The First American Army

by Bruce Chadwick

  It is unknown why she wanted to see Gage. As soon as she walked into his office his aides peppered her with questions about the size of the American army and its weapons and supplies. She apparently abandoned the conversation she planned to have with the British general under the barrage of queries. Angry that the officers were trying to pry information out of her, she snapped at Gage about his soldiers, “We are ready for them any time they choose to come out and attack us!”

  She had reacted as a patriot, and as any mother of a soldier. Mrs. Greenwood was, however, a lone American Daniel in the middle of a Redcoat lion’s den. The officers were incensed at her reply and shouted at her, but Gage paid them no heed. He just waved them out of the room and told her to return to her home.

  Greenwood and the rest of the men in the army were eager to attack the British army. “For danger, we knew none,” Greenwood bragged. Washington wanted to do so badly and planned an attack across the harbor at night, but his generals vetoed the idea.

  In the winter of 1776, Washington decided that he could use a battery of cannon to shell the British from Dorchester Heights, a peninsula south of Boston that looked down at the city across the harbor he faced. The army did not have many cannon and none large enough to fire heavy cannonballs that far.

  To the rescue came the improbable Henry Knox. The portly Knox, who weighed close to two hundred eighty pounds, had been a bookseller before the war and had read, he claimed, just about every book ever written on artillery. He had become head of the Continental Army’s artillery and told Washington that he would go to Fort Ticonderoga, in New York, with a regiment of men and transport the guns there to Boston. To do so, Knox and the soldiers had to move cannon out of the fort, cross Lake George on boats, cross the Hudson River, and take the field pieces nearly three hundred miles in winter, over snow covered roads and in severe weather. It seemed like a task of Biblical proportions, but Knox and his men did it. Using forty-two wooden sleds, eighty yoke of oxen, and a small fleet of ships, Knox transported the guns from Ticonderoga to Boston in less than three weeks and gave Washington his needed firepower.

  Washington ordered the cannon, protected by hundreds of bales of hay, placed on the heights in the middle of the night so that the men doing the work would not be seen and wind up as targets for British sentries. It was an enormous job undertaken on the evening of March 4. The completion of the work took three thousand men under General John Thomas, laboring all night, but by the first light of morning the hill was completely fortified.

  Greenwood was on the heights that next morning, peering down at Boston across the water, a target he believed would be rather easy to shell for the more than two dozen guns Knox had mounted on the hills. The British were wary of the guns as soon as sentries spotted them after the sun rose that morning. They felt like sitting ducks. The English planned to storm Dorchester Heights in a flotilla of small boats, but an unforeseen storm arose on the night of the invasion and they had to give up the assault. Greenwood had looked forward to an attack. He wrote, “If they had succeeded in landing they would certainly have been overpowered, for it was a steep hill and the Americans had a number of hogsheads and barrels filled with sand to roll down upon them, and intended to sally out of the fort upon them when in confusion and they would have liked no better fun.”

  The British did not like the “fun” the Americans provided on the night that their insulting play, Blockade of Boston, written by General Burgoyne, was staged in January at their fort on top of Bunker Hill. The British army presented the drama to mock the American forces, but there was an extra, unwritten act in the script.

  As the play commenced at about 9 p.m., Greenwood, fife in his waistband, was summoned along with fifty other men to march silently along a causeway belonging to Charlestown mills that ran beneath the fort. When most of Charlestown was burned on the day of the Bunker Hill battle, about ten or twelve damaged houses had been abandoned by their owners. Sutlers, homeless people, and camp followers, including people who sold merchandise to British soldiers, had moved into them. The plan was to attack the homes while the British army’s amateur thespians were busy with their play and not paying much attention to anything else. Only a few men were left to stand guard over the neighborhood.

  Greenwood wrote, “We surprised the sentries, took a number of prisoners, and set fire to these houses right under their very noses, the enemy at the fort being so astonished as not to fire for some time, at least not until the houses were in a light blaze.”

