The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [114]
Men without shirts held their overcoats tightly around their bare chests; those without shoes wrapped cartridge box leather around them. Some even sold their clothes and used the money to buy food.11 One colonel threw up his hands. “The soldiers of our army are almost naked,” he lamented in a letter.12
Richard Butler, a colonel in the Ninth Pennsylvania, wrote at the end of March that throughout the winter there had been only one blanket for every five men in his regiment. Some men had but one shirt and many none. He added that some of the tents were taken down, cut up, and used as blankets. The clothing crisis was ruining morale. “The want of clothing,” he wrote, “is the first thing that makes a soldier think little of himself. Had I clothing for them, I would venture to vouch for their conduct both as to their bravery and fidelity, and am certain it would be very conducive to their health.”13 Some soldiers who found themselves freezing without proper clothing wrote home to ask their families to send them cattle skins they could trade for articles of clothing, but many of these wound up stolen by other soldiers.14
The plight of the men was familiar to many who lived in that area of Pennsylvania. Wrote an angry Christopher Marshall, a resident of Lancaster,
[The] army are now obliged to encounter all the inclemency of this cold weather, as they are . . . living out in the woods with slender covering; our poor friends in town, many of them in want of fuel and other necessities, while internal enemies, under the protection of that savage monster Howe, are reveling in luxury, dissipation, and drunkenness without any feelings for their once happy, bleeding country.”15
The people who lived in Chester County insisted that they had no spare clothing that they could sell to the army and that the British had seized much of it in September. They had said the same thing about food, that had been confiscated by both British and American forces for months. What infuriated the starving and badly clad soldiers was the sight of those same local residents walking about covered in comfortable great coats with thick woolen scarves wrapped around their necks to keep themselves warm. The residents’ refusal to help the army caused great bitterness among the soldiers. On Christmas Eve, 1777, James Gray, a captain in the Third New Hampshire, wrote to his wife Susan of the residents, “In this state we find a people who are (generally speaking) the most unfriendly of any we have passed through.”16
In a letter to his brother, a furious Elias Boudinot declared, “The inhabitants are only fit for pickhorses,” and that “extortion reigns triumphant throughout every part of [Pennsylvania].” He had nothing but scorn for the Pennsylvania troops, writing that as fighting men they were “worse than a company of Jersey women.”17
Unable to obtain clothing at Valley Forge, many men wrote home and begged family, friends, and neighbors to send them some. A lowly ranking paymaster in a New Hampshire regiment wrote to a friend that he needed a shirt, stockings, white breeches “full large,” with a white waistcoat “homespun.” He said he would be happy to pay any “agreeable” price and then, in a flush of vanity, asked his friend to get ruffled and not plain sleeves on the shirts.18 Some men yearned for small pleasures, such as Jonathan Todd, of Connecticut, who asked his father in a letter he wrote on Christmas Day, “Don’t forget my shirt and watch; should be glad of a handkerchief.”19
Many saw the lack of clothing as a lack of patriotism by their states. General Enoch Poor of New Hampshire wrote to the members of his legislature that they had broken their word to the troops: “If any desert how can I punish them when they plead in their justification that on your part the contract is broken?” Henry Laurens, president of the Continental Congress, was even blunter, writing to New Jersey governor Livingston that he believed the army might collapse by the end of the year. He fumed “that we are