British Casualties in the Battle of Rhode Island
By Don N. Hagist
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Reenactors portraying the 22nd Regiment.
John Lindal Borland was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on August 18, 1753, to a wealthy family that owned more than 1,000 acres of land in various parts of the colony. After graduating from Harvard in 1772, he probably would have continued in the family business interests, but events in the area quickly changed his prospects. When hostilities broke out in April 1775, he moved with his family into a house in Boston, safe from the unrest in the countryside.
On June 5, American militiamen began driving livestock from Noddle’s Island and Hog Island, adjacent to Boston. British troops crossed to the islands to intervene, and a skirmish ensued. Jonathan Borland’s father, John Borland, climbed a ladder to the roof of their house to get a view of the action, but the ladder broke and he fell to his death.1 This sudden tragedy may have factored into the younger Borland’s decision to join the army – the British army, besieged in Boston.
That November he obtained a commission as an ensign in the 22nd Regiment of Foot, which had arrived in Boston just after the Battle of Bunker Hill in June. A year later he was with the regiment when it landed in Rhode Island. In the middle of August 1778, Borland was once again in a besieged town, Newport, when he was promoted to lieutenant. In this capacity he marched with his regiment on August 29 in pursuit of retreating American forces, and he was wounded in the ensuing battle.
When the Battle of Rhode Island began early in the morning of August 29, 1778, the British garrison in Newport consisted of just over 5,000 soldiers fit for duty – 1,800 in British regiments, almost 2,400 in German regiments (often referred to as Hessians), 650 in Loyalist corps, and 300 sailors and militia serving on shore.2 Of these, all of the British, 2,000 of the German, and almost 600 of the Loyalists were engaged in the battle, although some only in the later stages. After a day of battle, losses on both sides were similar.
On August 31, 1778, British Major General Robert Pigot wrote an official account of the battle enumerating the casualties: 1 officer, 4 sergeants, 31 private soldiers and two other men killed; 14 officers, 15 sergeants, 1 drummer, 180 private soldiers and two others wounded; and an officer, a sergeant, and 10 soldiers missing. Of these, 125 belonged to British regular regiments; the remainder to German and Loyalist corps.3
Understanding the casualties in the battle requires some understanding of how these regiments were structured in Rhode Island. The British regular troops in the battle consisted of a contingent of the Royal Artillery and four infantry regiments, the 22nd, 38th, 43rd and 54th. The infantry regiments were comprosed of ten companies of about 50 men each. Two of these companies were specialized – the grenadier company and the light infantry company. For the 22nd and 43rd regiments, these two companies were detached and serving in New York at the time of the Battle of Rhode Island. For the 38th and 54th, these two companies were also detached, but were in Rhode Island serving together as a four-company battalion called a flank battalion.4 At the battle on August 29, the flank battalion (consisting of four companies), the 22nd and 43rd regiments (each consisting of eight companies) marched in a column on what is now East Main Road. The 38th and 54th Regiments were initially held in reserve, and joined the battle later.
Reenactors portraying the 22nd Regiment.
On the day of battle, the 22nd Regiment had roughly 20 officers, 20 sergeants and 370 private soldiers available; this regiment took the bulk of the casualties, having 11 private soldiers killed, and four officers, two sergeants and 48 men wounded. The flank battalion, with about 200 officers and men, also suffered heavily, having an officer wounded and another missing, a sergeant killed, and a sergeant, a drummer and 19 men wounded, plus one missing. The Artillery and the 43rd each had one sergeant and two soldiers killed; the Artillery had an officer and ten men wounded, while the 43rd had two officers and 14 men wounded, and one missing. Neither the 38th nor the 54th, both having joined the battle late, reported any losses (besides their men in the flank battalions).
Lost in these numbers are the individual people. In the typical manner for the era, General Pigot named the officer casualties – Lieutenant Shapland Swiney of the 38th’s grenadier company, Lieutenant John Thomas Ledyard of the 54th’s light infantry, 2nd Lieutenant William Pemble of the Artillery, Lieutenant George Cleghorn and Ensigns Jonathan Lindall Borland, Andrew Adam and William Proctor of the 22nd, Ensigns Winthrop Roche and James Affleck of the 43rd, all wounded. For the others Pigot gave only numbers.5
Semiannual muster rolls for the British regiments list the names of each soldier and the dates on which they entered and left the regiment, allowing us to identify the British soldiers killed in the Battle of Rhode Island, as well as their service history. Other documents tell us a bit more about some of them, showing the variety of men who served in Rhode Island, including long-serving career soldiers and men recruited only for the duration of the war.
