Justice Anderson

The British army once sentenced Daniel Morgan to 500 lashes, a punishment that usually killed a man, for the crime of knocking out an officer who struck him. He survived every stroke. And he spent the rest of his life joking that the drummer had miscounted and only given him 499, so the British still owed him one. He collected that debt at a place called Cowpens. Morgan was not born to anything. He was a rough, barely educated frontiersman who made his living hauling freight by wagon on the Virginia frontier, a big, powerful, hot-tempered young man. During the French and Indian War, serving as a civilian teamster with the British army, a British lieutenant struck him with the flat of a sword. Morgan answered with his fist and dropped the officer cold. For a colonial to strike a British officer was close to a capital offense, and the court-martial sentenced him to five hundred lashes with the cat-o'-nine-tails, a flogging meant to flay a man and very often to kill him. They tied him up and laid it on, and Daniel Morgan did not die. He carried the ridged scars on his back for the rest of his life. But instead of breaking him, that brutal punishment forged something. It left him with a cold, permanent hatred of the British army and its contempt for colonial men like him, a hatred he would one day repay with interest. And it gave him his lifelong joke: the drummer lost count and stopped at 499, so the British, he liked to say, were still one lash short of paying him in full. When the Revolution came, that uneducated wagoner turned out to be a natural soldier of rare gifts. He raised a company of frontier riflemen, crack shots who could kill at distances that terrified British regulars, and he led them north to Saratoga, where his marksmen helped shatter Burgoyne's army and win the turning-point victory of the war. Morgan had a feel for battle that trained European officers lacked, an instinct for ground, for timing, and above all for the men he led. He understood that his militia were not professional soldiers and could not be asked to do what professionals did, so instead of cursing them for it, he built his tactics around what they could do. That genius reached its peak at the Battle of Cowpens in January 1781, one of the most perfectly fought battles in American history. Facing the dreaded Banastre Tarleton, Morgan set a trap built entirely on human nature. He put his unreliable militia in the front line and asked them only for two volleys, then permission to fall back, which they gladly did. Tarleton's British, seeing the Americans retreat, charged forward in a confident rush straight into Morgan's real line of hardened Continentals, and then Morgan sprang the jaws, hitting the British on both flanks at once in a double envelopment while his cavalry rode down their rear. In minutes Tarleton's command was destroyed, hundreds killed and captured, one of the most crushing and complete victories of the war, and Tarleton himself barely escaped. It was the frontier wagoner out-generaling the darlings of the British army. So the debt was paid. The boy they tried to flog to death grew up to be the man who methodically dismantled the British in the field, who understood soldiers because he had been treated like dirt as one, and who turned the hard lessons of his own back into some of the finest tactics the Revolution ever saw. Remember Daniel Morgan. The British gave him 499 lashes and made an enemy who never forgot, and he collected the last one at Cowpens, with interest.

October 1, 1862. Two weeks after Antietam, Abraham Lincoln shows up at Harpers Ferry to see George McClellan's army for himself. Lee had been beaten and pushed back across the Potomac, and he was badly hurt. Lincoln wanted him chased down and finished. McClellan wanted more time, more men, more horses, and more supplies. Lincoln spent days riding through the camps, reviewing troops and walking the Antietam battlefield. Alexander Gardner photographed him standing outside McClellan's headquarters tent, towering over everyone in his stovepipe hat. One morning Lincoln looked out over the huge camp with a friend and asked him what it was. The friend said it was the Army of the Potomac. Lincoln said no, that was McClellan's bodyguard. He went back to Washington and ordered McClellan to cross the Potomac and fight. McClellan took weeks to move. In early November, Lincoln fired him. McClellan never commanded troops again. Two years later he ran against Lincoln for president and lost.

He is one of only a tiny handful of Americans in all of history to receive the Medal of Honor twice, and the two acts show two completely different kinds of courage. The first was standing at his gun as his ship was torn apart in the greatest naval battle of the war. The second was running into a fire to save one man's life. John Cooper was an Irish immigrant who served in the United States Navy as a coxswain, an experienced petty officer. His first great test came on August 5, 1864, at the Battle of Mobile Bay, the fight where Admiral Farragut roared his famous order about the torpedoes. Cooper served a gun aboard the USS Brooklyn, one of the lead ships driving into the bay, which meant she absorbed some of the heaviest fire of the day. Confederate shot and shell raked the Brooklyn, smashing her and cutting down men all around Cooper's gun. Through all of it, Cooper stood to his work. As his crewmates were killed and wounded and the ship was battered, he kept his gun firing with skill and steadiness, helping to pour fire into the Confederate forts and the ironclad ram Tennessee until the enemy was beaten and the bay was won. For his coolness and courage in that storm of iron, he received his first Medal of Honor. His second came in a very different setting, months later, and it says something about the kind of man he was. On April 26, 1865, in Mobile, an accidental fire and explosion broke out among ammunition and stores. It was the sort of disaster that killed sailors regularly, sudden, chaotic, and deadly. A wounded man lay in the path of the flames, certain to die. Cooper did not hesitate. He advanced directly through the burning, exploding area, into the fire, and pulled the wounded man out to safety, saving his life at obvious risk to his own. For that act of rescue, he was awarded a second Medal of Honor. That combination is what makes him remarkable. The first medal was for valor in the teeth of enemy fire, the disciplined bravery of a man doing his deadly job while his ship was blown apart around him. The second was for a purely humane act of self-sacrifice, running toward danger not to kill an enemy but to save a life. John Cooper is one of only nineteen people ever to receive two Medals of Honor, and one of an even smaller number who earned them for two entirely separate actions. An Irish-born sailor, he embodied both faces of what the medal is meant to honor: the courage to stand and fight, and the courage to risk everything for a single comrade.

