The First American Army (4 page)

“Why are you really going to Boston?” shouted one man. Greenwood, as aroused for war as the rest of them by that time late in the evening, put down his fife and yelled back, “To fight for my country.”

All in the tavern roared their approval.

When he reached Boston, a bustling city of seventeen thousand residents, he discovered that his former hometown had become an armed camp. British soldiers occupied the city itself and the rebel army surrounded them, with headquarters in Cambridge. He was told he could not visit his parents, still living in Boston. Greenwood had landed in the middle of a nightmarish scene. General Gage had given approval for people to flee Boston, but there was no organization to the flight of the refugees. Some left by land, to the south, with their belongings packed in bags slung over their shoulders or stacked up in wooden carts. Others took the ferry to Charlestown that glided silently through the harbor.

The ferries were jammed with people and their possessions; the boats constantly threatened to tip over from the excess weight. Refugees included individual men and women, couples and families, some with animals, all carrying large trunks or tightly cinched canvas bags. There were so many people fleeing the port city—nearly half the population— that the overloaded ferries had to make runs all night, with their crowds of riders disembarking on docks shrouded in fog and darkness on the other side. No one knew where they would go next or when they could return to their homes. There were no plans to house them nearby.

Boston was a busy seaport in 1775, home to more than forty wharves and a dozen active shipyards. The city’s vessels were involved in a profitable trade between England, Europe, and the Caribbean, with some ships bringing slaves to the southern colonies from the Caribbean. The city was the most sophisticated in America, with more than a dozen handsome churches; several theaters; a government house, Fanueil Hall, with its handsome brick and column exterior; prosperous Merchants’ Row, a street along the waterfront jammed with three-story-high buildings; a good newspaper, the
Massachusetts Spy;
and more than two thousand homes and businesses. It was a city filled with popular taverns and hundreds of chimneys that could be seen for miles. The streets were filled with men on horseback, women in carriages, and workers with their small, horse-drawn carts.
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The city had become the colonies’ leading shipbuilding port, the center of the Atlantic fishing industry, and North America’s capital for hat making, the leather trade, distilled rum, hardware, and inexpensive furniture and carriages. Now it was a town under siege.
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The residents felt trapped. The city was under martial law and travel was severely restricted. The British army camped on the commons and commandeered warehouses, infuriating patriots. The editor of the
Pennsylvania Journal
called the Redcoats there “creatures” and wrote “the spirit which prevails among the [British] soldiers is that of malice and revenge; that there is no true courage to be observed among them.”
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The town’s loyalists constantly feared an attack by the rebels outside the city limits. One British sympathizer, Peter Oliver, wrote that “Our situation here, without exaggeration, is beyond description almost; it is such as eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor hath it ever entered into the heart of man to conceive Boston ever to arrive at . . . we are besieged this moment with ten or fifteen thousand men . . . all marketing from the country stopped . . . fire and slaughter hourly threatened and not out of danger from some of the inhabitants within of setting the town on fire.”
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All was chaos.

Greenwood was told that many houses in Charlestown were vacant, abandoned by residents who had fled. He found one and slept there for several days, with others. One night he was in a crowded Charlestown tavern and was asked to play his fife by Hardy Pierce, the first corporal in Captain T. T. Bliss’s company, after some soldiers saw the instrument sticking out of his pocket. He played several tunes, the music drowned out by the noise in the tavern, and the men were delighted. They brought him to the home of an Episcopal minister that had been commandeered as their regimental headquarters after the clergyman fled the city. The soldiers, and Captain Bliss, eventually convinced him to join their regiment as a fifer for an eight month enlistment at pay of eight dollars per month.

Most of the men in the American army slept in tents, but some, like Greenwood, were lucky. In addition to his eight dollars, Greenwood, probably because of his age, was allowed to live in the home of a local man who had left town and turned his residence over to the American army. Greenwood and several others shared a room, each sleeping on the floor with their knapsacks for pillows.

Another teenager, seventeen-year-old Elijah Fisher, from Attleboro, Massachusetts, whose six brothers all served in the war in some capacity, slept with others in the home of a local merchant named Nepven in Jamaica Plains, four miles outside Boston.
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Many men were given quarters in rooms at different buildings at Harvard College. For others, luck sometimes ran out. Private James Stevens, of Massachusetts, like Greenwood, was fortunate to be given a small room in a Charlestown house for his quarters. Stevens returned from guard duty one evening, however, to discover that he had been kicked out of the room by an officer who decided that he wanted it.
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All of the soldiers, no matter where they lived, regretted the British occupation of Bunker Hill, territory won in the bloody June 17, 1775, battle. None saw it as a true triumph, though. As a Rhode Islander who witnessed the brutal fighting wrote a friend, they all believed that Bunker Hill was, in fact, a great victory for America. “If our people had been supplied with ammunition, they would have held possession most certainly. Our people are in high spirits, and are very earnest to put this matter to another trial.”
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Bunker Hill was the only battle during the siege of Boston, but the Americans and British were engaged in constant skirmishes through the end of 1775 and in the winter of 1776. Detachments of troops from one side would be sent somewhere to do something—anything to draw attention—and soldiers from the other side would attempt to stop them. These mini-engagements were a part of Pvt. John Greenwood’s life. One of the earliest came just after the British had seized control of Bunker Hill and hauled cannon to the top of it.

Several dozen British soldiers rowed ashore at Lechmere’s Point to steal some cows, and a detachment of Americans, including Greenwood, was sent to stop them. They had to cross Willis Creek, waist-deep following several days of heavy rainfall, with their muskets held above their heads in order to reach the point. As soon as the men emerged from the creek, soaking wet, they were fired upon by British artillerists on top of Bunker Hill who had spotted them.

