The First American Army (20 page)

The minister was eager to hold a large prayer meeting in order to preach the word of God. On Wednesday night, September 4, after much planning and at his urging, officers gathered a huge crowd of several thousand men, healthy and sick, on the parade ground in the middle of the fort. Lit torches surrounded the area. There were so many men in the crowd, including his friend Dr. Beebe, that those at the rear could not see the minister. They shouted at him that their view was blocked by the huge assemblage of troops. The drummers from the regiments there volunteered to stack up their drums in two long lines, on top of each other, to form two pyramids about ten feet in height. The men then carried out a wooden platform and placed it on top of the two rows, connecting them.

The Rev. Robbins was pleased with the ad hoc stage, certainly the largest and highest he had ever stood on. Holding his Bible with great care, he then carefully climbed up the wall of drums to the top of the platform and there, with all able to see him, both his feet planted gingerly on the wooden platform, he preached the word of the Lord, his voice loud and vibrant, his figure illuminated by the dozens of burning torches against the star-filled sky. Thousands listened in rapt attention, their eyes looking upwards at the minister, his voice booming and his arms flailing in his animated sermon, the heavens themselves his backdrop.

Nonplussed, Robbins decided to give another robust sermon to another large crowd to calm the men the following night. He scribbled in his journal that day, “Enjoy through great mercy good health in the midst of sickness and death all around me,” and in the evening preached with great power to his assemblage of soldiers. He read from the prophet Joel: “A day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and of gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of trumpet and alarm.” Then, adding a small touch of politics and patriotism to his preaching, he exhorted the men to be brave, that “we could rejoice in the Lord, who could turn our mourning into joy.”

The sermon did little good, however, and two days later, after visiting the ever-mounting number of sick in the rancid hospitals and listening to enlisted men grumble about the war, he wrote in his journal that “our regiment is in a most miserable condition; I could wish they were all dismissed.” By Friday, September 13, the situation at Ticonderoga had deteriorated even further in Robbins’s eyes, just as it had for his friend Beebe. “The groans of the distressed in the camp are real affecting,” Robbins wrote, adding that out of 237 men in one regiment, 197 were sick and unfit for duty. Robbins then jotted down notes about his meeting in a hospital ward with a young man from Massachusetts who was dying. Robbins wrote, “He asked me to save him and said he was not fit to die.”

“I cannot die . . . Do sir, pray for me. Will you not send for my mother? If she were here to nurse me I could get well. Oh, my mother. How I wish I could see her. She was opposed to my enlisting. I am now very sorry. Do let her know that I am sorry,” the boy pleaded with the minister and then, later that night, expired.

One thing that both Beebe and Robbins noticed was that substantially more soldiers turned out for the evening prayer service as the number of dying increased. Perhaps they were seeking God’s protection. Robbins did not know, but he began to offer longer and stronger sermons. He asked the drummers to build his ten foot high platform with their instruments each evening and preached from the platform on top of them to ever larger congregations. Now, too, the minister noticed, his sermons in the evening attracted civilians who lived nearby, as well as the enlisted men and officers. The men not only listened to his readings from the Bible and his sermon, but joined in the loud and exuberant singing of rousing hymns, with a fifer and drummer adding music, as the torches burned around them on the parade ground and the moon rose over Fort Ticonderoga.

Robbins’s exhilaration was limited, though, because the garrison was hit with a succession of bad news. First, Washington’s forces had suffered a terrible defeat on Long Island, New York, during the last week of August. Second, the British army, thousands strong, had begun a march toward Ticonderoga.

Worst of all, Benedict Arnold’s navy had been defeated. The British had beaten Arnold’s hastily created sea force in a battle that commenced near Valcour Island at the northern tip of Lake Champlain on October 11 and lasted three days. The British sunk or disabled eleven of the sixteen ships, killing eighty or more of Arnold’s men and taking more than one hundred prisoners in a sea battle that continued thirty miles southward on the lake. Arnold and the rest of his men abandoned their ships, burned them, and escaped to Crown Point. Fearful of being destroyed there by a much larger British force, Arnold had the fort burned and the men headed south again, toward Ticonderoga. Arnold wrote to his superior, General Schuyler, that he was happy to be alive. “On the whole, I think we have had a very fortunate escape and have great reason to return our humble and hearty thanks to Almighty God for preserving and delivering so many of us from our more than savage enemies.”
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Finally, on October 15, 1776, the men from Arnold’s battered navy arrived in terrible condition. Arnold was satisfied that his fleet had inflicted enough damage to several of the British warships to force their repair. But he was exasperated by the losses of his ships and men. Through sheer coincidence, Robbins and Arnold met at the hospital, where the minister was offering comfort to Arnold’s men who fought in the lake engagement. The angry Arnold told Robbins to join a company of wounded men that he was sending to Fort George in the morning; Arnold decided that in addition to medical assistance, they needed all of the heavenly help they could obtain. Robbins agreed, but reluctantly. Face to face with the very insistent general, he had no choice.

