The First American Army (48 page)

I
t began to snow early on Sunday morning, December 5, 1779, and continued into Monday, the snow piling up throughout the village of Chatham and throughout Morris County, New Jersey. Militia Colonel Sylvanus Seely wrote that it “snowed hard all day.” So much had accumulated over the two days, nearly nine inches, that the roads were impassable to all but horse-drawn sleighs. In Philadelphia, where the storm hit even harder, residents measured the snowfall at eighteen inches.
¹

In Danbury, Connecticut, that morning the storm did not stop the Second Rhode Island, with Jeremiah Greenman, now a lieutenant, from starting its march to winter headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey. The regimental commander, Colonel Israel Angell, pushed his men to trudge eighteen miles to Cortlandt Manor, Colonel Phillip Van Cortlandt’s large estate on the eastern bank of the Hudson River, in a storm that blanketed the Hudson River Valley. The Second Rhode Island then marched a few miles each day until they were stopped by another severe storm on December 12. The men were wet and hungry. They were so hungry that, Greenman said, a group of them, wielding muskets, chased a pair of fleetfooted deer through a woods but did not catch them.
²

Washington’s main army traveled through the falling snow and arrived in Morristown from Newburgh, New York, on December 13. Colonel Seely had turned his wagon into a sleigh, taking off its wheels and fastening ski-like runners to it. On the day that Washington arrived, it snowed again. The temperatures remained low.

Everyone feared the weather would be severe, but no one anticipated one of the most brutal winters in American history. From November 1779 until the spring of 1780, New Jersey would be pounded by twentysix snowstorms, six of blizzard proportions. It was so cold that the temperatures in the region that January remained below freezing during all but two days. The Delaware River froze over by the end of December and remained so until March 4. The Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania, which intersected with the Delaware just below Philadelphia, froze and the ice was so thick that every day residents of the city rode horses and sleds over it. The York River in Virginia was frozen solid for several months. The water in Baltimore harbor was covered with a thick sheet of ice for twelve weeks. Most of the Chesapeake Bay froze over. New York harbor froze, and remained so for several months, permitting sleds to travel back and forth between New York City and New Jersey. It was the only time in recorded history that the deep harbor had frozen solid.
³

Washington selected Morristown, where the army had camped during the winter of 1776–1777, for several reasons. He again wanted to be stationed near Clinton’s army, warm and comfortable in New York City, in case the British decided to move out of the city and attack anywhere on the east coast. Morristown was at the intersection of two highways that he could use to move the army quickly if necessary. It was protected from a British surprise attack by several mountain ranges. It sat in the middle of thousands of acres of farmland with, he thought, plenty of food and cattle for his thirteen thousand man force. (A few hundred men would be billeted in towns a few miles away.) The county was patriotic and he was told that its local militia, led by Colonel Seely, was reliable.

His three thousand man army of 1776–1777 had caused problems in Morris County because the men had been quartered in private homes. As many as a dozen soldiers had stayed with families in small houses built to hold just four or five residents. The people complained of constant drinking, gambling, and cursing by the soldiers. This time, with a much larger army, Washington decided to build a sprawling city of huts in Jockey Hollow, near Morristown, as he had done at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777–1778 and at Bound Brook, New Jersey, the previous year. The massive hut encampment would, again, in population, take its place as the fourth largest city in the United States, behind Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.

Washington designed the huts and the city himself. The log cabins were similar to those at Valley Forge, but this time the huts were built on the sides of hills to provide drainage for water and melted snow. The walls and roofs were solid to prevent seepage. Each had a window cut into a wall for ventilation later, when the weather turned mild. The lack of drainage and haphazardly built walls in the Valley Forge huts, and little ventilation, helped to bring about diseases there. All of the Morristown huts were built in planned neighborhoods, New Yorkers together in one section, Pennsylvanians in another, and along carefully laid out streets. Warehouses, cattle pens covering several acres, and slaughterhouses were erected after the residential huts were completed.

The regiments that arrived early, in milder weather, had more luck with construction and were living in their cabins within two weeks. The men from other states, who came later, took much longer to complete hut construction because they had to battle the elements. Those without huts slept in tents; some had nothing.

On the day after the storm of December 5 and 6, Dr. James Thacher arrived in Morristown with his Massachusetts regiment. They had no cover. Thacher wrote in his diary,

One week later, a cold front moved into northern New Jersey, sending the already low temperatures in Jockey Hollow plunging. Lieutenant Erkuries Beatty, of the Fourth Pennsylvania Regiment, wrote to his brother, “Colder weather I never saw.” Captain Walter Finney, of Pennsylvania, freezing like everyone else, remembered that Jockey Hollow’s pre-war nickname was “Pleasant Valley.” In a sarcastic note in his journal, a freezing Finney wrote, “We did not find it answered to its name.”
⁵

The day after Beatty wrote his letter, the Second Rhode Island Regiment arrived in Morristown, exhausted from their long march over snow- and ice-covered dirt highways. One soldier wrote that “very early that winter the cold came. And such cold! There had been nothing like it in the memory of the oldest inhabitants. Roads disappeared under snow four feet deep.”
⁶
Johann Kalb, an officer who had come to America with Lafayette, wrote that Morristown was worse than Valley Forge and that “it is so cold that the ink freezes in my pen while I am sitting close to the fire.”
⁷

Jeremiah Greenman was not only irritated by the harsh weather but by the discovery that the land set aside for the Rhode Islanders had already been taken by the New Yorkers. Lieutenant Greenman’s regiment was ordered to march another mile through thick, snow-covered woods to a new piece of land. There, over the next two weeks, the Rhode Islanders labored through several snowstorms and the cold to build their huts. They had to live in flimsy tents on the outskirts of Morristown and march more than a mile to their construction site each day; they had little food.
⁸
Greenman wrote, “Very cold and almost starved for want of provisions.”

