The First American Army (36 page)

At first, most soldiers thought little of the stocky Prussian who barely spoke any English; no one believed the men, so weary from the winter, would have any interest in arduous daily training. They were wrong. Von Steuben was smart enough to turn the drills into contests between regiments, and the men, sometimes as angry with each other as they were with the British, welcomed the competition. He also wrote his own simplified maneuvering manual and the soldiers liked it.

Lt. George Ewing, of New Jersey, described the daily drills that commenced in April with genuine affection. He wrote, “This forenoon the brigade went through the maneuvers under the direction of Baron Steuben. The step is about halfway betwixt slow and quick time, an easy and natural step. I think [it is] much better than the former. The manual also is altered by his direction. There are but ten words of command.”
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Von Steuben’s condensed set of commands for battlefield repositioning and firing were much easier to understand and could be speedily implemented. The contests between the men escalated and within a few weeks the men were even practicing drills and marching maneuvers on their own, without any supervision, determined to do better than other regiments.

On May 6, 1778, the morale of the men at Valley Forge received an enormous boost when it was announced that France had recognized the United States as a sovereign nation and later would come into the war on its side. Louis XVI would supply muskets, cannon, thousands of men, and part of the French fleet to assist the Americans.

The announcement was greeted by a day-long celebration. At precisely 10 a.m. a cannon was fired to alert the brigades. A short time later a second cannon boomed to signal their movement to the parade ground. There they were greeted by a roaring salute by thirteen cannon, one for each state. That salute was followed by the traditional Fue de Joy, in which every man fired his musket three times, one after the other, giving anyone near the camp the joyful sound of more than thirty thousand shots fired into the morning sky. Between each of three Fue de Joys the thirteen cannon boomed again. After the first, the soldiers shouted, “Long Live the King of France.” At the conclusion of the second round of cannon they shouted, “God Save the Friendly Powers of Europe.” And at the end of the third, they shouted, “God save the American States.”
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The musketry and cannonading was followed by two receptions, one for the officers and another for the enlisted men. General Washington attended the officers’ reception, mingling with as many of his lieutenants, captains, and colonels as he could. Then His Excellency walked to the reception area where all of the thousands of enlisted men were gathered. To their delight, Washington had some food and drink and mingled with them.

Late in the afternoon, Washington left the reception with all eyes on him. He mounted his white horse and reined him to one side. As he did, without prompting, the eleven thousand some men then enrolled in the first American Army cheered him. Genuinely moved, the general turned the horse around, faced the men, took off his hat, and waved it at them in salute. Now they roared, clapping their hands together as fast as they could and then, almost in unison, the soldiers took off their hats and tossed them high into the air as the general rode off.

George Washington marveled at the good cheer of the army. In a letter to his cousin he recounted all of the hardships of the winter, but ended by telling him that “yet the army is in exceedingly good spirits.”
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James McMichael enjoyed the reception and cheered the commander as loudly as anyone else, but he yearned for his wife. Five days later, on May 11, probably at the repeated urging of Susanna, Lieutenant James McMichael, his time up, finally left the Continental Army after two full years of service. He had participated in some of the greatest battles of the conflict at New York, Brandywine, and Germantown and had survived the harrowing winter at Valley Forge. He wrote that he headed to his wife’s home in Stony Brook, New Jersey, on a pleasant spring day filled with the sounds of birds and “their notes of melody in the highest branches of the lofty cedars.”

On the night before he departed, McMichael wrote a long, epic poem describing the history and battles of his regiment. In the middle of it, describing the army’s arrival at Brandywine Creek, he penned a fourline stanza that captured the attitude of the young lieutenant and, in him, perhaps the entire army:

I
n March 1778, Private Elijah Fisher’s luck changed. One of the men from his regiment who was a member of the “life guard” that traveled with General Washington decided to leave just as the unit was increased in size. Fisher’s colonel asked him to take his place in the elite military unit, despite his recent illness.

To be chosen for the commander’s life guard was a great honor. Washington created the unit for two reasons. First, the guard, usually accompanied by a band, had special uniforms, new hats, the best and fastest horses. They traveled with him wherever he went to create an impressive image for the commander in chief. The members of the guard were a distinguished group and had to meet specific requirements. Each had to be American, not from any foreign power aiding the army. Washington insisted that they had to be good soldiers and men of “sobriety, honesty, and good behavior . . . handsomely and well made . . . neat and spruce.” The unit originally consisted of fifty-eight infantrymen and thirty-eight cavalry, but their number grew over the years. They were their own parade and gave Washington an aura of power. Second, the guard, whose members also had to be at least five feet, ten inches in height, was there to protect him from any personal attacks as the army moved. When it rested, they camped right next to his tent or home.
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Life was good in the special unit that guarded the commander in chief, the forerunner of the secret service that protected presidents later. The commander took care of the men who served in the guard with warm clothing and ample food. “I like being there much better than being in the regiment,” Fisher said. He still experienced kidney pains.

