The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [157]
The victory at Monmouth in the summer of 1778, the apparent end of the smallpox epidemics, and mild weather throughout 1779, plus more clothing, caused an increase in enlistments and a decrease in desertions for Washington’s army in the north.
It had been a year when Washington’s spy network, started in the early days of the war to provide him with solid information about the enemy, had grown to hundreds of informers. Spies had tipped him off to the exact route of the British toward Monmouth 1778 and in 1780 would once again prove invaluable.
Washington’s strategy had been to fight the British head-on when he could, such as at Monmouth and Brandywine, but to avoid confrontations when his prospects were not good. He needed to convince the British press and public that the Crown could not win what was becoming a lengthy war, and should quit. The plan began to pay off in 1779 as more and more British periodicals criticized the conflict, some publishing “body counts,” lists of the casualties, in their columns. Groups called “patriotic societies” were formed throughout England to protest the war in America and an increasing number of influential members of Parliament spoke out against it. The city of London refused to tax its residents for the war. One British army regiment had even mutinied when told they were going to fight in America. Even the prime minister, Lord North, began to consider shifting the focus of the war from America to Europe and the French and Spanish.
Still, there was no end to the war in sight. The British maintained posts in New York, Savannah, Charleston, and Newport and sent an endless supply of British troops and hired mercenaries, cannon, and warships to America. Their treasury appeared bottomless and King George III was determined to triumph.
Some thought that an American victory would only come if the British believed that they could never truly win, that they would fight for years with no result—and at great cost. Others were convinced victory for the rebels could only be realized if the conflict escalated into a full-blown world war, with Spain sending hundreds of ships and thousands of men to America, in addition to the promised French forces. Either way, the Continental Army and its thousands of enlisted men had to hold together as a fighting force. Their ability to do that was severely tested in the brutal winter of 1779–1780.
It began to snow early on Sunday morning, December 5, 1779, and continued into Monday, the snow piling up throughout the village of Chatham and throughout Morris County, New Jersey. Militia Colonel Sylvanus Seely wrote that it “snowed hard all day.” So much had accumulated over the two days, nearly nine inches, that the roads were impassable to all but horse-drawn sleighs. In Philadelphia, where the storm hit even harder, residents measured the snowfall at eighteen inches.1
In Danbury, Connecticut, that morning the storm did not stop the Second Rhode Island, with Jeremiah Greenman, now a lieutenant, from starting its march to winter headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey. The regimental commander, Colonel Israel Angell, pushed his men to trudge eighteen miles to Cortlandt Manor, Colonel Phillip Van Cortlandt’s large estate on the eastern bank of the Hudson River, in a storm that blanketed the Hudson River Valley. The Second Rhode Island then marched a few miles each day until they were stopped by another severe storm on December 12. The men were wet and hungry. They were so hungry that, Greenman said, a group of them, wielding muskets, chased a pair of fleetfooted deer through a woods but did not catch them.2
Washington’s main army traveled through the falling snow and arrived in Morristown from Newburgh, New York, on December 13. Colonel Seely had turned his wagon into a sleigh, taking off its wheels and fastening ski-like runners to it. On the day that Washington arrived, it snowed again. The temperatures remained low.
Everyone feared the weather would be severe,