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How George Washington Recruited a Whole New Army Under British Noses

George Washington had a problem he believed no one had ever encountered before. On January 1, 1776, the Continental Army would disappear unless Washington recruited enough men to replace it.

Somehow, he managed.

It wasn’t quite like that.

His ragtag fighting force, strung out along the hills surrounding Boston, had bottled up British troops despite having little gunpowder, inferior weapons and no heavy artillery. Nearly all enlistments expired on December 31. But somehow Washington recruited a whole new army within firing range of the world’s most powerful fighting force.

On Jan. 4, 1776, he wrote a letter to John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, to explain.

“It is not in the pages of History perhaps, to furnish a case like ours, to maintain a post within Musket Shot of the Enemy for Six months together without — and at the same time to disband one Army and recruit another, within that distance, of Twenty off British regiments, is probably more than ever was attempted.”

George Washington Recruited by Congress

The Continental Congress authorized a standing army on June 14, 1775, and the next day named George Washington “captain general” of American fighting forces.

It took nine days for Washington to ride from Philadelphia to Cambridge, delayed by public demonstrations along the way. He arrived on July 2, 1775, 15 days after the Battle of Bunker Hill. He knew little about the battle, though he learned along the way that 1,000 British troops had perished during the conflict. They were still encamped on top of the hill, peppering the Americans with artillery fire.

Washington was dismayed at what he saw. Few soldiers had uniforms or tents, and they lived in shantytowns of lumber and cloth. Some lived in vacated Tory homes, in one case, 250 men to a house. They hadn’t dug latrines and the camps stank.

The officers were not only ignorant and quarrelsome but scandalously disobedient, wrote Washington’s aide Joseph Reed to Elias Boudinot on Aug. 13, 1775. “Many had proven themselves notorious cowards.”

It took him a week to find out how many men he commanded.

He thought he had 20,000. He had 16,500 and only 14,000 were fit for duty. The rest were sick or wounded. The british had 6,000, but he figured they could form a fighting force of 12,000 if they armed slaves and Loyalists left in Boston.

“We are in an exceeding dangerous situation,” he wrote to his friend Richard Henry Lee on July 10.

Gunpowder

In early August, Washington learned the shocking truth about his gunpowder supply. During a war council, he was told his men barely had enough gunpowder for eight, maybe nine rounds each.

For a half hour, Washington sat in silence before speaking again, reported one of his generals, John Sullivan.

From then on, Washington didn’t dare order a morning or evening gun fired. When the British bombarded his forces with cannonade he couldn’t order their fire returned.

General Gage by John Singleton Copley

Fortunately, the enemy couldn’t believe how bad things were, according to the journal of Elias Boudinot. A member of the Committee of Safety of Massachusetts knew the secret, wrote Boudinot. He deserted and went over to Gen. Thomas Gage, the British commander, and told him.

“The fact was so incredible that General Gage treated it as a stratagem of war and the informant as a spy, or coming with the express purpose of deceiving him and drawing his army into a snare, by which mean we were saved from having our quarters beaten up,” wrote Boudinot.

“Few people know the predicament we are in,” wrote Washington to his friend Joseph Reed.

Had they known, the American Revolution might have ended right then and there.

Countermoves

On November 16, Washington ordered a 25-year-old former bookseller named Henry Knox, a colonel, to ask Congress for cannon. If he couldn’t get any, he should go to Fort Ticonderoga, captured in May, to retrieve the heavy artillery.

Henry Knox by Gilbert Stuart 1806

He also sent two men – his muster-master general, Stephen Moylan, and Col. John Glover — to outfit privateers to capture unarmed enemy supply ships. On November 29, Capt. John Manley, commanding the privateer Lee, captured the British brigantine Nancy, along with thousands of musket, shot and a cannon.

Washington also knew about a lightly guarded cache of gunpowder in the British colony of Bermuda. So he asked Rhode Island Gov. Nicholas Cooke to send an armed vessel to the island to capture it. Cooke obliged, sending Abraham Whipple on the mission.

But the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing. Congress also sent an armed vessel to Bermuda to steal the British store of gunpowder there. Bermudans who shared the colonies’ displeasure with Britain stole enough gunpowder to quadruple Washington’s supply. When Whipple arrived, the powder was already on its way to Washington.

The Army Dwindles

On October 31, King George III delivered a speech to Parliament declaring the Americans in open rebellion and asking for more troops to put down the uprising.

King George III

Winter was coming. Washington’s army had few blankets and no winter clothing. Enlistments started to expire on December 1 and every man could leave on January 1.

The patriotic fervor that inspired thousands to rush to Boston had worn off. Men started to flock back home. Whole regiments packed up and left.

By late November, Washington had only 3,500 men. “Could I have foreseen what I have, & am like to experience, no consideration upon Earth should have induced me to accept this Command,” he wrote in a Nov. 28, 1775 letter to Joseph Reed.

How Washington Recruited an Army

Enlistments came in slowly. News of the army’s harsh condition had spread. Washington, too, had introduced discipline: the lash, the pillory and the court martial.

And so the army offered a signing bonus: a dollar, big money in those days.

