The First American Army

by Bruce Chadwick

  The brigade did not move out the next day because a court-martial had to be held so that the regiment’s colonel could dispense discipline. The men formed in a large circle to serve as an audience for the judicial proceeding in which two privates and two sergeants were tried for leaving the company without permission. The court-martial board found all four guilty. The privates were to be whipped, one sergeant demoted, and the other admonished in front of the entire company. But the colonel, in a burst of holiday leniency, forgave the privates after they repented and did not have them whipped.

  The court-martial proceeding kept the company in the village all morning and they did not leave in time to reach Mount Holly that day. They arrived the next and finally slept in a thick woods outside of the town.

  In order to surprise the enemy, the troops were awakened at 3 a.m. The First Massachusetts, with the rest of the army, trudged ten miles in the dark to Moorestown, loaded their muskets, set up pickets, and waited for reinforcements before attacking the British there. But the intelligence the rebels received was wrong. The British had left the area long ago and were already back in Philadelphia.

  Wild and his regiment remained in a wooded area outside of Moorestown all of that day, Wednesday. On what the sergeant wrote was a “very cold and raw” Thursday morning, the men departed for a Delaware River crossing into Pennsylvania. The bone-chilling weather of Thursday vanished overnight and Friday morning brought very warm weather and sunshine, a crazy meteorological mix that would plague the army all winter. At 9 p.m., the men crossed the river on ferries and camped at a juncture between two roads that someone with a sense of humor had dubbed Crooked Billet. The next day the pleasant weather disappeared and a bad storm hit the area; it was so severe that the men stayed in their tents the entire following day, trying their best to stay dry as sheets of rain fell on the region. During the next few days, the temperatures rose and fell and the winds increased and decreased as the men went about routine camp chores in the uncertain climate.

  Twenty-four hours later, on December 5, Wild noted that the company’s supplies were vanishing. “We drew some fresh beef and flour,” he noted, “but had nothing to cook in. Was obliged to broil our meat on the fire and bake our bread in the ashes.”

  The missing supplies alarmed Wild, but he dismissed his worry the next day when someone found an iron kettle for cooking. They were lucky. Throughout Pennsylvania that week and the following week, soldiers complained that their supplies had not been replenished, blankets and coats had not arrived on schedule, and the usual shipments of food, much as they complained about its quality, were nowhere to be found. None of the officers knew why winter coats and other clothing on order for months had not been delivered and no one knew where to find very needed shoes. On December 10, Wild and a sergeant, needing coats as badly as everyone else, walked throughout the camp looking for clothing but did not find any.

  Their situation worsened on December 12, when they crossed the Schuylkill River and camped in a wooded area as thick flakes of snow began to fall—hard. The men were told to either pitch their tents or cut down trees and construct lean-tos for cover as the storm worsened. Crews were told to cut down trees for firewood. But they could not do so. “We had no tents nor axes to cut wood to make fires. It was a very bad snowstorm,” said Wild, one of many to notice that the tools they required were also missing.

  Some men did manage to build lean-tos and start fires during the week they camped there, but a wind caused flames from a campfire to burn down two of the lean-tos and the men who had planned to sleep in the destroyed structures had to sleep on the ground in the snow with no protection at all. The snowstorm, and days of steady rain that followed, kept the men in their camp in the middle of the forest, unable to travel to wherever the army would spend winter.

  They celebrated Thanksgiving on December 18, as ordained by Congress, following another snowfall. It was a disappointing holiday and a harbinger of the winter that was to come. “We had but a poor Thanksgiving,” wrote Wild. “Nothing but fresh beef and flour to eat without any salt and but very scant of [beef ].”

  On December 19, a “clear, cold, and windy” day, the First Massachusetts, along with most of the Continental Army, marched to Valley Forge. Wild and the men in his regiment, and all the other soldiers who were healthy, and there were not many, began what appeared to be the simple construction of the hut city late on the afternoon of December 23, two days before Christmas. They continued the work the following morning.

  In early afternoon of December 24, Christmas Eve, all work on the huts for the Massachusetts men, and for thousands of others, was halted.

  In a journal note, Wild wrote of the construction shutdown, “There was some misunderstanding.” It was a line that would come to represent all of the travails of the Continental Army during that historic and disastrous winter at Valley Forge.

  Chapter Nineteen

  PRIVATE ELIJAH FISHER AND THE AGONY OF VALLEY FORGE

  The American Revolution had been a hard war for Elijah Fisher. The private from Attleboro, Massachusetts, enlisted in the Continental Army for eight months along with his five brothers. At seventeen, the tall, thin Elijah was the youngest. He had joined the army right after the battles of Lexington and Concord, full of love of his country and anger at the British. He soon found himself directly in the line of fire when his regiment was ordered to defend Bunker and Breed’s Hills on June 17, 1775.

