The First American Army

by Bruce Chadwick

  “Whether he be a Tory or not, if it should be found out (which such things as robbery seldom are) some or all of you will be hung,” said Fisher, surprising the men with his honesty. In his diary that night, Fisher wrote that “there was no more heard about it” and that the theft, like so many, would not be punished. He was wrong.

  Howland complained about the robbery of his home to a member of the life guard whom he knew, John Stockdale. When he described the hats the men wore, Stockdale instantly knew who the thieves were. He went to Herring, Herrick, Brown, and Walton and told them that they might avoid trouble if they sneaked back to the two homes at night and returned everything they had stolen. That was impossible, they said, because some of the clothing was gone. A day later, the second man who was robbed complained to a another man in the guard while the pair had a beer together at a local tavern. A waiter overhearing their conversation told the soldier that Stockdale knew something about the robbery and the soldier confronted him. Stockdale would not talk, but the soldier reminded him that he could be arrested for concealing information and protecting criminals. Stockdale then told him the entire story; the men were arrested and found guilty at a court-martial.

  Washington felt betrayed. He expected all of his troops to be lawabiding and honest, but he demanded it above all from members of his own life guard. Like his aides, he considered his personal bodyguards members of his military family. The commander’s vengeance was severe. He ordered Herring, Walton, and Brown to be hanged and Herrick to receive one hundred lashes. Walton and Brown managed to escape. Walton was never heard from again but a contrite Brown returned to the army and was pardoned. Herrick was flogged one hundred times and Herring was hanged at Fishkill, on November 22, 1778.

  Fisher Returns to Civilian Life

  On January 7, his enlistment up, snow covering the roadways and fields of much of the northeast, Elijah Fisher left the army. Needing employment, he rode south to the community of Somerville to visit John Wallace. The Philadelphia merchant’s Somerville home had been used by George Washington as his headquarters the previous winter and Fisher had become friendly with the businessman and his wife, whom he referred to as “very clever folks.” The Wallaces were looking for a handyman and were happy to employ the ex-soldier. Fisher worked hard for the couple and at night worked on his journal; the Wallaces apparently saw him do so. They cringed at his sloppy handwriting and improper use of punctuation. They offered to tutor him in reading and writing.

  Fisher was always eager to learn new things, hopeful that improved reading and writing skills might help him find a good job when he returned home to Massachusetts. He took them up on their offer. For three hours every evening, for the entire month, the couple taught him to read and to improve his writing and penmanship. One of his exercises was to make longhand copies of books that were in the Wallaces’ small library and to copy letters and other written documents to perfect his penmanship. The copying in longhand significantly improved his handwriting. He was appreciative of the assistance from educated people and they were happy to help an army veteran on his way home who had helped them with household chores.

  Fisher was correct in his assumption that the tutoring in writing would help him land a good job later, but he could not have imagined then, in snow-covered and freezing Somerville, what that job would be and the amazing turn of events that would take him to it.

  The former private left the Wallaces in the middle of February and headed home to Attleboro, sometimes walking and sometimes riding. He made it about one-third of the way, to Newburgh, New York, and stopped off at the army barracks there to collect eight days worth of provisions, standard issue for a returning soldier’s trip home. Fisher indulged in a little bit of knavery when he arrived at the army encampment at Fishkill, a few miles away, and asked for his eight days of provisions for his trip home, the food he had already drawn at Newburgh hidden in his saddle bags. Unfortunately for him, an officer who saw him draw the original provisions at Newburgh had arrived just before him and watched him from a corner of the warehouse as he made his request.

  “Didn’t I see you draw your eight days of provisions in Newburgh just two days ago?” he asked the ex-private. An embarrassed Fisher, caught in his trick, tried to talk his way out of his predicament, going into a long explanation of how he had used up some of the provisions and needed more to reach Boston.

  “You could get more at Hartford and Litchfield,” the officer told him. “But I did not want to do that. With the provisions I am picking up here I won’t have to trouble the supply depots at those towns,” Fisher said.

  It is unknown if his little ruse worked, but he reached home in Attleboro on March 29. He planned to live and work there and found a job with Stephen Pond, a local farmer, agreeing to work six months in exchange for sixty bushels of corn. However, within four weeks he developed a bad sore on his right hand that prevented him from working any longer.

  And so, again, he reenlisted in the Continental Army—for the fourth time. Soldiering had become a source of steady income for him, as it was for many other young, unskilled laborers. As soon as Private Fisher reenlisted, he became involved in a heated argument over his pay, a dispute that was common among the soldiers.

  He joined a new regiment in Attleboro, pocketing a bounty for his latest service, a six-month tour of duty, and went directly to a military court of inquiry in Boston to collect £54 British sterling in back pay that he had been owed since his departure from the service in January. It was, he speculated, the perfect day for a soldier to arrive to collect money owed him—the Fourth of July.

  Many residents of Boston celebrated the holiday, but not Fisher. The board of inquiry informed him that the government owed him nothing. He had been paid £54 as a bounty for his latest enlistment and he had been owed £54—everything was now even. Fisher argued that he had not collected a £54 bounty in January.