Joseph Plumb Martin described the allure of a dollar on a drum head.

A dollar deposited upon the drum head was taken by some one as soon as placed there, and the holder’s name taken, and he enrolled . . . My spirits began to revive at the sight of the money offered; the seeds of courage began to sprout . . . O, thought I, if I were but old enough to put myself forward, I would be the possessor of one dollar, the dangers of war notwithstanding.

Some enlistees tried to game the system, waiting until the last minute to enlist in the hopes the army in its desperation would raise the bounty.

On New Year’s Eve Washington had 9,650 men – about half of what Congress authorized.

Nathanael Greene

To minimize disruption, Washington asked the men who enlisted for 1776 to join their new regiment a few days before the new year. He asked dismissed soldiers to stay longer and called up militias to reinforce the army.

On Jan. 1, 1776, Washington ordered the soldiers who didn’t reenlist to their parade grounds. They were then sent home, leaving by the hundreds and thousands.

Gen. Nathanael Greene lost three-fourths of his brigade and had fewer than 700 men.

Slowly, the Continental Army returned to its strength of 1775. The British stayed put, failing to take advantage of their enemy’s weakened position. By March, Henry Knox would arrived with his noble artillery train, and the British would soon evacuate.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Benedict Arnold’s Treason Unmasked to Washington—in Arnold’s Own House

George Washington learned about Benedict Arnold’s treason while staying at Benedict Arnold’s house near West Point. He wondered why Arnold, his best battlefield commander, wasn’t there. As he was getting ready for dinner, Alexander Hamilton brought him the news.

Arnold had vanished moments before Washington rode up to the sprawling mansion along the Hudson River. He had received a letter telling him that Washington knew, or would soon know, that the jig was up. The Americans had arrested a suspicious person with incriminating evidence in Arnold’s handwriting, the letter said.

Benedict Arnold

Arnold had received the dispatch over breakfast with two of Washington’s aides. They had gone to Arnold’s house ahead of the rest of the commander-in-chief’s entourage. Arnold had excused himself and gone somewhere on urgent business–to the fort, he told them.

They never saw him again.

Benedict Arnold’s Treason

Benedict Arnold’s treason stemmed from a web of motives. They included a desire to avenge his honor, a measure of greed, painful and crippling battle wounds and the influence of his Loyalist wife.

By the time Washington showed up at his house, he had already given the British information about planned American troop movements.

He was born Jan. 14, 1741 in Norwich, Conn., into a once-prominent New England family. His great-grandfather, also Benedict Arnold, had served as governor of Rhode Island. His great-great-grandfather, William Arnold, had established King’s Chapel in Boston. Benedict Arnold spent his boyhood in affluence, but his alcoholic father then squandered all his money.

His father’s failure meant Arnold couldn’t attend Yale, and it also gave him a thirst for money and honor. He succeeded at merchant shipping and privateering, only to lose practically everything in the patriot cause. When he turned traitor he demanded £20,000 for his services.

Col. Benedict Arnold, before his promotion to general

He had served the cause valiantly, capturing Fort Ticonderoga, leading the expedition to Quebec, stopping a British invasion at the Battle of Valcour Island. Arnold had also helped drive the British from Connecticut and led American forces to victory at Saratoga.

His men loved him. Congress did not, passing him over for promotion in favor of junior—and less heroic — men. His nemesis, Gen. Horatio Gates, hadn’t even mentioned Arnold’s name in his report about the Battle of Saratoga.

Love of Money

Arnold’s love of money got him into trouble. While he recovered from severe wounds at Saratoga (add photo of boot), Washington appointed him military governor of Philadelphia. The British had recently evacuated, and he fell in love with 18-year-old Peggy Shippen, from a prominent Loyalist family. They married April 8, 1779.

Peggy Shippen Arnold

Peggy liked to live large, as did her husband, and they led an ostentatious lifestyle. Arnold engaged in war profiteering, which led to his court martial. Though acquitted on several counts, the court recommended a reprimand for several minor transgression. Washington sent him a letter chastising him as gently as he could, but Arnold — crippled, bitter and married to a Loyalist — had already put out feelers to the British.

Rationale

Benedict Arnold’s treason resulted from patriotic motive, or so he told himself—and, later, Washington. The war in 1780 wasn’t going well. Congress dithered and failed to provide for the Continental Army, which suffered from poor morale. Currency inflation started spinning out of control. The alliance with France hadn’t produced any victories. Then in May came the worst defeat of the war when Gen. Benjamin Lincoln and his 10,000 troops surrendered unconditionally in Charleston, S.C. Washington despaired.

George Washington, 1776

The British had also made overtures for peace, giving the Americans almost everything they wanted except for independence.

Arnold wasn’t the only one who considered changing sides. Charles Lee, captured by the British, shared with them a plan to defeat the Continental Army.

And Ethan Allen negotiated with the British on behalf of Vermont for a separate peace. He wanted to protect his extensive land holdings and the British offered to recognize Vermont as an independent state, part of the British Empire.

