The First American Army

by Bruce Chadwick

  Robbins was distraught at the physician’s urging that he retire from the service. Robbins wrote that night, “I would not shrink from the work. Our war is a righteous war; our men are called to defend the country; whole congregations turn out and the ministers of the gospel should go and encourage them when doing duty, attend and pray for and be with them when sick, and bury them when they die. I hope to return to my work.” The next morning, extremely weak, he walked slowly to Beebe’s wagon, climbed in, and headed home for what Beebe and the doctors in Stillwater were certain was a permanent stay.

  Lewis Beebe apparently drove Robbins all the way home—distance of one hundred forty miles from Ticonderoga in a simple wagon over narrow dirt roads—and either bought, rented, or borrowed a horse. He rode the rest of the way to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and visited Dr. Sergeant, his personal physician, who cured him with five days of treatments with vinum antimonial, administered three times a day, and plenty of rest. Dr. Beebe never thought of staying home for good, as he might have, and returned to the army as soon as he felt better. He did so despite his growing attraction to Margaret Kellog, the daughter of a prominent family in Sheffield, whom he must have seen again on his medical leave.

  Endless Misery

  Beebe’s journey back to Fort Ticonderoga was constantly halted by rainstorms. He shrugged them off, starting to think like the soldiers he was treating. “The bravery of good soldiers consists in enduring hardships and fatigue with patience,” he said of his travails. On Wednesday, July 28, he was stuck at Fort George, where he visited the hospital and found it jammed with seven hundred men. Officers then took him to the fort’s graveyard. There were three hundred fresh graves, all dug within the last month. “It was melancholy, indeed, to see such desolation made in our army,” Beebe wrote.

  The staggering number of dead in the graveyard, most from smallpox, was the first sign that the American army’s situation had grown much grimmer in the weeks that the doctor had been away. He was greeted by even starker sights when he made it back to Ticonderoga. More men had arrived there and the death rate had climbed to ten per day. He learned, too, that Horatio Gates was fearful of a British attack and had ordered Benedict Arnold to build a small navy to battle British warships if they ventured onto Lake Champlain.

  Beebe told his superiors that half the men in his own regiment were unfit for duty not just with smallpox, but dysentery, jaundice, diarrhea, rheumatism, scurvy, piles, lumbago, and putrid fever, and that for many their situation was “truly dangerous.” Dysentery raged throughout the camp, he told them, and yet he had run out of medical supplies to treat it and had to listen to the troops yell at him, and other doctors, because they could not obtain any help.

  It was the smallpox that worried Dr. Beebe, though. He warned, “It has brought many to the grave and will many more unless immediately discharged.” The number of sick had swollen so much that it was no longer possible to treat all of them in the hospitals at Ticonderoga. Small villages of tents were set up outside the fort where those with diseases, fevers, and smallpox were sent until beds were available in the hospital, made so when men died and were dumped in the graveyards. Now there were no more open graves, but merely open pits into which a dozen or more corpses were tossed every morning. “Hard fortune to have so many sick on hand at one time. But harder for those who are sick to be crowded into dirty, lousy, stinking hospitals enough to kill well men,” he seethed in early August.

  One soldier who had been very ill, and convinced he would die, hid the knife from his dinner plate and, a few hours later, took his life by slitting his throat. One evening Beebe watched men carry a corpse out of a tent. They told him that the man had been eating dinner. He took one long breath, then another, then he fell forward, dead, his face hitting the beefsteak on his plate.

  Beebe was convinced now, after yet another depressing tour of his hospitals, that the men with smallpox, even though put in special wards, were infecting everyone else. He suggested simply sending them home to die with their loved ones. He also had to contend with the lack of medical manpower to treat the sick and dying. The doctors who had labored so courageously were coming down with fatal illnesses themselves. Some died and some were laid up in bed, unable to work. The few doctors remaining now had to take on all of the work, which grew in intensity each day. During the last week of August, several more doctors were bedridden and Beebe wrote angrily in his journal that all of the medical work had now fallen on his shoulders. He now had to treat doctors as well as soldiers on his daily rounds, serve as an administrator, beg generals for medical supplies, and complete endless paperwork. He was overwhelmed.

