The Far off Siege of Cuddalore Could be Last Battle of the American Revolution

British Regulars engage forces of the Sultan of Mysore during the Siege of Cuddalore.

What might be considered the last battle of the American Revolution came to an end on July 25, 1783 when the combatants got preliminary notice that a Peace Treaty had been signed.  The British forces including Hessian mercenaries and native units lifted their 48-day siege of the strong point citadel of Cuddalore or Gondelour to the French and defended by a recently reinforced French garrison and their native allies.  You scholars scrambling to find the fortress on a map of North America or even a map of the New World will be frustrated. Cuddalore was a port on the far southeast coast of India.

Huh!?!  Let me explain.

The French renewed an old feud with England when they became allies of the struggling and infant United States of America in February 1778 and an active belligerent by Declaration of War a month later.  Like the Seven Years War (the French and Indian War in North America) it quickly became a world war between empires fought not only in the former Colonies but on the high seas around the globe, on Caribbean islands, in Europe, West Africa, India, and the Philippines.  Britain’s allies included Prussia, Portugal, and a small gaggle of German principalities.  Fighting with the French in addition to the Continentals were the Holy Roman Empire (Austria, Saxony, and Bavaria), Spain, Russia, and the Indian Mughal Empire.

Both nations had ambitions and interests on the sub-continent and fought there in the previous 1754-63 conflict where East India Company under Robert Clive mounted its own private army.  The French Mughal allies were crushed and French enclaves and strong points including Cuddalore fell to the British virtually ending their presence in India.

French Admiral Pierre André de Suffren de Saint Tropez, also known as the Bailli de Suffren gestures to the Citadel of Cuddalore in this 1785 portrait by Pompeo Batoni.

By 1782 with British forces heavily committed in North America and the Antilles, French Vice Admiral Pierre André de Suffren Saint-Tropez, who had already defeated a Royal Navy Squadron off the Cape Verde Islands in the South Atlantic preventing the British from taking Cape of Good Hope, sailed to Southern India and allied with the Nawab of Mysore in his war against the East India Company.  Mysore troops already seized some old French strong holds including Cuddalore, which the French reinforced with 2500 European troops and 2000 Sepoys (native Indian troops) under the command of the Marquis de Bussy  to join the 5800 Musorians in the city and citadel.

As Suffren cruised Indian Ocean fighting a series of hard fought, desperate naval battles with a fleet under English Admiral Sir Edward Hughes, British troops under the command of Major-General James Stuart arrived outside Cuddalore on June 7, 1783.   Hughes’s army consisted of the 73rd and 78th Highlanders, the 101st Regiment—Regulars rather than East India Company troops—and a large body of Sepoys.  It was reinforced by a detachment of two Hanover mercenary regiments under Colonel Christoph August von Wangenheim.  The siege was on.

A French map showing the dispositions of forces during the Siege of Cuddalore.  The British lines are to the left and the fortress is in the lower right.

On June 15 Stuart launched a surprise pre-dawn attack which after hours of desperate fighting dislodged the allies from a key redoubt in front of the main citadel.  The defenders were forced back into the Fort and city as Stuart tightened his lines and waited for reinforcements from the sea.  But it was a costly victory.  His forces lost more than 900 killed and wounded while the allies lost more than 500 of their much larger force.  Stuart’s badly beat up force, especially the Europeans in their wool uniforms also suffered badly from the intense summer heat and disease which swept their encampments.

In the naval Battle of Cuddalore, Suffren's inferior fleet decisively defeated the Royal Navy driving it back to Madras.

Then on June 20 Stuart’s hopes for reinforcements were dashed when Suffren’s fleet arrived offshore and engaged the British flotilla for the final time, this time decisively defeating Hughes and sending him reeling back to Madras.  Suffren was then able to land 2500 marines who got inside the allied lines, significantly tipping the balance of power.

