Rear of the Camp

Rear of the Camp. . You are standing at the rear of the camp where the wagons were parked. The steeple of the Baptist Church marks the approximate location of Picket Post #3, which guarded the right flank., Lieutenant Samuel Brady was with Picket #3: “Brady was on guard duty, and laid down with his blanket buckled around him. The British were nearly on them before the sentinel fired. Brady ran, and as he jumped a fence a soldier struck at him with a musket and pinned his blanket to a rail. He tore the blanket and dashed on. A horseman overtook him and ordered him to stop. He wheeled and shot the horseman dead, and got into a small swamp, supposing no one in it but himself. In the morning he found fifty five men in it, of whom he took command and conducted to camp.” The swamp was probably the marshy area located down the hill in the woods to your right., Picket Post #4, located ¾ mile further down on the Lancaster Road [Old Lincoln Highway at Langford Avenue], was the first picket post attacked. It consisted of a lieutenant, sergeant, corporal, and sixteen privates, who faced a British advance guard of dragoons, riflemen, and light infantry. A British officer wrote, “a piquet fired upon us at the distance of fifteen yards miraculously without effect – This unfortunate Guard was instantly dispatched by the Riflemen’s Swords.” Nearly half of the pickets were killed or wounded, while the others fell back to the camp., Smallwood wrote, “in this confusion several more would have been killed by our own People had I not flung myself from my Horse and called aloud that I should have been glad to have seen them as ready to fire on the Enemy as they now seemed on their Friends, they knew my voice and ceased.”,