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February 1973 | Volume 24, Issue 2
Encounter at the Brandywine
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
Two hundred years ago men grown tired of a king shouldered arms and marched away to a quixotic and seemingly hopeless campaign against the greatest military power in the world. It was all a very long time ago, and it is perhaps too easy for us to see them as West, Trumbull, and all the artists schooled in the European tradition painted them: solemn demigods sacrificing themselves willingly on the altar of history, falling bloodlessly amid clusters ojflags beneath rich, rococo skies.
Of course, it wasn’t so. The men who fought our revolution were farmers, shopkeepers, blacksmiths, accountants, schoolteachers, and businessmen who felt they were being cheated and were willing to do something about it. Unlike their British and Hessian counterparts, most of them had never dreamed of being soldiers. They knew nothing of revetments and flanking maneuvers, and they certainly didn’t want to die. But when a war came, they found they were ready for a war.
For the most part, it wasn’t a business of Saratogas and Yorktowns and Washington and his aides galloping onto the field at Monmouth in the nick of time. It’s unlikely that the wounded used their last breath to cheer downy-faced drummer boys and gray-haired fife players. Most of the battles they fought ended in defeat. They would count their dead, pull back fifty miles, complain bitterly, and fight again. For eight terrible years they fought a stronger and better-equipped enemy in the forests and fields of the new land they had taken for their own. In the end, they triumphed.
Now, as the bicentennial of their struggle approaches, it is particularly fitting to honor the men rather than their legend. In the past hundred years few artists have attempted to portray seriously the battles that won America for us. Last year, the editors of A MERICAN HERITAGE commissioned Don Troiani, a young military historian and gifted artist, to paint the battles of the Revolution, not as historical pageantry, hut the way they must have looked. The uniforms and maneuvers in these paintings are as accurate as scrupulous research can make them. Each picture is followed by an account of the action m the words of the men who fought it. The first of this new series, the Battle of Brandywine, begins here.
In the summer of 1777 General Sir William Howe and thousands of his best troops left British-held New York and put out to sea, hound for the head of Chesapeake Bay and a major attack on Philadelphia, the capital of the new American republic. At last, after weeks of rumor and doubt, General Washington received word of Howe’s plans and hastily prepared to check him before he reached his goal. Despite the loss of New York the year before, the victories at Trenton and Princeton had spurred enlistments, and Washington was able to field an army of ten thousand men. They marched through Philadelphia late in August, shabbily dressed men sporting sprigs of