The First American Army (35 page)

On one occasion, a general obtained five hundred coats for the men of the Pennsylvania regiment, but the clothier general insisted that tailors had to work on the jackets. He then went on vacation, leaving the jackets in a warehouse. It was weeks before the jackets were finally delivered. Troops whose enlistment had ended attempted to take their blankets home with them and had to be ordered to leave them behind for others. Clothing could not be made easily, either. The United States did not have textile mills like England that could produce clothes for fourteen thousand soldiers.
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The lack of clothing meant that soldiers received little protection from the weather and came down with bad colds that turned into pneumonia; they wound up in the dreaded hospitals. The clothing crisis also meant that the troops were not available for needed camp drills and work crews throughout the winter.

A Massachusetts general told his superiors that three-quarters of his men could not report for parade because they had no clothes or shoes. “They are naked from the crowns of their heads to the soles of their feet,” he wrote.
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Many of his men wrote to friends and asked them to send clothing and to lobby their state legislatures to do the same. Lt. Archelaus Lewis, of the First Massachusetts, an officer in Ebenezer Wild’s regiment, was one. He wrote to a friend, Jesse Partridge, “There is two-thirds of our regiment barefooted and bare-backed, not a second shirt to put on nor breeches to cover their nakedness . . . this is the case with the greatest part of our army.” He told Partridge sarcastically that no one back home cared for the troops anymore. “By your conduct, you as good as say why should we trouble or concern ourselves about them? They are tied fast and let them look out for themselves.”
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One New Hampshire general told a friend about the soldiers that “one half of them destitute of any shoes or stockings to their feet, and I may add many without either breeches, shirts, and blankets . . . living in a cold season in log huts without doors or floors.”
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A Massachusetts officer, Col. Samuel Carlton, wrote that his men had no blankets or coats, but what broke his heart, too, was their lack of footwear. “Ninety men in the regiment have not a shoe to their foot and near as many have no feet to their stockings. It gives me pain to see our men turned out upon the parade to mount guard or to go on fatigue with their naked feet on the snow and ice.”
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Men without shirts held their overcoats tightly around their bare chests; those without shoes wrapped cartridge box leather around them. Some even sold their clothes and used the money to buy food.
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One colonel threw up his hands. “The soldiers of our army are almost naked,” he lamented in a letter.
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Richard Butler, a colonel in the Ninth Pennsylvania, wrote at the end of March that throughout the winter there had been only one blanket for every five men in his regiment. Some men had but one shirt and many none. He added that some of the tents were taken down, cut up, and used as blankets. The clothing crisis was ruining morale. “The want of clothing,” he wrote, “is the first thing that makes a soldier think little of himself. Had I clothing for them, I would venture to vouch for their conduct both as to their bravery and fidelity, and am certain it would be very conducive to their health.”
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Some soldiers who found themselves freezing without proper clothing wrote home to ask their families to send them cattle skins they could trade for articles of clothing, but many of these wound up stolen by other soldiers.
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The plight of the men was familiar to many who lived in that area of Pennsylvania. Wrote an angry Christopher Marshall, a resident of Lancaster,

The people who lived in Chester County insisted that they had no spare clothing that they could sell to the army and that the British had seized much of it in September. They had said the same thing about food, that had been confiscated by both British and American forces for months. What infuriated the starving and badly clad soldiers was the sight of those same local residents walking about covered in comfortable great coats with thick woolen scarves wrapped around their necks to keep themselves warm. The residents’ refusal to help the army caused great bitterness among the soldiers. On Christmas Eve, 1777, James Gray, a captain in the Third New Hampshire, wrote to his wife Susan of the residents, “In this state we find a people who are (generally speaking) the most unfriendly of any we have passed through.”
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In a letter to his brother, a furious Elias Boudinot declared, “The inhabitants are only fit for pickhorses,” and that “extortion reigns triumphant throughout every part of [Pennsylvania].” He had nothing but scorn for the Pennsylvania troops, writing that as fighting men they were “worse than a company of Jersey women.”
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Unable to obtain clothing at Valley Forge, many men wrote home and begged family, friends, and neighbors to send them some. A lowly ranking paymaster in a New Hampshire regiment wrote to a friend that he needed a shirt, stockings, white breeches “full large,” with a white waistcoat “homespun.” He said he would be happy to pay any “agreeable” price and then, in a flush of vanity, asked his friend to get ruffled and not plain sleeves on the shirts.
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Some men yearned for small pleasures, such as Jonathan Todd, of Connecticut, who asked his father in a letter he wrote on Christmas Day, “Don’t forget my shirt and watch; should be glad of a handkerchief.”
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Many saw the lack of clothing as a lack of patriotism by their states. General Enoch Poor of New Hampshire wrote to the members of his legislature that they had broken their word to the troops: “If any desert how can I punish them when they plead in their justification that on your part the contract is broken?” Henry Laurens, president of the Continental Congress, was even blunter, writing to New Jersey governor Livingston that he believed the army might collapse by the end of the year. He fumed “that we are starving in the midst of plenty, perishing by cold, and surrounded by clothing sufficient for two armies, but uncollected.”
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George Washington knew that he could simply seize clothing from Americans wherever he found it. Congress had given him dictatorial powers in 1776, since rescinded, and in September 1777 the Pennsylvania State Assembly authorized him to take whatever clothing and supplies he needed from the inhabitants living in the southeastern region of the state. He refused to do so, reminding the state assembly and Congress that martial law was unthinkable to him. He would find another way.