Greenwood wrote, “As eight or ten of us were in a huddle running up the hill, a ball from a twenty-four-pounder struck about three feet before me, driving the dirt smack in our faces. We ran on and just got down so as to get a shot at them before they pushed off.”

The skirmish at Lechmere Point, won by the Americans when they later posted cannon there, was one of a dozen. One of the hottest occurred in late May, in the section of the Boston area known as Chelsea. The Americans were determined once again to retrieve livestock taken by the British. The Americans tried to sneak up on the British but were spotted. Pvt. James Stevens was caught like the rest.

“The (British) regulars saw our men and fired on them. The firing then began on both sides and the firing was very warm. There come a man and ordered us over a knoll right into the mouths of (their) cannon. We got on to the top of the knoll and the grapeshot and cannonballs came so thick that we retreated back to the road. Marched down to the ferry. The regulars shouted. Our men got the cannon and plastered them and gave them two or three gunsides. The firing then set in some measure and there was a terrible cry amongst the regulars.”
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There were American attacks on British ships that attempted to land troops or to navigate Boston harbor near Charlestown. In one, General Israel Putnam ordered his men, hidden in a ditch, to wait until one ship, the
Diana,
and several accompanying barges were right in front of them before they opened fire. Their musket balls hit the schooner and barges like sheets of hail. One eyewitness said that the British “were engaged with great fury by our men along the shore.” A few moments later, Putnam ordered two cannon nearby to fire on the
Diana
. The well-placed shot ripped into the sails and rope rigging of the ship, setting it on fire. The flames could be seen throughout Boston that night.

Greenwood recorded these daily skirmishes between the armies. The much vaunted Pennsylvania riflemen, as bored as everyone else as the occupation and siege dragged on, spent many nights taking potshots at British soldiers in the city, or anyone they believed to be a British soldier, or, sometimes, anything that moved. The marksmen did kill some soldiers and wounded others, but their aim was nowhere near as accurate as legend had it—and they all bragged—and they often shot up the homes of residents. One night a rifleman mistook another rifleman for a British soldier and shot him. One evening some artillerists lobbed shells at British fortifications in the town and a shell burst in a guardhouse, shearing the legs off of several of the ten Redcoats in it and badly damaging the legs of the others.

The British harassed the regiments of Greenwood and others in similar fashion, their regulars often firing at Continental Army sentries. Few were hit, but the shooting was relentless. One private, Sam Haws, reported that he was fired at by the “wicked enemy” just about every day that he worked as a sentry in August 1775.
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Many of the nervous sentries, Greenwood said, bribed others into taking their post with half a pint of aniseed water, a popular liquid.

The British shot cannonballs at the Americans, too, but most of these did little damage. The cannon fire intrigued the young teenaged soldiers. Greenwood recalled, “The British were constantly sending bombs at us, and sometimes from two to six at a time could be seen in the air overhead, looking like moving stars in the heavens. These shells were mostly thirteen inches in diameter and it was astonishing how high they could send such heavy things. I have often seen them strike the ground when it was frozen, and bounce up and down like a foot-ball and again, falling on marshy land, they would bury themselves from ten to twelve feet in it.”

Greenwood knew men who dug the shells, now with burned-out fuses, from the ground, ripped the fuses off, and poured the powder that was inside into kegs for musket use. Once a British cannonball arced through the night sky and landed right in front of a building housing Greenwood and about two hundred other men. One of Greenwood’s teenaged friends in his company, Private Shubael Rament, seventeen, saw it coming through the air. He raced from the door of the building into the yard, stopping it as it rolled along the ground, and managed to pull the fuse out before it went off, saving the lives of the men inside.

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ife in camp outside of Boston was busy for Greenwood. George Washington had been appalled at the disorder of both the men and the camp when he first arrived, but within a month his tough discipline and dozens of daily orders concerning construction and cleanliness had turned the Boston camp into a military city. The men slipped easily into routines that would be seen in every camp in every year of the Revolution. The enlisted men rose at dawn, and often before it when sentries misjudged the rising of the sun. The days were filled with work, performed individually or in work gangs. Large and bulky earthworks of dirt, stone, and wood, often constructed around camps, required long weeks of labor.

Crews gathered and cut firewood throughout the war so that food could be cooked and men kept warm. Huts and tents were frequently repaired, especially during the fierce winters. Men who were quartered in civilian homes, usually officers, were ordered to help keep those houses clean and assist with chores. Men fed the thousands of horses that accompanied the army. Enlisted men took turns standing guard over the camp as sentries. Squads of men were sent to fish for food or to shoot game. Soldiers from seafaring areas were asked to build small ships or whaleboats for transportation and battle. Some of the enlisted men cooked for the men in their homes or barracks—usually with one cook for every twelve men—and some were assigned as guards at hospitals.

All soldiers like to complain and the men of the first American army were no different. The enlisted men, who had joined what they thought was the military business, were especially unhappy toiling in construction. Later in the war, the soldiers at Morristown were ordered to spend much of their time building a huge earthworks fort to repulse a British attack that did not come in four years. The exhausted enlisted men, displacing tons of dirt, trees, and shrubs, mockingly nicknamed the structure “Fort Nonsense.” One soldier involved in the construction of Fort Washington, in New York, sneered that the only wounds he had suffered during the entire war were eye inflammations from the dirt that flew into them as his shovel plunged into the earth.
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