The First American Army

by Bruce Chadwick

  Shortly after the arrival of the infected soldiers, a flotilla of British ships suddenly appeared. The warships sailed ever closer and began to shell the Americans when their cannon were in range. The U.S. boats and the hundreds of soldiers that had been walking along the river were both targets of the British cannon that raked the water and the shoreline. Some of the smallpox victims had managed to scramble on board Robbins’s gondola and other vessels, and stayed there, overcrowding the open decks of the ships, but dozens of others, still on land, were hailing the vessels with their arms and yelling for help. Left behind, they were taken prisoners as the army tried to outrun the British ships and head south to Sorel.

  General Thomas had sent out orders that all of the Americans fleeing the Quebec area, and those headed north, such as Robbins’s regiment, were to rendezvous at Sorel, a busy fur-trapping community, and await further orders. Robbins and the men in his boat raised their sail and helped pick up speed by manning the oars, too, as the shelling continued and numerous cannonballs crashed near the hull in the water, creating huge splashes of water close enough to soak the men on the boats. Robbins was frightened, his head swiveling from side to side as he watched shells hit in the water and explode on land, knocking down trees, sending tons of dirt soaring into the air, destroying huge clumps of bushes and leaving craters in the ground.

  He wrote, “Three [British] ships came near us, firing as they came, and our boats and people in a scattered condition. Distress and anxiety in every countenance, the smallpox thick among us. This is the most terrible day I ever saw. God of armies, help us.”

  A Doctor Far from Home

  Robbins and the men in flight with him reached Sorel, forty miles away, five days later, the day after Doctor Lewis Beebe had arrived there. He knew from information they received on the passage north that many American troops had been killed in Quebec and three hundred taken prisoner. He knew, too, that many of those still there and many in flight were badly wounded—and had been infected with smallpox. The men he greeted as they staggered into the American camp were in bad shape. He wrote in his journal, “Those who come safe to Sorel were obliged to leave all their baggage and bring nothing away but the clothes on their backs. No person can conceive the distress our people endured the winter past, nor was it much less at the time of their retreat.”

  Private Lemuel Roberts began his retreat just as hundreds of the pusfilled pocks exploded on his skin, even growing inside his ears. He wrote in his journal that he was racked with pain and misery. By the time his regiment reached safety in Sorel by boat, “my pock had become so sore and troublesome that my clothes stuck fast to my body, especially to my feet; and it became a severe trial to my fortitude to beat my disorder and assist in managing the boat.”9

  Lewis Beebe found himself in Sorel at the opposite end of the world from his former life. The bright, twenty-six-year-old doctor had, in just a few short years, achieved some distinction as a general practitioner in Sheffield, where he had moved after graduation to start his practice. Life was good. Beebe had become a welcome member of the community. He had married Lucy Allen, the sister of the fabled Ethan Allen, head of the Green Mountain Boys, on September 20, 1774.

  His golden life unraveled rather quickly once the war began. His wife, in her early twenties, died on June 10, 1775, and he plunged into a lengthy depression. Ethan Allen had gained fame by capturing Fort Ticonderoga from the British with Benedict Arnold in the spring of 1775, but shortly afterwards Allen was captured in a daring but failed attack on Montreal and sent to England, where he was hailed as Britain’s most illustrious prisoner of war. Beebe decided that leaving his hometown, and memories of his wife, for a stint in the army might help him recover emotionally and he volunteered in the spring of 1776. It seemed like a logical choice. His patriotic brother-in-law was surely an inspiration for the doctor. Beebe had also been friendly with John Brown, a political radical at Yale. He joined a Connecticut regiment and was assigned to join forces en route to reenforce an American army already reeling from a severe defeat at Quebec in the winter.

