The First American Army

by Bruce Chadwick

  Dr. Benjamin Rush, the physician general of the army, said that “the hospitals robbed the United States of more citizens than the sword . . . they are an apology for murder.” Rush was so fed up with conditions in them that toward the end of the winter he wrote that the worst thing that could happen to a sick soldier was to be put in a hospital and sarcastically suggested that the quickest way to win the war would be to ask the British army to march through Valley Forge so that the diseases there would kill all of them.9 Describing the numerous calamities at Valley Forge, General James Varnum wrote to a friend that if God determined he had to be punished for his life, he would rather be sent to hell than back to Pennsylvania.

  Elias Boudinot, the commissioner general of prisoners, was as angry about conditions as everyone else, but had great admiration for the men of Valley Forge, writing to his brother, “Nothing but suffering for our poor fellows, but they do it without complaint.”10 Adjutant General Alexander Scammel praised “the brave men who experience the severities of a camp life and cheerfully expose their lives with a determination to die or conquer.”11 And Dr. Waldo wrote of them, “The soldier, with cheerfulness he meets his foes and encounters every hardship—if barefoot, he labours through the mud and cold.”12

  That gritty determination came to not only symbolize the troops at Valley Forge, but the American soldier throughout history. The best example of that was Ebenezer Crosby of Massachusetts, one of the much maligned doctors. He had a recurrence of his asthma as soon as he arrived at Valley Forge and, hacking and wheezing, spent two weeks in the hospital. Even though not recovered, he went back to his regiment and promptly was stricken with pleurisy and bile, which he described as “severe and dangerous.” He survived that and, shortly after, came down with pleurisy again and found himself once again bedridden. He wrote that “my constitution was by no means fit to undergo the fatigues, hardships, and irregularities of camp life,” and, like so many others, asked to go home with a discharge. It was granted to the quite ill physician.

  Some weeks passed and his health improved slightly. Crosby, knowing he was needed and “desirous to see the ensuing campaign,” then changed his mind. He turned down the chance to go home to Massachusetts and sit in front of a fireplace in his warm house and eat a fine meal with his family and continued on at Valley Forge, freezing and starving with the rest of the army.13

  There were so many soldiers in the dozens of hospitals that dotted the Valley Forge camp and the surrounding villages that on March 7 only 3,301 men, out of a force then estimated at 10,200, were deemed fit for duty. Medical help for wounded or sick men in the 1770s was primitive. Ineffective medicine did little good for men stricken with typhus or other diseases and could not stop raging fevers. Men in the hospitals laid in their beds and watched others shake violently under the strains of high fevers before dying. Severe arm or leg wounds suffered in battle almost always resulted in gangrene and there was no medicine to combat it. The only solution was to amputate limbs. Only a very low level anesthetic was available, if at all, and the pain of amputation—by small, crude, handheld saws—was excruciating. Men had to be strapped to wooden operating tables with sticks thrust into their mouth to mute their screams as their limbs were removed. Puddles of blood covered the operating room floors.

  The mortality rates were shocking. One-third of all the soldiers sent to the makeshift army hospital in Bethlehem died there, and thirty-seven of the forty men from one Virginia regiment, along with some of their doctors. Half the two hundred forty soldiers at Lititz passed away, along with the Moravian pastor who also served as their doctor, and his five assistants. Hundreds, along with several doctors, could not survive at Yellow Springs. One-fifth of the 1,072 North Carolina soldiers died in the hospitals. Altogether, nearly twenty-five hundred soldiers died at Valley Forge, or nearly one sixth of the entire army.

  Washington received letters from men who were desperately ill in his hospitals who requested permission to return to their homes so that they could spend their last days surrounded by their families. Some doctors threw up their hands in frustration because their medicines did little good. “We avoid piddling pills, powders, cordials, and all such insignificant matters whose powers are only rendered important by causing the patient to vomit up his money instead of his disease,” wrote one.14

  A nasty feud between Dr. Rush and Dr. William Shippen, the head surgeon in the army, did not help matters. Rush resigned his post as physician general that winter, charging that Shippen was using hospital funds for his personal gain. Shippen was brought before a court-martial, but merely reprimanded. The result was chaos in the medical department.

