The First American Army (33 page)

The pair walked several miles through the isolated farmlands until they found a local farmer, a Mr. Miller, who agreed to let them recover in one of the bedrooms in his small home. Fisher had developed a bad cold from the snowstorms and suffered from a lack of food and the long journey by wagon. He contracted the putrid fever again on January 20, 1778, while at Miller’s home. It was, he noted, “a severe fit of sickness,” and he had to be carried out of the farmhouse, placed in the back of a wooden horse-drawn cart and driven to a hospital. Now, barely able to move from his high fever, his health grave, he was carried from the cart and put in a bed in one of the overcrowded medical facilities.

Fisher was placed in a large open ward with dozens of other men with the putrid fever, dysentery, and other ailments and became even sicker. Men in the ward began to die shortly after Fisher arrived, their bodies carried out to be replaced by other sick men in their beds within minutes—without the sheets being changed and the stench of death fouling the air. Elijah Fisher, fighting for his life, found himself in the center of an unfolding medical tragedy.

The army had many sick and wounded men from the battles of Brandywine and Germantown, and men with diseases such as typhus and dysentery. Army hospital department officials asked ministers in the small villages that surrounded the camp to give them permission to turn their churches into hospitals for the winter. The army simply commandeered those belonging to ministers who objected. Army doctors soon set up hospitals in other buildings too, including linen mills, general stores, courthouses, pottery shops, farmhouses, barns, stables, and a few popular taverns. Even the single men’s residence hall run by the Moravian religion at Bethlehem, Brethren House, was turned into a hospital. When those havens reached capacity, carpenters speedily erected Washington Hall, a three-story-high wooden structure with nine foot wide porches that housed thirteen hundred patients, becoming at once one of the largest medical centers in the nation.

The weather, although never overly harsh, was wildly erratic, with temperatures soaring from below freezing to over fifty degrees within twenty-four hours while balmy afternoons were followed by evening snowstorms. The unpredictable weather brought on bad colds that soon turned into bronchitis and other ailments. Hundreds of men came down with “scabies,” a medical problem brought on by lice and unsanitary living conditions that causes scabs over much of the body and constant itching. Others had dysentery, influenza, rheumatism, and pleurisy. Many contracted pneumonia from living in their flimsily constructed huts.

The medical facilities soon became hopelessly overcrowded. As an example, there were more than nine hundred soldiers in the three wards of the hospital in Reading that were supposed to hold three hundred sixty patients. Washington then ordered construction of sixteen-by-twenty-fivefeet on-site transitional hospitals where soldiers stayed until they could be moved to the larger facilities. In addition to the eleven transitional facilities, the army erected a dozen or more huts just for victims of scabies.

None of the soldiers at the facilities received much medical care because, in a paperwork mix-up, generals had granted furloughs to twelve of the sixty doctors on staff. Another dozen or so doctors became ill themselves. Several, fed up with the lack of care, quit and went home. Medical supplies were short and some regiments had no supplies at all. The lack of medical supplies became so desperate that in April the head doctor at Yellow Springs wrote to his superiors to “beg and pray” that they send him what he required.
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Dr. James Craig described the hospitals as “mere chaos.”
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Desperately needing help, Washington asked for the formation of a congressional committee to visit Valley Forge to witness the deprivations there. The congressmen were shocked. “Our troops. How miserable. The skeleton of an army presents itself to our eyes in a naked, starving condition out of health and out of spirits,” delegate Gouverneur Morris wrote after his arrival.
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Men were not placed in isolation wards and those with one disease would catch another from the man moaning in the bed next to them; men who arrived with a minor wound from a musket ball died a week later from typhus. There were no hospital clothes and men lay ill in their dirty uniforms. Food and water were in short supply.

Dr. Benjamin Rush, the physician general of the army, said that “the hospitals robbed the United States of more citizens than the sword . . . they are an apology for murder.” Rush was so fed up with conditions in them that toward the end of the winter he wrote that the worst thing that could happen to a sick soldier was to be put in a hospital and sarcastically suggested that the quickest way to win the war would be to ask the British army to march through Valley Forge so that the diseases there would kill all of them.
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Describing the numerous calamities at Valley Forge, General James Varnum wrote to a friend that if God determined he had to be punished for his life, he would rather be sent to hell than back to Pennsylvania.

