Who won the Battle of Monmouth?
The Battle of Monmouth, fought on 28 June 1778 in New Jersey, was tactically inconclusive, and both sides claimed it. The Americans held the field at nightfall, while the British slipped away and completed their march to the coast and New York. Washington attacked the British column as it withdrew from Philadelphia; an early American retreat under Charles Lee nearly wrecked the attack, until Washington rode up and re-formed the line. His troops then held their ground against British regulars through a day of fierce heat, and his supporters presented the result as an American victory.1
Part of The greatest battles of the American Revolution · Before: The Battle of Saratoga · Next: The Battle of Kings Mountain · Key figures: Baron von Steuben, The Marquis de Lafayette
The winter at Valley Forge had remade the Continental Army. At Monmouth, in appalling summer heat, Washington's men showed what that winter was worth, standing toe to toe with British regulars through one of the longest days of fighting in the war and refusing to break.2
The British leave Philadelphia
The American victory at Saratoga in 1777 brought France into the war in February 1778, and with it the threat of a French fleet off the American coast. The new British commander in chief, Lieutenant General Sir Henry Clinton, received orders to go over to the defensive and concentrate his forces at New York. That meant giving up Philadelphia, which the British had held since the previous autumn.3
The evacuation began on 15 June, and by 18 June the army was across the Delaware and marching into New Jersey. Some 3,000 Loyalists left the city with it, most of them by water. Clinton had roughly 17,500 men in two divisions, under Lord Cornwallis and the Hessian general Wilhelm von Knyphausen, and behind them crawled a baggage train that one count puts at about 1,500 wagons. Ahead lay about ninety miles of sandy roads to the coast.4
A march through the heat
The march was a misery. The thermometer rarely fell below 90 degrees Fahrenheit, men collapsed from heatstroke, and the column covered only about 35 miles in its first six days. Clinton concluded early that an army with such a train could not fight its way overland to New York, so at Allentown he turned northeast toward Monmouth Court House and the road to Sandy Hook, where the Royal Navy could carry him across the bay. Deserters drained away along the route, by one count about 550 of them, many of them Hessians.5
Washington left Valley Forge with about 13,500 men on 18 June and followed on a parallel course. His army had spent the winter being drilled by Baron von Steuben in a common system of maneuver, and he wanted to test it. At councils of war on 17 and 24 June most of his generals, led by Charles Lee, argued against risking a general action before the French arrived. Washington compromised: a strong advance force would strike the British rear while the main army followed.6 › Baron von Steuben
Who would lead the attack
Command of the vanguard should have gone to Lee as the senior major general. He had only recently returned to the army after being captured by British dragoons in December 1776 and exchanged, and at first he declined it. When Washington enlarged it to about 4,500 to 5,000 men and gave it to the young Marquis de Lafayette, Lee changed his mind and demanded it back. Lafayette stepped aside.7
Clinton halted at Monmouth Court House on 26 June to rest his men, and some historians see that pause as a deliberate invitation to attack on ground of his choosing. On 27 June Lee's vanguard reached Englishtown, about six miles away, with orders to attack the next day if the chance came. At four in the morning on 28 June Knyphausen's division started north up the Middletown road with the baggage, while Cornwallis stayed behind with the rear guard.8
Lee's bungled attack
Lee moved forward in the morning believing that he faced only a small covering force of light infantry and dragoons. He planned to pin and surround it. Instead Clinton turned back with Cornwallis's whole division, several thousand of the best troops in America, among them grenadiers and Guards. Lee had given his brigade commanders no clear plan, communication broke down, units began to fall back on their own, and by late morning the whole vanguard was retreating west through the heat with the British following.9
Washington rallies the line
Washington, riding ahead of the main army around noon, met the retreating troops and then Lee himself. Later legend had him swearing until the leaves shook on the trees. Mark Lender and Garry Stone, the modern historians of the campaign, argue that the exchange was heated but not the savage scene so often described, and that Lee had in fact conducted a creditable fighting withdrawal. Either way, Washington took charge on the spot.10
He ordered Anthony Wayne to hold the ground forward of the ravine with a few battalions while the main army formed behind a ravine on Perrine's Ridge. Wayne's men were overrun by British dragoons and grenadiers, but they bought the time Washington needed. When the British came on, they found Nathanael Greene's division on the American right, Lord Stirling's on the left, Lee's battered troops in reserve under Lafayette, and guns on both flanks.11 › George Washington
The afternoon on Perrine's Ridge
The fighting surged back and forth for hours. The British struck Stirling's left and were driven back by a counterattack. Cornwallis then threw grenadiers and Guards at Greene's division on the right, but American guns on Combs Hill, south of the road, fired straight down the length of the British line, and the attack fell apart. Across the field the artillery of both armies kept up what Britannica calls the largest artillery duel of the war.12
The heat was as deadly as the enemy. The temperature approached 100 degrees, there was little water, and men on both sides dropped where they stood; perhaps as many as a hundred soldiers died of heatstroke. Out of this day grew the story of "Molly Pitcher," a woman who carried water to an artillery crew and took her husband's place at the gun when he fell. The name has been attached to Mary Ludwig Hays, but Lender and Stone conclude that very likely several women helped the gun crews that day.13 › Molly Pitcher and the women at Monmouth
By about five in the afternoon Clinton called off his infantry, though the guns fired on until dusk. Wayne wanted to press on; Washington refused, judging his men, in his own words, "beat out and with heat and fatigue." He planned to renew the battle at dawn. Clinton rested his troops until about midnight and then marched them away in the dark toward the coast. When morning came, the Americans held an empty field.14
Counting the cost
Casualty figures vary widely. The American Battlefield Trust gives 325 American and 381 British losses, while Britannica lists 109 Americans dead, 161 wounded and 140 missing, against 207 British dead and 170 wounded. Official returns put the Americans at 356 and the British at 358; some estimates go to 500 Americans and as many as 1,200 British, figures that a reviewer of Lender and Stone suspects are inflated by reliance on American sources. The New Jersey park service sums it up as more than 600 men dead, dying or wounded.15
Why Monmouth mattered
Clinton reached Sandy Hook, and the navy carried his army to New York in early July with its baggage intact. Washington marched north to the Hudson and took post at White Plains. As Britannica notes, the two armies were back where they had stood two years before. On the map, Monmouth changed nothing.16
Its importance lay elsewhere. The Continental Army had stood in open battle against the main British army and not broken, and Washington's aides made sure the country heard about it as a victory. Lender and Stone call the battle a tactical draw that restored Washington's reputation after the defeats of 1777 and secured his command for the rest of the war. They are more cautious about Steuben, finding the evidence for the effect of his training inconclusive, though the park service still describes an army "retrained at Valley Forge."17
Lee could not leave it alone. He demanded a court-martial to clear his name. The court found him guilty of disobeying orders, of an unnecessary and disorderly retreat, and of disrespect to the commander in chief, and suspended him from command for a year. He never served again. Monmouth is often called the last major battle in the north, but Lender and Stone give that distinction to the fights at Connecticut Farms and Springfield, New Jersey, in June 1780. After Monmouth the war's focus shifted south toward Kings Mountain and the Carolinas.18
The battlefield today
Much of the ground is preserved in Monmouth Battlefield State Park, about 1,818 acres at Manalapan, New Jersey. Restoration in the 1990s rebuilt period fences, lanes and a woodlot, and the fields are still farmed. Three 18th-century farmhouses survive, among them the restored Craig House, whose family fled with their possessions as the armies approached. Wayside exhibits stand on Perrine Hill and Combs Hill, and the anniversary falls on 28 June.19