Thomas Plumb enlisted in the 22nd Regiment in late December 1765. In February 1777 he wrote a letter to his brother in Wendron, a town in Cornwall, England. In just over a page, he revealed some of his experiences in America, and offered his “kind respects to my loveing Wife & Child Uncle Wood, Molly & little William and all Enquireing friends.”6 He never saw his family again – he was one of the 11 killed in the 22nd Regiment on August 29, 1778, ending a 12-year career in the army.7 Also killed was Thomas Edwards, who had been serving in America for more than ten years, with the 65th Regiment in the late 1760s and into the 1770s before being transferred into the 22nd Regiment in 1776. Soon after British forces landed in Rhode Island, Edwards was placed as a safe guard at a farm north of Newport. After several nightly encounters with German soldiers intent on plundering the farm, he shot a group of marauders, killing one German soldier and wounding another; a court martial acquitted him of any wrongdoing, finding that he acted in accordance with his duties as a safe guard.8
Most of the 22nd’s men who died in the battle were long-serving soldiers like Plumb and Edwards. Daniel Johnson joined the army in 1768, Peter Horsefield and William Ellsworthy in 1769, William Sutherland in 1771, Jacob Jones before 1769, and Thomas Rowland some time between 1767 and 1772.9 All were probably from England or Scotland, and although none of their ages are known, having close to ten years in the army suggests that they were in their late twenties or early to mid-thirties.
Three others had enlisted only after the war began. Twenty-one-year-old Philip Thies was born in the Palatinate region of what is now Germany, one of some two-thousand men recruited in the British electorate of Hanover in late 1775 and early 1776 to serve in British regiments – not to be confused with the German regiments, often called Hessians, that served alongside British regiments in America.10 Forty of these men joined the 22nd Regiment in America in October 1776; Thies was the only one to die in the Battle of Rhode Island.
Recruit Michael Hickey, an Irishman, arrived in America in October 1776 to join the 22nd Regiment, and John Gardner arrived in June 1777; both were killed on August 29, 1778.
The 38th Regiment’s light infantry lost Thomas Boyer, a wartime recruit who had arrived in America in October 1776. Killed in the 54th’s grenadier company was long-serving Sergeant John Brown. The 43rd Regiment lost wartime recruits Thomas Turnbull and James Renny. In the Royal Artillery, Sergeant Richard Rawlings was killed, along with two soldiers who have not yet been identified.11
In the days following the battle, wartime recruit Thomas Buffet of the 22nd Regiment succumbed to his wounds, as did the 43rd’s Sergeant Richard Davidson and private soldier William Litchfield, both of whom had joined the army before 1770. Lieutenant Shapland Swiney of the 38th Regiment’s grenadiers, who had been wounded and taken prisoner, was exchanged and rejoined his regiment, as were the missing private soldiers.12
It is not possible to identify most of the men who were wounded, but it is clear is that most of them survived. General Pigot reported that the 22nd had 48 men wounded in the battle; besides Thomas Buffet, mentioned above, only three men died during the next four months of unknown causes, possibly from wounds but equally possibly from other causes.13 A number of men were discharged and sent back to Great Britain in early 1779, some of whom received pensions because they were disabled by wounds, but when and where they received their wounds is not recorded.14
Joseph Wright of Derby, Dead Soldier, 1789, San Francisco Fine Arts Museum.
