The First American Army (34 page)

Washington himself never abandoned his sick soldiers. From time to time, risking his own health, he visited the hospitals and stopped at the beds of soldiers to offer some encouraging words. It “pleased the sick exceedingly,” one doctor wrote of the general’s visit to his hospital.
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Elijah Fisher, lying in his hospital bed, kept track of the daily death toll at the hospital in which he was confined. Fifty of the men in the facility died during just the month that he was there. Fearful for his own mortality as he watched bodies carried out on stretchers, Fisher talked a physician into letting him go back to the Miller farmhouse. He assured him that he felt better and did not need hospital care anymore. The doctor was glad to see him leave; another soldier, from yet another wagon, was given his bed as soon as he left. Miller took him back and there he recovered.

Barely able to walk, Fisher decided to rejoin his regiment at Valley Forge on February 28. As soon as he arrived, he was witness to a smallpox epidemic that had swept into the area. Washington had ordered immediate inoculations for all the soldiers, including any traveling to Valley Forge from other towns or army camps. Elijah Fisher was transported to yet another hospital for his inoculation, his side still hurting, and promptly came down with the pox. The pus-filled pustules formed on his body and his skin turned dark and felt on fire, threatening his life.

At first, George Washington was not overly worried about the smallpox because most of his soldiers had been inoculated the previous year. This time, however, he had hundreds of new soldiers and a quick survey informed him that more than one third of them had never been inoculated. The general could not have the inoculated men recover in the hospitals with all the other sick men; they would give them the pox. He evacuated everyone from the large hospital at Yellow Springs and turned it into a smallpox recovery unit for men inoculated at Valley Forge.

Altogether, doctors inoculated four thousand soldiers at Valley Forge and another one thousand at other army winter camps. The procedures were again a great success and only a few dozen of the five thousand men treated for pox died and some of them passed on from other causes. Elijah Fisher was one of the many who survived. His body fought off the pox and he lived—yet again. By spring, the smallpox epidemic was over.

Another epidemic, starvation, was not.

In mid December, the army found itself with no meat and just twenty-five barrels of flour to be shared by fourteen thousand men. Many men complained to their families that they had little to eat on most days and went several days without any food at all. On the day that the army arrived at Valley Forge, Dr. Waldo wrote “provisions scarce” and wrote that the men wailed, “No meat! No meat!” throughout the day and night and that their cries were like “the noise of crows and owls.”
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Washington exploded in a letter to Henry Laurens, the new president of Congress. He told him that nearly half his army was sick or in the hospital or did not have enough clothing to report for duty. The other half was starving. He told him in blistering language that the supply departments of Congress impeded him at every turn, that local farmers would not help him and that his soldiers, and he, felt that the government had abandoned them. He went so far as to say that he feared a revolt by the public when they found how badly the soldiers were being treated. On December 23, he bluntly told Laurens that within days the army would “starve, dissolve, or disperse.”
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Any food that could be procured was difficult to deliver. First, there was a shortage of wagon drivers. And, although the winter was relatively mild, frequent rainfall and thawing snow turned the roadways in southeastern Pennsylvania to mud and wagons with supplies destined for the camp could not move. Rivers flooded over their banks and several boats trying to carry supplies across them capsized and the food was lost. On several occasions soldiers trying to salvage the supplies from the overturned boats drowned in the effort.

Some locals gouged the army, selling what little food they had at high prices, refused to sell on credit, or simply refused to sell at all. The food shortages became a chronic crisis that winter. Jedediah Huntington wrote to his brother in Connecticut that the soldiers “live from hand to mouth.”
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Following another food shortage in mid-February, an assistant in the commissary told his boss that the army had been without beef for five days and that there was no sign of any cattle on their way. “We have been driven almost to destruction,” the officer said of the starvation.
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The food crisis would continue throughout the winter and into the spring, as would the medical and clothing shortages, threatening the existence of the army. Inflation spiraled once again as American paper money depreciated in value and word of the awful winter brought recruitment to a standstill. There was continued friction among officers and even a failed conspiracy among some officers and members of Congress to replace George Washington as commander in chief with the newly famous Horatio Gates. And, on top of all that, the British army was just twenty miles away in Philadelphia and might attack at any moment.

T
he road to Valley Forge began just before dinner on September 2, 1777, for Lieutenant James McMichael of the Pennsylvania State Regiment, now renamed the Thirteenth Pennsylvania Riflemen. On that day McMichael’s regiment camped near Wilmington, Delaware. The men were told to prepare for battle because the British Army, on its way to Philadelphia, appeared to be marching toward nearby Christiana, a village in the northern part of the state.

The armies did not encounter each other there but at Brandywine

Creek, south of Philadelphia, on September 11, 1777. McMichael and his regiment were under the command of General William Maxwell and given the assignment of guarding Chadd’s Ford, one of several shallow fords that the enemy could use to cross the creek.

The main attack was made by Lord Cornwallis and Howe with seventy-five hundred men three and a half miles west, at Birmingham meeting house, following a flanking maneuver the Americans did not anticipate. Washington’s information was faulty, too. He had no idea as to the number of troops and cannon he had. Washington didn’t even know the location of the meeting house. The maps given him were not complete either, and the terrain looked different from Washington’s spyglass than it did on his maps.