Had some things gone differently, perhaps Benedict Arnold’s treason wouldn’t have happened. He wanted a naval command. He had plenty of experience at sea, and he felt his wounds made him unfit for battle on land. But Washington didn’t see it that way.

West Point

He ended up finagling command of West Point, a key American position on the Hudson River. Upon his arrival on August 25, Arnold began to dismantle the fort’s defenses. He didn’t make needed repairs and he sent two cannons away, ostensibly to get refurbished. Then he sent 500 men off to cut wood and another 200 north to guard Fishkill, N.Y.

The beverly Robinson house.

The Arnolds – Benedict, Peggy and baby Edward – moved into a house two miles down the Hudson from the fort and on the other side. The house had belonged to wealthy Loyalist Col. Beverly Robinson, who helped Arnold change sides.

Arnold had been begging the British for a meeting with their spymaster, Maj. John Andre. The first attempt failed. Then in late September Andre sailed up the Hudson on the sloop of war HMS Vulture. On the evening of September 21, Arnold sent two men in a boat to pick up Andre. They didn’t want to do it, but Arnold threatened to arrest them. They rowed out, picked up Andre and took him to shore, where Arnold waited with another horse. The two men talked at the Joshua Smith house in Haverstraw, N.Y. Meanwhile, Continental troops spied the Vulture and began bombarding the vessel, forcing it to move downriver.

John Andre

The Vulture’s departure stranded Andre. So Arnold gave him civilian clothes, a letter of transit under the assumed name John Anderson and intelligence about West Point. Andre’s superior officer, Gen. Sir Henry Clinton, had expressly told him not to do those three things.

Caught Out

Arnold returned to his headquarters on the banks of the Hudson. Two days later, he sat down to breakfast with Capt. Samuel Shaw and Maj. James McHenry.

They had been traveling with Washington and arrived in advance of the general’s expected visit that day. Washington had told them to go on ahead while he inspected redoubts along the way. But his entourage — including Henry Knox, Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette – stayed with Washington.

Arnold invited Shaw and McHenry to have breakfast with him while Peggy stayed upstairs with the baby. Then Lt. Solomon Allen arrived with a message for Arnold from Continental Army Col. John Jameson.

West Point from Phillipstown, 1831

Jameson wrote he found incriminating papers in the stocking of a suspicious person claiming to be John Anderson. He had sent the papers to Washington. Arnold realized they had captured Andre – “John Anderson” – and he would soon be unmasked.

As Arnold read the message he showed a moment of distress but quickly regained his composure. He excused himself and went outside to tell his servant to get a horse and alert his bargemen. Then he went upstairs to tell his wife he had to leave immediately to join the British. She fainted on the bed. Just then one of Washington’s light horsemen knocked on the bedroom door and told him Washington would arrive momentarily.

Col. John Jameson

Arnold then told his breakfast companions he had to go across the river to the fort to prepare for Washington’s visit. His horse didn’t await him, so he took the messenger’s horse. He galloped down to the river, where oarsmen waited to take him up the river to the fort. Or so they presumed.

Arnold ordered them downriver instead, offering them two gallons of rum each if they would row with all their might. When they approached the Vulture, he held up a white handkerchief. Arnold and the oarsmen boarded the vessel, and Arnold told them they were now prisoners. The men protested, but they were paroled when they arrived in New York.

Washington Finds Out

Moments after Arnold left, Washington rode up to the house. Told Arnold had gone to the fort, he ate a quick breakfast and went to the fort with Knox and Lafayette. Hamilton stayed behind in case any dispatches arrived. They agreed to meet back at the house for dinner, scheduled for 4 p.m.

Alexander Hamilton and Henry Knox

Washington expected a military salute when he approached the fort, but none came. Mystified, he was approached by the fort’s commandant, Col. John Lamb, who apologized for the inadequate reception. He hadn’t known Washington was coming.

Washington then asked to see Arnold. Lamb said he hadn’t showed up in two days. Washington then proceeded to inspect the fort, all the while asking about Arnold’s whereabouts.

When Washington, Knox and Lafayette returned to the Robinson house, they expected Mr. and Mrs. Arnold to greet them. But he had disappeared and she was still upstairs, indisposed. Washington went to his room to prepare for dinner when Hamilton handed him a sheaf of dispatches.

Washington then read the news of Arnold’s betrayal. He asked Hamilton and Lafayette to join him. “Arnold has betrayed us,” he said. “Whom can we trust now??

Theatre

Washington ordered Hamilton to gather some men to intercept Arnold downriver. Then Arnold’s aide, Lt. Col. Richard Varick, came to Washington’s room and told him Mrs. Arnold seemed to have gone mad.

Washington then went to see Peggy, who he had known since girlhood. Peggy Shippen Arnold put on quite a show for him, thrashing, crying and raving deliriously. She convinced Washington, and for many years historians, that she knew nothing of Benedict Arnold’s treason. Her feigned madness gave her husband more time to escape.

Washington believed Benedict Arnold’s treason had unhinged his wife. He let her alone for dinner, and told no one else of Arnold’s treason. “Mrs. Arnold is sick and General Arnold is away,” Washington said. “We must therefore take our dinner without them.”

