Thirteen Soldiers Read online

  What luck Washington’s army had that day appeared in the cautiousness of the dilatory General Howe. After the British made quick work of the American defenders at Kip’s Bay, Howe halted their advance to wait for reinforcements when they reached a small rise, now known as Murray Hill, less than a half mile from the landing. General Putnam, fearing his four thousand men would be cut off and trapped in lower Manhattan, rode to Kip’s Bay to consult with Washington, who was futilely exhorting his soldiers to fight. Washington agreed that Putnam’s position was hopeless and authorized his retreat to Harlem, which Putnam managed with astonishing speed, leaving his supplies and more than fifty cannon behind.

  Had Howe ordered his troops to continue their advance west they would have encountered little resistance and reached the Hudson shoreline long before Putnam could escape, dooming a third of Washington’s army and possibly ending the war. But he didn’t. He held his forces at Murray Hill until five o’clock, and halted them again at nightfall. Putnam’s rapid march north reached Harlem that night, with only the last of his line having been inconvenienced by the musket fire of the late-arriving British.

  American casualties, while not light, with nearly fifty killed and four hundred captured, were not determinative either. Washington’s army, tired, bedraggled, and outnumbered though it was, remained intact. The next morning, in the Battle of Harlem Heights, the Americans proved themselves capable of more than a retreat. Martin’s regiment gave a good account of themselves that, if it didn’t erase the memory of their disgrace at Kip’s Bay, certainly improved their morale.

  Just after daybreak a British force was spotted advancing north, and Washington dispatched a reconnaissance party under the command of Colonel Thomas Knowlton from Connecticut. They were soon skirmishing with advance elements of British light infantry, with little advantage gained by either. The Americans retreated in good order when superior British numbers began to press them. As the British followed, their buglers played “Gone Away,” a tune familiar to fox hunt enthusiasts like Washington, signaling the fox was in flight from the hounds. The insult enraged the Americans, except for Washington, who ignored it while he conceived a plan for a counterattack.

  When Knowlton’s rangers reached the American lines, Washington reinforced them and ordered them to flank the British right while another party of volunteers staged a diversionary attack. The British escaped the trap and retreated some distance before turning to fight. Knowlton was killed early in the ensuing battle, as was his second-in-command, Major Andrew Leitch of Virginia. Martin had known Knowlton in Connecticut and regarded him as “a brave man and excellent citizen.” But his loss didn’t dispirit the Americans, who pushed the British back repeatedly.

  Martin’s regiment was ordered to take the field after Knowlton fell and the British were retreating into nearby woods. They remained in the battle until Washington called off the chase that afternoon, when the retreating British had reached the protection of their ships’ cannon. Both sides had suffered heavy casualties, though British losses were greater. Martin recollected his regiment had lost eight to ten men, and their commander, Colonel James Arnold, had been wounded and would not return to the army. But the British had left the field. For the first time in the young war, Washington had stopped a British advance and won a battle. And the men of the 5th Connecticut, including young Joseph Martin, had played their part in the victory bravely.

  During the battle a sergeant from one of the Connecticut regiments had been sent to find ammunition. An officer, a general’s aide, stopped him and accused him of desertion. The sergeant explained his purpose, but the officer ordered him to return to his regiment. The sergeant refused, protesting that his mission was urgent. The officer drew his sword and threatened to kill him on the spot if he didn’t obey. The sergeant drew and cocked his musket in response and was arrested, tried for mutiny, convicted, and, with Washington’s approval, sentenced to death.

  The Connecticut troops were ordered to witness his execution, and Martin’s account of the incident claims they were on the verge of mutiny over the injustice. At the last moment the sergeant was granted a reprieve. “It was well that he was,” Martin remembered, “for his blood would have not been the only blood that would have been spilt.”

