The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [13]
Outside Boston, wives, girlfriends, relatives, and friends visited the soldiers in camp, sometimes staying at the nearby homes of friends for days. Some even lived with them. George Ewing’s uncle James traveled to Valley Forge to visit him in 1777 and lived in his hut with him and another soldier for three days.3 They brought extra food for the soldiers in the first American army, who quickly also became the first to complain about army food, as they have ever since. The women and friends also bought presents and clothing.
Many of the enlisted men maintained relationships with family and girlfriends far away by writing letters whenever they could. They looked forward to letters from home, too. Friends and family always asked how they were doing. Letters that arrived after a well-publicized and bloody battle usually were full of pleas for a letter back to assure family members, or wives and girlfriends, that their loved ones had not been hurt in the skirmish. An inordinate amount of correspondence that followed fierce battles, such as those that arrived in the days after the assault on Bunker Hill, started with the rather chilling line, “I realize that I may be writing to a dead man.”4
The foot soldiers debated and greatly embellished every rumor that floated through camp, and there were many. Benedict Arnold had been killed. No, he had been taken prisoner. No, he had been taken prisoner and escaped. The British had hired twenty, forty, or fifty thousand Russian soldiers (pick any number) to help them fight the Americans. A huge British force had secretly landed on the southern tip of Florida and had started to march up the Atlantic seaboard toward Boston (why any army would land in Florida to attack Boston, fifteen hundred miles away, was never questioned).
Some younger brothers mesmerized by the service eagerly agreed to take their older brother’s place in the regiment for a few days as the brother returned home for a brief vacation, all authorized by lower-ranking officers. Joel Fisher once took his brother Elijah’s place in Boston for two entire weeks.5
The men celebrated holidays in camp or by visiting the homes of fellow enlisted men. This was rather easy during the Boston siege since many of the enlisted men there lived in communities within thirty miles of the city and invited their friends for dinners at Thanksgiving and Christmas.6
The single men talked frequently about the lovely women they had met in whatever community near where the army had camped. Some in Boston were so mesmerized by the numerous beauties walking about the streets of Cambridge and Boston itself, across the harbor, that they watched them through the spyglasses that they were supposed to be using to track enemy movements.
If the girls made the men feel good, the chills of winter and various illnesses that were transported from one barracks to another did not. Some went to the doctors and were bled or given medicine that did little more than make them throw up. This medicine was so routine that one soldier wrote in his diary that he “saw the doctor and he gave me a puke.”7
Other aspects of camp life were depressing, too. The men were called out for regimental funerals, and there were many. A long string of funerals for the men who had been killed at Bunker Hill in 1775 was followed by another wave of burials for those who had been wounded and finally died a few days or weeks later. Deaths in camp occurred prior to Bunker Hill, however. Men who had been shot in the battles of Lexington and Concord and cared for in the camp outside Boston died from their wounds and were buried. Men died of disease and the fevers that swept through the American camps that winter and in just about every winter. Some