On June 25 DeBussy launched several sorties against the British lines but despite his superiority in numbers, badly botched the attacks.  The well-entrenched British lost only 25 men while the attackers lost 450 killed and wounded with another 150 taken prisoner including the field commander of the assault, the Chevalier de Dumas and several other officers.  The French lost the advantage they had gained by the reinforcements.

The siege dragged on for another five days with both sides taking casualties and suffering from losses to the heat and camp sickness, likely dysentery.  DeBussy was trying to get his depleted forces read for another sortie when a British ship arrived with news that France and Britain had tentatively agreed on peace.

On July 25 both exhausted European armies agreed on a local end of hostilities.   When the terms of the Treaty of Paris became known, the French had to surrender Cuddalore to the British.  In exchange they got back their important trading posts at Pondicherry north of Cuddalore and Mahé across the tip of the subcontinent on the western shore.

Thus ended the Indian part of the world war sparked by the American Revolution.  Historians refer to actions in that war outside of the New World as the Anglo-French War.  Although peace was restored between the powers, the war between Britain and the Mysoreans continued until the Treaty of Mangalore was signed in March 1784.  The Second Anglo-Mysore War ended with a British humiliation and the beginning of the end of the British East India Company.  Eventually the India Act made British possessions in India direct colonies with a Royal Governor General, and a vast colonial bureaucracy.

The French held on to their small enclave at Mahé and a few other points surrounded by British India.  After Indian independence, they were finally ceded by France in 1954.  

There is some small irony that it was heavily taxed East India Company tea that helped spark the American Revolution when Patriots dumped it into Boston Harbor.  And it was the last battle of that war that led to the collapse of the Company. 

Walking the Walk and Compassion for Campers Update for July 17, 2026

 

Look for new opportunities for action, education, community, and solidarity in and around McHenry County here every week.  

                                                            Walking the Walk 

Hands Off Our Vote! Roadside vigil and rally on Saturday, July 18 from 11am to 1pm at Rt. 31 at McCullom Lake Road in McHenry.  "In conjunction with the Good Trouble Lives On weekend of events, Indivisible McHenry County is hosting a Hands Off Our Votes rally to protect our voting rights in light of the Trump regime's efforts to sabotage our right to free and fair elections!"

McHenry County Disability Pride event will be held this year at McHenry County College, Building B on Saturday, July 25 from 10 am to 1 pm.  The free event aims to highlight the diversity and lived experiences within the community of people living with a wide array of disabilities, from physical and sensory to developmental and behavioral. Officially established in 2015, July is considered National Disability Pride Month.  Activities, service providers, community support and vendors.

Together We Stand McHenry County is sponsoring a Community Blood Drive on Saturday, July 26 at the Algonquin Township Building, 3702 US Rt. 14 between Crystal Lake and Cary.

The National March into Maquette Park Saturday, August 1, 9am-1pm at Chicago's Marquett Park. "In 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Chicago Freedom Movement marched into Marquette Park to confront entrenched segregation, redlining, and organized racial violence. Sixty years later, communities across the country face renewed attacks on voting rights and access to the ballot, expanding systems of criminalization and detention, and deepening economic inequality.

This national gathering connects the unfinished work of 1966 to the defining moral challenges of this moment. Faith leaders, civic leaders, organizers, artists, young people, and communities from across the country will march for free and fair elections, freedom for immigrant and marginalized communities, and a future rooted in dignity, justice, and shared humanity."

Led locally by IMAN in partnership with 60+ community-rooted organizations, including the Rainbow Push Coalition, The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), Side With Love, and the Unitarian Universalist Advocacy Network of Illinois (UUANI), and Sponsored nationally by Powered By Faith,  The National March into Marquette Park

Compassion for Campers

Our distributions are usually held on the first and third Fridays of the month from 10 am to 2 pm at the new McHenry County Resource Center (MCHC) at the McHenry County Mental Health Board offices, 620 Dakota Street in Crystal Lake.   Our next distributions will be on Fridays July 17.  Due to a Mental Health Board event the MCHC will be closed on August 7.  The following C4C distribution will be Friday, August 21.

