The colours of Col Buford's crushed Virginia troops
Col Sheldon's Connecticut dragoons fell to Tarleton in 1779
And this is the Joshua Reynolds painting referred to.
1782
Oil on canvas, 236 x 145 cm
National Gallery, London
Posted on 11/22/2005 4:23:26 AM PST by alnitak
Four rare battle flags captured during the American War of Independence by a British officer have been returned after more than two centuries to be auctioned.
The regimental colours seized in 1779 and 1780 by Lt Col Banastre Tarleton, who remains one of the conflict's most controversial figures, have already aroused huge interest among American military historians. They are expected to fetch between £2.3 million and £5.8 million at Sotheby's in New York next year.
Until recently the flags had hung in the Hampshire home of Capt Christopher Tarleton Fagan, the great-great-great-great nephew of the lieutenant colonel.
Capt Tarleton Fagan, a former Grenadier Guards officer, said: "I am very sad to sell them. They are an important part of our family history and we have had them for 225 years. However, there comes a time when their value is such that one can no longer afford to insure them."
Only about 30 American revolutionary battle flags have survived, all of which, apart from the ones to be sold at Sotheby's, are in museums and in most cases only fragments remain. The ones captured by Tarleton are in excellent condition and their history is well documented. One is the flag of the 2nd Regiment of Continental Light Dragoons, raised in Connecticut by Col Elisha Sheldon, who were defeated by Tarleton in Westchester County, New York in July 1779. The other three flags were seized the following year in a still controversial battle in the southern United States.
Tarleton crushed a Virginian regiment under Col Abraham Buford at Waxsaws near the border of North and South Carolina. Accounts of what happened next differ. According to the Americans, Tarleton ordered his men to slaughter more than 100 revolutionary soldiers who had already surrendered. But the British officer maintained that his horse was shot after a truce was declared and pinned him to the ground.
"His troops thought he had been killed and the loyalists among them ran amok," said Capt Tarleton Fagan.
The killing of the Virginian troops led to Tarleton being called "Bloody Ban". The Americans also coined the phrase "Tarleton's quarter", which meant that no prisoners were taken.
After the war ended Tarleton took the four battle flags back to England. Buford's main flag, made of gold silk, has a painted image of a beaver gnawing a palmetto tree, while the two smaller, plainer ones would have been battalion standards known as ground colours.
While Tarleton was reviled by his enemies, the British public proclaimed him a hero. He was immortalised in a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds which depicts the captured American flags lying at his feet.
The colours of Col Buford's crushed Virginia troops
Col Sheldon's Connecticut dragoons fell to Tarleton in 1779
And this is the Joshua Reynolds painting referred to.
1782
Oil on canvas, 236 x 145 cm
National Gallery, London
The title you created has been changed to the original published title.
Please do not alter titles.
Thanks.
U.S. History Bump!
Them who laughs last . . . laughs the best.
Once our greatest enemy, the Brits are now our staunchest ally.
Perhaps this auction will trigger suffficient interest to take a more objective assessment of Tarleton, the civil war aspects of the Revolution, and the role of propaganda and myth-making. Mel Gibson's entertainng but historically grossly inaccurate account of the Southern Campaign and the exploits of Francis Marion has done much to distort this partof our history.
For what it's worth, Tarleton surrendered at Yorktown. So, his pretty green jacket, white tights and his sorry surrendering ass were trophies of the United States. I bet that is not depicted on the portrait.
I did not, the article had 2 titles, depends on where you got to it from.
Funny how the article didn't seem fit to mention that little tidbit, isn't it?
Kinda makes you wish they'd killed the bastard at Cowpens and kept his head for a trophy.
Has anyone checked Sotheby's website to see if they hava any info?
Don Feder
America was always a lost cause
http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- IN "THE PATRIOT," the Mel Gibson movie that opened last weekend, there's one particularly poignant scene. A young Continental soldier -- Gibson's son in the story -- is in camp after another crushing American defeat. Among the effects of a fallen comrade he finds a tattered flag. As he reverently examines it, a grizzled veteran tells him, "It's a lost cause."
The American fight for independence, in fact, ,was the mother of all lost causes. England had a trained, highly disciplined professional army, led by competent if unimaginative generals.
American forces rarely numbered more than 20,000. Most were militia, a contentious, undisciplined crowd with elected officers.
