The First American Army Page 4

  If the girls made the men feel good, the chills of winter and various illnesses that were transported from one barracks to another did not. Some went to the doctors and were bled or given medicine that did little more than make them throw up. This medicine was so routine that one soldier wrote in his diary that he “saw the doctor and he gave me a puke.”7

  Other aspects of camp life were depressing, too. The men were called out for regimental funerals, and there were many. A long string of funerals for the men who had been killed at Bunker Hill in 1775 was followed by another wave of burials for those who had been wounded and finally died a few days or weeks later. Deaths in camp occurred prior to Bunker Hill, however. Men who had been shot in the battles of Lexington and Concord and cared for in the camp outside Boston died from their wounds and were buried. Men died of disease and the fevers that swept through the American camps that winter and in just about every winter. Some old men who had joined the service with great pride, in spite of their infirmities, died of old age, such as the patriotic James Frye, sixtysix, who insisted that his friends at home be told that he “died while in the Continental service.” There were so many funerals that in June 1775, before Bunker Hill, the soldiers attended six in just three days. One enlisted man went to three in one day in the spring of 1776.

  For many, the deaths they witnessed from bedsides in camp were the first they had ever seen. The experience unnerved a twenty-one-year-old chaplain, who described it in his journal in a shaky hand: “His breath was short. Sweat. And all of a sudden he contracted his body and it [distorted] the features of his face in a single, violent manner. He grinded with his teeth and his face turned black so fast, as if I could feel it. He vomited a large quantity of black water. Strangled. Nature Trembled. And he soon gave up the ghost at 6 p.m. I closed his eyes.”8 All of the men had to be wary of a new smallpox outbreak in Boston that took the lives of many citizens.

  The enlisted men were called out by regiment and were sometimes joined by other regiments to witness a flogging of another enlisted man. Floggings, standard military punishment for a variety of crimes, occurred so frequently that men in the Boston camp attended them at least once a week, sometimes more often. Men were flogged for desertion, insubordination, falling asleep on guard duty, petty theft, and a variety of other charges. They were tied to wooden stakes or trees and beaten repeatedly with a heavy lash. Punishment ranged from a few dozen lashes to over one hundred.

  The enlisted men sometimes had to witness the execution, by firing squad or hanging, of a multiple deserter or a man charged with other serious crimes, such as forgery, robbery, or spying for the enemy. The executions, which continued throughout the war, were not only designed to punish an offender, but to serve as preventative discipline for the entire army.

  These events shook the men, but few of them believed that they would spend years of their lives witnessing them. Most were convinced that the American Revolution would be a very short war, perhaps just one large battle there in Boston, and then everyone, victorious, could go home. Virginia’s Leven Powell told his wife to inform his business clients that he would be back soon. In a letter, he wrote, “It can be no great inconvenience for the people to wait for my return, which I expect is not far off.”9

  The men in the regiments of Greenwood and others sometimes annoyed each other, as men in any group forced to live and work together for long periods of time always do. Fistfights broke out between soldiers engaged in arguments and from time to time duels were threatened or actually fought by officers. Some men would steal clothing from others. Worse, men would steal the rifles of men in their own regiment. One man fumed when he heard that not only had someone stolen his rifle, but had sold it for five dollars in order to obtain money to gamble—and then lost the five dollars in a card game.

  The men complained bitterly about their food. By order of Congress, each man’s weekly food ration was supposed to consist of one pound of bread, one half pound of beef, one half pound of pork, or one and one quarter pound of beef if pork could not be had. Once each month the men were to be given one and one half pounds of fish instead of beef. For drinks, the allotment was one pint of milk and one pint of malt beer. Each man was also given six ounces of butter and one sixth of a pound of soap per week. The rations varied during the war and later molasses, cider, vegetables, rice, and Indian meal were added to the diet. Greenwood and others scoffed at what they were supposed to get whenever they looked down at the plates filled with the small, barely edible servings of the day.

  The soldiers and officers in the militia units outside Boston, with no training or discipline, may have been long on bravado but they were not reliable. Washington was especially despondent about his officers. He was so upset about their quality that upon his arrival in Boston to lead the army he punished one colonel and five captains for cowardice and stealing money from their regimental budgets and court-martialed dozens of officers for other offenses.10

  Even those who seemed so impressive upon their much anticipated arrivals, such as the raucous buckskin-clad riflemen from Pennsylvania, wound up disappointing the rest of the recruits in the army. They turned out to be chaotic bands of untamed frontiersmen who unnerved all who met them. They cursed throughout the day, drank as often as they worked, disdained the men from Massachusetts, and paid little attention to the rules of the newly created army. On two occasions in Boston a group of them charged a guardhouse and freed their compatriot Pennsylvanians who were incarcerated there. Emboldened by their success, the riflemen tried a third rescue, but Washington heard of it and surrounded the guardhouse with five hundred men, muskets loaded, and told them to shoot any riflemen who approached. None did.11 One officer complained about them that “there never was a more mutinous and undisciplined set of villains that bred disturbance in any camp.”12

