Charles Lee’s Disgrace at the Battle of Monmouth

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

Near the courthouse, Lee observed Oswald’s battery (two cannons engaged) pulling back and learned from its commander that the gunners were without infantry support. Lee sent an aide to Scott’s detachment to tell him to hold his position. Lee’s aide passed through where Scott’s men had been, and finding no one there continued north to where Wayne’s troops were posted. Despite the aide’s instructions for these units to hold their ground, the sight of the British passing across their front in great strength and the absence of any help to their right prompted these units to begin falling back.

Lee’s aide met a second who had been sent on the same mission, and the two brought their chief the bad news. Lee’s surprise that his left flank had dissolved was, according to one of them, ‘very great.’ His entrapment plan was in shambles. What many contemporary observers would later find incomprehensible was that the entire unraveling occurred without significant combat. The absence of the cohesion that might have steadied an established division, combined with differing perceptions of aims and objectives, caused Lee’s provisional division to break down into its constituent parts.

The withdrawal was in full swing by about 11:30 a.m. Maxwell never did settle on a new defensive line, because once his men reached that center point the British had already flanked them, so they continued their westward march. Scott held his second position until the passage of the British columns forced him to peel off to the northwest. Lee’s one real effort to organize a fresh line of resistance proved futile. ‘A new position was ordered,’ noted an officer on the scene, ‘but not generally communicated, for part of the troops were forming on the right of the ground, while others were marching away, and all the artillery driving off.’

Wayne made matters worse when he encountered a courier sent by Colonel Morgan seeking instructions for the six hundred men who were just three miles to the southeast, well positioned to threaten the British rear. Wayne told the messenger that a general retreat was in progress and that Morgan should ‘govern himself accordingly.’ Consequently, Morgan held back; whether an effort from that quarter would have delayed the British advance long enough for Lee to reestablish an effective line of resistance will never be known.

By Lee’s own estimate, the enemy force advancing on him now numbered perhaps six thousand (it would eventually swell to nearly ten thousand), soldiers he considered ‘the flower of the British army.’ After his first attempt to rally his command had proved ineffectual, Lee drifted with the flow of retreating units, seeking somewhere to re-form them. A French engineer on his staff suggested making a stand on property being farmed by a man named Ker. Once Lee reached the position he realized that it was compromised by slightly higher ground just to the east. A local militia officer, Captain Peter Wikoff, recommended Comb’s Hill, which Lee rejected because the swampy lowlands at its base would have to be bridged to handle his artillery. Wikoff also identified a defensible rise close to the Tennent Meetinghouse, known as Perrine Ridge. Recollecting it from his morning ride, Lee sent Wikoff to rally any troops reaching there.

Throughout all this, Lee was content to let the retreat continue, since it answered his purpose by keeping his units away from the British. On at least one occasion he was seen to urge a column ‘to retreat with more haste,’ and on another he complained that the ‘enemy have too much cavalry for us.’ Compounding his problems, his staff was nearly immobile. Both his aides were virtually afoot, with their horses badly wounded, and the animals carrying his acting adjutant general and French adviser were almost useless from heat and fatigue. However, he never lost his composure. Afterward when he was actively defending his reputation, Lee termed this phase a ‘masterly maneuver,’ though when pressed by a Washington aide for a situation report he ‘answered that he really did not know what to say.’

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

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

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.