The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [130]
As Rhea spoke to the commander, British shells exploded around them. Washington noticed, gazing across the meadows, that although his army had retreated, it had done so in great order. No one had panicked. Washington listened to Rhea, looked, nodded, and decided within minutes to do what Rhea suggested, with modifications. He then ordered the army to take up the new positions.12 Officers and men at Monmouth marveled at Washington’s calmness amid the fury of the battle and his ability to make quick decisions and issue crisp and clear orders that not only halted the retreat, but renewed the spirit of the American troops.
Seely then reported a sight that invigorated all of the Americans that morning. George Washington, on his white horse, rode back and forth in front of the American lines to yell out orders and rally the troops, an easy target for British guns.13 Wrote Lafayette of Washington’s bravery, “Never had I beheld so superb a man. [He] rode along the lines, amid the shouts of the soldiers, cheering them by his voice and example and restoring to our standard the fortunes of the fight.”14
Washington placed Anthony Wayne’s regiments, with some two thousand men, just arrived, on a second line of defense farther back up the slope and repositioned the first cannon that he could find on the knoll Rhea had designated. Regiments were stationed along the edges of woods to the right and left of the main force to prevent any flanking movements by the British.
Seely noted that what followed was “a great severe action in which the enemy lost several officers of distinction and left about two hundred men dead on the grounds. Numbers died on both sides.” On the other side of the battlefield, Sergeant Ebenezer Wild of the First Massachusetts had been marching with brigades under the Marquis de Lafayette for several days. Washington had at first put Lafayette in charge of the attack, but later changed his mind because he felt that Lafayette’s troops were not in the proper position and because the obstinate Lee insisted on being given that job as second in command.
Wild, who always spelled Lafayette’s name as “Markis Delefiat,” had been drenched in the thunderstorm that broke over the region two nights earlier. Lafayette’s brigades slept in the field each night as they moved closer to intercepting the British, with no protection from the elements. Wild wrote, “We took our lodgings in the road, without anything to cover us, or anything to lodge on but the wet ground and we in a very wet condition.”
The First Massachusetts marched five more miles the next day, June 27, that Wild said was “excessively hot,” and then, on June 28, reached Monmouth Court House just before 2 p.m. He had arrived at the opposite side of the battlefield from Seely and his militia. The Massachusetts men found the fighting severe as soon as they tried to hold a position on top of the slope where Washington had repositioned his army. Wild wrote, “Our division formed a line on an eminence about a half a mile in the front of the enemy and our artillery in our front. A very smart cannonading ensued from both sides.”
The Massachusetts men had marched into the middle of the fury and were unable to make much movement. Shells exploded all around them in what one newspaper called “the severest cannonade [that] ever happened in America.”15 Wild wrote, “We stayed here till several of our officers and men were killed and wounded. Seeing that it