  Soldiers remembered the deceased with great reverence. Lamenting the loss of the majority of privates in a company, Private John Henry wrote that “they were originally as elegant a body of men as ever came into my view . . . beautiful boys.” Men fondly recollected the elegance of the last rites of the Catholic church and the comfort the priests gave to those about to take their last breath. James Melvin, a private from Massachusetts, survived the smallpox. He was quartered with other Americans in a Quebec monastery following the failed attack there. On January 19, the evening after a day-long snowstorm, Melvin watched as the last rites were administered to a French soldier he knew who had been ravaged by the disease.

  He recalled, “The nuns came and read over him, afterwards the priest came in; then they fetched in a table covered with a white cloth and lighted two wax candles about three feet long, and set them on the table. The priest put on a white robe over his other garments and the nuns kneeled down, and the priest stood and read a sentence and then the nuns a sentence and so they went on some time; then the priest prayed by himself; then the nuns, and then the priest again, then they read all together a spell, and finally the priest alone; then the priest stroked the man’s face and then they took away their candles and tables and the man died.”2

  The parents of those who passed away were not angry, but proud. Matthew Patten, of Bedford, New Hampshire, said of his son John, who died along with so many others at Île-aux-Noix, “He was shot through his left arm at the Bunker Hill fight and now was dead after suffering much fatigue to the place where he now lies in defending the just rights of America to whose end he came in the prime of life by means of that wicked, tyrannical Brute of Great Britain.”3

  Dr. Lewis Beebe had become bitter and raged about everything that he saw. In his nightly journal he complained that amid all of the suffering at Ticonderoga men stole money and food from sick soldiers and that officers argued over promotions as men were buried. He said the officers, whom he had come to despise, had established themselves as national champions at swearing. “In short,” he angrily observed, “they laugh at death, mock at hell and damnation and even challenge the deity to remove them out of this world by thunder and lightening.”

  The doctor was just as unhappy with the drunkenness he found everywhere, among officers as well as the enlisted men. He never criticized enlisted men whom he loved, saving his barbs for the officers. “Drunkenness is a great beauty,” he wrote of the officers, “and profanity an ornament in an officer. The whims, caprice, and vanity of this set of beings is ridiculous to the last degree. Children are not often guilty of such scandalous behavior.”

  He found several targets for his most sarcastic remarks. One officer he loathed was Major Joseph Cilley of New Hampshire, whom, he said “rightly named, is a very silly man.” He lambasted most of the chaplains, calling the Rev. Ichabod Fisk, a former school classmate, “a great blunderbuss of the gospel.” He condemned others for spending their time trying to land better-paying jobs at larger parishes back home instead of tending to the sick. He wrote of one boring chaplain that if he stayed away longer, “They will in all probability regain their former health and spirits.”

  But there was one minister whom he did admire, his friend Rev. Ammi Robbins, who remarkably was back again for a third tour of duty. Robbins had recovered at home and waved off pleas from his own do
ctor and friends that he remain there and forget about the war. They had warned him that he had somehow managed to escape death from the putrid fever and should not take any more chances by returning to the army. Robbins ran into a very surprised Dr. Jonathan Potts when he stopped at Saratoga en route to his regiment. Potts had heard about the large number of doctors who had died at the forts along the shores of Lake Champlain. He begged Robbins not to return to the dangerous fever- and smallpox-ridden fort. “He told me it was at the risk of my life to go into the hospitals. But if the physician goes, why not a minister of the Great Physician?”

  On his way to Ticonderoga, Robbins stopped at Fort Edwards. The hospitals were full, so sick men at that garrison were housed in the fort’s bakery. The minister had apparently written to Lewis Beebe that he was on his way back, despite the grave warnings of Dr. Potts about risking his life. Dr. Beebe greeted Robbins upon his arrival at 7 a.m. and had a bread and cheese breakfast with him. He then gave Robbins a tour of the Ticonderoga hospitals and the medical tents outside the fort. One large camp was at a nearby post named Mount Independence, across the lake from Ticonderoga, where hundreds more lay ill. The Fifteenth Massachusetts, with fifer John Greenwood, was camped there.