Records for soldiers who received pensions after 1785 are more detailed, revealing a few of the wounded from the Battle of Rhode Island. James Collins, a native of County Fermanagh in Ireland born in 1748 who had learned the trade of flax dressing before joining the army soon after the war began, served in the 22nd Regiment and then joined the 54th Regiment at the end of war; when he was discharged in 1789 he received a pension because of “a Wound by a shot in the side, received at an Engagement at Quaker Hill in Rhode Island, on the 29th of August 1778.”15 Benjamin Arnold of the 38th Regiment’s light infantry, born in 1753 in Glastonbury, Somerset, was “wounded in the left leg at Rhode Island,” but remained in the regiment until 1789, then in other British military organizations until 1805.16 The 43rd Regiment’s John Hunt, born in Birmingham, Warwickshire, was 31 years old and had been in the army for eight years when he was “severely wounded in the left leg and in the right hand at Rhode Island on the 29th August,” but soldiered on until April 1793.17 Sergeant John McCardy of the 54th Regiment’s grenadiers, an 18-year veteran from Clones in County Fermanagh, Ireland, a weaver by trade, recovered from the wound he received in the battle and served until the end of the war, taking his discharge in November 1783 at the age of 43.18 Francis Cotton, a gardener from the village of Keadby, Lincolnshire who enlisted in the 54th Regiment on the first day of January 1776 at the age of 24, remained in the regiment until 1792 in spite of “a wound received in the left side at Rhode Island in North America”; he put in two and half more years in another regiment before being discharged because he was “subject to fitts of Insanity which renders him unfit for service.”19 Also in the 54th, 33-year-old John McLean of Fort William, Argyleshire, a carpenter, was “wounded in the thigh by a musket ball at Rhode Island,” but continued to serve in the regiment’s light infantry company. In 1781 he was wounded again, this time “in the leg, at Petersburgh in Virginia.” He nonetheless continued in the army until 1801.20
The wounded officers also fared well – mostly. William Pemble, an Englishman born in 1756 who started his career as a cadet at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich in 1771, lost his right arm in the battle. In spite of this disability, he continued as an officer, transferring into the infantry and serving in various capacities in Great Britain for at least another decade. Scottish-born 19-year-old Lieutenant George Cleghorn of the 22nd Regiment became a captain in the 38th Regiment two years after the battle and retired from the army in 1792. Lieutenant Shapland Swiney of the 38th, a native of Ireland and 22 years old in 1778, remained active in the regiment until 1785, when he went onto half-pay, a sort of reserve status. Ensign Winthrop Roche of the 43rd, from Ireland and 20 years old in 1778, rose to the rank of captain in the 43rd before retiring in 1792. The 43rd’s Ensign James Affleck, 19 years old and from England, also became a captain in an infantry regiment before transferring into the cavalry, where he was still serving as a major in 1793; he died in 1833. And the 54th’s Englishman Lieutenant John Thomas Layard, born in 1753, was still in the army in 1793 and lived until 1828.21
Ensign was the lowest commissioned rank in the army, the starting point of an officer’s army career. Young men with this rank might go out of their way to signalize themselves, gaining favor and reputation in the hope of rapid advancement. Jonathan Lindall Borland achieved this; his wound gave him the opportunity to go to England to recover; there he still served the army as a recruiting officer, and was able to be with his Loyalist family that had fled there after Boston was evacuated by the British in 1776. Borland eventually achieved the rank of major general, retired from the army in 1807, and lived until November 1825.
Borland’s two fellow wounded ensigns in the 22nd Regiment did not fare so well. Andew Adam, about whom little has been found, obtained his commission while in New York in January 1777 and joined his regiment in Rhode Island that November.22 He died of his wounds on September 6, 1778.23 William Proctor came from Nova Scotia to volunteer in the army in 1775 and “distinguished himself greatly in a small brush with the rebels” on August 28 of that year, receiving a minor wound in his thigh.24 He served in a Loyalist corps called the Royal Fencible American Regiment, then obtained a commission in the 22nd Regiment in August 1776.25 After he was wounded on August 29, 1778, Proctor was taken to the home of Jacob and Ester Hart where he was “afforded every relief and comfort.” There he “underwent several operations, & continued in extreme agony upwards of three weeks, during which time he met with all the attention his unhappy case required, and was treated with the tenderness, care and kindness he could possibly have experienced from the nearest relation.”26 In spite of these efforts, he died on September 19. Following army tradition, his effects were sold off, mostly purchased by his fellow officers, including his tent, cloth for uniforms, his gold epaulet – and a fiddle, which may have brought him comfort during long hours of military boredom, a symbol of a young gentleman’s cultural pursuits.27
“...underwent several operations, & continued in extreme agony upwards of three weeks, during which time he met with all the attention his unhappy case required, and was treated with the tenderness, care and kindness he could possibly have experienced from the nearest relation.”
