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Charles O'Hara is best remembered, if he is remembered at all, as the British officer who formally surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown. Unfortunately, entering captivity became something of a habit for him. Just over a decade later he was taken prisoner by an up-and-coming (but at the time still unknown) French officer named Napoleon Bonaparte. O'Hara is frequently described as a courageous, tenacious and competent officer -- but he completely lacked the combination of timing and luck which leads such a man to immortality.1
 I have reason to believe that a miniature of O'Hara exists, but it continues to elude me. Subbing for him in movie-land, Peter Woodward ("The Patriot") sports the legendary O'Hara grin. |
O'Hara slogged through the Carolinas and Virginia alongside Ban Tarleton, but their only connection is that they each reported to Lord Cornwallis. But like Tarleton and Cornwallis, O'Hara fell victim to The Patriot, and like Cornwallis, he was victimized under his own name. This gives me an excuse to add him to these pages, and I've taken it because he is an irresistible character. He has left only a few footnotes on the pages of history, but what little there is offers a glimpse of a charming, larger-than-life eccentric, variously described by his contemporaries as handsome, with a dark and ruddy complexion, a facile tongue, and a ready grin. "Though somewhat garrulous and boastful," a modern historian summarized him, "he was admired on both sides for his aggressive leadership and friendly manner."2
O'Hara's personality was shaped by a colorful family life and a strong military heritage. His grandfather rose from obscure beginnings in Ireland to serve with William III in Flanders, with the Duke of Ormonde at Vigo, and in various other campaigns of the late 1600s which earned him the rank of full general and a newly created Irish peerage as Baron Tyrawley. In later years, he was commander-in-chief of the British forces in Ireland.3
His son, James -- Charles's father -- was also an active soldier, who served with his father in Spain and under Marlborough in the Low Countries. He became colonel of the Royal Fusiliers and the Coldstream Guards, was granted an Irish peerage in his own right before he inherited his father's title, sat on the Privy Council, served terms as Britain's envoy to Portugal (twice) and Russia, and eventually attained the rank of field marshal. All in all, James O'Hara was a busy man.
In fact, his personal life was even busier than his professional one. He married the Honourable Mary Stewart, daughter of Viscount Mountjoy, but the marriage remained without issue. The same cannot be said of James's extra-marital relations. He may have sired as many as fourteen illegitimate children (the exact number doesn't seem to have been clearly recorded) by at least three different women, probably more. Horace Walpole characterized him as "singularly licentious, even for the courts of Russia and Portugal." Upon Tyrawley's return from his thirteen-year stint as envoy extraordinary to Portugal (in 1741), the ever-gossipy Walpole told a correspondent, "My Lord Tyrawley is come from Portugal, and has brought three wives and fourteen children; one of the former is a Portuguese with long black hair plaited down to the bottom of her back."4
Charles was one of the youngest members of that intricate brood, a product of James's long-term liaison with a Portuguese woman named Dona Anna who returned to England with him. (Presumably she was the black-haired woman of Walpole's comment.) Among his assorted siblings and half-siblings was a brother, James, who was also a soldier, and the well-known actress Mrs. George Anne Bellamy, whose eccentricities parade through the letters and diaries of the period, including an anecdote in George Hanger's memoirs.
A favorite with his father, Charles followed James's footsteps into the military. After leaving Westminster school he took up first an ensigncy in the 8th Foot (April, 1751), then a cornet's commission in the third dragoons (December, 1752). In January 1756, he was appointed "lieutenant and captain" in his father's regiment, the 2nd (Coldstream) Foot Guards. He began his active service the same year as his father's aide-de-camp in Gibraltar. After the battle of Minden, he joined the Marquess of Granby's staff in Germany where he made the acquaintance of both Henry Clinton and the future Lord Cornwallis.5
In 1762, Charles accompanied his father to Portugal as quartermaster-general of a British expeditionary force sent there to counter the threat of a Spanish invasion. The campaign was something of a political disaster and a military no-starter. The invasion never materialized, and the O'Haras returned to England a year later, having accomplished nothing. (Charles was, by then, a brevet lieutenant colonel.)
