The First American Army (6 page)

The enlisted men shared many of the same hardships and complained about many of the same things that soldiers since the Persian wars had done and would do in the years to come. They all seemed to know short people who made up for their lack of height by trying to seem authoritative, sergeants with deep voices, happy drunks, and men who had apparently slept with every woman on the Atlantic seaboard. All had met bullies. Most were witness to a fistfight in camp. Someone always forgot the password of the day necessary to reenter the camp. Many loved to play practical jokes on others. All seemed to know someone who had their tents burned in a campfire mishap. All enjoyed the spirits dispensed each day, any good food they could obtain anywhere, and an actual bed to sleep in after days of marching.

During their marches in the war most would, at one time or another, sleep in a field and sometimes wake up with snow on top of them. It seemed all, in some manner, had met British enlisted men, usually prisoners of war, and while they hated them as the enemy, seemed to like them as people, especially teenaged British soldiers.

In the view of the soldiers, clothing was always badly stitched, muskets poorly made, ammunition always in short supply, orders never clear enough. They complained bitterly that on many of their marches they wound up in the same place where they started. They hated work designed merely to fill time. It would always be too cold in winter and too hot in summer.

The men all enjoyed devouring the honey they were sometimes able to obtain from local farmers in summer, appreciated any free mending of their tattered uniforms from older women, and any flirtatious look they received from younger ones. They often made fun of their officers, telling jokes about them or offering their comrades impersonations designed to make the officers look ridiculous.

There was a social, intellectual, and military divide between the enlisted men and the officers. In Europe, some noblemen became officers and their distinguished station in life made them superior to the enlisted man who joined the army as a career or who were drafted. There were a few nobles in the British army, such as Lord Cornwallis and Lord Rawdon, or sons of lords, such as Lord Richard Howe, but their officers had come from important families in the merchant class, families that had always enjoyed impressive social standing in British society. They, too, considered themselves above the ordinary men they commanded.

The American officer was quite different. The officers, like the men, heralded the new, independent nation they were fighting for, but saw their sudden appointment as a captain or major as immediate entry into a “new” social order in America. Some had been members of the wealthy upper class, especially the southerner planters who had become rich off slave labor, and some had come from prosperous mercantile and shipping families in the New England and Middle Atlantic states. Many, though, had simply been elected by their men or appointed by Congress or state legislatures and had this elite life thrust upon them. They embraced it because, all of a sudden, someone was paying attention to them.

The American officers rarely fraternized with the enlisted men in camp, on the march, or anywhere else off the battlefield. That was because, many of the enlisted men charged, they spent much of their time lobbying for promotions, feuding with others whom they did not see fit for command, complaining of constantly being overlooked when colonels and generals were named, engaging in duels with each other to satisfy personal honor, and becoming embroiled in disputes with townspeople, merchants, and farmers over unpaid debts.

Almost none the officers had ever been leaders of men before and knew nothing about their responsibilities. Most were young, some twenty or twenty-one, and younger than many of the men they commanded. They had no military training. They failed to follow orders to help drill their men, visit the sick, check on firearms, or supervise men who were supposed to clean their regiment’s area of the camp. They were highly ineffective commanders and often performed badly in battle.

One twenty-one-year-old officer, John Lacey, defended himself by reminding critics that “we were all young and in a manner unacquainted with human nature, quite novices in military matters, had everything to learn and no one to instruct us.”
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Colonel William Richardson, of the Fifth Maryland Regiment, agreed that his junior officers were novices, but sneered that they were “but few removes from idiots.”
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The enlisted men, who had their own jobs to fill up their days and nights, left the officers to their own lives. The privates, corporals, and sergeants did what they were told to do, but ignored the officers during much of the war except when they needed their assistance in obtaining furloughs to go home to visit their wives and family. At times, the officers and the enlisted men of the Revolution seemed like two different kinds of soldiers in two different armies.

The enlisted men never missed an opportunity to poke some goodnatured humor at their superiors and the army itself, even if their barbs might land them in trouble. Some spoke to officers sarcastically. One sergeant, Joseph White, a teenager, even had the audacity to have some fun about the officers and army with George Washington himself.

White’s commander sent him to Washington’s headquarters with an urgent message and ordered him to deliver it personally to the commander in chief. Washington was standing with his wife Martha when White was ushered into the room. The general read the message and then looked up at White.

“What officer are you?” he said.

“I am the assistant adjutant of the regiment of artillery,” answered young White proudly.

“Indeed,” Washington said, “you are very young to do that duty.”