There, men under General John Sullivan and later Nathanael Greene could not hold back the English attack.
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Throughout the assault, which came at 4 p.m. and lasted several hours, Washington and Lafayette rode back and forth, rallying all of the men in the area. Lafayette was shot in the thigh and the commander in chief was constantly exposed to fire.
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General Wilhelm Knyphausen’s Hessians attacked Chadd’s Ford around 4:30 p.m. They crossed Brandywine Creek easily and tore into the American defenders, including McMichael, on the other side. It was a hot fight in the afternoon and McMichael knew that he and his men were in trouble from the moment it commenced.

It had been a horrific encounter. One man wrote, “The batteries at [Chadd’s] ford opened upon each other with such fury as if the elements had been in convulsions; the valley was filled with smoke and . . . for an hour and a half this horrid sport continued.”
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McMichael and his fellow soldiers were disappointed that they had been driven back and forced from the area, and relieved that the British had foolishly decided not to pursue them. All felt like Captain Samuel Shaw, of Massachusetts, who wrote, “No person could behave with more bravery than our troops; but, somehow or other, we were not successful.”
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The defeat at Brandywine was a stinging setback for the public, though. The Continental Army lost approximately eight hundred men, killed or wounded, and four hundred Americans were taken prisoner. The British lost 577 killed or wounded. Washington’s army had failed to halt Howe and permitted him to continue his campaign to capture Philadelphia. Washington came under intense criticism, especially when the English army took the city without a shot being fired in defense of it and paraded through town to the loud cheers of the thousands of Tories who lived there.

Washington learned that after Howe’s capture of Philadelphia Howe had divided his army, with three thousand in Philadelphia and about two thousand at Wilmington, Delaware. The remaining seven to eight thousand encamped just northwest of the town at the village of Germantown. The commander decided to attack them there. Recent enlistments had swollen Washington’s army to eight thousand continentals and three thousand militia, giving him superior numbers for a single engagement for one of the few times during the war.

On October 3, the battle of Germantown began. Washington decided to copy the Trenton plan of attack and marched the army all night for a surprise assault at dawn. The Americans would hit Howe from four different directions at precisely the same time in a coordinated attack. It would have worked, too, but an early morning fog slowed down the offensive and caused two regiments to collide and fire on each other. Confusion ensued and Washington ordered a retreat. McMichael was angry about the order to turn back. He wrote, “Here we had disagreeably to leave the field when we had nearly made a conquest.”

The retreat was slow and difficult. Wrote a drained McMichael that night, “I had previously underwent many fatigues but never any that so much overdone me as this. Had it not been for fear of being taken, I should have remained on the road all night. Considering my march when on picket [the night before], I had in twenty-four hours marched forty-five miles and in that time fought four hours during which we advanced so furiously through buckwheat fields. It was an almost unspeakable fatigue.”

Rumors of the Saratoga triumph reached Washington on October 18 and all celebrated. There was not much else to cheer about that fall and winter. Following the double defeats at Brandywine and Germantown, and the loss of Philadelphia, the American forces in Pennsylvania moved from village to village and camped for a night in one location and a week in another. Finally, on December 19, they arrived in Valley Forge for the winter.

McMichael had obtained a furlough just after he arrived at Valley Forge and returned in early January. The lieutenant’s hut was finally completed near the end of January; he slept in a tent with others during its construction. By that time, the tragedies of Valley Forge, caused primarily by dysfunction in the commissary and quartermaster divisions—and a lack of assistance from Chester County residents—had already started to unfold. The men had starved from time to time throughout the winter. Many died in the hospitals.

McMichael returned at the height of the clothing crisis that had begun prior to the army’s arrival at Valley Forge and continued throughout the winter. Some regiments found they lacked clothing as early as the summer. Colonel Israel Angell, commander of Jeremiah Greenman’s Second Rhode Island, complained about it in August 1777, when he wrote a caustic letter to his state legislature. He told them then that his men had been barefoot for weeks and that they gave the appearance of a “ragged, lousy, naked regiment.”
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The clothes of many other soldiers had been torn badly in the heated battles at Brandywine Creek and Germantown and during hut construction; they needed replacement, but little was available. The clothier department, run by the incompetent James Mease, had not foreseen any great need to buy clothes and Mease had refused several opportunities to do so because he felt that the prices were too high. Added to his recalcitrance was a quartermaster’s department, located forty miles away in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, whose administrators seemed to have little knowledge of the clothing woes of the army and did little to transport any. The department had not had a leader for months and clerks there who did try to assist the soldiers often found themselves lost in voluminous paperwork.

No clothing had been set aside either, because no one knew where the army would spend the winter. Shipments of clothes from New York State were lost en route. Another large clothing warehouse had been burned by the British. American officers billeted in other winter camps, such as those in New York and New Jersey, with clothing shortages of their own, halted shipments for Valley Forge and removed many of the uniforms and blankets and gave them to their own badly clad men.