The First American Army

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by Bruce Chadwick


  Greenwood then loaded the tiny swivel gun with two cannonballs and a strong gunpowder charge and fired in the direction of the ship. The sound was similar to that of a large cannon and it was loud enough, and menacing enough, to scare the British captain, who turned and sailed away as quickly as the night wind could carry his vessel. He must have thought he had engaged John Paul Jones himself.

  On board Greenwood’s ship there was a combination of fright and laughter. The charge and double load had blown the small gun out of its locks and sent it sailing across the deck, crashing into everything in its way. When Greenwood related the story to the captain of his mother ship, whom he met in port, the captain howled with merriment.

  “Captain Greenwood,” who had recently turned twenty, decided to become a real captain just a few weeks later. He took the money he had earned from privateering and with a ship’s mate, Myrick, purchased a schooner in Baltimore and won a contract to carry a load of corn to an ironworks on the Patapsco River, nine miles southwest of Baltimore on the Chesapeake Bay.

  The two rookie captains then embarked on one of the most inept cruises of the Revolution. They were supposed to sail behind another schooner to the ironworks, but left port late when Greenwood lingered too long at a nearby tavern. Lost in the middle of the Chesapeake, the sailing “expert” had to ask directions to the mouth of the river from the captain of another schooner that passed by them, much to the embarrassment of Myrick.

  No sooner did they start up the river when, according to Greenwood, a “monstrous” storm arose. Instead of heading for a safe inlet on the river, or simply anchoring and lowering their sails to ride out the furious winds, the two captains tried to sail through it. They soon lurched into each other on the deck when the ship ran aground on a sandbar. Greenwood was determined to keep sailing. Instead of waiting for the light of morning and the tide to attempt to move off the sandbar, he rode out in a flat bottomed boat they had secured on deck in the pitch black night. Thunderclaps boomed and lightning crackled all about him. He brought a coil of rope along, intending to pull the larger craft back into the river with his small boat. As soon as he yanked on the thick rope, his boat overturned and he was unceremoniously pitched into the river.

  Greenwood spotted a farmhouse on shore when another bolt of lightning hit and illuminated it and went there to get help for his ship. The farmer would not go out into the storm and told Greenwood to sleep in his home. By morning, the tide had lifted the boat off the sandbar and the captains prepared to sail to the ironworks. The men soon discovered that they never secured the corn ears, which had now floated into the pumps and clogged them, preventing any movement. Finally, the corn removed and the pumps fixed, the ship limped upriver to the ironworks with its battered cargo and similarly battered crew. The voyage had been such a catastrophe that Myrick quit and sold his share of the boat to another man in Baltimore.

  Private Greenwood made one last voyage and it should have been a calm one. He was the first mate for a repugnant captain on the Resolution, a six-gun schooner bound for St. Eustatius with a load of flour and orders to buy salt to bring back for Maryland merchants. The voyage took place without incident and upon his return Greenwood was happy to hear that the obnoxious captain had been fired and he had been given charge of the schooner for another run to St. Eustatius.

  This trip was no pleasure cruise, however. In the middle of their passage between the islands of Antigua and Saint Bartholomew a large, fast ship bore down on them. Greenwood let out all of his sail in an effort to outrun the monster ship coming at him. “I let out the reefs of the mainsail and clapped her away four points free,” he wrote. “She sailed like a bird, but in two or three hours the pursuing vessel came up with us, firing, one after another, seven shots at us, and at last got so close that I could see the buttons on the men’s coats.”

  The ship, the Santa Margaretta, looked fearsome. Originally a Spanish ship, the Santa Margaretta was a sleek, fast-moving, forty-four gun warship that carried two hundred twenty sailors, half of them musket men. She had been cruising up and down the Atlantic seaboard, bagging several prizes, before departing for the warmer waters of the Caribbean. Suddenly, the guns of the Santa Margaretta opened up.

