The First American Army (17 page)

The other doctors were pleased to greet Beebe. They had been overwhelmed by the volume of soldiers being carried into their hospitals. Surgeons used to treating a few men each day found themselves standing in the middle of temporary hospitals set up in barns or large tents with several hundred men around them and more being carried in each hour, many groaning from their wounds and illnesses.

Dr. Beebe began his work on a Wednesday, three days after his arrival, treating fifty patients in the general hospital at Sorel, where within weeks a total of more than thirty-three hundred sick men would be in hospitals, taking up all of the narrow wooden beds and laying on blankets spread on the floors. He treated most with the bloodletting that was so popular in the colonial era. Doctors firmly believed that many illnesses were caused by infected blood and that simply bleeding the victims, sometimes draining several pints from their bloodstream, would cure them. He gave others medicines such as tarts, antimonies, or jalap. A good doctor and a physician always trying to learn about disease, Lewis Beebe realized quickly that the dozens of different wounds the men had suffered, their diseases, ailments, and the smallpox afforded him a unique chance to study medicine, opportunities that never existed back in tiny Sheffield. “The camp is one of the finest schools in the world,” he noted.
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The next day a controversy erupted over how to treat the smallpox victims. There were more each day and soon infected men would total nearly two thousand in medical wards at Sorel and nearby in the towns of St. John and Chambly. At the time, there were inoculations, but the “ten days rest and diet” procedure for inoculation was slow and men came down with the disease before the inoculation could take effect.

Doctors urged high ranking officers to authorize inoculations upon arrival so that the men could be treated quickly and their lives saved. It seemed like an obvious decision. Benedict Arnold, who had been watching his men die of the pox since December, understood the need for the inoculations and ordered all of the men in Sorel to undergo them. The first regiment, Colonel Porter’s, was inoculated that day. The doctors made plans to inoculate everyone else within the next week or so. But then General John Thomas, who had seen men and women die of smallpox in Boston earlier in the year, disagreed and upon his arrival at Sorel the following day, May 16, ordered a halt to the inoculations that Arnold had just approved. Not only did Thomas override Arnold, but said that any soldier who received an inoculation would be shot. Thomas had decided that mass inoculations, and the recovery period, would render too many soldiers unable to fight should the British catch up to the Americans. Despite his reasons, the doctors in camp were astonished that a former physician would bar inoculations, especially since this was an obvious emergency.

So was everyone else. After Thomas’s orders halting all inoculations, men who did not want to be shot but wanted to survive smallpox secretly inoculated themselves between their toes, so there would be no physical evidence of cuts in their skin. Officers even told the men to do so and suggested areas of the body where cuts could not be easily detected. Everyone was scared. “The smallpox strikes terror into our troops,” wrote Rev. Robbins, who had seen the ravages of the disease in hundreds of men in Sorel, a place, he added, that had poor leadership and was in a daily state of confusion. (It is not known whether Robbins was immune to the disease).

On the following Tuesday, Dr. Beebe was visited by an aide to General Thomas who told him that the commanding general wanted to see him right away; the general did not feel well. The physician, uncertain what the general wanted, accompanied the officer to Thomas’s large command tent. Beebe was taken aback by the deteriorating condition of the man standing in front of him. Beebe knew what Thomas’s problem was right away. “He evidently had the smallpox,” a startled Beebe wrote, wondering how someone ill with the pox would prevent others from being inoculated. It made no sense.

Beebe’s own life would now be put in danger because Thomas, who knew he was sick and needed expert medical care, ordered the doctor to travel with him and treat him in Chambly, fifty miles away, where he planned to recuperate from his illness while continuing to run the army from a different base of operations as it withdrew south.

The two men, accompanied by a few soldiers, left Sorel on Tuesday and throughout their two-day journey down river to Chambly encountered many troops who were in flight from the Quebec area. They learned of a disastrous engagement between a Rhode Island regiment of seven hundred men led by Henry Sherburne, and several hundred Indians. According to early reports, everyone in Sherburne’s regiment had been killed in the battle. The men spreading that news had no reports of Arnold’s rush to rescue Sherburne’s men with soldiers including John Greenwood.

Just after sunset, after two days of slow and arduous traveling, Dr. Beebe and General Thomas arrived in Chambly. Thomas felt well enough to walk a half-mile to his lodging, listening to an array of both news and rumors about the trouble at Quebec as he moved. Doctor Beebe was at his side. The next morning, following more treatment from Beebe, General Thomas told the physician that he felt much better, and over the next few days his pustules began to shrink and his condition visibly improved. Beebe began to think that the general might survive the attack. His spirits were lifted at the new health of his most famous patient.

The condition of others with smallpox did not improve. Dr. Beebe began to treat more soldiers trying to fight off smallpox while laying in horse barns amid dirty hay and dung. The large wooden barns that creaked at night from the wind and were overwhelmed by heat in the daytime appeared to be large ovens in which men were roasting from the heat and dying of the pox. There was a nonstop cacophony of weeping, moans, and sheer misery that surrounded the doctor as he worked throughout the day in the barns. Beebe wrote of the men there ceaselessly groaning from pain:

Rev. David Avery was an obstinate man who would ask Dartmouth College for his tuition back because, he charged, he received no education there. The chaplain had traveled to Ticonderoga and Crown Point with Beebe in the winter. Avery possessed an iron constitution and was never sick, despite being surrounded by illness. He visited those barns at Chambly, too. He wrote, “The sick were in horse stables just cleared of dung . . . laid on the floors of the stinking stables.”

