The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [15]
Even those who seemed so impressive upon their much anticipated arrivals, such as the raucous buckskin-clad riflemen from Pennsylvania, wound up disappointing the rest of the recruits in the army. They turned out to be chaotic bands of untamed frontiersmen who unnerved all who met them. They cursed throughout the day, drank as often as they worked, disdained the men from Massachusetts, and paid little attention to the rules of the newly created army. On two occasions in Boston a group of them charged a guardhouse and freed their compatriot Pennsylvanians who were incarcerated there. Emboldened by their success, the riflemen tried a third rescue, but Washington heard of it and surrounded the guardhouse with five hundred men, muskets loaded, and told them to shoot any riflemen who approached. None did.11 One officer complained about them that “there never was a more mutinous and undisciplined set of villains that bred disturbance in any camp.”12
The early days of the Continental Army, before Washington’s arrival in June of 1775 may have been marked by soaring patriotism, but they were not filled with much administrative success in producing munitions or the development of a professional army encampment. There was very little gunpowder for any kind of a fight and at various times in the spring of 1775 men without powder for their muskets sharpened crude spears to use as substitutes for their guns if the feared British breakout from Boston took place.13 Although there were numerous farmers and a large number of merchants in the army, no engineers could be found who could build usable earthworks and other battle fortifications. These skills were so lacking that General Charles Lee, who preceded Washington as the general in charge of American forces in Boston, quipped that “not a single man of ’em is capable of constructing an oven.”14
Although some men knew how to load, fire, and care for muskets, others had never handled firearms before. This resulted in numerous accidents. One man held his musket a foot in front of him when he fired; the kick of the gun hit him in the chest and killed him. One man’s musket misfired in a barracks and the ball sped through two sets of boards in wall partition, crashed through the wooden bottom of a bunk bed, went through the chest of a man sleeping there, killing him, and finally lodged in a chimney. On what one soldier called “an awful day,” four men in one area of camp were badly wounded when guns went off accidentally.15 At least one man in Boston stabbed himself to death while trying to mount his bayonet to his musket.16 Another fell into a campfire and burned to death.17
The enlisted men shared many of the same hardships and complained about many of the same things that soldiers since the Persian wars had done and would do in the years to come. They all seemed to know short people who made up for their lack of height by trying to seem authoritative, sergeants with deep voices, happy drunks, and men who had apparently slept with every woman on the Atlantic seaboard. All had met bullies. Most were witness to a fistfight in camp. Someone always forgot the password of the day necessary to reenter the camp. Many loved to play practical jokes on others. All seemed to know someone who had their tents burned in a campfire mishap. All enjoyed the spirits dispensed each day, any good food they could obtain anywhere, and an actual bed to sleep in after days of marching.
During their marches in the war most would, at one time or another, sleep in a field and sometimes wake up with snow on top of them. It seemed all, in some manner, had met British enlisted men, usually prisoners of war, and while they hated them as the enemy, seemed to like them as people, especially teenaged British soldiers.
In the view of the soldiers,