  Ironically, the fires became visible right at the key moment in the play at the fort up above. In the drama, a Yankee sentinel, dressed as a tailor with paper measures hanging over his shoulders and his large shears sticking out of his pocket, rested upon his musket. He was talking to another Bostonian and looking out toward the harbor. A British sergeant, spotting the fire, ran on to the stage and shouted, “To arms! To arms! Gentlemen, the rebels are upon us!”

  Everyone assumed that the sergeant was part of the play; they cheered lustily but did not move from their seats. “The audience clapped their hands stoutly because he did so well, and it was some time before he could make them understand it was no sham. When they did, however, they tumbled downstairs, over one another, as fast as they could and broke up the Yankee play,” Greenwood recalled.

  Unable to storm Dorchester Heights and certain that his men could not survive continued artillery bombardment from the cannon stationed there, General Howe, who had succeeded Gage in charge of the army in Boston on October 10, 1775, decided to depart from the city and sail to Halifax, Canada, to develop a new strategy. He did not want his ships fired upon as they left. Howe struck an agreement with Washington that the British would not set fire to Boston, as they had threatened, if the Americans would let them sail away unmolested.

  Newspaper editors throughout the colonies hailed the March 17, 1776, withdrawal. Wrote an editor of the Pennsylvania Evening Post, “This morning the British army in Boston, under General Howe, consisting of upwards of seven thousand men, suffering an ignominious blockade for many months past, disgracefully quitted all their strongholds in Boston and Charlestown, fled from before the Army of the United Colonies, and took refuge on board their ships.”1

  Bostonians, Greenwood, and thousands of other soldiers, including Private Jeremiah Greenman, who had just arrived with a Rhode Island regiment, and Elijah Fisher, who had survived Bunker Hill, watched with great satisfaction as the huge fleet of British ships raised their anchors at 9 p.m. and, their wooden hulls creaking, slowly sailed out of the harbor. The Bostonians who lined the streets and heights of the area were hoping that they were free of the hated Redcoats forever. One of them, Boston councilman Timothy Newell, wrote with satisfaction, “Thus was this unhappy distressed town (through a manifest interposition of divine providence) relieved from a set of men whose unparalleled wickedness, profanity, debauchery, and cruelty is inexpressible.” Many saw their departure as an achievement for the Continental Congress. Others, such as a local minister, the Rev. Manasseh Cutler, viewed it as more than that. He saw the exodus of the Redcoats as a sign from above. “It was like the flight of the Assyrians,” Rev. Cutler told friends, “It was the Lord’s doing and is marvelous in our eyes.”2

  Some soldiers were hopeful that the British army would be seen no more, but Washington believed that the English would be back, if not in Boston then somewhere else, and that the American Revolution would not end until one army had soundly defeated the other in a single, bloody battle.

  That was not to be for some soldiers, such as privates Greenwood and Greenman. Most of the army would be sent to the New York City area, where Washington was certain the British would strike. Greenwood and Greenman, however, would not march with them. They would embark on a perilous expedition to Canada that would bring them face to face with British forces and Indian warriors in a strange land and plunge them into one of the most dreadful nightmares in American history.

  Chapter Five

  THE SOLDI
ERS

  The War

  By the spring of 1775, the tension between the American colonists and the British Crown had been growing for more than a decade, ever since the end of the French and Indian War in 1763. To cover the cost of that war and protect the American colonies from any more conflicts, Parliament insisted that the colonies pay higher taxes and permit the soldiers of the British army, with their bright red coats, shiny black shoes, and haughty attitudes, to occupy America.

