The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [26]
When it came to fighting, the men were eager. One soldier preparing for a fight against the British near Bristol Ferry, in Rhode Island, rammed two cartridges down his musket barrel instead of one as a friend looked on. When asked why he double-loaded, the soldier answered proudly, “I’ll be damned if I don’t give them a good [fight].” George Fleming, a captain in the Second Artillery Regiment, wrote to another officer who had gone home on furlough in the middle of the war about the enlisted men that “the company continue much as when you went away—always ready to go through fire and water.”14
In a letter to a newspaper, one soldier bragged that “[we will] bring thousands into the field, push the enemy with vigor, drive them from our towns, storm them in their strongholds, and never pause until we force them from our shores.”15
They were proud of what they had suffered. Some men who had been shot during the war, such as Lt. James Monroe, later the fifth president, hit in the chest at Trenton, refused to have the musket ball removed, telling friends and family that the ball would be a reminder of their service to the United States all of their lives.
And they were proud, as the amateur songwriter from New York said, of what they had done. Young Private Granger was with the American army that defeated the British at Saratoga in one of the major victories of the war. Upon returning home, he met inquisitive neighbors in his village asking about the engagement, and he described the battle at length, then recounted all of the wagons, cannon, gunpowder, and muskets the British had given up at its conclusion. He paused, sighed, and then added with great satisfaction that it was “the first British army that had ever surrendered to any nation, it was said.”
And most of all, they were proud that they had fought for the United States. One soldier was thrilled that his younger brother was going to join the army late in the war. He wrote to his father that “the profession of arms in such a cause as we are now engaged, is both just and honorable, and I am persuaded it would be a piece of injustice to deprive a young man of an opportunity of having it in his power at some future period, to look back on the present and enjoy the heartfelt satisfaction flowing from a consciousness of having done his duty.”16
This attitude rarely flagged, even under the most depressing conditions in winter camps and under heavy musket fire. The nadir of the soldiers’ war was undoubtedly the winter camp at Valley Forge, where over two thousand of the fourteen thousand American troops died of disease and wounds. Yet the tenacity of those who survived touched the hearts of all. In one lengthy letter to Congress outlining the condition of the army during that treacherous winter, a group of generals at Valley Forge wrote of the common soldiers that “there is no difficulty so great but that the troops are willing to encounter. There is no danger so imminent but they despise in comparison to the freedom of America . . . They delight in discipline, subordination, and perseverance: with these they expect to triumph over lawless domination and welcome the returning sweets of peace and plenty.”17
Chapter Six
WHY THEY FOUGHT
The motivations of the men who enlisted in the Continental Army were numerous. All soldiers in all wars believe that God is on their side, and the enlisted men in the United States military felt that way, too. The Great Awakening was an evangelical movement that had swept through America in the colonial era. Its advocates, usually Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist ministers, told Americans that the old preaching of the Anglican church that all were condemned to hell at birth was wrong. They insisted that men and women could attain heaven by leading good lives and helping mankind. They also preached that God was not within the official church, but within the souls of the people.
By the 1770s, the idea of doing