Prior to Yorktown, there were notable American victories -- Trenton, Princeton, Saratoga and Cowpens. But the mightiest empire on earth could absorb those defeats and more.
Our losses put us constantly on the brink of extinction -- the fall of Ft. Washington (3,000 Americans taken prisoner), Brandywine Creek, the bloody snows of Valley Forge, the defection of our ablest battlefield commander (Benedict Arnold), army mutinies in 1780 and 1781, Camden and the capture of New York, Philadelphia and Charleston.
Arguably, but for the formidable leadership of George Washington, a French fleet and those tenacious freeholders the British dismissed as peasants, the Crown would still be taxing our tea and the Fourth of July would be a footnote in history.
At some point in "The Patriot" it struck me: For most of our history, America has been a lost cause. If we won the revolution by the skin of our teeth, we clung to independence by our fingernails in the War of 1812. The British burned our capital. The only American victory anyone remembers, which kept England from seizing the mouth of the Mississippi, was won by an army of frontiersmen, freedmen, Indians and pirates, led by a general best known for fighting duels.
The Civil War was another nearly lost cause. The Confederacy had hands down the better generals and soldiers. The early battles saw rank upon rank of blue coats led to the slaughter. The Union was saved by a president with less than a year of formal education and a general with a fondness for the bottle who graduated near the bottom of his class at West Point.
Between 1918 and 1940, American preparedness declined to the point where, when we entered World War II (with another famous defeat), Hitler considered the American military a joke. Eisenhower laughed all the way from Normandy to the Elbe.
In the late 1970s, it looked like we were losing the Cold War, with America still reeling from Vietnam and Watergate, the Soviets advancing from Afghanistan to Nicaragua and a peanut farmer in the White House. A decade later, the Berlin Wall fell and the Kremlin went into receivership.
Today, once again, the American cause seems doomed -- the retreat of English as our common tongue, the multiculturalist assault on all we hold dear, American trade dollars arming communist China, the U.S. armed forces turned into a laboratory for bizarre social experiments and a draft-dodger as commander in chief -- from the man who reputedly could not tell a lie to the man who could be disbarred for lying under oath.
In a recent survey of seniors at 55 of our most prestigious colleges, only 23 percent were able to correctly identify James Madison as the principal framer of the Constitution. Nearly 80 percent earned a D or F on a high-school level American history test.
Is the cause lost at last? Not when there are still millions of us who remember what America once was. Not when there's an upsurge in patriotism in times of crisis, like the Gulf War. Not when the public response to books like "The Greatest Generation" and movies like "Saving Private Ryan" (and the applause I heard at the end of "The Patriot") shows the flame still burns.
It's time to take up the ragged banner, patch it and carry it once more into battle. The odds may be overwhelmingly against us. But destiny, it seems, is on our side.
If, in the coming engagement, you're a flag short, there's one on the mantle of the fireplace in our living room, folded in a triangular shape. It was presented to me at the funeral of my father, another patriot.
FYI..ping the troops..
The Patriot was riddled with gross inaccuracies, far more than just nit-picky stuff (Tarleton's troops wore green, not red uniforms, for example.)
There was an interesting article in Smithsonian about the historical advisors hired for the film; as it turns out, they were basically completely ignored and were pretty upset about it.
Pretty glaring is the fact that at no time in the war did the British lock the population of a town in a church and burn it to the ground, or anything close to that bad.
If a movie had shown American troops doing that in a war where it never actually happened, FR would have had a conniption fit to end all conniption fits.
You have to be kidding. Let's start with the broad fundamentals. The loyalist Americans tended to be up country farmers who fought against the slave-holding (White and Black) plantation owners. Francis Marion was one of the latter. He was a guerilla fighter. An extraordinary leader given that he was actually crippled and hung on despite tremendous difficulties - but he was definitely not a nice person: A Swamp Fox yes, but a rabid one. Tarleton and he were well matched.
Tarleton's regiment was made up of loyalists not British dragoons. It was a civil war in the south with all that portends.
As was already noted there was no mass killing of civilians by the British - though both sides murdered the innocent, burned and looted almost at will.
The war in the South was not good guys versus bad guys, but the culmination of longstanding ethnic and religious feuds, see Kevin Phillips the Cousins War.
wow how timely is that essay
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