  Thirteen months later, in late July, 1776, after he reenlisted for a year, he came down with a severe case of the putrid fever, which nearly killed him as the army moved from Boston to New York to defend the city. The fever kept the private in bed in a home turned into an army hospital. The medical care provided him, and all the men in hospitals, was minimal, but he survived the fever. Fisher did not feel much better five weeks later when he was released from the hospital, but insisted on rejoining his regiment and did so, despite a sharp pain in his side that remained with him for a long time. Fisher missed the British rout of the Continental Army at Long Island while he was in the hospital, and missed another catastrophe when he arrived back with the army. His regiment did not travel with Washington to White Plains, but was ordered to hold Fort Washington on the northern tip of Manhattan. Fisher’s pain in his side became unbearable, however, and a doctor ordered him to another hospital at Kingsbridge, fifteen miles north of the city. He was moved to another hospital in Newark, New Jersey, shortly after his arrival in Kingsbridge and missed the crushing defeat at Fort Washington, in which nearly three thousand Americans were taken prisoner.

  Fisher was moved to a private home in Newark after a period of several weeks as the hospital filled up with wounded and sick soldiers. The man he moved in with took him to the residence of a local doctor. The physician was not home but his wife tended to Fisher’s medical needs. She asked Fisher what was wrong with him. After a short explanation of the fever and the pains in his side, the doctor’s wife told Fisher that she knew from experience that he exhibited all the symptoms of kidney troubles. She nodded knowingly and informed him that she knew how to treat him. She mixed a handful of horseradish roots with a tear dish full of mustard seeds in a quart of gin and told him to drink a glass of the concoction every morning. The mix, a standard potion for kidney ailments in the era, worked. The pain in his side that had caused him so much agony for weeks subsided and Fisher was back with the army nine days later.

  There was grim news for him upon his return, however. He visited one of his brothers and learned that another brother, Enoch, had died ten days before. The stress of the news may have aggravated Fisher’s kidney and the throbbing pain in his side returned. Horseradish roots and mustard seeds did him no good this time and the pain worsened within days. Despondent over his brother’s death and his own poor health, the private asked for and obtained a discharge and went home to Massachusetts. Friends and relatives in Attleboro assumed that the war was over for the spunky teenager.

  At home, he was treated by a local
physician for several months and was the beneficiary of his mother’s care. Neither did much immediate good and Fisher suffered for six more months, spending much time in bed. No one expected him to return to the military. It was during this time, with little to do but think, that Fisher made up his mind to go back into the service. He reenlisted for a full three-year term in January, with the understanding that he could remain at home until his health improved. The army was very happy to oblige him. Recruiters were desperate for men after the waves of desertions and massive expiration of enlistments following the New York defeats. The teenager rejoined the army on August 21. His regiment was not with Washington’s army; he had been sent to join the forces under the command of General Horatio Gates at Saratoga. This time Fisher was in the thick of the battle against Burgoyne’s army there and, with the others, rejoiced at the stunning victory over the British.

  Fisher’s regiment was then ordered to join Washington’s army at Whitemarsh, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, as it prepared to march to Valley Forge for winter camp. It took just four days at Whitemarsh for Fisher, and everyone else in the fourteen-thousand-man army, to realize that they were in for a rough winter. He wrote, “We had no tents nor anything to cook our provisions in and that was pretty poor. Beef was very lean and no salt or any way to cook it but to throw it on the coals and broil it. The water we had to drink and to mix our flour with was out of a brook that run along by the camp and so many a-dipping and washing in it made it very dirty and muddy.”

  The march to Valley Forge began a week later, December 16, following a snowstorm. The fatigue of the march, the lack of nourishment and shelter, plus stress, brought back the crippling pain in Fisher’s side. The pain, he wrote, made daily life “tough to bear.”

  The creation of the sprawling hut city at Valley Forge was hampered by supply problems from the start. Officers had hoped to obtain the thousands of needed boards for the roofs and doors of the metropolis of huts from area sawmills, but most were inoperable due to frozen streams. The few axes that could be found had to do.

  Wrote Major Richard Platt, “If it were not for the scarcity of axes and other necessary tools, most of the troops would have been comfortably covered by this time. But our misfortune in those aspects together with some bad weather and scarcity of wood has prevented the business from being completed.”1

  Men lived in tents and were exposed to several early snowstorms, rain, and chilly temperatures for weeks as the erection of the large encampment suffered delay after delay. In an effort to move their men into huts, officers in charge of construction cut corners and many huts were built with openings between logs and roof boards. This negligence resulted in rain seeping into the huts and forming puddles on the uneven dirt floors. As a result, the stagnant water began to breed disease. There were no windows for ventilation.

  Soldiers drank dirty water from streams near Valley Forge. They urinated wherever they desired in camp because the digging of the privies in the frozen ground was as slow as the completion of the cabins. Garbage was left outside buildings and rotted; vermin appeared quickly, carrying disease. Horses that died were left where they collapsed; their carcasses brought on more sickness.

