A troop of militia cavalry, trying to move forward near Hartford, was cut off by an advance patrol of enemy cavalry that had crossed the river to outflank the defenders from the north. The Americans charged. But they were mounted on horses never used before for cavalry work. The enemy riders were men trained to swordsmanship. The American troop had averaged only 13 men in mounted drill in a whole year, because they had possessed neither horses nor armory.[131]
The green brutes reared at the sight of weapons. They pitched into each other as the enemy cavalry dashed at them, and added their iron hoofs to the mêlée. For one brief moment eyes stared into eyes, and it was hack and thrust. Then the enemy riders were through them, and whirled like a gale and swept through them again, and killed and killed.
The Massacre of the Connecticut River
“Annihilated,” reported the scout cavalry a little later, when its squadrons came up. “Our loss one dead, three slightly wounded.”
Annihilated! Yes, gentlemen of Congress, sitting in Washington at that moment and passing resolutions and appropriations, and uttering fine sentiments about millions for defense and not one cent for tribute! There were ugly things there on the Connecticut River shore that answered you more loudly in their eternal silence than if they had spoken with a thousand angry tongues.
That day’s battle that filled the fields of Connecticut with dead men’s bones to be plowed up in many a year afterward, went down in American history as the massacre of the Connecticut River. A massacre it was—an American massacre, carefully prepared by elaborate carelessness through many a year before.
Less than a thousand men, it was said afterward, escaped from the massacre. They crawled away down gullies or swam down the river, and hid under weeds and panted, and tied up their wounds with rags from their ragged garments. They were never able to tell what had occurred. They knew only that they had thought there was victory—and then, in front of them, and on their flanks, and behind them, there had come flames as if a hot line of blast furnaces had opened to blow in their very faces, wherever they turned.
“We have taught them their lesson!” said the hostile commander. “We shall have no more trouble.”
It was true. Western Connecticut was broken under the invader’s rod as Eastern Massachusetts had been broken. That night the army occupied Hartford, Meriden, New Britain, and New Haven, though not before the arms factories had been blown up, to welcome the soldiers with flaming ruins.
The next morning cavalry detachments began cautiously to scout into the Berkshire Hills, to feel for the American outposts.