  Beebe and Rev. Robbins might have met in Sorel, rapidly filling up with sick troops, that first day that Robbins arrived in May 1776. If not, they met shortly afterwards because both of their journals, and the journal of Rev. David Avery, another chaplain, indicate that Beebe and Robbins became friends and often traveled and dined together at the homes of local residents or with officers in their tents. Beebe wrote that he listened to and admired Rev. Robbins’s sermons; Robbins wrote of his meals with the doctor. Both men were healers. Robbins, a man of God, had arrived in war-torn Canada to spiritually heal the souls of men who were fighting and dying. Beebe had reached Canada not only to physically heal the men badly wounded in the battles there, but to attempt to save soldiers trapped in a brutal smallpox epidemic. Now, caught in the middle of a landmark military disaster and a massive, uncoordinated, frantic retreat, with dozens of men arriving in Sorel with their bodies ravaged by the smallpox and other illnesses, the two young healers would have their hands full.

  The other doctors were pleased to greet Beebe. They had been overwhelmed by the volume of soldiers being carried into their hospitals. Surgeons used to treating a few men each day found themselves standing in the middle of temporary hospitals set up in barns or large tents with several hundred men around them and more being carried in each hour, many groaning from their wounds and illnesses.

  Dr. Beebe began his work on a Wednesday, three days after his arrival, treating fifty patients in the general hospital at Sorel, where within weeks a total of more than thirty-three hundred sick men would be in hospitals, taking up all of the narrow wooden beds and laying on blankets spread on the floors. He treated most with the bloodletting that was so popular in the colonial era. Doctors firmly believed that many illnesses were caused by infected blood and that simply bleeding the victims, sometimes draining several pints from their bloodstream, would cure them. He gave others medicines such as tarts, antimonies, or jalap. A good doctor and a physician always trying to learn about disease, Lewis Beebe realized quickly that the dozens of different wounds the men had suffered, their diseases, ailments, and the smallpox afforded him a unique chance to study medicine, opportunities that never existed back in tiny Sheffield. “The camp is one of the finest schools in the world,” he noted.10

  The next day a controversy erupted over how to treat the smallpox victims. There were more each day and soon infected men would total nearly two thousand in medical wards at Sorel and nearby in the towns of St. John and Chambly. At the time, there were inoculations, but the “ten days rest and diet” procedure for inoculation was slow and men came down with the disease before the inoculation could take effect.

  Doctors urged high ranking officers to authorize inoculations upon arrival so that the men could be treated quickly and their lives saved. It seemed like an obvious decision. Benedict Arnold, who had been watching his men die of the pox since December, understood the need for the inoculations and ordered all of the men in Sorel to undergo them. The first regiment, Colonel Porter’s, was inoculated that day. The doctors made plans to inoculate everyone else within the next week or so. But then General John Thomas, who had seen men and women die of smallpox in Boston earlier in the year, disagreed and upon his arrival at Sorel the following day, May 16, ordered a halt to the inoculations that Arnold had just approved. Not only did Thomas override Arnold, but said that any soldier who received an inoculation would be shot. Thomas had decided that mass inoculations, and the recovery period, would render too many soldiers unable to fight should the British catch up to the Americans. Despite his reasons, the doctors in camp were astonished that a former physician would bar inoculations, especially since this was an obvious emergency.

  So was everyone else. After Thomas’s orders halting all inoculations, men who did not want to be shot but wanted to survive smallpox secretly inoculated themselves between their toes, so there would be no physical evidence of cuts in their skin. Offic
ers even told the men to do so and suggested areas of the body where cuts could not be easily detected. Everyone was scared. “The smallpox strikes terror into our troops,” wrote Rev. Robbins, who had seen the ravages of the disease in hundreds of men in Sorel, a place, he added, that had poor leadership and was in a daily state of confusion. (It is not known whether Robbins was immune to the disease).

  On the following Tuesday, Dr. Beebe was visited by an aide to General Thomas who told him that the commanding general wanted to see him right away; the general did not feel well. The physician, uncertain what the general wanted, accompanied the officer to Thomas’s large command tent. Beebe was taken aback by the deteriorating condition of the man standing in front of him. Beebe knew what Thomas’s problem was right away. “He evidently had the smallpox,” a startled Beebe wrote, wondering how someone ill with the pox would prevent others from being inoculated. It made no sense.