They barely touched their meal. Arnold’s aides, Lt. Col. Richard Varick and Maj. David Franks, had figured out Benedict Arnold’s treason. They knew they were under suspicion and covertly watched Washington to suss out what he knew. Washington and his officers did the same to them. “Never was there a more melancholy dinner,” Lafayette said years later. “The General was silent and reserved, and none of us spoke of what we were thinking about.”

After dinner, Washington asked Varick to stop outside. He told him about Benedict Arnold’s treason. Then he said he had no reason to suspect him or Franks, but they must consider themselves under arrest.

Peggy Shippen

Peggy had flirted with Andre during the British occupation of Philadelphia. Within a month of her marriage, Arnold corresponded with Andre. Later, evidence of Peggy’s involvement in Benedict Arnold’s treason came to light. The British had paid her £350 for handling secret letters.

The President’s House, Philadelphia, where Arnold lived as military general

Washington received a letter from Arnold, telling him Peggy didn’t know he’d turned traitor, and asking him to grant her safe passage to her family in Philadelphia. Washington gave her a choice: She could join her husband in New York or her family in Philadelphia. She chose Philadelphia.

At the same time, Washington intended to punish Benedict Arnold. He organized an attempt to track him down in New York, one that nearly succeeded. Had Arnold been captured, he would have been summarily hanged.

Aftermath

Andre went to the gallows on Oct. 2. A court martial exonerated Franks and Varick.

The British gave Arnold the rank of brigadier general, and he led his forces on destructive rampages through Virginia and Connecticut. Peggy eventually joined him in New York. After Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, the Arnold family left for London.

A few years later, Arnold returned to North America, settling in Canada to speculate in land and start a merchant shipping business. The family then returned to London, where Benedict Arnold died in 1801 at the age of 60. Peggy died three years later at the age of 44.

In 1781, American agents a letter that said the British had paid only £5,000 for Benedict Arnold’s treason, not the £20,000 he had demanded. Franklin wrote to Lafayette, calling it “a miserable bargain especially when one considers the quantity of infamy he has acquired to himself and entailed on his family.”

With thanks to Benedict Arnold: How The Traitor Was Unmasked by James Thomas Flexner, American Heritage, 1967; The Life and Treason of Benedict Arnold by Jared Sparks, 1851. This story updated in 2022,

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Fighting for Independence During a Smallpox Epidemic: Lake Champlain in 1776

Throughout the first six months of 1776, the soldiers of the American Northern Army in Canada fought against two deadly enemies: smallpox and the British military. The British turned out to be the less lethal of the two.

Mount Independence and Fort Ticonderoga. Photo courtesy of the author.

Development of a vaccine has now largely eradicated the highly contagious smallpox virus. But the disease could be so virulent it was known as the ‘speckled monster.’ Symptoms began with vomiting and high fever, followed a few days later by pustules in the mouth and on the tongue before spreading across the body. Recovery could take up to three weeks. Once infected, a person had about a one in three chance of dying.

The American army did not beat those odds.

The Invasion of Canada

In September 1775, the Continental Congress sent two expeditions to invade Quebec. One initially consisted of 2,000 men commanded by Brig. Gen. Richard Montgomery. They sailed up Lake Champlain toward Montreal, where they captured Fort St. John. Then they marched to Quebec, where they joined the second expedition led by Col. Benedict Arnold.

Arnold’s forces had dwindled to 600 men from the 1,100 that started out in Cambridge, Mass. It had taken months to reach Quebec through the Maine wilderness, and a third of Arnold’s men turned back during the grueling trek.

Map of the invasion of Canada.

Quebec

Montgomery’s forces joined Arnold’s in Quebec in early December. They launched an attack on the British fort in a howling snowstorm on New Year’s Eve – a disastrous mistake. Montgomery died in the battle, as did 50 men. Another 34 were wounded and 431 captured. The British lost only five killed and 14 wounded.

The Death of General Montgomery in the Attack on Quebec, Dec. 31, 1775, by John Trumbull

Smallpox had already begun to kill soldiers. The remaining forces under Arnold besieged the city for the next few months as the smallpox spread.

When reinforcements bolstered the British in May, the Northern Army began a disordered retreat. The army moved west from Quebec City toward Fort Ticonderoga, hindered by a staggering number of soldiers debilitated by smallpox.

Smallpox Misery

Dr. Lewis Beebe of Sheffield, Mass., arrived in Quebec in May. He kept a journal about his time in the army. In his entries we can see firsthand the misery caused by the epidemic. From Chambly, outside of Montreal, he wrote on May 26, “If ever I had a compassionate feeling for my fellow creatures… I think it was this day, to see Large barns filled with men in the very heighth of the small pox and not the least thing, to make them comfortable…”

Fort Chambly today. Photo courtesy of the author.

On June 17, as the army moved south toward Lake Champlain, Beebe wrote from Isle aux Noix:

Scarcely a tent upon this Isle but what contains one or more in distress and continually groaning, & calling for relief, but in vain! Requests of this Nature are as little regarded, as the singing of Crickets in a Summers evening. The most shocking of all Spectacles was to see a large barn Crowded full of men with this disorder… one nay two had large maggots, an inch long, Crawl out of their ears, were on almost every part of the body. No mortal will ever believe what these suffered unless they were eye witnessess.

