Procter’s Artillery consisted of four brass cannon pulled up behind a hastily built breastwork of earth and logs in front of an orchard. It looked across blooming fields of buckwheat toward the creek—“Meadow Ground” on the General Weedon map, drawn that day and the only American cartography that shows the battlefield. This battery fired all day at Knyphausen in one of the really spirited artillery duels of the war. The cannonading could be heard like distant thunder as far away as Philadelphia—by Congress then meeting at Independence Hall and by Thomas Paine, who wrote to Benjamin Franklin in Paris, “I was preparing Dispatches for you when the report of cannon at Brandywine interrupted my proceeding.”6
At noon, Washington rode up and down the American line, stopping off at the Chads House. James Parker, a Loyalist from Virginia, was secretly observing him from a British battery on the far heights, across the Brandywine. He watched as the general left the house accompanied by officers and two white flags, climbing the hill behind it to view the battlefield with a spyglass. Parker had the British fire their cannon, and “my prayers went with the ball that it might finish Washington & the Rebellion together.” As the shells whistled down, Washington said calmly to some civilians who were tagging along, “Gentlemen, you perceive that we are attracting the notice of the enemy. I think you had better retire.” Thus did Washington narrowly escape being killed, which might have changed the whole future history of the North American continent—and the world.
Meanwhile the British were executing their stealthy flanking maneuver. After wading across the West Branch at Trimble’s Ford (today, southeast of the intersection of Camp Linden and Northbrook roads), the main Redcoat force made its way to obscure Jefferis’s Ford on the East Branch. Farmers watched in astonishment at the sight, never to be forgotten, of “the army coming out of the woods into the fields belonging to Emmor Jefferis on the west side of the Creek above the fording place.” As young local Joseph Townsend later recalled, “In a few minutes the fields were literally covered over with them, and they were hastening towards us. Their arms and bayonets being raised, shone as bright as silver, being a clear sky and the day exceeding warm.”
For four hours Cornwallis’s huge army splashed across at Jefferis’s Ford—“horse and foot, artillery, baggage, provision wagons, arms and ammunition, together with a host of plunderers and rabble.” Rousted from his farmhouse, the terrified farmer Emmor Jefferis was forced to guide General Howe through the confusing lanes of the countryside east of the river. As the battle fully erupted, the Quaker ducked bullets that whizzed nearby. “Don’t be afraid Mr. Jefferis, they won’t hurt you,” Howe said with amusement. Meanwhile British troops ransacked Jefferis’s house. They rolled kegs of liquor out of the cellar, knocked off their heads, and got drunk on his lawn.7
After wading across at the ford, the Crown forces marched through a “terrible defile” into the hamlet of Sconneltown—the Americans could have ambushed them in the ravine, had they only known they were coming. They passed Strode’s Mill on Plum Run, where soldiers’ rude graffiti on beams and rafters would be pointed out for generations. Finally they paused at high Osborne’s Hill after many miles of rapid march. (A marker on today’s Birmingham Road at Country Club Road indicates the spot.) The view across the fertile fields and forests of September was lovely, and a British officer told young Townsend, “You have got a hell of a fine country here.”
Townsend’s reminiscences form one of the most striking eyewitness accounts of any battle during the war as he revisited, years later, with intense clarity what had plainly been the most extraordinary day of his life: the youthful wonder at seeing the magnificent soldiers who seemingly materialized out of nowhere; the spectacular uniforms; the sea of scarlet across the green landscape; the innumerable spurs and swords and shiny boots. At Osborne’s Hill the ground was strewn with heaps of blankets and baggage as the troops readied for their grim advance. Cornwallis, wrote the historian Trevelyan, now “deployed his whole force as coolly and methodically as if he were in Hyde Park,” and in stately, awesome formation they began to march forward, a scene one of their officers called “the most Grand & Noble Sight imaginable.” It was about 4:30 in the afternoon. So thrilled was Townsend by the beautiful spectacle, it came as an astonishing shock when a thousand guns suddenly began blazing and scarlet-clad warriors pitched forward into the dust.8
A Most Infernal Fire
Across Street Road and up the slope toward Birmingham Meeting came the Redcoats, both British and Hessians, and the Americans could see how deftly they had been flanked. That stone structure for Quaker worship had been erected in 1763, replacing an earlier building. Hopelessly outnumbered Virginians fired at the British from behind the graveyard wall. As they fell back, a battery on the hill to the south fired furious volleys of grapeshot down the road in front of the meetinghouse, shredding the roadside hedges, and British soldiers scrambled for shelter behind the wall. Others struggled up the slopes toward the meetinghouse. A lieutenant recalled, “There was a most infernal fire of cannon & musketry—smoak—incessant shouting—incline to the right! incline to the left!—halt!—charge!”9
At a fork in the road south of the meetinghouse, an old cannon installed in 1877 commemorates the American battery that blasted away at the British from the hilltop behind it. Washington himself belatedly rushed there to direct the fighting, trying to turn around what one historian calls his worst battlefield performance of the war. Just getting from the Ring House to the battle scene proved difficult; an American officer forced an aged Quaker named Brown, on threat of running him through on the spot, to jump onto a charger and guide the top commander over hill and dale. Washington’s horse galloped at Brown’s flank, leaping fences, the Father of His Country constantly shouting, “Push along, old man!”10
It took almost two hours for the British to take the heights, American general John Sullivan reported. “The hill was disputed almost muzzle to muzzle in such a manner that General Conway who has seen much service says he never saw so close and severe a fire…. We were obliged to abandon the hill we had so long contended for, but not till we had almost covered the ground between that & Bremingham meeting house with the dead bodies of the enemy.” The left fork in the road, to Dilworthtown, wound through woods and crossed Sandy Hollow. Fighting was intense on both sides of the road here. Cannon and musket fire tore through the forest in some of the most vicious fighting of the entire Revolution. “A cannon-ball went through Captain Stout,” a New Jersey soldier said, “and through a sergeant that stood behind him.”11
South of the road, young Lafayette galloped up and tried to stem the rout, the fighting happening in what he later remembered as being “in front of the thinly wooded forest.” Dismounting, he shouted to the men to fix bayonets, and he shoved them in the back if they tried to turn and flee. But the American line collapsed, and a bullet tore through the Frenchman’s left calf. Lafayette’s aide-de-camp hoisted him onto the saddle, and he escaped—with the patriotic wound that would make him instantly famous and beloved among all freedom-loving Americans. Among those who tended his injury, it is said, was young James Monroe, future American president, one of a whole roster of famous men who were on the battlefield that day, including Nathanael Greene, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Knox—and John Dickinson, supposedly the only signer of the Declaration of Independence to experience combat during the war. Here too was Lemuel Cook of Connecticut, who would live to see the Civil War—last survivor of all Revolutionary War veterans.12
Almost Cut to Pieces
As the battle thundered at Birmingham, the British finally attacked the American center to finish off the distracted Continentals. Knyphausen, wrote Trevelyan handsomely in the 1890s,
sent his infantry across Chads’s Ford in a dense succession of regiments, distinguished one from another by numerals which are all of them so many titles of honour in the estimation of an old-fashioned