It was about 5:30 in the afternoon when that assault on the ford began. Some troops waded across at the main ford, under fire from Procter’s battery who “raked the ferry … with grape.” The grapeshot “did much execution,” one of the Queen’s Rangers said; “The water took us up to our breasts, and was much stained with blood.” The Redcoats were dangerously exposed as they marched in a column down the road east of the ford, hemmed in by “the Morass on their Flanks,” and were “galled by Musketry from the Woods on their right and by round and grape Shot.” Others waded “up to our middle” at Chads’s Lower Ford, about where today’s railroad bridge stands, and took hits from a fourgun American battery on Rocky Hill, near where the N. C. Wyeth Studio is now.14
As the soaked army of invaders advanced through fields and orchards eastward of the Lower Ford, American soldiers “rallied afresh and fought Bayonet to Bayonet,” a British sergeant recalled. The powerful Redcoat force made short work of the Rebels. One group trapped “in a Buck Wheat field was totally scivered with the Bayonets before they could clear the fence round it” and escape. Among the Third Virginia Regiment eyeing the rout from the hills above Chads’s Ford was Captain John Marshall, future supreme court justice. The moment, however discouraging, was significant for patriotic symbolism: the Seventh Pennsylvania Militia who fought Knyphausen flew a red banner with a red-and-white stars-and-stripes canton, perhaps the first iconictype “American flag” ever seen in battle.15
Attack on the river. Chads’s Lower Ford came under fire from an American battery on Rocky Hill as British soldiers splashed across, in an imaginative 1940 depiction by Andrew Wyeth, who grew up on the distant slope.
Now the British overran all the Continental positions along the Brandywine, and artillerist Procter’s black horse was shot out from under him as he fled. In the mayhem, Colonel Samuel Smith of Maryland—later a U.S. Senator—was separated from his unit and feared capture in the night. He pounded on a Quaker’s door and demanded to be taken to Chester, toward which Washington’s army was hastening. “If you do not conduct me clear of the enemy,” Smith bellowed, “the moment I discover your treachery I will blow your brains out.”16
Also escaping was Colonel John Cropper, one of many Virginians on the field that day—including “Light-Horse” Harry Lee, the father of Robert E. Lee, himself the architect of some Civil War flanking maneuvers of an audacity that recall Brandywine. Stories of the battle long echoed in the South: Cropper’s grandson, Henry A. Wise, later a Confederate general, recalled fondly of his boyhood,
The children would never tire of hearing [Cropper] relate the story of the bloody fight at Brandywine, when the Seventh Virginia, the command of which had devolved upon him, was almost cut to pieces, and he himself was wounded by bayonet thrust; and how when the ensign had been killed and the colors captured, he drew a ramrod from a musket, tied his red bandanna to the end, and hoisted it as a flag.17
Cropper’s remnant troops spent the hours of darkness hiding in a newly felled wood before joining the headlong exodus toward the east. All during that hellish night, scores of wounded lay moaning on the battlefield: at least six hundred Americans were injured, and four hundred British. The dead numbered some three hundred on the patriot side, and an uncertain number of the king’s troops. Young farmer Townsend helped carry casualties to Birmingham Meeting, where doors were torn off and used for operating tables. Bodies and amputated limbs were dumped in a ditch in the graveyard. (Years later, in 1814, Townsend would offer medical aid to those who fell in the Battle of North Point at Baltimore, by which time he had become a leading Quaker of that city, noted for his devoutness and “tinge of quaint eccentricity.”) Other wounded were brought to the hamlet of Dilworthtown, where the British encamped for several days.18
Among the doctors who hastened to Dilworthtown under a flag of truce from Philadelphia was Benjamin Rush, who had helped bind up the wounded on the day of the battle and had almost been captured by the advancing British before escaping. Surgeon-general for the army and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Rush was struck by the politeness of the Redcoat officers and the commendable orderliness and discipline of their troops, compared with the Continentals. Ahead lay a brutal winter at Valley Forge, sixteen miles north, which would prove the ultimate test of these battered Americans’ resolve.19
As dusk fell on the night of the battle, George Washington was seen on the road to Wilmington, a mile below Dilworthtown, pointing his fleeing troops toward Chester in a scene that his namesake biographer Washington Irving would describe as “headlong terror and confusion…. The dust, the uproar, and the growing darkness, threw everything into chaos.” Hours later, a fateful letter was delivered to Congress:
CHESTER, September 11, 1777. Twelve o’Clock at Night. SIR, I am sorry to inform you that in this day’s engagement we have been obliged to leave the enemy masters of the field. Unfortunately the intelligence received of the enemy advancing up the Brandywine, and crossing at a Ford about six miles above us, was uncertain and contradictory, notwithstanding all my pains to get the best. This prevented my making a disposition adequate to the force with which the enemy attacked us on our right…. The Marquis La Fayette was wounded in the leg…. I have the honor to be, Sir, your obedient humble servant, G. WASHINGTON.20
With his brilliant military stroke, General Howe had nearly destroyed Washington’s Army—and might have finally done so, had he pursued the foe vigorously. Instead, he distracted himself by occupying Philadelphia fifteen days after the battle —and then winter came, the Americans slowly regrouping to fight again.
The Quakers of Birmingham were left to repair the damage to their farms and homes. For generations they would grumble about the pillaging done by the invaders, the pilfering of valuable clocks and heirlooms. British campfires in the wheat fields had been stoked with costly mahogany furniture, even as nearby fence-rails were left untouched. Heavy rainstorms washed soldiers’ mangled bodies out of their shallow graves, Townsend recalled, and “beasts and wild fowls” picked at them until he and others undertook reburial, a ghastly chore. One descendant of local settlers remembered, “Grandmother asserted that great numbers were killed in the [Brandywine] … and that the farmers for several days afterward were fishing dead bodies from the water.”21
Downstream, Wilmington did not escape this epic military campaign entirely, even if the Crown forces never attempted their Brandywine crossing there, as Washington had expected some days before. After the battle, Howe sent nine hundred troops of the Seventy-First Regiment of Foot to seize the town and secure accommodation for the wounded; as Howard Pyle would evocatively write, they “stacked their muskets along the stony streets in the moonlight.” Soldiers broke into the home of Delaware’s top political leader, President John McKinly, in the middle of the night and took him prisoner. Offshore were the men-of-war Roebuck and Liverpool, shelling the panicked town of 1,250. A militia captain named Stidham, descendant of the family of Swedish settlers on the Brandywine, saw the Roebuck coming into the creek in pursuit of his soldiers: “The balls rained down upon the roof” of the old homestead. Then Hessians came ashore, chasing Stidham through the house; he narrowly escaped by hiding in a hollow oak tree out back where he had once played hide-and-seek as a boy.22
Long Live Lafayette!
The battle proved the single most spectacular event ever to happen along the Brandywine—and remains so today. The historical associations that had already begun to cluster around the creek now found intense focus in this dramatic episode. At an early date, tourists came and reveled in historical memory here. The first were very illustrious: Lafayette himself, accompanied by a fellow officer, the Marquis de Chastellux. With a group of French friends from Philadelphia, they rode down to tour the battlefield in December 1780, even before the war was over.
They brought along a copy of the