The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [113]
The clothes of many other soldiers had been torn badly in the heated battles at Brandywine Creek and Germantown and during hut construction; they needed replacement, but little was available. The clothier department, run by the incompetent James Mease, had not foreseen any great need to buy clothes and Mease had refused several opportunities to do so because he felt that the prices were too high. Added to his recalcitrance was a quartermaster’s department, located forty miles away in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, whose administrators seemed to have little knowledge of the clothing woes of the army and did little to transport any. The department had not had a leader for months and clerks there who did try to assist the soldiers often found themselves lost in voluminous paperwork.
No clothing had been set aside either, because no one knew where the army would spend the winter. Shipments of clothes from New York State were lost en route. Another large clothing warehouse had been burned by the British. American officers billeted in other winter camps, such as those in New York and New Jersey, with clothing shortages of their own, halted shipments for Valley Forge and removed many of the uniforms and blankets and gave them to their own badly clad men.
On one occasion, a general obtained five hundred coats for the men of the Pennsylvania regiment, but the clothier general insisted that tailors had to work on the jackets. He then went on vacation, leaving the jackets in a warehouse. It was weeks before the jackets were finally delivered. Troops whose enlistment had ended attempted to take their blankets home with them and had to be ordered to leave them behind for others. Clothing could not be made easily, either. The United States did not have textile mills like England that could produce clothes for fourteen thousand soldiers.6
The lack of clothing meant that soldiers received little protection from the weather and came down with bad colds that turned into pneumonia; they wound up in the dreaded hospitals. The clothing crisis also meant that the troops were not available for needed camp drills and work crews throughout the winter.
A Massachusetts general told his superiors that three-quarters of his men could not report for parade because they had no clothes or shoes. “They are naked from the crowns of their heads to the soles of their feet,” he wrote.7 Many of his men wrote to friends and asked them to send clothing and to lobby their state legislatures to do the same. Lt. Archelaus Lewis, of the First Massachusetts, an officer in Ebenezer Wild’s regiment, was one. He wrote to a friend, Jesse Partridge, “There is two-thirds of our regiment barefooted and bare-backed, not a second shirt to put on nor breeches to cover their nakedness . . . this is the case with the greatest part of our army.” He told Partridge sarcastically that no one back home cared for the troops anymore. “By your conduct, you as good as say why should we trouble or concern ourselves about them? They are tied fast and let them look out for themselves.”8
One New Hampshire general told a friend about the soldiers that “one half of them destitute of any shoes or stockings to their feet, and I may add many without either breeches, shirts, and blankets . . . living in a cold season in log huts without doors or floors.”9 A Massachusetts officer, Col. Samuel Carlton, wrote that his men had no blankets or coats, but what broke his heart, too, was their lack of footwear. “Ninety men in the regiment have not a shoe to their foot and near as many have no feet to their stockings. It gives me pain to see our men turned out upon the parade to mount