The First American Army (26 page)

The regiment traveled to Fort Mercer, a fort on the Delaware, and then dawdled at Philadelphia. Time passed and McMichael’s frustrations grew. Would this be just one more of the hundreds of false alarms the regiment had been through? Would they again sleep on their arms all night and then do nothing in the morning? Would they be marched back to their island? Finally, on June 24, they crossed the Delaware at Coryell’s Ferry (today New Hope, Pennsylvania) and headed east, first for Ringoes and then toward Somerset Court House, a sleepy little village in the center of the state. The Americans there were nervous because General Howe’s main army of some eighteen thousand troops had left New Brunswick. Several of Howe’s regiments started to engage American units in northern New Jersey. They expected him to attack them.

What happened next is not clear. McMichael either decided to go AWOL so that he could see his wife or he talked his commanding officer into letting him sneak away from the regiment for a romantic tryst. He jumped on a horse shortly after noon on June 25 and left the column of troops as they marched down the dirt highway through Ringoes. He rode as quickly as he could, taking every shortcut he knew, crossing meadows and streams at full gallop, and reached Stony Brook, and his young wife, who was
very
happy to see him, at 2 p.m.

McMichael did not have much time with his spouse and presumably after a day and night of heated lovemaking he left her home at 2 a.m., climbing back on his horse in total darkness. McMichael rode through the night to Somerset Court House where, sleepless and physically drained, he trotted into camp astride his horse as the men rose at 6 a.m. He had nothing to fear if he had worried about being ready for battle after an evening with his wife, though. There was no encounter with the British that morning. The Redcoats were nowhere to be found.

Then, in what was a familiar pattern to the soldiers by then, the army marched about, looking for the British, but not finding them. The men finally arrived two weeks later at Morristown. The one night stand with his wife fresh in his mind, and sleepless once more thinking about her, he went to headquarters and asked for yet another furlough to return to Stony Brook, but was denied. With time on his hands, McMichael wrote another poem to Susanna, lamenting his inability to receive a pass to visit her:

The lieutenant was a lucky fellow, however. No sooner had he sent the poem off than he was ordered to return to his home state of Pennsylvania to hunt down deserters. He was ordered to ride to Bucks and Chester Counties—back via the highway through Ringoes—and track down men from his regiment who had left the army, and men from other regiments in those counties, arrest them, and return them to camp. It was made clear his mission was of the utmost urgency.

Desertion and the refusal of men to serve more than a single enlistment had been a constant problem in the Continental Army since the siege of Boston in the winter of 1775–1776, when Washington lost half his army and when men whose terms were up decided to simply walk home. Now, in the summer of 1777, Washington worried about the loss of troops once again.

Most of the men left for what they believed to be good reasons— their farms and businesses were falling apart in their absence and their loved ones needed them. “In some parishes but one or two men are left,” one colonel wrote to the governor of Connecticut, explaining the mass departures that had taken place during the summer of 1776. “Some have got ten or twelve loads of hay cut and not a man to take it up; some five or six, under the same circumstance; some have got a great quantity of grass cut, some have not finished hoeing corn; some, if not all, have got all their plowing to do, for sowing their winter grain; some have all their families sick and not a person left to care for them . . . It is enough to make a man’s heart ache to hear the complaints.”
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And, too, these men had tired of reading letters written to them by friends and neighbors back home who told them they had not joined the army precisely because they did not want their farms and businesses to lapse into ruin.

The soldiers departed for any number of reasons: they were tired of the cold, lack of clothing, and lack of pay; hungry; angry that promises of bonuses were not kept. Some were fearful of catching smallpox in camp. Some did not like the Frenchmen who had joined the army. Many simply did not like their officers. One group of four hundred men whose time was up refused to stay following a dispute with their commander, Lord Stirling. One complete militia unit from Massachusetts left en masse, despite a personal plea from Washington to remain.

Officers, like the enlisted men, left the service to return to their farms and families or departed because of illness. Some officers were jealous of the higher rank and pay of others whom they deemed incompetent and went home when their time was up. Many of the men who had agreed to remain for one more month for a $10 bonus, at Washington’s urging prior to the battle of Princeton, left exactly thirty days later, at the end of January. Their departure angered Washington, who had begged them to stay. But he was even more unhappy that troops from his native Virginia were leaving too, some after just a few weeks in camp.

The number of deserters, officers as well as enlisted men, became so great that Washington wailed to Congress in the early years of the war that “we should be obliged to detach one half of the army to bring back the other.”
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One general smirked that so many officers had left the military that when the next battle came, the army sent to meet them would just consist of George Washington and the enlisted men.

