The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [160]
Private Joseph Martin wrote, “We were absolutely, literally starved. I do solemnly declare that I did not put a single morsel of victuals into my mouth for four days and as many nights, except a little black birch bark which I gnawed off a stick of wood, if that can be called victuals. I saw several of the men roast their shoes and eat them.”11 Men were again reduced to eating their pets. Major James Fairlie wrote, “I ate several meals of dog and relished [them] very well.”12
An angry Washington complained to state governors and wrote to Congress that “unless some expedient can be instantly adopted, a dissolution of the army for want of subsistence is unavoidable.”13 The governors were enraged by price gouging and the reluctance of the citizens to support the troops. None was angrier that New Jersey’s Governor William Livingston. He wrote “that America, after having so long been the admiration of Europe and having an army on foot that defies the power of Great Britain should at last be compelled to disband her troops by the artifices and practices of Tories and speculators and monopolizers and scoundrels of all sorts and sizes could go very near to deprive me of my senses.”14
The governors, and Congress, responded to the general’s pleas and within days dozens of wagons arrived with food and clothing that would carry the troops through another few weeks. But it seemed that no matter what Washington did, he was thwarted by the unending snowfalls that continually made the roads impassable and forced the cancellation of the food deliveries. A brutal storm dropped eighteen inches of snow on December 18, and again halted all hut construction at Jockey Hollow and again ruined any chance to obtain food.
Sawmills throughout the state that the army relied upon to produce boards for the completion of the soldiers’ huts had been shut down by the ice and snow just like the gristmills. The shortage of boards became so acute that a supply officer, Joseph Lewis, a local man, ordered soldiers to tear down area barns for their wood and even had latrines pulled apart for their boards. Lewis begged area farmers to give the soldiers straw to make bedding for those who had managed to move into their huts.
There was little joy on Christmas Day. Most men still slept in tents that sagged under the weight of snow and ice. They existed on one-third rations. Their meager meals had been supplemented a bit in mid December, when Washington sent the emaciated horses to Pennsylvania and gave the men the animals’ corn. The soldiers had little clothing or shoes and found the little money they had was worthless.
Their commanders felt badly for them and noted that soldiers had often gone four or five days without food. “I was extremely shocked,” General von Steuben wrote to New York governor George Clinton. “[It was] the greatest picture of misery that was ever seen.”15 Governor Livingston told the New Jersey Assembly that the military situation was “deplorable,” and that “the army [is] reduced for want of provisions and that the magazines are everywhere exhausted.”16
If all of that was not enough to cause consternation throughout the army, Benedict Arnold was court-martialed that winter for malfeasance during his term as the military governor of Pennsylvania the previous year. He was convicted of illegally appropriating army wagons to haul goods that he reportedly sold for personal profit. General Washington, Arnold’s lone supporter in the army, simply admonished him. That rebuke, though, enraged Arnold and started him on his road to treachery.
Then, on December 27, yet another storm