The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [105]
At home, he was treated by a local physician for several months and was the beneficiary of his mother’s care. Neither did much immediate good and Fisher suffered for six more months, spending much time in bed. No one expected him to return to the military. It was during this time, with little to do but think, that Fisher made up his mind to go back into the service. He reenlisted for a full three-year term in January, with the understanding that he could remain at home until his health improved. The army was very happy to oblige him. Recruiters were desperate for men after the waves of desertions and massive expiration of enlistments following the New York defeats. The teenager rejoined the army on August 21. His regiment was not with Washington’s army; he had been sent to join the forces under the command of General Horatio Gates at Saratoga. This time Fisher was in the thick of the battle against Burgoyne’s army there and, with the others, rejoiced at the stunning victory over the British.
Fisher’s regiment was then ordered to join Washington’s army at Whitemarsh, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, as it prepared to march to Valley Forge for winter camp. It took just four days at Whitemarsh for Fisher, and everyone else in the fourteen-thousand-man army, to realize that they were in for a rough winter. He wrote, “We had no tents nor anything to cook our provisions in and that was pretty poor. Beef was very lean and no salt or any way to cook it but to throw it on the coals and broil it. The water we had to drink and to mix our flour with was out of a brook that run along by the camp and so many a-dipping and washing in it made it very dirty and muddy.”
The march to Valley Forge began a week later, December 16, following a snowstorm. The fatigue of the march, the lack of nourishment and shelter, plus stress, brought back the crippling pain in Fisher’s side. The pain, he wrote, made daily life “tough to bear.”
The creation of the sprawling hut city at Valley Forge was hampered by supply problems from the start. Officers had hoped to obtain the thousands of needed boards for the roofs and doors of the metropolis of huts from area sawmills, but most were inoperable due to frozen streams. The few axes that could be found had to do.
Wrote Major Richard Platt, “If it were not for the scarcity of axes and other necessary tools, most of the troops would have been comfortably covered by this time. But our misfortune in those aspects together with some bad weather and scarcity of wood has prevented the business from being completed.”1
Men lived in tents and were exposed to several early snowstorms, rain, and chilly temperatures for weeks as the erection of the large encampment suffered delay after delay. In an effort to move their men into huts, officers in charge of construction cut corners and many huts were built with openings between logs and roof boards. This negligence resulted in rain seeping into the huts and forming puddles on the uneven dirt floors. As a result, the stagnant water began to breed disease. There were no windows for ventilation.
Soldiers drank dirty water from streams near Valley Forge. They urinated wherever they desired in camp because the digging of the privies in the frozen ground was as slow as the completion of the cabins. Garbage was left outside buildings and rotted; vermin appeared quickly, carrying disease. Horses that died were left where they collapsed; their carcasses brought on more sickness.
The army’s supply problems mushroomed at Valley Forge. Washington knew as early as September that he was in the first stages of a clothing crisis that would cripple his “ragged men and half naked soldiers.”2 He knew, too, that he probably did not have as much food as he needed and was warned by commissary official Thomas Jones of “a calamity which I expect here every moment.” No one in the army had been paid in over two months. The “thousands” of new and needed soldiers Pennsylvania politicians had promised were nowhere to be found. The commander in