  Mismanagement was everywhere. Wagons full of medicine chests from Virginia bound for Valley Forge were stopped in Williamsburg and army doctors there took most of the chests to treat their own needy troops. A cask of wine sent from Albany to a camp hospital was kept in the home of a local politician for safety; he stole it. Ships thought to be about ready to land with medicine on board were seized by the British. A driver misunderstood instructions and returned home instead of proceeding to Valley Forge with a wagon full of medicine after waiting several days for a river to recede.15 Orderlies in the hospitals sometimes stole the clothing of their patients.

  The procurement and transportation of supplies, whether medicine, food, or clothing, were not under the jurisdiction of the army, but inept federal administrators in York, Pennsylvania, where the Continental Congress moved when the British occupied Philadelphia, and in Lancaster. There was little congressional supervision of the supply departments. The quartermaster, Thomas Mifflin, quit in October 1777, but Congress did not replace him until March 1778, throwing the entire office into disarray. As an example, Washington was assured that the government had 7.6 million pounds of flour, enough to last the whole winter, but in reality they had just 3.7 million pounds. Supply officers told him just before the winter camp was organized that the army would have enough meat for seven months, but in early December another check showed that there was only enough for eight more days.

  Many fumed to Washington about unqualified doctors. Jedediah Huntington suggested, in a cruel remark, that since all the doctors did was bleed “bad blood” from patients, the army should hire local barbers instead because they worked cheaper.”16 Dr. Rush was fed up with the hospitals at Valley Forge, too. “Our hospitals crowded with six thousand sick but [only] half provided with necessaries or accommodations, and more dying in them in one month than perished in the field during the whole of the last campaign,” he wrote to Patrick Henry. And Dr. William Brown said that “a large proportion” of the men who died could have been saved if they had enough medicine and recovered under better conditions.17

  One night, Dr. Waldo rushed to a hut in a vain effort to save the life of an Indian soldier. The man’s death seemed to symbolize all of the catastrophes of Valley Forge to the doctor. Waldo wrote, “He was an excellent soldier and a good natured fellow. . . . he has served his country faithfully. He has fought for those very people who disinherited his forefathers. Having finished his pilgrimage, he was discharged from the war of life and death. His memory ought to be respected more than those rich ones who supply the world with nothing better than money and vice. There the poor fellow lies, not superior now to a clod of earth, his mouth wide open, his eyes staring.”18

  Rush sneered, too, that citizens were not joining the army because of its medical woes. He wrote to Horatio Gates, “The common people are too much shocked with spectacles of Continental misery ever to become Continental soldiers.”19

  Some soldiers reeled from one illness to another. Leven Powell, a lieutenant colonel from Virginia, came down with the “flux,” a severe, diarrhealike bloody discharge, just before Christmas and was taken to the farm house of John Rowland, where he spent nine days recovering with other patients. The flux was followed by a bout of yellow jaundice that lasted nearly three weeks. Toward the end of his struggle with the debilitating jaundice, Powell noticed small sores
and a swelling of his right eye that reduced much of his sight in that eye. A few days later he complained of severe headaches and sores that broke out on his face. His left eye then swelled up and both eyes became weak and bloodshot. He feared he would go blind. A doctor told him that he had a bad case of what was called “St. Anthony’s Fire” and treated it the best he could.20

  General Washington was appalled by the medical catastrophe. “I sincerely feel for the unhappy condition of our poor fellows in the hospitals, and wish my powers to relieve them were equal to my inclination,” he wrote to Governor Livingston of New Jersey. “Our difficulties and distresses are certainly great and such as wound the feelings of humanity.”21