  Fisher was bitter and wrote, “If that was the way they meant to use the soldiers . . . If I had notice of it before I had engaged I never would have gone the six months. They just use soldiers. They will promise them that they will give them so and so and after they have got them to enlist they are cheated out of one-half they ought to have by one or another of the officers.”

  He was particularly mad at a government official whom he sneered sat “with his great wig” who said that soldiers sometimes were not owed what they believed. He added that those owed money would get it, but that these things took time. “You are wrong for accusing me and talking as you do,” he scolded Fisher, who was not satisfied with his answer and angrily continued to demand his money.

  Such disagreements occurred often. Throughout the war, pay and bounties remained hotly contested issues among the enlisted men. They were rarely paid on time; some had no salary for five or six months. An enlisted man’s pay was just $6.70 a month at the start of the war, $7.30 for musicians, and it only increased for both to about $13 per month by its conclusion. Soldiers could buy little on pay that could not keep up with runaway inflation. Americans grumbled, too, that the British enlisted men were paid twice their salaries and could buy what they needed at moderate prices, in English pound sterling, through the British army commissaries, sutlers, and supply depots.

  American enlisted men collected bounties from the federal government, states, counties, and even towns to join the Continental Army and the state militia. The state bounty was often higher than money offered by the Continental Congress. Those who had accepted the lower federal amount protested that they should have been awarded the state figure. Some were angry because they may have collected a $20 bounty when they enlisted for three years but later, as the state became desperate for recruits, other soldiers from that same state collected bounties that were four times as high (in 1777 the Continental Army offered a $20 bounty and the Massachusetts militia paid $86).

  Bounties later soared to $250 and more (with inflation). These later recruits were also often given a clothing bounty (uniform and blanket)
and, later, some land. The American paper money they received usually proved worthless as inflation ravaged the United States. States also awarded bounties based on inflation, so $86 bounties worked out to $25, but could be worth less if U.S. money depreciated even further that year. The soldiers often believed they were fighting for no compensation and felt shortchanged whenever they were involved in financial dealings with the government—just like Fisher.

  The four-time enlistee from Attleboro received help from an unexpected quarter that day. A black-haired man named Coffern, either a government worker or bystander, overheard the argument at the government office. He stepped forward and told the government official, “The soldiers have been used very ill as this man said, and they are cheated out of a good deal that they ought to have.”

  Coffern turned to Fisher and acted as an intermediary, holding neither side responsible but offering a solution. “Your selectmen [may have] used you ill in respect of sending in the account of the bounty you have received. It may be that there is a mistake and if you get them to certify what bounty you have received you shall have your [money] made up accordingly.”

  The representative of the Board of Inquiry said that would be satisfactory. A few days later, Fisher traveled back to Attleboro. Officials in the war recruitment office there checked the records in their books, looked for Fisher’s name, written in thick ink, and found the mistake. The £54 bounty was awarded Fisher in 1777, not 1780. They certified that he was, indeed, entitled to £54 in back pay. Fisher was happy as he began the march to his regiment’s destination, West Point, and a rendezvous with General Benedict Arnold.

  It was an eventful trip. The pain in Fisher’s side flared up again, once again sending him to a hospital set up in someone’s residence. This time the local physician treating the troops diagnosed his problem as pleurisy, not kidney failure, and kept him bedridden for a week. Fisher discovered that the man and woman who lived in the home where he was told to recover were Catholics. He learned that they had a family catechism among the other books on their shelves and asked to borrow it. He then spent hours each day slowly copying pages from the catechism in longhand, just to practice his penmanship.

  He was ordered from the hospital with ten other soldiers as the army abandoned camp and moved out. Other soldiers told him that his stay in the hospital might have saved his life. The regiment, on the eastern side of the Hudson, had to cross the river on barges to reach West Point. The crossing of the river had gone very badly. One of the larger barges overturned in the middle of the river and five yoke of oxen and five men drowned in the accident. Fisher, they said, might have drowned, too. It brought back memories of nearly drowning in the Schuylkill during the Valley Forge winter.

  Just before Elijah Fisher’s latest enlistment ran out at the end of 1780, a Sergeant Whippel, who was in charge of clothing and supplies for the company, offered a proposition to Fisher, whom he knew practiced reading and writing often. Whippel was eager to return home for a month but had no one to replace him in the supply office. If Fisher agreed to stay one month past his enlistment to fill in for him, Whippel would not only give him lessons on reading, writing, and penmanship, but show him how to write in cipher, or code, and unravel codes in the letters of others.

  Fisher kept his end of the deal and took over for Whippel, who left for home on December 4, 1780. However, with someone running his office, Whippel did not keep his end of the bargain. He lingered at home well past the end of the year. One sergeant and one lieutenant in the office were out recruiting and one lieutenant was home on furlough. That left Fisher as the only worker in the busy office. “I had to take care of the whole company and all the returns to sign and clothing to get and state stores and the like,” Fisher complained in his journal on February 8.

