Several years ago, I set out to understand the movements of the British army through Delaware and into Pennsylvania in early September 1777. It was a small piece of the Philadelphia campaign of Gen, Sir William Howe, who led a combined army of about 16,000 that landed on Elk Neck on August 25 and captured […]
Aside from being outmanned by the best army in the world when the American Revolution started, it was clear that the American forces were lacking specific skill sets, gaps which had to be addressed in order to assure victory. Early on, Congress identified several functions, the major ones being engineering and artillery, in which a […]
The radeau (French, singular for “raft”) was co-opted for eighteenth century warfare on and along Lake George and Lake Champlain, to deal with the challenges of wilderness, inland waterways. The radeau’s design was unique, incorporating a pragmatic approach to the problem of transportation and concentration of ship-mounted artillery in a self-contained transport in shallow water. The […]
History occasionally provides a pleasant surprise by revealing the record of an ordinary person who, thrust into a unique role, performed extraordinary services for his country. In researching the movement of American ordinance from the Hudson River and Philadelphia to Yorktown in 1781, this author discovered that the commodore appointed to lead the ordnance fleet, […]
The best-known scene of Col. Henry Knox’s train of artillery in the winter of 1775-1776 is Tom Lovell’s painting The Noble Train of Artillery. It shows a caravan of ox-drawn artillery that the Continental Army moved from the recently conquered Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York (pictured near the top left of the painting) through […]
The booming roar of cannon shattered the stillness of the warm summer air around Boston. A thirty-two pound cannonball screamed through the sky toward the Continental army encampment in Roxbury. Smashing through the wall of a house and tearing through two partitions, the shot ripped through a room where soldiers were eating breakfast. The ball […]
In a cemetery behind the Salem United Church of Christ, in Reamstown, Lancaster County, a boulder stands: This grinding bowl from East Cocalico is placed to Commemorate ITS MAKER THE AMERICAN INDIAN AND The Boulder, Three other local figures, who lived abreast of the loftier Traditions of their time, light and race: THE SOLDIER of […]
The Siege of Yorktown began subsequent to the movement of about fifty thousand American and French soldiers and sailors to eastern Virginia, twenty-eight thousand sailors and marines in the French blockade fleet and twenty-two thousand American and French soldiers surrounding the British Army on land. By October 9, 1781 tens of thousands of manhours had […]
As the British surveyed the fortifications being built upon Breed’s Hill across the harbor from Boston proper, beside the farmers, shop keepers, tradesmen and aspiring soldiers, one must wonder if their focus stopped when they saw what must have appeared to them as an elderly man with the bearing that comes from martial experience directing […]
