The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [132]
The general had nothing but admiration for the regular army and the several New Jersey militia units that had joined it. He declared, “The behavior of the troops in general, after they recovered from the first surprise occasioned by the retreat of the advanced corps, was such as could not be surpassed.”19
The Americans held the battlefield all night and awoke the next morning to find the British camp vacant. Clinton had had enough of the combined regular army and militia forces; he had departed and headed north, for New York, his original goal. Technically, the battle was a draw, but the Americans claimed victory because they had held the field. American losses were 356 killed and wounded; the British lost 358. More than sixty soldiers on each side died of heat stroke. Monmouth was a military success and a public relations coup for the American army and gave the rebellion new spirit.20
That spirit was muted for Sylvanus Seely and his militia company, though, because on the following day, another brutally hot one, he and his men were given one of the grim details of the war; they were told to bury the dead at Monmouth. There were so many dead Americans on the field near the courthouse that it took all day to dig their graves.
Chapter Twenty-Three
THE SECRET LIFE OF CAPTAIN SEELY
Seely was under stress throughout the rest of 1778 and in the early days of 1779. He was trying to buy and sell goods for his store, keep the army supplied, run his militia company, and, at the same time, care for his wife Jane, who was nine months pregnant at Christmas and expecting her child any day. The baby finally arrived two weeks later, on January 11, 1779. Betsy Seely’s birth was a very difficult one, however, and Jane was bedridden and sick for weeks.
The militia leader, knowing how poorly she felt, had to leave for Philadelphia for three days shortly after the birth of his daughter to buy things for his store. “Left my wife very sick,” he wrote in his diary. He was pleased, though, to discover that she was “mending” when he came home. Jane, or “Jenny,” as he called her, was ill for the rest of the month and much of February. Seely did what he could to comfort her and in early February persuaded one of his relatives, a woman, to help him nurse his wife.
The weather improved in mid February 1779, which pleased Seely. He wrote, “We have had so warm a spell that the maple trees are in season and the elm buds are swollen and sundry other buds and the grass begins to start.”
The British were pleased with the mild weather, too, because they planned to sneak out of New York and raid Elizabethtown where they would kidnap Governor Livingston as he dined with friends there. The surprise attack came on February 25. The Americans were overwhelmed by the British, who burned the army barracks in that community, along with several residential homes. The governor was having dinner with some military officers and Seely. They were startled, but all managed to escape. David Little, a local freeholder, was not so fortunate. He was seized along with twenty other residents in another part of town.
It was one of a number of attempts by the British to kidnap highranking political and military officials. Some succeeded and some did not. They had captured Charles Lee in 1776 and held him for nearly a year and a half. Later, they would arrest Henry Laurens, one of the presidents of the Continental Congress, when they found him on an oceangoing vessel that they seized. The grand prize in these schemes was George Washington and one year later they would stage a raid deep into New Jersey, and into Seely’s backyard, in a bold attempt to capture the commander in chief.
Seely was also an eyewitness to another kind of history that winter. His close