The First American Army (5 page)

The Boston camp was a messy collection of badly built structures that lined crooked dirt lanes. Some men lived in private homes, some in tents, some in huts, and some in crudely formed stone, wood, and dirt enclosures. Some tents had boards for sides and some had canvas. Some huts were well built and some badly designed. Some held too many men and some too few. The construction of wooden barracks outside Boston, and huts later in the war, began as soon as Washington took command. Groups of men erected barns for horses and slaughterhouses for cattle. Artillery crews spent their day at first mounting cannon and then cleaning and maintaining them and practicing gunnery drills. Men sewed their tattered uniforms and those who had been tailors before the conflict assisted and supervised them. Cleaning crews dug, filled up, and maintained latrines. Some men drove wagons. In the early days of the war, the army sometimes loaned crews of enlisted men to the counties or villages where they were camped to help with necessary governmental work; many enlisted men were employed as workers to construct barns for towns.

In a unique labor system apparently used only during the Boston siege, commanders even permitted enlisted men to sell furniture or other things that they made in camp to civilians. Some made furniture for generals in return for favors. Private William Parker continued his shoemaking business in the military, producing footwear that he sold to soldiers.
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Some men were even allowed to work for civilians in the community for a few weeks, walking back and forth from camp. The long-standing system of job-time swapping was honored, too, and many enlisted men had another do their work for them while they took the day off and swam or visited local women. Upon their return, at an agreed upon date, they worked the time of the man who had substituted for them.

Greenwood and all of the troops were drilled periodically during the day and much time was spent in the early months of the war simply training men how to load and fire muskets and maneuver with bayonets. Men attended prayers in the morning and in late afternoon when chaplains were on hand, usually led by one chaplain for each regiment. All were ordered to attend Sunday services and many went to those in nearby communities.

Hours were set aside for leisure. Ball games, such as lacrosse played by the Indians, proved popular and men competed against each other on the wide fields that surrounded the city. Washington saw so much merit in the ball games that he had men clear fields for them at every winter camp. Enlisted men engaged in wrestling matches in large, roughly hewn dirt areas. Sports fields were even cleared at Valley Forge. Many enlisted men, especially those from New England, delighted in ice skating on frozen ponds and rivers. Some went swimming in nearby lakes during the spring and summer. Shooting contests were allowed from time to time.

Men spent much of their time playing cards until this practice took up so much time and generated so many arguments that all gambling was outlawed in the winter of 1777. It was eradicated after a woman who permitted some soldiers to live in her Morristown, New Jersey, home reported that one of them had become ill during a card game and was placed in his bed by the others, who went back to their card game. Twenty-four hours later, she found the private dead and the men still playing cards, oblivious to his condition.

Men in the army indulged in a considerable amount of drinking, a common activity in colonial America. Beer and rum became a part of everyday life. The standard daily issue to the men included whiskey when available. It created substantial problems for the enlisted men throughout the war. Men in Greenwood’s regiment and others often staged drinking contests, with predictable results. Winners and losers became quite ill. James Stevens wrote that in one legendary drinking contest in Boston on February 7, 1776, one man defeated the other by downing forty-four glasses of beer and then, an hour later, died of alcohol poisoning. One drunk private shot and killed another following a dispute in camp at Boston one evening. The ill-tempered assailant’s stunning defense was that the shooting of the private was an accident; he was really trying to shoot the officer behind him.

Outside Boston, wives, girlfriends, relatives, and friends visited the soldiers in camp, sometimes staying at the nearby homes of friends for days. Some even lived with them. George Ewing’s uncle James traveled to Valley Forge to visit him in 1777 and lived in his hut with him and another soldier for three days.
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They brought extra food for the soldiers in the first American army, who quickly also became the first to complain about army food, as they have ever since. The women and friends also bought presents and clothing.

