The First American Army

by Bruce Chadwick

  The private, by then eighteen, was set free the next morning, September 25, 1776, after nine months as a prisoner of war. He and several other soldiers walked from New York toward New England and home, more than two hundred miles, reaching Rhode Island on November 9. He luxuriated in “clean clothes” and “new shoes” and was happy to be home.

  Jeremiah Greenman’s war appeared to be over. After all, the teenager had promised Governor Carleton that he would remain at home and never take up arms against the British again.

  He lied.

  Chapter Nine

  A HARROWING RETREAT

  John Greenwood traveled to New York with the bulk of George Washington’s army following the British evacuation of Boston, certain that he would defend that city. He would not. Greenwood’s regiment was among several designated to provide reinforcements for the ill-fated invasion of Canada. Greenwood’s Twelfth Massachusetts was dispatched to Canada after the men had spent just three weeks in New York. It was a happy layover for Greenwood, who had been promoted to senior fifer, because he was able to have new fifes made for the regiment by a skilled New York instrument maker. His fifes in his bags, he boarded a ship headed up the Hudson for Albany with his regiment. There, they would go overland and sail up Lake Champlain to Montreal. In the Canadian city, Greenwood assumed, they would march east and stage another attack on Quebec.

  The Twelfth Massachusetts reached Montreal, still held by the Americans, a few weeks later. The teenager was apprehensive about any battles the regiment might find itself in, complaining in his diary that the five hundred men of the Twelfth Massachusetts were badly equipped. They carried muskets and blunderbusses of different sizes, possessed little ammunition, and had no bayonets. The men did not have swords either, although some had procured tomahawks. They had heard reports that hundreds of Indians were fighting with the British.

  Exactly what they all feared—a battle involving Indians—took place only days after their arrival. A combined force of five hundred Indians and one hundred fifty British had surrounded an American outpost west of Montreal called the Cedars on May 19, 1776, forcing its interim commander to surrender. Some of the American soldiers there were executed by the Indians when they seized the garrison. The commander of the Cedars had left before the attack to plead for reinforcements from Arnold at Montreal. On May 17, Arnold sent one hundred forty men under Major Henry Sherburne of Massachusetts to assist the troops at Cedars, not knowing it was now held by the Indians. Sherburne brought the leader of the Twelfth Massachusetts, Captain Bliss, and some of his men with him.

  Bliss asked Greenwood if he wanted to accompany the men or appoint other fifers to travel with them. Greenwood decided to remain in Montreal and sent two other fifers. “Off they all marched,” he wrote, “[I] little thinking what a time they would have of it.”

  Greenwood, who had made the most fortunate decision of his life, could not know that Sherburne and his men would march right into a well-orchestrated ambush when they were within four miles of the Cedars on May 20. Six men were executed that night and the next day; the rest were held prisoner.

  News of a second debacle reached Montreal quickly and on Saturday, May 25, Arnold left that city with the remainder of the Twelfth Massachusetts and five hundred additional men from other regiments to rescue those taken prisoner. To accomplish that task, the small army would have to do battle with the British and the Indians. Greenwood and the other enlisted men were worried about being taken prisoners by the Indians; none of them wanted to be killed or mutilated. Wrote Greenwood, “It is the custom of the Indians always to carry their prisoners with them . . . have them lie on the damp ground in the open air without the least covering except the heavens. [They were] often well soaked with rain and with little or nothing to eat. [Men] are generally much debilitated and weakened and subject to attack of flux and fever. As soon as one poor fellow is not able . . . to travel with them, the Indians knock him in the head more for the sake of getting his scalp than of getting rid of him, for the scalp is their trophy of war and he who has in his possession the greatest number is accounted the bravest warrior.”

