The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [88]
Some of the soldiers married the women they encountered. Some they romanced and some they never saw again. Some women that they never expected to see again they found, sometimes to the woman’s chagrin. Lt. Walter Finney, of Pennsylvania, was a prisoner of war in New York City for eighteen months, but was one of hundreds of men held in residential homes and permitted to walk about the city during the day. Finney apparently struck up a romance with a woman, Mrs. Lovat, whose husband was also in the Continental Army. He gave her an expensive watch to sell in order to have money to purchase food and clothing. Finney saw neither the watch or the loving Mrs. Lovat again and he became the butt of numerous jokes among his fellow prisoners for losing his timepiece and his paramour at the same time.
Three years later, Finney was stationed at West Point and while on patrol one morning spotted none other than Mrs. Lovat and a man traveling to Newburgh on a highway. He stopped them and demanded either the watch or his money back. She said that the watch was gone; she had sold it to some officer in the American army and had no idea where he was and had spent the money long ago. Finney was furious. He had her arrested, but his superior officer let her go.
Finney, resigned once again to the loss of the watch, went about his business and began the ride back to West Point later in the afternoon. Unable to make much headway before darkness fell, he stopped at a farmhouse for lodging and was startled to find that Mrs. Lovat and her friend were staying there, too. Finney prepared for another argument about the watch, but the woman told him with a nervous smile that by incredible coincidence they drove past an army regiment just after they left him earlier in the day and spotted the soldier to whom she had sold the watch. He had given it back to her companion and, after a search of his bags, the companion produced the watch and handed it to a grateful Finney.9
Soldiers who could not travel home to wives or girlfriends, or had none, could always rely on prostitutes for sexual gratification. The ladies of the evening fell into three groups: women who worked out of their own homes; girls who plied their trade at taverns, as either visitors or barmaids; or the women who lived among the camp followers.
It is unclear when the first members of the world’s oldest profession began working in the New World, but court records exist describing “lewd women,” as they were usually called, being jailed, fined, and booted out of cities as early as the 1730s. By the 1770s, it was easy to find women who sold themselves in the taverns of the large cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Elizabethtown. Business was brisk in cities during the Revolution. In addition to their usual clientele of merchants, seaman, businessmen, and the community’s male residents, the women serviced the many American soldiers far from home. As a bonus, their source of income increased when the occupying British army arrived. Business proved so profitable during the war that prostitutes looking to move into a higher income bracket left their homes in the towns surrounding New York and set up shop along the streets and lanes of Manhattan, now bustling with soldiers.10
Prostitutes could be problematic, though. During the brief American occupation of New York City in the spring and summer of 1776, officers on nightly