The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [60]
“I felt that he was deluded,” he wrote about his first impression of the general, whom the enlisted men charged was a hopeless drunk. “A very singular trial I had,” he wrote of the visit to the dying Woedtke. “He most earnestly requested that I administer the sacrament to him, that he had made his peace with God, and nothing remained but to do his last command.”
Woedtke, thrashing about in his bed, began to mumble some last religious desire but Robbins could not understand what it was. He stopped him from rambling with a comforting hand and told him that “if he only believed in the Lord Jesus Christ he would be accepted,” and then left him, certain he would die within hours. He did.
Robbins’s own health had deteriorated badly again after his arrival at Ticonderoga, just as it had during his last tour of duty. He had taken medicine to purge himself on Tuesday night and spent hours in bed, dragging himself out to conduct a prayer service. By Thursday, he was much worse. “I need a constitution of brass to tarry here . . . utterly unable to go through the hospitals,” he wrote.
Very ill, Robbins sought the help of Jonathan Potts, the first surgeon of the army, who was visiting Ticonderoga and Fort George that week. Potts gave him a solution of manna, cream of tartar, senna, and aniseed, but it did not help. The minister felt even worse.
Potts was shocked by what he saw, writing that the sick were “without clothing, without bedding, or a shelter sufficient to screen them from the weather . . . we have at present one thousand sick . . . laboring under the various cruel disorders of dysentery, putrid fever, and the effects of a confluent smallpox.”1
On Friday, Robbins went to see his friend Lewis Beebe, whom he knew he could trust for a solid medical appraisal of his condition. Dr. Beebe gave him a thorough examination but did not offer any more medicine. He told his friend that the exposure to the disease and sickness at the fort was making him ill and advised him to spend time far away from Ticonderoga. Beebe himself was sick with a fever and, not placing much faith in his fellow doctors at the fort, had made up his mind to journey all the way to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, near his home, to see a friend who was a physician and find a cure. He was just as concerned over his friend Robbins’s health. He told him that he would take him to Fort Edwards, caring for him on the trip, leave him in good hands with doctors there, and then finish his own journey to Massachusetts.
Beebe procured a wagon and rode with the minister and another doctor south to Fort Edwards, where he put him to bed with an even higher fever. Beebe explained his condition to doctors there and they told Beebe that Robbins should go on to Saratoga for more medical advice and then to Stillwater, a few miles from Albany. Beebe drove the wagon all the way to Saratoga and then Stillwater, where a doctor told Dr. Beebe his friend was critically ill. The minister probably had an advanced case of the putrid fever, which brings a fever as high as 104 degrees, terrible headaches, nausea, vomiting, and a rash. The doctor told Robbins to go home for at least a month—away from anyone suffering from an illness—before he could return to his duties, and that, in fact, he was so ill that he might never be able to return to the army.
Robbins was distraught at the physician’s urging that he retire from the service. Robbins wrote that night, “I would not shrink from the work. Our war is a righteous war; our men are called to defend the country; whole congregations turn out and the ministers of the gospel should go and encourage them when doing duty, attend and pray for and be with them when sick, and bury them when they die. I hope to return to my work.” The next morning, extremely weak, he walked slowly to Beebe’s wagon, climbed in, and headed home for