After the end of the Seven Years' War, in 1765, O'Hara was named governor of the newly formed African province of Senegambia, and lieutenant-colonel-commandant of His Majesty's African Corps of Foot. This corps was actually a penal detachment of "military delinquents" who were pardoned their crimes on condition that they accepted life service in Africa.
O'Hara and his motley command arrived at Fort St. Louis, in Senegambia, in April 1766. Charles immediately took stock of the situation (bad) and energetically set about building fortifications, drilling his ragtag command up to snuff, and antagonizing the local traders by strong-arming them out of his way. Unfortunately, it was soon obvious that he made a far better soldier than a civil administrator. His reports home grew infrequent and uninformative, he lost the majority of his command to disease, and he continued to make local enemies. By 1776 his inattention to the civilian side of his duties led to an investigation by the Board of Trade, after which he was dismissed from his post.
By the time he got home to England, the war in America was heating up, and he still held his commission in the Coldstream Guards. He left Africa in September 1776, and was in New York by March 1777. He saw little action under Howe, being mostly confined to administrative duties such as arranging prisoner exchanges in New York and Philadelphia.6
In Philadelphia, he gained a reputation for hospitality, and in May 1778, he was one of four officers chosen as "managers" for the Mischianza (or Meschianza), the elaborate going-away party/pageant arranged for Sir William Howe.7
When Clinton took command after Howe's departure, he gave O'Hara a brevet rank of brigadier general, and -- because he was a good engineer and well known to Admiral Lord Howe -- assigned him to the command of Sandy Hook. At first Clinton was well pleased with him, but as usually happened, Sir Henry's esteem faded with familiarity. He was soon complaining, "but I soon found he was the last man I should have sent with a detached corps -- plans upon plans for defense; never easy, satisfied, or safe; a great, nay plausible, talker." In the fall of 1778, Clinton reassigned him to the command of Manhattan, and by the end of the year he was back in administration, once again handling prisoner exchanges. Apparently, O'Hara had had enough of the job. He went home on leave in February 1779.8
He returned to America in October 1780, now a brigadier general "in North America" and in command of the Guards brigade with the force General Alexander Leslie was bringing to reinforce Lord Cornwallis. They reached the Earl's camp at Winnsboro on January 18th, 1781, one day after the disastrous battle of Cowpens. About a week earlier, as the reinforcements were slogging inland from Charleston, he wrote a letter to his friend, the Duke of Grafton which contains a vivid description of the situation in the Carolinas:9
"The violence and the passions of these people are beyond every curb of religion, & Humanity, they are unbounded & every hour exhibits dreadful wanton mischiefs, murders, & violences of every kind, unheard of before. We find the country in great measure abandoned, & the few who venture to remain at home in hourly expectation of being murdered, or stripped of all their property."10
After Cowpens, Cornwallis ordered his baggage burned, in preparation to pursuing Greene's army, and O'Hara settled into command of the army's vanguard, a position he would hold until the battle of Guilford Courthouse. When he described the mood of the army in a subsequent letter to Grafton, he produced the most quotable quote of his entire career:
"Without baggage, necessaries or provisions of any sort for officer or soldier, in the most barren, inhospitable unhealthy part of North America, opposed to the most savage inveterate, perfidious, cruel enemy, with zeal and bayonets only, it was resolved to follow Greene's army to the end of the world."11
As the advance column of the army, O'Hara's Guards were involved in a constant stream of skirmishes with the rebels. At Cowan's Ford, the Guards crossed the Catawba under heavy rebel fire. Cornwallis described the skirmish in a dispatch home:
"[F]ull of confidence in the zeal and gallantry of Brigadier-general O'Hara, and of the brigade of guards under his command, I ordered them to march on, but, to prevent, confusion, not to fire until they gained the opposite bank. Their behaviour justified my high opinion of them; for a constant fire from the enemy, in a ford upwards of five hundred yards wide, in many places up to their middle, with a rocky bottom and strong current, made no impression on their cool and determined valour, nor checked their passage."12
O'Hara nearly drowned during the action when his horse fell or was shot from under him and "rolled with him down the current, for near forty yards," but he was able to scramble to safety.13
At Guilford Courthouse, he was wounded twice, in the chest and thigh. After the first wound, taken early in the battle, he relinquished command of the Guards to Lt. Col. Stuart. But Stuart was killed in the subsequent fighting, so O'Hara resumed command. "By the spirited exertions of Brigadier-general O'Hara, though wounded, the 2d battalion of the guards was soon rallied, and, supported by the grenadiers, returned to the charge with the greatest alacrity." That charge formed part of the final action which drove Greene's army from the field. The Guards suffered massive casualties, both in heavy fighting from the rebels and from "friendly fire" when, in a desperate move, Cornwallis ordered his artillery to fire grapeshot over their heads at the rebel forces, knowing that a percentage of it would strike his own men.14
In his dispatches after the battle, Cornwallis had nothing but praise for the Guards' commander.
