THE FIRST AMERICAN ARMY
THE UNTOLD STORY OF GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE MEN BEHIND AMERICA’S FIRST FIGHT FOR FREEDOM
BRUCE CHADWICK, PHD
Also by Bruce Chadwick
George Washington’s War
Brother Against Brother
Two American Presidents
Traveling the Underground Railroad
The Reel Civil War
“Bruce Chadwick reminds us that the Revolution was fought and won by men without general’s stars or officers’ commissions. It’s good to see how much ordinary Americans cared about liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
—Thomas Fleming, author of Liberty! The American Revolution
“Although wars are fought by soldiers, they are usually described by historians writing about generals. This book puts first things first: the story of the Revolutionary War is told as it was experienced by the soldiers who waged it, those unsung patriots whose souls were tried by battle, privation, and disease. It is a look through the other end of the telescope, giving new meaning to such words as sacrifice and courage and perseverance. To understand the war, really understand it, read this book.”
—Dave R. Palmer, Lieutenant General, U.S. Army (Ret), Author of The Way of the Fox, The River and the Rock, Summons of the Trumpet, 1794, First in War, and Washington and Arnold
“The First American Army is a most laudable and successful effort to put faces and personalities to some of the men at the knife’s edge of the Continental Army. …The author tells the stories of some long-forgotten soldiers whose individual achievements might appear small, but collectively comprised our army of independence. Through the use of anecdotes and excellent quotations from the writings of the soldiers themselves, he brings their characters to life and helps appreciate the intense sufferings and also some of the pleasures of life in the army.
“Dr. Chadwick brings clarity to a neglected, but absolutely vital, dimension of the Revolutionary War: why men choose to endure year after year of often bitter and frustrating army life. While the desertion rate among patriot soldiers was high, the fact that so many soldiers stayed and did their duty despite poor or non-existent food, clothing, and pay, reflects the remarkable commitment they had to achieving independence. Their steadfast faith and service in the cause never fails to evoke my admiration and respect.”
—Joseph Lee Boyle, Author of Writings from the Valley Forge Encampment of the Continental Army, December 19, 1777–June 19, 1778
Copyright © 2007 by Bruce Chadwick
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chadwick, Bruce.
The first American army : the untold story of George Washington and the men behind America’s first fight for freedom / Bruce Chadwick.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4022-0753-2
1. United States. Continental Army--Military life. 2. Washington, George, 1732-1799. 3. Washington, George, 1732-1799--Friends and associates. 4. Soldiers--United States--Social conditions--18th century. 5. United States--History--Revolution, 1775-1783--Social aspects. I. Title.
E259.C43 2005
973.3′4--dc22
2005019866
Printed and bound in the United States of America
VP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
For the brave men and women in the military forces of the United States of America
“The rising world shall sing of us a thousand years to come,
And tell our children’s children the wonders we have done.”
—song written by a soldier of the Second New York Regiment
CONTENTS
Author to Reader
Chapter 1: Bunker Hill: The Arrival of Private John Greenwood, Age Fifteen, Fifer
Chapter 2: The Siege of Boston, 1775–1776: Private Greenwood Joins an Armed Camp
Chapter 3: Camp Life
Chapter 4: Mother and Son Reunion
Chapter 5: The Soldiers
Chapter 6: Why They Fought
March to Quebec
Chapter 7: Private Jeremiah Greenman and Benedict Arnold
Chapter 8: Jeremiah Greenman: Prisoner of War
Chapter 9: A Harrowing Retreat
Chapter 10: The Healers: The Reverend, the Doctor, and the Smallpox Scourge
Chapter 11: Death Becomes a Daily Visitor
Chapter 12: The Compassionate Minister and the Enraged Doctor
Chapter 13: Christmas, 1776: Private John Greenwood Crosses the Delaware
Chapter 14: The Victory That Saved the Revolution
Chapter 15: New Jersey and Pennsylvania, 1777–1778: Lieutenant James McMichael: A Poet Goes to War
Chapter 16: Women of the Revolution
Chapter 17: Saratoga, 1777: The Arduous Journey of Sergeant Ebenezer Wild, Nineteen
Valley Forge
Chapter 18: The Harsh Road to a Winter Camp
Chapter 19: Private Elijah Fisher and the Agony of Valley Forge
Chapter 20: “The soldiers of our army are almost naked Lieutenant James McMichael: The Poet
Chapter 21: Private Elijah Fisher Joins Washington’s Elite Life Guard, 1778
Chapter 22: Monmouth, 1778: Captain Sylvanus Seely’s Militia Goes to War
Chapter 23: The Secret Life of Captain Seely
Chapter 24: Spring 1778: The African American Soldiers
Chapter 25: The Heroism of the Black Rhode Island Regiment
Chapter 26: John Greenwood, Privateer
Chapter 27: 1779–1780: The War’s Worst Winter and Mutiny
Chapter 28: Springfield: The Militia Saves the Revolution
Chapter 29: 1781: Victory at Yorktown
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes
Index
AUTHOR TO READER
The American Revolution may have been highlighted by the inspirational writing of Thomas Paine, the patriotism of the delegates to the Continental Congress, and the leadership of George Washington, but it was won by the enlisted men of the Continental Army over eight years of fighting against one of the greatest military forces in the world. It was not only their bravery under intense fire on battlefields at Trenton, Saratoga, and Yorktown that won the war, but their courage in simply staying together as an army through incredibly severe winters, smallpox epidemics, tattered clothes, and near-starvation that gained independence for America.
