The First American Army (18 page)

D
uring the second week of June, Dr. Beebe continued his medical practice—treating the sick, extracting teeth, watching men vomit after he gave them purge-inducing medicine, and inoculating hundreds of soldiers arriving at Chambly. He heard dozens of macabre stories from the men in the beds under his care. One dying enlisted man told him that he had been an ordained minister back home, but had been dismissed from his congregation over a sexual affair he had conducted with his maid. Disgraced and afraid to face anyone in his community, he joined the army. And he would soon be dead. “This is the fate of war,” Beebe wrote, “one rises and another falls.”

The camp was thrown into chaos by the sudden arrival of Benedict Arnold, who was still smarting from his losses in Canada and the chaotic retreat. Arnold now walked with a pronounced limp from the leg wound he suffered in the attack on Quebec on January 1. The physician saw him as an egomaniacal incompetent and one of the main causes of all the sickness and dying that surrounded him.

“The great Arnold arrived here yesterday and began to give his inconsistent orders,” Beebe wrote. With great cynicism, he added that “with his great pity for the sick,” Arnold ordered food allowances for those ill or with smallpox in the barns to be cut in half, along with reduced rations for the rest of the army as a food-supply crisis emerged. Arnold said that food was low, but his edict infuriated the physician. “In this order is discovered that superior wisdom which is necessary in a man in his exalted station,” Beebe sneered.

The following day the camp at Chambly was hurled into confusion when news arrived that the two-thousand-man army under William Thompson had been badly beaten on June 8, 1776, at the battle of Three Rivers and was in full retreat, all of the men scrambling toward either Sorel or Chambly, chased by both the British and hundreds of Indians. The British were able to recruit Indians in Canada and New York because the Indians feared losing their homes and land if the colonists were victorious. On June 14, John Sullivan ordered Sorel evacuated. Sullivan ordered the army to retreat one hundred miles south to Île-aux-Noix, an island in the Richelieu River just north of the entrance to Lake Champlain.

Dr. Beebe wrote sarcastically that he had no fear now that Benedict Arnold was in charge. “Being favored with such superior men for generals, what may not be expected from this army, when so much attention has been paid by the Continent to make their circumstances so agreeable and comfortable under all their disadvantages in this wilderness? Surely conquest, victory, and glory must attend us.”

On Monday, June 17, Dr. Beebe, with his boats full of sick soldiers and hundreds more infected with dysentery, malaria, and smallpox, arrived at Île-aux-Noix at 3 p.m. as part of the mad dash south into New York state. Île-aux-Noix contained one large farm at its center, but the rest of it was filled with insect-infested swamps. It was wholly unsuitable to any military compound, much less home for an entire army on the run. Beebe and everyone else who landed on the island were shaken by what they found there. He wrote in his journal, “I was struck with amazement to see the vast crowds of poor, distressed creatures. Language cannot describe nor imagination paint the scenes of misery and distress the soldiery endure. Scarcely a tent upon this isle but what contains one or more in distress and continually groaning and calling for relief, but in vain! Requests [for help] are as little regarded as the singing of crickets in the summers evening.”

Île-aux-Noix was filled with fleeing Americans, healthy and sick, plus their equipment, baggage, and boats. At one point that month, it was estimated that a total of eight thousand American soldiers were living on the tiny spit of land. It was so jammed with military that those soldiers arriving later could not even find space to erect tents for the night and were forced to sleep outdoors, on the ground, at the edge of the water near their boats, the only piece of land left.
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The sick and their doctors did not remain at Île-aux-Noix long as the British force of nearly ten thousand men rapidly moved south in a relentless effort to destroy the entire American army. The American camp at St. John’s, twenty-five miles north of Île-aux-Noix, was burned and the troops there also evacuated toward the hopelessly overcrowded Île-aux-Noix. Beebe and others were afraid that the army would not be able to move quickly enough to escape the grasp of the hard-pressing British troops and the always-feared Indians. The next day it was determined that everyone should be taken from Île-aux-Noix to Crown Point, nearly one hundred miles south on Lake Champlain.

Beebe was as stunned by the scenes at Crown Point as he had been at Île-aux-Noix, Chambly, and Sorel. Boats carrying dozens of sick soldiers arrived hourly in a huge, watery traffic jam. It was now reported that between thirty and fifty men were dying of smallpox each day in hospitals at Crown Point. Many had died in the boats on their way to Crown Point, falling dead in the ships. Beebe quoted the Bible when he asked himself about the wisdom of his commanding officers and their decision to undertake this massive evacuation, “Oh fools, when will ye be wise?”

Back home, word of the smallpox frightened civilians and it would soon become difficult to recruit new soldiers, as Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull warned George Washington. He wrote, “The smallpox in our northern armies carries with it greater dread than our enemies.”
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Crown Point was a rather large frontier fortress. Its signature was a wide entrance protected by a pair of huge iron doors. Doctor Beebe toured the camp at Crown Point in exceedingly hot and humid weather and was crestfallen; he told friends there that his own headcount showed that about five hundred men had smallpox and hundreds of others were suffering from other diseases or recovering from wounds suffered at the battles of the Cedars and Three Rivers. Many with smallpox were developing abscesses in all parts of their bodies because there was no medicine to stop their illness from spreading.

“Death has now become a daily visitor to the camps,” he wrote, adding that so many were dying that doctors, chaplains, and soldiers alike had hardened themselves to it and showed little emotion at the passing of a friend. Every time that he left the hospitals, Beebe told others that he was frustrated that there was little he could do except offer comfort. He lamented, “I can effect greater cures by words than by medicine.”

By the end of June, the number of fatalities was so great—four a day in Beebe’s regiment alone and fifty a day at Crown Point’s hospitals—that most of the men who were healthy spent almost all their time digging the graves of those who were dying. One regiment buried one hundred men in just eight days. “Death visits us every hour,” the doctor wrote.

