The First American Army (16 page)

He was told by all, officers and enlisted men, that his sermons helped the men feel better about life in the army. This encouraged him. Robbins was ebullient on April 20, when he stood in front of two regiments of seven hundred men each on the shores of Lake George, the beautiful wide body of water with its thickly forested shoreline his backdrop, and led them in loud prayers and spirited hymnal singing before they boarded their boats for another leg of the journey north.

Robbins lived with officers in small tents that accommodated from two to four men. He did not care for some of them, continually complaining about their profanity and “wickedness” and writing that “it would be a dreadful hell to live with such creatures forever.”

For the men, though, the dreadful hell was illness. “’Tis terrible to be sick in the army,” Robbins lamented. “Such miserable accommodations. It is enough to kill a man’s spirit when first taken to go into the hospital.”

Robbins and the men with him sailed north on Lake George, thirtythree miles long and from one to three miles wide, and then on to Fort Ticonderoga on the southern shores of Lake Champlain. None of them were prepared for the grotesque specter that greeted them as they were shown the cemetery there. The very upset minister wrote, “[We] saw many holes where the dead were flung in, and numbers of human bones, thighs, arms, etc. above the ground. Oh, the horrors of war. I never so much longed for the day to approach when men shall learn war no more and the lion and lamb lie down together.”

The army sailed across Lake Champlain, ever closer to Canada and Quebec, in “gondolas,” sixty-foot-long, two-masted schooners with open decks to carry supplies and troops. The chaplain joined the men in rowing the boat when the winds died down. They all talked of the coming battles and their fear of dying in them. Many were frightened. The minister knew that he might lose his life, too, despite his clergyman rank. Robbins prayed for his own safety and asked God to give him strength to be brave, to survive, and to help others make it through the storm ahead. “The prospects at Quebec look very dark,” he wrote. “Oh, that I might be able to trust in God and not be afraid.”

What Robbins and everyone else feared was not just fighting the British and the hundreds of Indians they had enlisted as their allies, but the smallpox epidemic there. The American army had become a victim of the fatal disease in December, just before the failed assault on Quebec. Those in Arnold’s army who had survived the trek to Canada were exhausted, hungry, and wore tattered and damp clothes that they rarely took off. Their huts and tents held more men than they should have. These conditions created an ideal climate for smallpox. General Richard Montgomery, who had smallpox as a young man and was immune, commandeered a building owned by the East India Company in Montreal and he appointed Doctor Isaac Senter as its administrator with orders to turn it into a six-hundred-bed hospital to house smallpox victims. They increased every day. Dr. Senter noted then that “the smallpox still very rife in the army.”
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A field hospital set up between the towns of Sillery and Cove to handle smallpox victims filled up quickly and doctors there said 10 percent of the army had the disease.
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General Thomas, a physician prior to the rebellion, had gone to Canada as the American commanding general on May 1. Thomas, fiftyone, was a fierce patriot and a member of Boston’s Sons of Liberty. The doctor was a well-dressed and distinguished man. He tried to isolate the men with smallpox in hospitals, but he had also permitted many of his men to live in private homes throughout the area. They became infected and the disease moved rapidly from them to others, and then to many more. Many deserted from the army after the January 1 defeat at Quebec, some with the pox, and promptly infected anyone they encountered in the Quebec area, and those people infected other soldiers whom they met later.
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Ultimately, over five hundred soldiers would die because of the pox.

General David Wooster arrived to take command of the army from Arnold in March and by the end of the month approximately one third of the 2,505 Americans had come down with the dreaded pox. Arnold wrote that “smallpox at this juncture” might result in “the entire ruin of the army.”
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The Americans who fled when British reinforcements arrived in Quebec on May 6 left hundreds of sick, including recovering smallpox victims, in hospitals and many more, unable to travel, along the sides of roads (fortunately for them, Governor Guy Carleton ordered his men to bring them back to Quebec where hospitals were set up to house them and many were saved).