Inoculation

Smallpox had no cure. But those who survived an infection would be immune. This led to soldiers seeking inoculation — intentional infection through the blood. This involved making an incision in the skin and applying pox to the wound. Those who were inoculated usually came down with a milder — though still harrowing — case of the disease with a much lower mortality rate. When recovered, those soldiers would have an immunity to future infections.

But inoculation violated regulations. Officers feared that inoculated soldiers would spread the disease to their comrades. If the soldiers all inoculated at one time, they would be too weak to defend against the enemy.

Nevertheless soldiers were surreptitiously inoculated. In May of 1776, Josiah Sabin served with the Green Mountain Boys at Quebec. Later in life Sabin recalled inoculating himself with smallpox. Then he also inoculated some of his comrades, blindfolded so as not to know who administered the inoculation. Nevertheless, Sabin was found out and only saved from severe punishment by the intervention of his commanding officer, Seth Warner.

Soldiering On

Finally, Benedict Arnold, in temporary command, issued an order allowing for inoculation. That lasted one day. Then Gen. John Thomas arrived, sent by Congress to take command of the army in Canada. He threatened execution for anyone performing or receiving inoculation. Thomas himself died of the disease in early June and the surreptitious inoculations went on.

Benedict Arnold

Later that summer, George Washington approved inoculation for the Continental Army.

Colonel Jeduthan Baldwin, an army engineer from North Brookfield, Mass., took inoculation on May 17, 1776. He described the progress of the disease in his journal. In six days he began to suffer symptoms including headache and pox. Over the next three weeks he suffered more headaches, sore throat, chills and, of course, painful pustules on his skin. But Baldwin continued to do his job the best he could, helping the retreat.

Crown Point

The army moved south on Lake Champlain to Crown Point and the large, damaged fort built by the British following the French and Indian War. Beebe arrived on the 26th of June. “The Regiment is in a most deplorable Situation,” he recorded in his journal, “between 4 & 500 now in the height of the small pox. Death is now become a daily visitant to the Camps…”

Crown Point today. Photo courtesy of the author.

Three days after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, John Adams wrote a letter to Abigail in which he reported on affairs in the north. “Our Army at Crown Point is an Object of Wretchedness, enough to fill a humane Mind, with Horror,” he wrote. “Disgraced, defeated, discontented, dispirited, diseased, naked, undisciplined, eaten up with Vermin—no Cloaths, Beds, Blanketts, no Medicines, no Victuals, but Salt Pork and flour.”

This army was charged with defending the newly minted United States of America from the 8,000 fresh British troops preparing to move south on Lake Champlain. The Americans had one advantage. The previous year, after capturing Fort Ticonderoga, they had also captured some gun boats. If the British tried to move south on the lake, the mini American navy could blow their troop ships to smithereens. Before the invasion could continue, the British needed to build their own war ships. This gave the Americans time to heal and prepare.

Philip Schuyler

From his headquarters in Albany, Maj. Gen. Philip Schuyler had command of the entire Northern Department, including this ravaged army. In early July he traveled to Crown Point to get a firsthand look at conditions there. With the consent of his general officers, Schuyler drew up a plan to handle the situation.

Philip Schuyler

First they needed to separate the fit soldiers from the ill, otherwise reinforcements would refuse to mingle with the infected. The sick were transported to Fort George at the southern end of Lake George.

Next Schuyler and his officers decided it would be a mistake to try to defend Crown Point. They did not have a large enough force to cover the long, narrow peninsula. It would be too easy for the British to sail cannon around the deep bay to the west and get the Americans in a crossfire. And it would be much more difficult to bring supplies and reinforcements.

But where to make a stand?

On July 12th, Schuyler answered that question in a letter to George Washington. “I am just returned from Crown point,” he wrote,

to which place I accompanied General Gates — On our Way to that place we stop’d at Tyconderoga and left Colonel Trumbull to take a View of the Grounds opposite to it and on the East Side of Lake Champlain…

Trumbull returned with a favorable report, wrote Schuyler, and on July 9 he and his general officers checked out the ground. They found it, “so remarkably strong as to require little Labour to make it tenable against a vast Superiority of Force, and fully to answer the purpose of preventing the Enemy from penetrating into the Country to the South of it.”

Mount Independence

The strong ground Schuyler referred to would soon be named Mount Independence, a 300-plus acre peninsula projecting northward from the Vermont shore. As a keystone to the defenses that included Fort Ticonderoga, the Mount would in a few short weeks buzz with activity as the Americans prepared to meet the British head on.

View of Mount Independence by By Zeph77 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Meanwhile, the steps taken by Schuyler paid off. The smallpox epidemic waned. By the end of August, Gen. Horatio Gates — in command of the Lake Champlain forces — could report to George Washington that the smallpox “is now perfectly removed from the Army.”

Dr. Beebe returned home at the end of July to recuperate from dysentery. He traveled north again at the end of August, intent on rejoining his regiment. he passed by Fort George, the smallpox hospital set up by Schuyler in early July.

