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The Battle Of Groton Heights

click image to enlarge A Sketch of New London & Groton with the Attacks made on Forts Trumbull & Griswold by the British Troops under the Command of Brig Gen Arnold, Sept 6th 1781. Map of the British attack on New London and Fort Griswold by Captain Daniel Lyman of the Prince of Wales American Volunteers. click image to enlarge References To Fort Griswold. Version of a 1781 British Plan of Fort Griswold. (H is at the SE corner and F is at the SW corner.)

The Library of Congress

In November 1775. Colonel Jedeiah Elderkin was directed by the Governor and the Council of Safety "to view the circumstances of the harbor at New London and neighboring places, and consider of the most proper places and manner of fortifying the same against our enemies." Elderkin recommended the fortification of several places in New London and Groton including the summit of the hill on Groton Heights where, "It seems nature had prepared a place to plant cannon for the protection of the harbor."

The riverside of the fort was designed so that artillery could command the river and port. It featured two projecting bastions and a low parapet (A parapet consists of a protection to the defenders in case of a siege. The word comes from the Italian parapetto and/or the French parapet, from Italian para, imperative of Italian parare (to cover, defend) and petto (breast), ultimately from the Latin pectus (breast); the Germans use the term Brustwehr (lit. chest protection), and in Norwegian brystvern which means the same, probably just a translation of the German term. Embattled parapets are oftener pierced for the discharge of arrows, etc.), which offered maximum flexibility in directing the fire of the fort's cannon. The landward side of the fort, which consisted of high parapet walls and embrasures (A flared opening for a gun in a wall or parapet. [French, from embraser, to widen an opening.]) for cannon, was designed to withstand infantry assault.

The Storming Of Fort Griswold And The Burning Of New London

The Battle of Groton Heights, fought September 6th, 1781, well deserves to be ranked with the contest at Lexington and Bunker Hill - those famous preludes to Saratoga and Yorktown. In this conflict, as in those, the heroic patriotism of our Revolutionary sires was displayed with a simple and touching grandeur that must ever awaken in the heart of every true American feelings of the deepest gratitude and admiration.

To outward seeming the battle was a defeat. In reality it was a glorious victory, whose every incident is worthy of being treasured up among the precious memorials of those revolutionary days. A small band of patriotic warriors defending their own and the liberties of thousands, yet unborn, against the forces of tyranny and oppression, such was the contest upon which the sun looked down on the memorable September day, more than a hundred years ago. While, on the other hand, the foes of the liberty strove with an equally clear and determined purpose.

Sir Henry Clinton, greatly chagrined by the manner in which he had been outwitted by General Washington, determined to retrieve his error by striking a decisive blow that should at once and forever deliver the high seas from the hated presence and depredations of those bold and adventurous American privateers, whose daring and successful exploits had so grievously injured British commerce, and so exasperatingly insulted and persistently defied British pride and British power. And, since from its harbor there had gone forth multitudes of these determined and successful opponents of the royal cause, upon their return had found a ready mart for their prizes and spoil among its townspeople, it was determined to make a bold and resolute attack upon New London. And thus, at the same time to satisfy the desire for revenge and the thirst for plunder, a plunder most rich. "The cargo of the merchant ship Hannah alone being valued at four hundred thousand dollars."

For this expedition great preparations were made and the command of it shrewdly given to that Judas of the Revolution, Benedict Arnold, who, in September, 1780, had "deserted the American cause and had been received into the British service with the rank of Brigadier General."

