The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [134]
Seely fancied himself a smooth womanizer, but he was putty in Mrs. Ball’s lovely hands. She sent him notes arranging meetings in the orchard and would not show up, leaving him standing alone, seething. She would agree to meet and then break the engagement at the last moment. She would hold what he termed “sweet” conversations with him at her home but then act coldly later in the evening when they met. Then, without warning, she would thaw out and shower him with affections in the apple orchard. The extent of the liaison was never spelled out in Seely’s diary, but on at least one occasion he said that she came “to his bed,” so it was sexual as well as romantic.
What Jane Seely knew about the affair was never known and throughout the Revolution, as the extramarital relationship continued, she never accused her husband of a liaison. But she knew something was going on. Mrs. Ball and Seely had several meetings in the orchard in July 1778. On August 3, Mrs. Ball visited Jane Seely, unannounced, for another casual visit between friends, but Mrs. Seely was cold and aloof toward her. A nervous Seely, at home when she arrived, scribbled in his diary that his wife “acted imprudently” toward his girlfriend. Mrs. Ball then fretted Jane Seely knew something and cancelled their next meeting in the orchard.
Seely continued his relationship with the doctor’s wife, but it was always an uncertain love. She would meet with him but argue about something. At their next meeting they would “share sweet kisses,” as he put it. Then she would not show up while he waited on cold nights in the orchard. His nighttime disappearances did not go unnoticed by his wife and throughout the entire fall of 1778, Seely wrote in his secret journal, Jane Seely was cold toward her husband.
In February 1779, following yet another snowstorm, Seely and his lover ended one of their evenings with a horrific argument over something and Seely was shaken. “Had great difference with the delight of my soul, so great that I believe it will never be made up. Oh, my heart. How shall I bear it?” he wrote in his diary.
Then, just four days later, the pair made up.
In the middle of this extramarital jousting, which Seely admitted made him “miserable,” his wife Jane appeared to have lived through a bout with breast cancer. She had been to a doctor who prescribed a mixture of roots and herbs, popular at the time, to treat some abnormality in her breasts. A distraught Seely went with his brother Sam to his friend Thomas Gardner’s home to obtain some roots to pound into a mixture to treat her breast ailment.
Jane recovered. She resumed her work as a midwife and continued to accompany her husband to dinner parties, church, and receptions. They visited friends and relatives and kept up a public facade of a happy marriage. There was always a chill in the union, though, as the militia leader kept meeting Mrs. Ball. The affair would not continue much longer, however, because Mrs. Ball became more interested in another man.
March and April featured warm days and other days when the temperature fell well below freezing and snowfalls of up to several inches were recorded. On April 18, 1779, Seely wrote in his diary that “it froze so hard as to kill the leave and the ice is half an inch thick.” The wild weather also brought diphtheria, whooping cough, typhoid and scarlet fever, and tuberculosis to Chatham and other towns in northern New Jersey.
The rough weather foreshadowed one of the worst winters of American history later that year, a winter that would threaten to destroy the army and end the Revolution.
Chapter Twenty-Four
SPRING 1778:
The African American Soldiers
The War
The victory at Monmouth