The First American Army (25 page)

O
n May 1, a Sunday, a local band arrived on Liberty Island, the musicians carrying their instruments from boats to a compact parade ground to entertain the troops stationed there. Among them were the three companies of Lieutenant McMichael’s regiment. They needed entertainment.

The Pennsylvanians had been through some of the most dangerous battles and hardest marches of the American Revolution. The men had no sooner left their villages in Pennsylvania on May 27, 1776, to applause and cheers from their friends and neighbors, then they, and McMichael, in his early twenties, found themselves on the front lines of the battles to defend New York. The enlisted men were thoroughly beaten at the battle of Long Island on August 27. There, in the early afternoon, the Pennsylvanians found themselves cut off from the army. They fought courageously but were hopelessly outnumbered. At first, under McMichael’s direction, a line of enlisted men attempted to make a stand. In the first round of volleys the man positioned right next to McMichael had his head blown off. McMichael was badly shaken. The regiment’s only chance to escape was to swim or wade through a large mill pond behind them with the enemy in hot pursuit.

McMichael, his musket held above his head, plunged into the pond, exhorting his men to follow him. Some of the men, their clothing, packs, and muskets too heavy for them, could not make it through the waters of the pond and drowned. The advancing British troops made it impossible for McMichael or other officers to go back to save them. McMichael himself was astonished that he reached the far shore of the pond. “It was the will of providence that I should escape,” he wrote.

Separated from the rest of the army, he and his men did not learn until later the extent of the devastation the army suffered in the Long Island battle. McMichael later wrote that his regiment and those fighting nearby lost two colonels, nineteen officers, twenty-three sergeants and three hundred ten enlisted men, all taken prisoner (total American losses that day were 312 killed, 1,097 captured
¹
). The lieutenant had survived one of the most severe engagements of the Revolution. “My preservation I only attribute to the indulgence of God,” he wrote. “For though the bullets went round me in every direction, yet I received not a wound.”

The Americans continued to lose in their confrontations with the British in New York and were forced to pull back from a position on Harlem Heights. The army retreated north to White Plains and formed a three mile defensive line that cut through the village.

On the morning of October 28, Howe’s army, consisting of nine thousand British regulars plus four thousand Hessians, advanced on the town after crossing the Bronx River. McMichael’s company and several militia units marched two miles to meet the enemy and test the Redcoats’ strength. There, McMichael described a furious Redcoat and Hessian assault against the American advance party.

He wrote, “We were attacked with [their] right wing being all Hessians. We kept up an incessant fire for nearly an hour when being informed from our flanking party that the [British] light horse were surrounding us. We were necessitated to retreat to the lines.” The Pennsylvanians, ordered back, joined the main line of defense later in the morning as General Howe’s entire force moved forward.

“Their left wing attacked a party of ours at an advanced post on a hill,” McMichael continued. “Our troops behaved with great fortitude but being overpowered by numbers were at last obliged to retreat to the lines. The enemy attempted to force our right wing in the lines but were put to a precipitate retreat back to the hill. The attack continued from 9 a.m. until 2 in the afternoon.” Finally, the left side of the American line collapsed when the Massachusetts militia units broke and fled. That was the beginning of the end and Washington soon ordered another general retreat north, beyond the Croton River.

Word spread that American losses were light (actually, they had lost only one hundred fifty men, killed or wounded) and that the enemy had lost six hundred (actually 313), but McMichael, at the center of the action that day, knew that regardless of numbers, the field in front of him was covered in blood.

A wing of the American army that was sent to hold Fort Washington in Manhattan was defeated. The main army was forced to run for its life across New Jersey toward Pennsylvania, with the British in pursuit. All felt the end was near. “Our army now being reduced to a small number gives us less hope of victory,” McMichael wrote.

The soldiers were bitter about the lack of public help for an army that was on its last legs. There was no assistance with food, shelter, or clothing from the New Jersey towns through which the army retreated. No local militias marched into camp to swell the ranks and, in fact, continued desertions badly depleted the army. The cheers the troops remembered in Boston had faded rather abruptly in New Jersey. In New Brunswick, a town on the banks of the Raritan River halfway across the state, McMichael watched two thousand soldiers whose time was up march home. He wrote that “the Tories now began to look at us with a disdainful countenance, wishing the enemy may drive us shortly out of town.”

