The First American Army: The Untold Story of George Washington and the Men behind America's First Fight for Freedom

by Bruce Chadwick Ph.D.

Overview

This is the first book that offers a you-are-there look at the American Revolution through the eyes of the enlisted men. Through searing portraits of individual soldiers, Bruce Chadwick, author of George Washington's War, brings alive what it was like to serve then in the American army.

With interlocking stories of ordinary Americans, he evokes what it meant to face brutal winters, starvation, terrible homesickness and to go into battle against the much-vaunted British regulars and their deadly Hessian mercenaries.

The reader lives through the experiences of those terrible and heroic times when a fifteen-year-old fifer survived the Battle of Bunker Hill, when Private Josiah Atkins escaped unscathed from the bloody battles in New York and when a doctor and a minister shared the misery of the wounded and dying. These intertwining stories are drawn from their letters and never-before-quoted journals found in the libraries belonging to the camps where Washington quartered his troops during those desperate years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781402250477
Publisher:	Sourcebooks
Publication date:	10/01/2006
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Bruce Chadwick, PhD lectures in American History at Rutgers University. He is the author of 5 other historical books: George Washington's War (Sourcebooks, 2004); Brother Against Brother; Two American Presidents: Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis 1861-1865; Traveling the Underground Railroad and The Reel Civil War. He lives in Randolph, New Jersey.

Bruce Chadwick is a former journalist and author of seven works of history including 1858, The First American Army, George Washington’s War, The General and Mrs. Washington, Brother Against Brother, Two American Presidents, Traveling the Underground Railroad, and The Reel Civil War. He lectures in American history at Rutgers University and also teaches writing at New Jersey City University.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt from Chapter 1
Bunker Hill: The Arrival of Private John Greenwood, Age Fifteen, Fifer

Early on the warm morning of June 17, 1775, British artillery in Boston and on Her Majesty's ships in the harbor opened fire on the Charlestown peninsula, north of the city. The peninsula contained the community of Charlestown, with its four hundred homes and some two hundred shops, warehouses, barns, and churches, plus three very high and large grassy hills, Bunker, the highest, Breed's, and Morton's. American troops had fortified Bunker and Breed's hills with earthworks, wooden fencing, and six cannon on the previous evening. General Thomas Gage, the commanding general in British-occupied Boston, was determined to clear the wide knolls to prevent the rebels from maintaining an elevated location where they would shell his army in the city or his ships in the harbor. An artillery pounding was to be followed by an afternoon attack of more than fifteen hundred troops.

Just after 1:30 p.m., a small navy of twenty-eight wide barges, each filled with more than forty armed British soldiers, and one transporting the man in charge of the operation, General William Howe, and his staff began to make its way across the harbor from Boston toward Morton's Point. As the ships moved through the water, the eyes of the men on board focused on Breed's and Bunker Hills.

At just over six feet tall, physically well-proportioned and able to remain calm under fire, the affable Howe cut an impressive military figure. He and his men landed and quickly realized that their cannon had the wrong-sized cannonballs and were inoperable. Howe sent the boats back for reinforcements and usable ammunition while the British navy and land artillery fired shells into Charlestown. The shells hit several of the wooden residences there, igniting small fires whose thick smoke drifted throughout the area. One shell hit a church steeple, setting it on fire, and it soon toppled into the street.

The British assault on the two hills was viewed by one of the largest audiences of civilians to witness any battle during the American Revolution. The British artillery had opened up earlier that morning and the cannonading awakened everyone. Hundreds of residents in Charlestown climbed to the tops of their homes and raced out into nearby streets and meadows to watch the fighting on the hills. In Boston, several thousand people stood on the roofs of their houses for a good view. Some climbed to the tops of churches. Hundreds more packed the wharves near the water where the view was clearer.
Somehow, it was Breed's Hill, a lower and less defensible knoll than Bunker, that the majority of the Americans wound up fortifying that day as the British continually shelled the area. The top of the hill was so elevated that the men there could see all of Boston's dozen or so church steeples. They could also look down on the mill pond, the north battery full of British cannon, Hudson's Point, and, barely, John Hancock's commercial shipping wharf, plus the tops of the masts of ships moored at the Long Wharf, on the other side of town. The provincial forces were led by General Israel Putnam, a veteran of the French and Indian War, and Colonel William Prescott. It was Prescott, the tall commander with the muscular build, developed from nearly twenty years of farming, who made most of the decisions. The esteemed Dr. Joseph Warren, sixty-nine, head of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, had joined them as a volunteer in a rash burst of patriotism applauded by all.

Wrote James Thacher, a local doctor who was an eyewitness, "[The British] immediately commenced a tremendous cannonade from their shipping, their floating batteries, and from all their fortifications. Bombs and shot were incessantly rolling among the provincials during the forenoon 'til the Royal Grenadiers and light infantry could be prepared to make their formidable attack."1 Private Peter Brown, a company clerk in Prescott's Massachusetts regiment, had fought at Concord. He watched the sea of Redcoats in their immaculate uniforms swarm off the barges and prepare for the attack. It was an awesome sight. Brown wrote that the British had so many men that they appeared ready to surround the provincials. "They advanced toward us in order to swallow us up. But they found a choky mouthful of us, though we could do nothing with our small arms as yet for distance and had but two cannon and nary a gunner. And they from Boston and from the ships a firing and throwing bombs, keeping us down 'til they got almost round us."