  Beebe’s own life would now be put in danger because Thomas, who knew he was sick and needed expert medical care, ordered the doctor to travel with him and treat him in Chambly, fifty miles away, where he planned to recuperate from his illness while continuing to run the army from a different base of operations as it withdrew south.

  The two men, accompanied by a few soldiers, left Sorel on Tuesday and throughout their two-day journey down river to Chambly encountered many troops who were in flight from the Quebec area. They learned of a disastrous engagement between a Rhode Island regiment of seven hundred men led by Henry Sherburne, and several hundred Indians. According to early reports, everyone in Sherburne’s regiment had been killed in the battle. The men spreading that news had no reports of Arnold’s rush to rescue Sherburne’s men with soldiers including John Greenwood.

  Just after sunset, after two days of slow and arduous traveling, Dr. Beebe and General Thomas arrived in Chambly. Thomas felt well enough to walk a half-mile to his lodging, listening to an array of both news and rumors about the trouble at Quebec as he moved. Doctor Beebe was at his side. The next morning, following more treatment from Beebe, General Thomas told the physician that he felt much better, and over the next few days his pustules began to shrink and his condition visibly improved. Beebe began to think that the general might survive the attack. His spirits were lifted at the new health of his most famous patient.

  The condition of others with smallpox did not improve. Dr. Beebe began to treat more soldiers trying to fight off smallpox while laying in horse barns amid dirty hay and dung. The large wooden barns that creaked at night from the wind and were overwhelmed by heat in the daytime appeared to be large ovens in which men were roasting from the heat and dying of the pox. There was a nonstop cacophony of weeping, moans, and sheer misery that surrounded the doctor as he worked throughout the day in the barns. Beebe wrote of the men there ceaselessly groaning from pain:

  The most shocking of all spectacles was to see a large barn crowded full of men with this disorder, many of which could not see, speak, or walk—one, nay two, had large maggots, an inch long, crawl out of their ears. [Pustules] were on almost every part of the body. No mortal will ever believe what these suffered unless they were eyewitnesses. It was almost sufficient to excite the pity of brutes.

  Rev. David Avery was an obstinate man who would ask Dartmouth College for his tuition back because, he charged, he received no education there. The chaplain had traveled to Ticonderoga and Crown Point with Beebe in the winter. Avery possessed an iron constitution and was never sick, despite being surrounded by illness. He visited those barns at Chambly, too. He wrote, “The sick were in horse stables just cleared of dung . . . laid on the floors of the stinking stables.”

  Those who survived those barns, and other wretched hospitals, described their illnesses and desperate efforts to overcome them in graphic detail. Simon Fobes survived his pox in a Quebec prison. He wrote, “When the pock was coming out in seventy to eighty of our number, a fever very high and no water to drink, the men drank their own urine which made the fever rage too violently to be endured. Our flesh seemed a mass of corruption. At the same time, we were covered with vermin. When we were a little recovered, we were moved back to our former prison without any cleansing or changing of our apparel. Our clothing was stiff with corrupted matter.”11

  Many of the men coming down with the smallpox were in mid retreat in the region and could neither rest or obtain inoculation. They were stuck and had to fight their way out of Canada and out of the grips of the epidemic. One was Bayze Wells, of Connecticut. He started to break out on May 7 while staying overnight at a farmhouse. He did not want to remain, ill, and be taken prisoner, so the next morning he climbed into a bark canoe and, with others, paddled several miles downriver to meet his regiment. He remained there for a week, becoming sicker, and then they had to flee. The entire group left in canoes and Wells, like the others, had to paddle as fast as he could all night. He felt dizzy throughout the evening and into early morning and, just after dawn, fainted in the canoe. He had to be carried the rest of the day in a cart and finally managed to make it to a hospital.

