The First American Army (37 page)

Executions were approved by Washington, too. Capital crimes included murder, excessive robbery or multiple robbery, multiple desertions (usually three), the forging of official papers to permit others to be paid fraudulent bounties, and spying for the enemy. The executions were carried out to warn others not to break the law as well as to punish offenders. They were not only witnessed by thousands of troops, but by large crowds of local residents who streamed to the execution site after hearing about it.

As a member of Washington’s personal guard, Fisher had witnessed the executions. He had also witnessed Washington’s leniency to men sentenced to die, or for other crimes, carried out with high drama to achieve maximum effect. The general often approved of court-martial punishment for a group of men for a crime, but only punished one and dropped the charges against the others. He would have a group of men who had committed a crime rounded up, but only have the ringleader arrested.

His leniency concerning executions was chilling. Soldiers would spend the morning stacking bales of hay into high walls as a backdrop for a firing squad after people throughout the area were informed that an execution would take place. Large crowds would gather and then the condemned, accompanied by a chaplain reading scriptures, would be brought forth, tied up, and blindfolded. The soldier would be placed on his knees, facing the firing squad, his hands bound behind him. The troops and townspeople gathered around the firing squad would be silent. The officer in charge of the firing squad would shout “Ready . . . Aim . . .”

Suddenly, a rider would gallop up, or an officer would step out of the crowd and shout, “Halt! A pardon from His Excellency!”
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One of the most melodramatic pardons concerned the scheduled hanging of eight men found guilty of participating in a ring that forged discharge papers and sold them to several hundred soldiers. Gallows were constructed, coffins built and placed in front of eight freshly dug graves in front of the gallows. The hanging had been advertised on broadsides and a crowd of several thousand townspeople, in addition to a brigade of soldiers, was present for the hangings. The men were led on to the newly built wooden scaffold, the thick ropes were tightened about their necks, and they then spent a few moments listening to the prayers of a chaplain. The clergyman finished his prayers, closed his bible, and stepped back. The hangman walked to the side and put his hand on the lever to spring the trap doors beneath the soldiers, who would then have their necks broken by the rope as their bodies fell or strangled to death.

“Stop! A reprieve from His Excellency!” shouted an officer, stepping out of the front lines of the crowd just as the hangman began to move the lever forward. A shudder went through the throng that had gathered. Seven men were freed and, on Washington’s orders, the eighth, the ringleader, was hanged.

The pardoned men were greatly relieved. “The trembling criminals are now divested of [the ropes] and their bleeding hearts leap for joy . . . No pen could describe the emotions which must have agitated their souls. They were scarcely able to remove from the scaffold without assistance,” noted someone in the crowd.
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Washington issued pardons at the last possible moment, he said, “to strike terror into their fellow soldiers.”

It worked.

There was nothing on earth that would move him to pardon John Herring though. John Herring was not only a criminal, but he had betrayed Washington’s personal trust, the worst thing any man could do. And that betrayal all started with an innocent sixteen dollar loan from Elijah Fisher.

Fisher had given the money to another member of the life guard, John Herrick, and fumed as days went by without any repayment. Finally, after more than two weeks, he returned from a one week furlough to visit his cousin to discover that Herrick was wearing a new suit of clothes. He accused him of purchasing new clothes without repaying his debt to him. Herrick told him that his parents were sending him money and he would pay Fisher when he received it. Then, a moment later, several other members of the guard walked in and they were sporting new suits. Fisher became suspicious.

