The First American Army

by Bruce Chadwick

  Jeremiah Greenman was in one of the other companies that fought their way into the lower town. He wrote, “With hearts undaunted to scale the walls we march on down to St. Roche,” and then to the lower town area of Quebec. They were easily spotted. “Alarm sounded and bells rang. They soon turned out and formed themselves along the ramparts. They kept a continual fire on us but we got up to their two-gun battery after losing a great number of men. We soon got into their battery, which was two nine pounders. We got in and took seventy prisoners. Then our men’s arms got wet and we could not do much.”

  Greenman’s unit was trapped. They soon learned that Montgomery had been killed and Arnold wounded. The attack had failed. Surrounded, they were forced to surrender to the British, as did between three and four hundred other Americans (fifty-one were killed and thirty-six wounded in the assault). Greenman was first marched to a Jesuit college in Quebec, opposite the cathedral there, and then to a convent, where he was put under guard, with others, as a prisoner of war.

  At first, Arnold did not know what happened to anyone after he was shot and went down in the snow. The general was carried back to a makeshift American hospital at St. Roche, where he received reports of the fighting. Despite the setbacks he had seen all around him in Quebec, he refused to order a retreat. The feisty Arnold was treated by Dr. Senter and did remain in the hospital, confined to bed, but he took two pistols with him and told Senter that he would fight it out with the British from his bed should they arrive.

  Prisoner of War

  Upon his arrival at the convent on the evening of January 1, 1776, Greenman had to chuckle when his jailers presented him with a cup of rum and a biscuit and wished him a happy New Year. Some New Year.

  The prisoners there, all enlisted men, were given one pound of bread, a half pound of meat and six ounces of butter once a day, and a half pint of boiled rice each day. A resident of the town gave them a cask of wine for New Year’s.

  The enlisted men were kept in very cramped quarters. “Very uncomfortable,” wrote Greenman, “Not enough room to lay down to sleep.”

  He wrote too soon. A few days later the enlisted men were taken to another room in the convent that was smaller than their original chamber. The men tore up some partition boards in the new cell and burned them to give themselves more room. Two men didn’t need more room; they were clamped in irons following a conversation about escaping that was overheard by a guard. The promised food allowances had been forgotten and the men were served salmon, or “stinking salmon,” as Greenman put it.

  Some of the troops were housed in a jail that overlooked a square through which wooden wagons carried the blood-soaked bodies of dead Americans. They had been tossed on top of each other, their limbs splayed this way and that, and their wounds fresh. They were driven on the way to the “death house,” where the slain American soldiers would be dumped in a pile with their compatriots. Pvt. John Henry, somberly watching a procession of the wagons, began to cry when one drove past his cell window carrying a friend. He wrote, “Poor Nelson lay on top of half a dozen other bodies, his arms extended beyond his head, as if in the act of prayer.”5

  Greenman found himself in such a tawdry prison because neither side planned for a long war. Neither the Americans or British constructed prisons and prisoners of war were marched into whatever large structures either side could find. The British put several thousand captured soldiers in New York City prisons that were formerly sugar warehouses. Prisoners taken in the Philadelphia battles found themselves in the Walnut Street jail in that city. Many American sailors were taken back to England and tossed into Dartmoor, Old Mill, and Forten prisons and even incarcerated in the Tower of London. Those captured in the Caribbean, usually from privateer vessels, were put into small jails or homes converted into jails on nearby islands. British and Hessian prisoners were held in jails and warehouses. Some Hessians were put to work as laborers in ironworks.

