The First American Army (19 page)

That night he was back in the fort’s hospitals, seeing patients in their beds and leading hundreds of wounded and dying men in two prayer services. He felt that he needed all of his resilience, and the hand of God, to continue. He noted, “Applied myself to my duties. Indeed, it is too much, but I am carried along.”

The pain that the chaplains felt, that all of the men of God felt, at Fort Ticonderoga and elsewhere in the Revolution, was very personal. They found themselves face to face with dying men every day and every night. They were there to comfort them as they prepared to leave the earth, to hear their last words, and to make promises to send their possessions to their loved ones. It was hard.

Several times over the next two days, Rev. Robbins found himself emotionally wrought. On Tuesday he was summoned to visit the son of Colonel Mann, a teenaged soldier who was dying and desperately sought some kind of religious comfort. On Wednesday he went to see his and Dr. Beebe’s friend, Colonel Reed, who had been battling smallpox for over a week. Reed, covered with the pus-filled explosions, looked and sounded pathetic. “Fear he won’t live,” Robbins wrote after a visit in which he tried to console Reed.

It was a grueling day for the minister. He made his daily rounds of the hospitals and conducted four different prayer services, some with the loud singing of hymns and some just solemn prayers. By nightfall, he was fatigued and emotionally spent. His day was not yet over. An officer told him he had to visit Baron Frederick William Woedtke, a Prussian officer who had joined the Continental Army as a brigadier general, whom the officer thought was dying. So did Robbins.

“I felt that he was deluded,” he wrote about his first impression of the general, whom the enlisted men charged was a hopeless drunk. “A very singular trial I had,” he wrote of the visit to the dying Woedtke. “He most earnestly requested that I administer the sacrament to him, that he had made his peace with God, and nothing remained but to do his last command.”

Woedtke, thrashing about in his bed, began to mumble some last religious desire but Robbins could not understand what it was. He stopped him from rambling with a comforting hand and told him that “if he only believed in the Lord Jesus Christ he would be accepted,” and then left him, certain he would die within hours. He did.

Robbins’s own health had deteriorated badly again after his arrival at Ticonderoga, just as it had during his last tour of duty. He had taken medicine to purge himself on Tuesday night and spent hours in bed, dragging himself out to conduct a prayer service. By Thursday, he was much worse. “I need a constitution of brass to tarry here . . . utterly unable to go through the hospitals,” he wrote.

Very ill, Robbins sought the help of Jonathan Potts, the first surgeon of the army, who was visiting Ticonderoga and Fort George that week. Potts gave him a solution of manna, cream of tartar, senna, and aniseed, but it did not help. The minister felt even worse.

Potts was shocked by what he saw, writing that the sick were “without clothing, without bedding, or a shelter sufficient to screen them from the weather . . . we have at present one thousand sick . . . laboring under the various cruel disorders of dysentery, putrid fever, and the effects of a confluent smallpox.”
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On Friday, Robbins went to see his friend Lewis Beebe, whom he knew he could trust for a solid medical appraisal of his condition. Dr. Beebe gave him a thorough examination but did not offer any more medicine. He told his friend that the exposure to the disease and sickness at the fort was making him ill and advised him to spend time far away from Ticonderoga. Beebe himself was sick with a fever and, not placing much faith in his fellow doctors at the fort, had made up his mind to journey all the way to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, near his home, to see a friend who was a physician and find a cure. He was just as concerned over his friend Robbins’s health. He told him that he would take him to Fort Edwards, caring for him on the trip, leave him in good hands with doctors there, and then finish his own journey to Massachusetts.

Beebe procured a wagon and rode with the minister and another doctor south to Fort Edwards, where he put him to bed with an even higher fever. Beebe explained his condition to doctors there and they told Beebe that Robbins should go on to Saratoga for more medical advice and then to Stillwater, a few miles from Albany. Beebe drove the wagon all the way to Saratoga and then Stillwater, where a doctor told Dr. Beebe his friend was critically ill. The minister probably had an advanced case of the putrid fever, which brings a fever as high as 104 degrees, terrible headaches, nausea, vomiting, and a rash. The doctor told Robbins to go home for at least a month—away from anyone suffering from an illness—before he could return to his duties, and that, in fact, he was so ill that he might never be able to return to the army.