  Arnold sent a scout to find Indian advance war parties and told Greenwood to go with him because, someone had told Arnold, Greenwood was “a brave little fellow of some intelligence.” It was here that the fifer became the soldier, carrying a gun and a sword he had procured in Montreal for the first time. That night, in search of Indians, the two men found a small two-story, two-room stone farmhouse in a thick forest. The scout, wearing a buckskin shirt, went in, leaving Greenwood hiding behind a wooden rail fence. Greenwood noted, “He was afraid my regimental clothing, blue coat turned up and trimmed with buff and silver lace, would cause suspicion.”

  The man and his wife inside seemed harmless, so the scout waved Greenwood to join him. Fifteen minutes later, the two soldiers and the couple were startled to hear a series of loud Indian war whoops coming from the woods outside the home. They assumed that the Indians had been in a skirmish with Arnold’s army, had lost, and were running from it. The scout and Greenwood dove underneath a bed in one of the rooms in an effort to hide. “In a minute or two the house and the entire road were ensconced with Indians, making a most hideous noise and retreating as fast as they could toward Fort Anne, some twelve miles off. In about an hour, they passed by without discovering us. Had they found us, we would have been burned alive.”

  Greenwood and the scout left the farmhouse and made their way through the woods, avoiding roads or clearings to remain unseen, and emerged several hours later outside of Fort Anne. The scout had changed clothes at the farmhouse and, looking like a Canadian trapper, ventured into the fort to gather information. He told Greenwood to hide behind another fence of round wooden poles a few hundred yards outside the fort. The teenager was nervous. He wrote, “I began to think what a situation I was in, standing in a nook between two posts of the fence within hearing of the savage Indians. Every minute appeared an hour; sometimes I heard them walking by me in the road. Then again, I would fancy they were looking after me; in short I had but a very unpleasant time of it.”

  Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the scout returned to tell him that the Indians were crossing the St. Lawrence and planned to ambush Arnold’s army of eight hundred men in a day or two. They had to hurry to inform the general of the danger. They began to run away from the fort through some thick underbrush, unable to see much on the ground in front of them in the dark. Greenwood fell climbing over a stone wall and cut open the heel of his right foot. He had lost the shoe for that foot earlier as they scrambled through some bushes and had to limp the two miles to the village of Lachine, on the St. Lawrence, where Arnold had told them he would stop to camp. The teenager’s foot continued to throb.

  Arnold, never one to wait, decided to attack the Indians preparing to ambush him and moved the army westward right after he received the information from Greenwood and the scout. Greenwood, unable to walk, was placed in the front of a boat, put in charge of a blunderbuss, and sailed toward Fort Anne with others against the current of the St. Lawrence as the bulk of the army marched along the shore. Arnold rode in a birch canoe close to Greenwood in the middle of the river.

  Along the way, the boats passed a naked man on the shore of a small island, who stumbled to the banks of the river. He was an American soldier who had escaped from the British and Indians that had taken the fort at the Cedars. He eagerly agreed to lead Arnold’s army to the Indian camp at Quinze Chiens, on the St. Lawrence.

  There, Greenwood wrote, they received a warm welcome. “The landing place was covered with woods, and behind every tree were three or four Indians who poured or showered their bullets upon us as thick as hailstones. General Arnold thought proper to give the signal of retreat to the other side of the river, so back we went.”

  They did so as fast as possible. From out of the woods appeared two field pieces operated by British soldiers that began to fire at the fleeing Americans in their canoes, the cannonbal
ls hitting close to the boats and sending splashes of water high into the air. The Indians fighting with Arnold were terrified. Greenwood observed that the cannon “made our Indians fly with their birch canoes like so many devils; they do not like to see large balls skipping over the water in and out until their force is lost, for a single one would knock their paper boats to pieces in a moment.”

  To Greenwood’s surprise, there was no battle that night or on the following morning. The Indians and the British under Captain George Forster had decided that Arnold’s forces were too large and well equipped for them and made the general an intriguing offer: they would give him almost all of their American prisoners, several hundred, if he would let them leave without firing a shot, and agree to free some British prisoners. After both sides scouted each other for six days, Arnold, as worried as anyone about leaving hundreds of his soldiers in the hands of the Indians, agreed.