Those who survived those barns, and other wretched hospitals, described their illnesses and desperate efforts to overcome them in graphic detail. Simon Fobes survived his pox in a Quebec prison. He wrote, “When the pock was coming out in seventy to eighty of our number, a fever very high and no water to drink, the men drank their own urine which made the fever rage too violently to be endured. Our flesh seemed a mass of corruption. At the same time, we were covered with vermin. When we were a little recovered, we were moved back to our former prison without any cleansing or changing of our apparel. Our clothing was stiff with corrupted matter.”
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Many of the men coming down with the smallpox were in mid retreat in the region and could neither rest or obtain inoculation. They were stuck and had to fight their way out of Canada and out of the grips of the epidemic. One was Bayze Wells, of Connecticut. He started to break out on May 7 while staying overnight at a farmhouse. He did not want to remain, ill, and be taken prisoner, so the next morning he climbed into a bark canoe and, with others, paddled several miles downriver to meet his regiment. He remained there for a week, becoming sicker, and then they had to flee. The entire group left in canoes and Wells, like the others, had to paddle as fast as he could all night. He felt dizzy throughout the evening and into early morning and, just after dawn, fainted in the canoe. He had to be carried the rest of the day in a cart and finally managed to make it to a hospital.

Many died on the retreat. One soldier, Charles Cushing, estimated that thirty captains alone had perished from the pox. Cushing’s friend, Colonel James Reed, of New Hampshire, told him that he expected to lose an entire third of his regiment to the disease.
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Others had to fight on while the smallpox festered in their bodies. Bayley Frye, a novice soldier who was made a colonel in order to get him to volunteer for a dangerous mission, found himself coming down with pox during the first week of May. Pustules began to appear on May 10. A few days later, very sick, he was ordered to take a village of four houses that held thirty-three men, women, and children. In the fight that ensued he nearly fainted from the pox several times. He could not move quickly and was badly injured.
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Dozens of men fleeing the Quebec disasters arrived in Chambly daily. New orders countermanded old ones within hours. Many had been wounded and others had smallpox.

Dr. Beebe, overworked and overwhelmed, was an angry young physician. He had nothing but disdain for the officers in the Continental Army that he had met in just two weeks at Sorel and Chambly. On the day when the officers ordered as many men as possible to parade at Chambly, over twelve hundred, most of them barely able to walk, Beebe scrawled sarcastically in his journal, “Had we a Washington or a Lee to take the command from a set of haughty, ambitious aspiring miscreants who only pride in promotion and honor, we might have hopes of regaining Quebec.”

He was even unhappier about his treatment of General Thomas, who had taken a turn for the worse after all the outward appearances of recovery. Thomas suddenly became ill and died of the pox in his bed at Chambly just after the sun rose on the morning of Sunday, June 2, a distraught Dr. Beebe at his bedside. What enraged Beebe was that the general, a doctor, might have been saved by being a recipient of the very smallpox inoculations that he had outlawed.

On the day after Thomas’s death, Beebe took a count of the men in the Chambly barns suffering from smallpox and put the number at just over three hundred. He and others had apparently secretly inoculated them, against Thomas’s wishes, while the general was in bed and Beebe hoped that they would all survive. They would not. On the very next day, a man died of the pox, his entire body covered with pus-filled pocks. No one would go near his corpse for fear of catching the disease themselves and the man had to be buried without a coffin. The standard set of pallbearers could not be found to carry the body to a grave and it had to be dragged there. “The stupidity of mankind in this situation is beyond all description,” wrote Beebe, who watched the way that the soldiers passed from the earth—without any dignity.

The next day Dr. Beebe visited an officer who had become his friend, Colonel Reed of New Hampshire, who had lost so many men in his regiment to the pox. Now he found to his dismay that Reed, too, had the smallpox. On his way back to his lodging, Beebe encountered a soldier whom he despised, a “little, great, proud, self-conceited, foppish quack.” The man haughtily asked Beebe if he had any physic [medicine] to give him because he did not feel well. The doctor, angry about all of the men sick and dying under his care, and now Colonel Reed, too, snapped at the soldier, “I have plenty of physic, but God damn my soul if I’ll let you have some.” Then he turned abruptly and walked away.

Two days later, on Friday, one man died of smallpox, one of colic, and one of a fever. Beebe and other doctors struggled to keep the soldiers in the barns alive. He was furious about the spartan, temporary hospitals, the dearth of medicine, and the uselessness of traditional medical practices. He wrote that night that he was “moved with compassionate feeling for poor, distressed soldiers; when they are taken sick, are thrown into this dirty, stinking place, and left to take care of themselves, no attendance, no provision made, but what must be loathed and abhorred by all, both well and sick.”

On Sunday, two men under his care died of smallpox and two more passed away from the disease on Monday. That same fatal day was also the one year anniversary of Lucy Beebe’s death and the memory of his late wife’s passing sent Beebe into a deep depression. He sadly wrote in his journal that night: “Oh fleeting time, who dost make no delay, but with rapid force sweeps all without distinction to one common grave. Let me remember that the same thing must take place with respect to me as it did to her.”

The good doctor then learned that a regiment badly afflicted with smallpox—the majority of the men were sick and barely able to walk— had just been ordered to travel by boat to Sorel, a distance of fifty miles. Beebe called the decision “ridiculous” and then scrawled at the end of his journal entry for that long and melancholy day, “It is enough to confuse and distract a rational man from becoming a surgeon to a regiment.”