  The early days of the Continental Army, before Washington’s arrival in June of 1775 may have been marked by soaring patriotism, but they were not filled with much administrative success in producing munitions or the development of a professional army encampment. There was very little gunpowder for any kind of a fight and at various times in the spring of 1775 men without powder for their muskets sharpened crude spears to use as substitutes for their guns if the feared British breakout from Boston took place.13 Although there were numerous farmers and a large number of merchants in the army, no engineers could be found who could build usable earthworks and other battle fortifications. These skills were so lacking that General Charles Lee, who preceded Washington as the general in charge of American forces in Boston, quipped that “not a single man of ’em is capable of constructing an oven.”14

  Although some men knew how to load, fire, and care for muskets, others had never handled firearms before. This resulted in numerous accidents. One man held his musket a foot in front of him when he fired; the kick of the gun hit him in the chest and killed him. One man’s musket misfired in a barracks and the ball sped through two sets of boards in wall partition, crashed through the wooden bottom of a bunk bed, went through the chest of a man sleeping there, killing him, and finally lodged in a chimney. On what one soldier called “an awful day,” four men in one area of camp were badly wounded when guns went off accidentally.15 At least one man in Boston stabbed himself to death while trying to mount his bayonet to his musket.16 Another fell into a campfire and burned to death.17

  The enlisted men shared many of the same hardships and complained about many of the same things that soldiers since the Persian wars had done and would do in the years to come. They all seemed to know short people who made up for their lack of height by trying to seem authoritative, sergeants with deep voices, happy drunks, and men who had apparently slept with every woman on the Atlantic seaboard. All had met bullies. Most were witness to a fistfight in camp. Someone always forgot the password of the day necessary to reenter the camp. Many loved to play practical jokes on others. All seemed to know someone who had their tents burned in a campfire mishap. All enjoyed the spirits d
ispensed each day, any good food they could obtain anywhere, and an actual bed to sleep in after days of marching.

  During their marches in the war most would, at one time or another, sleep in a field and sometimes wake up with snow on top of them. It seemed all, in some manner, had met British enlisted men, usually prisoners of war, and while they hated them as the enemy, seemed to like them as people, especially teenaged British soldiers.

  In the view of the soldiers, clothing was always badly stitched, muskets poorly made, ammunition always in short supply, orders never clear enough. They complained bitterly that on many of their marches they wound up in the same place where they started. They hated work designed merely to fill time. It would always be too cold in winter and too hot in summer.

  The men all enjoyed devouring the honey they were sometimes able to obtain from local farmers in summer, appreciated any free mending of their tattered uniforms from older women, and any flirtatious look they received from younger ones. They often made fun of their officers, telling jokes about them or offering their comrades impersonations designed to make the officers look ridiculous.

  There was a social, intellectual, and military divide between the enlisted men and the officers. In Europe, some noblemen became officers and their distinguished station in life made them superior to the enlisted man who joined the army as a career or who were drafted. There were a few nobles in the British army, such as Lord Cornwallis and Lord Rawdon, or sons of lords, such as Lord Richard Howe, but their officers had come from important families in the merchant class, families that had always enjoyed impressive social standing in British society. They, too, considered themselves above the ordinary men they commanded.

  The American officer was quite different. The officers, like the men, heralded the new, independent nation they were fighting for, but saw their sudden appointment as a captain or major as immediate entry into a “new” social order in America. Some had been members of the wealthy upper class, especially the southerner planters who had become rich off slave labor, and some had come from prosperous mercantile and shipping families in the New England and Middle Atlantic states. Many, though, had simply been elected by their men or appointed by Congress or state legislatures and had this elite life thrust upon them. They embraced it because, all of a sudden, someone was paying attention to them.

  The American officers rarely fraternized with the enlisted men in camp, on the march, or anywhere else off the battlefield. That was because, many of the enlisted men charged, they spent much of their time lobbying for promotions, feuding with others whom they did not see fit for command, complaining of constantly being overlooked when colonels and generals were named, engaging in duels with each other to satisfy personal honor, and becoming embroiled in disputes with townspeople, merchants, and farmers over unpaid debts.

  Almost none the officers had ever been leaders of men before and knew nothing about their responsibilities. Most were young, some twenty or twenty-one, and younger than many of the men they commanded. They had no military training. They failed to follow orders to help drill their men, visit the sick, check on firearms, or supervise men who were supposed to clean their regiment’s area of the camp. They were highly ineffective commanders and often performed badly in battle.

  One twenty-one-year-old officer, John Lacey, defended himself by reminding critics that “we were all young and in a manner unacquainted with human nature, quite novices in military matters, had everything to learn and no one to instruct us.”18 Colonel William Richardson, of the Fifth Maryland Regiment, agreed that his junior officers were novices, but sneered that they were “but few removes from idiots.”19

  The enlisted men, who had their own jobs to fill up their days and nights, left the officers to their own lives. The privates, corporals, and sergeants did what they were told to do, but ignored the officers during much of the war except when they needed their assistance in obtaining furloughs to go home to visit their wives and family. At times, the officers and the enlisted men of the Revolution seemed like two different kinds of soldiers in two different armies.

