The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [84]
Because for to go see my friends, I now no time can get
Farewell dear creature I must go, away to the wars
And for sometime quit Venus far, and join myself to Mars
Whose thundering noise does fill the ears of those which do be bold
And undergo his difficulties which scarcely can be told
The lieutenant was a lucky fellow, however. No sooner had he sent the poem off than he was ordered to return to his home state of Pennsylvania to hunt down deserters. He was ordered to ride to Bucks and Chester Counties—back via the highway through Ringoes—and track down men from his regiment who had left the army, and men from other regiments in those counties, arrest them, and return them to camp. It was made clear his mission was of the utmost urgency.
Desertion and the refusal of men to serve more than a single enlistment had been a constant problem in the Continental Army since the siege of Boston in the winter of 1775–1776, when Washington lost half his army and when men whose terms were up decided to simply walk home. Now, in the summer of 1777, Washington worried about the loss of troops once again.
Most of the men left for what they believed to be good reasons— their farms and businesses were falling apart in their absence and their loved ones needed them. “In some parishes but one or two men are left,” one colonel wrote to the governor of Connecticut, explaining the mass departures that had taken place during the summer of 1776. “Some have got ten or twelve loads of hay cut and not a man to take it up; some five or six, under the same circumstance; some have got a great quantity of grass cut, some have not finished hoeing corn; some, if not all, have got all their plowing to do, for sowing their winter grain; some have all their families sick and not a person left to care for them . . . It is enough to make a man’s heart ache to hear the complaints.”2
And, too, these men had tired of reading letters written to them by friends and neighbors back home who told them they had not joined the army precisely because they did not want their farms and businesses to lapse into ruin.
The soldiers departed for any number of reasons: they were tired of the cold, lack of clothing, and lack of pay; hungry; angry that promises of bonuses were not kept. Some were fearful of catching smallpox in camp. Some did not like the Frenchmen who had joined the army. Many simply did not like their officers. One group of four hundred men whose time was up refused to stay following a dispute with their commander, Lord Stirling. One complete militia unit from Massachusetts left en masse, despite a personal plea from Washington to remain.
Officers, like the enlisted men, left the service to return to their farms and families or departed because of illness. Some officers were jealous of the higher rank and pay of others whom they deemed incompetent and went home when their time was up. Many of the men who had agreed to remain for one more month for a $10 bonus, at Washington’s urging prior to the battle of Princeton, left exactly thirty days later, at the end of January. Their departure angered Washington, who had begged them to stay. But he was even more unhappy that troops from his native Virginia were leaving too, some after just a few weeks in camp.
The number of deserters, officers as well as enlisted men, became so great that Washington wailed to Congress in the early years of the war that “we should be obliged to detach one half of the army to bring back the other.”3 One general smirked that so many officers had left the military that when the next battle came, the army sent to meet them would just consist of George Washington and the enlisted men.
Washington complained to everyone he knew about the soldiers who would not reenlist unless they knew the identity of their officers. He wrote to former aide Joseph Reed that “such a dearth of public spirit and want of virtue, such stock-jobbing and fertility in all the low arts to obtain advantage of one kind or another in this great change of military agreement I never saw before and pray God I may