shadows fell. The first night, we worked our way through old favorites - The Ship Titanic, The Sloop John B - and new ones, like the Canadian Sea Shanty with blue-wooded call and response my cousin's son Elihu leanred and taught us all:

"Oh, the year was 1778, HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOW!
A letter of marque came from the king,
To the scummiest vessel I'd ever seen,

God damn them all!
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns , shed no tears
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's Privateers."

We are partial to nautical disasters, down-and-out ballads and standards of the American songbook.  I myself lead is in a grand version of Rocky Raccoon.

The greatest gifts of all were the gifts of self, the old friends and family both proximate and distant who all made the effort to come together at this extraordinary place to celebrate an extraordinary life that touched us all and abides with us still.  Every one of my mother's living cousins on her mother's side and many of their spouses, children and grandchildren came, and the lion's share of those on her father's side.  Every one of my first cousins and their families came.  My second cousins Tigerhawk and the Charlottesvillian were there, and it was such fun to watch their children and ours - third cousins! -engaged together in play. 

In the interest of bilateral relations I happily accepted the proffered Tigerhawk T-shirt (photo credit TH, who took it with his camera phone and e-mailed it to me moments later) and wore it with pride in the knowledge that blood is thicker than water and good people trump partisan politics every time.   I cleverly distracted my generally liberal family members with platters of stuffed quahogs, and after all, our dear grandmother was the most independent of Republicans.

Many people worked over many months to get the old place into the best shape it has been in decades for this event.  In honor of that effort, inside and out, I took this picture - a view that would have been impossible before my father undertook much clearing of scrub oak and poison ivy.   Garden beds were planted, and marigolds ringed the glacial rock in the lawn  as had been done by my grandmother in earlier times.  This winter and spring saw three bedrooms utterly renovated and the place has never looked better.  Long may it remain the land that sustains our souls and draws us back to each other.

Tenting Tonight

We are heading for the Northway and the massive French and Indian War Grand Encampment at Fort Ticonderoga this weekend to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Carillon.  We will be observers at this event, as were one or two of my ancestors: certainly Reverend Jonathan Ingersoll, Chaplain in Colonel Eleazer Fitch's 4th Connecticut Provincial Regiment, and possibly Lieutenant Elias Dayton of the Jersey Blues who was there the next year when the British took Ticonderoga.  Given my wife's French Canadian heritage, it is possible that some of her ancestors fought with the French.  In any case we'll be camping at Putnam Pond and enjoying the scenery and the gun smoke and a few days away from things like cell phones and blogging. 

Anticipate many pictures on our return.

Fighting with Two Arms Behind his Back: Knyphausen's Raid (Part 4)

The Royalists under Knyphausen had little more than a dozen miles to cover between their landing at Elizabethtown, New Jersey and Hobart's Gap which lead toward Washington's encampment and vulnerable supplies at Morristown.   The invading army that June night in 1780 included a strong force of cavalry that was utterly squandered on the campaign. 

The high mobility of the 17th Lancers, von Diemar's Black Hussars, the mounted Queens Rangers and the mounted German Jaegers could have been used to penetrate the countryside ahead of the marching columns and determine the enemy strength, and if they were not able - as was Buford at Gettysburg - to secure the high ground, at least they could screen the advance from attack by militia.  Washington, in fact, was so greatly alarmed by the presence of so many enemy horsemen that he ordered the recall of "Lighthorse Harry" Lee and his troopers, on their way South, to help counter a cavalry threat that ultimately never materialized. 

The Hessian commander was unable to get his horsemen across from Staten Island in time to be of any use on June 7th, when the head of the advancing column was blunted for hours at Connecticut Farms just a few miles northwest of Elizabethtown.  Nor were they used effectively during the battle two weeks later at Springfield just a bit further up the road.  Aside from a few ambuscades during the period when the British hunkered down between engagements at their beach-head below Elizabethtown, the mounted arm of Kyphausen's force contributed little to the outcome of the campaign.

