The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (117 page)

Near the end of the war, as Washington and Rochambeau squeezed Cornwallis into Yorktown, Clinton set Benedict Arnold in motion against

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the Connecticut coast, supposedly to divert the American army from its mission in Virginia. The citizens in these towns must have known what was coming, for General William Tryon had struck their coast in 1777 and again in 1779. In an early raid Danbury, though an inland town, lost nineteen houses and twenty shops to Tryon's torches. Two years later over two hundred buildings in Fairfield, about half of them houses, were burned. Tryon tried to burn Norwalk three days after Fairfield went up in smoke, and although he met some opposition he succeeded in destroying much of the town. The towns hardest hit in September 1781, when Benedict Arnold assumed Tryon's role, were New London and Groton at the mouth of the Thames. Near Groton at Fort Griswold, Connecticut militia cut down almost two hundred of Arnold's infantry before surrendering; the British forces retaliated by killing most of the garrison after they laid down their arms. This slaughter -- the word is appropriate -- was followed by abuse of the wounded. Groton itself also paid with the loss of buildings, but the cost was light compared with New London's where most structures -houses, stores, warehouses, barns, a church, the courthouse, and wharves and ships which had not been able to escape -- were reduced to smoldering rubble.
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Destruction brought one kind of pain. Less dramatic but no less deeply felt was the loneliness those at home endured. Women bore most: besides being alone with the anxiety of not knowing whether those they loved had survived battles, they had to worry about holding the family together. Life for them dragged on, with days often heavy with loneliness or darkened by dullness and unease. These feelings are clear in the letters Sarah Hodgkins wrote her husband Joseph while he was with the army.
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The Hodgkinses lived in Ipswich, Massachusetts. He was thirty-two years of age in 1775; she, twenty-five. When the war began, they had two children (he had five children by his first wife), a girl, born in 1773, and a boy, born in March 1775. Joseph Hodgkins's militia company joined the forces besieging Boston immediately after Lexington. Thus began his and Sarah's ordeal, lasting until he left the army in June 1779.

Sarah Hodgkins did not conceal her loneliness and anxiety from her husband.
On Thanksgiving in 1775, she confessed that the day seemed

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"lonesome and dull," and a few weeks later she came as close to selfpity.as she ever did -- "I look for you almost every day but I dont alow myself to depend on any thing for I find there is nothing to be depended upon but trouble and disappointments." She repeated "I want to see you" many times in the next three years and repeated too that she feared that her husband would not survive the war.
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Reading these confessions did not destroy the morale of Joseph Hodgkins, in fact they may have given him comfort even as they distressed him, for they were expressions of his wife's love. Sarah also declared her love openly though usually her letters were matter-of-fact in tone. Matter-of-fact but moving was this postscript: "give regards to Capt Wade [ Hodgkins's commanding officer] and tell him I have wanted his bed fellow prety much these cold nights. . . ." Joseph Hodgkins replied: "I gave your Regards to Capt Wade But he Did not wish that you had his Bed fellow But I wish you had with all my heart."
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News from home was always welcome. Sarah Hodgkins filled her letters with tidbits about the children, of relatives, and of Ipswich. When she was especially lonely, she was not above reminding Joseph that she was alone with their children -- "I have got a Sweet Babe almost six months old but have got no father for it." She also did not hide her opposition to Joseph's re-enlistment in 1776. He was to serve almost another three years despite her protests.
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Sarah Hodgkins's love for her husband helped sustain her in these years. The love found its place in her faith that Providence would see them through to happiness, if not in this world, at least in the next. Her heart, she told Joseph, "akes for you" when she thought of the difficulties and fatigues he endured. Her faith in God and in God's plan helped her keep her balance; as she said, "all I can do for you is to commit you to God . . . for God is as able to preserve us as ever and he will do it if we trust in him aright."
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Sarah Hodgkins endured the separation from her husband, and in June 1779 he returned home. Her feelings at the separation found echoes in his. But as he told her, he fought in a glorious cause, a cause which gained intensity through the pain and suffering borne in its service.

