The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [131]
Arriving earlier with Lee was the Second Rhode Island, with Private Jeremiah Greenman. The Rhode Islander, like everyone at Monmouth, complained of the heat, which he described as “hot and sultry.” The pullback ordered by Lee that morning was seen from many perspectives. The soldier’s view was that of a soldier facing the brunt of the English force directly in front of him. Greenman and his comrades were awed by the size of the British army. He wrote, “They formed in a solid column then fired a volley at us. They being so much superior to our numbers, we retreated. They began a very heavy cannonading and killed a few of our regiment.”
The men, scrambling back and away from the lines of Redcoats, found some protection behind a wooden fence, where they made another stand. He noted, “Light horse advanced against us. We fired very heavy. Then the footmen rushed on us.” Greenman and his men continued to fight as General Lee panicked. The Second Rhode Island seemed pinned down. “After firing a number of rounds, we was obliged to retreat,” Greenman wrote.
Greenman noted with alarm that many of the men running from the British on that unbearably hot day simply collapsed on the field and died of heatstroke. The entire battlefield was covered with men who died from the heat on both sides. “Left the ground with about a thousand killed and wounded, on our side about two hundred killed and wounded and died with heat.”
It was during that retreat that Private Greenman’s men were turned around by George Washington and ordered to attack the oncoming waves of the enemy. They did. This time they had assistance from sixteen American cannon opening up on each side of them. Amid the bursting shells and the volleys of musket balls in the warm air, Jeremiah Greenman was shot in the thigh and went down.
The American lines held against the constant bombardment of British cannon. Their fire was eventually muted by the return fire of the line of American cannon. The American batteries were not destroyed by the British howitzers, as planned, because the shells continually landed short of their marks. The American infantrymen held off a succession of British charges, large and small, that afternoon. Colonel Stephen Olney’s regiment had lost several men during the retreat, but they stopped and formed a solid line when they heard the American cannon erupt behind them and someone arrived, shouting encouragement to them. Olney wrote, “At this instant our main army came up, commanded by Washington himself, and commenced a heavy fire with our artillery and the British found they had got a fresh army to contend with.”16
The charge that Washington ordered late in the day pushed the British back. The Americans were proud of their work. “Drove the proud King’s Guards and haughty British Grenadiers and gained immortal honor,” wrote Major Joseph Bloomfield of his men in the Third New Jersey.17
The Americans fought with all the appearances of a fine European army as they were trained to do so at Valley Forge by von Steuben. Late in the afternoon, Britain’s General Clinton launched a classic flanking movement, but following their Valley Forge training in maneuvering, the American line swung over to stop it and halted the Redcoats in their tracks. That force, led by Anthony Wayne, remained exceedingly cool under the heavy British advance that began just five hundred feet away. Wayne and the officers had the men hold their fire until the last possible moment; then they opened up with a thunderous volley that stopped the attack. The Continentals began to chase the British. A group of Redcoats, pinned down in an orchard, were driven back by Americans and then shredded by Continental cannon as they tried to flee. The army had become, just as Washington had dreamed, a professional force capable of holding its own against, and even defeating, any army in the world.18
The intensity of the battle that day was