Valley Forge by Bob Drury & Tom Clavin

Author:Bob Drury & Tom Clavin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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I. Wayne’s skirmish with Mawhood inadvertently sparked a conflagration that burned at the southern end of the Garden State for months. When Mawhood could not find Wayne’s regiment, he took out his frustration on the area’s Whig population. Defeated New Jersey militiamen were bayoneted as they surrendered while their homes and farms were burned to the ground. Mawhood left a trail of butchery specifically intended, he wrote, “to reduce them [and] their unfortunate Wives & Children to Beggary & Distress.” (http://www.revolutionarywarnewjersey.com/new_jersey_revolutionary_war_sites/towns/hancocks_bridge_nj_revolutionary_war_sites.htm.)

II. In fact, the American soldiers who fell for this ruse were forced to serve as seamen on British ships or in garrisons far from the revolution’s battlefields. Like the British counterfeiting operation, the false promises in the newspaper postings enraged Washington, who wrote to the Virginia congressman Richard Henry Lee, “The enemy are governed by no principles that ought to actuate honest men.” (From “George Washington to Richard Henry Lee, 15 February 1778,” in The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, Vol. 13, ed. Lengel, pp. 549–50.)

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