A Zombie's History of the United States (6 page)

With Washington on the New Jersey shore, charge of the crossing had been given to artillery chief Henry Knox, a bookseller who had distinguished himself early in the conflict when he commanded a troop that retrieved the famous “guns of Ticonderoga” that had won the Americans the victory at Boston. Now, along with the men, Knox also had to safely see countless horses and eighteen pieces of artillery across the Delaware. Though hard going, events were moving, initially, as planned.

Things were not going as well for Cadwalader. In a letter to his brother, Washington recounted what Cadwalader had reported:

With the Men huddle at the riveredge apparently up rose a pitiful wale from the ranks. The Men had been ordered not yet to arm ther muskettes, lest some discharge accidently. Commotion reigned and soon the Commander learnt it was undead. The numbers he could not assess in the night light. He commanded no gunfire, lest the entire mission be givenway.

Unable to properly defend themselves, nor even see who was friend or foe, Cadwalader and his men were forced to retreat from their position. Things were not going well for Gen. Ewing either. Foul weather and ice jams on the river prevented him from even attempting a crossing below Trenton, but at least there were no zombies.

Zombies soon found their way to Knox and his men. The huge chunks of ice floating in the river made it all the easier for the zombies to reach the men in the boats. Many of the men were unable to swim, which made the icy water just as treacherous as the encroaching undead. Forbade to discharge their firearms as well, the soldiers were forced to chop at the zombies with their knives, swords, and bayonets to prevent them from climbing into the boats.

Miraculously, Knox got the men across the river—and with only a single casualty. Washington’s surprise attack at Trenton was a glorious success. Along with desperately needed muskets, powder, and artillery, 1,000 prisoners were captured. This was exactly what Washington and his men needed. The Delaware crossing rose to mythic proportions after the war. The number of zombies attacking the soldiers inflated with each telling, becoming several hundreds, when really it was probably closer to twenty. In 1851, artist Emanuel Leutze painted his famous
Washington Crossing the Delaware
, which depicted Washington nobly reserved, standing in the boat while his men battled zombies. Leutze used artistic license, of course—the zombies didn’t attack until well after Washington had crossed. The zombies were eventually painted out somewhere in the late 1800s.

The Siege at Valley Forge

Never do I hope to see such a sight again.

—Henry Knox, April 3, 1778

Washington and his troops had just fought what would prove to be the last major engagement of 1777 at the Battle of White Marsh in Pennsylvania. With winter quickly setting in, Gen. Washington, seeking quarters for his men, decided to pull the army from its present encampment in the White Marsh area and move to a more secure location. On December 19, over 10,000 weary troops marched into Valley Forge. Named for an iron forge on Valley Creek, the area was selected for its ideal positioning: close enough to keep British raiding parties out of Pennsylvania’s interior, yet distant enough to discourage surprise attacks, like Washington’s from the previous winter. To this end it would prove a success; the British caused no problems, but the winter was a long, hard, and dangerous one for other reasons.

On top of the irregular shipments of food, the alternating freezing and melting of the snow made it nearly impossible for the men to keep dry. While the lodgings they built provided them with sufficient protection from the cold, the close-quarters brought disease, illness, and worst of all, zombies, lured in by the smell of a thousand injured men.

The first attack came on January 26, 1778, when Sean Hall, a young soldier from Virginia, was found almost completely devoured just outside of camp, his torso chewed clean down to the spine. Similar solitary assaults continued to occur here and there for the next two weeks. One of the camp’s physicians recorded having to “put down” a soldier after he returned to camp with a zombie bite wound and “was soon seezed by the dreded Disorder.” It wasn’t until February 25 that things really heated up. Henry Knox recounted to his wife Lucy:

February the 25th

God in His good Grace only knows where from they all arrived, but arrive they have. While lunching with the General we heard resound of gunfire and much yelling, to which we attended with haste. When I emerged from the General’s cabin the Men were in complete maihem, here and there in frensy, calling to arms. I did immediately reason the Red Coats had made a gambit for us, but when I stood edge of the camp I saw a much worse site— The animated Dead. Host upon host of them! Perhaps the rank stench of sickness that has pervaded the camp has summoned them by their foul senses. I do not know. Dear Lucy, never have I seen such a terifying sight. Surely a thousand strong, the Dead fell upon us like a great raw wave.

February the 27th

How I wish the Red coats were assaulting us. One can rely on a mortal foe to behave accordingly. To use caution. To pause or to retreat. To be woonded. Relentless are the Dead.

These attacks were to last for four and a half weeks before the last of the zombies was finally de-animated. Accounts of exactly how many zombies made up the Siege at Valley Forge vary. Soldiers’ accounts years later put the number extremely high, as tremendous as 10,000. The truth is likely much lower, possibly 1,000, and this is not taking into account the number of new zombies spawned from bites.

All told, roughly 2,000 men died that winter. Two thirds of those deaths were disease and hypothermia related, but that still leaves a staggering 660 estimated deaths by zombie attack. For all the terror and tragedy, the siege proved a positive and pivotal turning point for the Continental Army and the future of America. Were it not for the constant zombie attacks, the colonials would have in all likelihood lost the war. Though 20 percent of the army had perished, those that survived had endured a hellish boot camp against an army far more ruthless than the British.