  Martin’s regiment also took part in the Battle of White Plains in late October, where they “lost in killed and wounded a considerable number.” After the British left White Plains, many of the Connecticut men, including Martin, having had little or nothing to eat for days and being poorly clad for the wet autumn weather, became ill. They were sent to convalesce in Norwalk, Connecticut, quartering with local, mostly Tory residents, and returned to camp in New York a few weeks later. He remained in the militia until Christmas, when his enlistment expired. “I had learned something of a soldier’s life,” he wrote, “enough I thought to keep me at home for the future.” The sixteen-year-old veteran bid his comrades farewell and walked home to his grandparents’ farm in Milford, Connecticut.

  He did not remain there long. By spring he would again take up arms, this time as a regular soldier, a private in the new Continental Army.

  FIFTY YEARS AFTER HE helped America win its independence, Joseph Martin, at the age of seventy, anonymously published a memoir of his service in the war. A Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Danger and Suffering of a Revolutionary Soldier, Interspersed with Anecdotes of Incident that Occurred Within His Own Observation did not sell well in the author’s lifetime, and the aged veteran died a pauper at ninety. Many who did happen to read it were offended by its tone and content. Rediscovered a century later, it has become a highly valued primary source for historians of the revolution, and Martin has finally received the acclaim he never received in his lifetime.

  Martin’s is not a story of glorious triumph over adversity but a chronicle of privation, misery, confusion, blunder, near mutiny, endurance, humiliation, and resentment. He warns his readers not to expect an account of “great transactions,” of martial conquests won by great men daring to change the course of history. “No Alpine wonders thunder through my tale,” he wrote in the book’s preface, quoting a British poem written at the turn of the nineteenth century. His was merely an anecdotal account of the “common transactions of one of the lowest in station in an army, a private soldier.”

  His narrative is outspoken, acerbic, self-deprecating, irreverent, humorous—often darkly so—sarcastic, ironic, poignant, and at times embittered. He doesn’t trumpet his or anyone’s heroism. He doesn’t expound eloquently on the meaning of the revolution and the ideals of the glorious cause. His patriotism sprang from a simpler understanding of the purposes for which the founding fathers pledged their lives and sacred honor. He shows rather than professes his love of country and her cause by his endurance in a terrible trial of body and mind. And his claim is made more powerful by the honesty and humility of his testimony.

  He admired Washington and other celebrated heroes of the revolution. Some officers he served under received his praise and others his contempt. He reserved his greatest respect for the men like him, the mostly poor and young regulars of Washington’s army, the weary, hungry, aggrieved survivors of shell, shot, ball, and bayonet, of deadly winters and lost battles, of harsh discipline and their countrymen’s indifference.

  His father was an itinerant and impoverished preacher, who sent young Martin to be raised by his maternal grandparents on their farm near Milford. They were exacting guardians, who put him to work on the farm at an early age. They were caring and generous as well. He remembers his childhood with fondness and parting from his grandparents with sadness.

  Martin rarely interrupts the account of his life with a discourse on the ideals of the revolution. Patriotic sentiments are scarce and written matter-of-factly. “I collected pretty correct ideas of the contest between this country and the mother country,” he wrote about his decision to enlist in the militia. “I thought I was as warm a patriot as the best of them.”

  His grandparents
opposed his enlistment. Even he didn’t warm to the idea until his friends and neighbors began enlisting. He recalled the passions aroused by the Stamp Act and the Boston Tea Party and confessed they had not stirred him to militancy. His grandfather described to him the hardships and savagery of the French and Indian War, and Martin felt then that “nothing should induce me to get caught in the toils of an army. ‘I am well, so I’ll keep,’ was my motto then, and it would have been well for [me] if I had ever retained it.”

