The First American Army (49 page)

If all of that was not enough to cause consternation throughout the army, Benedict Arnold was court-martialed that winter for malfeasance during his term as the military governor of Pennsylvania the previous year. He was convicted of illegally appropriating army wagons to haul goods that he reportedly sold for personal profit. General Washington, Arnold’s lone supporter in the army, simply admonished him. That rebuke, though, enraged Arnold and started him on his road to treachery.

Then, on December 27, yet another storm arrived and dropped yet another eighteen inches of snow, halting any food delivery. Desperate, many of men sneaked out of camp and plundered the local farms of food, clothing, kettles, knives, shovels, stockings, and anything else they could lay their hands on.

An appalled Washington issued orders barring any further theft and promised harsh punishments for those caught stealing, but he did not carry them out. The people had not helped the army in its hour of dire need, he reasoned, and so he let them suffer.

On January 2, a Sunday, a blizzard that continued for three days hit northern New Jersey, dumping more than a foot of snow on the Morristown area. Baron de Kalb remembered measuring drifts at twelve feet. The storm created havoc. Dr. Thacher, who still had no hut, wrote, “Several [tents] were torn asunder and blown down over the officers’ heads in the night, and some of the soldiers were actually covered while in their tents and buried like sheep under the snow. My comrades and myself were roused from sleep by the calls from some officers for assistance; their [tent] had blown down, and they were almost smothered in the storm; before they could reach our [tent] only a few yards, and their blankets and baggage were nearly buried in the snow.”
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Thacher wrote too soon. Just two days later, a second blizzard hit the area, dropping another six inches. This storm, too, was accompanied by high winds and chilly temperatures. On the morning of January 6, General Washington, who had watched the storm for four days, wrote in a weather diary he kept, “Night very stormy. The snow, which in general is eighteen inches deep, is much drifted. Roads almost impassable.”
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Greenman and the Rhode Islanders, like the other soldiers, found themselves trapped by the storms. The lieutenant worked with his men in digging out their tents and huts. They found piles of wood for their fireplaces beneath the thick blanket of snow that seemed to cover the whole world. They were freezing and starving to death at the same time. Dr. Thacher put it best when he wrote, “The sufferings of the poor soldiers can scarcely be described. While on duty they are unavoidably exposed to all the inclemency of storms and severe cold. They are badly clad and some are destitute of shoes. We are frequently for six to eight days entirely destitute of meat and then as long without bread. The soldiers are so enfeebled from hunger and cold as to be almost unable to perform their military duty or labor in constructing their huts.”
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No one realized this more acutely than George Washington. He rode through the snow to Jockey Hollow from time to time to visit the camp and supervise the work crews as they dug out. He only had admiration for his soldiers. “The troops, both officers and men, have born their distress with a patience scarcely to be conceived. Many of the latter have been four or five days without meat entirely and short of bread,” he wrote to Continental Congress president Samuel Huntington on January 5.
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The situation was desperate and everyone knew it. Congressional delegate William Ellery wrote with alarm that “we are at the very pinch of the game.”
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Washington did not want to declare martial law and seize food from residents, even though Congress had urged him to do it and that seemed the army’s only salvation. He knew martial law would set a terrible precedent. But after those January storms he had to consider doing so. His soldiers were trapped by a blizzard and starving to death. The general asked Nathanael Greene to call an emergency meeting of the Morris County freeholders, the area’s governing body, on the night of January 8. Greene had already told friends that he feared the worst, writing to one, “Unless the good people immediately lend their assistance to forward supplies, the army must disband.”
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That night, Greene read the men a letter from Washington in which he begged them to give the army the cattle, food, and clothing he needed, on credit, trusting him to pay them at some point in the future. If they did not, he seemed to say between the lines, and Greene surely indicated, they would force him to declare martial law and take what he needed to save his men.

It was a short meeting. Fully realizing the plight of the men, the freeholders assured the general that they would quickly find food and direct the residents to somehow open up the roads. Over the next two days, in a miracle of engineering, hundreds of local militiamen and farmers worked tirelessly to break open more than eight miles of roadway. Those same farmers, and others, then sent Washington hundreds of head of cattle, straw, wheat, corn, anything they had, on just credit, to save the army. A week later, a correspondent wrote in the
Jersey Journal,
“The army is now exuberantly supplied with provision and every other necessary to make a soldier’s life comfortable.”
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The soldiers were stunned by the generosity of the people that day. Wrote one, “The inhabitants of this part of the country discovered a noble spirit in feeding the soldiers; and to the honor of the soldiery, they received what they got with thankfulness.”
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The weather, food, and clothing catastrophes did not stop the Americans from planning yet another surprise winter attack. Washington had startled the enemy at Trenton three years before with his crossing of the Delaware in a snowstorm; why not do it again? The target was the British garrison on Staten Island, across the harbor from New York City, with its one thousand men.

Washington placed twenty-six hundred men under one of his veteran generals, Lord Stirling. Washington had to get the army to Staten Island quickly, so he decided to use hundreds of horse-drawn sleds to transport the army in what would be one of the most unusual attacks in military history.

Still, Washington worried. What if the caravan of sleds was seen? What if a thaw hit in the morning and the ice bridge to Staten Island from New Jersey melted, stranding the soldiers? What if the British forts were impregnable? Eager to stage the attack, and assured by Lord Stirling that it would succeed, Washington finally relented.
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Jeremiah Greenman arrived at the staging area for the raid, on the south side of the Morristown green, at 8 a.m. sharp on the morning of January 14 and waited with the twenty-six hundred other troops selected for the attack for the sleds promised by local farmers. Many of the soldiers wore hats and mittens that they had to borrow from the clothing warehouses. They had to return them when the attack ended. The sleds, each drawn by two horses, were delayed, but by 10 a.m. over four hundred had arrived and Lieutenant Greenman and seven others boarded one. Their sled followed the others in creating a lengthy train of sleighs that left Morristown in the early afternoon and traveled silently across the snow-covered roads thirty miles to Elizabethtown, where the soldiers slept overnight.

