Washington's Right Hand Man Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
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Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast
Episode 62 - Washington’s Right Hand Man
It is 1776. Washington gets all the credit.
You’re not bothered, that’s how it’s been since you met the guy but good lord do people not think he’s the very model of a continental general?
Well some people do. Since most of your forces deserted after the British drove you out of New York, there are more than a few people - people who haven’t seen him in action you might add - that don’t think big George is up to the challenge of leading an insurrection against the crown.
George is many things to many people in the Continental army, in this war that people are calling the Revolutionary War because forcing context down people’s throats is so important. But to you George is more than any of those things.
He’s your best friend.
You’re his confidant.
You’re his right hand man.
If it wasn’t for you then you wouldn’t be sitting huddled among your men in a collection of little boats, crossing the Delaware river when you’d much rather be home celebrating Christmas with your families.
Actually probably best to let Washington take the credit for keeping the men from their families at Christmas.
Not that they have much of a choice - the revolutionary army is on its knees and you know it. This whole plan is a bit of a hail mary really.
You knew it was when you suggested it and the rest of the generals all laughed into their drinks. You were sure it was when Washington decided that was what you were going to do.
Henry Knox could barely look you in the eye since it fell on him to ensure that these boats, laden with troops, horses and artillery, made it through the floating blocks of ice which lay in the Delaware river.
Yep, well done Hugh. You’ve done it again. Another Mercer original plan in the bag.
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This is Scotland. A podcast about history and where we made it. I’m Michael Park.
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It is 16th April 1746. The cannon fire in the distance is drowned out by the screams of the men you’re operating on. Punctured, shattered, bleeding and breathing their last on a field near Inverness.
This was the life of an army surgeon but it was pretty clear that the force you’d given your support to had been beaten. The Duke of Cumberland’s British forces had, by your estimates from the sheer numbers of wounded coming through, defeated Charles Edward Stuart.
Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Jacobite forces were done for and as soon as you weren’t up to your elbows in the blood of your young Jacobean comrades, you know you’ll be hunted.
You can’t go back to Aberdeenshire, that’s for damn sure.
You know fine well that the British don’t mess about when it comes to uprisings. Doesn’t matter if you’re a doctor or a soldier, if you messed with the crown you were going down.
So as soon as the last man is stabilised, or more likely dead on the table, you go into hiding, knowing that if the British army catches you then you’ll most likely be imprisoned or even hanged.
It is months before you’re able to buy your way onto a ship leaving for the colonies in America, out of reach - or at least out of the interest - of the redcoats.
You’re not the only one, but crucially you are one of the lucky ones as you head off to a new life in Pennsylvania, one of the American colonies.
But war tends to follow war, especially where the British are concerned and after eight relatively peaceful years you find yourself taking up arms for the British against the French and their Native American allies.
And both sides in the war have allies from the indigenous peoples; no side in the war has anything other than conquest in mind. This is a war for dominance being fought in theatres all over the world and it has come to your doorstep.
Why you decide that this is the time to fight is lost to history but many say it’s because you see the same scale of wounded that you saw that day at Culloden and vow to do something about it.
You are wounded in an attack on a Lenape (pr. Lenappy) staging village, and while it burns in the distance and the French powderkegs explode, you are separated from your unit.
With no supplies, no map, no horse and no hope you start walking. If only you remembered how you did it but focusing on the pain in your feet was the only way to mask the pain everywhere else and two weeks later, when you arrive at the gates of Fort Shirley some hundred miles away, no-one else can explain how you’re still alive.
Captain Mercer spends time convalescing and you find that in that time, because of your heroic trek through the forests of the Juniata valley, you become a Colonel and you become close with another officer in the British army.
George Washington.
You move to Virginia and live nearby Washington in a community teeming with fellow Scots. You open a little pharmacist’s shop, possibly with two ye olde e’s and treat Washington’s mother who lives just around the corner.