Knyphausen also had a substantial advantage in artillery.  After Maxwell's depleted brigade of New Jersey Continentals and assorted militia stood in the path of the Royalist advance at Connecticut Farms without artillery of their own - and held them off for more than three hours of ferocious fighting - they withdrew toward Springfield and the protection of an "old iron four-pound field piece" manned by New Jersey militia.   Only two or three of the estimated 15-20 cannon Knyphausen brought over from Staten island were brought to bear at Connecticut Farms, and these were the "battalion guns" that traveled with the lead brigades rather than a concentrated force. 

Artillery played a much greater role at Springfield on June 23rd, but even here it took six of Knyphausen's guns to silence a single six pounder that held up the British advance.  The Continentals never managed to get a battery of guns in place and the militia actually lost some of theirs when the Royalists emerged from their defenses at Elizabethtown for their second drive inland.

Thus the bulk of the fighting fell to just a few battalions out of the entire Royalist force, and to a thin blue line of Continental regiments and swarming groups of militia.  Given the total number of troops available to Knyphausen (on paper, at least), it is remarkable that the casualties were not much greater on the patriot side.  But merely having the resources under his command did not assure that they could be effectively deployed, and Knyphausen in his only independent command did not prove to be an aggressive commander.  We'll see how these factors played out when we examine the fight at Connecticut Farms in detail in the next post in this series.

Book Review: The Forgotten Victory; The Battle for New Jersey - 1780 by Thomas Fleming (1973)

There is only one full length history of Knyphausen's Raid and the engagements at Connecticut Farms and Springfield, New Jersey, and it has long been out of print.  Time and again during my research of these events for this series of posts, it became clear that I needed to find this book, and yesterday Interlibrary Loan delivered a much anticipated copy of Thomas Fleming's 1973 account:  The Forgotten Victory; The Battle for New Jersey - 1780.  In 1975, Fleming condensed this book into a 33 page booklet - #8 in the New Jersey's Revolutionary Experience Series entitled The Battle of Springfield - and I'm sorry to say that this abridged work, also out of print, is the better history of the two, for in its brevity it makes fewer errors.

Fleming is an engaging writer, a novelist and author of historical fiction as well as several excellent histories.  He has gone particulalry deep in the American Revolutionary period, and for this early work he clearly did a great deal of research on an important and neglected campaign of the war. He benefited from access to a wide range of documentary sources and there is plenty of fresh information available in both The Forgotten Victory and The Battle of Springfield, much of which with appropriate citation to aid the historian. Nonetheless there are nagging errors that taken individually seem nit-picky but in aggregate make one start to question the veracity of more essential points in the narrative. 

Some of these errors are those only one with a vested interest in esoteric details might catch.  Such, however, is the nature of the interested genealogist, and this campaign involved many of my ancestral kin.

On pg. 99 and again on pg 155, Fleming identifies Ensign Moses Ogden as the nephew of Major Aaron Ogden, who happens to be my Gr-gr-gr-great grandfather.  According to The Ogden Family Elizabethtown Branch by William Ogden Wheeler (1907) pg. 85, Moses Ogden was in fact a 1st cousin.  Unfortunately, Fleming actually references this work as his source for Ogden's lineage, but ended up getting it wrong more than once in print.

On page 247, Fleming describes the spectacle of the Royalists on the march to Springfield on June 23rd, making reference to "the Foot Guards gleaming in white lace.  Even the sergeants wore epaulets on their right shoulders.  Their drummers and fifers were in white coats lined with blue, and they wore white fur caps."  While that is they way they would have looked in the garrison uniforms back in England, the Service Brigade of Guards that fought in America wore a stripped down campaign dress from the moment of their arrival in 1776 when their commander, Brigadier General Edward Mathew, made radical alterations to their uniforms, removing the lace and epaulets and cutting down their hat brims and coat lengths.  They were still elite soldiers, but not the bandbox battalions described by Fleming.  His source for this description was accurate for the Guards in general, but not as they appeared in America.

On page 239, Fleming notes that General Nathaniel Greene had a personal bond with Col. Israel Angell's 2nd Rhode Island Regiment but gives no further explanation for it.   In fact this it quite true, for the Rhode Islander Greene had fought with these men in the defense of Fort Mercer during the Philadelphia campaign two years before, an event described by Fleming as an example of the fighting quality of the 2nd Rhode Island Continentals without ever making the connection back to Greene.

