The First American Army (15 page)

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.

Most of Champlain was surrounded by low terrain, marshy at times, and at many points on any boat trip on its waters travelers could see the majestic mountain ranges in the distance. The Green Mountains hugged the coastline of the northeast sections of the lake. The mountains contrasted starkly with the lake, too, and some soldiers in the retreating American army, now under the command of John Sullivan, reported sweating in the boats as they peered up at the snow-covered Adirondack Mountains in the distance. The weather on the lake, and in the region surrounding it, changed frequently and sudden summer rainstorms were common. The winds shifted with little notice or died suddenly. The waters of the lake could be flat for days and then produce ocean-sized waves when high winds swept over and churned up the water. The uncertain weather made sailing on the waters of the lake difficult. The weather shifted quickly, too, in uneven patterns. Hot days in summer were followed by chilly nights. It snowed early in winter toward the northern part of the lake, which cut into Canada, and on many Thanksgiving days those who lived there found themselves snowbound. In 1776, the snows came very early, in the third week of October.

The journey of Greenwood’s regiment down the lake was slow and languid. At its narrow sections they could see deer and a wide array of small animals on the shores and some of the birds that lived off the lake, such as the great blue heron, bald eagle, and the marsh wren. Osprey occasionally flew overhead.

From time to time, when the men were tired from rowing on calm days, or when it became very hot as the sun was reflected off the lake, Greenwood pulled out his fife and played some music. As always, the men appreciated it and, after a few moments of rest, rowed again, the splashing sounds of their oars dipping into the lake accompanied by some lively tunes on the fife and the squawks of a bird soaring high above them.

T
he Rev. Ammi Robbins’s journey toward the valley of death began on March 18, 1776. His departure from his home near Canaan, in the northwest corner of Connecticut, for service as a chaplain in the Continental Army could not have been more pleasant. He met friend and fellow minister Rev. Farrand in Canaan and together they rode six miles north to Sheffield, Massachusetts, just over the Connecticut state line, to the home of Robbins’s sister, who was also married to a minister, the Rev. John Keep. The three ministers and Robbins’s sister enjoyed a lengthy dinner and then prayed together. On the following morning, Rev. Robbins left the comfort of friends and family and headed into the heart of the American Revolution.

Robbins was a thirty-five-year-old Presbyterian minister from a state that had sent thousands of young men to war. He had joined the Continental Army because he hoped that as a chaplain he would be able to heal the hearts and souls of the men in the service who were risking their lives every day in the battle for independence that had lasted for nearly a year.

He was one of the many spiritual healers who volunteered to serve in the army after the Revolution began in the spring of 1775. The military had no difficulty signing up ministers. The men of God, who received officers’ pay, were eager to join the army because they saw the rebellion as not just a political and military revolution, but a campaign to redeem men’s souls, the logical extension of the Great Awakening.

George Washington believed that it was important to have many chaplains in the service. He believed that the comfort they could provide the men was as important as military leadership and that a fear of God helped to maintain discipline. The chaplains were not asked to do much more than they did for their congregations back home: they were charged with offering two prayer services on Sunday and one daily service during the week, if they so chose. They were to visit the sick and dying in the field hospitals when and if they could. They were to comfort anyone who sought them out. Some chaplains were good and some were bad, just like some doctors and officers.

Some ministers offered just one Sunday service and some faked illness to avoid Sunday work at all. Others offered a service every day in addition to their Sunday chores. Some ministers never visited the sick and some visited the hospitals all the time. Most of the army’s chaplains in winter or summer camps were local ministers who added army duties to their congregational responsibilities; others traveled with the army twelve months a year. Only a few served for more than one year; Rev. David Avery served for five. They all believed that they were appreciated by the troops, especially the enlisted men and the homesick young soldiers far from their villages and loved ones.