It’s pretty idyllic for a while. You, the local doctor, your pals are all on the Fredericksburg Committee of Safety along with you. You pay £2000 to buy Washington’s family farm on the other side of the Rappahannock River with the intention of founding a new settlement on its acreage.
But then war comes again and in June 1776, having received a letter with John Hancock’s John Hancock on it, you leave your idyllic life behind as a newly commissioned Brigadier General of the Continental Army, on your way to report at Washington’s New York Headquarters.
It is January 3rd 1777. Just a week since you, Washington, Knox and a small band of hardy soldiers crossed the Delaware river and launched a series of surprise attacks against Hessian mercenaries hired by the British.
It didn’t matter whose idea it had been but you were proud that it was yours.
The Hessians had been all but captured in the first attack the day after Christmas. 900-odd men captured with only two losses on your side - and both of them from the cold. It was inspiring soldiers of the continental army to extend their enlistments into the new year after the disaster of getting run out of New York.
The second battle had come last night, as the British forces had tried time and again to penetrate the American defences at the Assunpink Creek. They’d eventually given up and fallen back, mustering their strength for another go in the morning.
And that’s when Washington had snuck your forces out of the town with the intention of attacking Princeton some ten miles down the road. He left 500 men behind to make a load of noise and keep the campfires burning so the British would think they were digging in for another defence.
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MID ROLL
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It is 3rd January, 1777. In a frozen orchard outside Princeton, New Jersey, You, a doctor from Pitsligo in Aberdeenshire lie bleeding.
Your second has taken a musket ball to the head, your advanced party had been sent to destroy a bridge to slow down the British army returning from the now abandoned Trenton but you had met two regiments of British soldiers heading down to reinforce the troops preparing for that attack.
Outnumbered and outgunned with slower-loading rifles to the British muskets you ordered your men to keep firing but the British Colonel Mawhood ordered a bayonet charge.
You and your men didn’t have bayonets.
The blood in your mouth is bitter, metallic. You know that if the first five stabs of their bayonets hasn’t killed you then the last two probably will. Or the middle two. Or the first one. Doesn’t really matter.
The redcoats - the British soldiers - are turning your own cannons on your fleeing troops who have had no choice but to turn and run while the Redcoats congratulate themselves and fire volleys of cannonballs into the backs of the retreating Americans.
The British couldn’t be happier. They think that by stabbing you they’ve cut the head off the Continental Army.
These Redcoats are labouring under the misapprehension that they’ve just killed General George Washington.
A group of militia appear over the hill. They’re untrained and unprepared. As they see your men retreating many of them turn and run in the face of the well-prepared British regulars.
There’s every chance that the battle for Princeton could be over before it really starts as the British began to form up to attack the main body of the American army.
But then, out of a haze of American gunsmoke, you see him on his horse, waving troops forward, George Washington bringing everything he had down on the British troops in the frozen orchard where you had come to die.
It was the first time that the Continental Army had managed to defeat better trained British regulars in battle and while he rode roughshod over the defenders of the town, another column of American forces rode up the road toward the College of New Jersey - now Princeton University - where British forces had taken refuge.
The story goes that an artillery captain by the name of Alexander Hamilton ordered his men to fire cannons into the building, one of which decapitated a portrait of King George II which hung in the chapel.
Hamilton, who had already been tapped by Washington as a commander with potential during the escape from New York was made an aide-de-camp less than two months later. His time as Washington’s right hand man is much better known for some reason.
As for you, the doctor from Pitsligo, you refuse to leave your men as they die around you and are given a seat on the stump of an oak tree where you’re able to watch Washington’s counter attack and see, for the last time, your best friend do what he was best at.
It took you nine horrible, agonising days to succumb to the wounds from the bayonets, all that just to occasionally be remembered as a footnote in General Washington’s campaigns.
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You’ve been listening to Scotland, it was written and produced by me, Michael Park and is a production of Be Quiet Media.
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