On page 244, Fleming describes Springfield's "thirty-odd houses" at the time of the battle and states; "The present-day town of Springfield is only a fraction of the colonial town's size."  This would be news indeed to the present-day residents of Springfield, New Jersey, population 14,429 in the 2000 census, which may have grown in the past 35 years since Fleming wrote his book but not from a mere handful of houses in the 1970s as would have had to have been the case for Fleming's statement to be accurate. He probably meant to say the 1780-era village of Springfield was only a fraction of the present town's size: better editing should have caught this transposition.

The documentation of this campaign is full of confusing and misleading primary and secondary source material, and it is very difficult to sort out precise troop movements, let alone casualties.  As often as he provides footnotes in his account, Fleming's narrative reads more like one of his novels, and I found myself wanting more documented details and less dramatization.  In one of the most griping episodes in the story, the brave, forlorn stand of a lone cannon served by a doomed handful of continental artillerymen, Fleming introduces a 13-year-old boy who remains unidentified and is part of Springfield legend.  He volunteers to bring water to those manning the gun who are cut down one by one.  In the end, he joins Angell's men and fires on the converging British, wounding one "to his ecstatic delight."  Whether this character actually was ecstatic or not is a matter of conjecture, as he was reported killed very soon thereafter by a cannonball.  In a novel, ascribing emotions to characters is an appropriate devise.  In a work of history it is laden with assumption, and this is not the only case when Fleming falls back on the novelist's art.

There are further details that might clutter up the narrative but would have been very useful if included in an appendix.  Often Fleming describes unnamed regiments when it would have been a simple matter to identify them.  He says that five were left behind in Elizabethtown before the second advance on Springfield but nowhere in his book offers an order of battle.  Given that he was well aware that his was to be the first comprehensive historical treatment of the campaign, it is regrettable that Fleming did not provide the details of particular interest to historians.  It is still a fine popular account and a good read if you are looking to get the flavor of the events.  It has two excellent maps and plenty of engaging anecdotes, but as history it falls short as the first and last word on the subject.

"Who's on First?": Kyphausen's Raid (Part 3)

[Map: George Buchel, from Thomas Fleming (1975) The Battle of Springfield. Click to enlarge]

At the core, even the set piece battles of the American Revolution were often a matter of limited engagements.  Only a portion of Gates' and Burgoyne's men, for instance, clashed at Freeman's Farm and Bemis Heights during the climax of the Saratoga campaign.  Neither side could afford to lose their armies in pitched battles. 

Just as significantly, the organization of these armies, especially on the Royalist side, worked against unit cohesion.  Brigades were created and reshuffled as needed, and battalions routinely broken up for detached service.  A force of the size that Knyphausen brought over against New Jersey from New York in June of 1780 was really a small army, yet in neither of the principal engagements of the brief campaign was he able to concentrate his forces, the initial grouping and command structure went by the boards early on, and the brunt of the fighting was borne by just a few units.

Knyphausen used all but three of the infantry regiments he had available in New York on his invasion of New Jersey.  There are some inconsistencies among the various sources as to the precise strength and composition of his army.  Contemporary reports estimated between 5000 and 6000 men.  The most complete order of battle I have been able to discover in any of the histories of the campaign is presented in Winter at Morristown, 1779-1780: The Darkest Hour by Samuel Steele Smith (1979), which is both out of print and incredibly hard to locate.  It is possible to get snippet views of the text through Google Books, however, and from what I could tease out and compare with other sources I believe I have a complete picture.

Knyphausen initially organized his force into 5 "divisions" of  2 - 4 infantry regiments each.  2 divisions included cavalry, and all but the 3rd included artillery.  Each was commanded, at least on paper, by a Brigadier or Major General, but forces were detached and moved about almost from the start. 