Elias Boudinot, the commissioner general of prisoners, was as angry about conditions as everyone else, but had great admiration for the men of Valley Forge, writing to his brother, “Nothing but suffering for our poor fellows, but they do it without complaint.”
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Adjutant General Alexander Scammel praised “the brave men who experience the severities of a camp life and cheerfully expose their lives with a determination to die or conquer.”
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And Dr. Waldo wrote of them, “The soldier, with cheerfulness he meets his foes and encounters every hardship—if barefoot, he labours through the mud and cold.”
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That gritty determination came to not only symbolize the troops at Valley Forge, but the American soldier throughout history. The best example of that was Ebenezer Crosby of Massachusetts, one of the much maligned doctors. He had a recurrence of his asthma as soon as he arrived at Valley Forge and, hacking and wheezing, spent two weeks in the hospital. Even though not recovered, he went back to his regiment and promptly was stricken with pleurisy and bile, which he described as “severe and dangerous.” He survived that and, shortly after, came down with pleurisy again and found himself once again bedridden. He wrote that “my constitution was by no means fit to undergo the fatigues, hardships, and irregularities of camp life,” and, like so many others, asked to go home with a discharge. It was granted to the quite ill physician.

Some weeks passed and his health improved slightly. Crosby, knowing he was needed and “desirous to see the ensuing campaign,” then changed his mind. He turned down the chance to go home to Massachusetts and sit in front of a fireplace in his warm house and eat a fine meal with his family and continued on at Valley Forge, freezing and starving with the rest of the army.
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There were so many soldiers in the dozens of hospitals that dotted the Valley Forge camp and the surrounding villages that on March 7 only 3,301 men, out of a force then estimated at 10,200, were deemed fit for duty. Medical help for wounded or sick men in the 1770s was primitive. Ineffective medicine did little good for men stricken with typhus or other diseases and could not stop raging fevers. Men in the hospitals laid in their beds and watched others shake violently under the strains of high fevers before dying. Severe arm or leg wounds suffered in battle almost always resulted in gangrene and there was no medicine to combat it. The only solution was to amputate limbs. Only a very low level anesthetic was available, if at all, and the pain of amputation—by small, crude, handheld saws—was excruciating. Men had to be strapped to wooden operating tables with sticks thrust into their mouth to mute their screams as their limbs were removed. Puddles of blood covered the operating room floors.

The mortality rates were shocking. One-third of all the soldiers sent to the makeshift army hospital in Bethlehem died there, and thirty-seven of the forty men from one Virginia regiment, along with some of their doctors. Half the two hundred forty soldiers at Lititz passed away, along with the Moravian pastor who also served as their doctor, and his five assistants. Hundreds, along with several doctors, could not survive at Yellow Springs. One-fifth of the 1,072 North Carolina soldiers died in the hospitals. Altogether, nearly twenty-five hundred soldiers died at Valley Forge, or nearly one sixth of the entire army.

Washington received letters from men who were desperately ill in his hospitals who requested permission to return to their homes so that they could spend their last days surrounded by their families. Some doctors threw up their hands in frustration because their medicines did little good. “We avoid piddling pills, powders, cordials, and all such insignificant matters whose powers are only rendered important by causing the patient to vomit up his money instead of his disease,” wrote one.
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A nasty feud between Dr. Rush and Dr. William Shippen, the head surgeon in the army, did not help matters. Rush resigned his post as physician general that winter, charging that Shippen was using hospital funds for his personal gain. Shippen was brought before a court-martial, but merely reprimanded. The result was chaos in the medical department.

Mismanagement was everywhere. Wagons full of medicine chests from Virginia bound for Valley Forge were stopped in Williamsburg and army doctors there took most of the chests to treat their own needy troops. A cask of wine sent from Albany to a camp hospital was kept in the home of a local politician for safety; he stole it. Ships thought to be about ready to land with medicine on board were seized by the British. A driver misunderstood instructions and returned home instead of proceeding to Valley Forge with a wagon full of medicine after waiting several days for a river to recede.
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Orderlies in the hospitals sometimes stole the clothing of their patients.

