Read The First American Army Online
Authors: Bruce Chadwick
The First American Army (31 page)
Burgoyne had nowhere to turn and the next day agreed to surrender, accepted a cease-fire, and spent several days negotiating terms. On October 17, Gates ordered all of his men to line the route that the British would take to walk into the American camp to lay down their arms. The morning was dark and foggy, but by noon the sun had risen and bathed the Saratoga area with warmth for a historic event; the total surrender of an entire British army.
“We marched round the meeting house and came to a halt,” wrote Wild. By sheer fortune, their spot on the route gave them a front-row seat to the drama. It also offered them an unobstructed view of the size of the British army, with its six thousand men, cannon, camp followers, bands, and wagons. The parade into camp that Wild and his comrades assumed would take an hour or so dragged on all afternoon as company after company of rather grim looking Redcoats walked past their American conquerors.
Wild added, “General Burgoyne and his chief officers rode by us there, and then we marched further down the road and grounded our arms and rested there. At half after three o’clock, General Burgoyne’s army began to pass us, and they continued passing ’til sunset.”
Private Dan Granger, one of the militia volunteers who had hurried toward the battle, also had a good view of the historic moment. He and his company did not reach Saratoga in time for the final struggle, and on the day of the surrender they were on the other side of the Hudson, near the pontoon bridge that crossed it. They saw the American courier race away from the English camp with the surrender and watched over the river as the American celebration began. Disregarding orders to remain on the west bank of the river, the men in the company ran across the bridge.
“Soon we saw them coming,” Granger wrote. “General Gates’s troops were arranged on both sides of the road, drums and fifes playing ‘Yankee Doodle,’ cannon roaring in all quarters and the whole world seemed to be in motion. Officers lost command over the soldiers. I got as near to General Gates’s marquee tent as I could for the crowd and saw General Burgoyne and his suite ride up, and dismount and go into General Gates’s marquee and soon the van of the prisoners made their appearances. The Hessian troops came first with their baggage on horses that were mere skeletons, not able apparently to bear the weight of their own carcasses. These troops had some women, who wore short petticoats, bare-footed and bare-legged, with huge packs on their backs, some carrying a child and leading another or two. They were silent, civil, and looked quite subdued. The English troops followed and were cross and impudent enough.”
Granger felt an enormous sense of satisfaction in the scene. He wrote, “Having seen a large and well-equipped British army of about eight thousand surrender as prisoners of war and leaving on the field the finest and largest park of artillery that ever was seen in America, with all their carts, timbrels, and vehicles for the conveyance of their ammunition, was a great and pleasing novelty indeed.”
The British troops could not believe what had happened to them. Perhaps nothing explained their demoralized feelings better than British Lieutenant William Digby’s droll recollection of his army’s bands, which played one of the Empire’s most famous military songs, “The Grenadiers’ March,” as the troops surrendered. “We marched out with drums beating . . . but the drums seemed to have lost their inspiring sound.”
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News of the surrender caused jubilant celebrations throughout America. In Boston, Harvard College and dozens of homes were illuminated and thousands gathered around a huge bonfire to cheer the army. Soldiers throughout the army, from Washington’s division in Philadelphia to the militia at Bennington to Gates’s remaining men at Albany, rejoiced, too, in the astounding turn of events symbolized by the capture of Burgoyne’s army in what British historian Sir Edward Creasy, writing nearly one hundred years later, called one of the fifteen most decisive battles in the history of the world.
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It was put best by Dr. James Thacher, who treated the wounded from Saratoga at the army’s two-story hospital in Albany. “We witness the incalculable reverse of fortune, and the extraordinary vicissitudes of military events, as ordained by Divine Providence . . . the [news] of these events to the British government must affect them like the shock of a thunderbolt, and demonstrate to them the invincibility of a people united in the noble cause of liberty and the rights of man.”
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The victory at Saratoga had international and historic implications. It made a hero out of Gates, a moderately skilled commander who would soon be talked about as a replacement for George Washington. It stirred up false hopes in most Americans that the war would soon end. Most importantly, though, the victory convinced the French government that the Americans might be able, in time, to defeat the British. The French decided right after Saratoga to conclude treaties with the Americans, recognizing American independence, which led them to come into the war on the American side.
For Private Ebenezer Wild and the men of the First Massachusetts, though, the day after the Saratoga surrender was just another day in the army. There was a false rumor that Sir Henry Clinton was going to attack Albany and Wild’s regiment was sent on a grueling one-day, forty-mile march toward that city. As usual, the officers read maps the wrong way and the company became lost, wandering through the woods for an entire day. When they made it to Albany they were told the clothes they expected were not there and the men were given hand-me-down shirts from the Pennsylvania troops. The wagons with their supplies arrived hours late. On the following day it rained heavily and Wild could not sleep because small rivers of water ran through his tent, soaking his clothes.