  The residents of the colonies that stretched along the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to Georgia, three thousand miles from England, believed that they had created a vibrant country of their own since the time their British ancestors arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Jamestown, Virginia, in the early days of the seventeenth century. Over more than one hundred fifty years, the colonists had developed comprehensive legal, economic, and social systems. They had created their own courts, state assemblies, county governing boards, and schools and had dozens of good newspapers. America had become a trading giant, buying and selling with England and other European powers. In addition to the Roman Catholic and English Anglican religions, the colonies now supported the breakaway Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches. The population of the colonies had grown continually and by 1770 stood at 2.15 million, nearly double what it had been a generation before.

  Yet the Crown had little use for the Americans’ treasured institutions and would not let the colonies enjoy any voting representation in Parliament. The colonists, given a little democracy by the Crown through self-governing assemblies and independent courts, constantly sought more and English leaders did not like that at all. Starting in the 1760s, Parliament passed harsh new laws to raise taxes, curtail colonial commerce, and curb political freedom to keep the Americans in line. The Stamp Act of 1765 required all newspapers and legal documents to be taxed via a stamp that had to be affixed to them. The Iron Act forbid American manufacturers from selling carriages, plows, and kitchen utensils in England. The Revenue Act of 1764, better known as the Sugar Act, placed a tax on molasses, rum, coffee, and wine. The Currency Act outlawed American paper money. The Townshend Acts of 1767 authorized taxes on tea, glass, paper, and other goods. Those acts also introduced a new tax to pay for the costs of the British army occupying America. There were even taxes on new doorknobs.

  Some royal governors sneered at colonial assemblies and shut them down when they did not approve of their legislation, infuriating the colonists. The presence of British soldiers also annoyed the colonists, especially after a group of them shot and killed five Americans in Boston in 1770 in what the newspapers called the Boston Massacre.

  The angry Americans felt that their economy was being crushed and their freedoms taken away—they were becoming slaves to England. They fought back. Thousands participated in boycotts of British goods and most newspapers refused to obey the Stamp Act, which had to be rescinded. The protests reached a crescendo one night in 1773 when a radical group, the Sons of Liberty, dressed as Mohawk Indians, boarded the Dartmouth, a cargo ship in Boston harbor, and tossed its more than three hundred crates of tea into the water in the Boston Tea Party.

  British revenge was swift and harsh. Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts that further curbed freedoms and shut the port of Boston, a crippling blow to New England’s economy. Americans immediately denounced the Crown from the bustling cities to the small villages that dotted the country. People berated King George in small taverns and in large assembly halls. Some men, such as Virginia’s George Washington, took charge of armed militia companies and trained them for war. Others formed Committees of Safety, secret organizations that would aid any such rebellion.

  In England, the king and parliamentary leaders insisted that their actions from 1763 to 1775 had been temporary and necessary, but the Americans saw them as the precursors of even more draconian steps to destroy the new, democratic social order they had spent so many years creating. They would not give it up. Many felt, too, that, geographically, more than three thousand miles from London, they were a separate country anyway. They believed that they were a religious people and that God wanted them to free themselves from the motherland. Americans insisted fervently that they were a virtuous people who could create a virtuous nation. The British, they charged, were immoral and corrupt and no longer had the right to rule them. Their economy was surging. Who really needed England anymore?

  And, too, many of them believed that they were being borne along on the currents of history and that, as Thomas Paine put it with such elegance, “time hath found us.” If a war was needed to validate this virtuous land, many said, let it come. If families had to be shattered, businesses ruined, and even if lives had to be given up for American freedom, so be it. None said it better than the fiery red-haired Patrick Henry when he stood in a Virginia hall and shouted, “Give me liberty or give me death.”

