The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [35]
It was the lowest point in their lives and they feared dying in a grim, desolate wilderness hundreds of miles from their loved ones. Private Abner Stocking walked through the camp that morning and saw men “so weak that they could hardly stand on their legs.” They were despondent, he wrote, “many sitting wholly drowned in sorrow, wishfully placing their eyes on everyone who passed by them, hoping for some relief. Such pity-asking countenances I never before held. My heart was ready to burst and my eyes to overflow with tears when I witnessed distress which I could not relieve.”
Private Morison observed that “the universal weakness of body that now prevailed over every man increased hourly on account of the total destitution of food; and the craggy mounds over which we had to pass, together with the snow and the cold penetrating through our death-like frames made our situation completely wretched and nothing but death was wanting to finish our sufferings.”13
Finally, on October 30, forty-two days after they began their journey, Benedict Arnold, leading an advance scouting party searching for food, arrived at the first of several houses near the Chaudière. There he was able to procure from a local farmer a number of cattle for his men, which they first saw a day later when they encountered the advance scouts on their return. The men were delirious with happiness. Greenman wrote, “It was the most joyful sight I ever saw and some could not refrain from crying for joy. Some of the men were so hungry before the creatures [cattle] were dressed that they had the skin and all entrails guts and everything that could be eaten on the fires a-boiling.”
Two days later, they passed a farmhouse where the residents offered to sell Arnold more food. Greenman wrote, “There was beef and bread for us, which we cooked plenty of. Some of the men made themselves sick eating so much.” He added that it snowed that night as they lay on the ground, but, thanks to the food, “we slept very hearty.”
On November 12, Arnold’s expedition, fortified by more food from farmers they met, arrived on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, one of North America’s major waterways, which connected the Atlantic Ocean to both Quebec and Montreal. Their journey was nearly over. The enlisted men and their officers, and Arnold, had accomplished quite a feat; they had walked and sailed through three hundred fifty miles of some of the most difficult terrain in the United States, traveled up three rivers, crossed two mountain ranges, survived a severe storm, a treacherous flood, and several snowstorms and made it to the gates of Quebec City with 675 men, losing just 55—dead, sick, or deserted—not counting the three hundred men who turned back with Enos.
In letters he wrote to his superior, Schuyler, back in Albany, Benedict Arnold praised his men. “Short of provisions, part of the detachment disheartened and gone back, famine staring us in the face, an enemy’s country and uncertainty ahead. Notwithstanding all these obstacles, the officers and men, inspired and fired with the love of liberty and their country, pushed on.”14
But Arnold’s praise for the enlisted men under his care paled in comparison to the admiration they had for him for leading them through the wilderness. Private Stocking, who feared death on the trip, told friends, in remarks repeated by all of the enlisted soldiers, that Arnold was “beloved by his men.”
Congress was euphoric. One delegate wrote that the journey through the wilds of New England was “thought equal Hannibal’s over the Alps.”
Chapter Eight
JEREMIAH GREENMAN:
Prisoner of War
Quebec City was a walled-in fortification that an army could not conquer unless it was starved out, battered it with cannon in a lengthy siege, or stormed it with several thousand troops. This did