  “They then got ready a six-pound cannon from the quarterdeck loaded with grapeshot and fired point blank into us, cutting away our jib sheet blocks, forepeak tie, and other rigging forward,” a frantic Greenwood noted.

  The Resolution had been turned into the wind and toward the British warship. Greenwood was certain that if he did not surrender, the huge ship would ram his, cutting the Resolution in half and sinking her and his crew. He struck his colors and gave up.

  The captain and officers of the Santa Margaretta were a casual crew, far more interested in their prize cargo than prisoners. They let all of the crew of the Resolution go free when they anchored in Kingston, Jamaica. In fact, it was the British, not the Americans, who brought Greenwood home. The sailing master of the Santa Margaretta knew Captain Henry Nicholls, in charge of the British privateer Barracouta, headed for New York in a few days. He told him Nicholls would take him on as a passenger (probably for a price).

  Several weeks later, “Captain” Greenwood said goodbye to the commander and crew of the Barracouta in New York and made his way back to Boston in the spring of 1783 on board one of the ships carrying prisoners to their homes as the war wound down.

  Greenwood worked as a mate on merchant ships sailing out of Boston and was the captain of a schooner out of Baltimore on three trips during the last few months of the Revolution. The end of hostilities meant an end to privateering and, for awhile, the profitable merchant trade between New England and the West Indies. There was no work for the hundreds of wartime sailors like Greenwood, so he left Boston and traveled to New York. There, Greenwood, only twenty-three, planned to move in with his brother Isaac and, with him, take up dentistry, their father’s profession.

  The veteran soldier and sailor left Boston just as he had arrived there eight years before, in the summer of 1775 at the age of fifteen, carrying fifes in his backpack, bragging to all at a roadside tavern where he entertained patrons with his fife that year that he was there “to fight for my country.”

  He certainly had done so, and there was still one more chapter left in his story.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  1779–1780:

  The War’s Worst Winter and Mutiny

  The War

  The Crown, determined to destroy Washington’s main army, sent more than six thousand troops up the Hudson toward West Point, where he was headquartered, in the spring of 1779. The British force seized and held Fort Lafayette and a garrison at Stony Point, both twelve miles south of West Point on the banks of the Hudson. In a daring nighttime raid, Anthony Wayne’s men retook Stony Point on July 16, ending the British threat against the army. A month later, on August 19, Light-Horse Harry Lee captured the British garrison at Paulus Hook (Jersey City).

  The major battle between British and American troops in 1779 was the failed attempt by a combined American and French forces to recapture Savannah, seized by the British at Christmas, 1778. A September 1779 siege to take Savannah, aided by French troops who arrived with Admiral d’Estaing’s fleet, failed and residents complained that the Americans had destroyed half the town in the process. D’Estaing insisted that he could not stay and forced an early final assault on October 9 that was easily repulsed by the British.

  British forces in Georgia captured several towns and then Augusta, and administered a devastating defeat to an American force that tried to reclaim it. In May, Redcoats in Virginia easily captured Suffolk, Portsmouth, and a naval shipyard at Norfolk, where they seized or wrecked 137 American ships.

  Indian raids on rural towns in Pennsylvania and New York infuriated Congress, who had been courting tribal leaders. In the summer of 1779, Washington sent Generals John Sullivan and James Clinton and a force of thirty-seven hundred men to upstate New York and western Pennsylvania with orders t
o destroy the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederation and capture as many Indians as possible. Troops sent to the Pittsburgh area burned ten Indian villages while Sullivan’s main force campaigning through New York destroyed forty, including the entire community of Genesee, New York with its 128 buildings. The devastation of the communities made it difficult for the Indians to find much shelter for the coming winter. Sullivan’s men also ruined corn fields and apple orchards to make it impossible for the Iroquois to live off the land.