  The worst jails were the dreaded prison ships of the British navy, anchored in Wallabout Bay, off Brooklyn. The British needed large spaces to house three thousand American soldiers captured in the New York battles in 1776 and decided to refit several transport ships for confinement. The men were dumped into hopelessly overcrowded and badly managed ships, such as the Jersey, Hunter, and Stromboli. They slept side by side on wood planks in the badly ventilated holds of the ships with terrible food, infrequent exercise, and severe punishments for small infractions of the captain’s haphazard rules. The Jersey, a real hellhole, was renovated as a prison after it was determined to be unfit for service in the early 1770s. The men considered it the worst prison. Thousands died on the prison ships and their bodies were buried on beaches of Wallabout Bay. In 1808, American authorities decided to dig up the skeletons of prisoners buried there and found eleven thousand, some of whom were British and Hessian dead. Several thousand more were buried elsewhere and never found. No comprehensive records were kept on either side, but it is likely that more than ten thousand Americans perished as prisoners of war.6

  One solution to prison overcrowding for the British, particularly early in the war, was parole. Officers who were captured were held in private homes at night and allowed to walk about the city during the day; some even struck up friendships with residents and conducted romances with local women. These prisoners were usually kept between six months and a year and then sent home.

  Prison exchanges were another means of obtaining freedom. The British would free several dozen prisoners following a similar release by the Americans. This was often done by rank, one general for another or three lieutenants for three lieutenants. Enlisted men exchanged were grouped together.

  Captivity was depressing for soldiers, but it also had profound effects on their families back home. Men held prisoner could not help with their family farm or business. Their imprisonment placed enormous stress on their wives and family. Few were as upset, and held up as well, as Abigail Johnson, whose husband, Colonel Thomas Johnson, was held captive in Canada. She was eight months pregnant when he was captured; her sister was staying with her for the birth that her husband would miss. She was steadfast, though, and in her letters never worried about her health, only his. “It gives me great satisfaction to hear that you are well,” she wrote, “for I was very anxious for you.”7

  Many were harmed more by what they perceived as abandonment by wives, friends, and neighbors than by their terrible living conditions. Caleb Foot was taken prisoner in the winter of 1780 and incarcerated in the dreary confines of Forten Prison, in Portsmouth, England. In letters to his wife, he complained about the terrible food, cold, and lack of clothing, but he saved his real anguish for her and the others back home, telling her that “I must lie in prison ’til the wars are over and not have the pleasure to receive one letter from home; for I find by unhappy experience that friends in America are very scarce. It is very surprising that I cannot find one friend to write to me. This mystery is very dark to me, and I cannot account for it” (most likely Mrs. Foot, like many others, simply did not know where her husband was being held).8

  The windows of the convent where Jeremiah Greenman was housed did give the men good seats for the weeks-long, rather feeble siege of the town that Arnold tried to oversee from his hospital bed. Greenman regularly observed fires in St. Roche’s, outside the city, and at distant farmhouses that he surmised were caused by British bombardment. He and the men were certain that another American attack on Quebec would begin shortly and that they would soon be freed. Greenman noted, “We live very happily and contented, though we are in such a dismal hole, hoping the first dark night that our people will be in and redeem us.” The chance to watch the war ended in a few days when their jailers nailed thick wooden planks across their windows to prevent any further viewing.

  By March 1, a smallpox epidemic had raced through the convent, as it had struck throughout the Quebec area. Greenman wrote that nearly sixty men had been afflicted (actually, by that time several hundred prisoners as well as American troo
ps outside the city had come down with the pox). They were taken to the hospital to fight it. In a discriminatory and cruel decision, Governor Carleton had permitted officers, but not enlisted men, to be inoculated by Quebec doctors, so Greenman and his fellow enlisted men in the convent were constantly at risk.

  “Very cold and disagreeable,” he wrote of his days in confinement. The seventeen-year-old Greenman did not have to remain in prison, though. A miraculous opportunity presented itself on March 1. An American loyalist who was a trader, Captain James Frost, arrived at Quebec with his small fleet of ships that had just sailed up the St. Lawrence River. He was given a tour of the prison, along with several British officers who had arrived with him. Frost was allowed to walk past some of the cells and look at the prisoners. He was startled to see Jeremiah Greenman in one. Frost had been a friend of Greenman’s father before the war and knew the boy, too.