Howe ordered his men to march slowly in the direction of the newly dug breastworks on Breed's Hill. He sent the Royal Welch Fusiliers on a trot across a beach near the rear of the hill, toward a low stone wall and wood fence below the breastworks that seemed lightly defended because there was no firing coming from it.

Howe and his officers did not realize that Colonel John Stark and others had instructed their men behind the wall to withhold their fire until the Redcoats were close enough to hit with some accuracy. They were also instructed to shoot the officers to cause confusion and prevent orders from being heard.

When the intimidating Fusiliers, four abreast, bayonets fixed, trotted within fifty yards of the wall, the Americans opened up. The sound of the volley-it seemed that every musket was fired at once-could be heard throughout Boston.

The fury and force of the gunfire stunned the British. Stark had been right. At that close distance the muskets were lethal. Officers were hit and went down. The first line of men, instead of continuing up the slope toward the Americans, halted and tried to exchange fire with their muskets; this caused the second line to walk right into them. They were all easy targets for the Americans. Some of the British soldiers pitched forward, dead, and the men next to them fell backwards, musket balls lodged in their heads and chests, blood spurting everywhere. Those behind and around them were hit and killed or wounded and went down. Screams filled the air. Howe's vision of one single charge to drive the Americans off the hill and back to Charlestown evaporated in a roar of muskets, the air filled with the flames of the guns discharging and a rising cloud of smoke. Howe's own trousers were splattered with the blood of his men.

On the southern side of the hill, a similar outcome occurred as the Americans unleashed a thunderous musket volley that cut into the British army approaching the earthworks and the redoubt, a wooden wall that protected them. The British were decimated. Their regulars were not only easy targets, but Howe had so many of them, 1,550, and they were positioned so close together, that musket balls missing one soldier hit the man next to him or behind him.

The British were also advancing through grass that hid large rocks and deep holes. Soldiers tripped on the impediments and fell, sometimes bringing down those near them. Others tripped over their bodies as they tumbled. Their formations came apart in minutes and their legendary ability to maneuver on the battlefield was thwarted. As they tried to stand or help each other, they were hit with yet another volley of fire from the provincials behind the breastworks on top of Breed's Hill. Orders shouted by the English army officers were drowned out by the screaming of the wounded lying in the grass, the triumphant shouts of the rebels and the sounds of the muskets. Blood flew everywhere in the hot afternoon air and the British, shaken, retreated back down the hill.

Table of Contents

Author to Reader

Chapter 1 : Bunker Hill: The Arrival of Private John Greenwood,

Age Fifteen, Fifer

Chapter 2 : The Siege of Boston, 1775–1776: Private Greenwood

Joins an Armed Camp

Chapter 3 : Camp Life

Chapter 4 : Mother and Son Reunion

Chapter 5 : The Soldiers

Chapter 6 : Why They Fought

March to Quebec

Chapter 7 : Private Jeremiah Greenman and Benedict Arnold

Chapter 8 : Jeremiah Greenman: Prisoner of War

Chapter 9 : A Harrowing Retreat

Chapter 10 : The Healers: The Reverend, the Doctor, and the Smallpox Scourge

Chapter 11 : Death Becomes a Daily Visitor

Chapter 12 : The Compassionate Minister and the Enraged Doctor

Chapter 13 : Christmas, 1776: Private John Greenwood Crosses the Delaware

Chapter 14 : The Victory That Saved the Revolution

Chapter 15 : New Jersey and Pennsylvania, 1777–1778: Lieutenant James McMichael: A Poet Goes to War

Chapter 16 : Women of the Revolution

Chapter 17 : Saratoga, 1777: The Arduous Journey of Sergeant Ebenezer Wild, Nineteen

Valley Forge

Chapter 18 : The Harsh Road to a Winter Camp

Chapter 19 : Private Elijah Fisher and the Agony of Valley Forge

Chapter 20 : "The soldiers of our army are almost naked . . .": Lieutenant James McMichael: The Poet

Chapter 21 : Private Elijah Fisher Joins Washington's Elite Life Guard, 1778

Chapter 22 : Monmouth, 1778: Captain Sylvanus Seely's Militia Goes to War

Chapter 23 : The Secret Life of Captain Seely

Chapter 24 : Spring 1778: The African American Soldiers

Chapter 25 : The Heroism of the Black Rhode Island Regiment

Chapter 26 : John Greenwood, Privateer

Chapter 27 : 1779–1780: The War's Worst Winter and Mutiny

Chapter 28 : Springfield: The Militia Saves the Revolution

Chapter 29 : 1781: Victory at Yorktown

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Notes

Index