  The army’s supply problems mushroomed at Valley Forge. Washington knew as early as September that he was in the first stages of a clothing crisis that would cripple his “ragged men and half naked soldiers.”2 He knew, too, that he probably did not have as much food as he needed and was warned by commissary official Thomas Jones of “a calamity which I expect here every moment.” No one in the army had been paid in over two months. The “thousands” of new and needed soldiers Pennsylvania politicians had promised were nowhere to be found. The commander in chief also had hundreds of wounded and sick men arriving in carts and wagons and nowhere to put them. The army would not be able to live off the land, as the Pennsylvanians had guaranteed, because the farmers in Chester County had little food left in what one of Washington’s generals referred to as a “starved country.”3

  No one in the army seemed happy to be at Valley Forge that winter. A Massachusetts army surgeon, Dr. Albigence Waldo, may have put it best, and with a medical double-meaning, when he scribbled in his diary about his arrival there, “A pox on my bad luck.”4

  Ironically, it was not the inclement weather that would be a major obstacle to the survival of the army. The winter, in fact, was relatively mild despite six snowstorms, and many soldiers even referred to the weather on most days as “pleasant.”5 The real dangers were the lack of food and clothing, plus primitive medical care for men crammed into every usable building that the army could find and turn into temporary hospitals.

  Elijah Fisher’s commanding officer had many sick men under his care in addition to Elijah. Packed tightly against each other in a wagon, they were sent to one of the temporary hospitals at Reading, a town northwest of Valley Forge. The hospital there was full, however. Fisher, his kidney pain growing worse daily, was then dispatched in another crowded wagon down uneven dirt roadways to a second hospital in the tiny village of Ephrata. That hospital was also full. A doctor explained to the men that just about all of the hospitals were overflowing with sick soldiers and they had nowhere to put all of the ill troops who arrived daily. Fisher and another man were told to fend for themselves for care and shelter; there was nothing the army could do for them.

  The pair walked several miles through the isolated farmlands until they found a local farmer, a Mr. Miller, who agreed to let them recover in one of the bedrooms in his small home. Fisher had developed a bad cold from the snowstorms and suffered from a lack of food and the long journey by wagon. He contracted the putrid fever again on January 20, 1778, while at Miller’s home. It was, he noted, “a severe fit of sickness,” and he had to be carried out of the farmhouse, placed in the back of a wooden horse-drawn cart and driven to a hospital. Now, barely able to move from his high fever, his health grave, he was carried from the cart and put in a bed in one of the overcrowded medical facilities.

  Fisher was placed in a large open ward with dozens of other men with the putrid fever, dysentery, and other ailments and became even sicker. Men in the ward began to die shortly after Fisher arrived, their bodies carried out to be replaced by other sick men in their beds within minutes—without the sheets being changed and the stench of death fouling the air. Elijah Fisher, fighting for his life, found himself in the center of an unfolding medical tragedy.

  The army had many sick and wounded men from the battles of Brandywine and Germantown, and men with diseases such as typhus and dysentery. Army hospital department officials asked ministers in the small villages that surrounded the camp to give them permission to turn their churches into hospitals for the winter. The army simply commandeered those belonging to ministers who objected. Army doctors soon set up hospitals in other buildings too, including linen mills, general stores, courthouses, pottery shops, farmhouses, barns, stables, and a few popular taverns. Even the single men’s residence hall run by the Moravian religion at Bethlehem, Brethren House, was turned into a hospital. When those havens reached capacity, carpenters speedily erected Washington Hall, a three-story-high wooden structure with nine foot wide porches that housed thirteen hundred patients, becoming at once one of the largest medical centers in the nation.

  The weather, although never overly harsh, was wildly erratic, with temperatures soaring from below freezing to over fifty degrees within twenty-four hours while balmy afternoons were followed by evening snowstorms. The unpredictable weather brought on bad colds that soon turned into bronchitis and other ailments. Hundreds of men came down with “scabies,” a medical problem brought on by lice and unsanitary living conditions that causes scabs over much of the body and constant itching. Others had dysentery, influenza, rheumatism, and pleurisy. Many contracted pneumonia from living in their flimsily constructed huts.

  The medical facilities soon became hopelessly overcrowded. As an example, there were more than nine hundred soldiers in the three wards of the h
ospital in Reading that were supposed to hold three hundred sixty patients. Washington then ordered construction of sixteen-by-twenty-fivefeet on-site transitional hospitals where soldiers stayed until they could be moved to the larger facilities. In addition to the eleven transitional facilities, the army erected a dozen or more huts just for victims of scabies.

  None of the soldiers at the facilities received much medical care because, in a paperwork mix-up, generals had granted furloughs to twelve of the sixty doctors on staff. Another dozen or so doctors became ill themselves. Several, fed up with the lack of care, quit and went home. Medical supplies were short and some regiments had no supplies at all. The lack of medical supplies became so desperate that in April the head doctor at Yellow Springs wrote to his superiors to “beg and pray” that they send him what he required.6 Dr. James Craig described the hospitals as “mere chaos.”7

  Desperately needing help, Washington asked for the formation of a congressional committee to visit Valley Forge to witness the deprivations there. The congressmen were shocked. “Our troops. How miserable. The skeleton of an army presents itself to our eyes in a naked, starving condition out of health and out of spirits,” delegate Gouverneur Morris wrote after his arrival.8

  Men were not placed in isolation wards and those with one disease would catch another from the man moaning in the bed next to them; men who arrived with a minor wound from a musket ball died a week later from typhus. There were no hospital clothes and men lay ill in their dirty uniforms. Food and water were in short supply.