With at least a temporary home base, C4C can resume accepting donations of supplies including clean used sleeping bags and tents in their bags or cases, tarps and other basic camping gear, rain gear, and especially mosquito and tick repellents and sunscreen.  Contact Sue Rekenthaler at tomatos@mc.net or Patrick Murfin at pmurfin@sbcglobal.net for more information.

Financial support is critical to fulfilling our mission. The best thing you can do is offer your critically needed financial support. Money donations are always welcome at     https://tinyurl.com/3bz96axe.   Look for updates here.  Email compassionforcampers@treeoflifeuu.org .

Mademoiselle Corday Rendezvous With Dr. Guillotine

 

Charlotte Corday in the tumbril which bore her to the guillotine, by James E. McConnell. 

By all accounts Charlotte Corday stepped on the scaffold in Paris on July 17, 1793 with remarkable calm and dignity.  She knelt laying her reportedly lovely neck in the yoke of the apparatus.  At the appointed time the sure knife of the guillotine fell, and her head tumbled into the waiting basket.  Suddenly, a man named Legros, who may, or may not, have been an assistant to the executioner or perhaps a carpenter who worked on the machine that morning, rushed forward grabbing the head by its light brown hair and slapped it across the face.  A witness wrote that Corday’s face had an expression of “unequivocal indignation” at the slap. 

Twenty-four-year-old Corday came to this final indignity by meddling in French politics—with a butcher knife.

She was born on July 27, 1768 in a Normandy village and was graced with the elaborate name of Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d’Armont because her father, Jacques François de Corday, seigneur d’Armont was a member of the minor, but impoverished, nobility.  After her mother and older sister died of some sort of contagion, Charlotte and a younger sister were sent to a Convent in Caen.  While there she had access to the library where she read widely, enjoying particularly the classics like Plutarch in Latin.

By 1791 she left the convent and was living with a cousin, Madame Le Coustellier de Bretteville-Gouville who first brought her into the orbit of Girondin politics.

                    Mademoiselle Corday as portrayed by François-Séraphin Delpec.

The Girondin were the party of moderate Republicans who dominated the National Assembly when the King was overthrown.  At first their main opposition came from moderate Royalists who favored a constitutional monarchy.  Their main allies in the Assembly were the slightly more radical Montagnards.  Both were factions of the Jacobin Club, the main revolutionary society.

Back in Normandy Corday avidly read the writings of the most important members of the Girondin and associated with other provincial supporters.  And like the Girondin, she watched in horror as the Revolution seemed to spiral violently out of control.  Two events particularly shocked her.

First was the sudden overthrow of Louis XVI in March of 1792.  The Girondin were indeed in favor of abolishing the monarchy but had pinned their hopes on a more orderly transition to a republic.  The second event was the September Massacres when thousands of priests, aristocrats, monarchists, and other political detainees were dragged from their prisons and murdered or hastily tried and executed by the sans-culottes of the Paris Mob.

Both of those events transpired as the Girondin held nominal power in the government.  But the Montagnards, now assuming the mantel of the Jacobins, were scrambling for power, trying to keep up with the radicalized and angry poor of Paris.  Under the leadership of Maximilien Robespierre, Georges Danton, and Jean-Paul Marat Jacobins plotted the over-throw of their former allies and their complete elimination as a political force.  In May of 1793 the people of Paris rose against the Girondin government which had threatened to attack them with loyal levies from the provinces. In early June the National Guard officially ousted the government.  Within weeks the Reign of Terror was on.

                                Jean-Paul Marat by Jean Francois Garneray--a remarkably ugly little man.

Watching all of this with mounting horror in Normandy, Corday lay most of the blame not on the more active politicians, Robespierre and Danton, but on the movement’s ideological leader, Marat.  The former physician and scientist dedicated himself to revolutionary politics from the earliest stirring of the people.  A radical democrat he made himself the champion of the poor—the sans culottes—and the stinging critic of any perceived conservatism or weakness in a parade of revolutionary governments in his newspaper Le Journal de la République française under the nom de plume L’Ami du people.  He was often forced into hiding but kept, as best as he was able, his sometimes-outlawed paper in print.  He was an idol to the Mob in ways that ambitious politicians like Robespierre and Danton could only dream of.  In the Reign of Terror he undertook the role of prosecutor.