The Pennsylvania state regiment moved to Morristown for winter camp, but McMichael managed to talk his commanding officer into granting him a furlough to return to Pennsylvania. His request was among many granted by lower-ranking generals who did not check with the commander in chief, who agreed to furlough men, but did not want all requests approved. Washington did not realize they had been sent home until it was too late. Those soldiers who left included men such as McMichael. The furloughs, along with desertions and the departures of men whose enlistment was up, plus those whose emergency ten-day enlistment ended, left Washington with an army of just twenty-five hundred men in Morristown, his winter camp.

McMichael, who may have had smallpox earlier in life and was immune, did not get sick when the epidemic struck that winter. In fact, his health remained hearty throughout the winter. That was good, too, because his sturdy constitution permitted him to spend his time off in the village of Stony Brook, New Jersey.

It was in Stony Brook, just one mile from Princeton, where McMichael had met Susanna Vetnoy, twenty-five, the previous winter and was hopelessly smitten with her. He scribbled in his diary that it was there “when first I beheld the face of my dear Susanna.” They were married on March 4, 1776, after a steamy, whirlwind courtship of just ten days.

And so, on May 1, 1777, almost a year later, McMichael listened to the musicians on that fine spring day at his army camp on an island on the Delaware River and enjoyed their songs. But it was visions of his new wife Susanna, not the tunes of the lively band, that filled the lovesick lieutenant’s head.

McMichael had been seeing Susanna on short furloughs and, like so many soldiers in the Revolution, missed her terribly when he had to leave her embrace and rejoin the army. He had spent his last furlough, from April 2 through April 7, in bed with her for six days of “conjugal bliss.” The satiated young groom, like all young grooms, probably could not sleep for several days afterward, just thinking about his new bride and her enduring charms.

At the Delaware River outpost, his yearning for her grew even greater and then, on May 3, he received a steamy letter from Susanna that was full of lustful suggestions and a plea to him that she had physical “needs” that had to be satisfied. He wrote that her letter “exhilarates my animal spirits,” adding that “every sentence thereof was so pleasing and so calculated to render me happy that language fails to express the dictates of my mind.”

That letter sent poor McMichael reeling. It was then that he turned to poetry to express his feelings for Susanna for the first time in the war.

McMichael fell sick after he sent that poem, as he had from time to time during his nearly two years of combat, but learned just a few weeks later, in early June, that he might obtain another furlough. The thought of traveling to see Susanna, and attending to her “needs,” sent the lieutenant into another spate of poetry:

The furlough did come through, but Susanna’s ardent young husband was forced to cool his heels for two long days in Philadelphia before the next ferry sailed to Trenton. He crossed the Delaware with a group of officers he knew who persuaded him to join them for some “refreshments” at a tavern in Trenton that afternoon, further delaying his arrival at Susanna’s house. Finally, just after sundown, he wrote in his journal, he was in the arms of his amorous wife, “which filled my mind with all the delights possibly able to flow from the transitory enjoyments.”

In addition to his romantic desire for Susanna, McMichael had other reasons to ride to her home. It was a chance to live in a warm house, and not a cold tent, for a week or more. His wife surely cooked better meals than the army. Susanna, like all wives in the war, probably sewed his torn clothing. She might have sewn him new leggings or purchased new clothing for him. The diary indicates that they spent time with friends and her family, too, surely a comfort.

Again, duty called, and after a few days the lieutenant had to return to the military. There, he learned that his regiment was going into battle. McMichael then surprised his fellow officers and the enlisted men when he seemed overjoyed at the news. He was not thrilled about facing the British; he was ecstatic because the battle, he was told, would take place somewhere near Somerset Court House, in New Jersey. The highway to that town from Pennsylvania went through Ringoes, a New Jersey town just thirteen miles northwest of Stony Brook.