The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [87]
The men in the army always seemed to have one eye on the Revolution and one eye on the ladies, and sometimes both eyes on the ladies, a longstanding military tradition. And the men soon discovered that no matter where they traveled in America, rural farms or bustling seaports, there were plenty of good-looking women.
The arrival of the Continental Army in any town in the colonies brought out the girls, to the delight of the soldiers. The women of the community would welcome the soldiers with decanters of wine, cakes, and cheeses—and soothing smiles. The army could not march through a village without women cheering on the men and waving to them with great enthusiasm. Soldiers walking down a street would see a window fly open and behind it a woman with a platter of cakes for them that they took with a thanks and a wink as they marched by.1
During the first year of the war, enlisted men were sometimes quartered in the homes of residents of the communities where they stayed overnight or camped for periods of time. They had a chance to become quite friendly with the daughters of the household and their female friends and neighbors. Then, as now, women loved men in uniform. “The women here are quite amorous,” one man wrote with glee upon his arrival at Morristown in January, 1777. McMichael himself, before he met Susanna, marveled at the attractive women he met wherever the army traveled. In his diary, he wrote of the Continental Army’s disastrous defeat at the hands of the British regulars and the Hessians at the battle of White Plains, but remembered, too, that it was a village that was home to “a multiplicity of beautiful young ladies.” One soldier wrote of Mount Holly, New Jersey, that it was a “compact and pleasant village, having a great proportion of handsome women therein.”2
Men camped in one area for a long period of time sought out women wherever they could find them, and they knew where to look. Private Jabez Fitch and others went to the Punch Bowl Tavern, in Boston, “to find some white-stockinged women.”3 Sentries searched for women with their spyglasses.4
Sometimes the women found the soldiers. McMichael wrote that just after the army arrived near Germantown, a community just outside of Philadelphia in 1777, a group of several dozen good-looking local women marched into the American camp laughing and shouting to personally greet the soldiers. The men, needless to say, loved the attention.
Songs were written about the women that the troops met during the war, regardless of the length or seriousness of the relationship. One oftensung tune went like this:
A soldier is a gentleman, his honor is his life
And he that won’t stand by his post will never stand by his wife
In shady tents and cooling streams with hearts all firm and free,
We’ll chase away the cares of life in songs of liberty . . .
So fare you well, you sweethearts, you smiling girls adieu
For when the war is over, we’ll kiss it out with you.”5
Some soldiers encountered so many pretty girls that their fantasies were not simply kissing it out with a lovely woman, but with many of them. All were surprised at how many gorgeous women there were in America and some were astonished that certain towns were filled with them. Private Joseph Martin was one. He wrote when he marched through Princeton, New Jersey, with his regiment on the afternoon of June 24, 1778, “The young ladies of the town . . . had collected and were sitting in the stoops and at the windows to see the noble exhibition of a thousand half-starved and three-quarter-naked soldiers passing in review before them. I had a chance to be on the wing of the platoon next to the houses, as they were chiefly on one side of the street, and had a good chance to notice the ladies, and I declare that I never before nor since saw more beautiful, considering the numbers, than I saw at that time. They were all beautiful.”6
Many of the soldiers flirted with girls they saw, but some