There have been many books written about George Washington and other generals in the rebellion and volumes about the key battles of the conflict. There have been lengthy biographies about important political figures of the revolutionary period such as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. But there have been very few works written about the ordinary soldiers of the Continental Army, America’s first army, especially the enlisted men, the original grunts.
The First Amer
ican Army is an effort to tell the story of the Revolution through the eyes of the common soldiers, not the generals. It is the story of eight men and their travails. Four of them—Elijah Fisher, John Greenwood, Ebenezer Wild of Massachusetts, and Jeremiah Greenman of Rhode Island—were enlisted men. I added a lieutenant, Pennsylvania’s James McMichael, because he was a poet whose patriotic stanzas added much to the story. I selected a feisty thirty-five-year-old county militia captain, Sylvanus Seely of New Jersey, to explain the role of the militia units. I added a chaplain, the Reverend Ammi Robbins of Connecticut, and a physician, Dr. Lewis Beebe of Massachusetts, so that the reader could understand the spiritual and medical sides of the war.
Finding the men was not easy. Many generals and officers kept journals throughout the war, but few enlisted men wrote down their thoughts for posterity. Most of the enlisted men who did keep journals filled them with rather bland entries (“It rained . . .”). Very few infantrymen fought for more than one year, either, and I needed people who spent several years in the army to tell a complete story. I spent a long summer looking for ghosts of the American Revolution. I was lucky and found the extraordinary soldiers whose lives fill these pages. Only the diaries of Greenwood and Greenman were published in book form. Most of the others were published as magazine articles, some over one hundred years ago. Seely’s journal was never published.
The book is the chronicle of each man’s journey in the army, linked together to tell the overall story of the Revolution. As an example, the reader meets John Greenwood, the fifteen-year-old fifer from Cape Cod, at the battle of Bunker Hill in 1775. Greenwood’s life is then recounted throughout the book as the reader encounters the other soldiers as they enter the story. All of the men move in and out of the volume as the history of the war unfolds. We see Greenwood participate in the invasion of Canada in 1775–1776, riding in a canoe alongside Benedict Arnold. We leave him to meet a remarkable pair of men, Doctor Beebe and Reverend Robbins, who become friends in the middle of the chaotic American retreat from Canada that winter during a terrible smallpox epidemic. We join Greenwood again with George Washington’s army as it crosses the Delaware and makes history. He leaves the story but returns when he decides to fight the war on the high seas, not the battlefield. As he continually departs from the narrative, we pick up other soldiers’ stories. Jeremiah Greenman, a private from Rhode Island, appears early when he joins the ill-fated invasion of Canada with Greenwood and is taken prisoner and held for nearly a year in Quebec. He comes back again at the bitter battle of Rhode Island in 1778 and in the hard winter of 1779–1780 at Morristown. The others follow that same revolving pattern.
The tales are never predictable. Greenman fought throughout the entire conflict and participated in many of its key battles, but he also trained one of America’s first all-black military regiments, the First Rhode Island. The irascible Fisher joined the army right after the battles of Lexington and Concord and fought for eight years as a common infantryman, but spent a year as one of George Washington’s bodyguards. Ebenezer Wild fought at Saratoga, Monmouth, and Yorktown and was so devoted to the army that he was one of the founding members of the Society of Cincinnati, the first veterans memorial group, at the end of the war.
Lieutenant McMichael of Pennsylvania, the poet, filled his journal with rhyming stanzas about patriotism. The real charm of this colonial Longfellow, though, was that he was married during the war and spent the rest of it doing anything possible to slip away to see his amorous young wife.
Finally, there was Seely, the head of the Morris County, New Jersey militia when the Revolution began. Seely, a married man with four children, was in love with the army, in love with the idea of independence, and, as his secret coded diary showed, in love with just about every woman he met. The story of his incessant womanizing, and the awful guilt that it brought, unfolding at the same time that he served as one of the most courageous militia leaders of the war, adds another dimension to this account of the first American army.
I then added entries from the diaries and journals of many other soldiers, mostly enlisted men, to complete the story of the battles of the war, the hard winters at Valley Forge and Morristown, and the army’s constant struggle to survive.