Many of the enlisted men maintained relationships with family and girlfriends far away by writing letters whenever they could. They looked forward to letters from home, too. Friends and family always asked how they were doing. Letters that arrived after a well-publicized and bloody battle usually were full of pleas for a letter back to assure family members, or wives and girlfriends, that their loved ones had not been hurt in the skirmish. An inordinate amount of correspondence that followed fierce battles, such as those that arrived in the days after the assault on Bunker Hill, started with the rather chilling line, “I realize that I may be writing to a dead man.”
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The foot soldiers debated and greatly embellished every rumor that floated through camp, and there were many. Benedict Arnold had been killed. No, he had been taken prisoner. No, he had been taken prisoner and escaped. The British had hired twenty, forty, or fifty thousand Russian soldiers (pick any number) to help them fight the Americans. A huge British force had secretly landed on the southern tip of Florida and had started to march up the Atlantic seaboard toward Boston (why any army would land in Florida to attack Boston, fifteen hundred miles away, was never questioned).

Some younger brothers mesmerized by the service eagerly agreed to take their older brother’s place in the regiment for a few days as the brother returned home for a brief vacation, all authorized by lower-ranking officers. Joel Fisher once took his brother Elijah’s place in Boston for two entire weeks.
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The men celebrated holidays in camp or by visiting the homes of fellow enlisted men. This was rather easy during the Boston siege since many of the enlisted men there lived in communities within thirty miles of the city and invited their friends for dinners at Thanksgiving and Christmas.
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The single men talked frequently about the lovely women they had met in whatever community near where the army had camped. Some in Boston were so mesmerized by the numerous beauties walking about the streets of Cambridge and Boston itself, across the harbor, that they watched them through the spyglasses that they were supposed to be using to track enemy movements.

If the girls made the men feel good, the chills of winter and various illnesses that were transported from one barracks to another did not. Some went to the doctors and were bled or given medicine that did little more than make them throw up. This medicine was so routine that one soldier wrote in his diary that he “saw the doctor and he gave me a puke.”
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Other aspects of camp life were depressing, too. The men were called out for regimental funerals, and there were many. A long string of funerals for the men who had been killed at Bunker Hill in 1775 was followed by another wave of burials for those who had been wounded and finally died a few days or weeks later. Deaths in camp occurred prior to Bunker Hill, however. Men who had been shot in the battles of Lexington and Concord and cared for in the camp outside Boston died from their wounds and were buried. Men died of disease and the fevers that swept through the American camps that winter and in just about every winter. Some old men who had joined the service with great pride, in spite of their infirmities, died of old age, such as the patriotic James Frye, sixtysix, who insisted that his friends at home be told that he “died while in the Continental service.” There were so many funerals that in June 1775, before Bunker Hill, the soldiers attended six in just three days. One enlisted man went to three in one day in the spring of 1776.

For many, the deaths they witnessed from bedsides in camp were the first they had ever seen. The experience unnerved a twenty-one-year-old chaplain, who described it in his journal in a shaky hand: “His breath was short. Sweat. And all of a sudden he contracted his body and it [distorted] the features of his face in a single, violent manner. He grinded with his teeth and his face turned black so fast, as if I could feel it. He vomited a large quantity of black water. Strangled. Nature Trembled. And he soon gave up the ghost at 6 p.m. I closed his eyes.”
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All of the men had to be wary of a new smallpox outbreak in Boston that took the lives of many citizens.

The enlisted men were called out by regiment and were sometimes joined by other regiments to witness a flogging of another enlisted man. Floggings, standard military punishment for a variety of crimes, occurred so frequently that men in the Boston camp attended them at least once a week, sometimes more often. Men were flogged for desertion, insubordination, falling asleep on guard duty, petty theft, and a variety of other charges. They were tied to wooden stakes or trees and beaten repeatedly with a heavy lash. Punishment ranged from a few dozen lashes to over one hundred.

The enlisted men sometimes had to witness the execution, by firing squad or hanging, of a multiple deserter or a man charged with other serious crimes, such as forgery, robbery, or spying for the enemy. The executions, which continued throughout the war, were not only designed to punish an offender, but to serve as preventative discipline for the entire army.

