In the relative solitude provided by the farmhouse he was using for his field headquarters, Brigadier General Anthony Wayne set down his final earthly thoughts. He put the time at 11 p.m., the date July 15, 1779, and the location ‘near the hour & scene of carnage. It was a brief note as these things go, but it encapsulated the man.

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Addressed to the person whom Wayne considered his best and dearest friend, Sharp Delany, it would await delivery until the writer is no more. With a desperate combat in the offing, Wayne wanted the world to know that if he fell he had done so willingly in the defence of his Country and of the rights of mankind. He was a man of ambition and passion, and his adversaries were equally divided between the British and the petty forces of the new Continental government. Speaking as someone who had often battled to obtain clothing and weapons for his men, Wayne used valuable testimonial space to thunder over those Patriots who had lost their lives owing to the parsimony and neglect of Congress. Wayne’s anger flowed into a third paragraph, in which he worried that his commander, General George Washington, would also fall victim to these forces.

Coming near the end of this short missive, Wayne asked his friend to watch over his son and daughter, fearing that their mother will not survive this Stroke. He closed the note with felicitations to the Delany clan and a vow that he would sup the morrow either within the enemy’s lines in triumph or in the other World! Anthony Wayne signed his note, filed it carefully away, and then prepared himself to carry out one of the boldest and most desperate military actions of the Revolutionary War.

Two threads of history crossed this night along the west side of the Hudson River, twelve miles south of West Point. One was the personal odyssey of a civilian-warrior who had found his calling, the other a martial gesture by a mighty power mired in a war where victory lingered tantalizingly close but always out of reach.

Anthony Wayne, representing the third American generation of his family, was born on January 1, 1745, at Waynesborough in Chester County, Pennsylvania. His bloodlines were English and Irish, his sentiments decidedly republican. The road to his maturity was marked by brief detours as farmer, surveyor, land manager, tanner, and politician.

Even as he took part in the vigorous debates that were propelling the American colonies to break with England, Wayne learned the art of war by reading every book on the subject he could find. Not content to limit himself to the theoretical, he also began drilling a volunteer regiment and experiencing firsthand the qualities of citizen-soldiers. When force of reason gave way to force of arms, Wayne received command of the 4th Battalion of the Pennsylvania Line as a colonel in the Continental Army. Wayne and his unit passed through New York City in mid-April 1776, long enough for him to meet and impress George Washington, before he and his command left to take part in what proved to be a bitter coda to the Continental effort to bring Canada into its embrace. While the fighting he was engaged in at Trois Rivières was another American defeat in the midst of a failed campaign, Wayne’s coolness under fire and his steady presence during the subsequent retreat made him one of the few to emerge from this tragic miscalculation with his reputation enhanced. In the subsequent actions at Brandywine, Germantown, and especially Monmouth, Wayne, in the words of one of his peers, behaved Exceedingly Brave. Qualities emerged that clearly marked this soldier. He had a talent for organization, an ambition to succeed, and his swearing was legendary. He also understood that the freedom bestowed by a democracy did not extend into the army, where drill, discipline, and obedience were the necessary prerequisites for victory. Wayne also believed deeply (and made himself a regular nuisance on the matter) that soldiers had to look like soldiers.

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