The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [161]
An appalled Washington issued orders barring any further theft and promised harsh punishments for those caught stealing, but he did not carry them out. The people had not helped the army in its hour of dire need, he reasoned, and so he let them suffer.
On January 2, a Sunday, a blizzard that continued for three days hit northern New Jersey, dumping more than a foot of snow on the Morristown area. Baron de Kalb remembered measuring drifts at twelve feet. The storm created havoc. Dr. Thacher, who still had no hut, wrote, “Several [tents] were torn asunder and blown down over the officers’ heads in the night, and some of the soldiers were actually covered while in their tents and buried like sheep under the snow. My comrades and myself were roused from sleep by the calls from some officers for assistance; their [tent] had blown down, and they were almost smothered in the storm; before they could reach our [tent] only a few yards, and their blankets and baggage were nearly buried in the snow.”17
Thacher wrote too soon. Just two days later, a second blizzard hit the area, dropping another six inches. This storm, too, was accompanied by high winds and chilly temperatures. On the morning of January 6, General Washington, who had watched the storm for four days, wrote in a weather diary he kept, “Night very stormy. The snow, which in general is eighteen inches deep, is much drifted. Roads almost impassable.”18
Greenman and the Rhode Islanders, like the other soldiers, found themselves trapped by the storms. The lieutenant worked with his men in digging out their tents and huts. They found piles of wood for their fireplaces beneath the thick blanket of snow that seemed to cover the whole world. They were freezing and starving to death at the same time. Dr. Thacher put it best when he wrote, “The sufferings of the poor soldiers can scarcely be described. While on duty they are unavoidably exposed to all the inclemency of storms and severe cold. They are badly clad and some are destitute of shoes. We are frequently for six to eight days entirely destitute of meat and then as long without bread. The soldiers are so enfeebled from hunger and cold as to be almost unable to perform their military duty or labor in constructing their huts.”19
No one realized this more acutely than George Washington. He rode through the snow to Jockey Hollow from time to time to visit the camp and supervise the work crews as they dug out. He only had admiration for his soldiers. “The troops, both officers and men, have born their distress with a patience scarcely to be conceived. Many of the latter have been four or five days without meat entirely and short of bread,” he wrote to Continental Congress president Samuel Huntington on January 5.20
The situation was desperate and everyone knew it. Congressional delegate William Ellery wrote with alarm that “we are at the very pinch of the game.”21 Washington did not want to declare martial law and seize food from residents, even though Congress had urged him to do it and that seemed the army’s only salvation. He knew martial law would set a terrible precedent. But after those January storms he had to consider doing so. His soldiers were trapped by a blizzard and starving to death. The general asked Nathanael Greene to call an emergency meeting of the Morris County freeholders, the area’s governing body, on the night of January 8. Greene had already told friends that he feared the worst, writing to one, “Unless the good people immediately lend their assistance to forward supplies, the army must disband.”22 That night, Greene read the men a letter from Washington in which he begged them to give the army the cattle, food, and clothing he needed, on credit, trusting him to pay them at some point in the future. If they did not, he seemed to say between