The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [159]
One week later, a cold front moved into northern New Jersey, sending the already low temperatures in Jockey Hollow plunging. Lieutenant Erkuries Beatty, of the Fourth Pennsylvania Regiment, wrote to his brother, “Colder weather I never saw.” Captain Walter Finney, of Pennsylvania, freezing like everyone else, remembered that Jockey Hollow’s pre-war nickname was “Pleasant Valley.” In a sarcastic note in his journal, a freezing Finney wrote, “We did not find it answered to its name.”5
The day after Beatty wrote his letter, the Second Rhode Island Regiment arrived in Morristown, exhausted from their long march over snow- and ice-covered dirt highways. One soldier wrote that “very early that winter the cold came. And such cold! There had been nothing like it in the memory of the oldest inhabitants. Roads disappeared under snow four feet deep.”6 Johann Kalb, an officer who had come to America with Lafayette, wrote that Morristown was worse than Valley Forge and that “it is so cold that the ink freezes in my pen while I am sitting close to the fire.”7
Jeremiah Greenman was not only irritated by the harsh weather but by the discovery that the land set aside for the Rhode Islanders had already been taken by the New Yorkers. Lieutenant Greenman’s regiment was ordered to march another mile through thick, snow-covered woods to a new piece of land. There, over the next two weeks, the Rhode Islanders labored through several snowstorms and the cold to build their huts. They had to live in flimsy tents on the outskirts of Morristown and march more than a mile to their construction site each day; they had little food.8 Greenman wrote, “Very cold and almost starved for want of provisions.”
Freezing as hut construction went slowly, Greenman remembered that he was now a lieutenant and decided to pull rank. He told a sergeant to leave his finished hut and Greenman took his place. He told the unhappy sergeant that it was only temporary, until Greenman and the others finished their own huts. The sergeant had to wait a very long five weeks for that to happen.
They faced another clothing shortage. There were no shoes, either, for men walking in snow five inches deep. “The deficiency of shoes is so extensive that a great proportion of the army is totally incapable of duty and could not move,” Washington complained to a quartermaster at Newburgh. The commander fumed about the shortages to all later, when he could not send a five-hundred-man regiment to assist in the defense of Charleston because none of the men had footwear.9 The southern city then fell to the British under Sir Henry Clinton on May 12; the entire American army of fifty-five hundred men was captured and four thousand muskets seized. It was a terrible blow to the American cause.
The bitter cold was not the biggest worry of the enlisted men and their officers, though; they were starving. An autumn-long drought had caused a bread and flour shortage and many of the men who arrived in Morristown had not eaten any meat or bread in days. The snowstorms prevented the transportation of cattle to slaughterhouses so that the animals could be turned into meat for the soldiers. The cold and snow in New Jersey further hampered food and shelter operations. Gristmills that depended on fastrunning water from rivers and streams for power had to shut down when all the waterways froze over, and could not produce bread.
The army soon discovered that not only was there little food in the area but that the residents there were as reluctant as those near Valley Forge had been to sell the army food and clothing following yet another currency depreciation. Runaway inflation had crippled the national economy and now