among your people! New Jersey women exemplified the perfection of woman-kind! The militia of New Jersey could neither be bought nor crushed! Grateful for your summons to share this day's honors and contribute, so far as I may, to an abiding record of the events you commemorate, I would once again repeat those prophetic words, already realized, with which Washington pronounced the war for American independence ended : "Happy, thrice happy, shall they be pronounced, hereafter, who have contributed anything, who have performed the meanest office in erecting this stupendous fabric of empire on the broad basis of independency; who have assisted in protecting the rights of human nature and establishing an asylum for the poor and oppressed of all nations and religions." THE GROTON HEIGHTS MONUMENT (From Historical Sketch, September 6, 1879.) THE battle of Groton Heights must be viewed in its relations to other events of the Revolution. It was not a single and isolated event. It was a scene in the great act which closed at Yorktown in the surrender of Lord Cornwallis. Groton Heights stands connected with Yorktown. Had there been no siege of Yorktown there would have been no battle of Groton Heights, and no burning of New London. During the summer of 1781 the Continental government had been informed that a fleet and a body or troops was about to arrive from France, under Count de Grasse, to co-operate with the American forces against the British. Washington and Rochambeau had held an interview, and resolved to lay siege to New York and wrest it from the British. General Clinton, commander-in-chief of the British forces, began to bend everything to the defence of this stronghold. While these preparations were going on for the defence of New York, Washington changed his purpose, and determined upon the more feasible plan of laying siege to the army of Cornwallis in Virginia. So effectually did he conceal his ultimate design that he marched his forces around New York, crossed the Hudson, made rapid marches through the State of New Jersey, and was well on his way towards the head of Chesapeake Bay before General Clinton suspected that his movements had any other end in view than the siege of New York. The British general aimed to draw him back, and for that purpose planned a diversion into Connecticut, the colony that had furnished the largest quotas to the Continental army, the com monwealth of Washington's dear friend and faithful supporter, Jonathan Trumbull. Benedict Arnold, "that infamous traitor," had just returned from an expedition into Virginia, in which he marked his path with conflagration and slaughter. Great preparations were made. At ten o'clock, Thursday morning, September 6, 1781, the British troops landed in two divisions, of about eight hundred men each, on either side of the river; that on the New London side, under the traitor Arnold; that on the Groton side, under Lieutenant-Colonel Eyre. Captain Adam Shapley having only twenty-three men at Fort Trumbull, a mere water-battery, open from behind, spiked his guns, and with sixteen men crossed the river to Fort Griswold. There were now one hundred and sixty men in that fort. To the impudent demand of the British officer, Captain Beckwith, Colonel William Ledyard, in command, replied that "he would defend the fort to the last." It was now between eleven and twelve o'clock. Arnold stood on the tomb of the Winthrops, in the old burying-ground, and, with his field-glass, surveyed the scene. What conflict of emotion boiled in the breast of the arch-traitor as he cast his eye around the happy scene of his early life which he was now ravishing with sword and torch, we may not know. is official report reads, "After a most obstinate defence of forty minutes the fort was carried by the superior bravery of our battalions." It was the hour of noon. The battle had begun. Colonel Ayre led one regiment and Major Montgomery the other to the assault. With gleaming guns and nodding plumes they extend a long and fiery wave from north to south and fill the field. With shouts and yells they rend the air; over walls and rocks, over fields of ripening corn, through upland pastures, on they come like madmen. Time would fail to tell how Captain Elias Halsey with an eighteen-pounder swept twenty red-coats down, how Captain Shapley wounded Colonel Eyre, how Jordan Freeman, Ledyard's colored man, ran a boat-pike through brave Major Montgomery, and he fell lifeless back. Stephen Hempstead with his pike, his left hand wounded, cleared a breach. Samuel Edgecomb raised great cannon-balls and smote the assailants in the ditch below. Park Avery, in the hottest of the fight, cheered his son, a lad of seventeen, and the next moment saw him bite the dust. Belton Allyn, a gentle, pious boy, fell on the ramparts and went up to heaven. With gun-stocks, pikes, and cannon-balls they fought, hand to hand, one against five. The dead, the dying, and the wounded that lay in the trenches and fields around, the work of the stout-hearted little garrison, made a total of one hundred and ninety-three,-thirty-three more than were in the garrison. Surely, our brave sires were not the only sufferers that 6th of September, 1781! Stephen Hempstead says "they had attacked twice with great vigor, and were repulsed with equal firmness," when a shot cut the flag from the halyards. Until this moment our loss had been only six or seven killed and eighteen wounded. The enemy, supposing the flag to have been struck, rushed with redoubled