The First American Army

by Bruce Chadwick

  Most of the men left for what they believed to be good reasons— their farms and businesses were falling apart in their absence and their loved ones needed them. “In some parishes but one or two men are left,” one colonel wrote to the governor of Connecticut, explaining the mass departures that had taken place during the summer of 1776. “Some have got ten or twelve loads of hay cut and not a man to take it up; some five or six, under the same circumstance; some have got a great quantity of grass cut, some have not finished hoeing corn; some, if not all, have got all their plowing to do, for sowing their winter grain; some have all their families sick and not a person left to care for them . . . It is enough to make a man’s heart ache to hear the complaints.”2

  And, too, these men had tired of reading letters written to them by friends and neighbors back home who told them they had not joined the army precisely because they did not want their farms and businesses to lapse into ruin.

  The soldiers departed for any number of reasons: they were tired of the cold, lack of clothing, and lack of pay; hungry; angry that promises of bonuses were not kept. Some were fearful of catching smallpox in camp. Some did not like the Frenchmen who had joined the army. Many simply did not like their officers. One group of four hundred men whose time was up refused to stay following a dispute with their commander, Lord Stirling. One complete militia unit from Massachusetts left en masse, despite a personal plea from Washington to remain.

  Officers, like the enlisted men, left the service to return to their farms and families or departed because of illness. Some officers were jealous of the higher rank and pay of others whom they deemed incompetent and went home when their time was up. Many of the men who had agreed to remain for one more month for a $10 bonus, at Washington’s urging prior to the battle of Princeton, left exactly thirty days later, at the end of January. Their departure angered Washington, who had begged them to stay. But he was even more unhappy that troops from his native Virginia were leaving too, some after just a few weeks in camp.

  The number of deserters, officers as well as enlisted men, became so great that Washington wailed to Congress in the early years of the war that “we should be obliged to detach one half of the army to bring back the other.”3 One general smirked that so many officers had left the military that when the next battle came, the army sent to meet them would just consist of George Washington and the enlisted men.

  Washington complained to everyone he knew about the soldiers who would not reenlist unless they knew the identity of their officers. He wrote to former aide Joseph Reed that “such a dearth of public spirit and want of virtue, such stock-jobbing and fertility in all the low arts to obtain advantage of one kind or another in this great change of military agreement I never saw before and pray God I may never be witness to again . . . Could I have foreseen what I have and am likely to experience, no consideration upon earth should have induced me to accept this command.”4 Washington warned Congress and his generals that if thousands of new troops were not recruited the Revolution would collapse.5

  Those close to the commander in chief understood his frustration, but told him that he had wrongly assumed that everyone, from privates to colonels, shared his noble vision of the Revolution. Nathanael Greene, who would later become one of Washington’s closest confidants, put it diplomatically when he wrote early in the war that “His Excellency has been taught to believe that people here are a superior race of mortals, and finding them of the same temper and disposition, passions and prejudices, virtues and vices of the common people of other governments, they sink in his esteem.”6

  Many new to the military agreed with Washington’s grim assessment of the troops. One lieutenant, Alexander Graydon, a well-educated Pennsylvanian, sneered at the American force, calling it “the motley army.” He wrote that “the appearance of things was not much calculated to excite sanguine expectations in the mind of a sober observer. Great numbers of people were indeed to be seen, and those who are not accustomed to the sight of bodies under arms are always prone to exaggerate them. The irregularity, want of discipline, bad arms, and defective equipment in all respects gave no favourable impression of its prowess.”7

  There was little Washington could do to stem the departure of men who had served their time, but he instituted a series of steps to stop the mass desertion that threatened to ruin the military. Officer furloughs were ended so that regimental leaders could watch over their men; they were also ordered to be kind to all unhappy soldiers. Newspapers were asked to publish physical descriptions of deserters and their readers were urged to turn them in for a $5 reward. He also convinced Congress to order states to have deserters arrested and brought before local magistrates before being returned to the service. Deserters were usually given one hundred lashes and some were even executed.

  That’s where James McMichael’s assignment originated. He and many other officers were sent to their home counties to seek out deserters and arrest them. McMichael did as he was told, but on the way was delayed at Stony Brook. The ardent young lieutenant was in such a hurry to reach his wife there that he rode all day, arriving at Susanna’s home at 9 p.m. He stayed with her that night and for two more nights and days, finally departing for Pennsylvania on July 14. Susanna, unable to let her new groom go, accompanied him as far as the Delaware and then McMichael headed into Pennsylvania and she reluctantly returned home. He reasoned the outcome of the war and the history of the world had not been changed much by his secret, joyous little stopover at Stony Brook.

  There were other times when McMichael would sneak off to see his beloved. Sometimes he rode to Stony Brook and on other occasions he met her for trysts at the homes of her friends in Amwell, a community several miles north. Once he had to leave Susanna to catch a ferry back to camp and missed it. McMichael promptly decided to spend two more days with Susanna. The lieutenant then invented a lengthy tale about his Herculean but unsuccessful efforts to travel up and down the Delaware for days to find another ferry to reach camp, an explanation his commanding officer grudgingly accepted.