"The zeal and spirit of Brigadier-general O'Hara merit my highest commendations; for after receiving two dangerous wounds he continued in the field whilst the action lasted; by his earnest attention on all other occasions, seconded by the officers and soldiers of his brigade: His Majesty's guards are no less distinguished by their order and discipline than by their spirit and valour."15
Badly wounded and suffering from the loss of a half-brother or son, O'Hara described the battle of Guilford Courthouse and its aftermath in far less heroic terms when he had recovered enough to again write to Grafton16:
"I never did, and hope I never shall, experience two such days and Nights as those immediately after the Battle, we remained on the very ground on which it had been fought cover'd with Dead, with Dying and with hundreds of wounded, Rebels as well as our own -- a violent and constant Rain that lasted above Forty hours made it equally impraticable to remove or administer the smallest comfort to many of the Wounded.....
"I wish [the battle] had produced one substantial benefit to Great Britain, on the contrary, we feel at this moment, the sad and fatal effects of our loss on that Day, nearly one half of our best Officers and Soldiers, were either Killed or Wounded, and what remains are so completely worn out...[that] entre nous, the Spirit of our little Army has evaporated a good deal."17
O'Hara's wounds were so severe that he was initially expected to die, but he stayed with the army -- carried in a horse litter -- and made a remarkable recovery. He was back on duty by the summer, serving on several detached commands before finally joining Cornwallis at Yorktown.18
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During the siege, he suggested energetic countermeasures, but none of them came to fruition. In mid-October, 1781, Cornwallis accepted the inevitable, and it was O'Hara who formally surrendered the British garrison to Washington's army. Ever resilient, he dined that night with Washington and proceeded to charm his captors en masse. At a subsequent dinner given by Rochambeau, one French officer expressed amazement at the "sang froid and gaity even" shown by O'Hara.19
He received a promotion to Major General in November, and remained in New York under parole until February 1782, when he was exchanged for Brig. Gen. McIntosh. Afterwards he stayed on with Clinton's staff until April, when he led an expeditionary force consisting of the 19th and 30th Foot to the West Indies to reinforce Jamaica against the threat of invasion. The force arrived in Charleston in April 26, where they were supposed to pick up additional troops before departing for Jamaica, but Leslie protested to New York that he could not spare any part of his garrison. O'Hara sailed again with his original force in early May, and arrived in Antigua on June 24, due to naval orders which had diverted the force from a direct route to Jamaica. On July 4, he wrote to the incoming commander-in-chief, Sir Guy Carleton, that "on his arrival at Antigua General Mathew detained him and his detachment to reinforce the troops in those islands." 20
Late the same year, O'Hara was finally able to make his departure for England, where he took up command of his new regiment, the 22nd Foot.
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O'Hara's gambling addiction and fondness for high living soon ran him into debt, and he followed the time-honored tradition of spending some time on the Continent, hiding out from his creditors. While traveling in Italy, he met author Mary Berry, and began a fifteen year long -- and ultimately unsuccessful -- courtship of her. Although in the end she refused to marry him, Berry always retained an affection for him, describing him in her journal, as "the most perfect specimen of a soldier and a courtier of the past age."21
With some help from Cornwallis, O'Hara managed to sort out his finances and was home by 1785. He chose not to accompany the Earl to India -- having had enough of far-flung climes, perhaps -- and in 1787 was appointed to the staff at Gibraltar, where he remained as commandant of the garrison until 1791. In 1792, he was appointed Lieutenant Governor of Gibraltar, shortly before war broke out with Revolutionary France.