As Washington said in a letter to his brother:

RUMOR MILL

Long before the classic cherry tree legend, a popular story about George Washington during the time of the Revolution was that he would bite zombies to demonstrate his lack of fear, his famous wooden dentures allowing him this show of machismo without becoming zombinated. When asked by a journalist if these stories were true, Washington admitted that they were nothing more than tall tales, quipping, “I would not want to endure the taste.”

Popular gossip amongst the British Army was that Washington employed zombies among his troops, using the creatures to achieve his victories. This was purely British propaganda. Attempts had been made long before the Revolutionary War to use zombies in combat but they were impossible to control; they were in fact, more likely to attack their own side. Washington knew this. He also hated zombies, refusing to even use them as slave labor at Mt. Vernon. American naval hero John Paul Jones was known to keep a zombie or two onboard his ship for the purposes of tossing onto enemy ships during close-quarter battles. Washington frowned on this practice, but was not one to question Jones’s success.

Political cartoon appearing in the
Pennsylvania Gazette
, July 20, 1777.

After the war, it became a popular rumor that notorious traitor Benedict Arnold was in fact a zombie, but evidence to the contrary is extremely strong.

Tragic for life lost, but I dare say the constant undead bombardments were a boon. The men have been reborn, strong, steely and unfraid of the British… Quite truly we would not have weathered this storm were it not for Franklin’s godsend.

The godsend Washington refers to was Baron Fried-rich Wilhelm von Steuben, a one-time member of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia’s general staff. Von Steuben had been forced to seek employment elsewhere when that career ended in a rumored homosexual scandal. As fortune would have it, he happened to be traveling through Paris in the summer of 1777, where he was introduced to the colonial ambassador, Benjamin Franklin. Von Steuben immediately offered his military skills to the patriot cause. As fortune would continue to have it, von Steuben arrived at Valley Forge on February 23, 1778, with a letter of introduction from Franklin, mere days before the zombie siege broke out.

Washington immediately assigned von Steuben the duties of acting inspector general, with the task of devising and carrying out an effective training program. Numerous obstacles threatened success, as no standard American training manuals existed, but the zombie siege proved the perfect scenario for von Steuben to work his magic. “From dawn to dusk his familiar voice is heard in camp above the chaos, shouting commands to the men,” Knox wrote his wife. With his deft skills and experience, von Steuben soon smartly moved companies, regiments, and then brigades from column to line, loaded muskets with precision, and exterminated the undead in throngs. When the Continental Army paraded on May 6, 1778, to celebrate the new French-American alliance that Franklin and John Adams had worked to establish, people saw a completely different army—precise, capable, and imposing. With added confidence, Washington and his troops waged war afresh and with glorious success.

An American Zombie in Paris

That I have no friendship for Franklin I avow. That I
am incapable of having any with a man of his moral
sentiments I avow. As far as fate has compelled me,
I would not wish to face the Undead with another,
this too I avow.

—John Adams, letter to his wife, November 1782

By October 1781, Cornwallis had become trapped at Yorktown, Virginia. The French Navy had defeated the British fleet at the Battle of the Chesapeake, which prevented Cornwallis from making an escape by sea, and Washington sat outside the city with nearly 19,000 men blocking the way by land. After several days of bombardment from the French and American forces, on October 19, Cornwallis, knowing he had no alternatives, surrendered. It was a decisive victory for America. While scattered fighting would continue at sea, the Siege of Yorktown was to prove the last major battle in North America of the war. When word reached London, King George III finally lost control of Parliament to the peace party, and in April 1782, the Commons voted to the end the war. The American Revolution had been won. Now it was time to talk resolution. Though, ironically enough, the peace talks were ultimately to prove a bloody affair.

The treaty negotiations convened in Paris in fall 1782, with American interests represented by Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay,
Federalist Papers
co-author and soon to be first chief justice of the United States. Franklin and Adams were personally at odds following a letter Franklin had written to the Continental Congress in 1780 impugning Adams’s capabilities. Despite this, Adams and Franklin temporarily put aside their differences for the greater good—American independence. Diplomatically, the negotiations went well for the American side. As Adams noted in his diary:

Our situation is not unlike the fable of the Undead and the Farmer. The dead man has terrorized the farmer for weeks, until finally apprehending the farmer and beginning to devour him. The farmer responds by beginning to devour the dead man in turn. Soon the dead man finds himself being eaten by the farmer faster than he can do his own eating. The dead man tells the farmer that the farmer must stop, and then the dead man will let him go. “No,” says the farmer, “it is you who must stop, and then I will let you go.” Our situation is that of the farmer. We now firmly have the British in hand. The peace is ours to dictate.

The negotiators would meet every day for lengthy discussion of treaty terms (such as prewar debts and the new boundaries of American territory), often convening over meals attended by a variety of guests. On the night of November 12, negotiations commenced over dinner at the Hotel de Valentinois. One of the guests in attendance was the Marquis de Lafayette, who had proved his valor and military prowess during the war at the Battle of Rhode Island and again at Yorktown. Lafayette had just recently returned from America, bringing with him a zombie he had captured in Virginia, which he planned to present to King Louis XVI. Thinking it would make a grand impression at the dinner, Lafayette brought the zombie to the hotel, bound by a collar and chain.