Washington complained to everyone he knew about the soldiers who would not reenlist unless they knew the identity of their officers. He wrote to former aide Joseph Reed that “such a dearth of public spirit and want of virtue, such stock-jobbing and fertility in all the low arts to obtain advantage of one kind or another in this great change of military agreement I never saw before and pray God I may never be witness to again . . . Could I have foreseen what I have and am likely to experience, no consideration upon earth should have induced me to accept this command.”
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Washington warned Congress and his generals that if thousands of new troops were not recruited the Revolution would collapse.
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Those close to the commander in chief understood his frustration, but told him that he had wrongly assumed that everyone, from privates to colonels, shared his noble vision of the Revolution. Nathanael Greene, who would later become one of Washington’s closest confidants, put it diplomatically when he wrote early in the war that “His Excellency has been taught to believe that people here are a superior race of mortals, and finding them of the same temper and disposition, passions and prejudices, virtues and vices of the common people of other governments, they sink in his esteem.”
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Many new to the military agreed with Washington’s grim assessment of the troops. One lieutenant, Alexander Graydon, a well-educated Pennsylvanian, sneered at the American force, calling it “the motley army.” He wrote that “the appearance of things was not much calculated to excite sanguine expectations in the mind of a sober observer. Great numbers of people were indeed to be seen, and those who are not accustomed to the sight of bodies under arms are always prone to exaggerate them. The irregularity, want of discipline, bad arms, and defective equipment in all respects gave no favourable impression of its prowess.”
⁷

There was little Washington could do to stem the departure of men who had served their time, but he instituted a series of steps to stop the mass desertion that threatened to ruin the military. Officer furloughs were ended so that regimental leaders could watch over their men; they were also ordered to be kind to all unhappy soldiers. Newspapers were asked to publish physical descriptions of deserters and their readers were urged to turn them in for a $5 reward. He also convinced Congress to order states to have deserters arrested and brought before local magistrates before being returned to the service. Deserters were usually given one hundred lashes and some were even executed.

That’s where James McMichael’s assignment originated. He and many other officers were sent to their home counties to seek out deserters and arrest them. McMichael did as he was told, but on the way was delayed at Stony Brook. The ardent young lieutenant was in such a hurry to reach his wife there that he rode all day, arriving at Susanna’s home at 9 p.m. He stayed with her that night and for two more nights and days, finally departing for Pennsylvania on July 14. Susanna, unable to let her new groom go, accompanied him as far as the Delaware and then McMichael headed into Pennsylvania and she reluctantly returned home. He reasoned the outcome of the war and the history of the world had not been changed much by his secret, joyous little stopover at Stony Brook.

There were other times when McMichael would sneak off to see his beloved. Sometimes he rode to Stony Brook and on other occasions he met her for trysts at the homes of her friends in Amwell, a community several miles north. Once he had to leave Susanna to catch a ferry back to camp and missed it. McMichael promptly decided to spend two more days with Susanna. The lieutenant then invented a lengthy tale about his Herculean but unsuccessful efforts to travel up and down the Delaware for days to find another ferry to reach camp, an explanation his commanding officer grudgingly accepted.

His poems to Susanna inspired Lt. McMichael to write more poetry and throughout the revolution he penned dozens of poems, some long and some short. It was not unusual for soldiers to write a four line ditty to a wife, girlfriend, or family member every once in awhile, but following his summer trysts, McMichael turned to rhyme to describe his feelings not just about his passion for Susanna, but the Revolution itself. His poems grew from four lines to eight lines to several pages. Later, they would become Homeric in length. He found rhymed stanzas an easy medium to express himself and did so often. He wrote during warm, pleasant summer days but also turned to poetry during his bleakest hours at Valley Forge.

Infused into his poetry was the same gritty determination to win the war, unite the country, and secure independence from the hated Redcoats, a conviction felt by many who wrote poetry or the songs that regiments sang throughout the conflict. In all of McMichael’s stanzas, there was a disdain for the Tories:

He had little use for the antiwar Quakers of Pennsylvania either, describing them harshly in one of his poems:

He wrote of his own hopes to fight well, expressed the night before an anticipated engagement with the enemy:

McMichael, like all soldiers, feared death. They all knew that their lives could end at any moment on the battlefield, that they could fall from a musket ball or bayonet. It was the fear that soldiers carried within their hearts for centuries and would continue to carry long after the Revolution. During the blackest hours of the rebellion, McMichael, ever apprehensive about his safety, wrote poems about being killed, such as one he finished the night before a battle:

It is not known if the young lieutenant sent these poems to his wife or whether he only mailed her his love sonnets. There were plenty of those and they gave the soldier renewed energy every time he finished one. He gained even more sustenance when one of Susanna’s letters, especially the sultry ones, arrived and he could sit down and read it—over and over and over.

M
cMichael’s yearning to see his beloved was a common feeling among the soldiers, whether officers or enlisted men. Many had wives or girlfriends back home to whom they wrote as frequently as possible; they treasured letters from them that they received in camp. All attempted to win furloughs to visit them and made their way home as quickly as carriages or horses—or for some their feet—could take them when they obtained a pass. Soldiers bombarded their commanding officers with requests to go home specifically to see those they loved.