It was the fleet of thirty-two sail, bearing the troops to their destination, that Sergeant Rufus Avery discovered from his lofty station in Fort Griswold at the earliest dawn of that renowned September morning. Instantly informing this superior officer, Capt. William Latham, of the fact, the latter at once perceived the urgency of the case and sent a messenger immediately to Col. William Ledyard, under whose command Forts Griswold and Trumbull and the adjacent harbor then were. To this summons Col. Ledyard quickly responded. On embarking to friends gathered around him, "If I have this day to lose either life or honor, you who know me best know which it will be." On his arrival he "ordered," says Sergeant Avery, "two large guns to be loaded with heavy charges of good powder, etc." Of one of these Capt. Latham took charge and the worthy Sergeant of the other directing it "so as to give a 'larum' to the country in the best manner that could be done." "Two guns," he tells us, "was the regular 'larum,' which discouraged our troops from coming to our assistance."

A few hours later began that conflict destined to put the constancy and valor of both soldiers and citizens to a test as terrible as it was severe. The invading army disembarked on either side of the river. The British troops were divided into two divisions of 800 men. Those upon the west shore being under the immediate command of General Arnold, and proceeding on their march upriver to the town, quickly taking in succession Fort Trumbull, Town Hill Fort, and New London. Despite orders to the contrary, many buildings were burned and homes plundered, with no other evidence of the enemy's presence than the salute "with one volley" from the guns of the battery by Captain Shapley and his brave men from Fort Trumbull. The latter he then abandoned, after spiking its guns, and proceeded to embark his force in three boats, one of which was taken by the enemy. Seven of his men were also wounded before they succeeded in gaining the kindly protection of Fort Griswold on the opposite shore. No other course was left to the patriot Captain, since Fort Trumbull was at best only "a water battery," entirely unable to resist the attacks of an opposing military force.

In the meantime another portion of the British troops had effected a landing under their commander, Col. Eyre, upon the eastern shore, at Groton Point. After a somewhat retarded march toward Fort Griswold, shortly after noon, with their troops formed in line "under the lee of a rocky height one hundred and thirty yards southeast from the fort." From this place "a flag of truce" was dispatched demanding the immediate and unconditional surrender of the fortress. Their demand was refused as was also a second coupled with a threat that "if obliged to storm the works, martial law should be put in force." To this the instant response from Fort Griswold's commander, Col. William Ledyard, faced with the threat of no quarter, was returned, "We shall not surrender, let the consequences be what they may," In answer to this brave defiance the enemy at once pressed forward to the attack, "with a quick step in solid columns," eight hundred men against a hundred and fifty!

Yet this small band of patriots, animated by the justice of their cause and by the hope of promised reinforcements, prepared to offer their foes a brave and resolute resistance. "Col. Ledyard ordered his men to reserve their fire until the detachment which came up first had reached the proper distance." When the word was given an eighteen pounder loaded with two bags of grape shot was opened upon them, and it was supposed that twenty men fell to the ground killed or wounded by the first discharge. "It cleared." said and eye-witness, "a wide space in their column." Their line now became so broken that the fields in very direction were "covered with scarlet-coated soldiers with trailed arms, in every variety of posture, bending, prostrate, dropping, half-up, rushing forward, and still keeping a kind of order." Again they attempt the assault, in order to seize upon the southwest bastion of the fort, only to be met with the same deadly and persistent fire as before, while they bear from the field their commander, Col. Eyre, mortally wounded.

At the same moment a still fiercer conflict is taking place on the northeast side of the fort. Major Montgomery having led his soldiers in solid ranks through the abandoned redoubt (A redoubt is a fort or fort system usually consisting of an enclosed defensive emplacement outside a larger fort. It is meant to protect soldiers outside the main line of defense and is often hastily constructed. Redoubts were a component of the military strategies of most European empires during the colonial era, although the concept of redoubts has existed back to medieval times. By definition, a redoubt's walls always contain only obtuse (vice, acute) angles.), from whence rushing with "great fury" into the ditch below he seizes and holds it, and a moment later the ramparts, defended by bent pickets, and so high the soldiers could not scale it "without assisting each other." Nor was this all, for the Americans, unable to oppose the progress of the besiegers, otherwise showered upon their heads "cold shot nine pounders and every variety of missile that could be seized upon." In the language of another, "the vigor of the attack and the defence were both admirable." At this point Major Montgomery was killed, and the fury of his troops was redoubled.