The 1st Division was lead by Brigadier General Thomas Stirling, the subject of an earlier post.  This was the vanguard and made the first crossing in the evening of June 6th from Staten Island to Elizabethtown Point.  Stirling established the beachhead with the light companies of the 37th and 38th regiments of foot, veterans of hard service (the 38th had been at Bunker Hill).  The rest of these two regiments soon crossed over, along with the Hessian Leib ("du Corps") and Landgraf musketeer regiments.  Stirling's division also had 2 six pounders.

The problem with having Stirling lead the van was that he only had these two light companies for skirmishers and no screen of cavalry.  Soon after leading the advance up the darkened road to Elizabethtown he was felled by a picket guard lead by Ensign Moses Ogden of Spenser's (4th) New Jersey Regiment.  During the delay that followed the Hessian and Anspach (dismounted) Jaegers were moved to the head of the column.  They had been assigned to the Third Division under Major General William Tryon, the former Royal governor of New York and an old hand at leading raids into Connecticut. The Jaegers were not at full strength, with 280 of their number on detached service in the South and another on mounted service elsewhere in the column.  The remaining 300 riflemen would be the tip of the spear in the actions to come and in the end suffered more than 1/3 casualties. 

Tryon also seems to have had 40 loyalist pioneers under his command (possibly from the "Black Pioneers" comprised of escaped slaves).  The core of his command was the elite Service Brigade of the British Foot Guards, made up of officers and men selected by draft from each of the 3 Guard Regiments in England.  The Guards on American service were organized into two battalions of 5 companies each, including Grenadier and Light Companies.  Only the 1st Grenadier Company was comprised of men who came from pre-existing flank companies of the Guards.  Their commander had been Brigadier General Edward Mathew of the 2nd "Coldstream" Guards, but on this expedition for reasons I have not been able to determine he was apparently assigned the command of the 2nd Division which did not include the guards.  Perhaps he was still suffering from the illness that compelled him to give up his command of Fort Knyphausen that April.  One biography says he participated in the expedition as a volunteer which would indicate that he was a supernumerary. 

In any event he was a senior officer and was given command of one of the largest Divisions with nearly 1,700 men.  It included the 22nd and 57th regiments of foot, and also the 1st and 4th battalions of the New Jersey Loyalist volunteers under Brigadier General Cortland Skinner.  According to Steele he had "some cavalry" and 2 six pounders, and he also had the single company of the 17th regiment of foot - 79 men - that had been formed from those of the battalion who had not been captured at Stony Point the previous winter by Anthony Wayne.

The 4th and 5th Divisions were lead by Hessian Generals Carl von Hackenberg and Friedrich von Lossberg.  Von Hackenberg had the British 43rd regiment of foot, the Hessian Regiment Böse and the 1st Anspach Regiment (some sources say also the 2nd Bayreuth regiment but this unit appears to have remained in New York at the outset of the campaign).  He also had 2 three-pounders.  Von Lossberg had the Hessian Donop regiment, and I believe also the Garrison regiment von Bünau.  The bulk of the cannons, from both the Royal an Hessian Artillery, was with the 5 Division, possibly including 2 six-pounders, 6 three-pounders, and 2 howitzers.  It also had the bulk of the cavalry - elements of the 17th light dragoons, and the mounted Queen's Rangers, which included Captain Friederick de Diemar's "Black Hussars".  This last unit was comprised of Germans - largely Brunswickers - who had escaped after the surrender of Burgoyne's army. Diemar has a Hanoveran and held a commission in the 60th Royal Americans.

If by now you are thoroughly confused as to who goes with whom, imagine the state of affairs on the ground, with multiple crossings made from Staten Island to the marshy Jersey Shore at night toward an enemy whose disposition was unclear and who got the ball rolling by shooting the Brigadier General leading the advance.  There were delays while a swamp was bridged.  There were delays while units were shifted position from command to command.  In the end only two divisions marched through Elizabethtown on the road to Connecticut Farms on the morning of the 7th, with considerable gaps between them. We'll pick up the narrative of the fight that took place that day in a future post.

