The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [89]
Worse, angry and drunk ladies of the evening armed with knives that they concealed in their dresses would wound or murder soldiers who did not pay up or who physically abused them. Dead and dismembered bodies of U.S. soldiers were found in a meadow just north of Trinity Church in Manhattan, a favorite clandestine meeting place for soldiers during the war.
There was class distinction, too, involving women attracted to the soldiers whether for love or money, especially in Philadelphia. After the British army left that city in May 1778, following an occupation of nearly eight months, one gossipmonger chattered that many of the well-bred young women in town were walking about quite pregnant from their liaisons with Redcoat officers, explaining that “the British officers played the devil with the girls.” The wag then noted that “the privates, I suppose, were satisfied with the common prostitutes.”12
The women who traveled with the camp followers made most of their income from the enlisted men in the army, but also profited from American officers and those from foreign countries, such as France, whom they hoped would pay them more.
Prostitutes who lived among the camp followers were not very discreet, either. They thought nothing of having sex with clients in an army tent where other men were sleeping, recalled Sergeant Benjamin Gilbert. He noted, “At night Marcy was at our tent and lay all night with Sgt. Phillips and went home at gun firing in the morning.”13 Generals usually overlooked the “working girls,” but when their activities proved detrimental to army discipline they were drummed out of the camp in public ceremonies, just like soldiers were dismissed, to discourage similar overt sexual behavior among other women.14
Prostitutes descended on the seventeen thousand men in the army outside Boston in the spring of 1775 and caused such commotion, and distracted so many men from camp duty, that General Artemas Ward, the Continental Army’s first commander prior to Washington, issued an order that “no lewd women” were to remain in the camp; two prostitutes were subsequently chased out of Charlestown.15
George Washington banned the “lewd women” of Philadelphia from descending on his winter camp at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777–1778 after doctors told him many of those piling into the overcrowded hospitals there suffered from venereal disease probably caught from local prostitutes during the previous months.16 Word of the sexual cavorting in the American camps, whether with “amorous” women or prostitutes, became so pronounced that the wives of British officers, captured following one battle, feared that they would be handed over to the enlisted men for their sexual enjoyment (it never happened).17
The wives and girlfriends of the enlisted men who trailed after the army were respectable, but were always segregated from the army when it moved, walking together and not with the soldiers. However, the “lewd women” were not seen as very respectable and caused quite a scene wherever they went. Washington was so embarrassed by them that he sometimes ordered them to march at the rear of his army and to take side streets when the army paraded through a town so that the residents would not notice them. Once, when the army arrived in Philadelphia, the prostitutes, angry at the prudish commander in chief ’s wishes, refused to follow orders and paraded in a rather bawdy manner through the main thoroughfares of the city with the troops, skipping, howling, and brazenly lifting their skirts at spectators as they went.
Thomas Paine insisted that one of the major threats to unity among Americans