Corday decided that if Marat was somehow removed from the scene the Reign of Terror would collapse and France would be spared a civil war.  At some point she decided to act on her own.

She travelled from Normandy to Paris intent on killing Marat and composing a manifesto explaining the action she planned to take.  She first tried to approach him at the National Assembly only to discover that he no longer attended the meetings.  Next, she sought him out at his house after purchasing a 6-inch butcher knife on the morning of July 13.  A servant turned her away initially, but when she returned that night claiming to have a list of Caen Girondin who planned an insurrection, Marat allowed her to be admitted.

Marat, who suffered from a painful and debilitating skin condition was working as usual from a makeshift desk stretched across his bathtub.  He conducted the interview and collected the list.  According to her later statement he either said that those on the list would be immediately disposed of or arrested and put to death.  

                            The Death of Marat by David.

With that Corday rose from her chair and strode to the bathtub pulling her knife from her corset.  She plunged deep into the chest of the helpless man who could only manage to blurt out “Aidez-moi, ma chère amie!” (Help me, my dear friend) before dying.  Corday pierced Marat’s lung, aorta and left ventricle.  He died all but instantly.

As the household responded with alarm, Corday sat quietly awaiting inevitable arrest.

Everything went quickly after that.  She was interrogated at length—and most likely tortured in an attempt to find out if she was part of a wider conspiracy.  In her hurried trial she told the court that “I killed one man to save 100,000.”  She had no illusion that she would not pay with her life.

For their part the Jacobin authorities, terrified for their own lives and unsure if Corday acted alone, ordered her body examined to see if she was a virgin.  They believed that she must have been sleeping with a man who controlled her.   They steadfastly refused to believe a woman would be able to conceive and execute such a plan on her own.  Unfortunately for them, she turned out to be a virtuous virgin.

Although her manifesto, Address to the French people, friends of Law and Peace was secretly published and circulated, at least in Paris, Marat was elevated to the status of martyr/hero.  His bust was installed on the altars of former churches when the new revolutionary Cult of Reason was proclaimed.  The popular painter David portrayed Marat’s lifeless body in the bath in a picture that took Paris by storm and was widely reproduced.

If Marat’s reputation won the immediate propaganda war, it was not to last.  The excess of the Reign of Terror spun rapidly out of control, appalling many former supporters and even eventually members of the notorious mob.  Outside Paris the provinces seethed with resentment and rebellion brewed.  Within a year they were ousted from power and on 9 Thermidor by its new Revolutionary calendar and July 10, 1794 by the Gregorian, Robespierre’s head was separated from his shoulders, likely on the same busy guillotine that had been so effective on Corday.

The surviving moderate Republicans, surviving younger aristocrats, and royalists were back in sway for a while under the Directorate until the shrewd Napoleon Bonaparte, hero of the wars of invasion by the European powers seeking to restore the monarchy, gathered up the power for his personal dictatorship and ultimate Empire.

The eventual fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy at the point of Europe’s bayonets calmed France for a while, but glaring class inequality continued to fester, particularly in Paris which erupted in street rebellions in 1830 and again in 1832.  The latter was a paltry, doomed affair now remembered only because it inspired Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and, of course the musical stage and screen blockbuster of our time.   

                        The revisionist view with Corday as heroine by Paul Baudry.

Supporters of the monarchy sought out historical figures to write an alternative myth of the bloody past, someone of undeniable courage who dared to face the howling mob.  Charlotte Corday was the perfect candidate.  Her story was retold and embellished in books and stage melodramas, something that would be repeated after the brief Republic following the fall of the Bourbons to the 1848 uprising when Louis Napoleon came to power. 

