The First American Army (38 page)

Coffern turned to Fisher and acted as an intermediary, holding neither side responsible but offering a solution. “Your selectmen [may have] used you ill in respect of sending in the account of the bounty you have received. It may be that there is a mistake and if you get them to certify what bounty you have received you shall have your [money] made up accordingly.”

The representative of the Board of Inquiry said that would be satisfactory. A few days later, Fisher traveled back to Attleboro. Officials in the war recruitment office there checked the records in their books, looked for Fisher’s name, written in thick ink, and found the mistake. The £54 bounty was awarded Fisher in 1777, not 1780. They certified that he was, indeed, entitled to £54 in back pay. Fisher was happy as he began the march to his regiment’s destination, West Point, and a rendezvous with General Benedict Arnold.

It was an eventful trip. The pain in Fisher’s side flared up again, once again sending him to a hospital set up in someone’s residence. This time the local physician treating the troops diagnosed his problem as pleurisy, not kidney failure, and kept him bedridden for a week. Fisher discovered that the man and woman who lived in the home where he was told to recover were Catholics. He learned that they had a family catechism among the other books on their shelves and asked to borrow it. He then spent hours each day slowly copying pages from the catechism in longhand, just to practice his penmanship.

He was ordered from the hospital with ten other soldiers as the army abandoned camp and moved out. Other soldiers told him that his stay in the hospital might have saved his life. The regiment, on the eastern side of the Hudson, had to cross the river on barges to reach West Point. The crossing of the river had gone very badly. One of the larger barges overturned in the middle of the river and five yoke of oxen and five men drowned in the accident. Fisher, they said, might have drowned, too. It brought back memories of nearly drowning in the Schuylkill during the Valley Forge winter.

Just before Elijah Fisher’s latest enlistment ran out at the end of 1780, a Sergeant Whippel, who was in charge of clothing and supplies for the company, offered a proposition to Fisher, whom he knew practiced reading and writing often. Whippel was eager to return home for a month but had no one to replace him in the supply office. If Fisher agreed to stay one month past his enlistment to fill in for him, Whippel would not only give him lessons on reading, writing, and penmanship, but show him how to write in cipher, or code, and unravel codes in the letters of others.

Fisher kept his end of the deal and took over for Whippel, who left for home on December 4, 1780. However, with someone running his office, Whippel did not keep his end of the bargain. He lingered at home well past the end of the year. One sergeant and one lieutenant in the office were out recruiting and one lieutenant was home on furlough. That left Fisher as the only worker in the busy office. “I had to take care of the whole company and all the returns to sign and clothing to get and state stores and the like,” Fisher complained in his journal on February 8.

March arrived and still no sign of Whippel. Fisher told a lieutenant that he believed Whippel would never return and “I would have to spend the whole war in his room.” The lieutenant, who must have wondered about the missing Whippel too, told Fisher not to worry, that the sergeant would be back any day.

March turned into April and Fisher continued to complain. Finally, on April 6, four months after he left camp, Sergeant Whippel came back—to Fisher’s delight. Fisher was immediately discharged and, to make up his three months of added service, he was promoted to sergeant on his very last day in the army.

On April 23, 1781, Sergeant Elijah Fisher returned home to Attleboro. He began working for a Doctor Johnson in Newton, Massachusetts, for $9 a month on a six-month contract; a sum, he noted with irony, that matched his 1777 bonus of $54 for joining the army. Fisher, now twenty-three years old, put his uniform in a trunk and prepared for civilian life. He had enlisted for four different tours of duty, served nearly six years in the army, had participated in the siege of Boston, survived the winter at Valley Forge, fought at Bunker Hill, Saratoga, and Monmouth, and, he reminded many, was a personal bodyguard for George Washington.

Fisher was certain on May 5, 1781, his first day of employment with Dr. Johnson, that for him the war was finally over. He was wrong.

“The whole of the New Jersey militia are cautioned to be ready to march at beat of drum with four or five day’s provisions and should the alarm be reasonably given. I think we could turn out men sufficient in the state before General Howe could half perform his route, to make him wish himself back [home] again.”

—M. Halstead to Captain Sylvanus Seely

T
he note was sent in late December 1777 to Seely, head of the five-hundred-man Morris County unit of the New Jersey state militia that protected the northeastern section of the state. It was one of the best organized militia units in the country and had been since the conflict began. Seely was its capable commander.

Seely and the Morris County men were a far cry from the ramshackle militias that sprang up in the early days of the war. The militia units established by the states that supplemented the Continental Army were vital to the success of the Revolution, but most had not performed well. The militia members were drafted by their states to serve short terms of three to eight months; regular Continental soldiers volunteered for terms of one to three years.