  The alliance with the French had not been as productive as Congress had hoped. The massive numbers of troops promised by Paris had not arrived and those that did saw meager action. The French navy had so far contributed little to the American cause. Its admirals were strongly criticized for leaving the battle of Newport, refusing to attack New York, and leaving too soon in the aborted effort to retake Savannah. In 1779, the U.S. received some more international help when Spain declared war on England, seized several towns from the British along the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico and helped financially with some small loans. The Spaniards could not be convinced to contribute much needed troops, however, and a promised combined Spanish-French sea assault on the British navy in waters near England, to be followed by an amphibious attack, never materialized.

  Sea battles between America, France, and Spain against England raged in the Caribbean throughout the year. American ships successfully harassed British warships and merchant task forces around Great Britain and in a much heralded battle, John Paul Jones’s Bon Homme Richard defeated the British Serapis in a lengthy battle off the coast of England.

  The victory at Monmouth in the summer of 1778, the apparent end of the smallpox epidemics, and mild weather throughout 1779, plus more clothing, caused an increase in enlistments and a decrease in desertions for Washington’s army in the north.

  It had been a year when Washington’s spy network, started in the early days of the war to provide him with solid information about the enemy, had grown to hundreds of informers. Spies had tipped him off to the exact route of the British toward Monmouth 1778 and in 1780 would once again prove invaluable.

  Washington’s strategy had been to fight the British head-on when he could, such as at Monmouth and Brandywine, but to avoid confrontations when his prospects were not good. He needed to convince the British press and public that the Crown could not win what was becoming a lengthy war, and should quit. The plan began to pay off in 1779 as more and more British periodicals criticized the conflict, some publishing “body counts,” lists of the casualties, in their columns. Groups called “patriotic societies” were formed throughout England to protest the war in America and an increasing number of influential members of Parliament spoke out against it. The city of London refused to tax its residents for the war. One British army regiment had even mutinied when told they were going to fight in America. Even the prime minister, Lord North, began to consider shifting the focus of the war from America to Europe and the French and Spanish.

  Still, there was no end to the war in sight. The British maintained posts in New York, Savannah, Charleston, and Newport and sent an endless supply of British troops and hired mercenaries, cannon, and warships to America. Their treasury appeared bottomless and King George III was determined to triumph.

  Some thought that an American victory would only come if the British believed that they could never truly win, that they would fight for years with no result—and at great cost. Others were convinced victory for the rebels could only be realized if the conflict escalated into a full-blown world war, with Spain sending hundreds of ships and thousands of men to America, in addition to the promised French forces. Either way, the Continental Army and its thousands of enlisted men had to hold together as a fighting force. Their ability to do that was severely tested in the brutal winter of 1779–1780.

  It began to snow early on Sunday morning, December 5, 1779, and continued into Monday, the snow piling up throughout the village of Chatham and throughout Morris County, New Jersey. Militia Colonel Sylvanus Seely wrote that it “snowed hard all day.” So much had accumulated over the two days, nearly nine inches, that the roads were impassable to all but horse-drawn sleighs. In Philadelphia, where the storm hit even harder, residents measured the snowfall at eighteen inches.1

  In Danbury, Connecticut, that morning the storm did not stop the Second Rhode Island, with Jeremiah Greenman, now a lieutenant, from starting its march to winter headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey. The regimental commander, Colonel Israel Angell, pushed his men to trudge eighteen miles to Cortlandt Manor, Colonel Phillip Van Cortlandt’s large estate on the eastern bank of the Hudson River, in a storm that blanketed the Hudson River Valley. The Second Rhode Island then marched a few miles each day until they were stopped by another severe storm on December 12. The men were wet and hungry. They were so hungry that, Greenman said, a group of them, wielding muskets, chased a pair of fleetfooted deer through a woods but did not catch them.2

  Washington’s main army traveled through the falling snow and arrived in Morristown from Newburgh, New York, on December 13. Colonel Seely had turned his wagon into a sleigh, taking off its wheels and fastening ski-like runners to it. On the day that Washington arrived, it snowed again. The temperatures remained low.