Fisher and the personal guard were always with Washington and the experience gave Fisher a chance to see how Washington conducted himself as he met with foreign dignitaries, other generals and local ministers, farmers and merchants. He was witness to the relationship that Washington enjoyed with his wife Martha, who spent every winter of the war with the general. She, too, was protected by the life guard. Fisher knew about Washington’s close relationship with his slave servant, Billy Lee, who spent a considerable amount of time with the general, riding with him many afternoons of the war. Fisher watched as Washington inspected camps and led battles. He saw him during happy times, following a victory in a battle (Washington rarely smiled in public in order to hide his bad teeth) and he saw the flashes of anger that the general kept hidden from the army and the public, especially at Valley Forge when Washington fumed about the lack of clothing and food. Fisher also had a close-up view of the enormous respect and admiration displayed by people who came to see the commander in chief. But Fisher and the men in the life guard served to protect him, not befriend him. Fisher never indicated in his journal that he ever actually talked to Washington.

The personal guard also played a major role in all of the pomp that Washington loved to direct on special occasions. One of Washington’s lobbying efforts throughout the war was with the chiefs of various Indian tribes. He wanted their friendship in order to keep them from joining the British. Fisher and the members of the guard would witnesses the arrival of the Indian chiefs at Valley Forge. They came wearing their ornate headdresses and flowing robes for meetings and dinners to cement the friendship with the Continental Army. The guard assembled to greet visiting foreign dignitaries or rode out to greet them with the commander, music playing and flags flying in the breeze. The guard would also assemble in lines to greet American public figures, such as governors or congressional delegates, upon their arrival at Valley Forge and stood near the general in the many anniversary celebrations held to celebrate victories and boost morale.

Their greatest responsibility, of course, was the personal safety of the most important person in the United States—George Washington. They were to protect him from any kidnap attempts or snipers. (There had been one plot to assassinate the general in 1776; an American soldier, Thomas Hickey, was hanged for it.)

On May 30, 1778, Fisher almost lost his life as a member of the personal guard, but it was not during a battle, assassination attempt, or kidnapping. Another member of the guard had crossed the Schuylkill to buy milk and yelled over the river at Fisher, taking a walk with several other men, to fetch a canoe and cross over to pick him up. Fisher procured a canoe and a pole and proceeded to cross the river, whose current was faster than usual. He switched the pole from one side of the canoe to another and pushed down on it, hard. The pole hit a rock underneath the water and then slid off the side of it and plunged further down toward the river bottom. It forced Fisher to tumble out of the canoe and into the rapidly running water.

He later wrote in his journal, “[I] made for shore, but the current was so swift it carried me downstream. Every little while I could touch bottom, the water being up to my middle, but I could not stand in comparison more than I could stand on the side of a house. I tried for shore, but the more I tried the more the current would sweep me downstream. I tried to touch bottom but I could not.”

He began to slip under the waters of the Schuylkill. Fisher wrote that each time he tried to push his head out of the water it was held down by the current and he started to go to sleep underwater. The private felt his body go limp and believed that he was drowning. His body, he said, felt “as easy as it ever did in my life.”

All of a sudden, he felt arms around him and his head flew up out of the river, droplets of water cascading off of it. His arms were held by something and he could feel them rise above the water level, too. His feet could feel the bottom of the river bed. A friend, Blake, watching him float down the Schuylkill, dove into the river and swam as fast as he could after Fisher, shouting to others to assist him. Blake grasped his friend in a bear hug, his arms under Fisher’s armpits, and yanked him hard toward shore; other men on the bank of the river grabbed Fisher and hauled him up out of the river and onto the bank as he gasped for air.

The men dried him off the best they could with their own jackets, wrapped him in a blanket, and took him to one of the barracks in camp to see a doctor, explaining his near drowning to the physician there. The doctor did what every doctor seemed to do in the army. He bled him. Fisher, who probably needed nothing more than some dry clothes and a few hours in bed to recuperate, promptly began to feel very weak and fell ill when several pints of his blood were taken out. “I was very unwell for several days,” he reported. Like other men, he was sicker when he left the hospital than when he arrived.

As a member of the elite guard, Fisher was an eyewitness to the harsh punishments, and clemency, meted out by George Washington. On June 4, 1778, Washington approved the hanging of a former soldier in the Tenth Pennsylvania, Thomas Shanks, as a spy. Thousands lined the parade ground to watch the grim execution. On another occasion the commander ordered a firing squad execution for a man who had deserted and rejoined the army seven times, illegally collecting a bonus each time he reenlisted. Fisher witnessed the hanging of another man for robbery. On another occasion, the victims were two soldiers who had, like too many others, fraudulently enlisted for a bounty, then deserted, then reenlisted for another bounty several times. Washington ordered both shot by a firing squad.

But Washington could be lenient, too. On August 21, 1778, sixteen men were sentenced to death for desertion and for illegally enlisting more than once. Washington asked their officers if there was some mitigating circumstance that he could use—character, long service, sterling prior record—to spare them. He pardoned all at the last moment.

George Washington maintained a harsh policy of punishments in the army. He had been notorious for insisting on floggings of one hundred lashes during the French and Indian War. At that time he commanded troops at frontier garrisons in Virginia as head of a colonial company for the British army, which allowed as many as two thousand lashes for infractions. In 1775, Congress set thirty-nine lashes as the toll for punishment of crimes that ranged from first time desertions to striking an officer to petty theft. As the war progressed, and the need for discipline grew, the number again climbed to one hundred by the following year; this pleased Washington, who insisted that harsh punishment deterred further crime. Sometimes as many as a half-dozen men were flogged on the same day for different crimes.
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