The procurement and transportation of supplies, whether medicine, food, or clothing, were not under the jurisdiction of the army, but inept federal administrators in York, Pennsylvania, where the Continental Congress moved when the British occupied Philadelphia, and in Lancaster. There was little congressional supervision of the supply departments. The quartermaster, Thomas Mifflin, quit in October 1777, but Congress did not replace him until March 1778, throwing the entire office into disarray. As an example, Washington was assured that the government had 7.6 million pounds of flour, enough to last the whole winter, but in reality they had just 3.7 million pounds. Supply officers told him just before the winter camp was organized that the army would have enough meat for seven months, but in early December another check showed that there was only enough for eight more days.

Many fumed to Washington about unqualified doctors. Jedediah Huntington suggested, in a cruel remark, that since all the doctors did was bleed “bad blood” from patients, the army should hire local barbers instead because they worked cheaper.”
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Dr. Rush was fed up with the hospitals at Valley Forge, too. “Our hospitals crowded with six thousand sick but [only] half provided with necessaries or accommodations, and more dying in them in one month than perished in the field during the whole of the last campaign,” he wrote to Patrick Henry. And Dr. William Brown said that “a large proportion” of the men who died could have been saved if they had enough medicine and recovered under better conditions.
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One night, Dr. Waldo rushed to a hut in a vain effort to save the life of an Indian soldier. The man’s death seemed to symbolize all of the catastrophes of Valley Forge to the doctor. Waldo wrote, “He was an excellent soldier and a good natured fellow. . . . he has served his country faithfully. He has fought for those very people who disinherited his forefathers. Having finished his pilgrimage, he was discharged from the war of life and death. His memory ought to be respected more than those rich ones who supply the world with nothing better than money and vice. There the poor fellow lies, not superior now to a clod of earth, his mouth wide open, his eyes staring.”
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Rush sneered, too, that citizens were not joining the army because of its medical woes. He wrote to Horatio Gates, “The common people are too much shocked with spectacles of Continental misery ever to become Continental soldiers.”
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Some soldiers reeled from one illness to another. Leven Powell, a lieutenant colonel from Virginia, came down with the “flux,” a severe, diarrhealike bloody discharge, just before Christmas and was taken to the farm house of John Rowland, where he spent nine days recovering with other patients. The flux was followed by a bout of yellow jaundice that lasted nearly three weeks. Toward the end of his struggle with the debilitating jaundice, Powell noticed small sores and a swelling of his right eye that reduced much of his sight in that eye. A few days later he complained of severe headaches and sores that broke out on his face. His left eye then swelled up and both eyes became weak and bloodshot. He feared he would go blind. A doctor told him that he had a bad case of what was called “St. Anthony’s Fire” and treated it the best he could.
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General Washington was appalled by the medical catastrophe. “I sincerely feel for the unhappy condition of our poor fellows in the hospitals, and wish my powers to relieve them were equal to my inclination,” he wrote to Governor Livingston of New Jersey. “Our difficulties and distresses are certainly great and such as wound the feelings of humanity.”
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The commander took steps to correct the problems. Doctors who had gone home were ordered back to Valley Forge, food and clothing was sent directly to the hospitals and not just to the camp supply officers, pits were dug in which garbage and animal carcasses were buried, urination anywhere except a privy was made a crime punishable by death, officers were put in charge of new cleanliness patrols, more medicine was found in private stores throughout the country and sent to the hospitals, officers were told to make regular visits to the sick, soldiers were ordered to bathe regularly and to wash their uniforms frequently, and windows were cut into the walls of huts to provide much-needed ventilation. The commander also sent chaplains to visit the sick. The work was not easy. The Rev. James Sproat, one of the ministers, wrote in his diary that he saw so many sick soldiers in the hospitals that he “was very much fatigued” at the end of every day.
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