“Have you had money sent from home, too? I fear that you have taken some other way to get [the clothes] than that,” he said. Herrick then blurted out the truth. John Herring, entrusted by Washington to purchase necessary supplies and clothing for the commander and his aides, had attempted to buy clothing from a Tory, Mr. Prince Howland, who lived in Fishkill, New York. Howland, like many Tories, did little to help the army; he turned down the request. Herring noticed several nice suits, shirts, pants, and other pieces of clothing in the home while he was talking to the man. Late that night, Herring and several other members of the guard, Herrick, Elias Brown, and Moses Walton, blackened their faces with burnt cork and with their hats pulled down over their foreheads, broke into the Howland’s house and stole dozens of pieces of clothing that they kept for themselves. They also robbed the home of another man in the same neighborhood, John Hoag, stealing hats, coats, shirts, boots, and suits, but this time also helping themselves to $400.

“Whether he be a Tory or not, if it should be found out (which such things as robbery seldom are) some or all of you will be hung,” said Fisher, surprising the men with his honesty. In his diary that night, Fisher wrote that “there was no more heard about it” and that the theft, like so many, would not be punished. He was wrong.

Howland complained about the robbery of his home to a member of the life guard whom he knew, John Stockdale. When he described the hats the men wore, Stockdale instantly knew who the thieves were. He went to Herring, Herrick, Brown, and Walton and told them that they might avoid trouble if they sneaked back to the two homes at night and returned everything they had stolen. That was impossible, they said, because some of the clothing was gone. A day later, the second man who was robbed complained to a another man in the guard while the pair had a beer together at a local tavern. A waiter overhearing their conversation told the soldier that Stockdale knew something about the robbery and the soldier confronted him. Stockdale would not talk, but the soldier reminded him that he could be arrested for concealing information and protecting criminals. Stockdale then told him the entire story; the men were arrested and found guilty at a court-martial.

Washington felt betrayed. He expected all of his troops to be lawabiding and honest, but he demanded it above all from members of his own life guard. Like his aides, he considered his personal bodyguards members of his military family. The commander’s vengeance was severe. He ordered Herring, Walton, and Brown to be hanged and Herrick to receive one hundred lashes. Walton and Brown managed to escape. Walton was never heard from again but a contrite Brown returned to the army and was pardoned. Herrick was flogged one hundred times and Herring was hanged at Fishkill, on November 22, 1778.

On January 7, his enlistment up, snow covering the roadways and fields of much of the northeast, Elijah Fisher left the army. Needing employment, he rode south to the community of Somerville to visit John Wallace. The Philadelphia merchant’s Somerville home had been used by George Washington as his headquarters the previous winter and Fisher had become friendly with the businessman and his wife, whom he referred to as “very clever folks.” The Wallaces were looking for a handyman and were happy to employ the ex-soldier. Fisher worked hard for the couple and at night worked on his journal; the Wallaces apparently saw him do so. They cringed at his sloppy handwriting and improper use of punctuation. They offered to tutor him in reading and writing.

Fisher was always eager to learn new things, hopeful that improved reading and writing skills might help him find a good job when he returned home to Massachusetts. He took them up on their offer. For three hours every evening, for the entire month, the couple taught him to read and to improve his writing and penmanship. One of his exercises was to make longhand copies of books that were in the Wallaces’ small library and to copy letters and other written documents to perfect his penmanship. The copying in longhand significantly improved his handwriting. He was appreciative of the assistance from educated people and they were happy to help an army veteran on his way home who had helped them with household chores.

Fisher was correct in his assumption that the tutoring in writing would help him land a good job later, but he could not have imagined then, in snow-covered and freezing Somerville, what that job would be and the amazing turn of events that would take him to it.

The former private left the Wallaces in the middle of February and headed home to Attleboro, sometimes walking and sometimes riding. He made it about one-third of the way, to Newburgh, New York, and stopped off at the army barracks there to collect eight days worth of provisions, standard issue for a returning soldier’s trip home. Fisher indulged in a little bit of knavery when he arrived at the army encampment at Fishkill, a few miles away, and asked for his eight days of provisions for his trip home, the food he had already drawn at Newburgh hidden in his saddle bags. Unfortunately for him, an officer who saw him draw the original provisions at Newburgh had arrived just before him and watched him from a corner of the warehouse as he made his request.