In 1793, he was promoted to lieutenant general and given his first independent wartime command, as the military governor of Toulon. Upon his arrival, he immediately set out to improve the city's defenses. His efforts were hampered by sickness among the garrison and political quarrels among the various allied factions, and the French Revolutionary army besieging the town had them outnumbered two to one. Perhaps remembering his protests over Cornwallis's passivity at Yorktown, he organized a series of sorties:
On the 30th [of November, 1793], the enemy having erected and opened a battery against the post at Malbousquet, from which shells would reach the town and arsenal, Governor O'Hara was determined to attempt to destroy it, and bring off the guns: accordingly, at four o'clock in the morning, a corps of 2300 men, consisting of the combined forces, under the command of Major General David Dundas, marched from Toulon, surprised and completely carried the redoubt. But the ardour and impetuosity of the troops, (instead of forming on the height where the battery was raised, as they were particularly ordered to do,) led them to rush after the enemy near a mile on the other side, in a very scattered and irregular manner. In consequence of which the enemy collected in very great force, and compelled the combined forces to retreat with considerable loss. General O'Hara, who went out himself after the redoubt was taken, and mixing with the troops, was wounded and taken prisoner.22
He was taken prisoner by a French junior officer named Napoleon. Napoleon treated him with courtesy, but he didn't fare as well once he was passed on to the clutches of Robespierre's political machine. Classed as a "political criminal" and an "insurrectionist" O'Hara was forced to watch mass executions by guillotine in Lyon -- with the suggestion that a similar fate awaited him -- then paraded through the streets of Paris to be insulted by the mob. Incarcerated with numerous other prisoners in a small cell in the Luxembourg, he suffered harsh treatment and abuse, and was on the verge of being brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal when Robespierre was overthrown. He remained a prisoner for an additional year before finally being exchanged in August 1795.23
He returned to England and spent a few months recuperating from captivity -- the wound he had taken at Toulon never healed properly and troubled him for the remainder of his life -- and continuing to court Mary Berry. They became engaged, but when he left on his next posting, she declined to accompany him. The relationship faded without them ever meeting again, but when Berry's friends -- including Horace Walpole -- censured O'Hara for causing her unhappiness, she defended him staunchly.
At the time, Sir Henry Clinton was the nominal Governor of Gibraltar, but Sir Henry was already suffering from his final illness and was too unwell to leave England to take up his post. When he died in December 1795, O'Hara was named as his replacement, and he returned to Gibraltar to spend the remaining years of his life at the post where his military career began.
At this time in his life, Admiral Sir William Hotham produced the only negative evaluation of O'Hara's personality that I've seen, and even that comes with a proviso which helps to explain it. Hotham described him as "not a good-tempered man... subject to fits of ill-humour which he was at no pains to conceal. This was partly attributed to the sufferings and privations he had undergone while in the Luxembourg, which had permanently soured his disposition."24
The garrison he commanded seems not to have shared Hotham's complaint. O'Hara dealt with them fairly and was very popular. He soon acquired the nickname "Old Cock of the Rock." As Governor he was noted for his lavish hospitality and his increasingly archaic manner of dress, which was more suited to the period of the Seven Years' War than the dawn of a new century.25
Another example of his eccentricity -- or a wonderfully warped sense of humor -- surfaced about this time, in an anecdote published in The Times newspaper on August 25, 1788:
Anecdote of Major General O'HARA, the present Commanding Officer at Gibraltar. -- Whilst this officer was Governor of St. Lucia, a young man who wanted to marry his aunt, a Madame Le Batt, and who had been refused by the priests of the island, unless he could obtain a dispensation from the Pope, applied to the Governor, naturally supposing him as great a man as his Holiness, for his permission, which was instantly granted in this following words:
"The bearer hereof has my permission to marry his aunt, or his grand-mother, if he chuses.
CHARLES O'HARA,
Major General and Pope."
