Hallowed Ground: How Forgotten Battles Shaped America

By Douglas Smock

History is constantly changing. What we know of past events is based on someone's interpretation. Even first-person accounts can vary widely and, in fact, did in the reports of Benedict Arnold's conduct at the second Battle of Saratoga in 1777. The conventional histories were based on a now-discredited account by one officer. A letter made public in 2016 painted a different version of events more favorable to Arnold.

Hallowed Ground: How Forgotten Battles Changed America provides a fresh look at history through the lens of battles that deserve new attention, starting with the Saratoga Campaign. The little-taught Mexican War that preceded the Civil War is too easily recalled as an important training ground for the legendary military leaders of the Civil War. It was also a land grab condemned by Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Henry Clay, and many others. The issues of technology and preparedness are major themes of the chapters on Selma, Alabama, during the Civil War and the Saint-Mihiel offensive in World War I. Selma was a focal point of Confederate efforts to build munitions while the US Army played catchup on aircraft, tanks, and wireless communications at Saint-Mihiel. Future American military leaders such as George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower, and William Mitchell quickly learned the new technologies. The fifth chapter tells the forgotten story of one of the most inspiring Americans of the twentieth century, Dr. Gordon Seagrave, a Baptist missionary on the northern frontier of Burma who became one of the military's greatest combat surgeons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887937816

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Hallowed Ground

How Forgotten Battles Shaped America

Douglas Smock

Copyright © 2023 Douglas Smock

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2023

Cover photos (clockwise from top left: Dr. Gordon Seagrave (US Army); Eddie Rickenbacker shown with his SPAD aircraft (National Archives); Sketch of American ships at the Battle of Valcour Bay by Charles Randle (National Archives of Canada)

Back Cover Photo: A British drum captured at the Battle of Bennington, 1777. (Massachusetts Archives)

ISBN 979-8-88793-769-4 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88793-781-6 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

To my grandchildren: Calvin, Mary, Alina, Eli, and Sebastien

To my great-uncle James Kearns, a doughboy and great baseball friend

To all forgotten service personnel

Wars are won by the side that accomplishes the impossible.

—George C. Marshall

The sad mission of history is to roam particularly through bloody fields, in the midst of the smoke of the combatants and the loud roar of the cannon.

—Mexican historians

I would not have the anniversaries of our victories celebrated, nor those of our defeats made fast days and spent in humiliation and prayer; but I would like to see truthful history written.

—Ulysses S. Grant

The Raindrops on Your Old Tin Hat

(J. Hunter Wickersham)

The mist hangs low and quiet on a ragged line of hills,

There’s a whispering of wind across the flat,

You’d be feeling kind of lonesome if it wasn’t for one thing—

The patter of the raindrops on your old tin hat.

An’ you can’t help a-figuring—sitting there alone—

About this war and hero stuff and that,

And you wonder if they haven’t sort of got things twisted up,

While the rain keeps up its patter on your old tin hat.

When you step off with the outfit to do your little bit

You’re simply doing what you’re s’posed to do—

And you don’t take time to figure what you gain or lose—

It’s the spirit of the game that brings you through.

But back at home she’s waiting, writing cheerful little notes,

And every night she offers up a prayer

And just keeps on a-hoping that her soldier boy is safe—

The Mother of the boy who’s over there.

And, fellows, she’s the hero of this great, big ugly war,

And her prayer is on the wind across the flat,

And don’t you reckon maybe it’s her tears, and not the rain,

That’s keeping up the patter on your old tin hat?

This poem was written by Second Lieutenant J. Hunter Wickersham to his mother on September 11, 1918. The following day, he was killed in action in Limey, France, in the Saint-Mihiel Offensive. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery.

Introduction

History is constantly changing. What we know of past events is based on someone’s interpretation. Even first-person accounts can vary widely and, in fact, did in the reports of Benedict Arnold’s conduct at the second Battle of Saratoga in 1777. The conventional histories were based on a now-discredited account by one officer. A letter made public in 2016 painted a different version of events more favorable to Arnold. First-person accounts of Arnold’s naval battle a year earlier at Valcour Bay also differed widely.

Our perception of history changes as we discover new documents and also evolves as we change. Hallowed Ground: How Forgotten Battles Changed America provides a fresh look at history through the lens of battles that deserve new attention.

I write this, my second book on forgotten American battles, as both a tribute to our forgotten service personnel, including my own family members, and to tell little-remembered stories of our own fascinating history such as the role of an amazing missionary doctor in remote Burma who became one of America’s greatest combat surgeons.