Many of the enlisted men who died were single, but some were married and had children. Beebe was an eyewitness to the passing of Captain Shortridge, a middle-aged man who had been accompanied in the service by his two young sons. The boys were there with Beebe at Shortridge’s deathbed as he expired. Beebe was distraught by the tragedies that unfolded daily and on June 29 his spirits sank to their lowest point during the entire time he spent in the military.

“What will become of our distressed army?” he wrote in his journal that night. “Death reigns triumphant. God seems to be greatly angry with us. He appears to be incensed against us, for our abominable wickedness and in all probability will sweep away a great part of our army to destruction. ’Tis enough to make human nature shudder only to hear the army in general blaspheme the holy name of God. This sin alone is sufficient to draw down the vengeance of an angry God upon a guilty and wicked army . . . ripening fast for utter destruction.”

Much of this he blamed on Benedict Arnold, and in a scathing note in his journal hoped for his death: “I heartily wish some person would try an experiment on him, to make the sun shine through his head with an ounce ball; and then see whether the rays come in a direct or oblique direction.”

Beebe was so upset at conditions that he did not even think the chaplains he saw at Crown Point could do any more for the souls of the dying soldiers than he could for their bodies. And he saw few. He remembered fondly the lengthy morning and evening prayers in Albany; now he was lucky to find a chaplain offering one single prayer a day. He noticed very few walking through the smallpox wards.

T
he chaplain that he missed the most was the engaging man he had met when he first arrived at Sorel, Rev. Ammi Robbins. The chaplain had become very ill just when Beebe moved to Chambly with General Thomas. Robbins was so sick that the commander who replaced Montgomery upon his death, General David Wooster, had approved his request to leave the army and return home to Connecticut. Robbins joined a regiment of men from Massachusetts on their way back to that state. After a perilous journey down Lake Champlain and Lake George by boat and across approximately one hundred forty miles of land, by wagon, he arrived home on June 5, obviously happy that his service in the war was at an end and that he had lived to talk about it. Like the other chaplains, he often wondered if diseases or the British would kill him. His buoyant journal entry for Wednesday, June 5, summed up his feelings: “Rode home and found my dear family well, after having experienced and seen the most abundant displays of Divine goodness and mercy. O for true gratitude.”

The compassionate minister apparently remained obsessed with the woes of the army and the need of the soldiers for God’s help. Just one month later, on July 2, 1776, the day that most of the delegates signed the Declaration of Independence—with no explanation in his journal— Ammi Robbins not only reenlisted in the Continental Army, but requested that he be sent back to his regiment at smallpox-infested Crown Point. On Tuesday, July 9, Rev. Robbins arrived back at Crown Point to rejoin his regiment. He wrote in his journal that the men, officers, and enlisted soldiers were surprised and quite pleased at his return. They were “exceedingly rejoiced to see me,” he wrote. None was happier to welcome him back than Dr. Lewis Beebe, who ended the misery of his daily journal with the very happy tidings that “last evening Rev. Robbins returned to his regiment in a comfortable state of health.” Robbins, recovered from all of his ailments, was full of energy and once again eager to do the Lord’s work.

Dr. Beebe attended Robbins’s sermon that Sunday afternoon. It began at 4 p.m., right on time, as did all of Robbins’s sermons. The minister had his largest audience yet. He spoke inside the garrison, near the barracks, before General Wooster, dozens of officers, and more than a thousand troops gathered from several regiments. Well-rested from his month-long stay at home, he was in the best of health; his voice was strong and passionate. He turned to Isaiah 8, 9, and 10 in his Bible, held in front of him, for his sermon.

Dr. Beebe was thrilled by his friend’s preaching that day. He wrote that “it was a most animating and encouraging discourse, delivered with spirit and warmth; he gained the most strict attention of almost every hearer present and was universally admired as an orator and divine.” In it, the minister tried to be hopeful for his soldier audience, reading from the eighth verse of Isaiah: “Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, here am I, send me.” Many people came up to the minister afterwards and congratulated him on his powerful sermon. Robbins shrugged off the praise, telling them, “May I be more concerned to please God and less to please men.” Robbins’s return seemed to infuse some life and hope into the deathridden camp. The minister now prayed with the men every single morning and in the afternoon as well. He toured the different hospitals at Crown Point each day and, when he entered a large ward, asked the sick and infected soldiers there to pray along with him. He either stood or knelt, Bible in hand. He led dozens of men in prayer, sometimes a hundred in a large ward, especially the overburdened smallpox ward. Then, if the men seemed strong enough, he encouraged them to join him in singing loud and rousing religious hymns that could be heard throughout the fort and from great distances beyond its high walls.

Two days later, the minister was ordered to Fort Ticonderoga, ten miles south on the same western side of Lake Champlain. Ticonderoga was in need of chaplains. Late in the afternoon, he landed on the shore near the fort and walked directly to a small garrison hospital, one of several, to visit and comfort the sick. Most were smallpox victims. Robbins put off dinner and asked officers to call several regiments of men together for a special sunset prayer service. He dined much later after leading hundreds of men in prayer and song on the parade ground of the fort.

The following morning the energetic Robbins returned to Ticonderoga’s west hospital, a large facility, and planned to spend the morning visiting men in all of the other medical facilities, too. That plan was scuttled by the misery he felt as soon as he walked into the west hospital and saw more than one hundred men there and the terrible condition that most of them were in. He was stunned. “Never was such a portrait of human misery as in these hospitals,” he wrote in his journal. He asked the men to pray with him in the large, open ward. His sermon began with a phrase that he felt himself as he looked out on the groaning, diseased patients. “Be ye therefore sober and watch unto prayer,” he began.