On this day in 1780, George Washington rode up to Benedict Arnold's headquarters expecting breakfast with a trusted general, and instead walked into the discovery that his most brilliant officer had just tried to sell the Revolution to the enemy. Arnold escaped by a matter of minutes. It was one of the most dramatic mornings of the entire war. The trap had been closing for two days. On September 23, militiamen had captured Major André with the West Point plans in his boot. Word of the arrest, and the incriminating papers, was now working its way through the American command, but through a chain of confusion and bad luck, a warning also reached Arnold himself first. On the morning of September 25, Arnold was at his headquarters, the Robinson house across the river from West Point, waiting for Washington, who was riding in after a conference in Hartford. Then a messenger arrived with the news Arnold had been dreading: André was taken. Arnold understood instantly that the papers in André's boot were in his own handwriting, that the whole plot was exposed, and that he had perhaps minutes before he was arrested for treason and hanged. Washington was already almost at the door. Arnold moved fast. He excused himself, went upstairs to his wife Peggy, told her the plot had collapsed, and then bolted. He raced down to the river, threw himself into his barge, and ordered his oarsmen to row for their lives downriver to the Vulture, the British warship waiting on the Hudson. He got away clean, rowing right past the defenses he had been planning to betray, to the safety of the enemy fleet. By the time Washington's men understood what had happened, the traitor was gone. And then came the scene that people never forget. Washington arrived, toured West Point, found things oddly out of order, and then the captured documents caught up with him, André's confession and the plans in Arnold's own hand. The full magnitude of the betrayal hit him all at once. Benedict Arnold, the hero of Saratoga, the man he had trusted with the most important fortress in America, had conspired to hand it, and quite possibly Washington himself, to the British. Washington, normally so composed, was stunned. He is said to have turned to those around him and asked, almost in disbelief, "Whom can we trust now?" Upstairs, Arnold's wife Peggy put on a spectacular performance, appearing to lose her mind with hysterical grief, convincing Washington and his officers that she was an innocent, distraught victim who knew nothing of her husband's crimes. They pitied her and let her go. Only much later did evidence suggest she had likely been in on the plot from the beginning. In the moment, her act helped complete Arnold's escape and protected her. So the plot failed, but the traitor got away. West Point was saved, André would hang, and Arnold would live on as a British general, his name becoming the American synonym for betrayal. September 25 is the day the mask came off, the day Washington learned that the greatest battlefield general the Revolution had produced had become its greatest traitor, and stood there asking the hardest question a commander can ask: after this, whom can we trust now?

On this day in 1779, an American captain stood on the deck of a ship that was literally sinking under his feet, on fire, riddled with holes, half his crew dead or wounded, and when the enemy shouted across the water asking if he surrendered, he roared back a line that the United States Navy has never forgotten: "I have not yet begun to fight!" His name was John Paul Jones, and what he did that night made him the founding legend of the American navy. Understand how insane the setting was. Jones was not defending American waters. He had taken the fight to the enemy's home, cruising in a small squadron right off the coast of England itself, terrorizing British shipping in their own front yard. His flagship was an old, worn-out French merchant vessel he had converted into a warship and renamed the Bonhomme Richard, in honor of Benjamin Franklin's "Poor Richard." It was slow, tired, and outgunned. Off Flamborough Head, Jones ran into a British convoy escorted by a brand-new, faster, more powerful Royal Navy frigate called the Serapis. By every rational measure, Jones should have run. The Serapis was a better ship with heavier guns. Instead, Jones attacked. The battle that followed, fought into the night under a rising moon, was one of the most savage ship-to-ship duels of the entire age of sail. Early on, disaster struck the Americans: two of the Bonhomme Richard's big old cannon burst when fired, blowing apart their own gun crews and leaving Jones dangerously short of firepower. The Serapis hammered the Richard mercilessly, its heavier guns tearing the American ship to splinters, opening holes below the waterline, setting fires. The Richard was being destroyed. So Jones did the only thing that could save him. If he could not win a gunnery duel, he would not fight one. He drove his ship straight into the Serapis and lashed the two vessels together, hull against hull, muzzle to muzzle, so close the gun crews were practically fighting through each other's ports. Now it was not a naval battle so much as a brawl, and Jones's American and French sailors and marines could rake the enemy's decks with musket fire and grenades from the rigging. It was in the middle of this hell, with his ship clearly sinking and afire, that the British captain called over, reasonably, to ask if the Americans had had enough and wished to strike their colors. And Jones, standing on a doomed deck, gave the answer that became immortal: he had not yet begun to fight. And he meant it. The turning point came from above. One of Jones's men climbed out on a yardarm over the enemy ship and dropped a grenade down through an open hatch into the Serapis, where it touched off a chain of gunpowder charges. The explosion ripped through the British gun deck, killing and maiming dozens of men in an instant. The fight went out of the Serapis. Its captain, his own ship now wrecked and burning, finally surrendered. And here is the almost unbelievable ending. John Paul Jones had won, but his own ship was beyond saving. The Bonhomme Richard was so shattered that it slowly sank over the next day, and Jones had to move his victorious crew onto the captured Serapis and sail away in the enemy's ship, because his own had gone to the bottom. He won the battle and lost his vessel, all at once. The victory made him a hero on both sides of the Atlantic, a symbol that the infant United States could carry the war to the mightiest navy on earth and win. To this day, the Navy calls John Paul Jones its father, and it teaches new sailors his answer from that burning deck. Remember September 23, 1779, and the man who was sinking, and on fire, and outgunned, and answered a demand for his surrender by saying he had not yet begun to fight, and then proved it.