  Frost asked the guards to remove Greenman from his cellblock for a conference and pulled him far away from the officers, a firm hand on Greenman’s by now rather weak arm, turning to shield his actions from the jailers. Frost reached into his jacket and gave Greenman some money. Then he carefully explained to the teenager that if he would sign a king’s pardon, or admission of guilt, the captain, who had friends in high places in Quebec, could not only have the boy set free, but released into his custody. Then, as his guardian, he could put him on board one of his ships as a general seaman and take him home to his family in Rhode Island.

  An undernourished but proud Greenman looked right at him, thrust the money into his pocket, and nodded his thanks. But he refused the extraordinary offer. “I told him I had entered the cause of my country and meant to continue in it until our rights was declared.” The officers laughed at him but Frost did not. The teenager turned, summoned the guard, and went back into confinement, ignoring his chance to go home.9

  Greenman and the others passed their time in prison with ingenious inventions. They played every word game they had ever learned and told endless war stories. When they ran out of stories they discussed every girl each of them had ever met. Needing some musical entertainment to perk up their downtrodden spirits, they tore the buttons off their coats and somehow turned them into a fife that a musician among them played to cheer them up.

  On most days the prisoners discussed the many rumors that floated through the convent. The two that received the most dissection were that 1) Benedict Arnold would personally lead a charge on the town to free them, and that it would come that night or the next, and 2) George Washington, furious that they had been held in prison, had assembled an army of two thousand of his best soldiers and had sent it to Quebec weeks before; it would be arriving to storm the city at any moment.

  The days dragged on. Every few days someone would be put in irons for offenses such as trying to talk to a sentry or discussing escape. Every few nights an alarm would be sounded and a cannon would be rolled into place in front of Greenman’s cell to prevent an escape if an attack from outside the walls commenced. “They are afraid of us,” he wrote proudly.

  The soldiers were moved again on March 13, forty-three days after their capture, to a secure army barracks they nicknamed the Dauphin Jail, because the British, hearing the same rumors as the prisoners, were certain that Arnold would lead an attack on March 15.

  There were so many prisoners in each room at the overcrowded barracks that they had to sign a sheet that was nailed to the door to identify them. Greenman joked that at least the new jail was so strong, with its high ceiling and thick stone walls, that it was “bomb proof ” and they would be safe from cannon fired by either side.

  The new jail had windows that no one bothered to board this time and the men had an ample view of the city and, beyond it, if they stood on their toes, they could see the colors flying over the tops of the tents of the American forces. The enlisted men confined with Greenman began to think that they might be able to escape from the jail, which was not as secure as the convent. “Most of the prisoners thought best to get out then,” Greenman said.

  The larger problem was to escape from the walled-in city with its enormous gates. An escape from the barracks would be noticed and the men would have little time to make it to the walls and scramble over them to freedom. There were British soldiers everywhere, in addition to the jail guards and sentries on the walls, and the Americans would be shot.

  The planning of the escape took days, and as the men talked they came up with an ingenious scheme to not only escape from the confines of the Dauphin Jail, but seize Quebec itself. The plan, as Greenman outlined it often in later years for eager listeners, went like this: all of the prisoners would quietly leave through the main door of the barracks, which they were certain could be jimmied open. One group of escaping soldiers would subdue the Redcoats guarding the perimeter of the Dauphin Jail and everyone else would follow them out. One group of prisoners, containing artillerists, would race to the cannon on the ramparts, running up the narrow stone stairways, disabling soldiers in their way, turn several cannon around, and then shoot at any building in the town in order to set it on fire. At the same time, anticipating the confusion the artillery would cause, another group of men would storm St. John’s Gate, the main entrance to the city, kill or knock out any guards there, and quickly open it. Anyone who subdued a British soldier would grab his musket and fire at other soldiers, or fire anywhere, to make noise.

  Their comrades outside the city, spotting the fires and hearing the cannon and muskets, and seeing the gate raised, would then surely attack the town. The ensuing battle that Greenman and the other escapees envisioned would not only result in their freedom, but the capture of Quebec.