“Visited the hospital,” he recorded on the 28th. [He] “found the number of sick to be about 700, viewed the burying place counted upwards of 300 graves… the appearance of which was melancholy indeed, to see such desolation made in our army.”

Bibliography

Cubbison, D. R. (2010). The American Northern Theater Army in 1776. McFarland.

Dann, J. C. (1999). The Revolution Remembered. University of Chicago Press.

Fenn, E. A. (2002). Pox Americana. Macmillan.

Frederic R. Kirkland, ed. “Journal of a Physician on the Expedition Against Canada.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. (Volume LIX, Number 4). October 1935.

Wickman, Donald. (2017) Strong Ground: Mount Independence and the American Revolution, Mount Independence Coalition.

Zeoli, Stephen. (2015) Mount Independence: The Enduring Legacy of a Unique Historic Place, 3rd Edition. Self published.

Stephen Zeoli spent two summers in his younger days as caretaker at Mount Independence State Historic Site in Orwell, Vt. Today, Steve is the president of the Mount Independence Coalition, the friends group working with the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation to interpret the historic site. He is also the author of the self-published book Mount Independence: The Enduring Legacy of a Unique Historic Place.

This story last updated in 2022.

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How John Adams Became A “Church going Animal”

It took a lifetime of study and reflection for John Adams to come up with his religious credo. In the end, the self-styled church going animal boiled it down to just four words.

He was an elderly ex-president, free of the public spotlight’s glare, when he finally confessed the essence of his faith to an old rival.

Church going Animal

John Adams spent his decades of rural retirement exchanging rich letters with friends and devouring key volumes on foreign faiths. A descendant of Puritan immigrants, he saw the world while serving as an American statesman in revolutionary Europe. Between his diplomatic tasks, Adams grew fascinated with comparing different religious beliefs. Frequent travel heightened his interest.

Adams was a lifelong student of church and state. He took notes on sermons, looked up biblical references, and explored aspects of ancient Egyptian religion. Writing to old colleague Dr. Benjamin Rush in the summer of 1811, Adams reflected on the pivotal role of religion in his life.

“It is notorious enough, that I have been a Church going Animal for Seventy Six years, i.e. from the Cradle,” he wrote.

John Adams, Church going Animal

A Providential Turn

Like one of his beloved oak trees, Adams’s faith had deep roots in New England culture. As a young man, he studied theology at Harvard College and considered becoming a Congregationalist minister. Back in Braintree, his family parish (now the United First Parish Church of Quincy, Unitarian Universalist), was battling through a controversy.

In John Adams’ words, the church’s new pastor Lemuel Briant was “a jocular and liberal scholar and divine.” A teenaged John Adams heard plenty of Briant’s radical theology. Shedding older Puritan ways, Briant told his community that practicing a Christian life–rather than repeating dogma–would open up a path to salvation, but only if they chose it.

Briant’s sermons sent a ripple. This idea was a fairly new one for worshippers to weigh.

Several local clergy took issue with Briant’s message. As the controversy unspooled, the preacher’s wife left him, after claiming that he had committed “several scandalous sins.”

Scandalous Sins

Church officials launched a full investigation into Briant’s moral character. From 1749 to 1753, Adams kept an eye on the pamphlets that supported or criticized Briant’s beliefs.

“I may say I was born & bred in the centre of Theological & Ecclesiastical controversy,” he recalled. “It broke out like the eruption of a volcano and blazed with portentious aspect for many years.”

Though he agreed with Briant’s spiritual outlook, Adams was troubled by the way that society had treated the minister. Lemuel Briant made it through the inquiry, but his health was broken, and he died in 1754.

To Adams, the whole debate bred a “Spirit of Dogmatism and Bigotry.” He was convinced that pursuing a career in the pulpit would “involve me in endless Altercations and make my Life miserable, without any prospect of doing any good to my fellow Men.” Far better, he thought, to study law.

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/church-going-animal-ufpc.jpg

Where John Adams started out as a church-going animal. The United First Parish Church of Quincy, Mass.

Puritan Echoes

By 1765, John Adams had opened his practice and begun a family with wife Abigail. New England’s unique religious history ran alongside his commute between Boston and Braintree.

Take the rows of locust trees lining Salem’s “Witchcraft Hill,” which reminded him of the Puritans’ fiery witchcraft trials, and of “that memorable Victory over the Prince of the Power of the Air.”

He knew little for certain about his own Puritan ancestors, but John Adams was proud to invoke them and their legacy of dissent. When he sat down to write his Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law that summer, Adams harkened back to family history. He was anxious to show that “ordinary” men and women could overturn tyranny, no matter the conditions they inherited.

“Their greatest concern seems to have been to establish a government of the church more consistent with the scriptures, and a government of the state more agreable to the dignity of humane nature, than any they had seen in Europe: and to transmit such a government down to their posterity, with the means of securing and preserving it, for ever,” Adams wrote.

The Cost of Freedom

According to John Adams, harnessing Providence’s will with a liberal education had emboldened the Puritans’ Great Migration. He applauded their drive to reform the Church of the England, and to seek out new streams of profit in the early American colonies.