“Didn’t I see you draw your eight days of provisions in Newburgh just two days ago?” he asked the ex-private. An embarrassed Fisher, caught in his trick, tried to talk his way out of his predicament, going into a long explanation of how he had used up some of the provisions and needed more to reach Boston.

“You could get more at Hartford and Litchfield,” the officer told him. “But I did not want to do that. With the provisions I am picking up here I won’t have to trouble the supply depots at those towns,” Fisher said.

It is unknown if his little ruse worked, but he reached home in Attleboro on March 29. He planned to live and work there and found a job with Stephen Pond, a local farmer, agreeing to work six months in exchange for sixty bushels of corn. However, within four weeks he developed a bad sore on his right hand that prevented him from working any longer.

And so, again, he reenlisted in the Continental Army—for the fourth time. Soldiering had become a source of steady income for him, as it was for many other young, unskilled laborers. As soon as Private Fisher reenlisted, he became involved in a heated argument over his pay, a dispute that was common among the soldiers.

He joined a new regiment in Attleboro, pocketing a bounty for his latest service, a six-month tour of duty, and went directly to a military court of inquiry in Boston to collect £54 British sterling in back pay that he had been owed since his departure from the service in January. It was, he speculated, the perfect day for a soldier to arrive to collect money owed him—the Fourth of July.

Many residents of Boston celebrated the holiday, but not Fisher. The board of inquiry informed him that the government owed him nothing. He had been paid £54 as a bounty for his latest enlistment and he had been owed £54—everything was now even. Fisher argued that he had not collected a £54 bounty in January.

Fisher was bitter and wrote, “If that was the way they meant to use the soldiers . . . If I had notice of it before I had engaged I never would have gone the six months. They just use soldiers. They will promise them that they will give them so and so and after they have got them to enlist they are cheated out of one-half they ought to have by one or another of the officers.”

He was particularly mad at a government official whom he sneered sat “with his great wig” who said that soldiers sometimes were not owed what they believed. He added that those owed money would get it, but that these things took time. “You are wrong for accusing me and talking as you do,” he scolded Fisher, who was not satisfied with his answer and angrily continued to demand his money.

Such disagreements occurred often. Throughout the war, pay and bounties remained hotly contested issues among the enlisted men. They were rarely paid on time; some had no salary for five or six months. An enlisted man’s pay was just $6.70 a month at the start of the war, $7.30 for musicians, and it only increased for both to about $13 per month by its conclusion. Soldiers could buy little on pay that could not keep up with runaway inflation. Americans grumbled, too, that the British enlisted men were paid twice their salaries and could buy what they needed at moderate prices, in English pound sterling, through the British army commissaries, sutlers, and supply depots.

American enlisted men collected bounties from the federal government, states, counties, and even towns to join the Continental Army and the state militia. The state bounty was often higher than money offered by the Continental Congress. Those who had accepted the lower federal amount protested that they should have been awarded the state figure. Some were angry because they may have collected a $20 bounty when they enlisted for three years but later, as the state became desperate for recruits, other soldiers from that same state collected bounties that were four times as high (in 1777 the Continental Army offered a $20 bounty and the Massachusetts militia paid $86).

Bounties later soared to $250 and more (with inflation). These later recruits were also often given a clothing bounty (uniform and blanket) and, later, some land. The American paper money they received usually proved worthless as inflation ravaged the United States. States also awarded bounties based on inflation, so $86 bounties worked out to $25, but could be worth less if U.S. money depreciated even further that year. The soldiers often believed they were fighting for no compensation and felt shortchanged whenever they were involved in financial dealings with the government—just like Fisher.

The four-time enlistee from Attleboro received help from an unexpected quarter that day. A black-haired man named Coffern, either a government worker or bystander, overheard the argument at the government office. He stepped forward and told the government official, “The soldiers have been used very ill as this man said, and they are cheated out of a good deal that they ought to have.”