The attack on Staten Island commenced early the next morning. Greenman wrote brusquely in his journal, “Crossed the river on the ice. Came to Staten Island and proceeded on toward the enemy’s forts . . . five miles.”

The element of surprise that the Americans had enjoyed when they crossed the Delaware had been lost; the army had been seen. The British had time to dig in behind ten-foot-high snow and ice walls and barricade themselves in houses and barns. They were ready for the assault and easily turned back the American forces after a series of thunderous musket and cannon volleys.

To Lieutenant Greenman’s surprise, Lord Stirling did not order a retreat back to Morristown. He kept the army on Staten Island overnight on what turned out to be one of the coldest evenings of the year. “We took a post on a hill half a mile from one of the forts where the snow was about two feet deep. Here we dug the snow off the ground and built up fires and tarried all night. Very cold with a number of our men’s feet froze.” Doctors later reported nearly five hundred men suffered frozen feet.

An angry Greenman wrote the following day, after the retreat finally began, that one-third of the men in his own regiment had suffered frostbite on their feet during the night. The trip back to Morristown on the sleds began after disheartening news that some local residents had followed the army to Staten Island and looted some of the homes there.
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Sylvanus Seely was a witness to that. He had not been ordered to participate in the attack, but rode to Staten Island with a friend anyway to watch. He noticed with disgust people rummaging through homes of British sympathizers. Seely wrote that “the residents of the island are sorely plundered.” The looting would mushroom into a public relations disaster for the Continental Army and cost Lord Stirling his command.

The British retaliated for the raid in early February by attacking both Elizabethtown and the nearby community of Bergen. They burned several buildings in each community, captured more than a dozen officers and, in a bold move, abducted Joseph Hedden, one of the Essex County freeholders.
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By that time, all of the huts at Jockey Hollow were completed, but continual clothing, food, and supply problems continued to plague the soldiers. The currency shortage that drove the price of a horse up to $20,000 eased somewhat when Congress decided to collect and burn existing money and create a new, limited supply to curb inflation.

Several more storms hit the area, delaying shipments of clothing and food. The population that had saved the army in January was reluctant to do so again and throughout February and March merchants and farmers constantly argued with army purchasing agents over prices and credit. At one point General de Kalb wailed, “These are the people who talk about sacrificing their all in the cause of liberty!” And Nathanael Greene lamented that “there was never a darker hour in American politics than this.”
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Sylvanus Seely, now a colonel, spent the winter of 1780 as he had spent most of the winters of the war. Since the army was in camp, the militia was not called to join it and Seely’s military business was limited to overseeing the posting of guards around the Morristown area and maintaining the complicated beacon and alarm gun lookout network that Washington had devised three years earlier. He continued to run his small inn, but the dreadful weather curtailed business. The colonel continued to engage in business deals, traveling to purchase items for his store that he would try to sell at a profit. He again entered into small business deals with army officers. They would provide cash for some transaction with him, and he would take care of the business and split whatever profit there was. He became sick from the bad weather from time to time.

His life fell apart in early April. The militia leader had gone out to settle some financial debts in a snowstorm that dumped three inches of snow on the area on Friday, March 31. Seely became ill from exposure and on the following Thursday saw a doctor, who bled him. The bleeding did not hurt as much as what happened to him later that day—he was arrested.

The charges against him were serious—trading with the enemy. It was alleged that as leader of the militia while it was posted in Elizabethtown he permitted local residents to illegally purchase British goods taken by the American army from a captured ship. He was also accused of permitting residents to illegally sell goods to the British, as well as transporting goods from ships to his quarters and later selling them. It was charged that he permitted loyalists to illegally travel back and forth between Elizabethtown and New York. Finally, it was alleged that Seely juggled his militia payroll books to permit friends who were just privates to receive officers’ pay.

The arrest came at a time when illegal colonial–English sales, called “London trade,” had become an epidemic; Governor Livingston called any such transaction “a piece of villainy.”
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American currency was practically worthless and many Americans found it more beneficial to sell goods to the British for their far more valuable pound sterling. It was also difficult to find goods in American stores and British soldiers were happy to sell what they had at a tidy price. Several American officers had been convicted for participating in these illegal transactions during the winter. Seely found himself one of many people sought in a widening effort to stop the business, which hurt the local and national economy.

The next day, Friday, brought even more trouble for the militia colonel. He learned in the morning that a friend, William Crowell, had been killed by a musket ball from a British gun that had accidentally discharged. Then, that night, he saw Mrs. Ball again and they got into a terrible fight. “Believe I shall never be able to get her affection again, and that she hates me,” he wrote in his secret diary.

Despite these personal woes, Colonel Seely worked hard to prove himself innocent at his court-martial, which was eventually held on May 4 in Bernardsville. He asked a friend to gather evidence that would prove him innocent and he himself testified that he had done no wrong and offered the court-martial board all the assistance they requested in looking at his orders and his militia payrolls. The court-martial board only took one hour to acquit Seely of all charges.

In an extraordinary move, Governor Livingston issued an official proclamation noting the acquittal that was published in both the
Jersey Journal
and the
New Jersey Gazette
. It was no ordinary proclamation, though. It listed the charges and the not guilty verdict but then, at the end, the governor wrote that Seely “is entitled to the character of a good soldier, a vigilant officer, and faithful citizen, and as such deserves the gratitude of his country.”
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