  Many died on the retreat. One soldier, Charles Cushing, estimated that thirty captains alone had perished from the pox. Cushing’s friend, Colonel James Reed, of New Hampshire, told him that he expected to lose an entire third of his regiment to the disease.12

  Others had to fight on while the smallpox festered in their bodies. Bayley Frye, a novice soldier who was made a colonel in order to get him to volunteer for a dangerous mission, found himself coming down with pox during the first week of May. Pustules began to appear on May 10. A few days later, very sick, he was ordered to take a village of four houses that held thirty-three men, women, and children. In the fight that ensued he nearly fainted from the pox several times. He could not move quickly and was badly injured.13

  Dozens of men fleeing the Quebec disasters arrived in Chambly daily. New orders countermanded old ones within hours. Many had been wounded and others had smallpox.

  Dr. Beebe, overworked and overwhelmed, was an angry young physician. He had nothing but disdain for the officers in the Continental Army that he had met in just two weeks at Sorel and Chambly. On the day when the officers ordered as many men as possible to parade at Chambly, over twelve hundred, most of them barely able to walk, Beebe scrawled sarcastically in his journal, “Had we a Washington or a Lee to take the command from a set of haughty, ambitious aspiring miscreants who only pride in promotion and honor, we might have hopes of regaining Quebec.”

  He was even unhappier about his treatment of General Thomas, who had taken a turn for the worse after all the outward appearances of recovery. Thomas suddenly became ill and died of the pox in his bed at Chambly just after the sun rose on the morning of Sunday, June 2, a distraught Dr. Beebe at his bedside. What enraged Beebe was that the general, a doctor, might have been saved by being a recipient of the very smallpox inoculations that he had outlawed.

  On the day after Thomas’s death, Beebe took a count of the men in the Chambly barns suffering from smallpox and put the number at just over three hundred. He and others had apparently secretly inoculated them, against Thomas’s wishes, while the general was in bed and Beebe hoped that they would all survive. They would not. On the very next day, a man died of the pox, his entire body covered with pus-filled pocks. No one would go near his corpse for fear of catching the disease themselves and the man had to be buried without a coffin. The standard set of pallbearers could not be found to carry the body to a grave and it had to be dragged there. “The stupidity of mankind in this situation is beyond all description,” wrote Beebe, who watched the way that the soldiers passed from the earth—without any dignity.

  The next day Dr. Beebe visited an officer who had become his friend, Colonel Reed of New Hampshire, who had lost so many men in his regiment to the pox. Now he found to his dismay that Reed, too, had the smallpox. On his way back to his lodging, Beebe encountered a soldier whom he despised, a “little, great, proud, self-conceited, foppish quack.” The man haughti
ly asked Beebe if he had any physic [medicine] to give him because he did not feel well. The doctor, angry about all of the men sick and dying under his care, and now Colonel Reed, too, snapped at the soldier, “I have plenty of physic, but God damn my soul if I’ll let you have some.” Then he turned abruptly and walked away.

  Two days later, on Friday, one man died of smallpox, one of colic, and one of a fever. Beebe and other doctors struggled to keep the soldiers in the barns alive. He was furious about the spartan, temporary hospitals, the dearth of medicine, and the uselessness of traditional medical practices. He wrote that night that he was “moved with compassionate feeling for poor, distressed soldiers; when they are taken sick, are thrown into this dirty, stinking place, and left to take care of themselves, no attendance, no provision made, but what must be loathed and abhorred by all, both well and sick.”

  On Sunday, two men under his care died of smallpox and two more passed away from the disease on Monday. That same fatal day was also the one year anniversary of Lucy Beebe’s death and the memory of his late wife’s passing sent Beebe into a deep depression. He sadly wrote in his journal that night: “Oh fleeting time, who dost make no delay, but with rapid force sweeps all without distinction to one common grave. Let me remember that the same thing must take place with respect to me as it did to her.”

  The good doctor then learned that a regiment badly afflicted with smallpox—the majority of the men were sick and barely able to walk— had just been ordered to travel by boat to Sorel, a distance of fifty miles. Beebe called the decision “ridiculous” and then scrawled at the end of his journal entry for that long and melancholy day, “It is enough to confuse and distract a rational man from becoming a surgeon to a regiment.”