"Theirs Not To Reason Why"; Knyphausen's Raid (Part 2)

From the Patriot point of view, the way General Knyphausen conducted his invasion and subsequent withdrawal from New Jersey in June of 1780 made no sense.   The Royalists had a force of nearly 6,000 that far outnumbered the local militia and the handful of depleted Continental regiments that opposed them.  Knyphausen twice marched inland from his beachhead to fight two sharp engagements, only to withdraw his entire force each time - as the commander of the New Jersey Continentals, General William Maxwell, would later put it - "with their backsides to the Sound near Elizabethtown."  Washington's letters throughout the crisis show that he struggled to find meaning in the retrograde movements of the enemy, writing to General Anthony Wayne after the enemy's second withdrawal that "It is certainly difficult if not impossible, to ascertain their views."

Participants on the Royalist side has questions of their own.  Lt. Colonel Ludwig Johann Adolph von Wurmb, who commanded the Hessian and Anspach Jaeger Corps, later wrote;

"I regret from the depths of my heart that the great loss of the Jaegers took place to no greater purpose."

Indeed, if the objective of the campaign were merely a raid in force, its costs do not justify the result.  A campaign of more than two weeks to burn two insignificant villages, followed by a retreat back to Staten Island, should not have taken the deployment of 16 British, German and Loyalist infantry battalions, not to mention a considerable cavalry force and artillery.  It was only much later, when historians were able to study British and German accounts of these events, that Knyphausen's behavior, if not his leadership, becomes understandable.  Far from being the result of a coherent strategy, Knyphausen's objective changed in the midst of battle, and the reason for it was more than just a remarkable intelligence failure that underestimated Patriot resolve and the capacity of the militia to put up an effective resistance.  Factional intrigue within the Royalist High Command doomed the venture from the start.

When Sir Henry Clinton, the British Commander in Chief in North America, sailed south with nearly half the New York garrison in the end of 1779, the focus of the war effort shifted to the southern colonies.  As mention in the first post in this series, those Royalist leaders who remained in New York bridled at the thought that Clinton was keeping them inactive and in the dark while he was off winning laurels in the south.  For his part, Clinton was notoriously silent about his intentions and overall strategy, confiding in a few close staff officers but not his commanders, let alone the Loyalist elite in New York who indeed wished to have him replaced, potentially by one of their own. 

Lt. General Knyphausen was the senior officer left in New York and so by default was commander in Clinton's absence.  Speaking no English, he was unwilling to launch a major campaign without orders from Clinton, much to the dismay of the New York Royalists, who even as late as May 28th were asking themselves if it were certain that Knyphausen "has a mind."

In fact, Clinton did have a plan for Knyphausen that resembled the course of action the reluctant Hessian general ultimately took in New Jersey, but it was to bring his Carolina Army north after reducing Charleston and to break the back of the Continental army in a two pronged advance on the patriot encampment in Morristown. 

It was an excellent strategy.  The continental battalions had suffered through the worst winter of the war and new recruits were lacking to fill their depleted ranks.  The stores and artillery at Morristown were as vulnerable as Washington's army, which could not fight both Knyphausen and Clinton simultaneously.  New Jersey might well be returned to royalist control. 

But Clinton failed to let anyone in New York know his intentions.  Knyphausen, too, was tired of garrison duty.  When two regiments of the Connecticut line mutinied that May, it seemed to the Royalists in New York that Washington's army was on the verge of collapse.   A plan finally took shape that would send a major force into New Jersey at Elizabethtown and march toward Hobart's Gap, the gateway through the Watchung Range to the Continental encampment and the supplies at Morristown.  This, of course, was what Clinton had in mind for Knyphausen, but it was premature for Clinton's force was still in Charleston.

Astoundingly, there was still an eleventh hour opportunity to for Knyphausen to pull his punch, for by remarkable coincidence Clinton's A.D.C. Major William Crosbie, who was privy to his commander's plans, arrived from the South just as the invasion fleet was being readied.  Thomas Fleming, whose research into the Springfield raid stands as the most authoritative to date, describes how Major Crosbie failed to stop the unauthorized invasion:

"Major Crosbie was nonplussed.  He was on the stickiest wicket that any aide-de-camp ever encountered in the history of warfare.  Sir henry had told him his real plans, but he had enjoined him to strictest secrecy.  All Crosbie could do was give "hints" to those "to whom he should judge proper.  This left Major Crosbie in an impossible position.  He could not hope to screen out "proper" from "improper" hearers without making a host of powerful enemies.  Since Sir Henry had a tendency to be jealous of almost everyone in the army above the rank of Colonel, its was easy for Crosbie to construe all of these assembled generals as improper.  He has obviously intended to say nothing about Sir Henry's plan.  Now he floundered and flapped and blurted out something vague.  They had no reason to expect Sir Henry very soon, he said - or at least that is what everyone concluded from what he said.  After more circumlocutions, everyone had the impression that Sir Henry was going to raid in the Chesapeake.