In 1860 Paul Jacques Aimé Baudry painted the same scene of Marat dead in the bathtub as celebrated by David from a different angle showing a heroic Corday surveying her work.

Marat/Sade on stage in London with Patrick Magee, Glenda Jackson, and Ian Richardson directed by Peter Brook in the 1967 Royal Shakespere Company film version.

In the 1960 the story was retold in the international theater sensation The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade better known simply as Marat/Sade and the 1967 film directed by Peter Brook based on his Royal Shakespeare Theater Company London production.   Songs from the show including Poor Old Marat were recorded as a medley by Judy Collins on her best-selling album In My Life.

Marat and Corday remain to this day potent symbols in France to be extolled or reviled depending on one’s politics.

 

Deadly 1996 Chicago Heat Wave--Some Victims Were Late Casualties of the '68 Democratic Convention

 

1995 headlines tell the shocking story of the heat wave disaster that hit Chicago in July.  

Note--The Chicago area is sweltering this week for the second prolonged heat wave this season.  Temps in the low90s and heat indexes in the low °100s--just below an official Heat Emergency.  Bad.  But once it was far, far worse.

My Columbia College writing teacher John Schulz penned one of the earliest and best accounts of the demonstrations and street confrontations around the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  He called it No One Was Killed.  Perhaps he was premature in that judgement by 27 years.

In July of 1995 more than 700 people died as the city baked in temperatures that hovered around °100.  It was breathlessly covered with grainy but graphic television footage of Chicagoans sweltering and inconvenient bodies stacked in refrigerator trailers at the overwhelmed Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office and buried unceremoniously in slit trenches.

There had been other notable heatwaves in the city, especially in the mid-1930’s when the city was struck with the same blasting heat that created the Dust Bowl.  But none produced anything like the same mortality rates.  Several factors including humidity levels, a heat inversion that trapped polluted air over the city, and frequent spot power outages and brownouts contributed to the toll.  So did the city’s deeply ingrained racism. 

By 1995 many Chicagoans enjoyed air conditioning.  But not so much in the city’s poorest wards and neighborhoods.  Massive high-rise public housing developments like Robert Taylor Homes on the South Side and Cabrini Green on the Near North Side as well as Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) mid-rise senior buildings were un-air-conditioned.  And unlike the city’s traditional housing stock of two and three flats, courtyard apartments, brick bungalows and other single-family homes, those buildings did not have good cross ventilation to cool them at nights.  Instead, they were virtual brick ovens that retained the day’s suffocating heat.

There are many easily found press photos of the heat wave like this one of paramedics loading an elderly victim into an ambulance.  But almost none show Black victims.  Back then newspapers and television seldom covered news in the Black community unless there was a riot.  That included Black murder and other crime victims or positive community news.  Systematic racism erased Blacks from the collective memory of the disaster for years.

Even when public housing residents or other poor folks could install window air-conditioning units, many could not afford to run them due to the high cost of electricity.  Some were even reluctant to use fans.  Moreover, an aggressive campaign by Commonwealth Edison to disconnect power to those with outstanding electric bills who they were barred by law from stopping service to during freezing Winter months, left many poor folks in the stifling dark.  In addition, during the heart of the five-day heat wave that year record electrical usage sparked wide-spread spot power outages and brown-outs.

Many residents in high crime areas were afraid to leave their windows open at night.

As the oppressive heat and high humidity settled over the city, trapped smog became a further health hazard for the elderly and those with respiratory ailments. 

The city government was slow to respond to the growing emergency even as bodies began piling up at the morgue.  The city did not declare a heat emergency and open cooling centers until the fourth day of the crisis.   There was as yet no system for the emergency distribution of fans or to provide bottled water to the most adversely affected residents.

Eric Klinenberg, author of the 2002 book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, has noted that the map of heat-related deaths in Chicago mirrored the map of poverty.  Most adversely affected were the elderly and isolated—those without family or community support.  Old men with chronic illnesses fared far worse than elderly women, who tended to have more social connections to look after them.

