Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence (6 page)

Four

Learning to Be Soldiers

1775

The incursion into Canada, the patriots’ first major offensive expedition, would prove to be one of the most extraordinary efforts of the entire war. A critical role in the operation would fall to the itinerant teamster who had years ago followed Braddock into the Ohio Country and been flogged for his insolence.

In the summer of 1775, Daniel Morgan had volunteered to join the first troops specifically recruited for a national army. The hulking Virginian with the loud, twangy voice and the mad gleam in his eye took command of one of ten companies of “expert riflemen.” Congress had voted to raise these “continental” troops from the backwoods of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania to reinforce the siege around Boston. These wild outlanders were experienced in frontier war, accustomed to hard living, and armed with an unusual firearm: the light, long-barreled, frighteningly accurate, uniquely American Pennsylvania rifle.

Now thirty-nine, Morgan was eager to support his “brethren in Boston.” Like many of the backwoodsmen, he knew the ways of Indians. His riflemen had a reputation for cunning and savagery that rivaled that of America’s natives. Congress viewed them as a secret weapon capable of delivering the British a lethal blow.

After the French war, Morgan had pursued his rowdy life, eager for fights, foot races, and bouts of drinking. He merrily joined in backwoods brawls described as “Biting, Butting, Tripping, Throtling, Gouging,
Cursing,” and “kicking one another on the Cods.”
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The sport proved an excellent preparation for war.

During his late twenties, Morgan came under the influence of the teenage daughter of a local farmer. Contemporaries described Abigail Curry as “plain, sensible, and pious.” She passed on some of her education and her religious sensibility to the gruff backwoodsman. She bore him two daughters, Nancy and Betsy, during the 1760s, and they finally married in 1773. Daniel went no more a roving. He rented some land in the Shenandoah Valley to grow tobacco and hemp, and did well enough as a yeoman farmer to purchase a few slaves.

The news from Boston reawakened his taste for a fight. Like most participants, he expected the war to be exciting, successful, and short. Abandoning his family and farm for a few months seemed a small price to pay to take part in a drama that might endow its actors with immortality.

Enthusiasm for the cause made recruitment easy. Morgan preached glory and the rights of man in loud, rough terms that made sense to unschooled backwoodsmen. He took his pick of volunteers, selecting the biggest men, the best marksmen, and the hardiest fighters.

Congress had stipulated companies of sixty-eight men—Morgan signed up ninety-six in less than a week. The men possessed the instincts of hunters: deep patience, hair-trigger awareness of their surroundings, and the ability to withstand rain, cold, and hunger. Each was fitted out with a rifle and a tomahawk. Each carried a scalping knife, a nine-inch blade suitable for eating, whittling, or slicing human flesh. Instead of a uniform, the men wore their traditional dun-colored hunting shirts fashioned from heavy fringed linen, along with leather leggings and moccasins. This gear was practical and set them apart as the first of America’s special forces.

Morgan trained his men for three weeks in the rudiments of war as he understood it. On July 15, they marched toward Boston. Townspeople turned out to offer them bread, cider, and hearty cheers. Local militiamen marched alongside to show support. Virginia congressman Richard Henry Lee marveled at “their amazing hardihood, their method of living so long in the woods without carrying provisions with them.”

“They are the finest marksmen in the world,” John Hancock declared. “They do execution with their Rifle guns at an amazing distance.” Unlike a musket, a rifle, fully five feet long, had spiral grooves incised along the interior of its barrel. The ridges gave the ball a gyroscopic spin, causing it to fly far more accurately than one from a musket. To impress the locals, one man would confidently hold a five-inch target between his knees for his mates to fire at from forty yards. Then all would strip to the waist, paint themselves like Indians, and put on displays of ferocity.

These intrepid riflemen arrived in Cambridge on August 6, 1775, having tramped a total of nearly six hundred miles in three weeks, an astounding pace. They found themselves in a camp that was suddenly the third-largest city on the continent. Their arrival created a sensation. Their rough language mortified the local descendants of Puritans. They demonstrated the accuracy of their backwoods hunting implements for mystified New Englanders. John Adams thought a rifle “a peculiar kind of musket.”

As an elite force, the riflemen were given a separate bivouac and excused from routine camp duties. But a month of inaction wore on them. They drank rum, fought among themselves, and stole from surrounding farms. “They are such a boastful, bragging set of people,” an observer noted, “and think none are men or can fight but themselves.”
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When Washington asked for recruits to invade Canada, every one of them volunteered. Morgan’s Virginians and two Pennsylvania companies were chosen by lot.

* * *

Congress had initially assigned the attack on the fourteenth colony to General Philip Schuyler, commander of the Northern Department. The forty-two-year-old scion of a powerful Albany family, Schuyler supported the patriot cause but remained deeply suspicious of the rebels’ egalitarian notions. During the war with the French, he had served as a supply officer, a post suited to an experienced businessman.

He agreed to the operation, then he delayed. In August, with the campaigning season slipping by, Washington turned the Canada invasion into a pincer maneuver. He would send another force north along a little-used route through Maine to threaten Quebec City while Schuyler’s men pushed toward Montreal. The British commander in Canada, Guy Carleton, would have to divide his meager force or relinquish territory to defend a single point.

Schuyler finally set out and besieged the British fort at St. John’s that Arnold had raided in the spring. While the operation was under way, the commander fell ill with “Barbarous Complications of Disorders.” He turned the mission over to his second in command, the former British officer Richard Montgomery. The veteran Montgomery questioned whether Schuyler had the “strong nerves” required for war.

* * *

While Montgomery’s traditional corps relied on artillery for its heavy hitting, the wing approaching through Maine would embody a new strategic idea. Relieved of the burden of heavy guns, the force would gain mobility.
The lethal fire of the riflemen would, in lieu of cannon, give the force a long-range killing capability. The big backwoodsmen could also serve as shock troops for storming the walls of the city.