  His poems to Susanna inspired Lt. McMichael to write more poetry and throughout the revolution he penned dozens of poems, some long and some short. It was not unusual for soldiers to write a four line ditty to a wife, girlfriend, or family member every once in awhile, but following his summer trysts, McMichael turned to rhyme to describe his feelings not just about his passion for Susanna, but the Revolution itself. His poems grew from four lines to eight lines to several pages. Later, they would become Homeric in length. He found rhymed stanzas an easy medium to express himself and did so often. He wrote during warm, pleasant summer days but also turned to poetry during his bleakest hours at Valley Forge.

  Infused into his poetry was the same gritty determination to win the war, unite the country, and secure independence from the hated Redcoats, a conviction felt by many who wrote poetry or the songs that regiments sang throughout the conflict. In all of McMichael’s stanzas, there was a disdain for the Tories:

  We are now unto Chester County came

  In which some people lives that are of fame

  But some are Tories to their great disgrace

  Numbers of them reside near to this place

  He had little use for the antiwar Quakers of Pennsylvania either, describing them harshly in one of his poems:

  By Tories we are now surrounded

  Either marching or rebounding

  But Tories still are pusillanimous

  And can’t encounter men magnanimous

  We made us merry at their expense

  Whilst they wished we were all gone hence

  These were the people called Quakers

  And in war would not be partakers

  To liberty’s sons this seemed but light

  We still allowed that we could fight

  He wrote of his own hopes to fight well, expressed the night before an anticipated engagement with the enemy:

  I am now nearly sick of marching

  But for the en
emy must be searching

  When we do meet we’ll surely fight

  And try which party is most right

  This must be decided, by arms,

  By thundering Mars’ most loud alarms

  I’ll take my post amongst the rest

  And act the manner which I think best

  McMichael, like all soldiers, feared death. They all knew that their lives could end at any moment on the battlefield, that they could fall from a musket ball or bayonet. It was the fear that soldiers carried within their hearts for centuries and would continue to carry long after the Revolution. During the blackest hours of the rebellion, McMichael, ever apprehensive about his safety, wrote poems about being killed, such as one he finished the night before a battle:

  When I lay down I thought and said

  Perhaps tomorrow I may be dead

  Yes I shall stand with all my might

  And for sweet liberty will fight.

  It is not known if the young lieutenant sent these poems to his wife or whether he only mailed her his love sonnets. There were plenty of those and they gave the soldier renewed energy every time he finished one. He gained even more sustenance when one of Susanna’s letters, especially the sultry ones, arrived and he could sit down and read it—over and over and over.

  Chapter Sixteen

  WOMEN OF THE REVOLUTION

  McMichael’s yearning to see his beloved was a common feeling among the soldiers, whether officers or enlisted men. Many had wives or girlfriends back home to whom they wrote as frequently as possible; they treasured letters from them that they received in camp. All attempted to win furloughs to visit them and made their way home as quickly as carriages or horses—or for some their feet—could take them when they obtained a pass. Soldiers bombarded their commanding officers with requests to go home specifically to see those they loved.

  Wives often begged their husbands to stay home for awhile. These requests were not strictly for romantic trysts. Many men had left farms and small businesses that did not prosper during their absence. Others were the heads of families with six or more children and the responsibility to run the family and care for the children alone placed a heavy burden on their wives. Some women were also left to supervise laborers, or in some cases dozens of slaves, and found that a difficult task. Others had to run stores. The return of a husband, even if only for a few days or weeks, would prove helpful.

  Some women traveled with the army to be close to their husbands, but not many. These were usually high-ranking officers’ wives, who lived with them in huts, tents, or houses. A few wives of enlisted men marched with the army and were in the group called “camp followers.” It consisted of several hundred people, including women who worked for the army as piecework laborers, washing and repairing clothes, and sutlers who sold goods to soldiers and nurses. The camp followers also included several prostitutes.

  The men in the army always seemed to have one eye on the Revolution and one eye on the ladies, and sometimes both eyes on the ladies, a longstanding military tradition. And the men soon discovered that no matter where they traveled in America, rural farms or bustling seaports, there were plenty of good-looking women.

  The arrival of the Continental Army in any town in the colonies brought out the girls, to the delight of the soldiers. The women of the community would welcome the soldiers with decanters of wine, cakes, and cheeses—and soothing smiles. The army could not march through a village without women cheering on the men and waving to them with great enthusiasm. Soldiers walking down a street would see a window fly open and behind it a woman with a platter of cakes for them that they took with a thanks and a wink as they marched by.1

  During the first year of the war, enlisted men were sometimes quartered in the homes of residents of the communities where they stayed overnight or camped for periods of time. They had a chance to become quite friendly with the daughters of the household and their female friends and neighbors. Then, as now, women loved men in uniform. “The women here are quite amorous,” one man wrote with glee upon his arrival at Morristown in January, 1777. McMichael himself, before he met Susanna, marveled at the attractive women he met wherever the army traveled. In his diary, he wrote of the Continental Army’s disastrous defeat at the hands of the British regulars and the Hessians at the battle of White Plains, but remembered, too, that it was a village that was home to “a multiplicity of beautiful young ladies.” One soldier wrote of Mount Holly, New Jersey, that it was a “compact and pleasant village, having a great proportion of handsome women therein.”2