He slowly solved the problem by replacing the key men in charge of the army’s supplies. Washington convinced Congress to streamline the quartermaster and commissary departments. He arranged for an excellent administrator, Jeremiah Wadsworth, to be named head of the commissary and the commander in chief ’s right hand man, General Nathanael Greene, became head of the quartermaster’s department and ran it from Valley Forge. Within a month, the crisis ebbed. Wadsworth completely reorganized the department, reduced the corruption within it, and expanded the search for food into the far reaches of each state. Greene tightened up the organization of the quartermaster’s department and hired hundreds of new wagon drivers, all civilians, to expedite the delivery of clothing and other supplies.

Unable to procure needed meat in the Valley Forge area to feed his starving troops, Washington sent Generals Wayne and Greene on several foraging expeditions in New Jersey and later ordered officers to disperse throughout the middle Atlantic states to find cattle and bring them to Valley Forge. His scouts located considerable numbers of cattle on farms as far away as Maryland and Massachusetts and brought them several hundred miles to Valley Forge, through inclement weather, down narrow, uneven dirt roads, and over streams and rivers. They also managed to drive every herd except one past the British. The cattle drive, a tenacious undertaking, saved the army.

The state governments that so many cursed at Valley Forge
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assist the army, even though it took a long time to do so. Colonel William Shepard wrote a heartfelt plea to the Massachusetts legislature complaining that his destitute men lived “barely above a state of want” at Valley Forge due to the inaction of clothing procurers back home. The legislature not only ruled the procurers negligent but ordered the immediate production of new clothing for the troops. Governors in other states ordered clothing for their regiments in the winter camp.
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Lt. James McMichael, the poet, was despondent about life in camp throughout the clothing crisis and all of the other disasters of the Valley Forge winter. He missed his wife. On February 2, he wrote a poem that reflected the woes of any soldier who was homesick for the woman he loved. In it he explained that although he preferred to be with her, as a patriot he had to remain in the army and try to survive the brutal winter.

The lieutenant finished his poem, put it down, then picked it up and with his quill added something else that seemed to come directly from his heart to his wife:

The sicknesses of Valley Forge began to claim his friends, sending McMichael into more depression. One lieutenant whom he knew was killed by another officer in a duel. His friend Captain John Speer, who had fought with valor in several battles, died of a fever on February 8 and McMichael attended his funeral. That night he wrote a poem praising his friend’s service to his country and reminding anyone who read it that patriots all went to heaven.

McMichael’s journal and collection of poems reflected his increasing unhappiness with life throughout the Valley Forge winter following those incidents. He wrote to his wife often and continually told her how much he loved her and how he desired to be with her.

McMichael and the others were provided with some sports and entertainment to keep their mind off the dreadful conditions in camp. It was discovered that several officers had been amateur actors before the war. They formed a theatre troupe and staged plays in one of the bakehouses; the bakery was filled to capacity for the performances. Part of a meadow was cleared for athletic events. The men played lacrosse, an Indian game, and a type of croquet called wicket. George Washington even participated in some of the wicket contests.

There were fast days to seek God’s protection for the army (the men joked that with food supplies low, they fasted every day). Washington’s February 22 birthday was celebrated. The first of May, May Day, was celebrated by brigades of men with white blossoms tucked into the bands of their hats. They marched back and forth on the parade grounds in front of wooden poles gaily decorated with ribbons for each brigade. Thirteen men carried bows and thirteen arrows for each state and thirteen drummers and thirteen fifers serenaded the army. All of the privates were drawn up into thirteen platoons of thirteen men each.
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McMichael made it through the tough winter, he told his new bride again and again, by reading the many letters she sent him and through the poems he forwarded to her. On March 4, their first anniversary, he composed a short poem that captured both the love of a young couple and the loneliness of the soldier:

Those alarms would be sounded again in the spring when General Henry Clinton, who replaced Howe, decided what he was going to do with the army of some twelve thousand men he had stationed in Philadelphia. The men at Valley Forge wondered whether he would attack them or whether he would strike at other Pennsylvania towns, or communities in New Jersey. Would Washington assault Philadelphia?

The American commander knew that he had an army that had fought well, despite losing, at Brandywine and Germantown. But he was in charge of a fourteen-thousand-man army weakened and demoralized by the harsh winter. In order to turn his army into a better fighting force he welcomed Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a Prussian army officer and drill master who presented him with a mostly fabricated biography. Von Steuben assured Washington that he could teach the Americans classic European battlefield maneuvers that would enable them to defeat the British in any direct confrontation. Washington needed that assurance. His army had been beaten in most classic, open-field confrontations and registered its victories only in sneak attacks such as Trenton. He might be able to convince Britain to quit the war if they realized the Americans could beat them in direct battle.