The exact number of deaths in Cook County may never be known for sure.  Mortality tables show that 739 additional people died in that week above the usual average.  Blacks suffered significantly higher death rates than Whites or Hispanics.

A body being loaded into an emergency refrigerated trailer outside the Cook County Medical Examiner's office.

Seven refrigerator trailers had to be used to handle the bodies.  Many of the elderly victims lived and died alone.  When it was all over, 41 of the victims were either not identified or had no family to claim the bodies.  They were buried in plywood caskets in a slit trench in a suburban Homewood cemetery.

A priest reads prayers over the caskets of 41 unclaimed victims of the 1995 heat wave before they were covered by a bulldozer.

Some of the deaths were a direct result of Mayor Richard J. Dailey’s decision to close the parks, especially the lakefront parks, to overnight sleeping to prevent them from being used by Yippies and other demonstrators during the ‘68 Convention protests.

Chicagoans had been seeking relief from the heat at night on the shores of Lake Michigan as far back as the 19th Century.  On October 8, 1877 a rare hot, dry blanket covered the city and much of the Midwest on both sides of the Lake. Despite the fact that railroad tracks, lumber yards, tanneries and other industrial buildings, warehouses, and busy wharves and piers blocked easy access to the lakefront in many areas, hundreds, maybe thousands, were sleeping where they could, including the cemetery that is now Lincoln Park when the Great Chicago Fire broke out.  They would soon be joined by tens of thousands more fleeing the rapidly spreading conflagration.

After Daniel Burnham’s great plan led to the creation of a string of lakefront parks and public beaches and Chicago’s extensive streetcar systems made them easily accessible to residents far from the shores, the custom of whole families camping out on blankets under the stars was well established.  In the major heatwaves from the ‘30s through the ‘60s the press reported the custom.

Chicagoans sleeping in the park on a hot night in the 1950's.

That ended after Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin announced plans for a Yippie! Festival of Life during the 1968 Democratic National Convention to protest the War in Vietnam.  The call to the Festival invited the youth of America to come to the city and camp in the lakefront parks.  Hysterical press coverage imagined thousands of drug and sex crazed radicals descending of the city and creating “anarchy in the streets.”  For their part, the Yippies relished the free publicity.

Alarmed, Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered the Chicago Park District to enact an ordinance closing all parks at 11 pm and prohibiting any sleeping or camping.   First to feel the effects of the ordinance were surprised troops of Boy Scouts and veteran’s organizations who had regularly used the parks for camping.  During a relatively mild heat snap in July families seeking to sleep out were first turned away.

The battles to clear Lincoln Park of Yippies and other demonstrators during the Conventions were bloody affairs with Chicago Police Department baton charges and heavy use of tear gas that spilled into nearby Old Town Streets.

Chicago Police mass in Lincoln Park before violently pushing Yippies and other protestors out of the park after the new curfew.

Almost everyone expected that things would go back to normal after it was all over, that either the ordinance would simply be unenforced in future years against ordinary Chicagoans or that it would be explicitly repealed. But Dailey was terrified the parks could once again be used by radicals and by rumors that the city restive and angry West and Southside Black residents would swarm the parks and threaten Loop businesses and the swanky Gold Coast.  His lawyers also advised him that if the camping bans were lifted, the Courts might rule that they had been imposed strictly to limit the rights of assembly and free speech and not, as had been claimed, for general public safety and protection of park land and facilities from damage.

Year after year, the sleeping ban stayed and was vigorously enforced, mostly against the homeless who still sought secluded spots to comfortably rest.  By the 1990’s the old custom of seeking relief at night Lake was a more than half forgotten quaint memory.  Park ban enforcement kept Occupy Chicago from establishing permanent camp bases as in other cities—a reinforcement for city officials of the rason d’etre of Daley’s decree.

How many of the ‘95 victims might have survived if they still had access to the air conditioner by the Lake?  No one can say for sure, but probably dozens or scores.

They were the late casualties of the Democratic Convention.