Adams had a political lesson for his peers of 1765, too. He drew on the actions of the “vexed” Puritans to ignite the revolutionary imagination of his family and friends. Adams reminded readers that Puritan colonists had laid their faith in American success, opening schools and carving out towns. Their freedom, he wrote, came at great cost.

“Be it remembred, however, that liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker,” he wrote. “But if we had not, our fathers have earned, and bought it for us, at the expence of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.”

A World Within

John Adams spent much of the 1770s and the 1780s on the road, traveling first to the Continental Congress, and then serving as an American minister to Europe. As he moved around the Continent, Adams sought out diverse religious experiences in France, the Netherlands, and England. He recorded foreign rituals and new beliefs, and he grew to appreciate the sensory impact of religion.

While he embraced the idea of religious toleration, Adams did not always find it easy to practice. An early experience at a Catholic mass in Philadelphia left him dazzled by the organ music but choking on incense. The “Grandmother Church” had “Every Thing which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant,” John told Abigail. “I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.” He remained curious about beliefs beyond his own, acquiring books and writing to clergy.

Adams spent his final years at Peacefield, immersed in reading about foreign faiths and cultures. When he and Thomas Jefferson renewed their correspondence in 1812, religion became a favorite subject. “I have been a diligent Student for many years in Books whose Titles you have never Seen,” Adams teased his former rival.

At Jefferson’s request, and after a lifetime of seeking, John Adams unveiled his religious credo: “Be Just and Good.”

End Notes

Notes on the author of How John Adams Became A “Church going Animal”

Sara Georgini, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., earned her doctorate in history at Boston University. She is the series editor for The Papers of John Adams, part of the Adams Papers editorial project based at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the author of Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family (Oxford University Press, 2019). Follow her on Twitter: @sarageorgini. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: John Adams. Portrait, pastel on paper by Benjamin Blyth, ca. 1766. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and United First Parish Church (Unitarian Universalist), Quincy, Massachusetts.

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More Revolutionaries Died in Prison Than on the Battlefield. A Lot More.

Late in 1776, the British army released thousands of revolutionaries imprisoned in New York. Their condition – starving, diseased, near death – horrified the American colonies.

That was just the beginning. The British military command would continue to incarcerate and abuse some 30,000 revolutionaries in New York.

The patriot press spread the news of the prisoner abuse, hardening public opinion against the British. A typical news item from the Connecticut Gazette on Jan. 4, 1782, describes 130 prisoners landed from New York in deplorable condition. “It is enough to melt the most obdurate heart to see these miserable objects landed at our wharves sick and dying, and the few rags they have on covered with vermin and their own excrements,” reported the Gazette.

Somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of the revolutionary prisoners died. One historian estimates two to three times as many men died in New York prisons than in battle.

“The POW story was, in short, a public-relations disaster for the British,” wrote Edward G. Burrows in The Prisoners of New York in the Long Island History Journal. “It enflamed public opinion, squelched any hope of reconciliation, and turned resistance into a fight to the death.”

Revolutionaries in prison aboard the Jersey.

Revolutionaries as POWs

British troops landed in New York City on Sept. 15, 1776 and remained until November of 1783. George Washington and his men tried to dislodge them during the Battle of Long Island in August of 1776. Not only did he fail, but the British captured thousands of Continental Army prisoners. Two months later, the British captured Fort Washington and more revolutionaries.

In the end, they took more than 4,000 Continental Army soldiers (4,114 by one count) and 300 officers. And they held them in deplorable conditions in non-Anglican churches, sugar refineries, jails, almshouses and broken-down warships. Civilians, too, ended up in the horribly overcrowded lockups: 800 in one church, 20 per cell in the city jail and 1100 in the most notorious prison ship, the Jersey.

The notorious Jersey, moored off Long Island

Then in December the POW revolutionaries began to die in heaps.

The British military commander, Lt. Gen. Sir William Howe, released nearly 2,300 soldiers on parole. He informed George Washington that only a few remained in New York.

But what happened to the other revolutionary prisoners – nearly 2,000 of them? One patriot said he sent “one half to the world of spirits for want of food.”

Brutal Example

Howe loaded hundreds of starving prisoners onto transport ships. Some couldn’t make it that far. Ethan Allen, on parole himself, saw several prisoners fall dead in the streets as they tried to walk to the vessels in New York Harbor.

The Glasgow transported about 200 revolutionary prisoners to Milford, Conn. At least 20 died on the way. Nineteen more died on their first night in Connecticut. Thirty-two were too sick to move once they landed. And many of those who could walk home died en route. Most of those who made it home died soon thereafter.

That first mass prisoner release ended January 27, 1777.

In February of 1777, Brig. Gen. Samuel Holden Parsons reported about three-fourths of paroled revolutionaries imprisoned near Lyme, Conn., had died already.

To the left is a sugar house in Manhattan that once held as many as 500 prisoners.

Even as Howe was releasing the POWs, Washington captured hundreds of Hessian troops during the Battle of Trenton. He ordered his men to treat them humanely.

