Thirteen Soldiers

by John McCain

  He recovered in the spring, and after walking ninety miles in two days without provisions he caught up with his corps as it was about to cross the Hudson River. Shortly after he arrived, he and nine other men were ordered to hunt down two more deserters. They traveled another ninety miles in twenty-four hours without finding the fugitives, who, as it turned out, had been hiding only a few miles from camp.

  He spent the summer on an island in the Hudson quarrying rock to use in repairing the army’s fortifications at West Point. The officious captain he had tumbled into a ditch the previous fall was still in command and still hated by his men. Martin discovered that some soldiers were planning to make a bomb in a canteen, filling it with gunpowder and attaching a fuse. They said they intended only to frighten the officer. Martin believed it would have killed him and was barely able to persuade the men to drop their plan.

  He spent another hard winter in New York waiting anxiously for peace to be declared. Sent on a detail one day to cut wood for the barracks, he walked downriver five miles, where he was caught in a sudden blizzard and had to return by a circuitous route of ten miles in a bitterly cold wind and snow eighteen inches deep. His right ear was frostbitten and he was sick for several days. Accustomed to suffering, he dismissed the incident, explaining, “Afflictions always attended the poor soldiers.” A friend of his, of the same age, was showing off with his musket one day to amuse Martin, tossing it overhead and catching it, when he lost control and his bayonet stabbed him in the leg. “An ignoramus boy of a surgeon” dressed the wound. A few days later his friend complained that his neck and back hurt. Martin informed the captain, who had the boy taken to a hospital in Newburgh, where he was seized with lockjaw and died.

  When spring came the men watched to see if the great chain the Americans stretched across the Hudson in navigable months to impede British ships would be laid down again. If it were not, they reasoned, then peace must be at hand. It wasn’t. On April 19, 1783, they learned that Congress had preliminarily approved the terms of the Treaty of Paris, which wouldn’t be formally concluded until September. Martin described the men as exultant when they heard the news, but worried about the condition in which they would return to their homes. They were “starved, ragged, and meager,” he wrote, with “not a cent to help themselves with.”

  On June 11 their captain entered their barracks and informed them that, though they were not formally discharged from service, they could all return home and would be recalled if circumstances required it. If they weren’t recalled, their furloughs would be considered honorable discharges when the war’s end was officially declared. The joy they had expected to feel when the end arrived was little in evidence; sorrow was the more common emotion. They had lived so long together, shared so much suffering together, “bearing each other’s burdens” and concealing “each other’s faults,” it was hard to part. “Ah, it was a serious time,” Martin remembered.

  They were allowed to keep their muskets and take some ammunition with them. That and the clothes on their backs were all they possessed. They were to receive certificates for the years of back wages owed them and were told their discharges could later be used to claim the hundred acres of land in the Ohio country they had been promised when they enlisted. Many of the men set off immediately for home. Martin and others stayed at West Point, waiting for their “settlement certificates” for back pay. It wasn’t clear when the certificates would be provided, so Martin volunteered to serve the final few months of a friend’s enlistment while he waited for his money. He was honorably discharged less than two months later and received his certificates, some of which he sold for a little money to buy some clothes.

  He never went home. He stayed in New York for the year and taught school for a time. In the summer of 1784 he left New York for what is now the state of Maine, where he had heard rumors of free land being granted to veterans. He settled in a little town on Penobscot Bay where the water narrows into a river. He never received his hundred acres of Ohio land. Instead he worked a hundred acres of Maine farmland, to which he did not possess title; as many veterans did, he simply claimed a parcel of unused land and tried to make a life for himself. He married Lucy Clewley, and they had a daughter and a son, who was mentally disabled.

  The famous Henry Knox, who had been Washington’s general of artillery, had acquired something called the Waldo Patent, a land grant giving him title to a vast swath of Maine, which encompassed many veterans’ farms, including Martin’s. He demanded payment for them and evicted the veterans who couldn’t pay. Martin could not pay.

  “I throw myself and my family wholly at the feet of your Honor’s mercy,” he wrote Knox, “earnestly hoping that your Honor will think of some way, in your wisdom, that may be beneficial to your Honor and save a poor family from distress.” Knox never replied, and Martin lost his farm. He is believed to be one of a party of veterans who fired their muskets one day at some of Knox’s surveyors.

  He served as his town’s clerk and a selectman and was a captain of the Maine militia. He managed somehow to obtain another, smaller holding and farmed it. He wrote poetry and hymns, and he painted. He was well liked by his neighbors. And he was always poor and often nearly destitute.

  IN THE FIRST DECADE of the new century, a national debate began over the question of providing pensions to Revolutionary War veterans. The idea was not universally popular; far from it. Most Americans, and many of their elected representatives, were still suspicious of standing armies. Reflecting that suspicion was the popular belief that it had never really been necessary to create the Continental Army, that militias could have won independence with more regard for the nation’s republican character.