  The minister was eager to hold a large prayer meeting in order to preach the word of God. On Wednesday night, September 4, after much planning and at his urging, officers gathered a huge crowd of several thousand men, healthy and sick, on the parade ground in the middle of the fort. Lit torches surrounded the area. There were so many men in the crowd, including his friend Dr. Beebe, that those at the rear could not see the minister. They shouted at him that their view was blocked by the huge assemblage of troops. The drummers from the regiments there volunteered to stack up their drums in two long lines, on top of each other, to form two pyramids about ten feet in height. The men then carried out a wooden platform and placed it on top of the two rows, connecting them.

  The Rev. Robbins was pleased with the ad hoc stage, certainly the largest and highest he had ever stood on. Holding his Bible with great care, he then carefully climbed up the wall of drums to the top of the platform and there, with all able to see him, both his feet planted gingerly on the wooden platform, he preached the word of the Lord, his voice loud and vibrant, his figure illuminated by the dozens of burning torches against the star-filled sky. Thousands listened in rapt attention, their eyes looking upwards at the minister, his voice booming and his arms flailing in his animated sermon, the heavens themselves his backdrop.

  Nonplussed, Robbins decided to give another robust sermon to another large crowd to calm the men the following night. He scribbled in his journal that day, “Enjoy through great mercy good health in the midst of sickness and death all around me,” and in the evening preached with great power to his assemblage of soldiers. He read from the prophet Joel: “A day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and of gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of trumpet and alarm.” Then, adding a small touch of politics and patriotism to his preaching, he exhorted the men to be brave, that “we could rejoice in the Lord, who could turn our mourning into joy.”

  The sermon did little good, however, and two days later, after visiting the ever-mounting number of sick in the rancid hospitals and listening to enlisted men grumble about the war, he wrote in his journal that “our regiment is in a most miserable condition; I could wish they were all dismissed.” By Friday, September 13, the situation at Ticonderoga had deteriorated even further in Robbins’s eyes, just as it had for his friend Beebe. “The groans of the distressed in the camp are real affecting,” Robbins wrote, adding that out of 237 men in one regiment, 197 were sick and unfit for duty. Robbins then jotted down notes about his meeting in a hospital ward with a young man from Massachusetts who was dying. Robbins wrote, “He asked me to save him and said he was not fit to die.”

  “I cannot die . . . Do sir, pray for me. Will you not send for my mother? If she were here to nurse me I could get well. Oh, my mother. How I wish I could see her. She was opposed to my enlisting. I am now very sorry. Do let her know that I am sorry,” the boy pleaded with the minister and then, later that night, expired.

  One thing that both Beebe and Robbins noticed was that substantially more soldiers turned out for the evening prayer service as the number of dying increased. Perhaps they were seeking God’s protection. Robbins did not know, but he began to offer longer and stronger sermons. He asked the drummers to build his ten foot high platform with their instruments each evening and preached from the platform on top of them to ever larger congregations. Now, too, the minister noticed, his sermons in the evening attracted civilians who lived nearby, as well as the enlisted men and officers. The men not only listened to his readings from the Bible and his sermon, but joined in the loud and exuberant singing of rousing hymns, with a fifer and drummer adding music, as the torches burned around them on the parade ground and the moon rose over Fort Ticonderoga.

  Robbins’s exhilaration was limited, though, because the garrison was hit with a succession of bad news. First, Washington’s forces had suffered a terrible defeat on Long Island, New York, during the last week of August. Second, the British army, thousands strong, had begun a march toward Ticonderoga.