One of the most inspiring Americans of the twentieth century, Dr. Gordon Seagrave, was well-known in the 1940s and 1950s but is now virtually unknown. He was a Baptist missionary in the northern frontier area of Burma, close to the Chinese border. When World War II broke out, he was anxious to become a combat surgeon for US Gen. Joseph W. Stillwell. He and his team of young native nurses asked for, and received, the toughest close-to-the-action assignments as Stillwell’s army slogged through northern Burma. After the war, he was imprisoned on trumped-up charges by a newly formed Burmese government that resented the prestige and power of foreigners among its often rebellious indigenous tribes.

It’s also important to remember the little-taught Mexican War that preceded the Civil War. It’s too easily recalled as training ground for the legendary military leaders of the Civil War. It was also a land grab condemned by Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Henry David Thoreau, and many others.

We rightfully condemned invasions of territories such as Ukraine, but we forget, or were never told, that America invaded Mexico in 1846 on a fabricated pretense and then took 55 percent of its territory, the American Southwest. Battle buffs like to study the near-flawless execution of the campaign by military officers who would become legendary leaders in the American Civil War. One of them, Robert E. Lee, wrote later that he was ashamed that the United States had bullied Mexico, a weak country in political disarray. I include Mexican sources that make clear the unfairness of the war and the suffering of the Mexicans.

This book also tells the story of one of the most interesting towns in America, Selma, Alabama, whose population has never exceeded twenty-five thousand. It was the site of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s last stand and his first loss (not counting his humiliating nighttime escape from Fort Donelson). As US Gen. James Wilson led his victorious army on a march to Montgomery, Alabama, he was joined by thousands of cheering newly liberated enslaved people. One hundred years later, Black Americans led by Martin Luther King made the same march seeking equal rights promised by the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 but never realized by many.

There are also stories of how wars triggered rapid growth in manufacturing and technology that changed America. Selma, for example, was selected as the site for a naval foundry and ordnance complex as the Confederacy raced overnight to overcome a huge deficit in iron, gunpowder, and weapons production. The Civil War also triggered massive industrial growth from Pittsburgh to the remote northern woods of Maine.

New technologies emerged, such as hollow-bore molding of iron castings and the very early beginnings of the steel industry. America was propelled almost overnight into the Industrial Age.

The issue of technology, unpreparedness, and industrial catch-up is also a major theme of the chapter on the Saint-Mihiel Offensive in France in 1918. America entered World War I well behind in the development of aircraft, wireless communications, and tanks. That changed in a hurry as allies France and Britain shared technology with the US in hopes of ending the war soon. Future American military leaders such as George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower, and William Mitchell quickly learned the new technologies while American manufacturers also jumped in, including development of an advanced aircraft engine called the Liberty.

The American perspective on World War I is very different from the French, English, or German. Nowhere is that clearer than a walk and drive through the Saint-Mihiel area of northeastern France today. A beautiful hilltop monument with scrupulously manicured grounds commemorates America’s role in the battle, which was virtually insignificant from a strategic perspective. An American military cemetery in the sector is also totally first class. Much more sobering just a few miles northwest is an ossuary at Verdun. In a battlefield of less than eight square miles, almost a quarter million perished in a six-month battle in 1916. Skeletal remains of some 130,000 are piled high and can be viewed through small ground-level exterior windows. As a Frenchman told me in Verdun, We had no money to do what the Americans did. The bones for the ossuary were first collected from the field not by the government but by the bishop of Verdun.

Manufacturing also played a role in Chapter 1 on the Saratoga campaign as a small naval fleet was built from scratch in 1776 in a backwater New York town on the southern edge of Lake Champlain. Construction of the fleet slowed a British invasion from Quebec by a year, enabling the arming of the Continental Army with a flood of clandestinely supplied French muskets, ammunition, and cannons that would be critical in the battle of Saratoga in 1777, one of the most significant victories in US history. The arms were refurbished at a new federal arsenal in Springfield, Massachusetts, that would in time develop new technologies that would automate manufacturing and arm US soldiers through the twentieth century.

This book is also the story of interesting Americans such as Dr. Seagrave. The first chapter outlines the early heroics of Benedict Arnold, looking at signs of trouble that would lead to his traitorous betrayal of George Washington. The Mexican War chapter reviews the early military careers of an A-list of officers who would play leading roles in the Civil War. The story of George Patton’s evolution from an early interest in the cavalry to America’s first tank commander is told through his personal papers. The Selma chapter tells the voting rights struggle through the words of a teacher and little-remembered civil rights leader, Frederick D. Reese.

Battles provide a way to understand history, and they are also a platform to tell stories that are often forgotten to time. There is no intent here to glorify wars or battles but to understand them and to help assure that we are always prepared.

North Weymouth, Massachusetts

February 2023

Author’s Note

In the first chapter, the 1776 naval encounter on Lake Champlain is universally called the Battle of Valcour Island. I chose to call it the Battle of Valcour Bay because the battle took place on water, not land. Also, if it were the Battle of Valcour Island, the battle would have been fought in Vermont (then the New Hampshire Grants) when in fact it was fought in the state of New York. It was the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813, not the Battle of Put-In-Bay, the nearby island.