The men of God put their lives at risk. Some chaplains died of illnesses during the war and some were killed in accidents. At least one committed suicide. Others came down with smallpox and died or had their faces scarred for the rest of their lives. Still others became ill in the service and wound up dying at home, or being weakened for life. Some lost their positions in churches back home by refusing to leave the army when called back by the church elders.

Rev. Ammi Robbins did not realize the magnitude of the nightmare he was traveling toward when he reported to Albany in the middle of that cold and blustery year. Traveling up to Canada a few weeks later would be Dr. Lewis Beebe, a Yale graduate from Sheffield, Massachusetts. Beebe was one of the hundreds of doctors who had left their private practice to save the lives and tend to the wounds of the soldiers in the first American army. He would be the healer of their bodies as Robbins would be the healer of their souls. Neither of the healers knew each other, but would meet and become friends in the middle of the terrible chaos that now engulfed Canada.

The journey to Canada became nothing short of macabre as each day passed and the army moved farther and farther north. At each stop, the minister would discover some reminder of death and catastrophe. His uncle had been killed during a battle in the French and Indian War outside of Albany two decades before and one day Robbins went out with another man to visit his uncle’s grave. It was one of many in a small cemetery. He found his uncle’s resting place and “dropped a tear over it” and went back to camp. It was the first of many graves over which he would cry during his journey to Canada.

The starting point for the trip, Albany, was a city full of both patriots and Tories as well as several thousand Continental Army soldiers, but it was also a boisterous city of taverns and prostitutes, and the language of the people that the righteous minister met was laced with loud and graphic profanity. The city from whence his journey would begin was, he wrote in his journal, an American Sodom and Gomorrah, “a wicked city,” and he said that he deplored the “wickedness of the people [in it].”

There, prior to the beginning of the march toward Canada, Robbins offered prayers in the morning and in the evening each day, doing more than most men of the cloth in the army. The minister visited the sick in army hospitals that had been created out of residences and barns. He was encouraged by the large assemblage of soldiers that turned out to pray with him and listen to him read from the Bible and preach.

He noted in the daily journal that he kept that there was a growing awareness of death around him that was triggered by his visit to his uncle’s grave in the cemetery. One afternoon he prayed with two young soldiers, weakened by fever, nearly motionless on their beds, who soon died. The next day he was summoned to the community of Stillwater, several miles from Albany, to pray for a man whose time, it was said, was growing short. It was. The man, suffering greatly in his bed, died as Robbins sat next to him on a wooden chair reading scriptures aloud.

His sermons to the congregation of several hundred troops and a collection of townspeople who lived nearby, who traveled by horse and carriage to listen to him, were long and powerful and even then people praised his preaching style. He quoted from Hosea, “I will go and return to my place until they acknowledge their offense and seek my face,” and Micah, “And this man shall be the peace.”

There were overtures in some of his sermons, though, unintended at that time, that provided an unsettling foreshadowing of the debacles to come on the journey they were all about to embark upon. In one ominous sermon, he talked of a God who had abandoned his people, reading a passage from the Bible that said, “If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence.”

Robbins attended the funeral of yet another soldier who died the day before the army began its march. The entire journey north was a trip filled with somber reminders of war, destruction, and death. One day into the march, north of Saratoga, the men passed Fort Edwards, a burned-out stockade used during the French and Indian War, which Robbins reported “moldering down” like a slowly collapsing ghost. A day later, at the southern tip of Lake George, he was given a tour of the ruins of Fort William Henry. It was there, in 1757, that the British surrendered to the French, under the Marquis Louis Montcalm, only to have hundreds of his Indian troops attack their caravan as they left the fort, killing sixty-nine soldiers and women and taking two hundred away as prisoners. As Robbins finished that tour, he met two companies of Pennsylvania troops on their way to Canada, carrying their sick. They told the minister that they had left men who had died on the march on the sides of the road. “How easy ’tis for God to bless or blast our designs,” a saddened Robbins wrote in his journal that night.