  The British never understood the anger that permeated America and the colonists did not understand the need for the Crown’s stranglehold on them. Both were headed for a showdown. It arrived on April 19, 1775. British general Thomas Gage learned that the colonists had secretly stored weapons and ammunition in the tiny Massachusetts village of Concord, outside of Boston. Nearly nine hundred British troops were dispatched to seize this arsenal. The night before, silversmith Paul Revere and others rode through the countryside to warn residents of Concord, and other communities, that the British would be coming the next day. A company of armed local minutemen confronted the British regulars on the village green in the town of Lexington as the king’s troops tried to march through it on their way to Concord. A single shot was fired by someone—no one knows from which side—the “shot heard round the world,” and a battle followed, with the Redcoats chasing the Americans off the green. The British then continued to Concord, where they were engaged in another heated battle with militia. This time, the British fled and began a long march back to Boston, harassed by the militia all the way. The Americans, firing from behind buildings, trees, and stone walls, inflicted 273 casualties, with 72 dead, on the English force.

  The American Revolution had begun.

  The battles of Lexington and Concord, reported in colonial newspapers throughout the Atlantic seaboard, galvanized many Americans against the Crown. At the behest of Massachusetts leaders, thousands of men, young and old, left the security and comfort of their homes in the cities and on farms and joined local militia units. The formation of these companies was greeted with celebrations. In Williamsburg, Virginia, an afternoon of festivities was capped by a parade of soldiers attended by hundreds of cheering residents of the state capital. The editor of the leading newspaper in the colony wrote that Virginians were happy “that the domination of Great Britain was now at an end, so wickedly and tyrannically exercised for these twelve or thirteen years past.”1 These militia units then marched to Boston, where an army of nearly twenty thousand men was gathering to force the British out of the busy port city. There, under the command of several generals and later George Washington, the newly appointed commander in chief, these men became the first American army.

  The militia companies were raised locally and were not national units like today’s army. Residents of the same town or county joined the same militia troop, along with cousins who lived nearby. Friends and men who worked in the same stores or farms joined up together. The men went to war in their own crude uniforms, carrying their own muskets. The leader of their militia was not appointed by superior officers or strangers, but elected by his own men. The officers came from all walks of life. One British army lieutenant, accustomed to professional soldiers serving as officers, was astonished that among a group of American prisoners he found a blacksmith, hatter, butcher, tanner, shoemaker, and tavernkeeper.2 The army included fathers and sons, cousins and siblings. All six brothers of the How family of Methuen, Massachusetts—David, Jonathan, James, Jacob, Isaac, and Farnham—enlisted at the same time.3 The units, with popular homegrown leaders, quickly came to represent the
people of a county and, collectively, the new United States in the eyes of the American people.4 The British did not find themselves facing a professional military force, but a true people’s army.

  The first American army was a sight to behold as it grew at the perimeter of Boston. Men from all over the New England states poured into the army camp. Huge tracts of white tents, brightly illuminated by campfires in the evening, expanded every day as more men arrived. Some crusty forty- and fifty-year-old veterans of the French and Indian War trudged into camp, their old uniform coats and breeches a little too tight on their frames, and regaled the men with their old war stories. Wideeyed teenaged boys, seated around campfires, listened to them with rapt attention. Everyone was ecstatic over the arrival of the bands of swaggering riflemen, in their frontier buckskin shirts, who had become legends for their marksmanship and lust for a fight. Townspeople in Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont (then a part of New Hampshire), and the other New England states marveled at the sight of newly formed militia groups marching smartly down their roadways in the early morning, the men shouldering muskets and tucking pistols into their belts, bragging to each other about the quick destruction they would unleash on the British.

  These militia units would double and triple in size as they approached the greater Boston area. Farmers watched soldiers walk down the road alongside their fields and, moved by their patriotism, dropped their rakes and hoes, kissed their wives and children goodbye, went to their houses, fetched their muskets, and ran after the army, joining the rear echelon as it moved along. Merchants in small towns, equally moved, did the same, dragging old muskets that had not been fired in years out of their closets and slinging them over their shoulders after bidding their families farewell. Tiny bands of musicians, usually with very young drummers and fifers, serenaded the men with songs, both old and new. Enormous colorful banners filled the air, along with the throaty cheers of the men after innumerable toasts with ale. It was a time of heady anticipation.