During a brief lull in the fighting after the second assault, the American flag was shot from its halyard. Although instantly remounted on a pike pole, the British took this event as a signal of surrender, and they advanced again, only to be fired upon. Infuriated at being resisted after they believed the garrison had surrendered, they scaled the wall with renewed fury. At last, by sheer force of numbers, all opposing obstacles were overcome. Finally, a British soldier managed to open the gate, allowing the British troops to pour in. The enemy rushed in like a flood, "swinging their caps and shouting like mad-men." Though the patriots had surrendered (Conflicting accounts indicate that even while Col. Ledyard ordered the garrison to surrender, some men continued firing from the barracks.) and thrown down their arms, their brutal adversaries continued to "fire upon them from the parapets and to hew down" all whom they encountered as they hastened to "unbolt the southern gate." No sooner is this done than the voice of a British officer is heard demanding in stern tones: "Who commands this fort?" "I did, sir, but you do now," is the reply of the American Commander, at the same time presenting his sword in token of surrender. Seizing it, his military assassin, said to be a Major Bromfield, or Bloomfield, without a word, plunged it up to the hilt into the heart of his noble but too trusting foe. The attendant soldiers with their bayonets completed the bloody deed. Thus perished, in the forty-third year of his age, one of the most illustrious martyrs of American liberty.

Like scenes were being enacted in other parts of the fort. "As the British marched in," says a recent historian, "company after company, they shot or bayoneted every American they saw standing." "Three platoons, each of ten or twelve men, fired in succession into the magazine (Magazine is the name for an item or place within which ammunition is stored.) amid the confused mass of living men, that had fled thither for shelter, the dying and the dead." The only reason, it would seem, that an explosion did not take place was the fact that the powder scattered about was too wet with human blood to ignite. So awful was the carnage and plunder that even the British officers could no longer endure the sight. One of them is said to have been seen rushing about everywhere, with drawn sword, exclaiming: Stop! Stop! In the name of heaven, stop! My soul can't bear it!" Satiated with plunder and blood, the invaders finally began a hasty retreat from the place they had filled with so much of death and horror.

Stripping the dead patriots, about eighty-four in number, paroling the most dangerously wounded, to the number of thirty-five, they drove the remaining thirty, "most of them wounded," before them as prisoners of war. (Arnold reported his losses for the expedition at 51 dead and over 130 wounded.) But, brutal as they were they shrank from leaving them to their fate, that of being blown up with the fort (for a train of powder had already been set from the barracks to the magazine) the defenseless men whom they had just paroled. Gathering them together, therefore, with no gentle hand, they fling them into an ammunition wagon. Fastening a chain about it, they dragged it a short distance down the hill, and then "darting aside" allowed it to rush madly downward with its freight of wounded and bleeding men, caring neither whether it was dashed to pieces upon the stones by the way, or engulfed in the river that flowed at the foot of the declivity, which, no doubt, would have been the case but for the trunk of an apple tree near the bottom of the descent, that proved a friendly obstacle. For more than an hour the sufferers in the wagon remained helpless and in great agony in the place where it had been arrested in its course. They were then carried into the house of Ensign Avery - one of their number - which was near by.

But help was near at hand. Good Doctor Joshua Downer, with his son Avery, was hastening to the assistance of the heroes who needed it so greatly. In the morning he had perceived the smoke of burning New London, and at once started from his home in Preston for the scene of conflict. On his way to the Avery house, and possibly not far from it, he met and bound up the wounds of several of the slightly wounded patriots, and among them Mr. Benjamin Bill, and others. Upon the following morning Dr. Downer was joined in his work of mercy by a band of those noble women, of whom it is the proud wish of so many in our day to be called the "Daughter." These ministered to the suffering patriots with the care and tenderness, which only a woman's hand can bestow and only a woman's heart can feel. Such is the picture of the battle of Groton Heights. May it remain engraved forever in our hearts!

