The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [2]
The book is the chronicle of each man’s journey in the army, linked together to tell the overall story of the Revolution. As an example, the reader meets John Greenwood, the fifteen-year-old fifer from Cape Cod, at the battle of Bunker Hill in 1775. Greenwood’s life is then recounted throughout the book as the reader encounters the other soldiers as they enter the story. All of the men move in and out of the volume as the history of the war unfolds. We see Greenwood participate in the invasion of Canada in 1775–1776, riding in a canoe alongside Benedict Arnold. We leave him to meet a remarkable pair of men, Doctor Beebe and Reverend Robbins, who become friends in the middle of the chaotic American retreat from Canada that winter during a terrible smallpox epidemic. We join Greenwood again with George Washington’s army as it crosses the Delaware and makes history. He leaves the story but returns when he decides to fight the war on the high seas, not the battlefield. As he continually departs from the narrative, we pick up other soldiers’ stories. Jeremiah Greenman, a private from Rhode Island, appears early when he joins the ill-fated invasion of Canada with Greenwood and is taken prisoner and held for nearly a year in Quebec. He comes back again at the bitter battle of Rhode Island in 1778 and in the hard winter of 1779–1780 at Morristown. The others follow that same revolving pattern.
The tales are never predictable. Greenman fought throughout the entire conflict and participated in many of its key battles, but he also trained one of America’s first all-black military regiments, the First Rhode Island. The irascible Fisher joined the army right after the battles of Lexington and Concord and fought for eight years as a common infantryman, but spent a year as one of George Washington’s bodyguards. Ebenezer Wild fought at Saratoga, Monmouth, and Yorktown and was so devoted to the army that he was one of the founding members of the Society of Cincinnati, the first veterans memorial group, at the end of the war.
Lieutenant McMichael of Pennsylvania, the poet, filled his journal with rhyming stanzas about patriotism. The real charm of this colonial Longfellow, though, was that he was married during the war and spent the rest of it doing anything possible to slip away to see his amorous young wife.
Finally, there was Seely, the head of the Morris County, New Jersey militia when the Revolution began. Seely, a married man with four children, was in love with the army, in love with the idea of independence, and, as his secret coded diary showed, in love with just about every woman he met. The story of his incessant womanizing, and the awful guilt that it brought, unfolding at the same time that he served as one of the most courageous militia leaders of the war, adds another dimension to this account of the first American army.
I then added entries from the diaries and journals of many other soldiers, mostly enlisted men, to complete the story of the battles of the war, the hard winters at Valley Forge and Morristown, and the army’s constant struggle to survive.
Other than Dr. Beebe and Rev. Robbins, who became friends in the war, we do not know if the other men knew one another. We do know that they were often in the same battles. Seely’s militia and Greenman’s Second Rhode Island even fought side by side at Springfield. Their diaries give us fascinating views of these battles from the different perspectives of the men, amid much smoke and bloodshed. It should be noted, too, that these were humble men and I had to find other sources to fully report their courage under fire.
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