The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [107]
The medical facilities soon became hopelessly overcrowded. As an example, there were more than nine hundred soldiers in the three wards of the hospital in Reading that were supposed to hold three hundred sixty patients. Washington then ordered construction of sixteen-by-twenty-fivefeet on-site transitional hospitals where soldiers stayed until they could be moved to the larger facilities. In addition to the eleven transitional facilities, the army erected a dozen or more huts just for victims of scabies.
None of the soldiers at the facilities received much medical care because, in a paperwork mix-up, generals had granted furloughs to twelve of the sixty doctors on staff. Another dozen or so doctors became ill themselves. Several, fed up with the lack of care, quit and went home. Medical supplies were short and some regiments had no supplies at all. The lack of medical supplies became so desperate that in April the head doctor at Yellow Springs wrote to his superiors to “beg and pray” that they send him what he required.6 Dr. James Craig described the hospitals as “mere chaos.”7
Desperately needing help, Washington asked for the formation of a congressional committee to visit Valley Forge to witness the deprivations there. The congressmen were shocked. “Our troops. How miserable. The skeleton of an army presents itself to our eyes in a naked, starving condition out of health and out of spirits,” delegate Gouverneur Morris wrote after his arrival.8
Men were not placed in isolation wards and those with one disease would catch another from the man moaning in the bed next to them; men who arrived with a minor wound from a musket ball died a week later from typhus. There were no hospital clothes and men lay ill in their dirty uniforms. Food and water were in short supply.
Dr. Benjamin Rush, the physician general of the army, said that “the hospitals robbed the United States of more citizens than the sword . . . they are an apology for murder.” Rush was so fed up with conditions in them that toward the end of the winter he wrote that the worst thing that could happen to a sick soldier was to be put in a hospital and sarcastically suggested that the quickest way to win the war would be to ask the British army to march through Valley Forge so that the diseases there would kill all of them.9 Describing the numerous calamities at Valley Forge, General James Varnum wrote to a friend that if God determined he had to be punished for his life, he would rather be sent to hell than back to Pennsylvania.
Elias Boudinot, the commissioner general of prisoners, was as angry about conditions as everyone else, but had great admiration for the men of Valley Forge, writing to his brother, “Nothing but suffering for our poor fellows, but they do it without complaint.”10 Adjutant General Alexander Scammel praised “the brave men who experience the severities of a camp life and cheerfully expose their lives with a determination to die or conquer.”11 And Dr. Waldo wrote of them, “The soldier, with cheerfulness he meets his foes and encounters every hardship—if barefoot, he labours through the mud and cold.”12
That gritty determination came to not only symbolize the troops at Valley Forge, but the American soldier throughout history. The best example of that was Ebenezer Crosby of Massachusetts, one of the much maligned doctors. He had a recurrence of his asthma as soon as he arrived at Valley Forge and, hacking and wheezing, spent two weeks in the hospital. Even though not recovered, he went back to his regiment and promptly was stricken with pleurisy and bile, which he described as “severe and dangerous.” He survived that and, shortly after, came