  Men camped in one area for a long period of time sought out women wherever they could find them, and they knew where to look. Private Jabez Fitch and others went to the Punch Bowl Tavern, in Boston, “to find some white-stockinged women.”3 Sentries searched for women with their spyglasses.4

  Sometimes the women found the soldiers. McMichael wrote that just after the army arrived near Germantown, a community just outside of Philadelphia in 1777, a group of several dozen good-looking local women marched into the American camp laughing and shouting to personally greet the soldiers. The men, needless to say, loved the attention.

  Songs were written about the women that the troops met during the war, regardless of the length or seriousness of the relationship. One oftensung tune went like this:

  A soldier is a gentleman, his honor is his life

  And he that won’t stand by his post will never stand by his wife

  In shady tents and cooling streams with hearts all firm and free,

  We’ll chase away the cares of life in songs of liberty . . .

  So fare you well, you sweethearts, you smiling girls adieu

  For when the war is over, we’ll kiss it out with you.”5

  Some soldiers encountered so many pretty girls that their fantasies were not simply kissing it out with a lovely woman, but with many of them. All were surprised at how many gorgeous women there were in America and some were astonished that certain towns were filled with them. Private Joseph Martin was one. He wrote when he marched through Princeton, New Jersey, with his regiment on the afternoon of June 24, 1778, “The young ladies of the town . . . had collected and were sitting in the stoops and at the windows to see the noble exhibition of a thousand half-starved and three-quarter-naked soldiers passing in review before them. I had a chance to be on the wing of the platoon next to the houses, as they were chiefly on one side of the street, and had a good chance to notice the ladies, and I declare that I never before nor since saw more beautiful, considering the numbers, than I saw at that time. They were all beautiful.”6

  Many of the soldiers flirted with girls they saw, but some could be downright bawdy in their eagerness to meet those of the opposite sex. Dozens of men in Charlestown, Massachusetts, spent the summer of 1775 bathing naked in the Charles River near one of the busy bridges that crossed it to show off their physiques for the women that walked across the span; some men sashayed nude across the bridge to draw even more attention. Their antics always drew complaints from local residents. George Washington had to outlaw the practice.7 Just a year later, other soldiers swam naked in a mill pond on Long Island, New York, to entice young women from the nearby village; General Nathanael Greene ended this practice with a similar order.8

  Some of the soldiers married the women they encountered. Some they romanced and some they never saw again. Some women that they never expected to see again they found, sometimes to the woman’s chagrin. Lt. Walter Finney, of Pennsylvania, was a prisoner of war in New York City for eighteen months, but was one of hundreds of men held in residential homes and permitted to walk about the city during the day. Finney apparently struck up a romance with a woman, Mrs. Lovat, whose husband was also in the Continental Army. He gave her an expensive watch to sell in order to have money to purchase food and clothing. Finney saw neither the watch or the loving Mrs. Lovat again and he became the butt of numerous jokes among his fellow prisoners for losing his timepiece and his paramour at the same time.
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  Three years later, Finney was stationed at West Point and while on patrol one morning spotted none other than Mrs. Lovat and a man traveling to Newburgh on a highway. He stopped them and demanded either the watch or his money back. She said that the watch was gone; she had sold it to some officer in the American army and had no idea where he was and had spent the money long ago. Finney was furious. He had her arrested, but his superior officer let her go.

  Finney, resigned once again to the loss of the watch, went about his business and began the ride back to West Point later in the afternoon. Unable to make much headway before darkness fell, he stopped at a farmhouse for lodging and was startled to find that Mrs. Lovat and her friend were staying there, too. Finney prepared for another argument about the watch, but the woman told him with a nervous smile that by incredible coincidence they drove past an army regiment just after they left him earlier in the day and spotted the soldier to whom she had sold the watch. He had given it back to her companion and, after a search of his bags, the companion produced the watch and handed it to a grateful Finney.9

  Soldiers who could not travel home to wives or girlfriends, or had none, could always rely on prostitutes for sexual gratification. The ladies of the evening fell into three groups: women who worked out of their own homes; girls who plied their trade at taverns, as either visitors or barmaids; or the women who lived among the camp followers.

  It is unclear when the first members of the world’s oldest profession began working in the New World, but court records exist describing “lewd women,” as they were usually called, being jailed, fined, and booted out of cities as early as the 1730s. By the 1770s, it was easy to find women who sold themselves in the taverns of the large cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Elizabethtown. Business was brisk in cities during the Revolution. In addition to their usual clientele of merchants, seaman, businessmen, and the community’s male residents, the women serviced the many American soldiers far from home. As a bonus, their source of income increased when the occupying British army arrived. Business proved so profitable during the war that prostitutes looking to move into a higher income bracket left their homes in the towns surrounding New York and set up shop along the streets and lanes of Manhattan, now bustling with soldiers.10