What happened
The fleet that took New Providence came apart on its way home. In April it fought a British frigate off Rhode Island, and one of the Marine officers commissioned that first December was killed in the action.
By May the ships were being restocked with officers and men taken from each other. A replacement lieutenant went to the Cabot to fill that vacancy. To reinforce Lieutenant Isaac Craig and "his depleted group of 12 Marines" aboard the Andrew Doria, the commodore appointed Lieutenant John Trevett, who came across with 17 Marine privates taken out of the Alfred.
That is the state of the institution in the month this entry is about. Two months after the landing at New Providence, the Continental Marines were moving privates between ships by the dozen to keep detachments at strength.
At Newport the Columbus was being made ready for a cruise, and she was in the same condition. Like the other vessels of the fleet, Captain Abraham Whipple's ship "suffered from an immediate and partial crew loss following its return from New Providence." The official history is specific about where the loss fell hardest: "Hardest hit by sickness, desertion, and resignation was the Marine company."
Then the officers went. "The Columbus lost all three of her Marine officers by resignation shortly after her return to New London."
The record can only explain one of the three. "No reason has been found for the resignations of Captain Joseph Shoemaker and Lieutenant Robert Cummings, but Lieutenant John Trevett relinquished his position in order to take a similar post on board the Andrew Doria." Shoemaker was the officer who had joined out of the same Philadelphia fox hunting club as Samuel Nicholas. Trevett was the lieutenant who had carried the flag of truce up the trail at Fort Montagu three months earlier.
Whipple filled the captaincy by transfer. Lieutenant Matthew Parke came over from the Alfred and was promoted to captain in Shoemaker's place, which is the ordinary way an institution fixes a hole.
The lieutenancy he filled differently. "To fill one of the vacant lieutenancies, Whipple elevated Sergeant Edward Burke."
The sentence that follows is the one that gives that promotion its weight. "Trevett's position, however, was left empty for want of a qualified officer." Whipple was not promoting from the ranks because anyone would do. He had two holes, he judged one man fit, and he sailed a lieutenant short rather than name a second.
The Columbus went to sea on Tuesday 18 June. As she came out of the East Passage of Narragansett Bay a lookout sighted the Cerberus standing in from Block Island, and the Columbus cleared for action and fired a broadside.
The frigate answered with three in rapid succession and then withdrew. Crippled, the Columbus limped back to Newport with the help of the Andrew Doria, the Providence, and two Rhode Island galleys, and the encounter set her cruise back several weeks.
In early August she got out again in company with the Andrew Doria. The two separated, and on the 10th the Columbus took five sugar ships, of which only two ever made port.
That is the whole of Edward Burke's summer in the record: a promotion at a pier, a broadside answered three to one, a tow home, and five prizes of which three got away. The history moves on to other ships.
What is less known
Burke's promotion was not a reward for a battle. It came in a refit, at a pier, in the middle of an administrative collapse that the history describes in the language of sickness and desertion rather than of valor.
That is the ordinary shape of it. The promotion from the ranks that the official history names here happened because three men quit and one man was still standing there, competent, on a ship that needed a lieutenant by June.
The Cerberus is the other half. Burke's first outing as an officer ended with his ship shot up in her own bay inside a day, towed home by three friends, weeks behind schedule.
Whatever the promotion felt like in June, it was followed almost immediately by a lieutenant's billet on a crippled ship, which is a more honest picture of a first job than most. The cruise he had been promoted to make did not happen for weeks, and when it did the prizes mostly got away.
The reading
The Corps promotes the person who is still there, and being still there is not nothing.
What that costs is visible in the same sentence. Whipple left a billet empty rather than fill it with the next name down, which means somebody stood a lieutenant's watches for nothing that summer, and the ship went to sea short.
A First Sergeant recognizes this immediately. The billet comes open in the least convenient month, the obvious candidates are gone, and the choice is between a Marine you would not have picked in an unhurried year and running short. Most people fill it, because a name in the box ends the conversation and an empty box invites a question at every brief.
Whipple did both things in one decision, and that is the part worth copying. He promoted the sergeant he could defend and he refused to promote the one he could not, on the same day, on the same ship, into the same shortage. The record does not show him splitting the difference by naming two adequate men.
I have been the Marine who was still there, and it is a strange thing to be selected for. You do not know whether you were chosen or whether the room simply emptied.
The answer is usually some of both, and the only part you control is being the one whose name does not make the person deciding hesitate. That is built in the ordinary months, not in the month the billet opens.
The other lesson runs the other direction, toward the people who left. Three officers walked away from the Columbus that spring and the history can only explain one of them, and the Corps went on regardless. A unit's continuity is not held up by the people with the most standing in it.
Burke is remembered because he was in the muster book when it mattered, and because a captain who could have taken the easy path wrote his name in a lieutenant's billet instead.
Neither of those is a quality you can put on a fitness report. One is presence and the other is somebody else's judgment about you, and a Marine gets very little say over the second except by managing the first.
The question
Name the last time you filled a billet with whoever was left instead of leaving it empty. Which part of that job did the Marine end up carrying that you would not have handed them in a normal month, and who besides you knew it?
Sources
- Smith, Charles R. Marines in the Revolution: A History of the Continental Marines in the American Revolution, 1775-1783. History and Museums Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1975. Chapter IV, "Uncombined Operations, April-December 1776." Read at archive.org
- A Chronology of the United States Marine Corps, 1775-1934, Volume I. Historical Branch, G-3 Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1965. Entries for 1776. Read at archive.org
Corrections
None.