  And the complicated and daring plan might have worked, too, except for one, tiny, unforeseen problem: ice. The main barracks door was continually stuck shut by ice that formed on the floor within the jail every day. Two teenaged soldiers were assigned to discreetly chip away at the ice, to allow the door to swing open when necessary, but they were spotted by guards. The two teenagers were grabbed and locked in irons and interrogated, as were other prisoners. One frightened man divulged the entire scheme.

  The revenge of their British jailers was swift. All of the men were confined in thick, heavy leg irons or handcuffs, which Greenman wrote were “very uncomfortable.” Head counts were now taken twice a day to make certain that no one had escaped. Rations were cut and a new kind of biscuit was given to the men. “We think they was poisoned,” Greenman said of the biscuits after most of the men became sick shortly after eating them.

  The men demanded medical care after vomiting up the biscuits. They received it, but the only medicine they wound up with was the common physic that doctors on both sides gave men to make them purge themselves. “[It] proved that we was poisoned,” insisted a bitter Greenman, who, like the others, vomited even more after taking the medicine.

  Here, again, the men, miserable in their irons, talked endlessly of the attack by Arnold that they were certain would be launched at any moment. It was their only hope, but as March faded into April and then early May, Greenman abandoned that dream and lamented. “We are almost ready to give up, fearing they will not come.”

  Any hopes they maintained of an American attack to free them were ended harshly on May 6. Just after the sun rose that morning, the prisoners looked out their windows on an astonishing sight—three large British warships (the frigates Surprise and Iris and the sloop Martin) majestically sailing up the St. Lawrence right at them, their big canvass sails unfurled and billowing in the Canadian wind, the first of fifteen ships in a fleet. Greenman observed, “Three ships came into the harbor with reinforcements of about one thousand men at which time all the bells in the city rang.”

  The troops did not disembark and march into Quebec, as Greenman expected, but, in a preplanned, surprise maneuver, charged directly at the American camp on the Plains of Abraham, shocking the Continental Army. Governor Carleton directed a force of two hundred men from the ships and seven
hundred of his own soldiers in the charge. The Americans fled in confusion after a short battle that the men in the Dauphin Jail watched in utter depression. Their last hope for salvation seemed to flee along with their army.

  Greenman was dejected and angry at his comrades at the same time. He wrote, “If they had only known how bad it was to be a prisoner they would never have retreated [without] giving battle.”

  The twelve warships behind the Surprise, Iris, and Martin arrived the next day, with more troops and cannon. Throughout the month, additional vessels landed in Quebec; some troop transports and some supply ships. Their jailers told them that the new army was led by Britain’s best general, the flamboyant “Gentleman” Johnny Burgoyne, and that he rode at the head of an army of over seven thousand men. First they were going to chase and destroy the American troops, now under the command of General John Thomas, and then turn toward Montreal and wipe out the Americans holding it. The city was under the command of Arnold, who had moved there in early May.

  The news crushed Greenman. “Here we live very discontented and quite out of hope of ever being relieved,” he wrote in late September, adding later that “they are keeping us in such a hole not fit for dogs much more for men.”

  He was certain that he would never go home and might spend years in the Dauphin Jail, but he was wrong. Governor Guy Carleton decided that he was better off without the prisoners because it was too costly to house, feed, and guard them. During the first week of June, Carleton walked into the Dauphin Jail, surrounded by his armed guards, and stood a few yards from Greenman as he addressed the men.

  They could go home, and shortly, he told them, as long as they promised to remain there and not rejoin the American army and fight against the British. It was that simple. By now, the men just wanted to leave and almost all signed a promise to remain at home, including Greenman. They left Canada nine weeks later on British ships that eventually took them to New York for their release. The night before they were to be freed, the British on board hosted them to a “night of carousing and dancing,” as Greenman gleefully noted in his journal.