In that case, Knyphausen growled to [his aid] Beckwith, who was frantically translating all this, their invasion of New Jersey was strategically sound.  It would pin down Washington's main army, leaving Sir Henry free to chew up what parts of Maryland and Virginia he chose.  With elaborate courtesy, General von Knyphausen suggested that Major Crosbie join the invasion as a member of his staff.  The agitated aide-de-camp mumbled his acceptance and before the night was over, found himself slogging through the marshes of Staten Island shore to board a New Jersey-bound flatboat."

                                    -  Thomas Fleming (1975) The Battle of Springfield, pgs 11,12

Crosbie, whose old battalion the 38th Regiment of foot was in the lead division of the Royalist force, would  not find the courage to inform Knyphausen of the real state of affairs until well after battle had been joined the following day at Connecticut Farms.  This changed everything, for with confirmation that Clinton was even now bringing his force back from the south, Knyphausen knew better than to proceed any further.  Instead, he brought his force back to their beach head and hunkered down to wait for Clinton.   No wonder the Patriots, let alone many of the Royalists, could make neither heads nor tails of it all!

Crosbie, incidently, was subsequently promoted to Lt. Col. of the 22nd Regiment of foot, which also took part in Knyphausen's Springfield Raid, and was a Major General by 1793.

Stirring the Hornet's Nest: Knyphausen's Raid (Part I)

The 1780 campaign season had arrived and the Royalists in occupied New York were restless and impatient.  The Commander in Chief, General Sir Henry Clinton, had shifted the main theater of the war to the southern colonies the previous winter and laid siege to Charleston, South Carolina which surrendered on May 12th, 1780.  In contrast, the main body of the continental army remained with Washington encamped in Morristown, New Jersey, from which it could shift to counter threats to the Hudson Highlands or New Jersey and Philadelphia.   

Clinton had left Hessian Lieutenant General Wilhelm, Baron von Knyphausen in command in New York in his absence.  Despite orders from Clinton to remain in place - though significantly without sharing with his subordinate his strategic reasons for doing so - Knyphausen was under increasing pressure from Clinton's detractors to use the garrison of 8,000 men offensively.  Among these loyalist and crown leaders were Benjamin Franklin's son William, the exiled Tory governor of New Jersey; the Royal Chief Justice of New York William Smith; the Royal governor of New York General James Robinson and former royal governor General William Tryon.

Knyphausen was a widely respected division commander and studied the situation carefully.  After the coldest winter of the century, New York was no longer under threat of invasion over ice and thought could therefore be given to offensive operations.  Washington's force at Morristown was thought to be on the verge of mutiny after enduring intense hardship in its winter encampment, and many Royalist leaders still held out hope that New Jersey loyalists would take up arms and help win back the colony.  A 1794 British report on The History of the Origin, Progress and Termination of the American War reveals how misplaced these assumptions about the coming campaign would prove to be:

"If the inhabitants were disposed to throw off the yoke of congress, the force sent to their assistance would enable them to do it: And if a mutinous disposition still prevailed amongst the soldiers of the American army, some advantage might probably be gained over general Washington. It soon however appeared that part of this intelligence was false, and the rest greatly magnified.  Although the Inhabitants of the Jerseys had murmured in consequence of the depredations committed on them by the American soldiers in the time of their distress from want of provisions, they had never thought of deserting the American cause:  On the contrary, they made the greatest exertions to relieve the necessities of those very men to whose depredations they were exposed; and it was principally owing to these exertions that the American army had not been actually disbanded.  A mutinous disposition had also certainly discovered itself amongst the soldiers of the American army:  But it arose from distress, and not disaffection...Under such circumstances the British commanders experienced a grievous disappointment:  Instead of being received in the Jerseys as friends, the militia very generally turned out to oppose them."