  His attitude changed when war came. Enthused by the spectacle of neighbors marching off to Boston, excited by the talk of soldiers who had been briefly billeted on his grandparents’ farm, and having become tired of farm work, he resolved to “go a sogering.” But his grandparents refused their permission. He spent 1775 resenting his fate, envying the adventures of his friends, and working up the nerve to defy his grandparents. They finally relented early the following year, after he threatened to run off to sea. But his enthusiasm for “sogering” dimmed when he discovered that enlistment in the militia obligated him to give a year’s service. “I wished only to take a priming,” he explained, “before I took upon the whole coat of paint for a soldier.”

  His opportunity arrived when the army, facing daunting odds against a numerically superior British in New York and desperate for troops, cut the enlistment period to six months. So he made his mark and went to war as many young men have, harboring misgivings and expressing bravado. He confessed his determination was at times “almost overset” by the knowledge that once he enlisted there would be no turning back: “I must stick to it; there will be no receding.” And yet when he heard the British were being reinforced by another fifteen thousand troops, he claimed, “I did not care if there had been 15 times 15,000. . . . The Americans were invincible in my opinion.”

  His opinion soon changed. He sailed for New York City, where he joined his regiment and began brief and improvised training in the practices of soldiering. His regiment was ordered into action not long after the start of the Battle of Long Island. They were ferried to Brooklyn and marched to a plain, where he first encountered soldiers wounded in battle, the sight of which “a little daunted me and made me think of home.” A battle raged nearby, and a young lieutenant lost control of his emotions, “sniveling and blubbering” and begging the men in his company to forgive any injuries he had done them.

  Martin saw his first action the next afternoon, when some men of his regiment, making for a cornfield in search of something to eat, chanced upon an equal number of British soldiers. The advantage shifted back and forth as both sides reinforced, until most of Martin’s regiment was engaged and the British were driven off. The battle for Long Island ended the next night. Surrounded by the British and facing the prospect of complete annihilation, Washington ordered his army’s evacuation after a valiant stand by Maryland troops had temporarily delayed its destruction. Martin’s regiment marched back to Brooklyn as quietly as it could manage and joined the rest of the army waiting on the wharves to be ferried to Manhattan. In the morning the British discovered the rebels had escaped.

  Then came the disgrace at Kip’s Bay and the regiment’s partial redemption in Harlem, the retreat from White Plains and Martin’s return home, a bloodied, hard-worn veteran, still possessing the boyish sense of humor he would never lose but not the swagger that had been the first casualty of his war.

  In his telling Martin went to war the first time for adventure, the second time for money. After his defeat at Fort Washington in November, Washington took his main army to New Jersey and across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania, where, a month later, he would recross the Delaware and surprise a Hessian garrison at Trenton and a British garrison at Princeton. The Continental Congress, heeding Washington’s urgent pleas, had finally recognized the need to field and train an army that would not be in constant danger of disintegration due to the prevalence of short-term enlistments and poorly trained, independent-minded militia. It authorized a new standing army of seventy-five thousand men who would enlist for three years or the duration of the war. Each of the thirteen states was given a recruitment quota it was to fill by whatever means it deemed necessary.

  Notwithstanding the morale-boosting victories at Trenton and Princeton, the size and success of the British offensive dampened the patriotic fervor for the war that had characterized the initial response to Concord and Lexington. States had a difficult time meeting their quotas and instituted drafts, or schemes that were not quite drafts but that obligated towns to recruit the service of a specific number of citizens. In Connecticut, townships divided men into separate groups, and each group was required to procure one soldier for the army either by finding a volunteer or paying for a substitute. If they failed to produce a volunteer or substitute, one of their number would be drafted.

  In the spring of 1777 Martin was entreated to reenlist by a friend who had taken a lieutenant’s commission. He was slowly warming to the idea, and eventually decided to put his name forward as a substitute, and was happily accepted by his peers. “I thought, as I must go, I might as well get as much for my skin as I could,” he explained. He didn’t remember the sum he was paid but doubted it was more than the amount he spent enjoying his last few days of freedom. He marched off to war for the second time with greater misgivings than he had the first time and none of the bravado. His sense of humor, however, remained intact. “That little insignificant monosyllable—No—was the hardest word in the language for me to pronounce,” he recalled, “especially when solicited to do a thing which was in the least degree indifferent to me; I could say Yes, with half the trouble.”