His old wounds caught up with him in the summer of 1801, and O'Hara spent the last eight or nine months of his life ill and in constant pain. During his years as Governor, he had found time to overcome the loss of Mary Berry by starting families with two local women, neither of whom he married. He had also managed to amass a considerable fortune. When he died on February 21, 1802, he left £70,000 which was put in trust for his four natural children. Interestingly, he also left property valued at £7000, including several items of valuable commemorative plate, to a black servant.26
Charles left a permanent mark on Gibraltar in the form of "O'Hara's Battery," a defensive emplacement which was originally called "O'Hara's Folly" after the look-out tower which he had built there:
The value of Gibraltar as an observation post enthused Charles O'Hara to have a tower constructed on the higher points of the ridge (1,408 ft.), of such a height (about 200 ft.) that an observer on the top should be able to see from it all ship movements off Cadiz 60 miles away. But for the intervening mountains, such visual observations would have been theoretically possible but O'Hara's faith did not move them.27
The outcropping of rock was later fitted with a series of gun emplacements, and was active as a defense position as recently as World War II. As for the tower itself, it
served as a monument to 'The Old Cock of the Rock', till one day in 1888, a Royal Artillery officer told the commander of a gunboat (HMS Wasp) ... that it was due for demolition. There was an argument as to whether the job could not be done with the boat's five-inch gun. Next morning the Wasp moved towards Algeciras, anchored, and to the amazement of the Algecirans and Gibraltarians alike, fired eastwards. ... [T]he sixth [round] cracked the tower from top to bottom.28
While exploring the Gibraltar website [see links], I also spotted a less spectacular legacy to his time there. An "O'Hara's road" is shown on one of their maps.
His obituary in The Gentleman's Magazine notes, "The General's death is much felt and lamented in Gibraltar. Few men possessed so happy a combination of rare talents. He was a brave and enterprising soldier, a strict disciplinarian, and a polite accomplished gentleman." Not at all a bad epitaph.29
I have an odd little anecdote to add as a postscript, which I've kept to the end because it is almost certainly apocryphal. It is an extract from a personal letter from one of Cornwallis's officers to a relative, recounting an incident along the route of march to Virginia.
"On the evening of the 31st of March, it was resolved to cross a ford called Stuart's ford, which we were informed the rebels had overlooked in the panic our rapid movements occasioned among them. The first column consisting of the guards, grenadiers, &c. arrived at the place early on the first, but found the river swelled by the heavy rains, and guarded by a few irregular militia, who cowardly firing upon us during our passing the ford, which was nearly 700 yards wide. Notwithstanding this interruption. the whole column advanced upon them, with Gen O'Hara at its head; and had not the affair been rather serious, by the opposition of the skulking rebels, you would have been highly entertained with the situation and behaviour of our gallant leader. You know he is a little man, and consequently unfit to march thro' a deep river: he was therefore obliged to ride upon the back of one of the grenadiers of our regiment, with his double barrelled fusée in his hand: Being by this circumstance a good mark for the rascals, they fired several shots at him, which he took no notice of 'till he got within forty yards, when he returned the fire off his grenadier, and had the good fortune to strike three of the wretches and wound a fourth. upon which the rest fled to the woods with the greatest precipitation. The officers laughed at the droll adventure, and complimented the General upon his victory."30
The date given places this event two weeks after O'Hara was critically wounded at Guilford Courthouse, at which point it seems highly unlikely he would have been up to the antics described. So the date is wrong, or perhaps even the name is wrong (O'Hara is normally described as tall), but true or fictitious, it's a tale that suits the colorful, eccentric man about whom it was told.
In addition to a completely inaccurate portrayal in The Patriot, O'Hara plays a small but amusing role in Thomas Hamilton's novel The Youth and Manhood of Cyril Thornton (London, 1827; Reprint: Edited by Maurice Lindsay; Aberdeen: The Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1990).
He plays a somewhat larger role in Emma Donoghue's Life Mask (London: Virago Press, 2004). Focused on sculptor Anne Damer, a main subplot concerns the triangle between her, Mary Berry and O'Hara. (In Donoghue's reconstruction of events, the bone of contention in the triangle is Berry, btw, not O'Hara.)
And of course he also does wooden or caricatured cameos in any number of RevWar novels, but none that I've found of any particular interest.
