Most of Champlain was surrounded by low terrain, marshy at times, and at many points on any boat trip on its waters travelers could see the majestic mountain ranges in the distance. The Green Mountains hugged the coastline of the northeast sections of the lake. The mountains contrasted starkly with the lake, too, and some soldiers in the retreating American army, now under the command of John Sullivan, reported sweating in the boats as they peered up at the snow-covered Adirondack Mountains in the distance. The weather on the lake, and in the region surrounding it, changed frequently and sudden summer rainstorms were common. The winds shifted with little notice or died suddenly. The waters of the lake could be flat for days and then produce ocean-sized waves when high winds swept over and churned up the water. The uncertain weather made sailing on the waters of the lake difficult. The weather shifted quickly, too, in uneven patterns. Hot days in summer were followed by chilly nights. It snowed early in winter toward the northern part of the lake, which cut into Canada, and on many Thanksgiving days those who lived there found themselves snowbound. In 1776, the snows came very early, in the third week of October.
The journey of Greenwood’s regiment down the lake was slow and languid. At its narrow sections they could see deer and a wide array of small animals on the shores and some of the birds that lived off the lake, such as the great blue heron, bald eagle, and the marsh wren. Osprey occasionally flew overhead.
From time to time, when the men were tired from rowing on calm days, or when it became very hot as the sun was reflected off the lake, Greenwood pulled out his fife and played some music. As always, the men appreciated it and, after a few moments of rest, rowed again, the splashing sounds of their oars dipping into the lake accompanied by some lively tunes on the fife and the squawks of a bird soaring high above them.
Chapter Ten
THE HEALERS:
The Reverend, the Doctor, and the Smallpox Scourge
The Rev. Ammi Robbins’s journey toward the valley of death began on March 18, 1776. His departure from his home near Canaan, in the northwest corner of Connecticut, for service as a chaplain in the Continental Army could not have been more pleasant. He met friend and fellow minister Rev. Farrand in Canaan and together they rode six miles north to Sheffield, Massachusetts, just over the Connecticut state line, to the home of Robbins’s sister, who was also married to a minister, the Rev. John Keep. The three ministers and Robbins’s sister enjoyed a lengthy dinner and then prayed together. On the following morning, Rev. Robbins left the comfort of friends and family and headed into the heart of the American Revolution.
Robbins was a thirty-five-year-old Presbyterian minister from a state that had sent thousands of young men to war. He had joined the Continental Army because he hoped that as a chaplain he would be able to heal the hearts and souls of the men in the service who were risking their lives every day in the battle for independence that had lasted for nearly a year.
He was one of the many spiritual healers who volunteered to serve in the army after the Revolution began in the spring of 1775. The military had no difficulty signing up ministers. The men of God, who received officers’ pay, were eager to join the army because they saw the rebellion as not just a political and military revolution, but a campaign to redeem men’s souls, the logical extension of the Great Awakening.
George Washington believed that it was important to have many chaplains in the service. He believed that the comfort they could provide the men was as important as military leadership and that a fear of God helped to maintain discipline. The chaplains were not asked to do much more than they did for their congregations back home: they were charged with offering two prayer services on Sunday and one daily service during the week, if they so chose. They were to visit the sick and dying in the field hospitals when and if they could. They were to comfort anyone who sought them out. Some chaplains were good and some were bad, just like some doctors and officers.
Some ministers offered just one Sunday service and some faked illness to avoid Sunday work at all. Others offered a service every day in addition to their Sunday chores. Some ministers never visited the sick and some visited the hospitals all the time. Most of the army’s chaplains in winter or summer camps were local ministers who added army duties to their congregational responsibilities; others traveled with the army twelve months a year. Only a few served for more than one year; Rev. David Avery served for five. They all believed that they were appreciated by the troops, especially the enlisted men and the homesick young soldiers far from their villages and loved ones.