The term pounder is used in reference to cannons. It refers to the size of the ball shot by the cannon.

In the third chapter on the Mexican War, I use the modern spellings for Monterrey and Matamoros, Mexico. Also in the third chapter, a widely used source is a book titled Notes for the History of the War between Mexico and the United States. For sake of brevity, it is referred to just as Notes after the initial reference.

Chapter 1

Benedict Arnold, Shoot-Out on the Lake, and Revolutionary Turnaround

It was a strife of pygmies for the prize of a continent, and the leaders are entitled to full credit both for their antecedent energy and for their dispositions in the contest; not least the unhappy man who, having done so much to save his country, afterward blasted his name by a treason unsurpassed in modern war.

—Alfred Thayer Mahan, naval historian

There was Benedict Arnold, with dash and verve and an indomitable spirit of adventure, capable of an heroic march that Hannibal might have admired, but wanting in the strength of character to endure steadfast, in spite of persecution and injustice, to the end.

—Claude H. Van Tyne, historian

Valcour Bay, New York, 1776

One of the exhibits at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, is a gunboat called the USS Philadelphia. Retrieved from the bottom of Lake Champlain in 1935, the boat measures fifty-three feet long, fifteen feet wide at its beam, and four feet deep. It carried a crew of up to forty-five and was armed with a twelve-pounder long gun at the bow and a nine-pounder on each side.

It was part of a small fleet built in a hurry at Skenesborough, New York, in 1776 with the help of special incentives drafted by a congress that was also preparing the Declaration of Independence. The fleet commanded by Benedict Arnold was crushed by the British, but its threat slowed an invasion from Canada that was later brought to a complete halt by a militia-strengthened continental army near Saratoga, New York. The campaign was the turning point in the Revolutionary War. An entire British army was captured and imprisoned for the duration of the war.

Without Arnold’s intervention on Lake Champlain, the 1777 British invasion would have almost certainly succeeded, in the opinion of American historian Claude H. van Tyne, who won the Pulitzer Price for a book on the American Revolution. The naval engagement itself only slowed the British invasion by three days, but the British also had to build a fleet in the lake, which was an invasion route to and from Canada from the 1750s to the early 1800s.

In the year between the battles at Valcour and Saratoga, large amounts of desperately needed war matériel clandestinely flowed from France to the Continental Army.

We know that France, either directly or through foreign merchants she encouraged, furnished nine-tenths of all the munitions of war which made Washington able to carry on in 1776 and 1777. French secret aid also made possible the American victory at Saratoga, wrote van Tyne.¹ Thousands of the American soldiers at Saratoga used French muskets.² Half of its cannons were French.

In April 1777, a single French cargo ship delivered to the Continental Army fifty-two pieces of brass cannon with all the apparatus, 6,132 Stand of arms, 255,000 gun flints, 925 tents, twenty-one bales and one case cloths, serge, linens, and etc., five bales blankets, sixty-two packages of tin plates, a large quantity of iron and lead balls, intrenching tools, grenades, 1,029 bales of powder, and etc.³

A French civilian named Beaumarchais established a fictitious company called Roderique Hortalez et Compagnie that was funded by secret French and Spanish sources to supply war matériel to the American colonies. It’s estimated that Roderique Hortalez operated as many as forty ships between 1776 to 1778. Surplus French muskets for the Northern army were sent through a new arsenal in Springfield, Massachusetts, where they were refurbished.

Van Tyne’s opinion on the importance of building Arnold’s fleet has been generally accepted, but many other developments were also important to victory at Saratoga. Poor decision-making by British commanders played a role. Fired-up militia won a key battle near Bennington, Vermont, in August 1777. The determined resistance of a young Dutch American commander in the British siege of Fort Stanwix in Rome, New York, was also critical. British overconfidence after an easy capture of Fort Ticonderoga also played a part. A flood of militia to Saratoga after the first phase of the battle on September 19, 1777, was arguably the most important factor.

Valcour was the first major naval battle in US history. It was one of the early tests of Benedict Arnold, who would be a hero at Saratoga and then later become the most infamous traitor in American history. Were there hints of his character flaws in 1776 and 1777? Arnold was reckless and daring, often in financial distress, charged with corruption, and very sensitive to slights.

Another fascinating aspect of the naval battle on Lake Champlain was the rapid (three-month) construction of a small naval group in a rural backwater. The ability to rapidly build a navy was a harbinger of American capability that would again become a winning formula in the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813 and even much more dramatically in the spectacular American industrialization from 1940 to 1944.

Arnold’s Battle of Valcour Bay (or Island) is remembered in a tiny private museum in Whitehall, New York; the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in Vergennes, Vermont; the Smithsonian; and in a model of the USS Philadelphia at the US Navy Museum in Washington, DC, among a handful of other locations.