  The commander took steps to correct the problems. Doctors who had gone home were ordered back to Valley Forge, food and clothing was sent directly to the hospitals and not just to the camp supply officers, pits were dug in which garbage and animal carcasses were buried, urination anywhere except a privy was made a crime punishable by death, officers were put in charge of new cleanliness patrols, more medicine was found in private stores throughout the country and sent to the hospitals, officers were told to make regular visits to the sick, soldiers were ordered to bathe regularly and to wash their uniforms frequently, and windows were cut into the walls of huts to provide much-needed ventilation. The commander also sent chaplains to visit the sick. The work was not easy. The Rev. James Sproat, one of the ministers, wrote in his diary that he saw so many sick soldiers in the hospitals that he “was very much fatigued” at the end of every day.22

  Washington himself never abandoned his sick soldiers. From time to time, risking his own health, he visited the hospitals and stopped at the beds of soldiers to offer some encouraging words. It “pleased the sick exceedingly,” one doctor wrote of the general’s visit to his hospital.23

  Elijah Fisher, lying in his hospital bed, kept track of the daily death toll at the hospital in which he was confined. Fifty of the men in the facility died during just the month that he was there. Fearful for his own mortality as he watched bodies carried out on stretchers, Fisher talked a physician into letting him go back to the Miller farmhouse. He assured him that he felt better and did not need hospital care anymore. The doctor was glad to see him leave; another soldier, from yet another wagon, was given his bed as soon as he left. Miller took him back and there he recovered.

  Barely able to walk, Fisher decided to rejoin his regiment at Valley Forge on February 28. As soon as he arrived, he was witness to a smallpox epidemic that had swept into the area. Washington had ordered immediate inoculations for all the soldiers, including any traveling to Valley Forge from other towns or army camps. Elijah Fisher was transported to yet another hospital for his inoculation, his side still hurting, and promptly came down with the pox. The pus-filled pustules formed on his body and his skin turned dark and felt on fire, threatening his life.

  At first, George Washington was not overly worried about the smallpox because most of his soldiers had been inoculated the previous year. This time, however, he had hundreds of new soldiers and a quick survey informed him that more than one third of them had never been inoculated. The general could not have the inoculated men recover in the hospitals with all the other sick men; they would give them the pox. He evacuated everyone from the large hospital at Yellow Springs and turned it into a smallpox recovery unit for men inoculated at Valley Forge.

  Altogether, doctors inoculated four thousand soldiers at Valley Forge and another one thousand at other army winter camps. The procedures were again a great success and only a few dozen of the five thousand men treated for pox died and some of them passed on from other causes. Elijah Fisher was one of the many who survived. His body fought off the pox and he lived—yet again. By spring, the smallpox epidemic was over.

  Another epidemic, starvation, was not.

  In mid December, the army found itself with no meat and just twenty-five barrels of flour to be shared by fourteen thousand men. Many men complained to their families that they had little to eat on most days and went several days without any food at all. On the day that the army arrived at Valley Forge, Dr. Waldo wrote “provisions scarce” and wrote that the men wailed, “No meat! No meat!” throughout the day and night and that their cries were like “the noise of crows and owls.”24

  Washington exploded in a letter to Henry Laurens, the new president of Congress. He told him that nearly half his army was sick or in the hospital or did not have enough clothing to report for duty. The other half was starving. He told him in blistering language that the supply departments of Congress impeded him at every turn, that local farmers would not help him and that his soldiers, and he, felt that the government had abandoned them. He went so far as to say that he feared a revolt by the public when they found how badly the soldiers were being treated. On December 23, he bluntly told Laurens that within days the army would “starve, dissolve, or disperse.”25

  Any food that could be procured was difficult to deliver. First, there was a shortage of wagon drivers. And, although the winter was relatively mild, frequent rainfall and thawing snow turned the roadways in southeastern Pennsylvania to mud and wagons with supplies destined for the camp could not move. Rivers flooded over their banks and several boats trying to carry supplies across them capsized and the food was lost. On several occasions soldiers trying to salvage the supplies from the overturned boats drowned in the effort.