The men of God put their lives at risk. Some chaplains died of illnesses during the war and some were killed in accidents. At least one committed suicide. Others came down with smallpox and died or had their faces scarred for the rest of their lives. Still others became ill in the service and wound up dying at home, or being weakened for life. Some lost their positions in churches back home by refusing to leave the army when called back by the church elders.
Rev. Ammi Robbins did not realize the magnitude of the nightmare he was traveling toward when he reported to Albany in the middle of that cold and blustery year. Traveling up to Canada a few weeks later would be Dr. Lewis Beebe, a Yale graduate from Sheffield, Massachusetts. Beebe was one of the hundreds of doctors who had left their private practice to save the lives and tend to the wounds of the soldiers in the first American army. He would be the healer of their bodies as Robbins would be the healer of their souls. Neither of the healers knew each other, but would meet and become friends in the middle of the terrible chaos that now engulfed Canada.
The journey to Canada became nothing short of macabre as each day passed and the army moved farther and farther north. At each stop, the minister would discover some reminder of death and catastrophe. His uncle had been killed during a battle in the French and Indian War outside of Albany two decades before and one day Robbins went out with another man to visit his uncle’s grave. It was one of many in a small cemetery. He found his uncle’s resting place and “dropped a tear over it” and went back to camp. It was the first of many graves over which he would cry during his journey to Canada.
The starting point for the trip, Albany, was a city full of both patriots and Tories as well as several thousand Continental Army soldiers, but it was also a boisterous city of taverns and prostitutes, and the language of the people that the righteous minister met was laced with loud and graphic profanity. The city from whence his journey would begin was, he wrote in his journal, an American Sodom and Gomorrah, “a wicked city,” and he said that he deplored the “wickedness of the people [in it].”
There, prior to the beginning of the march toward Canada, Robbins offered prayers in the morning and in the evening each day, doing more than most men of the cloth in the army. The minister visited the sick in army hospitals that had been created out of residences and barns. He was encouraged by the large assemblage of soldiers that turned out to pray with him and listen to him read from the Bible and preach.
He noted in the daily journal that he kept that there was a growing awareness of death around him that was triggered by his visit to his uncle’s grave in the cemetery. One afternoon he prayed with two young soldiers, weakened by fever, nearly motionless on their beds, who soon died. The next day he was summoned to the community of Stillwater, several miles from Albany, to pray for a man whose time, it was said, was growing short. It was. The man, suffering greatly in his bed, died as Robbins sat next to him on a wooden chair reading scriptures aloud.
His sermons to the congregation of several hundred troops and a collection of townspeople who lived nearby, who traveled by horse and carriage to listen to him, were long and powerful and even then people praised his preaching style. He quoted from Hosea, “I will go and return to my place until they acknowledge their offense and seek my face,” and Micah, “And this man shall be the peace.”
There were overtures in some of his sermons, though, unintended at that time, that provided an unsettling foreshadowing of the
debacles to come on the journey they were all about to embark upon. In one ominous sermon, he talked of a God who had abandoned his people, reading a passage from the Bible that said, “If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence.”
Robbins attended the funeral of yet another soldier who died the day before the army began its march. The entire journey north was a trip filled with somber reminders of war, destruction, and death. One day into the march, north of Saratoga, the men passed Fort Edwards, a burned-out stockade used during the French and Indian War, which Robbins reported “moldering down” like a slowly collapsing ghost. A day later, at the southern tip of Lake George, he was given a tour of the ruins of Fort William Henry. It was there, in 1757, that the British surrendered to the French, under the Marquis Louis Montcalm, only to have hundreds of his Indian troops attack their caravan as they left the fort, killing sixty-nine soldiers and women and taking two hundred away as prisoners. As Robbins finished that tour, he met two companies of Pennsylvania troops on their way to Canada, carrying their sick. They told the minister that they had left men who had died on the march on the sides of the road. “How easy ’tis for God to bless or blast our designs,” a saddened Robbins wrote in his journal that night.