These events shook the men, but few of them believed that they would spend years of their lives witnessing them. Most were convinced that the American Revolution would be a very short war, perhaps just one large battle there in Boston, and then everyone, victorious, could go home. Virginia’s Leven Powell told his wife to inform his business clients that he would be back soon. In a letter, he wrote, “It can be no great inconvenience for the people to wait for my return, which I expect is not far off.”
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The men in the regiments of Greenwood and others sometimes annoyed each other, as men in any group forced to live and work together for long periods of time always do. Fistfights broke out between soldiers engaged in arguments and from time to time duels were threatened or actually fought by officers. Some men would steal clothing from others. Worse, men would steal the rifles of men in their own regiment. One man fumed when he heard that not only had someone stolen his rifle, but had sold it for five dollars in order to obtain money to gamble—and then lost the five dollars in a card game.

The men complained bitterly about their food. By order of Congress, each man’s weekly food ration was supposed to consist of one pound of bread, one half pound of beef, one half pound of pork, or one and one quarter pound of beef if pork could not be had. Once each month the men were to be given one and one half pounds of fish instead of beef. For drinks, the allotment was one pint of milk and one pint of malt beer. Each man was also given six ounces of butter and one sixth of a pound of soap per week. The rations varied during the war and later molasses, cider, vegetables, rice, and Indian meal were added to the diet. Greenwood and others scoffed at what they were supposed to get whenever they looked down at the plates filled with the small, barely edible servings of the day.

The soldiers and officers in the militia units outside Boston, with no training or discipline, may have been long on bravado but they were not reliable. Washington was especially despondent about his officers. He was so upset about their quality that upon his arrival in Boston to lead the army he punished one colonel and five captains for cowardice and stealing money from their regimental budgets and court-martialed dozens of officers for other offenses.
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Even those who seemed so impressive upon their much anticipated arrivals, such as the raucous buckskin-clad riflemen from Pennsylvania, wound up disappointing the rest of the recruits in the army. They turned out to be chaotic bands of untamed frontiersmen who unnerved all who met them. They cursed throughout the day, drank as often as they worked, disdained the men from Massachusetts, and paid little attention to the rules of the newly created army. On two occasions in Boston a group of them charged a guardhouse and freed their compatriot Pennsylvanians who were incarcerated there. Emboldened by their success, the riflemen tried a third rescue, but Washington heard of it and surrounded the guardhouse with five hundred men, muskets loaded, and told them to shoot any riflemen who approached. None did.
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One officer complained about them that “there never was a more mutinous and undisciplined set of villains that bred disturbance in any camp.”
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The early days of the Continental Army, before Washington’s arrival in June of 1775 may have been marked by soaring patriotism, but they were not filled with much administrative success in producing munitions or the development of a professional army encampment. There was very little gunpowder for any kind of a fight and at various times in the spring of 1775 men without powder for their muskets sharpened crude spears to use as substitutes for their guns if the feared British breakout from Boston took place.
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Although there were numerous farmers and a large number of merchants in the army, no engineers could be found who could build usable earthworks and other battle fortifications. These skills were so lacking that General Charles Lee, who preceded Washington as the general in charge of American forces in Boston, quipped that “not a single man of ’em is capable of constructing an oven.”
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Although some men knew how to load, fire, and care for muskets, others had never handled firearms before. This resulted in numerous accidents. One man held his musket a foot in front of him when he fired; the kick of the gun hit him in the chest and killed him. One man’s musket misfired in a barracks and the ball sped through two sets of boards in wall partition, crashed through the wooden bottom of a bunk bed, went through the chest of a man sleeping there, killing him, and finally lodged in a chimney. On what one soldier called “an awful day,” four men in one area of camp were badly wounded when guns went off accidentally.
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At least one man in Boston stabbed himself to death while trying to mount his bayonet to his musket.
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Another fell into a campfire and burned to death.
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