Other than Dr. Beebe and Rev. Robbins, who became friends in the war, we do not know if the other men knew one another. We do know that they were often in the same battles. Seely’s militia and Greenman’s Second Rhode Island even fought side by side at Springfield. Their diaries give us fascinating views of these battles from the different perspectives of the men, amid much smoke and bloodshed. It should be noted, too, that these were humble men and I had to find other sources to fully report their courage under fire.
These were simple infantrymen. There was no brilliant political theory in the diaries of the men in this book and no majestic lines about republican government or the rights of man. The common soldiers left the oratory to Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. But there was a constant call for independence and liberty. This is the story of brave men, the grunts of the first American army, who fought hard every day for a cause they firmly believed in and three main goals: 1) stay alive, 2) end the war to get home as soon as possible, and 3) kick the despised British out of the United States.
In doing that, for eight long years and against significant hardship, they not only won the war, but helped to create a unique democratic nation—the United States of America—that, despite all of its problems, has thrived as a model for freedom for the more than two hundred years since, thanks to them.
THE FIRST AMERICAN ARMY
Chapter One
BUNKER HILL:
The Arrival of Private John Greenwood, Age Fifteen, Fifer
Early on the warm morning of June 17, 1775, British artillery in Boston and on Her Majesty’s ships in the harbor opened fire on the Charlestown peninsula, north of the city. The peninsula contained the community of Charlestown, with its four hundred homes and some two hundred shops, warehouses, barns, and churches, and three very high and large grassy hills: Bunker, the highest, Breed’s, and Morton’s. American troops had fortified Bunker and Breed’s hills with earthworks, wooden fencing, and six cannon on the previous evening. General Thomas Gage, the commanding general in British-occupied Boston, was determined to clear the wide knolls to prevent the rebels from maintaining an elevated location where they would shell his army in the city or his ships in the harbor. An artillery pounding was to be followed by an afternoon attack of more than fifteen hundred troops.
Just after 1:30 p.m., a small navy of twenty-eight wide barges—each filled with more than forty armed British soldiers, and one transporting the man in charge of the operation, General William Howe, and his staff—began to make its way across the harbor from Boston toward Morton’s Point. As the ships moved through the water, the eyes of the men on board focused on Breed’s and Bunker Hills.
At just over six feet tall, physically well-proportioned and able to remain calm under fire, the affable Howe cut an impressive military figure. He and his men landed and quickly realized that their cannon had the wrong-sized cannonballs and were inoperable. Howe sent the boats back for reinforcements and usable ammunition while the British navy and land artillery fired shells into Charlestown. The shells hit several of the wooden residences there, igniting small fires whose thick smoke drifted throughout the area. One shell hit a church steeple, setting it on fire, and it soon toppled into the street.
The British assault on the two hills was viewed by one of the largest audiences of civilians to witness any battle during the American Revolution. The British artillery had opened up earlier that morning and the cannonading awakened everyone. Hundreds of residents in Charlestown climbed to the tops of their homes and raced out into nearby streets and meadows to watch the fighting on the hills. In Boston, several thousand people stood on the roofs of their houses for a good view. Some climbed to the tops of churches. Hundreds more packed the wharves near the water where the view was clearer.
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br /> Somehow, it was Breed’s Hill, a lower and less defensible knoll than Bunker, that the majority of the Americans wound up fortifying that day as the British continually shelled the area. The top of the hill was so elevated that the men there could see all of Boston’s dozen or so church steeples. They could also look down on the mill pond, the north battery full of British cannon, Hudson’s Point, and, barely, John Hancock’s commercial shipping wharf, plus the tops of the masts of ships moored at the Long Wharf, on the other side of town. The provincial forces were led by General Israel Putnam, a veteran of the French and Indian War, and Colonel William Prescott. It was Prescott, the tall commander with the muscular build developed from nearly twenty years of farming, who made most of the decisions. The esteemed Dr. Joseph Warren, sixty-nine, head of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, had joined them as a volunteer in a rash burst of patriotism applauded by all.
Wrote James Thacher, a local doctor who was an eyewitness, “[The British] immediately commenced a tremendous cannonade from their shipping, their floating batteries, and from all their fortifications. Bombs and shot were incessantly rolling among the provincials during the forenoon ’til the Royal Grenadiers and light infantry could be prepared to make their formidable attack.”1
Private Peter Brown, a company clerk in Prescott’s Massachusetts regiment, had fought at Concord. He watched the sea of Redcoats in their immaculate uniforms swarm off the barges and prepare for the attack. It was an awesome sight. Brown wrote that the British had so many men that they appeared ready to surround the provincials. “They advanced toward us in order to swallow us up. But they found a choky mouthful of us, though we could do nothing with our small arms as yet for distance and had but two cannon and nary a gunner. And they from Boston and from the ships a firing and throwing bombs, keeping us down ’til they got almost round us.”2
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