  Nevertheless a federal law was enacted in 1818 granting a $96 annual pension, approximately $1,800 in today’s dollars, to any male who had served for more than nine months. A year later the law was amended to restrict pensions to those veterans who could prove they were living in poverty. The law didn’t make any provision for women who had served or for the thousands of African Americans who had fought for the country’s independence. In the end only a little more than three thousand veterans actually received compensation. Martin was one of them, and in a petition he filed to claim his pension he claimed his net worth to be negligible. He had “no real nor personal estate, nor any income whatever, my necessary bedding and wearing apparel excepted, except two cows, six sheep, one pig.”

  A more generous law was adopted in 1832 that included many veterans who had been denied a pension previously. At the time Martin wrote his narrative, the debate over what the Continentals deserved from their country still continued, and many Americans resented even the modest compensation veterans received under the terms of the 1818 law. Martin saved the last few pages of his narrative to address the controversy, not bothering to conceal his contempt for those who questioned the honor and worth of the men who had liberated the nation and done so without demanding anything from the ungrateful people who now dismissed their sacrifices.

  He began by cataloguing everything they were promised when they enlisted and the very little they actually received, even basic commitments of food and clothing. He recalled their terrible suffering: “Almost every one had heard of the soldiers of the Revolution being tracked by the blood of their feet on the frozen ground. This is literally true; and the thousandth part of their sufferings has not, nor ever will be told.”

  They had fought exhausted, naked, and starved, he reminded his readers, and were kept in that condition in winter quarters, when marching, and on the battlefield. He allowed that many militia had served bravely and well, a fact he could testify to personally as he had served alongside them. But he argued that militia had not and could not have won the war. That had been accomplished by a standing army, well trained and serving for the duration of the war because, he explained, militia “would not have endured the sufferings the army did; they would have considered themselves (as in reality they were and are) free citizens, not bound by any co
rds that were not of their own manufacturing.”

  To those who resented veterans for receiving pensions, he wrote, “The only wish I would bestow upon such hardhearted wretches is, that they might be compelled to go through just such suffering and privations as that army did.” He closes his tirade by assuring any readers for whom the old veterans were “an eyesore, a grief of mind,” that they need only wait a little while to be relieved from their offense. “A few years longer will put [the veterans] all beyond the power of troubling them, for they will soon be ‘where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.’ ”

  Joseph Plumb Martin would take a little longer to go to his rest, likely showing a spirited obstinacy to the end. He died twenty years later, in 1850, at age ninety. His narrative deserves an honored place in the archives of the revolution among our most famous founding documents.

  Martin would be the last person to begrudge the appellation “the father of his country” to the great man he served under and esteemed. But a nation doesn’t have a single parent; our history identifies a whole class of founding fathers. The men who fought, suffered, and died to achieve the independence the founders declared surely deserve a share of the distinction, though for their part, they thought it honor enough to be described as just who they were.

  Joseph Martin’s final resting place is in a small cemetery in Stockton Springs just a few paces from U.S. 1, which in summer is often choked with traffic as throngs of vacationers make their way to the pretty harbor towns of the Maine coast. If any of them happen to spot the small marble monument that decorates his grave, not one in ten thousand will know who it memorializes or read the simple inscription it bears:

  PRIVATE JOSEPH PLUMB MARTIN

  SOLDIER OF THE REVOLUTION

  George Roberts, American seaman and gunner on the privateer Chasseur in the War of 1812.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Brothers-in-Arms

  Charles Black, a freeborn African American sailor, risked his liberty and life for his country and comrades in the War of 1812.

  ON THE FIRST DAY OF August 1842, a thousand members of the Young Men’s Vigilant Association marched along Lombard Street in what is today Society Hill, the tony Philadelphia neighborhood of gracious streets lined by brick townhouses and streetlights made to look like nineteenth-century gas lamps. It was a humbler address in 1842, home to the city’s growing population of free African Americans and fugitive slaves. The marchers had staged the parade to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the British Empire’s abolition of slavery in the West Indies.

  Philadelphia’s African American community had increased by 50 percent over the previous two decades, and the modest economic and social progress that accompanied their growing numbers was perceived as a threat by another expanding community nearby. Rural, uneducated, and poor Irish immigrants competed with African Americans for subsistence work and housing. The Irish occupied the last rung of the economic ladder and resented the success of African Americans, who just barely grasped the rung above them. Freed black males in Philadelphia had even briefly possessed the right to vote until 1838, when it was stripped from them.

  Both communities had reasons to fear for their security, of course, in a country that had little respect for the rights and dignity of either. The Irish, beset not only by desperate poverty but by the bigotry and violence of anti-Irish, anti-Catholic nativists, and who understandably held the British Empire in low regard, blamed the city’s other victims of prejudice for their wretched circumstances.

  They had clashed before, but never as violently as on this day, when an Irish mob attacked the marchers as they passed Mother Bethel Church, one of the first African American churches in the country. The marchers fought back, further enraging their assailants. The ensuing riot lasted for three days.

  The mob made for the home of a leader of the black community and outspoken abolitionist, who had armed himself in preparation for the confrontation. A Catholic priest dissuaded the rioters from attacking him and burning his house, but they burned and looted a great many other places, scores of homes, the Second African Presbyterian Church, and Smith’s Hall, a well-known meeting place for abolitionists. Blacks were dragged from their homes and savagely beaten. Hundreds were injured, the number killed unrecorded but presumably many. Firemen were attacked as they fought the blazes. Philadelphia’s mayor and police did little to quell the violence until the riot began to subside on the third day and the local militia was called in to restore order.