Freezing as hut construction went slowly, Greenman remembered that he was now a lieutenant and decided to pull rank. He told a sergeant to leave his finished hut and Greenman took his place. He told the unhappy sergeant that it was only temporary, until Greenman and the others finished their own huts. The sergeant had to wait a very long five weeks for that to happen.

They faced another clothing shortage. There were no shoes, either, for men walking in snow five inches deep. “The deficiency of shoes is so extensive that a great proportion of the army is totally incapable of duty and could not move,” Washington complained to a quartermaster at Newburgh. The commander fumed about the shortages to all later, when he could not send a five-hundred-man regiment to assist in the defense of Charleston because none of the men had footwear.
⁹
The southern city then fell to the British under Sir Henry Clinton on May 12; the entire American army of fifty-five hundred men was captured and four thousand muskets seized. It was a terrible blow to the American cause.

The bitter cold was not the biggest worry of the enlisted men and their officers, though; they were starving. An autumn-long drought had caused a bread and flour shortage and many of the men who arrived in Morristown had not eaten any meat or bread in days. The snowstorms prevented the transportation of cattle to slaughterhouses so that the animals could be turned into meat for the soldiers. The cold and snow in New Jersey further hampered food and shelter operations. Gristmills that depended on fastrunning water from rivers and streams for power had to shut down when all the waterways froze over, and could not produce bread.

The army soon discovered that not only was there little food in the area but that the residents there were as reluctant as those near Valley Forge had been to sell the army food and clothing following yet another currency depreciation. Runaway inflation had crippled the national economy and now it took $30 in continental scrip to purchase what one hard dollar (gold or silver) could buy. Most farmers and merchants would not accept credit, as the Pennsylvanians at least had done. Many local merchants complained that the army still owed them money from the winter of 1777. The citizens who refused to feed the army were as angry as the soldiers who were starving. General Greene wrote Colonel Daniel Broadhead that he was afraid “the people will pull us to pieces.”
¹⁰

Private Joseph Martin wrote, “We were absolutely, literally starved. I do solemnly declare that I did not put a single morsel of victuals into my mouth for four days and as many nights, except a little black birch bark which I gnawed off a stick of wood, if that can be called victuals. I saw several of the men roast their shoes and eat them.”
¹¹
Men were again reduced to eating their pets. Major James Fairlie wrote, “I ate several meals of dog and relished [them] very well.”
¹²

An angry Washington complained to state governors and wrote to Congress that “unless some expedient can be instantly adopted, a dissolution of the army for want of subsistence is unavoidable.”
¹³
The governors were enraged by price gouging and the reluctance of the citizens to support the troops. None was angrier that New Jersey’s Governor William Livingston. He wrote “that America, after having so long been the admiration of Europe and having an army on foot that defies the power of Great Britain should at last be compelled to disband her troops by the artifices and practices of Tories and speculators and monopolizers and scoundrels of all sorts and sizes could go very near to deprive me of my senses.”
¹⁴

The governors, and Congress, responded to the general’s pleas and within days dozens of wagons arrived with food and clothing that would carry the troops through another few weeks. But it seemed that no matter what Washington did, he was thwarted by the unending snowfalls that continually made the roads impassable and forced the cancellation of the food deliveries. A brutal storm dropped eighteen inches of snow on December 18, and again halted all hut construction at Jockey Hollow and again ruined any chance to obtain food.

Sawmills throughout the state that the army relied upon to produce boards for the completion of the soldiers’ huts had been shut down by the ice and snow just like the gristmills. The shortage of boards became so acute that a supply officer, Joseph Lewis, a local man, ordered soldiers to tear down area barns for their wood and even had latrines pulled apart for their boards. Lewis begged area farmers to give the soldiers straw to make bedding for those who had managed to move into their huts.

There was little joy on Christmas Day. Most men still slept in tents that sagged under the weight of snow and ice. They existed on one-third rations. Their meager meals had been supplemented a bit in mid December, when Washington sent the emaciated horses to Pennsylvania and gave the men the animals’ corn. The soldiers had little clothing or shoes and found the little money they had was worthless.

Their commanders felt badly for them and noted that soldiers had often gone four or five days without food. “I was extremely shocked,” General von Steuben wrote to New York governor George Clinton. “[It was] the greatest picture of misery that was ever seen.”
¹⁵
Governor Livingston told the New Jersey Assembly that the military situation was “deplorable,” and that “the army [is] reduced for want of provisions and that the magazines are everywhere exhausted.”
¹⁶