Of the one hundred and sixty odd men who were in the fort on the 6th of September, almost all were natives of New London and Groton, and most fought within the sight and all within the hearing of their own firesides. Their wives and children or fathers and mothers heard the guns they fired and those of the enemy by which they died. They could only imagine the bayonet stabs by which the greater portion of them were murdered after the surrender. When the roar of cannon and the rattle of musketry ceased, and they knew by the curling smoke of the burning town that the invaders were victors, they still hoped for humanity to the vanquished. Not till the hostile flag at the mast-head of the British fleet disappeared in the darkness did those friends and neighbors gather to find their loved ones dead among heaps of slain, literally butchered by the barbarism of a civilized people worse than that of the savages. How easy to picture men and women, wives, mothers, sweethearts, fathers and brothers, examining the faces of the sleepers to find the dearest idols of the heart cold in death, bathed in gore, murdered by brutal enemies; led by a traitor who in other years had known every foot of the ground so bravely consecrated to a noble memory.

Does not the reader see the crowd of anxious ones all that long night after the slaughter, some with lanterns, others by their hands alone, searching for their household treasures, and having found them, tenderly and carefully as a mother lays her infant to sleep, carrying the still bleeding body on the rude country-made bier, raised on the shoulders of old men and boys, to the near or distant home for burial? So they went with the Allyns northward to their century old, family graveyard by the river bank with the Perkinses and Starrs northeastward, with the Averys and Ledyards south, all to their final resting place - burying them with simple rites and uncovered heads among their ancestors in the almost neglected "God's Acre," where it will be an honor for the generations of all time to lie in ground which their valor defended, which their freely-given lives sanctified, and which their holy dust has forever consecrated to liberty and patriotism.

About four hundred and fifty yards southeast from the fort is the grave of Colonel Ledyard, whose name has been given to the cemetery, which was formerly known as that of Packer's Rock, from the high ledge upon its eastern border. In 1854 the State appropriated fifteen hundred dollars for the erection of a suitable memorial to the martyr. His remains, with those of his wife and children, were removed a few yards to the west, near the centre of the ground, and a beautiful monument, cut from native granite, was erected over his grave.

It is enclosed by an iron railing supported by posts appropriately cast in the form of cannon. Within the enclosure are the remains of the slab of blue slate which originally marked the grave; it is now nearly destroyed, and the inscription rendered illegible by the vandalism of the relic hunter. On the west face of the monument, upon the shaft, an unsheathed sabre is carved in relief below, upon the sub-base, in raised letters, is the name LEDYARD.

John Hempsted, Connecticut Militia:

I now Setdown to give a narrative of My proseding on the 6th Day of Sept., 1781. … In the morning of the sd day I was att my house in bed, between Brake of Day and Sunrise. I hard the Signel of an-larm by the fireing of thre Cannon … I turn’d Out and ask’d my wife to git Brakefast as soon as possabel for I must go off. I went Down on the hill … Whare the fleet was in fare Site in a line acrost the haber. There was 15 Sale of Ships an other Square rig’d Vessels, besides other Vesels. I came home. My brakefast was redy. After Brakefast … My hors Being redy I Slung my Musket & Cartrig Box and mounted with my littel Black Boy to bring the hors Back. … After I got Under Way my wife Called to me prety loud. I Stopt my hors and ask’d her What She wanted. Her answer was Not to let me hear that you are Shot in the Back.

Brigadier General Benedict Arnold, British Army:

At 10 o’clk the troops, in two divisions and in four debarkations, were landed, one on each side of the harbor, about three miles from New London, that on the Groton side consisting of the 40th and 54th regiments, and the 3d battalion of the New Jersey Volunteers, with a detachment of Yaggers [Hessian jaegers] and artillery, were under command of Lieutenant-Colonel Eyre.