The trip to Fort George, at the southern end of Lake George, nearly cost the reverend his life, and the lives of all the men in his boat. There was little breeze and the men were forced to row. The lake was smaller than Champlain and, closer to the shore, they had the opportunity to look out from the boat at the gorgeous scenery that surrounded them. Autumn had arrived in upstate New York. The green leaves on the hundreds of thousands of trees that the soldiers could see on shore had changed to their customary fall colors of red, orange, and yellow. This rainbow of turning leaves gave the woods a painter’s palette of vivid color. They had pulled on their oars hard all morning, their hands callused from dragging them through the waters of the lake, but the uncertain weather of Lake George struck hard in the afternoon.

Just after 2 p.m. a fierce wind whipped across the lake and snapped the rudder band on the boat as the helmsman tried to push the rudder in order to steer forward in the severe northwest gale. The rudderless boat was then adrift and floated directly at a cluster of large, jagged rocks near the shore of a small island. The boat, moving quickly with the wind, was about to be smashed to pieces when the breeze shifted at the last moment and sent the craft sailing harmlessly into a small cove. The men dropped anchor and decided to remain there, sleeping on deck. No one took a close look at the darkening sky. Rain began to fall just after the sun went down and continued, hard, all evening. The men were drenched.

Robbins and the sick men, all of them soaked from the torrents of rain they had endured all evening, managed to fix the rudder in the morning and rowed to Fort George. There, Robbins, whose health had been restored during his latest return to the front, came down with yet another fever. Despite his ailments, he visited every ward in the hospitals at Fort George and prayed with the men. The minister had been hardened by the war. He wrote in his journal that he had tended to the spiritual needs of three men as they died in their beds in front of him that day and yet felt no great sadness; the deaths he had been witnessing for months seemed to have made him immune to suffering.

There was no sermon by the Rev. Robbins the following Sunday. The fever and bad cold he had developed on the trip from Ticonderoga to Fort George had made him so sick he could not preach. He was emotionally and mentally distressed, and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Dr. Potts had warned him that one more tour of duty at Ticonderoga would kill him, and now, perhaps, his fatal prophecy would come true. Robbins was finished and he knew it.

On Thursday, October 31, a week after the first snowfall on Lake Champlain, a very sick and despondent Rev. Ammi Robbins arrived home in Connecticut yet again. More than five thousand Americans, half the original force, had been lost—killed in battle or by smallpox, disease, and fever, or captured—in the ill-fated expedition to Canada. Among the dead in the mismanaged, ill-advised incursion into Canada were many doctors, chaplains, and musicians who never lifted a musket, drew a sword, or fired a cannon. Rev. Robbins had survived, though, he imagined, as he wrote on the day that he arrived home for the last time, thanks to “Divine mercy and favor.”

By the end of October, the smallpox scourge had faded. Arnold’s navy had inflicted far more damage on the British warships on Lake Champlain than was initially suspected and Governor Guy Carleton decided to return to Canada for the time being and abandon his pursuit of the reeling American army. Even though he lost the lake battles, Arnold’s ability to halt the British advance southward was critical to the war. If Carleton had moved south he might have been able to defeat the Americans at Ticonderoga and move on to join Howe in New York, splitting the colonies in two and perhaps winning the war in the spring of 1776.

This pause in the fighting gave Beebe and the other doctors inside the garrisons time to let the soldiers wounded in the summer campaign heal. Men who contracted typhus, the putrid fever, and other ailments slowly recovered. The hospital tents came down and the medical wards were soon emptied. With great bravado, General Horatio Gates, whom Congress had chosen to succeed Schuyler in that region, declared an end to the smallpox epidemic and pronounced the army in good health once again.

On December 4, Dr. Lewis Beebe—his enlistment ended and still alive despite another bout of fever—yearned to see girlfriend Margaret Kellog. Hopeful of resuming the life of a civilian, he began the long journey home to Sheffield, Massachusetts, a journey of one hundred fifty miles. He traveled with his regiment and on his own by wagon, horseback, and sleigh on a circuitous route down through New York, into Pennsylvania, east across New Jersey, north into New York again, and finally to Connecticut and Massachusetts. Upon his arrival home, he would write a final line, one of great solace, in his journal, “I once more returned to my father’s house,” happy at last to be among those he loved.

The two healers, the man of medicine and the man of the cloth, had survived their journey into and out of the hell of the Canadian disaster and made it back to their hometowns alive. While the doctor had fretted that he had lost so many lives, he had saved many, too. And while the minister lamented over and over again that he was unable to offer God’s help to enough men, he had to know that whether it was sitting next to the bed of a dying soldier or standing on top of his high drum platform surrounded by torches, he had brought the word of God to the soldiers of the Revolution and in doing so had eased their fears.

As Beebe was headed home by sleigh to Sheffield, Massachusetts, the week before Christmas, he and the others traveling with him learned all the details of the crushing defeats George Washington’s army had suffered in the New York area during the previous three months. Following the debacle on Long Island, the British followed the Americans to Harlem, forcing them to retreat. Washington withdrew his forces to White Plains, where he suffered another loss and had to withdraw still farther north.

General Howe turned his attention on another target, the garrison of three thousand Americans at Fort Washington in Manhattan. The British and Hessian force of thirteen thousand men overran the fort, forcing nearly all three thousand of its defenders to surrender. Howe and Lord Cornwallis then went after Washington’s main army, pursuing it across New Jersey. Washington had lost many of his cannon at Fort Washington. He had suffered more than five thousand men lost in casualties and desertions. The British chased him westward and now, as Beebe rode home in late December, Washington found himself on the western shore of the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, about to be crushed.