  The enlisted men never missed an opportunity to poke some goodnatured humor at their superiors and the army itself, even if their barbs might land them in trouble. Some spoke to officers sarcastically. One sergeant, Joseph White, a teenager, even had the audacity to have some fun about the officers and army with George Washington himself.

  White’s commander sent him to Washington’s headquarters with an urgent message and ordered him to deliver it personally to the commander in chief. Washington was standing with his wife Martha when White was ushered into the room. The general read the message and then looked up at White.

  “What officer are you?” he said.

  “I am the assistant adjutant of the regiment of artillery,” answered young White proudly.

  “Indeed,” Washington said, “you are very young to do that duty.”

  White looked straight at the sharply dressed General, at six foot three and over two hundred pounds a towering presence, and told him that while that was true, in the army he was growing older every day. A wide smile, one of the few the men ever saw, spread across Washington’s face and he let White go.20

  Soldiers who became unhappy with the service went home when their terms were up, refusing to reenlist, blithely assuming that others would take their place. This practice began at the very beginning of the war, at the end of 1775, when half of the nearly twenty thousand soldiers went home when their time expired.21 This practice confounded Congress and the generals and the troops who stayed, many of whom hissed at the groups of those returning home as they left camp. Others unwilling to wait until their time ended simply left camp as deserters, seeing no harm in it. Men deserted individually, with friends, or with small groups. They took their belongings, and sometimes their muskets, with them. No one stopped them as they marched home to Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Virginia and other states. Some even deserted to the enemy.22 “We shall not, with all our rhetoric, be able to maintain many,” Colonel Jedediah Huntington complained to his brother Jabez in November 1775.23

  The delegates to the Continental Congress knew that the army they had raised to lead America to its promised land was beset with problems within months of its formation and that the patriotism that followed Lexington had ebbed. As early as October 1775, John Adams and other delegates found themselves bombarded with complaints about the military. He wrote to one of his state’s generals, “It is represented in this city by some persons and it makes an unfriendly impression upon some minds that in the Massachusetts regiments there are a great number of boys, old men, and Negroes such as are unsuitable for the service and therefore that the Continent is paying for a much greater number of men that are fit for action or any service.”24

  Delegate Silas Deane, his desk drawer full of complaints too, wrote to his wife that “the behavior of our soldiers has made me sick, but little better could be expected from men trained up with notions of their right of saying how and when and under whom they will serve.”25 John Hancock, the president of Congress, summed up the feelings of most about the behavior of the army in a letter to the leaders of the colonies to tell them that “the situation of the army is alarming.”26

  But Congress also understood that the men had surrendered much and been given little in return. The delegates noted with pride, too, that there were soldiers just fifteen years old, such as John Greenwood, who were willing to die for their country. All of the enlisted men had their thanks. New Hampshire delegate Josiah Bartlett reminded congressional colleagues that the men faced “almost insuperable difficulties” and said in the spring of 1776 that “instead of wondering that we are in no better situation than at present, I am surprised we are in so good.”27

  Chapter Four

  MOTHER AND SON REUNION

  The problems of the commander in chief and the Continental Congress were far from the mind of John Greenwood, who reenlisted. His major problem was finding a way to sneak into Boston t
o locate his parents, especially his mother, whom he had seen just briefly on the morning of the Bunker Hill battle when she had shrieked at him to run away.

  Greenwood’s efforts to see her again, and to reunite with his father, were thwarted because of the travel prohibitions. What the teenaged soldier did not realize, however, was that his mother was right there in Cambridge. On the day before Bunker Hill, when he last saw her, Mrs. Greenwood had obtained a pass from the British to visit the American camp to search for her son, whom she heard had recently arrived. She took hidden money with her to pay anyone she could find to serve in Greenwood’s place as a substitute. Terrified that her son would be killed or wounded, she intended to talk her youngster into going back to Falmouth, where he could stay with his uncle and where he would be safe.

  Mrs. Greenwood had not returned to Boston after the battle of Bunker Hill because of the chaos and new travel restrictions, this time imposed by the Americans. She had actually been living in Cambridge for six weeks, at a friend’s home, and spent her days there in sheer misery because men in the army had told her that they knew for a fact that her son had been killed at Bunker Hill in one of the ferocious British assaults. The few inquiries she had made turned up no sign of her son and, relying on information from soldiers she considered to be well informed, she drifted into prolonged mourning.

  In mid-July, however, Mrs. Greenwood met Sergeant John Mills of Connecticut, who told her that her son was very much alive and living on the other side of Charlestown. An hour later, John Greenwood wrote, he was standing in front of his tent, staring out at the camp, when he heard joyful screams nearby. He wrote, “Who should I see but my mother, coming toward me in the company of Sergeant Mills.”

  An emotional reunion of mother and son followed, but Mrs. Greenwood could not stay. She had managed to obtain a pass from General Washington himself to return home to Boston earlier that day and had to leave right away. Mrs. Greenwood walked to Bunker Hill, where she was admitted to the fort after showing her pass, and was then introduced to a British officer, Major John Small, whom she told friends was quite friendly. She was transported to her home and then she asked Small to take her to see General Gage.