The division on the New London side consisted of the 38th regiment, the Loyal Americans, and the American Legion Refugees, and a detachment of 60 Yaggers, who were immediately, on their landing, put in motion. …

Sergeant Stephen Hempstead, Connecticut Militia:

… The enemy were soon in motion, and marched with great rapidity, in a solid column, to within a short distance of the fort [Griswold], where, dividing the column, they rushed furiously and simultaneously to the assault of the southwest bastion and the opposite sides. They were, however, repulsed with great slaughter. … The enemy rallied and returned the attack with great vigor, but were received and repulsed with equal firmness. During the attack a shot cut the halyards of the flag, and it fell to the ground, but was instantly remounted on a pike-pole. This accident proved fatal to us, as the enemy supposed it had been struck by its defenders, rallied again, and rushing with redoubled impetuosity, carried the southwest bastion by storm. …

Colonel Ledyard, seeing the enemy within the fort, gave orders to cease firing, and to throw down our arms, as the fort had surrendered. We did so, but they continued firing upon us, crossed the fort and opened the gate, when they marched in, firing in platoons upon those who were retreating to the magazine and barrack-rooms for safety.

Thomas Hertell, witness to the action:

On entering the works the officer, on whom had devolved the command of the remnant of the British forces, demanded, “Who commands this fort?” The gallant Col. Ledyard advancing, answered, “Sir, I had that honor but now you have,” —and presented … his sword to the victor, who … immediately with Col. Ledyard’s own sword run him through the body.

Sergeant Rufus Avery, Connecticut Militia:

The column then continued marching toward the south end of the parade. … They killed and wounded nearly every man in the fort as quick as they could, which was done in about one minute. I expected my time to come with the rest. One mad-looking fellow put his bayonet to my side, and swore, “bejasus, he would skipper me.” I looked him very earnestly in the face and eyes, and asked for mercy and to spare my life. He attempted three times to put the bayonet in me, but I must say I believe God forbade him, for I was completely in his power. … A platoon of about ten men marched up near where I stood, where two large outer doors to the magazine made a space wide enough for ten men to stand in one rank. They discharged their guns into the magazine among the dead and wounded. …

Brigadier General Benedict Arnold:

The attack was judicious and spirited, and reflects the highest honor on the officers and troops engaged. … Eighty-five men were found dead in Fort Griswold, and sixty wounded, most of them mortally. … The officers and troops in general behaved with the greatest intrepidity and firmness. …

Sergeant Stephen Hempstead:

Those that could stand were then paraded, and ordered to the landing, while those that could not (of which number I was one) were put in one of our ammunition wagons, and taken to the brow of the hill (which was very steep, and at least one hundred rods in descent), from whence it was permitted to run down by itself, but was arrested in its course, near the river, by an apple-tree. The pain and anguish we all endured in this rapid descent, as the wagon jumped and jostled over rocks and holes, is inconceivable; and the jar in its arrest was like bursting the cords of life asunder, and caused us to shriek with almost supernatural force. Our cries were distinctly heard and noticed on the opposite side of the river … amidst all the confusion which raged in burning and sacking the town. …

The cruelty of our enemy cannot be conceived. … We were at least an hour after the battle within a few steps of a pump in the garrison, well supplied with water, and, although we were suffering with thirst, they would not permit us to take one drop of it, nor give us any themselves. Some of our number, who were not disabled from going to the pump, were repulsed with the bayonet. …

Such was the battle of Groton Heights; and such, as far as my imperfect manner and language can describe, a part of the sufferings which we endured. …

Fort Griswold ranks among the nation's best-preserved Revolutionary War fortifications. Surviving earthworks include the remains of the ramparts and the parapets of the fort. Wooden platforms, upon which infantry and cannon once stood, were located on the interior faces of the earthworks. Over time, erosion has reduced the height of the parapets.

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