White looked straight at the sharply dressed General, at six foot three and over two hundred pounds a towering presence, and told him that while that was true, in the army he was growing older every day. A wide smile, one of the few the men ever saw, spread across Washington’s face and he let White go.
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Soldiers who became unhappy with the service went home when their terms were up, refusing to reenlist, blithely assuming that others would take their place. This practice began at the very beginning of the war, at the end of 1775, when half of the nearly twenty thousand soldiers went home when their time expired.
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This practice confounded Congress and the generals and the troops who stayed, many of whom hissed at the groups of those returning home as they left camp. Others unwilling to wait until their time ended simply left camp as deserters, seeing no harm in it. Men deserted individually, with friends, or with small groups. They took their belongings, and sometimes their muskets, with them. No one stopped them as they marched home to Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Virginia and other states. Some even deserted to the enemy.
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“We shall not, with all our rhetoric, be able to maintain many,” Colonel Jedediah Huntington complained to his brother Jabez in November 1775.
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The delegates to the Continental Congress knew that the army they had raised to lead America to its promised land was beset with problems within months of its formation and that the patriotism that followed Lexington had ebbed. As early as October 1775, John Adams and other delegates found themselves bombarded with complaints about the military. He wrote to one of his state’s generals, “It is represented in this city by some persons and it makes an unfriendly impression upon some minds that in the Massachusetts regiments there are a great number of boys, old men, and Negroes such as are unsuitable for the service and therefore that the Continent is paying for a much greater number of men that are fit for action or any service.”
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Delegate Silas Deane, his desk drawer full of complaints too, wrote to his wife that “the behavior of our soldiers has made me sick, but little better could be expected from men trained up with notions of their right of saying how and when and under whom they will serve.”
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John Hancock, the president of Congress, summed up the feelings of most about the behavior of the army in a letter to the leaders of the colonies to tell them that “the situation of the army is alarming.”
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But Congress also understood that the men had surrendered much and been given little in return. The delegates noted with pride, too, that there were soldiers just fifteen years old, such as John Greenwood, who were willing to die for their country. All of the enlisted men had their thanks. New Hampshire delegate Josiah Bartlett reminded congressional colleagues that the men faced “almost insuperable difficulties” and said in the spring of 1776 that “instead of wondering that we are in no better situation than at present, I am surprised we are in so good.”
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T
he problems of the commander in chief and the Continental Congress were far from the mind of John Greenwood, who reenlisted. His major problem was finding a way to sneak into Boston to locate his parents, especially his mother, whom he had seen just briefly on the morning of the Bunker Hill battle when she had shrieked at him to run away.

Greenwood’s efforts to see her again, and to reunite with his father, were thwarted because of the travel prohibitions. What the teenaged soldier did not realize, however, was that his mother was right there in Cambridge. On the day before Bunker Hill, when he last saw her, Mrs. Greenwood had obtained a pass from the British to visit the American camp to search for her son, whom she heard had recently arrived. She took hidden money with her to pay anyone she could find to serve in Greenwood’s place as a substitute. Terrified that her son would be killed or wounded, she intended to talk her youngster into going back to Falmouth, where he could stay with his uncle and where he would be safe.

Mrs. Greenwood had not returned to Boston after the battle of Bunker Hill because of the chaos and new travel restrictions, this time imposed by the Americans. She had actually been living in Cambridge for six weeks, at a friend’s home, and spent her days there in sheer misery because men in the army had told her that they knew for a fact that her son had been killed at Bunker Hill in one of the ferocious British assaults. The few inquiries she had made turned up no sign of her son and, relying on information from soldiers she considered to be well informed, she drifted into prolonged mourning.

In mid-July, however, Mrs. Greenwood met Sergeant John Mills of Connecticut, who told her that her son was very much alive and living on the other side of Charlestown. An hour later, John Greenwood wrote, he was standing in front of his tent, staring out at the camp, when he heard joyful screams nearby. He wrote, “Who should I see but my mother, coming toward me in the company of Sergeant Mills.”

An emotional reunion of mother and son followed, but Mrs. Greenwood could not stay. She had managed to obtain a pass from General Washington himself to return home to Boston earlier that day and had to leave right away. Mrs. Greenwood walked to Bunker Hill, where she was admitted to the fort after showing her pass, and was then introduced to a British officer, Major John Small, whom she told friends was quite friendly. She was transported to her home and then she asked Small to take her to see General Gage.

It is unknown why she wanted to see Gage. As soon as she walked into his office his aides peppered her with questions about the size of the American army and its weapons and supplies. She apparently abandoned the conversation she planned to have with the British general under the barrage of queries. Angry that the officers were trying to pry information out of her, she snapped at Gage about his soldiers, “We are ready for them any time they choose to come out and attack us!”

She had reacted as a patriot, and as any mother of a soldier. Mrs. Greenwood was, however, a lone American Daniel in the middle of a Redcoat lion’s den. The officers were incensed at her reply and shouted at her, but Gage paid them no heed. He just waved them out of the room and told her to return to her home.