As the group was getting organized, Morgan sized up the officer chosen to lead this unique force: Benedict Arnold had returned to the cause. At thirty-four, Arnold was six years younger than Morgan. Both men were self-made, but in different ways. Morgan had spent months wandering through trackless forests with his rifle, sleeping under stars and rain. Arnold had negotiated with sharp-minded merchants and used his wits to turn a profit. In the course of the war, the two would emerge as the patriots’ most skilled natural fighters.

Washington told Arnold that “upon the success of this enterprise . . . the safety and welfare of the whole continent may depend.”
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In addition to the two hundred riflemen, Arnold picked eight hundred New England and New York militiamen, many of them veterans of Bunker Hill. In mid-September, the strike force, a total of 1,050 men, marched to coastal Newburyport, Massachusetts, where they would board on a flotilla of small ships for a dash up the coast. Before embarking, they staged a grand parade through town. Amid the cheers, the reality of the great task began to sink in. It dawned on one twenty-two-year-old volunteer that “many of us should never return to our parents and families.”
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Munching on the ginger that Arnold, the former apothecary, had thoughtfully provided, the men still succumbed to seasickness as they scudded 140 miles along the stormy coast. Yet in a few days they were gathering themselves at the mouth of the Kennebec River, preparing for a trek into the unknown.

The men loaded their supplies into two hundred boats that a local carpenter had slapped together, “very badly,” from green wood. Each twenty-foot-long vessel could hold up to a ton of supplies or six men. They carried forty-five days’ of food for the expected twenty-day trip—barrels of flour and of preserved beef and pork. Military supplies—powder and ammunition, as well as their own muskets and rifles—added to their load.

Like Arnold himself, most of the leaders were neophytes at war, guided as much by improvisation and guesswork as by experience. Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Greene, a cousin of Nathanael Greene, owned a Rhode Island mill. Major Return J. Meigs was a Connecticut merchant. Captain Henry Dearborn, a twenty-four-year-old New Hampshire physician, had marched his company toward Lexington the very day the news arrived, despite the fact that his wife had given birth that same morning. With John Stark, he had survived the worst of the Bunker Hill inferno.
Heading off to Canada, Dearborn took along his black Newfoundland dog for companionship. The oldest and most experienced officer was forty-six-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Roger Enos. He had already been to Quebec with the British army in 1759. His men would haul the bulk of the expedition’s reserve supplies at the rear of the march.

At least two men took their wives. Joseph Grier’s spouse was a strapping six-footer. Jemima Warner went along because she was concerned about the health of her husband, James. Wives frequently accompanied husbands on military campaigns, but for women to sign on for such a perilous expedition was extraordinary. Another who made the trek was Aaron Burr, a zealous nineteen-year-old graduate of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, who served as a volunteer aide to Arnold.

The riflemen were the core of the force. Arnold put all three rifle companies under Captain Morgan. The experienced woodsmen would go first, blazing the trail for the others. Morgan was suited to commanding hard men. Later portraits show him with the angled nose and battered face of a seasoned pugilist. They downplay an ugly scar he carried on the side of his face. Serving with a ranger corps on the Virginia frontier after the Braddock debacle, he had ridden into an Indian ambush. A bullet had torn through his neck and cheek, knocking out his teeth. He had barely escaped with his life.

“His manners were of the severest cast,” one of his men wrote of Morgan, “but where he became attached, he was kind and truly affectionate.”
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* * *

Maine’s glacier-clawed landscape, with its three thousand ponds and lakes, offered a grim prospect for travelers. As the Kennebec River stepped toward the sea, it leaped over a series of rapids and waterfalls. At each, the men had to pole, paddle, and push the boats against the tumbling water. Or they had to unload the vessels, haul them out, carry them as far as the next manageable stretch, return for their equipment and supplies, carry that, reload the boats, and go on. Again and again they moved their sixty-five tons of supplies over these punishing portages. At one point, a soldier recorded, the river was “exceeding rapid and rocky for five miles, so that any man would think, at its first appearance, that it was impossible to get Boats up it.”

On October 10 they passed the last frontier settlement and plunged into “the greatest forest upon earth.” They would not encounter another human habitation for three hundred miles. They could see mountains “on each side of the river, high and snow on the tops.” In the brittle evening air, they heard the honking of great wedges of geese heading south. The weather turned severely cold, and they awoke each morning to find their clothes stiff with ice.

“Now,” wrote Private Caleb Haskell, “we are learning to be soldiers.”
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Morgan and his men forged a way over the Great Carrying Place, a series of portages between ponds, to the Dead River, so called because of
its easy-flowing water. The crossing took five days. They hauled the boats and supplies through “Spruce Swamps Knee deep in mire.” Dysentery ravaged the ranks. Arnold ordered a log hospital thrown up. He was already down to 950 men and twenty-five days’ provisions.

On they moved into the “eternal night” of the wilderness. “A dreary aspect,” one man wrote, “a perpetual silence, an universal void, form the face of nature in this part of the world.”
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A prolonged, drenching rain caused the river to rise twelve feet and fill with debris. Rifleman George Morison wrote in his journal about “stumbling over fallen logs, one leg sinking deeper in the mire than the other. . . . Down goes a boat and the carriers with it. A hearty laugh prevails.”
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On October 23, as men tried to dry their sodden clothing around fires, Arnold noted that the increasingly intense cold would freeze the ground and make walking easier. Most of the troops shared their leader’s hopeful outlook. Fighting men had an advantage, wrote Private Morison: “Great as their sufferings often are, they are never doomed to endure the miseries of those terrible spectres, spleen and melancholy.”
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