Smallpox was the scourge of the eighteenth century. Epidemics in London that arrived between 1718 and 1746 had killed tens of thousands of people. Several thousand died in similar epidemics in Geneva and Berlin in those years. Forty thousand perished in a smallpox attack in Belem, Brazil, in 1750. The 1721 epidemic that reached Boston claimed the lives of 15 percent of the population of the city.

The disease struck quickly and usually took the lives of between 10 and 15 percent of the population of a city, but sometimes claimed as many as one-third or 40 percent of the residents. Those struck suffered severe fevers, throbbing headaches, aches of the loins and limbs, fast pulses, and painful vomiting. After several days, ugly pus-filled eruptions appeared on the skin all over the body, often completely disfiguring the face. Victims’ heads often turned blue and those who did die perished within a week.

The standard procedure to prevent smallpox was diet and inoculation. Doctors prescribed ten to fourteen days of rest and a light diet, plus purging, followed by the injection of the smallpox pustules into the skin with a one-eighth-inch-wide lancet. The diet usually consisted of pudding, milk, ripe fruit, carrots, cabbage, potatoes, and vegetables.
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Smallpox would break out on the skin several days later, accompanied by a fever. The patient walked about outside and drank generous amounts of very cold water to assist the virus injected into his system in fighting off the pox. The diet and purging were considered mandatory to cleanse the body for the inoculation and introduction of the virus into the system.
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Ironically, these doctors, who saved so many lives, terrified residents in nearby neighborhoods because they inoculated people, giving them smallpox to fight smallpox. They feared the introduction of the disease could infect those not immune to smallpox who lived nearby. A hospital in Boston where smallpox patients were treated was burned down by neighbors who feared those inoculated there would infect the entire city. Someone threw a bomb into the room of a man recovering from his inoculation in an attempt to kill him to prevent him from spreading the disease. Dr. Boylston, a genuine medical hero, had been frequently taunted for inoculating people; he once told friends he was concerned about his safety.
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No one, however, understood the magnitude of the crisis about to envelope the Americans stationed along Lake Champlain in forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point as well as at their camps in the Canadian villages of Sorel, at the intersection of the St. Lawrence and Richelieu Rivers, and Chambly farther south on the Richelieu. None of these places was equipped to handle several thousand smallpox victims, and those infected with other diseases, such as typhus, in addition to the wounded men retreating from the military defeats in Canada. There were not enough hospitals, beds, medical supplies, or doctors. Like a tidal wave, smallpox was headed toward Rev. Robbins and all of the Americans in the northern area of New York.
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Robbins’s regiment soon arrived at Chambly, a small village in Canada, a Catholic country that Robbins referred to as “the dwelling place of Satan.” The minister, who loathed Roman Catholics, visited a Catholic church there and was appalled by what he saw: three crucifixes, a holy water font, and an altar. As he looked around, a young man walked down the center aisle, knelt in front of the altar, and began to pray. Robbins was indignant. “Oh, when shall Satan be found and the Anti-Christ meet a final overthrow?” he wrote of the visit to the church.

Just three days later, he and the soldiers sailed up the Richelieu River past the village of St. Dennis. A strong wind carried them at a rapid rate down the river. The Protestant minister was irked to see a long string of small homes with crucifixes on their roofs and a Roman Catholic church. In a macabre scene, a group of curious nuns in their black and white habits emerged from the church and stared at the American army, looking directly at Rev. Robbins, as their flotilla of vessels moved past them and headed toward the war.

On Tuesday, May 7, Robbins and the soldiers in his regiment met dozens of men who were returning from Quebec by land; part of the general route that had commenced the day before when British reinforcements had arrived at Quebec. Some of the soldiers had been wounded and bled through their clothes as they half walked, half limped southward, trying to bear up under the hot sun. Many, trembling as they appeared, were badly infected with smallpox and other diseases and the men with Robbins all feared the disease would spread throughout the boat.

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.”

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.”
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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.