  The African American abolitionist and historian William Cooper Nell, in his history of African Americans who had served in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, quoted a “local philanthropist” describing the fate of one of the riot’s victims:

  A Colored man, whom I visited in the hospitals, called to see me to-day. He had just got out. He looked very pitiful. His head was bent down. He said he could not get it erect, his neck was so injured. He is a very intelligent man, and can read and write. I will give you his story.

  Charles Black, over fifty, resides in Lombard Street. Was at home with his little boy unconscious of what was transpiring without. Suddenly, the mob rushed into his room, dragged him down stairs, and beat him so unmercifully that he would have been killed, had not some humane individuals interposed, and prevented further violence.

  Charles Black had known more than his share of misfortunes before he was set upon by the mob that day. He had lived for a time within the walls of one of the most notorious prisons in the world. He had braved the fire of cannon and musket and heard the terrible ring of cutlass striking cutlass. He bore wounds inflicted by one or more of those arms, though the scant information we have about his life doesn’t specify which weapon—grapeshot, ball, or blade—drew his blood.

  Black was a sailor. His father had fought at Bunker Hill, and his grandfather in the French and Indian War. When the War of 1812 began he was impressed as a seaman in the British Navy who refused to fight against his country and, eventually, fought for her.

  There is little more recorded about his life before he was dragged from his home by an angry mob and savagely beaten. But we can imagine it by recalling the experiences of other African Americans who served in the navy during the wars that preceded the war that would end slavery.

  It was a hard life that followed the day he felt, as had thousands of other men from the lower orders of their societies, “a damp, drizzly November in my soul” and went down to the sea to seek opportunities unavailable to him elsewhere. It would have been an unpredictable life, much of it spent in miserable living conditions, an often dangerous life and subject to violent discipline. But for however much of his life was spent under sail, Black would have known what it was like to live as a rough equal among white men.

  Racial prejudices and tensions didn’t entirely disappear at sea, but most ships were integrated. There was a social hierarchy at sea, of course, and those on the top held absolute power over those beneath them. But the caste system at sea had much less to do with racial prejudice than did the one on shore.

  Fifteen to twenty percent of sailors in the U.S. Navy during the War of 1812 were African Americans. They constituted anywhere from 12 to 25 percent and in some cases 50 percent of a single ship’s company. The percentage was the same or higher on privateers during the war as it had been on American merchant ships before the war.

  The War of 1812 was fought primarily for “free trade and sailors’ rights,” for the freedom of American seaborne commerce and in opposition to the British practice of impressment. More of the war’s turning points were the result of naval engagements than land battles. When it was over, neither side had acquired new territory, but the British blockade and seizure of American merchant ships and the impressment of American sailors was finished.

  During the Napoleonic wars Great Britain imposed economic sanctions called the Orders in Council to curtail American trade with Britain’s enemies. The British Navy was ordered to stop and search neutral ships and co
nfiscate those that were carrying contraband goods to or from enemy ports. Britain had expanded its navy to more than six hundred ships, and it couldn’t meet its manpower needs by press-ganging only men residing in the British Isles. So His Majesty’s ships were authorized to abduct sailors on American privateers. Ostensibly only British-born sailors were to be impressed, even if they had acquired U.S. citizenship. But in practice British captains had quotas to fill, and they weren’t overly scrupulous about establishing the national origins of the sailors they seized. Thousands of American sailors, British and native-born, were impressed, and there was little the small U.S. Navy could do to prevent it.

  The harm to America’s economy caused by the obstruction of her maritime trade was severe. The injury done to national honor by the seizure of American ships and sailors outraged the American public. One incident in 1807 lit the fuse for the war that would erupt in 1812.

  “Give a ship an unlucky name,” wrote the nineteenth-century naval historian James Barnes, “and it will last throughout the whole of her career.” The superstitions of sailors ought not to be taken lightly. The unfortunate career of the American frigate Chesapeake is a case in point.

  Barnes records that the Chesapeake was stuck in her slipway at her launch and the following day ran onto a sandbar. She didn’t handle well at sea either. Improvements were made to her, and she eventually sailed more gracefully, “yet her bad name stuck to her, as bad names will.” It never stuck faster than on June 22, 1807, when the HMS Leopard cut across the bow of the Chesapeake about fifty miles off Norfolk, Virginia, and hailed the American ship’s captain, Commodore James Barron.

  In the spring of 1807 two French ships that had been damaged in a hurricane limped into Hampton Roads, Virginia, for repairs. British ships were stationed off shore to block their escape. During the blockade three impressed seamen from HMS Melampus, Daniel Martin, William Ware, and John Strachan, and another from HMS Halifax, Jenkins Ratford, a British native, took advantage of the opportunity and escaped to Portsmouth, where they were seen on shore by some of their officers. To avoid being taken back into service, all four enlisted on the Chesapeake as she was taking on stores and crew for a voyage to the Mediterranean.