The Battle of Rhode Island was the last major engagement for British regiments in Rhode Island. Raids to the mainland were conducted in 1779, but mostly by Loyalist troops rather than British regulars. When the island was evacuated in 1779, the regiments were blended into the British army in New York; most of the veterans of the Battle of Rhode Island fought in other major engagements. The 22nd Regiment played a major role in the Battle of Connecticut Farms in New Jersey in June 1780, as did the 38th Regiment. The 43rd was sent to Virginia in 1781, and was part of the army that surrendered at Yorktown that October. Also part of the Yorktown capitulation were the light infantry companies of the 22nd, 38th, 43rd and 54th Regiments, all now including some Rhode Island veterans. The 54th Regiment suffered terribly in the attack on Fort Griswold in Groton, Connecticut in September 1781.
All of these regiments left the new United States when the war ended in 1783; the 54th went to Nova Scotia, while the others returned to England. Soldiers who served in the Battle of Rhode Island gradually left the ranks, some taking land grants in Nova Scotia at the war’s end, some succumbing to illness in other foreign lands, some continuing in the army until they were no longer fit for service, often into the early 1800s.
Resources:
(1) Jonathan Sewall to Thomas Robie, June 7, 1775, Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 2nd series volume 10 (1895–1896):412; New-England Chronicle, June 8, 1775.
(2) Alwick Castle, UK: List of the Troops on Rhode Island during the late Seige, Manuscripts of the Duke of Northumberland, Letters & Papers, Jan. – March 1777, No. 51, 23/3 p. 25.
(3) John Almon (ed.), The Remembrancer, or impartial repository of public events (London: J. Almon, 1779), Vol.7, p.15.
(4) See Don N. Hagist, These Distinguished Corps: British Grenadier and Light Infantry Battalions in the American Revolution (Helion, 2021), 11-21, 141-143.
(5) Almon (ed.), The Remembrancer, Vol.7, p.15
(6) The National Archives, Kew, UK (TNA): Thomas Plumb to Alexander Johns, February 22, 1777, Intercepted mails and papers, America, 1777-1779, HCA 30.272.
(7) TNA: Muster rolls, 22nd Regiment of Foot, WO 12/3871 and /3872.
(8) TNA: Muster rolls, 65th Regiment of Foot, WO 12/7377 and 22nd Regiment of Foot, WO 12/3872; TNA: Trial of Thomas Edwards, WO 71/83 p.102-108.
(9) Rowland had served in the 27th Regiment and Jones in the 65th before joining the 22nd. TNA: Muster rolls, 22nd Regiment of Foot; 27th Regiment of Foot, WO 12/4328; 65th Regiment of Foot, WO 12/7377.
(10) Don N. Hagist, “Forty German Recruits: The Service of the von Scheither Recruits in the 22nd Regiment of Foot, 1776–1783,” Journal of the Johannes Schwalm Historical Association, Vol.6, no. 1 (1997).
(11) TNA: Muster rolls, 38th Regiment of Foot, WO 12/5171; 43rd Regiment of Foot, WO 12/5562; 54th Regiment of Foot, WO 12/6398 and /6399; Royal Artillery, WO 10/151.
(12) William L. Clements Library, Ann Arbor, MI (WLC): Frederick Mackenzie Papers: Box 1, Returns of killed, wounded and missing.
(13) TNA: Muster rolls, 22nd Regiment of Foot, WO 12/3872.
(14) TNA: Examinations of Invalid Soldiers, WO 116/7.
(15) TNA: Discharge of James Collins (Callings), WO 121/7/95.
(16) TNA: Discharges of Benjamin Arnold, WO 121/7/315, WO 121/145/242, WO 121/163/242.
(17) TNA: Discharge of John Hunt, WO 121/16/179.
(18) TNA: Examinations of Invalid Soldiers, November 26, 1783, WO 116/8.
(19) TNA: Discharge of Francis Cotton, WO 121/24/349.
(20) TNA: Discharge of John McLean, WO 121/46/361.
(21) TNA: Succession books, WO 25, courtesy of J.A. Houlding.
(22) TNA: Succession books, WO 25; TNA: Muster book, HMS Buffalo, ADM 36/8663.
(23) WLC: Frederick Mackenzie Papers: Box 1, Returns of killed, wounded and missing.
(24) WLC: William Howe to Thomas Gage, August 29, 1775, Gage Manuscripts, Volume 134; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Eleventh Report, Appendix, Part V: The Manuscripts of the Earl of Dartmouth (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1887), 385.
(25) TNA: Succession books, WO 25.
(26) TNA: AO 13/68 part 2/140-141.
(27) Lloyds Bank Archives, London: Agent’s Ledgers, 22nd Regiment of Foot, A56e/102.
