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Banastre Tarleton was "commandant" or field commander of the British Legion. Below him in the command structure were two slots for individual brigade majors for the cavalry and infantry components of the unit. Except for a few weeks in August/September 1780, Tarleton was in practical command of the cavalry himself. The brigade major for the Legion's infantry wing was Charles Cochrane.¹

Born in Scotland on January 23, 1749, Cochrane was a younger son of the eighth Earl of Dundonald. His elder brother, Archibald, the ninth Earl, was a soldier prior to inheriting his title, and Cochrane's family tree reads like a Who's Who of the 18th century military. Another brother, Sir Alexander Forester Inglis Cochrane, became Admiral of the Blue and served as commander of the British fleet at Chesapeake Bay during the War of 1812. His nephew, Thomas, the tenth Earl, also became an admiral after a colorful career that carried him through the navies of Peru, Brazil and Greece before returning to serve Britain in America and the West Indies. Cochrane's wife, Catherine, was the daughter of Major John Pitcairn, who fought at Lexington and died at the Battle of Breed's (Bunker) Hill.

Cochrane himself had a solid military career behind him when he joined the Legion. He started out as a teenaged ensign in the 25th Regiment, served for a time as a lieutenant in the 7th Regiment of Foot, and arrived in Boston in 1774 as the youngest captain in "The King's Own" (4th Regiment). By his own account, he "had much to do in assisting his father in law Major Pitcairn" at the battle of Lexington. After Breed's Hill, he was given temporary command of the Grenadier Company, replacing a wounded officer, and he served in that post until September, 1776 when the regular company commander returned to duty. Cochrane was then given command of the Light Company of the 4th regiment, where he stayed until the 4th was reassigned to the West Indies in 1778.²

He spent the winter of 1777-78 in Philadelphia with Howe's army, by which time he summarized his background as "six years an ensign, six a lieutenant and nearly five a captain" when he petitioned Sir William Howe to allow him to purchase a majority within the 4th Regiment. The commission went to an older captain, however, so the ambitious Cochrane looked around for another road to advance his career. He ended up trading his captain's commission in the 4th for a lieutenancy in the 1st Guards belonging to Captain/Lieutenant Fraser. This gave him the freedom to accept a brevet major's commission in the newly formed British Legion.³

Some time in the late summer of 1780, Cochrane prepared a professional resumé to accompany another petition for promotion. Speaking of himself in the third person, he has this to say about his service with the Legion⁴:

He was the first who introduced into the army the species of service of mounted light infantry, a kind of corps theretofore unknown, though the subsequent advantages have been found from much experience to answer the fullest expectations.
 
The cavalry and infantry of the Legion has ever moved together, and have gone with confidence any distance from the main army when mutually supporting one another.
 
Zealous for the honor of the corps and to promote the service, the infantry have cheerfully often rode eighty miles in twenty four hours without either bridle or saddle, and only a blanket and piece of rope substituted for a bridle, assisting their cavalry to surprize and beat the enemy.
 
With confidence Capt. Cochrane may say that no cavalry can or has acted in America until the co-operation of mounted infantry was introduced with them, and that upon every occasion the infantry of the Legion have bore an ample share of either fatigue or honor in all actions since the formation of the corps....⁵

Cochrane saw active service with the Legion in the Jersies, and at least once functioned as its field commander while Tarleton was away at headquarters in New York.⁶

He commanded the Legion infantry in the early actions of the Southern Campaign, including Moncks Corner and Waxhaws. Praising the actions of his unit in his resumé, Cochrane has this interesting tidbit to offer about the latter action:

While Capt. Cochrane was dismounting and forming the infantry opposite the rebel centre, he heard a rebel officer upon the right call to his men, --
 
"Be cool and take care what they were about, that it was only a few light horse, and they would give a good account of them."
 
He was answered by another officer upon the left: --
 
"He was mistaken, he was mistaken; do you see here, there is infantry."⁷

In early June, 1780, anticipating a lull in the campaign through the heat of summer, Cochrane applied to Lord Cornwallis for leave to go home. He had been in America for more than six years and, since both his father-in-law and his father had died while he was in service, he had personal affairs to settle. Cornwallis granted the request on June 10th, so Cochrane returned to New York, where Sir Henry Clinton entrusted him with military dispatches to take with him back to England. General James Robertson also entrusted him with a letter to Lord Amherst, noting that "Major Cochran who carrys this is an Officer who has gallantly distinguished himself -- and can inform You of what is passing here, and perfectly well of the state of Carolina and Georgia."⁸

Due to the abundance of rebel privateers on the shipping lanes, getting home proved to be more of a problem than anticipated. He made his first attempt aboard "a small schooner of his own", but was set upon by privateers. He saved himself by capturing the boarding crew, then returned to New York to deliver his prisoners to Clinton. On his second attempt to leave, he was again attacked before he had even left the Sound and this time the schooner was taken. To save his dispatches, Cochrane jumped overboard and swam back to shore.

Cochrane did eventually make it home to England. William Willcox notes that he arrived in London in mid-October (1780) with dispatches from Sir Henry. Cochrane had also been tasked with a mission to speed up the procurement of cavalry equipment, which was desperately needed by the Legion and other units. According to R. Arthur Bowler, he was to "follow through to completion the order for 1,000 sets of equipment," but it took him until December to get the contracts approved by the Treasury. The equipment itself had still not arrived in America by the end of May 1781."⁹

Cochrane returned to American in 1781, bringing his wife and two children with him. He was in New York by June, at which time Andrew Elliot makes a passing mention of him in a letter that also provides a snippet of insight into his personality:

Your friend Cochran is here... his schemes are wonderful, he tells me Lord Stormont, Germain, North, etc. have seen them, all this is foolish, I wish the poor man well for he is really pleasant and agreeable.¹⁰

In October, 1781, Clinton sent Cochrane to Yorktown with dispatches for Lord Cornwallis. Cochrane slipped through the French blockade in an open boat, reaching Yorktown on October 10th. His original intention may have been to rejoin the Legion, but it would have been a useless gesture, both because they were pinned down at Gloucester and because the Legion's infantry wing had been effectively destroyed at the battle of Cowpens. Instead, Cornwallis assigned Cochrane to his own staff as an aide-de-camp.