Robbins was distraught at the physician’s urging that he retire from the service. Robbins wrote that night, “I would not shrink from the work. Our war is a righteous war; our men are called to defend the country; whole congregations turn out and the ministers of the gospel should go and encourage them when doing duty, attend and pray for and be with them when sick, and bury them when they die. I hope to return to my work.” The next morning, extremely weak, he walked slowly to Beebe’s wagon, climbed in, and headed home for what Beebe and the doctors in Stillwater were certain was a permanent stay.

Lewis Beebe apparently drove Robbins all the way home—distance of one hundred forty miles from Ticonderoga in a simple wagon over narrow dirt roads—and either bought, rented, or borrowed a horse. He rode the rest of the way to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and visited Dr. Sergeant, his personal physician, who cured him with five days of treatments with vinum antimonial, administered three times a day, and plenty of rest. Dr. Beebe never thought of staying home for good, as he might have, and returned to the army as soon as he felt better. He did so despite his growing attraction to Margaret Kellog, the daughter of a prominent family in Sheffield, whom he must have seen again on his medical leave.

Beebe’s journey back to Fort Ticonderoga was constantly halted by rainstorms. He shrugged them off, starting to think like the soldiers he was treating. “The bravery of good soldiers consists in enduring hardships and fatigue with patience,” he said of his travails. On Wednesday, July 28, he was stuck at Fort George, where he visited the hospital and found it jammed with seven hundred men. Officers then took him to the fort’s graveyard. There were three hundred fresh graves, all dug within the last month. “It was melancholy, indeed, to see such desolation made in our army,” Beebe wrote.

The staggering number of dead in the graveyard, most from smallpox, was the first sign that the American army’s situation had grown much grimmer in the weeks that the doctor had been away. He was greeted by even starker sights when he made it back to Ticonderoga. More men had arrived there and the death rate had climbed to ten per day. He learned, too, that Horatio Gates was fearful of a British attack and had ordered Benedict Arnold to build a small navy to battle British warships if they ventured onto Lake Champlain.

Beebe told his superiors that half the men in his own regiment were unfit for duty not just with smallpox, but dysentery, jaundice, diarrhea, rheumatism, scurvy, piles, lumbago, and putrid fever, and that for many their situation was “truly dangerous.” Dysentery raged throughout the camp, he told them, and yet he had run out of medical supplies to treat it and had to listen to the troops yell at him, and other doctors, because they could not obtain any help.

It was the smallpox that worried Dr. Beebe, though. He warned, “It has brought many to the grave and will many more unless immediately discharged.” The number of sick had swollen so much that it was no longer possible to treat all of them in the hospitals at Ticonderoga. Small villages of tents were set up outside the fort where those with diseases, fevers, and smallpox were sent until beds were available in the hospital, made so when men died and were dumped in the graveyards. Now there were no more open graves, but merely open pits into which a dozen or more corpses were tossed every morning. “Hard fortune to have so many sick on hand at one time. But harder for those who are sick to be crowded into dirty, lousy, stinking hospitals enough to kill well men,” he seethed in early August.

One soldier who had been very ill, and convinced he would die, hid the knife from his dinner plate and, a few hours later, took his life by slitting his throat. One evening Beebe watched men carry a corpse out of a tent. They told him that the man had been eating dinner. He took one long breath, then another, then he fell forward, dead, his face hitting the beefsteak on his plate.

Beebe was convinced now, after yet another depressing tour of his hospitals, that the men with smallpox, even though put in special wards, were infecting everyone else. He suggested simply sending them home to die with their loved ones. He also had to contend with the lack of medical manpower to treat the sick and dying. The doctors who had labored so courageously were coming down with fatal illnesses themselves. Some died and some were laid up in bed, unable to work. The few doctors remaining now had to take on all of the work, which grew in intensity each day. During the last week of August, several more doctors were bedridden and Beebe wrote angrily in his journal that all of the medical work had now fallen on his shoulders. He now had to treat doctors as well as soldiers on his daily rounds, serve as an administrator, beg generals for medical supplies, and complete endless paperwork. He was overwhelmed.

