"Good God! What Brave Fellows I Must This Day Lose!"

[Subdeacon Joe]

The Maryland 300

 

Two hundred and forty years ago, America’s “300 Moment” occurred during the Battle of Brooklyn. In one of the greatest, yet now forgotten, small-unit engagements in American history, several hundred Marylanders made an epic stand resembling that of the 300 ancient Spartans at Thermopylae. The Marylanders saved Washington’s Army — and, perhaps, the United States. On August 27, 1776, over the crackle of musket fire and the boom of cannon, the indomitable Major Mordecai Gist of the Maryland Line ordered his men forward. Shots tore through their ranks. Undaunted, the men continued to surge toward an old stone house occupied by British General Lord Cornwallis and his Redcoats. Thousands of British and Hessian soldiers flanked the Marylanders. Few Americans would survive.

 

Cornwallis’s men trained a light cannon and musket fire on the advancing Marylanders, who mounted a suicidal preemptive strike on Cornwallis and his men in the Vechte-Cortelyou house — a bayonet charge aimed at protecting their brothers-in-arms and creating a crucial window of time for them to escape to their fortifications in Brooklyn Heights. The soldiers who participated in that unorthodox assault would become known as the “Immortals” or the “Maryland 400” (a classical reference to the ancient Greek stand). With their blood, these men bought, in the words of one American historian, “an hour, more precious to American liberty than any other in its history.” The British continued “pouring the canister and grape upon the Americans like a shower of hail.” In the melee, “the flower of some of the finest families of the South [were] cut to atoms.” Defying the carnage unfolding around them, Gist’s men “closed their ranks over the bodies of their dead comrades, and still turned their faces to the foe.” The boldness of the Marylanders’ charge initially unhinged Cornwallis’s defenses as his gunners nearly abandoned their artillery, but intense fire from the house and fresh reinforcements compelled the Marylanders to retreat before mounting yet another charge. From a distant hill, General George Washington watched the gallant display through his spyglass. As the Marylanders began to fall, he cried out, “Good God! What brave fellows I must this day lose!”

 

 

 

[DocWard]

Thank you for sharing.

[twelve mile REB]

We have many such chapters in the cause of liberty from single acts of bravery to these brave 400. Its truly a shame that we as a nation no longer hold these men as heros and role models but substitute the slime of society in their place.