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Sarah Hodgkins did not have to face redcoated soldiers at her door. She did not lose cattle and crops to marauders; no soldier put a torch to her house or cut down fruit trees in the yard or tore apart the fences and the sheds of the farm for firewood. Of course, she lived in fear for Joseph's life, but at least she did not have to worry that the enemy would take her own.

The enemy remained far enough away after Howe evacuated Boston in 1776 to permit most civilians in Massachusetts to lead fairly quiet lives. Quiet, and to some extent safety, disappeared wherever the armies marched or camped. Common rumor throughout the war had it that the Hessians, as all troops from German provinces were called, were to be feared the most. Howe's pursuit of Washington across New Jersey in late 1776 aroused a deep hatred of German troops among civilians. These soldiers probably did not behave worse than their English allies, but because they were "foreign" and spoke a strange language they excited a deep revulsion.

Eighteenth-century armies did not ordinarily deal gently with the civilians they encountered, and Howe's English and German soldiers behaved in conventional ways. They entered private houses unbidden and took what they wanted -- food, clothing, and anything else they could lay their hands on. Keeping warm was difficult in winter, and, not surprisingly, troops pulled down fences and buildings for fuel.

Such actions were repeated throughout the war and not just by the enemy. Washington's soldiers endured terrible hunger and cold at Valley Forge in 1778, and during the winter of 1779-80, strung out around Morristown, New Jersey, they suffered even more. In these times and in others, the temptation to plunder nearby civilians proved irresistible to some. There were many occasions when no excuse seemed necessary, around Monmouth Court House, for example, at the end of June 1778. In the aftermath of the battle the American soldiers entered houses which civilians had fled when the two armies came together. The Americans carried off whatever they could find, only to be pulled up short by an angry Washington who ordered that they be searched.

Washington had to give such orders more than once during the war. His British opposites, Howe and Clinton and their staffs, took similar actions. Both armies indeed punished marauders, in or out of uniform, severely. James Thacher, a medical officer who kept a thorough journal, reported that soldiers near Albany in 1778 who had robbed and murdered inhabitants were hanged. Thacher called these creatures "villains," and

his hatred of them seems to have been widely shared in both armies.
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Still, soldiers robbed and killed civilians throughout the war.

Civilians learned to fear not only the army of each side but also those who traveled with them or who lived in their shadows. The camp followers of both armies, for the most part mature women -- wives and a number who were not wives -- committed a variety of offenses against civilians. These women normally provided useful services for officers and men. They washed clothing, cooked, nursed the sick and wounded, and gave other sorts of comfort. They did not always confine their attentions to soldiers, however. When the opportunity to steal presented itself, some took advantage of it. Several with Nathanael Greene's army in April 1781 may have joined soldiers in burning houses near Camp Gum Swamp, South Carolina. Greene threatened to execute any that were caught. Women "belonging" to regiments in Washington's army in July 1778, when it was near Newark, New Jersey, may have taken two cloaks, handkerchiefs, shirts, pillow cases, and a large "Diaper Blankett" from civilian houses. Regimental officers searched them for these items after the civilians complained of their losses.
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Civilians feared another group -- the outlaws who lurked on the fringes of the armies. Near New York City for much of the war, around Philadelphia from September 1777 until July 1778, and throughout the Carolinas and Georgia from 1780 on, such bands roamed -- often disguised as partisans serving one army or the other -- plundering and killing. In reality they were jackals, possessing neither decency nor principles and seeking only their own advantage. The real partisans despised them. Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox of South Carolina, found that bandits trailed his irregulars and passed themselves off as soldiers under his command. In this guise they plundered luckless Carolinians. Marion gave his men permission to put these outlaws to death without a trial or court-martial.
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The Americans living in or near towns and cities occupied by the armies experienced the worst that the war could bring. Boston was the first of the cities to be occupied, but its trial ended early in the war. If the city had not ever really grown accustomed to having the army in its midst, it managed at least to hold together until fighting began

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at Lexington. In the month that followed this first great battle, about half its civilian population left. With their departure and with the city under siege, life in Boston assumed a bleak cast. And in June after the heavy casualties the British army suffered at Bunker Hill, almost everyone must have felt depressed and anxious.