The First American Army (27 page)

Wives often begged their husbands to stay home for awhile. These requests were not strictly for romantic trysts. Many men had left farms and small businesses that did not prosper during their absence. Others were the heads of families with six or more children and the responsibility to run the family and care for the children alone placed a heavy burden on their wives. Some women were also left to supervise laborers, or in some cases dozens of slaves, and found that a difficult task. Others had to run stores. The return of a husband, even if only for a few days or weeks, would prove helpful.

Some women traveled with the army to be close to their husbands, but not many. These were usually high-ranking officers’ wives, who lived with them in huts, tents, or houses. A few wives of enlisted men marched with the army and were in the group called “camp followers.” It consisted of several hundred people, including women who worked for the army as piecework laborers, washing and repairing clothes, and sutlers who sold goods to soldiers and nurses. The camp followers also included several prostitutes.

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.
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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.”
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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.”
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Sentries searched for women with their spyglasses.
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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:

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.”
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Many of the soldiers flirted with girls they saw, but some could be downright bawdy in their eagerness to meet those of the opposite sex. Dozens of men in Charlestown, Massachusetts, spent the summer of 1775 bathing naked in the Charles River near one of the busy bridges that crossed it to show off their physiques for the women that walked across the span; some men sashayed nude across the bridge to draw even more attention. Their antics always drew complaints from local residents. George Washington had to outlaw the practice.
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Just a year later, other soldiers swam naked in a mill pond on Long Island, New York, to entice young women from the nearby village; General Nathanael Greene ended this practice with a similar order.
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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.
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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.
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Prostitutes could be problematic, though. During the brief American occupation of New York City in the spring and summer of 1776, officers on nightly patrols reported rounding them up, usually following bar disputes or street brawls between the women and soldiers who did not pay for their services. It was not unusual for half a dozen or more prostitutes to be tossed into a New York jail each night. One officer who conducted nightly round-ups found them a menace; he referred to them as “bitchfoxy jades, jills, haggs, strums, and prostitutes,” but admitted that “their employ is very lucrative.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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 was prostitution. He wrote in number III of
The American Crisis
that “the whole race of prostitutes in New York were Tories” and that like-minded Loyalist hookers in Philadelphia laced the pillow talk they conducted with their patriotic clients there with malicious pro-Crown propaganda.
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Lieutenant James McMichael had no need of prostitutes, though, because he had his passionate wife Susanna and visited her whenever he could. McMichael spent the rest of the summer of 1777 on routine work as his regiment camped in New Jersey and saw little action. He was sent on several more missions back to Pennsylvania to hunt for deserters, trips that were unproductive. On one in July, he spent the night at the Spread Eagle Tavern, in Chester County, following an afternoon ride that took him “past the Valley Forge,” a remote ironworks twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia. He rode by the small forge and the wide plateau adjacent to it, on the banks of the Schuylkill River, and thought nothing of it.