The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [20]
Newspaper editors throughout the colonies hailed the March 17, 1776, withdrawal. Wrote an editor of the Pennsylvania Evening Post, “This morning the British army in Boston, under General Howe, consisting of upwards of seven thousand men, suffering an ignominious blockade for many months past, disgracefully quitted all their strongholds in Boston and Charlestown, fled from before the Army of the United Colonies, and took refuge on board their ships.”1
Bostonians, Greenwood, and thousands of other soldiers, including Private Jeremiah Greenman, who had just arrived with a Rhode Island regiment, and Elijah Fisher, who had survived Bunker Hill, watched with great satisfaction as the huge fleet of British ships raised their anchors at 9 p.m. and, their wooden hulls creaking, slowly sailed out of the harbor. The Bostonians who lined the streets and heights of the area were hoping that they were free of the hated Redcoats forever. One of them, Boston councilman Timothy Newell, wrote with satisfaction, “Thus was this unhappy distressed town (through a manifest interposition of divine providence) relieved from a set of men whose unparalleled wickedness, profanity, debauchery, and cruelty is inexpressible.” Many saw their departure as an achievement for the Continental Congress. Others, such as a local minister, the Rev. Manasseh Cutler, viewed it as more than that. He saw the exodus of the Redcoats as a sign from above. “It was like the flight of the Assyrians,” Rev. Cutler told friends, “It was the Lord’s doing and is marvelous in our eyes.”2
Some soldiers were hopeful that the British army would be seen no more, but Washington believed that the English would be back, if not in Boston then somewhere else, and that the American Revolution would not end until one army had soundly defeated the other in a single, bloody battle.
That was not to be for some soldiers, such as privates Greenwood and Greenman. Most of the army would be sent to the New York City area, where Washington was certain the British would strike. Greenwood and Greenman, however, would not march with them. They would embark on a perilous expedition to Canada that would bring them face to face with British forces and Indian warriors in a strange land and plunge them into one of the most dreadful nightmares in American history.
Chapter Five
THE SOLDIERS
The War
By the spring of 1775, the tension between the American colonists and the British Crown had been growing for more than a decade, ever since the end of the French and Indian War in 1763. To cover the cost of that war and protect the American colonies from any more conflicts, Parliament insisted that the colonies pay higher taxes and permit the soldiers of the British army, with their bright red coats, shiny black shoes, and haughty attitudes, to occupy America.
The residents of the colonies that stretched along the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to Georgia, three thousand miles from England, believed that they had created a vibrant country of their own since the time their British ancestors arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Jamestown, Virginia, in the early days of the seventeenth century. Over more than one hundred fifty years, the colonists had developed comprehensive legal, economic, and social systems. They had created their own courts, state assemblies, county governing boards, and schools and had dozens of good newspapers. America had become a trading giant, buying and selling with England and other European powers. In addition to the Roman Catholic and English Anglican religions, the colonies now supported the breakaway Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches. The population of the colonies had grown continually and by 1770 stood at 2.15 million, nearly double what it had