The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [179]
The war did not actually end at Yorktown. It would take another two years before the peace treaty was finally signed, but nearly everyone at the surrender of Cornwallis’s army was certain that the outcome of the six year conflict, with considerable help from the French, was now certain— independence for America.
AFTERWORD
The Revolutionary War did not end with the British defeat at Yorktown. England still had armies in New York, Savannah, and in North Carolina. British forces engaged in several small skirmishes on land and on the high seas after Yorktown and England could have continued militarily. However, the capture of Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown brought about antiwar riots in London, strident calls for a cessation of activities in the London press and would cause the resignation of Lord North, the prime minister. The Crown, in effect, decided to end the war and grant the colonies independence after Cornwallis’s defeat in the fall of 1781. Negotiations toward a peace treaty took nearly two years, however, and the war did not technically conclude until the fall of 1783.
What happened to the soldiers of the first American army when the war finally ended?
The return to civilian life was difficult for most of them. The army did not disperse en masse in November of 1783, when the British left. The enlisted men went home throughout 1781, 1782, and 1783. There were thousands of them. Those who were not going back to family farms had no guarantees of returning to their old jobs and neither the Continental Congress or the states had job programs for them. Some veterans, particularly craftsmen, did find work or went back to their old employers. Others only landed positions that paid less than they earned before the war; many could not find employment at all. The end of the war also meant the end of the privateering business and thousands of seamen found their careers on the high seas over. Many had to pursue new lines of work.
That’s what happened to Elijah Fisher. The cantankerous Fisher, who had problems getting along with people throughout the war, was never able to find long term employment in the Boston area after he left the army in 1780. He worked as a laborer and bounced from one job to another, sometimes being dismissed and sometimes quitting. Each job seemed to end in a heated dispute over work rules and pay.
Disgusted, Fisher signed on as a seaman on a merchant ship out of Boston in 1783 while the war still continued. The vessel was captured by a British ship on the high seas shortly thereafter and the crew was incarcerated on the notorious prison ship Jersey, anchored in New York harbor. There, at long last, Fisher’s penmanship studies and practice finally did him some good. The captain of the Jersey needed a prisoner with good handwriting to serve as a clerk. Fisher won the post. He continued as a prisoner, and still slept in the dreary hold with the men. As a muchneeded clerk, though, he spent the day working in his own office and received decent meals—missing all of the daily misery of the other prisoners. He was on the prison ship when the war ended.
Fisher had little luck finding a job upon his return to Boston after the peace treaty. Fed up, he moved to the wilderness of Maine, where he met and married Jerusha Keene in 1784. They had eight children. He settled into the village of Livermore and lived out his days as a farmer there.
Ebenezer Wild remained with the army until the very end of the war in 1783. He was so devoted to the military that he became one of the founding members of the Massachusetts Society of Cincinnati, founded by officers to memorialize the war throughout their lifetimes. Wild moved to Boston in 1789 and became a shopkeeper on Merchants Row, one of the city’s most