  Some locals gouged the army, selling what little food they had at high prices, refused to sell on credit, or simply refused to sell at all. The food shortages became a chronic crisis that winter. Jedediah Huntington wrote to his brother in Connecticut that the soldiers “live from hand to mouth.”26 Following another food shortage in mid-February, an assistant in the commissary told his boss that the army had been without beef for five days and that there was no sign of any cattle on their way. “We have been driven almost to destruction,” the officer said of the starvation.27

  The food crisis would continue throughout the winter and into the spring, as would the medical and clothing shortages, threatening the existence of the army. Inflation spiraled once again as American paper money depreciated in value and word of the awful winter brought recruitment to a standstill. There was continued friction among officers and even a failed conspiracy among some officers and members of Congress to replace George Washington as commander in chief with the newly famous Horatio Gates. And, on top of all that, the British army was just twenty miles away in Philadelphia and might attack at any moment.

  Chapter Twenty

  “THE SOLDIERS OF OUR ARMY ARE ALMOST NAKED . . .”

  Lieutenant James McMichael: The Poet

  The road to Valley Forge began just before dinner on September 2, 1777, for Lieutenant James McMichael of the Pennsylvania State Regiment, now renamed the Thirteenth Pennsylvania Riflemen. On that day McMichael’s regiment camped near Wilmington, Delaware. The men were told to prepare for battle because the British Army, on its way to Philadelphia, appeared to be marching toward nearby Christiana, a village in the northern part of the state.

  The armies did not encounter each other there but at Brandywine

  Creek, south of Philadelphia, on September 11, 1777. McMichael and his regiment were under the command of General William Maxwell and given the assignment of guarding Chadd’s Ford, one of several shallow fords that the enemy could use to cross the creek.

  The main attack was made by Lord Cornwallis and Howe with seventy-five hundred men three and a half miles west, at Birmingham meeting house, following a flanking maneuver the Americans did not anticipate. Washington’s information was faulty, too. He had no idea as to the number of troops and cannon he had. Washington didn’t even know the location of the meeting house. The maps given him were not complete either, and the terrain looked different from Washington’s spyglass than it did on his maps.

  There, men under General John Sullivan and later Nathanael Greene could not hold back the English attack.1 Throughout the assaul
t, which came at 4 p.m. and lasted several hours, Washington and Lafayette rode back and forth, rallying all of the men in the area. Lafayette was shot in the thigh and the commander in chief was constantly exposed to fire.2

  General Wilhelm Knyphausen’s Hessians attacked Chadd’s Ford around 4:30 p.m. They crossed Brandywine Creek easily and tore into the American defenders, including McMichael, on the other side. It was a hot fight in the afternoon and McMichael knew that he and his men were in trouble from the moment it commenced.

  We took the front and attacked the enemy at 5:30 and being engaged with their grand army we at first was obliged to retreat a few yards. We then formed in an open field, where we fought without giving way on either side ’til the [sun] descended below the horizon. It then growing dark and our ammunition all but expired, we ceased firing on both sides . . . This day for a severe and successive engagement exceeded all I ever seen. Our regiment fought at one stand for about an hour with an incessant fire and yet the loss [of men] much less than that of Long Island. Neither was we so [beaten] as at Princeton. Our common defense being about fifty yards. I lost three men in my division, yet Providence preserved me from being wounded.

  It had been a horrific encounter. One man wrote, “The batteries at [Chadd’s] ford opened upon each other with such fury as if the elements had been in convulsions; the valley was filled with smoke and . . . for an hour and a half this horrid sport continued.”3

  McMichael and his fellow soldiers were disappointed that they had been driven back and forced from the area, and relieved that the British had foolishly decided not to pursue them. All felt like Captain Samuel Shaw, of Massachusetts, who wrote, “No person could behave with more bravery than our troops; but, somehow or other, we were not successful.”4