He was told by all, officers and enlisted men, that his sermons helped the men feel better about life in the army. This encouraged him. Robbins was ebullient on April 20, when he stood in front of two regiments of seven hundred men each on the shores of Lake George, the beautiful wide body of water with its thickly forested shoreline his backdrop, and led them in loud prayers and spirited hymnal singing before they boarded their boats for another leg of the journey north.
Robbins lived with officers in small tents that accommodated from two to four men. He did not care for some of them, continually complaining about their profanity and “wickedness” and writing that “it would be a dreadful hell to live with such creatures forever.”
For the men, though, the dreadful hell was illness. “’Tis terrible to be sick in the army,” Robbins lamented. “Such miserable accommodations. It is enough to kill a man’s spirit when first taken to go into the hospital.”
Robbins and the men with him sailed north on Lake George, thirtythree miles long and from one to three miles wide, and then on to Fort Ticonderoga on the southern shores of Lake Champlain. None of them were prepared for the grotesque specter that greeted them as they were shown the cemetery there. The very upset minister wrote, “[We] saw many holes where the dead were flung in, and numbers of human bones, thighs, arms, etc. above the ground. Oh, the horrors of war. I never so much longed for the day to approach when men shall learn war no more and the lion and lamb lie down together.”
The army sailed across Lake Champlain, ever closer to Canada and Quebec, in “gondolas,” sixty-foot-long, two-masted schooners with open decks to carry supplies and troops. The chaplain joined the men in rowing the boat when the winds died down. They all talked of the coming battles and their fear of dying in them. Many were frightened. The minister knew that he might lose his life, too, despite his clergyman rank. Robbins prayed for his own safety and asked God to give him strength to be brave, to survive, and to help others make it through the storm ahead. “The prospects at Quebec look very dark,” he wrote. “Oh, that I might be able to trust in God and not be afraid.”
What Robbins and everyone else feared was not just fighting the British and the hundreds of Indians they had enlisted as their allies, but the smallpox epidemic there. The American army had become a victim of the fatal disease in December, just before the failed assault on Quebec. Those in Arnold’s army who had survived the trek to Canada were exhausted, hungry, and wore tattered and damp clothes that they rarely took off. Their huts and tents held more men than they should have. These conditions created an ideal climate for smallpox. General Richard Montgomery, who had smallpox as a young man and was immune, commandeered a building owned by the East India Company in Montreal and he appointed Doctor Isaac Senter as its administrator with orders to turn it into a six-hundred-bed hospital to house smallpox victims. They increased every day. Dr. Senter noted then that “the smallpox still very rife in the army.”1 A field hospital set up between the towns of Sillery and Cove to handle smallpox victims filled up quickly and doctors there said 10 percent of the army had the disease.2
General Thomas, a physician prior to the rebellion, had gone to Canada as the American commanding general on May 1. Thomas, fiftyone, was a fierce patriot and a member of Boston’s Sons of Liberty. The doctor was a well-dressed and distinguished man. He tried to isolate the men with smallpox in hospitals, but he had also permitted many of his men to live in private homes throughout the area. They became infected and the disease moved rapidly from them to others, and then to many more. Many deserted from the army after the January 1 defeat at Quebec, some with the pox, and promptly infected anyone they encountered in the Quebec area, and those people infected other soldiers whom they met later.3 Ultimately, over five hundred soldiers would die because of the pox.
General David Wooster arrived to take command of the army from Arnold in March and by the end of the month approximately one third of the 2,505 Americans had come down with the dreaded pox. Arnold wrote that “smallpox at this juncture” might result in “the entire ruin of the army.”4 The Americans who fled when British reinforcements arrived in Quebec on May 6 left hundreds of sick, including recovering smallpox victims, in hospitals and many more, unable to travel, along the sides of roads (fortunately for them, Governor Guy Carleton ordered his men to bring them back to Quebec where hospitals were set up to house them and many were saved).
