The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [180]
Shepard Kollock, who founded the Jersey Journal, continued to serve as the editor of the newspaper the rest of his life and made it one of the finest publications in early America.
Stephen Olney, bayoneted at Yorktown in 1781 and told by doctors that he would not live out the week, died fifty long years later.
Dr. Lewis Beebe had been greatly influenced by his wartime friend, the Rev. Robbins. Beebe himself became a minister in the Congregational Church in Vermont in 1787. The pastorate was not a good choice for the highly opinionated Beebe though, and he left the ministry four years later. He moved to Lansingburgh, New York, where, ironically, the staunch critic of drunkenness at Fort Ticonderoga opened up a liquor store that he ran until his death in 1816.
Rev. Ammi Robbins stayed in the ministry all of his life, continuously preaching the word of the Lord and the righteousness of the Revolution. He moved from Canaan to Litchfield, Connecticut, after the war and later became a member of the local school board.
Colonel Sylvanus Seely remained the head of the Morris County militia through the end of the war. He and his wife attended the December 4, 1783, fireworks extravaganza in New York that celebrated the signing of the peace treaty. Seely’s tempestuous affair with Mrs. Ball ended sometime in the winter of 1782 but his womanizing continued. He tumbled into an affair of several weeks with Betsy Barnet, a doctor’s wife from the Philadelphia area, whom he met at a vacation resort in northwestern New Jersey. Following that, he became romantically involved with the wife of his friend, Shepard Kollock.
Seely ran inns in Chatham until 1800 and then, at age fifty-three, decided that New Jersey was too congested. Seely and his family moved to an undeveloped region of eastern Pennsylvania, where he built a sawmill and a gristmill. Other settlers followed and a town was created; the locals named it Seelyville in honor of its founder and Revolutionary War hero. His secretly coded diary indicated that his womanizing wound down after he moved to Pennsylvania. Colonel Seely lived there until his death in 1820. His wife Jane stayed with him despite his unfaithfulness and in 1819 they celebrated fifty years of marriage.
Young John Greenwood, the fifteen-year-old who worked as a fifer, soldier, and sailor, had the most unusual post-war career of all. Greenwood, unable to find much work in Boston after the war, moved to New York and became a dentist, just like his father. He was a good one, too. Greenwood pioneered the use of foot-powered drills and tooth implants. His specialty, though, was dentures. He invented adaptable springs for dentures and became renowned for creating porcelain false teeth out of ivory from hippopotamus.
Greenwood knew that George Washington suffered from his bad teeth and that the general was unhappy with the various false teeth dentists had given him. He offered his services once more to the commander in chief, now the president of the United States. Washington was very pleased with the ivory dentures that Greenwood fashioned for him and wore them for the rest of his life, visiting his former private’s Manhattan office on occasion for care. The president also let Greenwood advertise himself in newspapers as “Dentist to His Excellency, George Washington.”
A few of the lower ranking officers and enlisted men mentioned in this account went on to some prominence. Sam Shaw, a major by the time the fighting ended, was later appointed America’s first consul to China. Joseph Bloomfield, who made out his will soon after he enlisted and was shot at Brandywine, plunged into politics and served as the governor of New Jersey for ten years and later spent two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. At the age of fifty-nine, he abruptly left the governor’s mansion and enlisted in the army to fight the British yet again in the war of 1812.
Lt. James McMichael, the poet, joined his wife at her home in