The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [82]
The Pennsylvania state regiment moved to Morristown for winter camp, but McMichael managed to talk his commanding officer into granting him a furlough to return to Pennsylvania. His request was among many granted by lower-ranking generals who did not check with the commander in chief, who agreed to furlough men, but did not want all requests approved. Washington did not realize they had been sent home until it was too late. Those soldiers who left included men such as McMichael. The furloughs, along with desertions and the departures of men whose enlistment was up, plus those whose emergency ten-day enlistment ended, left Washington with an army of just twenty-five hundred men in Morristown, his winter camp.
McMichael, who may have had smallpox earlier in life and was immune, did not get sick when the epidemic struck that winter. In fact, his health remained hearty throughout the winter. That was good, too, because his sturdy constitution permitted him to spend his time off in the village of Stony Brook, New Jersey.
It was in Stony Brook, just one mile from Princeton, where McMichael had met Susanna Vetnoy, twenty-five, the previous winter and was hopelessly smitten with her. He scribbled in his diary that it was there “when first I beheld the face of my dear Susanna.” They were married on March 4, 1776, after a steamy, whirlwind courtship of just ten days.
And so, on May 1, 1777, almost a year later, McMichael listened to the musicians on that fine spring day at his army camp on an island on the Delaware River and enjoyed their songs. But it was visions of his new wife Susanna, not the tunes of the lively band, that filled the lovesick lieutenant’s head.
McMichael had been seeing Susanna on short furloughs and, like so many soldiers in the Revolution, missed her terribly when he had to leave her embrace and rejoin the army. He had spent his last furlough, from April 2 through April 7, in bed with her for six days of “conjugal bliss.” The satiated young groom, like all young grooms, probably could not sleep for several days afterward, just thinking about his new bride and her enduring charms.
At the Delaware River outpost, his yearning for her grew even greater and then, on May 3, he received a steamy letter from Susanna that was full of lustful suggestions and a plea to him that she had physical “needs” that had to be satisfied. He wrote that her letter “exhilarates my animal spirits,” adding that “every sentence thereof was so pleasing and so calculated to render me happy that language fails to express the dictates of my mind.”
That letter sent poor McMichael reeling. It was then that he turned to poetry to express his feelings for Susanna for the first time in the war.
Amidst alarms my love is placed
On my Susanna, Dear
Whilst her sweet charms is by me traced
As well remote as near
But when the war is at an end
To visit her I do intend
And with her spend the rest of life
For hope she’ll prove a good wife
McMichael fell sick after he sent that poem, as he had from time to time during his nearly two years of combat, but learned just a few weeks later, in early June, that he might obtain another furlough. The thought of traveling to see Susanna, and attending to her “needs,” sent the lieutenant into another spate of poetry:
I now thought I was in her arms
And drowned in bliss amidst her charms
And though not well yet I seemed all alive
For pleasing thoughts did me revive
Then I thought were I but at Stonybrook
That on my dear Susanna I might look
Her smiles to me would a physician prove
We did each other admire with ardent love
I will with speed a visit pay to she
Who of all others most pleasing is to me
That when her charms I do behold
Which are as if formed in a mold
I may be happy whilst I do