From time to time over the coming weeks, we will examine this last major land campaign of the American Revolution in the northern colonies, including the engagements at Connecticut Farms and nearby Springfield New Jersey that took place in June 228 years ago.  I'd roll this series out over several days, but experience has shown that except for hardcore history buffs it is best to leaven my offerings with other fare.  I'm also waiting to see if the local inter-library loan will come through with a couple of key sources not available on line and currently out of print.  I'll likely archive them together for those who wish to get the full, sequential effect.

As with Sullivan's Expedition against the Iroquois the previous year, my Ogden and Dayton ancestors played prominent parts in this story, and their leadership and actions on this occasion were particularly decisive in resisting the Royalist advances literally on the thresholds of their own homes.   A third cousin of Matthias and Aaron Ogden's became a celebrated female martyr for the cause, as galvanizing for the patriots at this stage of the war as had been the death of Jane McCrea in 1777 at the hands of Burgoyne's native allies.  Knyphausen's Springfield Raid is passed over in many histories of this period, and the details of its two principal battles are often jumbled together.  We will untangle this tale and explore its significance in subsequent posts. 

Smith Grads

Mom is going to her 45th college reunion this weekend.  I found this slide from her graduation day in 1963 and scanned it. She and her three sisters all are alumnae of Smith College (classes of '59, '61, '63 and '68).

But it doesn't stop there.  My cousin Leila graduated in 1992: a third generation Smith legacy, for our grandmother Athalia (Ogden) Barker was Smith class of '34.  Her two sisters Margie and Esther were Smith '28 and '30.  Margie, Mom and my aunt Marty shared the same 5 year reunions.  The picture of Margie and Marty, below, was taken in June, 1968, the year Marty graduated and also the year she married my Uncle Colin. 

There probably should be a Smith weather vane over the family homestead.  In 1975 when Smith celebrated its centennial, my cousins and I all got "Smith College: A Century of Women on Top" T-Shirts.  Must be why we all turned out so progressive.

Happy reunion!

"Ogden Can Do Better"

In 1884, my Great grandfather Archibald Gracie Ogden Sr. (1869-1931) traveled from Elizabeth, New Jersey to Grosse Isle, Michigan to attend boarding school.  He stayed with his cousins the Biddles, and was especially close with John Biddle, a recent West Point graduate who would later be the best man at Ogden's wedding and a Major General commanding of American forces in Great Britain and Ireland in 1918.  He had such a good time in  Michigan, in fact, that he neglected to write to his family as often as they might have hoped (a situation familiar to many parents whose children have recently left the next).  His father Dayton Ogden (1833-1914) who had also been away to school at a young age, wryly wrote his son during summer holidays:

"Judging from the numbers of letters you have written I suppose you don't want to be bored with many nor to have your holiday-time to any great extent taken up with answering them.  This is partly my reason for not writing & then again it is hard to find anything to write about from here that is of particular interest to you."

All the same, Dayton Ogden concluded his letter to his son to "take all the time you can for enjoyment" and not to answer "unless the humor for writing is on you."  From this letter, dated August 23, 1885, I learned that Archibald G. Ogden had witnessed Grant's funeral during the summer and had a view of Niagara falls from the suspension bridge.  This photograph was taken during that time in Buffalo, New York.  It and the letter from his father were contained in a school grade book covering the 184-1885 year.  It is a remarkable record, with daily grades alloted from 1-10 in subjects like Latin Composition, Virgil, Greek Lessons, French, Algebra and Arithmetic.  His weekly average was tallied along with his class rank.  The signature of his teacher and a parent accompanies each weekly marking period.  His grades were consistently strong but even so his class rank was often in the teens and twenties.  His teacher made exactly one comment during the entire year on the page for the marking period of January 16th, 1885 - "Ogden can do better" -, to which his mother Esther Ogden replied; "I quite agree with Mr. Cutter."