Battle of Paoli, The Paoli Massacre

In the predawn darkness of September twenty-first, seventeen seventy-seven, a column of British soldiers crept silently through the Pennsylvania countryside toward an American encampment near present-day Malvern. What happened next became one of the most controversial episodes of the Revolutionary War, remembered ever after as the Paoli Massacre.

Brigadier General Anthony Wayne had positioned his Continental troops here to shadow the British army's flank as it moved toward Philadelphia. British Major General Charles Grey devised a plan to destroy the force with a nighttime bayonet assault. His tactical innovation was brutal in its simplicity: he ordered his soldiers to remove the flints from their muskets entirely. No flints meant no accidental discharges, no muzzle flash to reveal positions, and no option but cold steel. Grey earned his nickname, No-Flint Grey, that night.

The British crept to within fifty yards of the sleeping Americans before a sentry cried the alarm. What followed was swift and savage. Grey's troops drove through the firelit camp with bayonets and sabers, cutting down men who could barely see their attackers in the darkness. The assault lasted perhaps thirty minutes. When it was over, fifty-three Americans were dead, well over one hundred more were wounded, and seventy-one had been taken prisoner. British casualties totaled eleven men.

Patriot newspapers seized on the attack's nature, men cut down with bayonets in the dark, no quarter asked or given, and published furious accounts of British brutality. The word massacre took hold. It gave Washington's army a rallying cry. In subsequent engagements, Continental soldiers shouted 'Remember Paoli' as they advanced into British lines, transforming a tactical defeat into a moral weapon.

The battlefield here was one of the earliest Revolutionary War sites to be commemorated, with a monument placed over the mass grave in eighteen seventeen, three decades after the Constitution was written.