And on the day after that the men received orders to move out. General Washington had commanded them to spend the winter with his army on a large plateau twenty-three miles from Philadelphia near a small ironworks called Valley Forge.
Chapter Eighteen
The War
I
n the summer of 1777, General William Howe decided to capture Philadelphia—the new American capital city, home of the Continental Congress, and a major port. He was certain that the occupation of that city would be a major military victory that might just cripple the rebels’ willingness to continue the war. Howe took a force of fifteen thousand men down the Atlantic seaboard on two hundred sixty ships, sailed into the Chesapeake Bay, landed near what is now Elkton, Maryland, and marched north toward Philadelphia. There he engaged Washington’s main army at Brandywine and Germantown, near the city.
After those battles, George Washington’s force of nearly fourteen thousand soldiers, with their supply wagons and train of cannon, sought a camp for the coming winter while Horatio Gates’s northern army remained in Albany. Pennsylvania officials insisted that Washington’s army establish winter quarters near the Valley Forge, northwest of Philadelphia on the banks of the Schuylkill River. They wanted the army there to protect southeastern Pennsylvania from any British attack. Several generals recommended Wilmington, Delaware, towns in Pennsylvania, and communities in New Jersey. Washington, under intense political pressure from the politicians, chose Valley Forge.
There was no housing at Valley Forge and the soldiers were faced with the challenge of building a large city on meadows that could, when completed, house all fourteen thousand men, two thousand horses, several slaughterhouses, cattle pens, granaries, offices, parade grounds, privies, stables, wagon barns, blacksmith shops, and several hospitals. To house his men, Washington ordered the construction of log huts, sixteen by fourteen feet in size. Twelve enlisted men would live in each. Every hut had bunk beds for sleeping and a small fireplace in the rear. More spacious huts were built for officers. The cabins were built along neatly planned dirt lanes with soldiers from each state grouped together in their own neighborhoods. The encampment was so large that, in population, it was the fourth largest city in the United States.
The hut city was plagued with problems from the day the army arrived. The misery that the troops encountered there would test their endurance and courage like no other time in the Revolution and, perhaps, no other time in American history.
S
ergeant Ebenezer Wild’s journey to Valley Forge was ominous. The trip from Morristown, New Jersey, was filled with all of the myriad problems that had plagued the army from the first days of the war. That included a court-martial, mixed up orders, poor intelligence, overly long marches, mismanagement, snowstorms, rain deluges, cold weather, and a lack of both food and supplies. If any soldier’s route served as a truly representative preamble for the tangled troubles that would nearly overwhelm the army at Valley Forge, it was Wild’s.
The march of Wild’s regiment, the First Massachusetts, began in Albany on October 30, just three weeks after the battle of Saratoga. The trek would cover a total of more than two hundred fifty miles and take the soldiers through mountain ranges in northern New Jersey, flat sandy terrain in the central and southern part of the state, and then through the rolling hills of eastern Pennsylvania. The First Massachusetts traveled to Morristown, camped there for several weeks, and then moved south on Friday, November 21, on a narrow dirt highway to Basking Ridge, a tiny village in the foothills of the Watchung Mountains. There, in a brief note that would symbolize much that lay ahead that winter, Wild scribbled in his journal, “Unsettled weather.”
Two days later, on November 23, the army camped just outside of Princeton, where it had achieved a stunning victory ten months earlier. Again, in a line that would foreshadow the treacherous months ahead, Wild wrote that the field where they set up their tents was “very full of briers.” The prickly brier bushes that dotted the fields and woods around Basking Ridge would be the least of the troubles that the men from Massachusetts would encounter that winter.
The brigade did not move out the next day because a court-martial had to be held so that the regiment’s colonel could dispense discipline. The men formed in a large circle to serve as an audience for the judicial proceeding in which two privates and two sergeants were tried for leaving the company without permission. The court-martial board found all four guilty. The privates were to be whipped, one sergeant demoted, and the other admonished in front of the entire company. But the colonel, in a burst of holiday leniency, forgave the privates after they repented and did not have them whipped.
The court-martial proceeding kept the company in the village all morning and they did not leave in time to reach Mount Holly that day. They arrived the next and finally slept in a thick woods outside of the town.
In order to surprise the enemy, the troops were awakened at 3 a.m. The First Massachusetts, with the rest of the army, trudged ten miles in the dark to Moorestown, loaded their muskets, set up pickets, and waited for reinforcements before attacking the British there. But the intelligence the rebels received was wrong. The British had left the area long ago and were already back in Philadelphia.
