The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [119]
Their greatest responsibility, of course, was the personal safety of the most important person in the United States—George Washington. They were to protect him from any kidnap attempts or snipers. (There had been one plot to assassinate the general in 1776; an American soldier, Thomas Hickey, was hanged for it.)
On May 30, 1778, Fisher almost lost his life as a member of the personal guard, but it was not during a battle, assassination attempt, or kidnapping. Another member of the guard had crossed the Schuylkill to buy milk and yelled over the river at Fisher, taking a walk with several other men, to fetch a canoe and cross over to pick him up. Fisher procured a canoe and a pole and proceeded to cross the river, whose current was faster than usual. He switched the pole from one side of the canoe to another and pushed down on it, hard. The pole hit a rock underneath the water and then slid off the side of it and plunged further down toward the river bottom. It forced Fisher to tumble out of the canoe and into the rapidly running water.
He later wrote in his journal, “[I] made for shore, but the current was so swift it carried me downstream. Every little while I could touch bottom, the water being up to my middle, but I could not stand in comparison more than I could stand on the side of a house. I tried for shore, but the more I tried the more the current would sweep me downstream. I tried to touch bottom but I could not.”
He began to slip under the waters of the Schuylkill. Fisher wrote that each time he tried to push his head out of the water it was held down by the current and he started to go to sleep underwater. The private felt his body go limp and believed that he was drowning. His body, he said, felt “as easy as it ever did in my life.”
All of a sudden, he felt arms around him and his head flew up out of the river, droplets of water cascading off of it. His arms were held by something and he could feel them rise above the water level, too. His feet could feel the bottom of the river bed. A friend, Blake, watching him float down the Schuylkill, dove into the river and swam as fast as he could after Fisher, shouting to others to assist him. Blake grasped his friend in a bear hug, his arms under Fisher’s armpits, and yanked him hard toward shore; other men on the bank of the river grabbed Fisher and hauled him up out of the river and onto the bank as he gasped for air.
The men dried him off the best they could with their own jackets, wrapped him in a blanket, and took him to one of the barracks in camp to see a doctor, explaining his near drowning to the physician there. The doctor did what every doctor seemed to do in the army. He bled him. Fisher, who probably needed nothing more than some dry clothes and a few hours in bed to recuperate, promptly began to feel very weak and fell ill when several pints of his blood were taken out. “I was very unwell for several days,” he reported. Like other men, he was sicker when he left the hospital than when he arrived.
Crime and Punishment
As a member of the elite guard, Fisher was an eyewitness to the harsh punishments, and clemency, meted out by George Washington. On June 4, 1778, Washington approved the hanging of a former soldier in the Tenth Pennsylvania, Thomas Shanks, as a spy. Thousands lined the parade ground to watch the grim execution. On another occasion the commander ordered a firing squad execution for a man who had deserted and rejoined the army seven times, illegally collecting a bonus each time he reenlisted. Fisher witnessed the hanging of another man for robbery. On another occasion, the victims were two soldiers who had, like too many others, fraudulently enlisted for a bounty, then deserted, then reenlisted for another bounty several times. Washington ordered