The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [17]
White’s commander sent him to Washington’s headquarters with an urgent message and ordered him to deliver it personally to the commander in chief. Washington was standing with his wife Martha when White was ushered into the room. The general read the message and then looked up at White.
“What officer are you?” he said.
“I am the assistant adjutant of the regiment of artillery,” answered young White proudly.
“Indeed,” Washington said, “you are very young to do that duty.”
White looked straight at the sharply dressed General, at six foot three and over two hundred pounds a towering presence, and told him that while that was true, in the army he was growing older every day. A wide smile, one of the few the men ever saw, spread across Washington’s face and he let White go.20
Soldiers who became unhappy with the service went home when their terms were up, refusing to reenlist, blithely assuming that others would take their place. This practice began at the very beginning of the war, at the end of 1775, when half of the nearly twenty thousand soldiers went home when their time expired.21 This practice confounded Congress and the generals and the troops who stayed, many of whom hissed at the groups of those returning home as they left camp. Others unwilling to wait until their time ended simply left camp as deserters, seeing no harm in it. Men deserted individually, with friends, or with small groups. They took their belongings, and sometimes their muskets, with them. No one stopped them as they marched home to Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Virginia and other states. Some even deserted to the enemy.22 “We shall not, with all our rhetoric, be able to maintain many,” Colonel Jedediah Huntington complained to his brother Jabez in November 1775.23
The delegates to the Continental Congress knew that the army they had raised to lead America to its promised land was beset with problems within months of its formation and that the patriotism that followed Lexington had ebbed. As early as October 1775, John Adams and other delegates found themselves bombarded with complaints about the military. He wrote to one of his state’s generals, “It is represented in this city by some persons and it makes an unfriendly impression upon some minds that in the Massachusetts regiments there are a great number of boys, old men, and Negroes such as are unsuitable for the service and therefore that the Continent is paying for a much greater number of men that are fit for action or any service.”24
Delegate Silas Deane, his desk drawer full of complaints too, wrote to his wife that “the behavior of our soldiers has made me sick, but little better could be expected from men trained up with notions of their right of saying how and when and under whom they will serve.”25 John Hancock, the president of Congress, summed up the feelings of most about the behavior of the army in a letter to the leaders of the colonies to tell them that “the situation of the army is alarming.”26
But Congress also understood that the men had surrendered much and been given little in return. The delegates noted with pride, too, that there were soldiers just fifteen years old, such as John Greenwood, who were willing to die for their country. All of the enlisted men had their thanks. New Hampshire delegate Josiah Bartlett reminded congressional colleagues that the men faced “almost insuperable difficulties” and said in the spring of 1776 that “instead of wondering that we are in no better situation than at present, I am surprised we are in so good.”27
Chapter Four
MOTHER AND SON REUNION
The problems of the commander in chief and the Continental Congress were far from the mind of John Greenwood, who reenlisted. His major problem was finding a way to sneak into Boston to locate his parents, especially his mother, whom he had seen just briefly on the morning of the Bunker Hill battle when