  Everyone feared the weather would be severe, but no one anticipated one of the most brutal winters in American history. From November 1779 until the spring of 1780, New Jersey would be pounded by twentysix snowstorms, six of blizzard proportions. It was so cold that the temperatures in the region that January remained below freezing during all but two days. The Delaware River froze over by the end of December and remained so until March 4. The Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania, which intersected with the Delaware just below Philadelphia, froze and the ice was so thick that every day residents of the city rode horses and sleds over it. The York River in Virginia was frozen solid for several months. The water in Baltimore harbor was covered with a thick sheet of ice for twelve weeks. Most of the Chesapeake Bay froze over. New York harbor froze, and remained so for several months, permitting sleds to travel back and forth between New York City and New Jersey. It was the only time in recorded history that the deep harbor had frozen solid.3

  Washington selected Morristown, where the army had camped during the winter of 1776–1777, for several reasons. He again wanted to be stationed near Clinton’s army, warm and comfortable in New York City, in case the British decided to move out of the city and attack anywhere on the east coast. Morristown was at the intersection of two highways that he could use to move the army quickly if necessary. It was protected from a British surprise attack by several mountain ranges. It sat in the middle of thousands of acres of farmland with, he thought, plenty of food and cattle for his thirteen thousand man force. (A few hundred men would be billeted in towns a few miles away.) The county was patriotic and he was told that its local militia, led by Colonel Seely, was reliable.

  His three thousand man army of 1776–1777 had caused problems in Morris County because the men had been quartered in private homes. As many as a dozen soldiers had stayed with families in small houses built to hold just four or five residents. The people complained of constant drinking, gambling, and cursing by the soldiers. This time, with a much larger army, Washington decided to build a sprawling city of huts in Jockey Hollow, near Morristown, as he had done at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777–1778 and at Bound Brook, New Jersey, the previous year. The massive hut encampment would, again, in population, take its place as the fourth largest city in the United States, behind Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.

  Washington designed the huts and the city himself. The log cabins were similar to those at Valley Forge, but this time the huts were built on the sides of hills to provide drainage for water and melted snow. The walls and roofs were solid to prevent seepage. Each had a window cut into a wall for ventilation later, when the weather turned mild. The lack of drainage and haphazardly built walls in the Valley Forge huts, and little v
entilation, helped to bring about diseases there. All of the Morristown huts were built in planned neighborhoods, New Yorkers together in one section, Pennsylvanians in another, and along carefully laid out streets. Warehouses, cattle pens covering several acres, and slaughterhouses were erected after the residential huts were completed.

  The regiments that arrived early, in milder weather, had more luck with construction and were living in their cabins within two weeks. The men from other states, who came later, took much longer to complete hut construction because they had to battle the elements. Those without huts slept in tents; some had nothing.

  On the day after the storm of December 5 and 6, Dr. James Thacher arrived in Morristown with his Massachusetts regiment. They had no cover. Thacher wrote in his diary,

  The snow on the ground is about two feet deep and the weather extremely cold; the soldiers are destitute of both tents and blankets and some of them are actually barefooted and almost naked. Our only defense against the inclemency of the weather consists of brushwood thrown together. Our lodging last night was on the frozen ground. Having removed the snow, we wrapped ourselves in great coats, spread our blankets on the ground and lay down by the side of each other, five or six together, with large fires at our feet. We could procure neither shelter or forage for our horses and the poor animals were tied to trees in the woods for twenty-four hours without food, except the bark which they peeled from the trees.4

  One week later, a cold front moved into northern New Jersey, sending the already low temperatures in Jockey Hollow plunging. Lieutenant Erkuries Beatty, of the Fourth Pennsylvania Regiment, wrote to his brother, “Colder weather I never saw.” Captain Walter Finney, of Pennsylvania, freezing like everyone else, remembered that Jockey Hollow’s pre-war nickname was “Pleasant Valley.” In a sarcastic note in his journal, a freezing Finney wrote, “We did not find it answered to its name.”5

 

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