Smallpox was the scourge of the eighteenth century. Epidemics in London that arrived between 1718 and 1746 had killed tens of thousands of people. Several thousand died in similar epidemics in Geneva and Berlin in those years. Forty thousand perished in a smallpox attack in Belem, Brazil, in 1750. The 1721 epidemic that reached Boston claimed the lives of 15 percent of the population of the city.
The disease struck quickly and usually took the lives of between 10 and 15 percent of the population of a city, but sometimes claimed as many as one-third or 40 percent of the residents. Those struck suffered severe fevers, throbbing headaches, aches of the loins and limbs, fast pulses, and painful vomiting. After several days, ugly pus-filled eruptions appeared on the skin all over the body, often completely disfiguring the face. Victims’ heads often turned blue and those who did die perished within a week.
The standard procedure to prevent smallpox was diet and inoculation. Doctors prescribed ten to fourteen days of rest and a light diet, plus purging, followed by the injection of the smallpox pustules into the skin with a one-eighth-inch-wide lancet. The diet usually consisted of pudding, milk, ripe fruit, carrots, cabbage, potatoes, and vegetables.5
Smallpox would break out on the skin several days later, accompanied by a fever. The patient walked about outside and drank generous amounts of very cold water to assist the virus injected into his system in fighting off the pox. The diet and purging were considered mandatory to cleanse the body for the inoculation and introduction of the virus into the system.6
Ironically, these doctors, who saved so many lives, terrified residents in nearby neighborhoods because they inoculated people, giving them smallpox to fight smallpox. They feared the introduction of the disease could infect those not immune to smallpox who lived nearby. A hospital in Boston where smallpox patients were treated was burned down by neighbors who feared those inoculated there would infect the entire city. Someone threw a bomb into the room of a man recovering from his inoculation in an attempt to kill him to prevent him from spreading the disease. Dr. Boylston, a genuine medical hero, had been frequently taunted for inoculating people; he once told friends he was concerned about his safety.7
No one, however, understood the magnitude of the crisis about to envelope the Americans stationed along Lake Champlain in forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point as well as at their camps in the Canadian villages
of Sorel, at the intersection of the St. Lawrence and Richelieu Rivers, and Chambly farther south on the Richelieu. None of these places was equipped to handle several thousand smallpox victims, and those infected with other diseases, such as typhus, in addition to the wounded men retreating from the military defeats in Canada. There were not enough hospitals, beds, medical supplies, or doctors. Like a tidal wave, smallpox was headed toward Rev. Robbins and all of the Americans in the northern area of New York.8
Robbins’s regiment soon arrived at Chambly, a small village in Canada, a Catholic country that Robbins referred to as “the dwelling place of Satan.” The minister, who loathed Roman Catholics, visited a Catholic church there and was appalled by what he saw: three crucifixes, a holy water font, and an altar. As he looked around, a young man walked down the center aisle, knelt in front of the altar, and began to pray. Robbins was indignant. “Oh, when shall Satan be found and the Anti-Christ meet a final overthrow?” he wrote of the visit to the church.
Just three days later, he and the soldiers sailed up the Richelieu River past the village of St. Dennis. A strong wind carried them at a rapid rate down the river. The Protestant minister was irked to see a long string of small homes with crucifixes on their roofs and a Roman Catholic church. In a macabre scene, a group of curious nuns in their black and white habits emerged from the church and stared at the American army, looking directly at Rev. Robbins, as their flotilla of vessels moved past them and headed toward the war.
On Tuesday, May 7, Robbins and the soldiers in his regiment met dozens of men who were returning from Quebec by land; part of the general route that had commenced the day before when British reinforcements had arrived at Quebec. Some of the soldiers had been wounded and bled through their clothes as they half walked, half limped southward, trying to bear up under the hot sun. Many, trembling as they appeared, were badly infected with smallpox and other diseases and the men with Robbins all feared the disease would spread throughout the boat.
The First American Army Page 11