Charles Lee’s Disgrace at the Battle of Monmouth

By Noah Andre Trudeau | MHQ  | one comment  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

Lee and Wayne were on the same page, but at cross-purposes. It was Lee’s intention to fix the enemy line in place using a force pressing through the village, while he took the remainder of his division around the British right. After watching Wayne’s detachment move off (presumably) into the village, Lee led the rest of his command northward. However, when he came to the open plain overlooking Monmouth Courthouse, he saw that Wayne had gone where Lee had

intended to go, and that there was no Continental presence in the village.

At that moment gunfire crackled from Wayne’s position. His movement had not been unnoticed, and a small detail of riders from the 16th Light Dragoons pushed out from the rear guard to counter the threat. The British cavalry, fooled into thinking their opposition was only a small party of mounted militia, were lured under the guns of an unwavering line of Pennsylvania Continental infantrymen who scattered them with a volley.

Lee tried to modify his plan. Wayne was instructed to press the enemy hard enough to keep the British in place, but not so hard as to cause their retreat. The aggressive Wayne responded by shifting his position even farther north, taking station on either side of a gully pointing toward the enemy. (By so doing, he took with him the infantry that had been protecting Oswald’s guns, which had set up northwest of the village.) At the same time, Lee was ordering forward other segments of his provisional division to provide the pinning pressure against the British left flank. He directed Lafayette to come forward with his three regiments (which had begun this day’s work under Wayne’s command). This force of about eight hundred men cut across the open ground northwest of Monmouth Courthouse to a point about a half-mile from the British line. These maneuvers left two units still waiting for orders — the 1,440 men under Brig. Gen. Charles Scott, and the thousand-strong New Jersey Brigade led by Brig. Gen. William Maxwell.

In retrospect, this would be the apogee of Lee’s leadership this day. As Lafayette guided his command into line just on the village outskirts, Lee told him: ‘My dear Marquis, I think these people are ours.’ In response to one of his subcommanders who had ridden forward for instructions, Lee exclaimed that ‘by God he would take them all.’ To an aide sent ahead by Washington, Lee explained that ‘he was going to order some troops to march below the enemy and cut off their retreat.’ The British cannons were causing Wayne enough problems that he asked for reinforcements, a request that Lee refused, telling the officer who brought it that the enemy action represented ‘a customary maneuver with retreating troops.’

Lee’s entire plan was based on the faulty premise that the small British rear guard was beyond supporting distance of the bulk of Clinton’s trailing division. In fact, an important piece of that command, the 2nd Grenadiers, was just out of sight and halted awaiting instructions, which weren’t long in coming. ‘I caused the whole rear guard [division] to face about and return back,’ Clinton later wrote. Here was the chance he had sought to hit the Americans so hard that they would forget about his vulnerable wagon train.

Lee had just seen Lafayette’s detachment into place on the northern

outskirts of the village (and was probably intending to send Scott and Maxwell to reinforce Wayne for the killing blow) when the 2nd Grenadiers poured out of their concealed position and the entire British line began moving purposefully toward Monmouth Courthouse, as Clinton had astutely judged Lee’s right flank to be his weak point.

This advance was the catalyst that triggered all the units of Lee’s provisional division to react, though little of it was as the Continental officer intended. What happened next was similar to a transportation disaster caused by the accumulation of small incidents, none of which was fatal on its own. Brigadier General Scott rode out from his detachment to survey the field. To his left he could no longer see Wayne’s troops, who had taken cover under the British artillery fire. Ahead Scott could see the increasingly thickening British formations marching toward Monmouth Courthouse, with the troops under Lafayette giving ground before them. Lacking any orders and worried that the enemy advance would trap his brigade, Scott decided to shift west to a more defensible position. At the same time Maxwell began to circle his New Jersey brigade back to reinforce Lee in the center. These were sound, even bold moves, but both were undertaken without any reference to Lee’s designs.

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Tags: 17th - 18th Century, American Revolutionary War, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures

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