  Worst of all, Benedict Arnold’s navy had been defeated. The British had beaten Arnold’s hastily created sea force in a battle that commenced near Valcour Island at the northern tip of Lake Champlain on October 11 and lasted three days. The British sunk or disabled eleven of the sixteen ships, killing eighty or more of Arnold’s men and taking more than one hundred prisoners in a sea battle that continued thirty miles southward on the lake. Arnold and the rest of his men abandoned their ships, burned them, and escaped to Crown Point. Fearful of being destroyed there by a much larger British force, Arnold had the fort burned and the men headed south again, toward Ticonderoga. Arnold wrote to his superior, General Schuyler, that he was happy to be alive. “On the whole, I think we have had a very fortunate escape and have great reason to return our humble and hearty thanks to Almighty God for preserving and delivering so many of us from our more than savage enemies.”4

  Finally, on October 15, 1776, the men from Arnold’s battered navy arrived in terrible condition. Arnold was satisfied that his fleet had inflicted enough damage to several of the British warships to force their repair. But he was exasperated by the losses of his ships and men. Through sheer coincidence, Robbins and Arnold met at the hospital, where the minister was offering comfort to Arnold’s men who fought in the lake engagement. The angry Arnold told Robbins to join a company of wounded men that he was sending to Fort George in the morning; Arnold decided that in addition to medical assistance, they needed all of the heavenly help they could obtain. Robbins agreed, but reluctantly. Face to face with the very insistent general, he had no choice.

  The trip to Fort George, at the southern end of Lake George, nearly cost the reverend his life, and the lives of all the men in his boat. There was little breeze and the men were forced to row. The lake was smaller than Champlain and, closer to the shore, they had the opportunity to look out from the boat at the gorgeous scenery that surrounded them. Autumn had arrived in upstate New York. The green leaves on the hundreds of thousands of trees that the soldiers could see on shore had changed to their customary fall colors of red, orange, and yellow. This rainbow of turning leaves gave the woods a painter’s palette of vivid color. They had pulled on their oars hard all morning, their hands callused from dragging them through the waters of the lake, but the uncertain weather of Lake George struck hard in the afternoon.

  Just after 2 p.m. a fierce wind whipped across the lake and snapped the rudder band on the boat as the helmsman tried to push the rudder in order to steer forward in the severe northwest gale. The rudderless boat was then adrift and floated directly at a cluster of large, jagged rocks near the shore of a small island. The boat, moving quickly with the wind, was about to be smashed to pieces when the breeze shifted at
the last moment and sent the craft sailing harmlessly into a small cove. The men dropped anchor and decided to remain there, sleeping on deck. No one took a close look at the darkening sky. Rain began to fall just after the sun went down and continued, hard, all evening. The men were drenched.

  Robbins and the sick men, all of them soaked from the torrents of rain they had endured all evening, managed to fix the rudder in the morning and rowed to Fort George. There, Robbins, whose health had been restored during his latest return to the front, came down with yet another fever. Despite his ailments, he visited every ward in the hospitals at Fort George and prayed with the men. The minister had been hardened by the war. He wrote in his journal that he had tended to the spiritual needs of three men as they died in their beds in front of him that day and yet felt no great sadness; the deaths he had been witnessing for months seemed to have made him immune to suffering.

  There was no sermon by the Rev. Robbins the following Sunday. The fever and bad cold he had developed on the trip from Ticonderoga to Fort George had made him so sick he could not preach. He was emotionally and mentally distressed, and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Dr. Potts had warned him that one more tour of duty at Ticonderoga would kill him, and now, perhaps, his fatal prophecy would come true. Robbins was finished and he knew it.

  On Thursday, October 31, a week after the first snowfall on Lake Champlain, a very sick and despondent Rev. Ammi Robbins arrived home in Connecticut yet again. More than five thousand Americans, half the original force, had been lost—killed in battle or by smallpox, disease, and fever, or captured—in the ill-fated expedition to Canada. Among the dead in the mismanaged, ill-advised incursion into Canada were many doctors, chaplains, and musicians who never lifted a musket, drew a sword, or fired a cannon. Rev. Robbins had survived, though, he imagined, as he wrote on the day that he arrived home for the last time, thanks to “Divine mercy and favor.”