impetuosity, carried the southwest bastion by storm, crossed the parade, and unbarred the gates. A British officer shouted, "Who commands this fort?" "I did, sir," was Colonel Ledyard's reply, as he tendered his sword, "but you do now." His sword was thrust through his body by the hand that received it. This was the signal for indiscriminate slaughter. Blood flowed over all the area and hid the greensward. They trod in blood! There was blood in the magazine and in the barracks; blood was on the platform; blood was everywhere! There they lay in heaps, fallen one upon another, scarce twenty, out of one hundred and thirty able-bodied men when the British entered, able to stand upon their feet. There they lay, as brave a band as fought with Leonidas at Thermopylæ. At sunset Arnold set sail for New York. Deplorable and costly as it was to the British, as a strategic movement it was an utter failure. Washington scarcely deigned to notice it. Instead of sending troops into Connecticut, he drew them all into Virginia, and Yorktown decided the campaign. JOHN JOSEPH COPP. THE GROTON HEIGHTS LESSON. (From Address delivered September 6, 1879.) Two facts, illustrated to the eye, must be held as characteristic of the State of Connecticut in its relation to the War of Independence. The first is, that bloodiest and most atrocious deed of all the war, which is commemorated by the lofty obelisk beside us. The other is, that this should be the only battlemonument within the State,-and the State itself without battlefields of later date than the war with the Pequot savages, if we except the skirmish at Danbury, in 1777, and the invasion of New Haven, in 1779. These instances are the only ones in the history of two hundred years in which an armed force of an enemy remained over-night upon her soil. In Connecticut there never was a revolutionary war! She entered the struggle for independence complete, with her governor, and council, and the whole machinery of the colonial government. In other colonies there was more or less revolution. We, in Connecticut, fought, not for the achieving of new liberties, but for the defence of the old. . . . As early as 1778, Governor Trumbull wrote to the Tory Tryon, "The barbarous inhumanity which has marked the prosecution of the war on your part, the insolence which displays itself on every petty advantage, and the cruelties exercised on those whom the fortune of war has thrown into your hands, are inseparable bars to the very idea of any peace with Great Britain on any other conditions than the most perfect and absolute independence." At length it seemed that History had completed her dramatic preparations, and that the curtain was ready to rise upon such a scene of slaughter. Arnold, once the most brilliant officer in the Continental service, was a traitor in disgrace, fleeing from the sight of honorable and patriotic men and loathed by those who had bought him and were ready to use him on the base business, unworthy of the name of war, to which they had now resolved to stoop. Only a brief rehearsal of his part, by the burning of Richmond and the devastation of other parts of Virginia, and Arnold was ready, one year from the date of his treason, to disembark, in the bright daylight of the morning of September 6, 1781, with his band of foreign incendiaries and assassins, take his stand on the tomb of the Winthrops, and direct the destruction of the town and the slaughter of his fellow-citizens and neighbors. . . . There is a curious superficial resemblance to be observed between the battle of Groton Heights and the battle of Bunker Hill. In each case there was the storming of a hill-top fort by a vastly superior force of regular troops, against a scanty garrison of untrained militia. In each case the successful storm was accompanied by burning the neighboring town. In each case the military event is commemorated by a granite obelisk, and the memory of it is cherished proudly as more precious than the memory of many victories. Even as the brave fighting of the farmers of Bunker Hill committed the people to the commencement of the war, so the more heroic suffering and dying of the martyrs of Groton Heights made it thenceforth impossible to think of compromises and concessions, which the British government had been offering to the American people on condition of their renewed allegiance. After the death of Ledyard and his neighbors there could be no end of the war but in victory. The victory was not far away, indeed, for the glory of Yorktown was nigh at hand. But there was need, nevertheless, for the horror of Groton Heights. The blood of all these martyrs was not spilled in vain! . . . O fellow-citizens of Connecticut, and especially men of Groton, children of these martyred heroes, be proud of the stock from which you are descended-proud, with that worthy and honest pride which shall lead you to emulate the virtues of the race from which you are sprung! You do well to build your schoolhouse in the shadow of this lofty obelisk, and to let this arena of the bloody struggle be trodden, year by year, in the happy sports of boys and girls. But think what a shame it would be before the world if the children of such ancestors should prove recreant to their glorious name! Think what a legacy of glory and ennobling responsibility has come down to you, to be kept and handed down, unimpaired and enhanced, to your children after you! "Guard well your trust, The faith that dared the sea, Their garnered dust." LEONARD WOOLSEY BACON. |