The First American Army (45 page)

The First Rhode Island, mobilized in February of 1778, fought on until the victory at Yorktown in the fall of 1781, participating in numerous engagements, providing one of the longest service records in the Continental Army. It was led by Colonel Greene throughout the war until he was killed in a British ambush in the spring of 1781.

The states honored their promise to give freedom to all of the five thousand slaves who served as soldiers and sailors during the Revolution, as well as land that had been guaranteed to some. The victory in the Revolution did not bring about the end of slavery in America, as the black soldiers had hoped. No one freed their slaves to celebrate victory at Yorktown or the signing of the peace accords in 1783. The new Constitution, approved in 1789, did not eradicate slavery either. In fact, the booming cotton market meant an even greater increase in slavery in the southern states in the years following the war.

Life was often harsh for blacks in the North as well as the South after the Revolution. Black veterans awarded their freedom for military service had an even harder time finding work than whites. In 1796 one, Pomp Peters, unable to make ends meet, sold the one hundred acres of land the United States had given him as his bounty to fight for his country for just $20 in order to pay his bills.
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Another, George Knox of New Hampshire, faced such financial woes that in 1784 he and his wife gave up their freedom and became indentured servants for five years in order to be given food and shelter and to collect a promised $100 worth of land or cattle at the end of the term.

Black private Michael Sudrick, who enlisted and reenlisted five different times and fought until the very end of hostilities in 1783, spent the rest of his life in such terrible financial shape that he was constantly sued for nonpayment of bills.
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Another army veteran, Prince Light, who fought at Saratoga, had such financial trouble in the years following the war that when he died in 1821 his recorded estate was worth just $2.20.
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Some, such as Joseph Mun of Connecticut, felt betrayed. His owner, and the Connecticut legislature, agreed to free him if he served the full threeyear term in the army. Mun suffered a broken arm in a battle and had to be discharged short of his three years. The Connecticut courts ruled that he had to go back into slavery because he had not served his full term.
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An ironic footnote to part the black soldiers played in the Revolution, and the smashing of their dream of universal freedom at its end, was the story of the three grown sons of Jude Hall. Black freedmen James, Aaron, and William Hall, of New Hampshire, were all mistaken for runaway slaves or deliberately kidnapped by groups of slave catchers traveling through New England in the early nineteenth century, taken South, and sold into bondage. Their father, Jude Hall, had fought for eight years in the Revolution, longer, in fact, than George Washington, certain that the war would bring an end to slavery in America.
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That would not come for another eighty years and yet another war.

T
wo years after he left the army in January 1777, following the crossing of the Delaware and the victory at Trenton, private John Greenwood felt “uneasy” and wanted to fight in the Revolution again. He had spent three months of 1778 with the Boston Light Infantry when they were assigned the duty of guarding some of the British soldiers captured at the battle of Saratoga. There, he worked once more as a fifer, not as an infantryman. Now, in the winter of 1779, Greenwood turned his back on the army and decided to go to sea to do what he could to win the war. It was a natural choice. Young Greenwood, who had just turned nineteen, had spent most of the previous two years working in Cape Cod fisheries in Falmouth, Massachusetts. He had been on boats constantly and befriended many seaman, some of whom had sailed on the American privateers that preyed on British shipping in the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.

Privateering was a lucrative industry. Congress had no navy when the war began. By the summer of 1775, Rhode Islanders had transformed two ships into warships by adding some guns and Congress had ordered the refitting of several more, but that was a meager fleet.
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America needed a substantial sea force to combat Great Britain’s hundreds of ships and their flotillas of merchant ships carrying millions of dollars worth of supplies to and from America and ports in the West Indies. British privateers also preyed on American merchant ships. The English vessels were equipped with “avarice and enmity,” congressional delegate Richard Henry Lee charged, and America needed the privateers to “clear our coast” of the British villains.
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Building new ships was incredibly expensive and time consuming, so in order create an “instant navy” Congress authorized private shippers that did not already carry cannon for protection to refit their vessels with them to prey on English boats. The refurbishing was completed in American harbors such as Boston, Marblehead, and Newburyport in Massachusetts, New London, Connecticut, or in Caribbean ports.

The owners of every type of ship—brigs, schooners, sloops—refitted their vessels for high seas combat. Most of the sailors on these ships, guaranteed a portion of any booty, signed on when the ship became a privateer.
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The captains of these ships were given “letters of marque” that acknowledged that they fought for America but were entitled to the goods they captured. Some called it a patriotic license to steal.