The day after he took up the post, Cochrane accompanied Cornwallis on an inspection of the outer defenses. He fired off one of the cannons himself, but when he looked over the breastworks to see the effect of his shot, he was decapitated by an incoming cannon ball. He has the dubious distinction of being the only British field officer to be killed at Yorktown.

He may have lacked the color and panache of Tarleton or George Hanger, but Cochrane was ambitious and far from a routine thinker. Prior to his first attempt to sail home, he laid an ambitious proposal before Sir Henry Clinton. He and Tarleton would raise a second battalion for the British Legion. Cochrane would command this second battalion himself (with a promotion to lieutenant colonel, of course), while Tarleton remained in overall command, as senior lieutenant colonel.

The second part of this project involved recruiting a body of three hundred men "who shall be ready to man the flat boats for transporting the army, the armed vessells for covering their landing or guarding the inland navigation and carry intelligence from one Province to another." This corps, which would also fall under Cochrane's command, would have made the Legion a three-wing force with its own inland navy.¹¹

The only record of how Clinton reacted to the proposal is a note by Cochrane that Sir Henry was "pleased to refer Captain Cochrane to General [William] Dalrymple, who would digest such a proposal for the good of the service." This less-than-enthusiastic response must have prompted him to take the matter over Clinton's head to Lord George Germain, for the proposal did find its way to Whitehall.¹²

The document also contains a petition to have the Legion transferred to the British Establishment, and that was the only one of its suggestions which ever came to fruition. Its elaborate proposals for reorganizing the Legion made their way up to the King, but on December 1, 1780, Baron Amherst informed Lord George Germain that George III did not think forming such a body of men would be expedient, and that Clinton already had all the necessary authority to raise troops in America. Nor was he prepared to provide Tarleton and Cochrane with the proposed promotions, due to their lack of seniority.¹³

Catherine Pitcairn Cochrane outlived her husband by several decades and eventually remarried. Their two children, a son and a daughter, both died young.

[Many thanks to Don Gara for providing the major documents on Cochrane used to compile this article.]

Notes:

¹ Nominally, George Hanger occupied the post of brigade major for the cavalry through most of the Legion's existence, but he only saw about six weeks of active service with it. [ back ]

² Mellon Chamberlain, "Memorial of Captain Charles Cochrane, A British Officer in the Revolutionary War, 1774-1781" (Cambridge: John Willson and Son, University Press, 1891), p5. [ back ]

³ Lord Barrington to Sir Henry Clinton, 21 Nov 1778, in Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on American Manuscripts in the Royal Institute of Great Britain, 4 vols. (London: Printed for His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1901-9), 1:349. Chamberlain, p5. Later in the document Cochrane refers to himself as a captain because a Guards lieutenant held the rank of captain in the regular army. [ back ]

⁴ The draft copy of this document which survives has no date. [ back ]

⁵ Chamberlain, p6 [ back ]

⁶ In A History of the Operations of a Partisan Corps called the Queen's Rangers (North Stratford, New Hampshire: Ayer Company, 2000), p104, John Graves Simcoe describes a combined operation of the Queen's Rangers, Legion and Emmerick's Chausseurs in which Cochrane commanded the Legion cavalry, "Lt. Col. Tarleton being in New-York." [ back ]

⁷ Chamberlain, p8. [ back ]

⁸ James Robertson to Lord Amherst, 12 August 1780, in James Robertson, The Twilight of British Rule in Revolutionary America: The New York Letter Book of General James Robertson, 1780-1783, eds. Milton M. Klein and Ronald W. Howard (Cooperstown, NY: The New York State Historical Association, 1983), p141. Cochrane also carried a dispatch from Josiah Martin to Lord George Germain, per Martin to Germain, 10 June 1780, in K.G. Davies, ed.; Documents of the American Revolution, 1770-1783, 21 vols. (Dublin: Irish University Press, c1977-1982), 18:106-107. [ back ]

⁹ William B. Willcox, Portrait of a General (New York: Knopf, 1964), p364n. R. Arthur Bowler, Logistics and the Failure of the British Army in America, 1775-1783 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), p152. Before the replacements could arrive, the situation became desperate. When a few hundred units arrived in November, 1780, they were given to the Legion, but their worn-out equipment was refurbished as much as possible and issued to Loyalist militia groups. [Bowler, p155, quoting various Cornwallis letters.] [ back ]

¹⁰ Andrew Elliot to Lord Cathcart(?), June 11, 1781, quoted in Eugene Devereux, "Extracts from Original Letters Relating to the War of Independence and Cornwallis's Capitulation at Yorktown," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 11 (1887): 334. [ back ]

¹¹ Chamberlain, p9. [ back ]

¹² Chamberlain, p9. [ back ]

¹³ Tarleton continued to campaign for this improvement in the Legion's status, and eventually achieved it briefly. The Legion cavalry became "A regiment of (light) dragoons" on the British Establishment, Christmas Day, 1782, but was disbanded only a year later. Amherst to Germain, 1 Dec 1780, calendared in Davies, 16:449, has the King's rejection of the scheme. [ back ]