The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [126]
Sylvanus Seely was a logical choice for captain of the Morris militia. County officials needed someone with military experience and he was one of the few men in New Jersey who had fought in the French and Indian War. Seely was thirty-five when the Revolution began and had moved to Chatham from Pennsylvania. He ran a small inn, with a general store and tavern (stocked with French brandy and West India rum). The inn was located at the intersection of the two highways that ran through Chatham (today Main Street and Fairmount Avenue). The captain and his family lived in the inn; Seely married Jane Williamson, a local girl. Their first child, John, was born on January 27, 1772. Jane gave birth to Eleanor in 1774. Three more children, Sophia, Elizabeth, and George, were born during the war.2
In 1776, Chatham was a small village twenty miles west of New York. The main highway from New York to Chester that then took travelers to Philadelphia ran through Chatham and the Passaic River bisected it. The village could boast of thirty-nine buildings that included a sawmill, a forge, a gristmill, and two taverns. The population consisted of about two hundred forty people, including several slaves. Most of the residents were Presbyterians who worshipped at a church in Bottle Hill (Madison) or traveled to Hanover to another Presbyterian church to hear the fiery patriotic minister, Rev. Jacob Green. Three doctors lived in town. The village children attended school in nearby Morristown.
Chatham was a patriotic community in a patriotic county. Half the men in the village served in the war. Most of them were young; their average age was eighteen. Dr. Peter Smith, twenty-seven, left his practice to become an army doctor just nine months after the war began.3 Many of the younger boys, from nine to fourteen, formed a mock children’s militia. They played soldier, battling each other in nearby fields with wooden guns. Chatham served as part of the Continental Army’s winter camp in 1776–1777. The town let soldiers live in the homes of its residents and in tents in nearby fields. The army brought problems, however. The hundreds of soldiers billeted in the village drained all of the area’s food and at times starved when local farmers ran out of it and the army commissary could not find any more to send them. The food crisis there in the winter of 1776–1777 was so bad that Washington mentioned the town in a heated letter he sent to the commissary demanding more food. “The cry of provisions comes to me from every quarter. General Maxwell writes word that his people are starving . . . people could draw none [food]; this difficulty I understand prevails also at Chatham.” The town was hit hard by the smallpox epidemic of 1777 that began in nearby Morristown. Washington took the unprecedented step of inoculating his entire army without the traditional rest and diet formula used all over the world, and offered inoculations for civilians in the area. Some residents were inoculated; some were not. Dozens who did not obtain the inoculation in Chatham died, including young children and a local minister.
Chatham gave the Revolution its young men, one of its doctors, much of its food and supplies, and its townspeople died in the smallpox epidemic. Its citizens, including Captain Seely of its militia, had pledged everything to the cause. The townspeople were so staunchly on the side of the rebellion that people who were on their deathbeds made out patriotic wills, such as Eunice Horton, who in her last days, in 1778, wrote a will that was dated with great pride, “This first day of August, in the year of American Independence.”4
It was a pretty town. Thousands of acres of fertile land surrounded the farming community where residents grew a variety of crops, such as corn. Dozens of large cherry and apple orchards dotted the countryside. The village lay amid thick forests of hickory, oak, and butternut trees. Chatham