  March arrived and still no sign of Whippel. Fisher told a lieutenant that he believed Whippel would never return and “I would have to spend the whole war in his room.” The lieutenant, who must have wondered about the missing Whippel too, told Fisher not to worry, that the sergeant would be back any day.

  March turned into April and Fisher continued to complain. Finally, on April 6, four months after he left camp, Sergeant Whippel came back—to Fisher’s delight. Fisher was immediately discharged and, to make up his three months of added service, he was promoted to sergeant on his very last day in the army.

  On April 23, 1781, Sergeant Elijah Fisher returned home to Attleboro. He began working for a Doctor Johnson in Newton, Massachusetts, for $9 a month on a six-month contract; a sum, he noted with irony, that matched his 1777 bonus of $54 for joining the army. Fisher, now twenty-three years old, put his uniform in a trunk and prepared for civilian life. He had enlisted for four different tours of duty, served nearly six years in the army, had participated in the siege of Boston, survived the winter at Valley Forge, fought at Bunker Hill, Saratoga, and Monmouth, and, he reminded many, was a personal bodyguard for George Washington.

  Fisher was certain on May 5, 1781, his first day of employment with Dr. Johnson, that for him the war was finally over. He was wrong.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  MONMOUTH, 1778:

  Captain Sylvanus Seely’s Militia Goes to War

  “The whole of the New Jersey militia are cautioned to be ready to march at beat of drum with four or five day’s provisions and should the alarm be reasonably given. I think we could turn out men sufficient in the state before General Howe could half perform his route, to make him wish himself back [home] again.”

  —M. Halstead to Captain Sylvanus Seely

  The note was sent in late December 1777 to Seely, head of the five-hundred-man Morris County unit of the New Jersey state militia that protected the northeastern section of the state. It was one of the best organized militia units in the country and had been since the conflict began. Seely was its capable commander.

  Seely and the Morris County men were a far cry from the ramshackle militias that sprang up in the early days of the war. The militia units established by the states that supplemented the Continental Army were vital to the success of the Revolution, but most had not performed well. The militia members were drafted by their states to serve short terms of three to eight months; regular Continental soldiers volunteered for terms of one to three years.

  Washington needed the militia for several reasons. First and foremost, he wanted them to join the undermanned army whenever it traveled in spring and summer to fight against the British. The militia was responsible for protecting army supply and munitions warehouses throughout the country and guarding prisoners. Its members often found themselves in small skirmishes with British troops passing through their counties, particularly when British food foraging parties were sent to buy or steal cattle or corn for their vast army. Militiamen also served as guards at roadways and bridges near winter and summer camps and built and repaired wooden beacon towers that were set on fire to warn the army if a British force was on the march.

  Regular army troops, generals, and the delegates to Congress often jeered the militias. Militia units from different states were highly criticized because at critical junctures in the Revolution they broke and ran in battles and frequently left the service, en masse, when their enlistments were up or simply deserted. Militia would even depart just before a battle, leaving the regular army weakened, because that morning was the last day of their enrollment. Over eight thousand militia participated in the battles in and around New York in 1776, but a week later only two thousand remained. In the early days of the war, the militia could not be relied upon to fight well and were poorly armed. The Americans had to retreat from White Plains when New England militia companies ran as the British approached.

  They infuriated Washington. “To place any dependence upon militia is, assuredly, resting upon a broken staff,” he complained to Congress, and believed that it was difficult to train men accustomed to “unbounded freedom.” He was harsher on militia leaders, whose amateurism startled him when he first met them during the siege o
f Boston. “Their officers are generally of the lowest class of people and, instead of setting a good example to their men, are leading them into every kind of mischief,” he said, and throughout the war charged that militia commanders were more interested in promotions than victories.1

  However, they had also helped the army at key moments of the war. They provided several thousand extra troops for major engagements and often meant the difference between victory and defeat, such as at Bennington, Vermont, where militia led by General John Stark turned back part of Burgoyne’s army. It was Ethan Allen’s militia that captured Fort Ticonderoga in 1775.

  The Morris County division of New Jersey’s state militia had already been together for several years when the war commenced and by the time Seely began keeping his wartime diary in May 1778, the Morris militia had shown themselves to be well organized and dependable. They would soon find themselves the critical unit at two of the major battles of the war, Monmouth and Springfield.

  Sylvanus Seely was a logical choice for captain of the Morris militia. County officials needed someone with military experience and he was one of the few men in New Jersey who had fought in the French and Indian War. Seely was thirty-five when the Revolution began and had moved to Chatham from Pennsylvania. He ran a small inn, with a general store and tavern (stocked with French brandy and West India rum). The inn was located at the intersection of the two highways that ran through Chatham (today Main Street and Fairmount Avenue). The captain and his family lived in the inn; Seely married Jane Williamson, a local girl. Their first child, John, was born on January 27, 1772. Jane gave birth to Eleanor in 1774. Three more children, Sophia, Elizabeth, and George, were born during the war.2