Photo shows a model of the USS Philadelphia at the US Navy Museum in Washington, DC (Wikimedia Commons).

The small town in upstate New York where the gunboats were built, then called Skenesborough and now called Whitehall, bills itself as the birthplace of the US Navy. Six American communities, including Philadelphia, also claim to be the birthplace of the navy.⁴ The navy itself is mute on the matter.

It’s hard to imagine today how an important naval engagement could take place on landlocked Lake Champlain, which is located primarily in northwestern Vermont with parts crossing into New York and Quebec. Extending north from the lake is the 106-mile-long Richelieu River, which drains into the St. Lawrence River, northeast of Montreal. Skenesborough straddled a creek in New York that fed into the southern entrance to the lake.

Named for seventeenth-century French explorer, Samuel de Champlain, Lake Champlain is 107 miles long and just fourteen miles across at its widest point. It was a coveted strategic location during three North American wars: the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812. It was part of a water route that allowed invaders to move into or out of British Canada. Key to its defense were a series of forts, most notably Fort Ticonderoga, which was often called Gibraltar of the North.

The first European fortification on Lake Champlain was Fort Saint-Frédéric, which was built by the French in 1731 to protect trading interests. In the mid-1750s during the French and Indian War, the French built a fort about fifteen miles south of Fort Saint-Frédéric and called it Fort Carillon. The fort controlled traffic between Lake Champlain and Lake George, which was a gateway to New York’s Hudson Valley. Next to the fort was a 3.5-mile portage route along the LaChute River, which was not navigable.

Lake Champlain was a strategic water route between Canada and the American colonies. Battles were fought there in the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812 (Wikimedia Commons).

British forces unsuccessfully attacked Fort Carillon in 1758 then drove the French out in 1759 and took control of Lake Champlain. The British replaced Fort Saint-Frédéric with Fort Crown Point. Fort Carillon was replaced with Fort Ticonderoga. The word Ticonderoga was derived from an Iroquois term for the junction of two waterways.

One of the British casualties in 1758 was second-in-command George Howe, whose two younger brothers, Richard and William, would command British naval and land forces, respectively, during the start of the American Revolution. Fighting in the Lake George area in the 1750s was vividly described in James Fennimore Cooper’s classic novel, Last of the Mohicans.

In 1775, Fort Ticonderoga was attacked once again, this time by American colonial forces.

New England militia commanded by Ethan Allen and accompanied by Benedict Arnold captured the two British forts on Lake Champlain in May 1775 during the Siege of Boston when George Washington’s new army was desperate for artillery.

The Americans then captured a schooner called Katherine at Skenesborough. Rechristened as Liberty, it became one of the first warships of the embryonic American Navy. Arnold sailed the Liberty 140 miles north to the British port of St. Johns (now called Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu), where he captured another ship that he renamed Enterprise. It was a spectacular success one year before the Continental Congress agreed on the Declaration of Independence. It demonstrated the positive aspects of Benedict Arnold’s fearless military character.

The overconfident Americans then decided to strike the British along the St. Lawrence Seaway at Montreal and Quebec. They incorrectly felt the local population would join them in ousting the British. The decision was made to assault from two directions, a strategy that required an army led by Benedict Arnold to march through the Maine wilderness. Forty percent of his 1,200 troops were lost to starvation, exposure, or desertion.

In the second prong, Brig. Gen. Richard Montgomery led an army through the Champlain Valley. Montgomery was second-in-command to Gen. Philip Schuyler of the Northern Department of the Continental Army based in Albany. Schuyler was a veteran of the French and Indian War who had planned the invasion of Quebec but was replaced by Montgomery due to illness. His three daughters would become stars of modern pop culture in the Broadway show Hamilton.

The northern army was created by the Continental Congress, which retained the right to appoint commanders of regional military departments, much to the annoyance of Washington. It was a clumsy setup that would lead to problems after the Saratoga campaign.

The British operated two armies in North America; one under Gen. Guy Carleton who commanded in Canada and a larger force based in New York commanded by Gen. William Howe. Carleton and Howe both reported to George Germain, who directed Northern American affairs from London. Germain was a controversial figure in Britain who rose to high political office despite an ignominious military career in which he was convicted of cowardice at the 1759 battle of Minden.

British King George III followed developments closely and oversaw top military appointments.

At St. Johns, Montgomery’s army captured two more ships: the schooner Royal Savage and a row galley that was rerigged as a schooner and named Revenge. The armies converged at Quebec and were defeated. They maintained a siege in the winter of 1775–1776 but were ravaged by weather and disease. British reinforcements led by Gen. John Burgoyne arrived in the spring and drove them out of the area.

Most of the officers and soldiers in Burgoyne’s army were very green. For most, it was their first military campaign. It was Burgoyne’s first army command. The Americans fell back