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August 1976 | Volume 27, Issue 5
Monmouth
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
When in June of 1778 Sir Henry Clinton evacuated Philadelphia and moved his army of ten thousand British and German troops toward New York, Washington called his officers together to discuss strategy. Their decision—which, said Alexander Hamilton, “would have done honor to the most honorable society of midwives, and to them only”—was to keep watch on Clinton’s flank but to avoid a major action.
Washington thought differently. He wanted a fight and sent out an advance guard under Lafayette. But when the Americans came into contact with the British near Monmouth Court House, New Jersey, on the morning of the twenty-eighth, the cranky and unstable General Charles Lee had taken command. Lee wanted no part of a battle. When he saw one shaping up, he issued a series of contradictory orders that led to a confused, obscure fight in which groups of American troops drifted here and there aimlessly. Soon Lee’s whole force of five thousand was in retreat, the men staggering in the hundred-degree heat.
Washington arrived on the field about noon and, astonished and enraged, galloped up to Lee and demanded an explanation. Lee paltered, and Washington pressed on along the road to Monmouth. He came at last upon two regiments of Maryland and Pennsylvania troops bringing up the rear of the retreat, with the British only two hundred yards behind them. Washington rallied the two regiments and went back after fresh troops to form a new line behind them. As men began to come up, the American line stiffened and finally stood firm against fierce assaults from British infantry and cavalry. A year before, the American troops under such pressure would have broken and run, but now they were seasoned by a winter of training at Valley Forge, and time and time again they threw back the best that Clinton could send against them.
All through the sweltering afternoon the attacks came on, and by five o’clock the British and Hessians were so spent that they could do no more. Washington ordered a counterattack, but the heat and the fighting had sapped the Americans too, and so the longest battle of the war, and the last important fight in the North, came to a close.
That night Clinton withdrew, and eventually brought his army safely to New York, as he had planned. While Washington had not actually won a victory, he had held his ground and inflicted more casualties than he took—some two hundred and fifty British and Germans were killed, and only seventy-two Americans.
Perhaps the happiest consequence of the battle was to get the perpetually troublesome Charles Lee out of the army. He demanded a courtmartial, got one, and was found guilty. Initially suspended from his command for a year, Lee took it upon himself to write Congress so obnoxious a letter that he was finally dismissed from the service for good.
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