The Birthday Every Marine Knows

Ships Need Fighting Men

The colonies had been at war with the most powerful empire on earth for seven months. They had an army outside Boston, and almost no navy. The Continental Congress, the delegates from the thirteen colonies who ran the war, had voted on October 13th to fit out its first armed ships.

But ships needed fighting men. Marines. Soldiers who lived and fought at sea. They guarded the ship, fired muskets from the rigging in battle, and led the way ashore.

The push came from a plan to strike Nova Scotia, a British base to the north. John Adams wrote a draft in his own hand. Two battalions, five hundred privates each. A battalion is a unit of several hundred soldiers.

Congress tightened the wording, and on Friday, November 10th, it passed. "Resolved, That two Battalions of marines be raised."

And Congress was picky. No one was to be enlisted "but such as are good seamen, or so acquainted with maritime affairs as to be able to serve to advantage by sea."

As a Navy veteran, I like that line. A ship is no place to learn your way around. Congress wanted men who already belonged on a deck.

Congress had the words. Now it needed the men. And where it found them is where the legend begins.

Two Words

On November 28th, 1775, John Hancock, the president of Congress, signed a commission for a Philadelphian named Samuel Nicholas. A commission is the official paper that makes someone an officer. Nicholas became a captain of Marines, the first Marine officer appointed under the new resolution.

He was never formally named Commandant, the top officer of the Corps. But by tradition, the Marine Corps counts him as its first.

Now, those two words. Tun Tavern.

Here's what the record shows. One of the first Marine officers, Robert Mullan, was part of the family that ran Tun Tavern, a favorite of sailors on the Philadelphia waterfront. And the Marine Corps' own history calls Tun Tavern a recruiting headquarters, with Mullan as one of the main recruiters.

That much is solid. But the picture of the first Marines lined up at the bar, and the Corps born inside those walls? That's tradition. Even the Marine Corps' own history says the tavern is "reputed to have been the birthplace."

And here's the twist. Samuel Nicholas's family ran a tavern too. The Conestoga Wagon. Some historians think it was just as likely a recruiting post.

Two taverns. Two families. One legend.

By December, Nicholas had raised about three hundred men. One battalion, not two. And within three months, some of them would be climbing into boats off a British island.

The Powder Island

They sailed with America's first squadron, under Commodore Esek Hopkins.

In February of 1776, Hopkins went after the one thing Washington's army needed most. Gunpowder. Without it, muskets and cannons were useless. And the British kept a large store of it at Nassau, on the island of New Providence in the Bahamas.

On March 3rd, 1776, the Marines climbed into boats and went ashore a few miles east of Nassau. Around two hundred and fifty Marines and sailors, most of them Marines, all under Captain Nicholas. The Navy calls it the first amphibious assault by American Marines. Amphibious means a landing from the sea onto a hostile shore. It would become the Marine Corps' trademark.

This is the part a Navy man loves. Sailors and Marines in the same boats, headed for the same beach.

Nobody fired a shot at them. That afternoon they took Fort Montagu. The next morning, the governor, Montfort Browne, surrendered Fort Nassau and the town.

But Browne had been clever. Before he gave up, he shipped most of the gunpowder away. There had been one hundred seventy-four casks. Hopkins got twenty-four.

Still, they hauled off close to ninety cannon and fifteen brass mortars, a short, stubby kind of cannon.

The Marines had proved they could take a beach. Nine months later, with the war nearly lost, they would be asked to fight somewhere no one had planned for them. On land, in winter, far from any ship.

Far From Any Ship

By December of 1776, Washington's army had been beaten in New York and was retreating across New Jersey.

Samuel Nicholas, now a major, marched a battalion of Marines out of Philadelphia to join him. They were attached to a brigade of Philadelphia troops under John Cadwalader. A brigade is a larger group, made up of several battalions.

On Christmas night, Washington crossed the Delaware and won at Trenton. Cadwalader's men tried to cross farther south. But ice stopped most of them, and the Marines missed the fight.

They would not miss the next one. On the night of January 2nd, 1777, they joined Washington's army outside Princeton. The next morning, British troops smashed into the American front line. General Hugh Mercer was mortally wounded, and his men fell back.

Cadwalader's brigade, with roughly a hundred and thirty Marines, moved up on the right. Under heavy fire, the line began to waver.

Then, as the story was told afterward, Washington himself rode in among them, calling out: "Parade with us my brave fellows, there is but a handful of the enemy and we will have them directly!"

The line held. More American troops came up. And the British broke and ran.

It was the Continental Marines' first real land battle.

So you'd think the new country would hold on to them. It didn't.

The Missing Years

The Continental Marines fought for the rest of the war, at sea and ashore.

Then came peace, with the Treaty of Paris in 1783, and the new country had no money for a navy. Ships were sold. And the Marines simply faded away. The last known Continental Marine is a Private Robert Stout, serving on the frigate Alliance in April of 1784.

For about fourteen years, the United States had no Marines at all. No oldest Marine. No youngest. No one to hand the Corps to the next generation.

Then French warships and privateers, privately owned armed ships, began seizing American merchant ships. The country needed a navy again. And on July 11th, 1798, President John Adams, the same man who had drafted that first Marine proposal back in 1775, signed the act establishing and organizing a Marine Corps. The Corps has existed without a break ever since.

So here's the strange part. For more than a hundred years, Marines celebrated their birthday on July 11th. Not November 10th.

So how did today become the day?

Order Number Forty-Seven

On October 21st, 1921, Major Edwin McClellan, who ran the Marine Corps' history section, sent a memo to the Commandant, Major General John A. Lejeune. McClellan argued that the real birthday was November 10th, 1775. The day Congress first called for Marines.

On November 1st, 1921, Lejeune issued Marine Corps Order Number Forty-Seven. A short history of the Corps, to be read to every command, every November 10th.

And that is the message from the start of this episode. The one read aloud before the cake. It has been read every November 10th since.

The cake came later. Marine historians trace cake ceremonies back to 1935, and in 1952, Commandant Lemuel Shepherd made the ceremony official across the Corps.

Near the end of that order, the Commandant wrote this, in his own words:

"This high name of distinction and soldierly repute we who are Marines today have received from those who preceded us in the corps. With it we have also received from them the eternal spirit which has animated our corps from generation to generation and has been the distinguishing mark of the Marines in every age."

From generation to generation. Just like the cake. Experience, handing the Corps to the next generation.

So the answers are in. The Corps began with a few lines of ink. The tavern was a real recruiting post, but the birthplace is tradition. And the date came from a historian's memo and a Commandant who wanted Marines to remember.

As a Navy veteran, I'll say this. Marines have sailed with the Navy since the first American squadron put to sea, and the Corps is still part of the Department of the Navy. Navy corpsmen and chaplains serve with Marines to this day. We rib each other. But when it counts, we're the same team. So to every Marine listening, happy birthday, and Semper Fidelis. Always faithful.

Today, on a ship at sea or at a birthday ball, the oldest Marine in the room will take a slice of cake and hand it to the youngest.

Tomorrow: it's Veterans Day, and the guns of World War One are set to fall silent at eleven o'clock. So with one minute left, why is Private Henry Gunther still walking toward a German machine gun? The Daily Muster is supported by Parcaut Supply Co. Subscribe, and fall in with us again tomorrow. Muster's done. Fair winds. I'm Ed Parcaut, and I'll see you tomorrow.