Battle of Brandywine: The Human Toll

By Mary Costella

The Battle of Brandywine, on September 11, 1777, was one of the largest land battles fought during the Revolution. By some estimates, the British army, when it landed in Maryland two weeks earlier, numbered approximately 16,000, whereas the Continental Army, under General George Washington, might have been as large as 13,000. Thus, almost 30,000 soldiers were engaged in a desperate struggle over control of the territory around Philadelphia.

Given the initial host of combatants, an accurate accounting of casualties would be informative, but in the case of this battle, the numbers are elusive. Since the losses on both sides were heavy – much heavier for the British than the official reports indicated – General Sir William Howe was naturally inclined to propagandize on behalf of his British forces, keeping the body count low. A large disparity occurs between Howe’s official report to Parliament of his losses (90 dead, 488 wounded) and the numbers given in a dispatch found after the Germantown Battle (1,976). The same report lists Continental losses at 1,300, which is close to the number given by Major General Nathanael Greene, although these estimates are far from certain. The numbers generally accepted are 800 to 1,200 Continentals killed or wounded, while possibly as many as 2,000 British met the same fate.

One factor contributing to the uncertainty of casualty figures is the nature of the battle: it covered roughly a ten-square-mile area, heavily wooded. There was plenty of room for stragglers. Men who fell were often sheltered in local farmhouses or buried by local residents on the spot. The Continental Army was still fairly undisciplined and disorganized. When it finally broke and scattered after the retreat at Sandy Hollow, accounting for the wounded and deserters became particularly difficult. In addition, local Quaker residents, who would not comply with the requested wartime quotas on religious grounds, also refused to document the war, choosing instead to ignore it as best they could. One of the few written references to the conflict raging about them is the following cryptic Birmingham Meeting entry: "Today there was much confusion outside."

One person who was an exception to this attitude was a young Quaker youth named Joseph Townsend, who found himself in the thick of the battle. His account, written some years later, is both a valuable window into the events of that one day, and incidentally an endearing testament to the timeless impetuosity of youth and its yearning to be where the action is. According to Townsend’s account, "the doors of the [Birmingham] meeting house were torn off and the wounded carried thereon into the house which was now occupied as a British hospital…."

The first Birmingham Meeting House, a primitive building, was erected in 1722, to be replaced in 1763 by the structure which stood during the Battle of Brandywine, and which still stands today. Washington had commandeered the meeting house as a hospital about 48 hours before the battle, thinking at the time that engagement would take place far from it, probably in Chadds Ford, and that the wounded would thus be relatively protected. So the benches were moved out, and the sick were moved in. In fact, due to Howe’s surprise strategy of dividing his troops to catch the Continentals in a pincer maneuver, the battle was begun practically outside the front door. The Quakers prudently repaired to nearly Sconneltown to hold their fifth-day meeting, the Continental sick were removed, and the British immediately took over the building for similar purposes. As the battle raged around it, the meeting house suffered almost no damage, probably because the attack was so unanticipated that neither side had entrenched artillery.

After the battle, the British moved on to set up hospitals, first at Dilworth, then in Wilmington. The Continental wounded were scattered about in small groups near the area of battle, many of them initially being moved to the Turk’s Head Tavern in what is currently the town of West Chester. Doctors were under orders from Congress to leave hospitals if necessary to attend the sick and wounded on the battlefield. The celebrated delegate Dr. Benjamin Rush, recently appointed Physician General of the Continental Army, was among those summoned to attend the wounded at General Howe’s invitation.

Many other wounded and incapacitated Continentals were loaded into springless open wagons and transported in the direction of Philadelphia. There they were to be sent on to Trenton where a Continental hospital had been established. Due to the vagaries of war and the uncertain fate of the city and environs, the wounded were moved yet again to greater safety in Bethlehem, Allentown, and Easton. Others were sent to Moravian religious communities in Ephrata, Bethlehem, Lititz, and Reading. Diseases such as typhus, yellow fever, and malaria plagued the hospitals. In his memoirs Dr. Rush noted "Fatal experience has taught the people of America…that a greater proportion of men have perished with sickness in our armies than have fallen by the sword."

Burial details are hard to come by, but eyewitness accounts that exist indicate that mass burials in shallow pits were the norm. Joseph Townsend’s account is illustrative: "…the inhabitants found it necessary to call in the assistance of their neighbors to rebury many of the dead, who lay exposed to the open air and ravages of beasts and wild fowls, having in consequence of the late heavy rains, been washed bare, and some few of them had never been interred."

Several of the British officers who had died at the Birmingham Meeting House were interred in its adjoining burial ground, along with the bodies of fallen Continental soldiers. Today, in the cemetery adjacent to the meeting house, there is a common gravestone commemorating the unknown soldiers of both sides.

Bayard Taylor, the celebrated local author who visited the burial ground fifty years after the battle to pay homage to the dead, wrote, "We almost deemed it sacrilege, to walk over and tread upon, the graves of our country’s brave defenders."