Washington needed the militia for several reasons. First and foremost, he wanted them to join the undermanned army whenever it traveled in spring and summer to fight against the British. The militia was responsible for protecting army supply and munitions warehouses throughout the country and guarding prisoners. Its members often found themselves in small skirmishes with British troops passing through their counties, particularly when British food foraging parties were sent to buy or steal cattle or corn for their vast army. Militiamen also served as guards at roadways and bridges near winter and summer camps and built and repaired wooden beacon towers that were set on fire to warn the army if a British force was on the march.

Regular army troops, generals, and the delegates to Congress often jeered the militias. Militia units from different states were highly criticized because at critical junctures in the Revolution they broke and ran in battles and frequently left the service, en masse, when their enlistments were up or simply deserted. Militia would even depart just before a battle, leaving the regular army weakened, because that morning was the last day of their enrollment. Over eight thousand militia participated in the battles in and around New York in 1776, but a week later only two thousand remained. In the early days of the war, the militia could not be relied upon to fight well and were poorly armed. The Americans had to retreat from White Plains when New England militia companies ran as the British approached.

They infuriated Washington. “To place any dependence upon militia is, assuredly, resting upon a broken staff,” he complained to Congress, and believed that it was difficult to train men accustomed to “unbounded freedom.” He was harsher on militia leaders, whose amateurism startled him when he first met them during the siege of Boston. “Their officers are generally of the lowest class of people and, instead of setting a good example to their men, are leading them into every kind of mischief,” he said, and throughout the war charged that militia commanders were more interested in promotions than victories.
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However, they had also helped the army at key moments of the war. They provided several thousand extra troops for major engagements and often meant the difference between victory and defeat, such as at Bennington, Vermont, where militia led by General John Stark turned back part of Burgoyne’s army. It was Ethan Allen’s militia that captured Fort Ticonderoga in 1775.

The Morris County division of New Jersey’s state militia had already been together for several years when the war commenced and by the time Seely began keeping his wartime diary in May 1778, the Morris militia had shown themselves to be well organized and dependable. They would soon find themselves the critical unit at two of the major battles of the war, Monmouth and Springfield.

Sylvanus Seely was a logical choice for captain of the Morris militia. County officials needed someone with military experience and he was one of the few men in New Jersey who had fought in the French and Indian War. Seely was thirty-five when the Revolution began and had moved to Chatham from Pennsylvania. He ran a small inn, with a general store and tavern (stocked with French brandy and West India rum). The inn was located at the intersection of the two highways that ran through Chatham (today Main Street and Fairmount Avenue). The captain and his family lived in the inn; Seely married Jane Williamson, a local girl. Their first child, John, was born on January 27, 1772. Jane gave birth to Eleanor in 1774. Three more children, Sophia, Elizabeth, and George, were born during the war.
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In 1776, Chatham was a small village twenty miles west of New York. The main highway from New York to Chester that then took travelers to Philadelphia ran through Chatham and the Passaic River bisected it. The village could boast of thirty-nine buildings that included a sawmill, a forge, a gristmill, and two taverns. The population consisted of about two hundred forty people, including several slaves. Most of the residents were Presbyterians who worshipped at a church in Bottle Hill (Madison) or traveled to Hanover to another Presbyterian church to hear the fiery patriotic minister, Rev. Jacob Green. Three doctors lived in town. The village children attended school in nearby Morristown.

Chatham was a patriotic community in a patriotic county. Half the men in the village served in the war. Most of them were young; their average age was eighteen. Dr. Peter Smith, twenty-seven, left his practice to become an army doctor just nine months after the war began.
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Many of the younger boys, from nine to fourteen, formed a mock children’s militia. They played soldier, battling each other in nearby fields with wooden guns. Chatham served as part of the Continental Army’s winter camp in 1776–1777. The town let soldiers live in the homes of its residents and in tents in nearby fields. The army brought problems, however. The hundreds of soldiers billeted in the village drained all of the area’s food and at times starved when local farmers ran out of it and the army commissary could not find any more to send them. The food crisis there in the winter of 1776–1777 was so bad that Washington mentioned the town in a heated letter he sent to the commissary demanding more food. “The cry of provisions comes to me from every quarter. General Maxwell writes word that his people are starving . . . people could draw none [food]; this difficulty I understand prevails also at Chatham.” The town was hit hard by the smallpox epidemic of 1777 that began in nearby Morristown. Washington took the unprecedented step of inoculating his entire army without the traditional rest and diet formula used all over the world, and offered inoculations for civilians in the area. Some residents were inoculated; some were not. Dozens who did not obtain the inoculation in Chatham died, including young children and a local minister.