The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [124]
It was an eventful trip. The pain in Fisher’s side flared up again, once again sending him to a hospital set up in someone’s residence. This time the local physician treating the troops diagnosed his problem as pleurisy, not kidney failure, and kept him bedridden for a week. Fisher discovered that the man and woman who lived in the home where he was told to recover were Catholics. He learned that they had a family catechism among the other books on their shelves and asked to borrow it. He then spent hours each day slowly copying pages from the catechism in longhand, just to practice his penmanship.
He was ordered from the hospital with ten other soldiers as the army abandoned camp and moved out. Other soldiers told him that his stay in the hospital might have saved his life. The regiment, on the eastern side of the Hudson, had to cross the river on barges to reach West Point. The crossing of the river had gone very badly. One of the larger barges overturned in the middle of the river and five yoke of oxen and five men drowned in the accident. Fisher, they said, might have drowned, too. It brought back memories of nearly drowning in the Schuylkill during the Valley Forge winter.
Just before Elijah Fisher’s latest enlistment ran out at the end of 1780, a Sergeant Whippel, who was in charge of clothing and supplies for the company, offered a proposition to Fisher, whom he knew practiced reading and writing often. Whippel was eager to return home for a month but had no one to replace him in the supply office. If Fisher agreed to stay one month past his enlistment to fill in for him, Whippel would not only give him lessons on reading, writing, and penmanship, but show him how to write in cipher, or code, and unravel codes in the letters of others.
Fisher kept his end of the deal and took over for Whippel, who left for home on December 4, 1780. However, with someone running his office, Whippel did not keep his end of the bargain. He lingered at home well past the end of the year. One sergeant and one lieutenant in the office were out recruiting and one lieutenant was home on furlough. That left Fisher as the only worker in the busy office. “I had to take care of the whole company and all the returns to sign and clothing to get and state stores and the like,” Fisher complained in his journal on February 8.
March arrived and still no sign of Whippel. Fisher told a lieutenant that he believed Whippel would never return and “I would have to spend the whole war in his room.” The lieutenant, who must have wondered about the missing Whippel too, told Fisher not to worry, that the sergeant would be back any day.
March turned into April and Fisher continued to complain. Finally, on April 6, four months after he left camp, Sergeant Whippel came back—to Fisher’s delight. Fisher was immediately discharged and, to make up his three months of added service, he was promoted to sergeant on his very last day in the army.
On April 23, 1781, Sergeant Elijah Fisher returned home to Attleboro. He began working for a Doctor Johnson in Newton, Massachusetts, for $9 a month on a six-month contract; a sum, he noted with irony, that matched his 1777 bonus of $54 for joining the army. Fisher, now twenty-three years old, put his uniform in a trunk and prepared for civilian life. He had enlisted for four different tours of duty, served nearly six years in the army, had participated in the siege of Boston, survived the winter at Valley Forge, fought at Bunker Hill, Saratoga, and Monmouth, and, he reminded many, was a personal bodyguard for George Washington.
Fisher was certain