  The prisoners the Indians turned over to Arnold the next day were pathetic looking. “Poor fellows, they looked as if they had been dragged by the heels for a hundred miles over the ground,” Greenwood noted.

  On May 6, reinforcements from England sailed up the St. Lawrence and had arrived at Quebec; nine hundred British troops on the ships attacked the Americans there as soon as the ships dropped anchor, driving them west toward Montreal. Then they marched west toward an even rosier target—Arnold and his army at Montreal.

  Arnold felt that the city could not be held. Upon his return he raced through Montreal to organize a massive and hasty American evacuation of the city on reports that the newly arrived British troops were within two days march of his army. With authorization from Congress, he bought up supplies from local merchants and farmers with practically worthless Continental currency. Arnold told his men to order residents to accept it, and then, in a maneuver that was to become a trademark, Arnold seized vast supplies of booty—rum, molasses, clothing—“for the army” that some later charged were for himself.

  When the Americans fled Montreal on June 15, they barely managed to escape. The evacuation itself was a scene of complete disorder, graphically described by Greenwood: “Down we scampered to the boats, those of the sick who were not led from the hospital crawling after us. Camp equippage, kettles, and everything were abandoned in the utmost confusion—even the bread that was baking in the ovens—for we were glad to get away with whole skins. When halfway across the river, it began to grow very dark and down came the rain in drops the size of large peas, wetting our smallpox fellows, huddled together like cordwood in the boats, and causing the deaths of many.”

  They crossed the St. Lawrence as speedily as possible. “It was a very cold rain and as the boat struck the shore I, being but a boy, and wet through and through, tried to take care of myself, at which I had a tolerable good knack, and so left the rest, dead and alive, to do the same. An old barn being near, I went in and soon found that others had discovered the retreat as well as myself and were lying on the floor close together like hogs, so I contentedly pigged it down with the rest.”

  A fatigued Greenwood and the men did not get much rest because officers came looking for them. “Turn out or we’ll fire upon you!” shouted one at the groaning soldiers in the barn, who were too tired and drenched to move. “We’ll fire upon you!” the soldier yelled again, brandishing his musket in the middle of the crowded barn. “Fire away!” a demoralized and exhausted Greenwood thought to himself as he stared at the officer.

  Arnold, fearful of the British behind him, led a forced march of three miles and then let the men sleep. Greenwood spotted an old wooden windmill and slept inside it, awakened in the morning by the beat of the drums, the early morning light and calls to move out. He watched as General Arnold ordered priests in the village to give him all of the wagons and carts nearby so that he could transport his stores and the sick. An angry Arnold told them that if they refused he would burn down the village; the clergymen agreed.

  At St. John’s, along the route toward Sorel, the Americans passed piles of warehouse stores from Montreal that Arnold had taken in the name of the army. They sat on the roadside or in yards; some of the wooden crates had been opened. The supplies, or the “plunder,” as Greenwood called it, had created a major problem for Arnold. He had been given approval from Congress to take whatever he needed from the merchants and swore that he had written down a list of the goods, supplying the name of each contractor or merchant from whom it was purchased—and the cost—for verification. He told Congress, though, that the rush of the retreat prevented a complete listing. He wrote to them, “It is impossible to know one hour beforehand the necessary steps to be taken. Everything is in the greatest confusion, not one contractor commissary or quartermaster; I am obliged to do the duty of all.”1

  Arnold had sent the goods to St. John’s and ordered Colonel Moses Hazen to sign for them and post a guard to insure their safety until his army arrived. Hazen, who did not like Arnold, noticed right away that there were no lists of what was in the crates or from whom they had been purchased. Despite what Arnold claimed were orders, Hazen refused to sign and to post a guard and his men opened the wooden crates and removed items from them, further muddling the paperwork on the goods.2 It appeared that Arnold did not have receipts for most of the supplies, either. This “official” removal of captured or commandeered goods, incomplete and questionable paperwork, lack of receipts, and shoddy bookkeeping would be a hallmark of Arnold throughout the war.