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1 While just about everyone seems to have liked O'Hara, his military acumen was not so universally acknowledged. In a private letter to Sir Henry Clinton, written after the war, John Graves Simcoe once sniped that O'Hara was "the person one would wish at the Head of the Enemy's Army." Sir Henry Clinton, "Sir Henry Clinton's Review of Simcoe's Journal," ed. Howard M. Peckham, William and Mary Quarterly, 2nd series, 21 (1941): 370. [ back ]
2 Brendan Morrissey, Yorktown 1781 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 1997), p19. [ back ]
3 General information on O'Hara's family background and early life is drawn from William D. Griffin, "General Charles O'Hara," Irish Sword 10 (1972): 179-187, and various comments and notes taken from the Yale edition of the correspondence of Horace Walpole. Walpole was well acquainted with both James and Charles O'Hara. [ back ]
4 Griffin, p179; quoting Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of George the Third; ed. G. F. R. Barker, 4 vols. (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1894), 1:144. Horace Walpole, Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis et al., 48 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, c1940-1983), 18: 104. [ back ]
5 These odd double-ranks were exclusive to the Guards. A man who held a lieutenancy in one of the Guards regiments was equivalent to a captain in a regular army regiment. Similarly, a Guards "captain and lieutenant colonel" was a captain in the Guards but a lieutenant colonel in the regular army. [ back ]
6 Commissioners for Exchange of Prisoners (Col. O'Hara et al) to Sir William Howe, 11 Apr 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), 1:230. [ back ]
7 "Four of the gentlemen subscribers were appointed managers -- Sir John Wrottesley, Col. O'Hara, Major Gardiner, and Montresor, the chief engineer." Letter, dated Philadelphia, May 23, 1778, printed in Gentleman's Magazine, 48 (1778): 353. [ back ]
8 Sir Henry Clinton, The American Rebellion, ed. William B. Willcox (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), p100n. Sir Henry Clinton to George Washington, 10 Nov 1778, in Report on Amer. MS., 1:342. I'm puzzled by this chronology, though it seems commonly accepted. On Jan. 9, 1779 Clinton wrote to Lord Barrington that "The necessity of paying particular attention to Sandy Hook whilst the French fleet lay off this harbour inclined him to appoint Col. O'Hara to that command." Ibid.,, 1:368. There's no obvious reason for the delay, or for his reporting a past rather than the present assignment. [ back ]
9 Cornwallis: The American Adventure (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston; 1970), p171. Charles Jenkinson to Sir Henry Clinton, 02 Mar 1779, in Report on Amer. MS., 1:390. Charles Jenkinson to Sir Henry Clinton, 12 May 1780, Ibid., 2:121. [ back ]
10 Charles O'Hara to the Duke of Grafton, Jan 6, 1781, in Franklin and Mary Wickwire, [ back ]
11 Charles O'Hara to the Duke of Grafton, April 20, 1781, in Charles O'Hara, "The Letters of Charles O'Hara to the Duke of Grafton," ed. George C. Rogers, Jr., South Carolina Historical Magazine 65 (1964): 174. [ back ]
12 Earl Cornwallis to Lord George Germain, dated Guildford, March 17th, 1781. In Banastre Tarleton, A History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781, in the Southern Province of North America (London: Printed for T. Cadell, in the Strand, 1787), p262. [ back ]
13 R. Lamb, An Original and Authentic Journal of Occurrences During the Late American War, from Its Commencements to the Year 1783 (Dublin: Wilkinson & Courtney, 1809), p345. [ back ]
14 Earl Cornwallis, dispatch to Lord George Germain, dated Guildford, 17th March, 1781, quoted in Tarleton, p306. George Washington Greene claims that O'Hara heard Cornwallis give the order, and protested, "It is destroying our own men," to which Cornwallis responded, "I see it, but it is a necessary evil we must endure to avert impending destruction." See George Washington Greene, The Life of Nathanael Greene, 3 vols. (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1871), 3:201. [ back ]
