The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [48]
Rev. Ammi Robbins did not realize the magnitude of the nightmare he was traveling toward when he reported to Albany in the middle of that cold and blustery year. Traveling up to Canada a few weeks later would be Dr. Lewis Beebe, a Yale graduate from Sheffield, Massachusetts. Beebe was one of the hundreds of doctors who had left their private practice to save the lives and tend to the wounds of the soldiers in the first American army. He would be the healer of their bodies as Robbins would be the healer of their souls. Neither of the healers knew each other, but would meet and become friends in the middle of the terrible chaos that now engulfed Canada.
The journey to Canada became nothing short of macabre as each day passed and the army moved farther and farther north. At each stop, the minister would discover some reminder of death and catastrophe. His uncle had been killed during a battle in the French and Indian War outside of Albany two decades before and one day Robbins went out with another man to visit his uncle’s grave. It was one of many in a small cemetery. He found his uncle’s resting place and “dropped a tear over it” and went back to camp. It was the first of many graves over which he would cry during his journey to Canada.
The starting point for the trip, Albany, was a city full of both patriots and Tories as well as several thousand Continental Army soldiers, but it was also a boisterous city of taverns and prostitutes, and the language of the people that the righteous minister met was laced with loud and graphic profanity. The city from whence his journey would begin was, he wrote in his journal, an American Sodom and Gomorrah, “a wicked city,” and he said that he deplored the “wickedness of the people [in it].”
There, prior to the beginning of the march toward Canada, Robbins offered prayers in the morning and in the evening each day, doing more than most men of the cloth in the army. The minister visited the sick in army hospitals that had been created out of residences and barns. He was encouraged by the large assemblage of soldiers that turned out to pray with him and listen to him read from the Bible and preach.
He noted in the daily journal that he kept that there was a growing awareness of death around him that was triggered by his visit to his uncle’s grave in the cemetery. One afternoon he prayed with two young soldiers, weakened by fever, nearly motionless on their beds, who soon died. The next day he was summoned to the community of Stillwater, several miles from Albany, to pray for a man whose time, it was said, was growing short. It was. The man, suffering greatly in his bed, died as Robbins sat next to him on a wooden chair reading scriptures aloud.
His sermons to the congregation of several hundred troops and a collection of townspeople who lived nearby, who traveled by horse and carriage to listen to him, were long and powerful and even then people praised his preaching style. He quoted from Hosea, “I will go and return to my place until they acknowledge their offense and seek my face,” and Micah, “And this man shall be the peace.”
There were overtures in some of his sermons, though, unintended at that time, that provided an unsettling foreshadowing of the debacles to come on the journey they were all about to embark upon. In one ominous sermon, he talked of a God who had abandoned his people, reading a passage from the Bible that said, “If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence.”
Robbins attended the funeral of yet another soldier who died the day before the army began its march. The entire journey north was a trip filled with somber reminders of war, destruction, and death. One day into the march, north of Saratoga, the men passed Fort Edwards, a burned-out stockade