Soldiers remembered the deceased with great reverence. Lamenting the loss of the majority of privates in a company, Private John Henry wrote that “they were originally as elegant a body of men as ever came into my view . . . beautiful boys.” Men fondly recollected the elegance of the last rites of the Catholic church and the comfort the priests gave to those about to take their last breath. James Melvin, a private from Massachusetts, survived the smallpox. He was quartered with other Americans in a Quebec monastery following the failed attack there. On January 19, the evening after a day-long snowstorm, Melvin watched as the last rites were administered to a French soldier he knew who had been ravaged by the disease.

He recalled, “The nuns came and read over him, afterwards the priest came in; then they fetched in a table covered with a white cloth and lighted two wax candles about three feet long, and set them on the table. The priest put on a white robe over his other garments and the nuns kneeled down, and the priest stood and read a sentence and then the nuns a sentence and so they went on some time; then the priest prayed by himself; then the nuns, and then the priest again, then they read all together a spell, and finally the priest alone; then the priest stroked the man’s face and then they took away their candles and tables and the man died.”
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The parents of those who passed away were not angry, but proud. Matthew Patten, of Bedford, New Hampshire, said of his son John, who died along with so many others at Île-aux-Noix, “He was shot through his left arm at the Bunker Hill fight and now was dead after suffering much fatigue to the place where he now lies in defending the just rights of America to whose end he came in the prime of life by means of that wicked, tyrannical Brute of Great Britain.”
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Dr. Lewis Beebe had become bitter and raged about everything that he saw. In his nightly journal he complained that amid all of the suffering at Ticonderoga men stole money and food from sick soldiers and that officers argued over promotions as men were buried. He said the officers, whom he had come to despise, had established themselves as national champions at swearing. “In short,” he angrily observed, “they laugh at death, mock at hell and damnation and even challenge the deity to remove them out of this world by thunder and lightening.”

The doctor was just as unhappy with the drunkenness he found everywhere, among officers as well as the enlisted men. He never criticized enlisted men whom he loved, saving his barbs for the officers. “Drunkenness is a great beauty,” he wrote of the officers, “and profanity an ornament in an officer. The whims, caprice, and vanity of this set of beings is ridiculous to the last degree. Children are not often guilty of such scandalous behavior.”

He found several targets for his most sarcastic remarks. One officer he loathed was Major Joseph Cilley of New Hampshire, whom, he said “rightly named, is a very silly man.” He lambasted most of the chaplains, calling the Rev. Ichabod Fisk, a former school classmate, “a great blunderbuss of the gospel.” He condemned others for spending their time trying to land better-paying jobs at larger parishes back home instead of tending to the sick. He wrote of one boring chaplain that if he stayed away longer, “They will in all probability regain their former health and spirits.”

But there was one minister whom he did admire, his friend Rev. Ammi Robbins, who remarkably was back again for a third tour of duty. Robbins had recovered at home and waved off pleas from his own doctor and friends that he remain there and forget about the war. They had warned him that he had somehow managed to escape death from the putrid fever and should not take any more chances by returning to the army. Robbins ran into a very surprised Dr. Jonathan Potts when he stopped at Saratoga en route to his regiment. Potts had heard about the large number of doctors who had died at the forts along the shores of Lake Champlain. He begged Robbins not to return to the dangerous fever- and smallpox-ridden fort. “He told me it was at the risk of my life to go into the hospitals. But if the physician goes, why not a minister of the Great Physician?”

On his way to Ticonderoga, Robbins stopped at Fort Edwards. The hospitals were full, so sick men at that garrison were housed in the fort’s bakery. The minister had apparently written to Lewis Beebe that he was on his way back, despite the grave warnings of Dr. Potts about risking his life. Dr. Beebe greeted Robbins upon his arrival at 7 a.m. and had a bread and cheese breakfast with him. He then gave Robbins a tour of the Ticonderoga hospitals and the medical tents outside the fort. One large camp was at a nearby post named Mount Independence, across the lake from Ticonderoga, where hundreds more lay ill. The Fifteenth Massachusetts, with fifer John Greenwood, was camped there.