15 Earl Cornwallis, dispatch to Lord George Germain, dated Guildford, 17th March, 1781, in Tarleton, p308. [ back ]
16 Another casualty of Guilford Courthouse was First Lieutenant Augustus O'Hara of the artillery, who is sometimes referred to as Charles's half-brother and sometimes his illegitimate son. The latter seems most probable, given that Tarleton describes him as a "spirited young officer." (A nephew is also possible, given his large family.) Tarleton, p273. [ back ]
17 Charles O'Hara to the Duke of Grafton, 20 April 1781, in Rogers, p177-178. [ back ]
18 The rebels thought the same thing. Writing to Daniel Morgan (March 20th, 1781), Nathanael Greene said, "The enemy had many officers killed & wounded, among the latter General Ohara is said to be mortally wounded." See Nathanael Greene, The Papers of General Nathanael Greene, ed. Richard K. Showman, Dennis M. Conrad et al., 11+ vols. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press for the Rhode Island Historical Society, 1994), 7:456. By the 23rd, writing to Samuel Huntington, he had revised his information to list "OHarra" among the field officers who had been wounded. Greene/Showman, 7:465. [ back ]
19 George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, Rebels and Redcoats (New York: DaCapo Press, Inc., n.d.), p495. [ back ]
20 Charles Jenkinson to Sir Henry Clinton, 02 Nov 1781, Report on Amer. MS., 2:245. Prisoner Exchange, 09 Feb 1782, Ibid., 2:397. Sir Henry Clinton to Charles O'Hara, 14 Apr 1782, Ibid., 2:450 contains instructions for the expedition to Jamaica. Embarkation return of the 19th and 30th Regiments, 28 Apr 1782, Ibid., 2:471. Charles O'Hara to Sir Henry Clinton, 29 Apr 1782, Ibid., 2:472-3. Sir Henry Clinton to Brig. Gen. Archibald Campbell, 01 May 1782, Ibid., 2:476. Alexander Leslie to Sir Henry Clinton, 09 May 1782, Ibid., 2:485. Edward Mathew to Sir Guy Carleton, 02 Jul 1782, Ibid., 3:2. Charles O'Hara to Sir Guy Carleton, 04 Jul 1782, Ibid., 3:6. [ back ]
21 O'Hara's relationship with Berry runs as a thread through her voluminous correspondence with him and various friends, though the discretion of the day keeps the reasons behind its failure frustratingly vague. See Mary and Agnes Berry, The Berry Papers, Being the Correspondence Hitherto Unpublished of Mary and Agnes Berry (1763-1852), ed. Lewis Melville (London; New York: John Lane; Toronto: Bell & Cockburn, 1914) and Mary Berry, Extracts of the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry from the Year 1783 to 1852, ed. Lady Theresa Lewis (3 volumes, London: Longmans, Green & Co.; 1865). [ back ]
22 Isaac Schomberg, Naval Chronology; Or, An Historical Summary Of Naval And Maritime Events From The Time Of The Romans, To The Treaty Of Peace, 1802, 5 vols. (London: Printed for T. Egerton, and Richardson, 1802), 2:246. [ back ]
23 Ironically, O'Hara was exchanged for the son of his old opponent in America, Rochambeau. [ back ]
24 Griffin, p187, quoting Sir William Hotham, Pages and Portraits from the Past, being the Private Papers of Sir William Hotham, ed. A. M. W. Stirling, 2 vols. (London, 1919), 1:231. [ back ]
25 Check out the Gibraltar website's tribute to him. See our links page. (Thanks to Barb S. for pointing me at the site.) [ back ]
26 The Gentleman's Magazine 72 (1802): 278. [ back ]
27 George Hills, Rock of Contention: A History of Gibraltar (London: Robert Hale & Company, 1974), p365. [ back ]
29 Gentleman's 72:278. [ back ]
30 Extract of a letter from Capt (Forbes) C. (Champagne) of the 23d Regiment, now serving under Lord Cornwallis, to his relation Lieutenant (Josiah) C.(Champagne, 31st Reg't) on the recruiting service at Doncaster, dated Wilmington, April 17, 1781. Printed in The Leeds Intelligencer (Tuesday, June 26, 1781). Transcript courtesy of Don Londahl-Smidt and Todd W. Braisted. [ back ]
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