  Arnold’s army began to approach Lake Champlain in the middle of June. At the same time, an American force of one thousand men under the command of Generals John Sullivan and William Thompson was badly defeated at Three Rivers on June 8. The survivors of that battle were also forced to turn around and retreat toward Sorel in a helter-skelter fashion after losing hundreds of men.3 That expedition had been authorized by Congress, thanks to Arnold’s gloomy letter in April that he ended by warning them that “everything is at a stand for want of resources and, if they are not obtained soon, our affairs in this country will be entirely . . . ruined.”4 Congress was so startled by the letter that it sent a congressional committee all the way to Montreal to meet with Arnold to see what could be done to take Canada. The delegation, led by Benjamin Franklin, was wined and dined by the wily general; they were convinced that they had to send Arnold all the reinforcements they could and that Canada had to be conquered—despite the newly arrived British force.

  The country could not be taken, however, and the three separate expeditions of Montgomery, Arnold, and now Sullivan had ended as fiascoes and in hasty exit from Canada. The retreat from Montreal and other Canadian posts had been so badly planned that the group of Americans fleeing ahead of Arnold’s army—moving as fast as it could to leave the hell that Canada had become for its soldiers—believed that the men behind them were not Americans, but the British, and had set fire to a bridge they had crossed to prevent the “Redcoats” from following. Greenwood and the others had to cross the bridge while it was still burning, running through the flames as fast as they could.

  The Redcoats that Greenwood thought were behind him, however, were the real Redcoats and they were so close that they terrified him. He wrote, “We could plainly see the British on the opposite shore; so close were they upon us that if we had not retreated as we did, all would have been prisoners.”

  Arnold had his boats destroyed after the men crossed to the southern side of the St. Lawrence to prevent the British from seizing them and the men had to march southward on foot. The soldiers in Greenwood’s regiment, in the rear, found themselves walking by the seriously wounded American soldiers and smallpox victims who had died on the way and had been left on the side of the road so as not to slow down the column. Their corpses made haunting mileposts.

  Since he was a boy, no one asked Greenwood to do the same work that the men in the army performed. He did not have to carry heavy supplies, assist in the rowing of the boats or stand watch as a guard. He wanted to do his share to help the army, though, and
so he did what he knew best—he played music. Each evening on the retreat from Montreal, Greenwood took out a new fife he had made in New York and entertained both officers and the enlisted men with tunes. He had a standard repertoire of songs that he performed and then played any personal favorites that the men requested. These included both rousing drinking tunes they had heard so often at taverns and slow romantic ballads that reminded many of loved ones at home. Then, risking his health, Greenwood walked over to the temporary camp hospitals to visit the sick, including the men afflicted with smallpox, and played songs for them on his fife. They were all grateful for some lively melodies on those terrible nights on the run.

  Finally, the vast waters of Lake Champlain were in sight and the soldiers in Arnold’s army were loaded into a flotilla of large sailboats, all equipped with oars for rowing when there was no wind. They had a scorching sun above them and more than a hundred miles of open water in front of them—and the British army close behind them—before they would reach their destination, Fort Ticonderoga.

  Champlain, named after the French explorer Samuel de Champlain, was a natural wonder. It was the largest lake in what was the United States then, except for the Great Lakes, whose shores were shared by the U.S. and Canada. Champlain was one hundred seven miles long and fourteen miles across at its widest and just one mile at its narrowest. At some junctures at its northern tip, where it flowed into the Richelieu River near some islands, the lake was just a few hundred yards wide. The lake, which formed part of the border between New York and Vermont, covered a total of 435 square miles. It was 399 feet deep in some places, but near the shorelines, and in some places near Valcour Island to the north, it was just a few yards deep and only shallow bottom vessels could sail there. Lake Champlain was nestled between the Adirondack Mountains to the west and the Green Mountains, in Vermont, to the east.