The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [28]
Some were excited to spot famous people, the celebrities of the era. Some enlisted men wrote home with delight that they met Benjamin Franklin in Canada. Others met John Adams in Boston. Most at one time or another met the governor of a state. Some encountered foreign diplomats who visited camp. The supreme thrill, though, was any sighting of George Washington. Men would write home of glimpsing Washington even if they had merely seen him gallop down the road on his handsome horse. An actual meeting with him would make for a story told and retold for generations.
Some saw the war as the adventure of a lifetime. That was certainly the reason Joseph Plumb Martin signed up in Connecticut’s fifth battalion two days after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. He wanted to become, he wrote, “what I had long wished to be, a soldier.”13
And when the various enlisted men formed into neat lines on their village greens and marched off to war to the applause of their friends and neighbors they felt not just pleased but, as a company, something very special. They were, as a young chaplain wrote of his comrades, “an elegant regiment.”14
For some, the war was very personal. John Greenwood joined the army as a fifer because of his friend Samuel Maverick, killed by the British in the Boston Massacre. Some students at Princeton University joined after the British ruined university buildings when they marched through the town. Sam Shaw joined because for months hated British troops had been quartered in his Boston home. Elisha Bostwick of Connecticut fought because the British hanged Nathan Hale, his friend and neighbor. Dan Granger, just thirteen, walked into the American camp in Boston and talked a colonel into letting him take the place of his brother because he feared the brother, very ill, might die if he did not return home. Doctor Lewis Beebe signed up, in part, to flee the grief he felt following the death of his young wife. Jeremiah Greenman of Rhode Island, a seventeen-year-old with no job or future, wrote that he joined “to make myself a man.”
The men in the army also saw themselves as the military extension of the political and social revolution taking place around them in America and embraced their role. Wrote one philosophical soldier to a newspaper, “We fight to rejoice that the Almighty Governor of the universe hath given us a station so honourable and planted us the guardians of liberty, while the greatest part of mankind rise and fall undistinguished as bubbles on the common stream.”15
And some, like Lemuel Roberts, joined the service in a simple burst of patriotism. He wrote, “The whole continent now became attentive to the call of liberty; the alarm was universal and feeling my bosom glow with love for my country, I turned out on the first alarm.”16
That exuberance exhibited by Roberts and so many others was evident to the British. One of Her Majesty’s soldiers wrote that “what religion was there [during the Huguenot wars in France] liberty is here, simply fanaticism, and the effects are the same.”17
Some of the better educated men in the army believed they were casting the foundation not just for a new political system in the 1770s, but a