The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [110]
Washington himself never abandoned his sick soldiers. From time to time, risking his own health, he visited the hospitals and stopped at the beds of soldiers to offer some encouraging words. It “pleased the sick exceedingly,” one doctor wrote of the general’s visit to his hospital.23
Elijah Fisher, lying in his hospital bed, kept track of the daily death toll at the hospital in which he was confined. Fifty of the men in the facility died during just the month that he was there. Fearful for his own mortality as he watched bodies carried out on stretchers, Fisher talked a physician into letting him go back to the Miller farmhouse. He assured him that he felt better and did not need hospital care anymore. The doctor was glad to see him leave; another soldier, from yet another wagon, was given his bed as soon as he left. Miller took him back and there he recovered.
Barely able to walk, Fisher decided to rejoin his regiment at Valley Forge on February 28. As soon as he arrived, he was witness to a smallpox epidemic that had swept into the area. Washington had ordered immediate inoculations for all the soldiers, including any traveling to Valley Forge from other towns or army camps. Elijah Fisher was transported to yet another hospital for his inoculation, his side still hurting, and promptly came down with the pox. The pus-filled pustules formed on his body and his skin turned dark and felt on fire, threatening his life.
At first, George Washington was not overly worried about the smallpox because most of his soldiers had been inoculated the previous year. This time, however, he had hundreds of new soldiers and a quick survey informed him that more than one third of them had never been inoculated. The general could not have the inoculated men recover in the hospitals with all the other sick men; they would give them the pox. He evacuated everyone from the large hospital at Yellow Springs and turned it into a smallpox recovery unit for men inoculated at Valley Forge.
Altogether, doctors inoculated four thousand soldiers at Valley Forge and another one thousand at other army winter camps. The procedures were again a great success and only a few dozen of the five thousand men treated for pox died and some of them passed on from other causes. Elijah Fisher was one of the many who survived. His body fought off the pox and he lived—yet again. By spring, the smallpox epidemic was over.
Another epidemic, starvation, was not.
In mid December, the army found itself with no meat and just twenty-five barrels of flour to be shared by fourteen thousand men. Many men complained to their families that they had little to eat on most days and went several days without any food at all. On the day that the army arrived at Valley Forge, Dr. Waldo wrote “provisions scarce” and wrote that the men wailed, “No meat! No meat!” throughout the day and night and that their cries were like “the noise of crows and owls.”24
Washington exploded in a letter to Henry Laurens, the new president of Congress. He told him that nearly half his army was sick or in the hospital or did not have enough clothing to report for duty. The other half was starving. He told him in blistering language that the supply departments of Congress impeded him at every turn, that local farmers would not help him and that his soldiers, and he, felt that the government had abandoned them. He went so far as to say that he feared a revolt by the public when they found how badly the soldiers were being treated. On December 23, he bluntly told Laurens that within days the army would “starve, dissolve, or disperse.”25
Any food that could be procured was difficult to deliver. First, there was a shortage of wagon drivers. And, although the winter was relatively mild, frequent rainfall and thawing snow turned