The heavily armed merchant-turned-privateer vessels were necessary because neutral nations, such as Holland, were willing to trade with America. That meant American ships could sail to a Caribbean island, such as Dutch-held St. Eustatius and there trade their cargoes of tobacco and corn for gunpowder brought to the tiny island by Dutch captains. The gunpowder was essential to the American Revolution. But the laws of neutrality also permitted any belligerent nation (the British) to sink or capture any ship carrying arms for their enemy.
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Privateering became popular because there were so many cargoladen ships that could be taken on the high seas in a region that stretched from Halifax, Canada, all the way to the coast of Brazil; others sailed off the coasts of Ireland, Scotland, and England itself, using French ports as their home. About seventeen hundred American privateers put to sea, six hundred from Massachusetts alone, from 1776 until 1783. As many as 449 sailed at any one time. The privateers ranged in size from one to five hundred tons and carried between four and twenty cannon. Crew sizes averaged about one hundred men, half with muskets for armed engagements, but some ships carried as many as three hundred. The ships carried more than ten thousand seamen with them over the seven years of the war, captured or sank six hundred British vessels (American ships sunk or captured twice as many vessels as the British and five times the value in cargo) and seized goods worth between $18 million and $66 million, according to different records.
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Life on board the privateers could be very lucrative for the ordinary seamen. The ship’s owner received the largest share of the prize booty and the U.S. government received a small cut, but the captain and officers received shares and each seaman was awarded a share. A seaman’s percentage of the booty from a single voyage of a few months, if the prize ships taken were loaded with expensive goods, could provide him with an income for a year or more. The opportunity to make fast money attracted so many investors that merchants sold off shares of their ships. Some ships were owned by a dozen shareholders, but one merchant sold off 196 shares to eager subscribers.
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Newspaper advertising for sailors to serve on privateers emphasized the windfall profits to be earned on the rolling waves of the Atlantic. A Connecticut newspaper ad said that ship owners were looking for “all gentlemen volunteers who are desirous of making their fortunes in eight weeks,” and a
Boston Gazette
ad sought out “all those jolly fellows who love their country and want to make their fortune at one stroke.”
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Patriotic privateers also had the satisfaction of sinking or disabling one of Her Majesty’s ships or seizing supplies on their way to the British army, bringing the end of the war that much closer.

This combination of patriotism and profit made privateering quite attractive. One British officer held as a prisoner of war in Boston wrote that “Boston harbor swarms with privateers and their prizes.” America had gone privateering mad, crazed with the profit and wealth that privateering promised.

And the British knew it. The
London Chronicle
reported in 1777 that American privateers terrorized Scottish officials. “Our seas so full of American privateers that nothing can be trusted upon this defenseless coast,” one said.
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A British writer commented in 1778 that commercial British ship owners now had to employ a fleet of small combat ships just to protect their large, cargo-heavy merchant ships from attacks by Americans, adding “The coasts of Great Britain and Ireland were insulted by the American privateers in a manner which our hardiest enemies had never ventured in our most arduous contentions with foreigners.” British and Scottish parents were so fearful of the American naval commander John Paul Jones that they told their children to stay away from the beaches for fear his crew would kidnap them.
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It was not just the safety of shipping near Great Britain that the Crown worried about, either. The privateers seemed to be everywhere in the Caribbean, too. The governor of British-held Jamaica reported “a constant track of American schooners” in his waters.
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And especially in the Caribbean, small fleets of American privateers set out to capture specific large British ships, often successfully. “A great number [of privateers] in these seas fitted out on purpose to take the
Greyhound,
” wrote Captain Henry Byrne of one large ship to the British Admiralty just before Christmas, 1776.
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The American raids became so successful that in one single week in Caribbean waters American ships captured fourteen British vessels.
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The ships were extraordinarily successful at harassing British merchant ships. John Adams wrote that the captains and sailors all deserved the fame that they had received. He noted, “Some of the most skillful, determined, persevering, and successful engagements that have ever happened upon the seas have been performed by American privateers.”
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Some American officials opposed the sanctioning of privateers because their owners could use their booty to pay sailors an average of five times what the Continental Navy could offer on its few ships. The privateers, some said, also took on board thousands of men who might have fought for the always recruit-desperate army. American general Charles Lee even suggested that no privateers should be allowed to sail until all army regiments were filled with men.
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The money made many congressional delegates also wonder about the sailors’ true patriotism. William Whipple wrote that the income earned on the privateers would bring about “the destruction of the morals of the people.” He said that sailors would “soon lose every idea of right and wrong.”
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Whipple, and others, worried that the privateers would seize cargo from friendly ships, too, for the money, and that some would wind up behaving no better than pirates. In a letter filled with sarcasm, John Pickering wrote to his brother Timothy, a congressional delegate, just after the war ended that many sailors and port workers seemed demoralized by the peace because it ended their opportunities to make money on privateers.
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Of course, the punishments for those captured on privateers were severe. Those not killed or drowned in hotly contested sea battles were imprisoned in the wretched British prison ships in New York harbor or, if captured in the waters of the Caribbean, put in irons in hot, rancid jails on malaria-infested islands held by the British there. Some went to prisons in England.

None of this concerned John Greenwood. The young private had survived the invasion of Canada, smallpox, and the crossing of the Delaware; he would not worry about being captured on the high seas. As every sailor he knew who had sailed with the privateers assured him, the small, sleek American boats could always outrun the lumbering British warships.

In 1778, he signed on to the
Cumberland,
bound for Barbados in the Bahamas with one hundred thirty men, as a steward but worked as a midshipman. At first, the men were nervous because sea combat was dangerous. Men were killed and their ships sunk or wrecked. One vivid description was written by John Paul Jones after his
Ranger
took on the
Drake:
“The
Drake
being rather astern of the
Ranger,
I ordered the helm up, and gave her the first broadside. The action was warm, close, and obstinate. It lasted an hour and five minutes, when the enemy called for quarters, her fore and main top sail yards being both cut away, and down on the cap; the fore top gallant yard and mizzen gaff both hanging up and down along the mast; the second ensign which they had hoisted shot away and hanging over the quarter gallery in the water; the jib shot away and hanging into the water; her sails and rigging entirely cut to pieces, her masts and yards all wounded and her hull also very much galled.”
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