  He joined his new regiment, the 8th Connecticut, in May in Newtown, New York, and shortly thereafter marched to Peekskill, New York. He remained in the Hudson highlands most of that summer as part of an undermanned force that was expected to prevent the British from gaining control of the entire Hudson and severing New England from the other colonies.

  But rather than challenge the Americans’ hold on the highlands, General Howe believed he could end the rebellion by occupying the rebel capital, Philadelphia. In late August he landed a force of fifteen thousand men at the northern reach of the Chesapeake Bay and two weeks later defeated the Americans at Brandywine Creek, after which he marched triumphantly into Philadelphia. Martin’s regiment was one of several ordered to reinforce the battered main army after the Brandywine defeat.

  Martin had injured his ankle some days before and was left to guard the regiment’s baggage train as it made its way to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. But he chafed at the duty. He had for some time been under the command of officers who were not from his regiment, and he didn’t like it. “Soldiers always like to be under the command of their own officers,” he explained. “They are generally bad enough, but strangers are worse.” As soon as the baggage reached Bethlehem, he asked for permission to rejoin his regiment. He returned in time to limp along with the 8th Connecticut as it marched through the night to Germantown, where Americans and British were about to clash again. The regiment arrived not long before the tide of battle turned. The Americans fought well in the beginning and seemed to have the advantage. But Washington had conceived a complicated battle plan involving four separate columns, and in the gun smoke and low-lying fog their lines became entangled. Americans began to fire on each other, precipitating another disorderly retreat.

  The Battle of Germantown inaugurated what Martin would remember as the period that encompassed his worst experiences in the war, including a brutal siege of a small island fort in the Delaware River, but also a more comfortable winter than that experienced by soldiers who bore the awful deprivations of Valley Forge—hardships that Martin witnessed but, for the most part, did not share.

  He begins his account with reference to the deprivation that plagued him the worst throughout the war: the constant want of food. He makes his first complaint about hunger days after entering the army. From there to the end of his narrative all the experiences he recounts, t
he battles won and lost, the long marches and near escapes, the many mishaps and few occasions of unexpected good fortune, all the wounds and exhaustion and heat and cold he and his comrades endured, never figure so prominently in his story as does the subject to which he always returns: starvation. Every few pages there appears another account of it. Sometimes, most times he recalls it humorously, just as he does the improvised feasts he rarely enjoyed. Nothing in the war seems to have lodged so firmly in his memory as the experience of marching, fighting, freezing, and boiling without enough to eat.

  When the army reorganized after their rout at Germantown, Martin recalls “marching and countermarching, starving and freezing, nothing else happened, although that was enough,” until they encamped at White Marsh north of Philadelphia, and he went to sleep having had nothing to eat since noon the previous day. Soon afterward he wandered into a place where cattle had recently been slaughtered and happened upon an ox spleen, which he took back to camp, roasted, and hastily consumed. “I had not had it long in my stomach,” he recalled, “when it began to make strong remonstrances and to manifest a great inclination to be set at liberty again . . . and with eyes overflowing with tears at parting with what I had thought to be a friend, I gave it a discharge.”

  Shortly after his brief bout with the ox spleen, his regiment joined a detachment ordered to scatter a British force encampment on the other side of the Schuylkill River. They carried few provisions and nothing edible. They waded across the freezing river that night before their officers ordered them to halt. For the remainder of the night they stayed in place, shivering, forbidden to light fires to warm themselves and dry their clothes. Near daybreak they were made to ford the river again and backtrack to a place they had reached the previous day to wait for reinforcements. That next night, after reinforcements arrived, they forded the Schuylkill again. Wet, cold, and starving, they arrived the next morning where the British were believed to be camped. But the British had left.