“Let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren who have fallen into their hands,” Washington said.

But the British continued to abuse their revolutionary prisoners, and the newspapers continued to print the stories.

Prisoner Abuse

In 1777, the Continental Congress investigated prisoner abuse, which deeply dismayed John Adams. “I who would not hurt the Hair of the Head of any Animal . . . am obliged to hear continual Accounts of . . . the most tormenting Ways of starving and freezing, committed by our Enemies.”

The British gave the prisoners only a tiny amount of food, often just moldy biscuit and raw pork. Slop buckets overflowed with excrement, while ticks and lice infested the prisoners’ clothing. Thousands died of typhus, dysentery, smallpox and scurvy. Some revolutionary prisoners ate their own shoes and clothes.

The prisoners in one notorious prison, the Provost, complained of their treatment:

…they were put on the scanty allowance of two pounds hard biscuit, and two pounds of raw pork per week, without fuel to dress it. That they were frequently supplied with water from a pump where all kinds of filth was thrown, by which it was rendered obnoxious and unwholesome, the effects of which were to cause much sickness. That good water could have been as easily obtained. That they were denied the benefit of a hospital; not permitted to send for medicine, nor to have the services of a doctor, even when in the greatest distress. That married men and others who lay at the point of death were refused permission to have their wives or other relations admitted to see them. And that these poor women, for attempting to gain admittance, were often beaten from the prison door.

Devastating Impact

Some prisoners sold their shoes and clothes to the guards in exchange for food. Others weren’t so lucky. The guards put poison powder in their food because they wanted their watches or silver buckles.

William Howe

The British also tormented some revolutionary prisoners, making them sit on coffins with ropes around their necks and threatening to hang them.

In many cases, the British hoped to starve the prisoners into submission, hoping they’d enlist in the British army or navy. Some succumbed, but most resisted.

The sacrifice was enormous. Litchfield, Conn., for example, sent 36 men to the defense of Fort Washington. Only six returned. Four died in battle, but the British took 32 prisoner. Of those, 20 died in the New York prisons and six on the way home.

Danbury sent 100 men to defend Fort Washington. The British took 50 prisoner and held them in a sugar house. Two survived.

The historian Burrows reminds us to acknowledge their sacrifice. The United States wasn’t just made by “those gentlemen in powdered wigs and knee britches we have heard so much about in recent years,” he wrote. The country was also made by “thousands upon thousands of mostly ordinary people who believed in something they considered worth dying for.”

With thanks to the Journal of the American Revolution, 1776 – The Horror Show by Brian O’Malley and the Long Island History Journal, The Prisoners of New York by Edward G. Burrows. This story was updated in 2021.

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Connecticut Battles Pennsylvania in the Pennamite Wars

The Pennamite Wars between Connecticut and Pennsylvania involved some of the worst brutality of the Revolutionary era. They also resulted in the name of a western state.

Settlers from both Pennsylvania and Connecticut claimed ownership of 23 miles along the Susquehanna River. Called the Wyoming Valley, it had lush, fertile plains that rarely disgorged a stone when plowed.

King Charles II had given the valley to Connecticut in 1662. Unfortunately, he also gave it to Pennsylvania in 1681. In 1768, a development company met in Hartford to divide up the Wyoming Valley into five towns, which they named Plymouth, Kingston, Hanover, Wilkes-Barre, and Pittston.

When the first Connecticut settlers arrived, they found Pennamites – Pennsylvanians – already there.

Fighting soon broke out. And then it broke out again and again for the next 30 years. The bloodiest fight – a massacre, really — in 1778 was later recast as a conflict of the American Revolution.

The Battle of Wyoming, however, had more to do with competition over land than revolution. Its brutality stoked such outrage that George Washington sent Gen. John Sullivan on a scorched earth campaign to retaliate.

First Pennamite War

When 40 Connecticut Yankees arrived in the Wyoming Valley, they set about building two forts, Durkee and Forty, on one side of the Susquehanna River. The Pennamites built forts Wyoming and Ogden on the other side to stop the Yankee encroachment on their land.

The two sides skirmished for years, though accounts vary on the number of casualties and what actually counts as a Pennamite battle.

In 1763, someone murdered a respected Indian chief, Teedyuscung. His son blamed Connecticut and raided a Connecticut settlement, killing more than two dozen people.

But those first conflicts certainly did not claim anywhere near as many lives as the Battle of Wyoming.

Pennamite War forts along the Susquehanna.

Battle of Wyoming

During the American Revolution, the Connecticut militia in the Wyoming Valley got called up to serve in the Continental Army. The departure of hundreds of able-bodied men left the Connecticut settlements vulnerable.

A British officer named John Butler decided to exploit Pennamite resentment against the Connecticut settlers. He recruited loyalist Pennamites as well as Iroquois Indians (who obviously had their own grievances against settlers) to attack the Yankees. They massed outside of Forty Fort on July 3, 1778.

Another Butler, a Yankee leader with a first name of Zebulon, led some 300 men from the fort to attack the much larger force of about 500 British soldiers, Pennamite Loyalists and Indian warriors. He should have stayed inside the fort.

Accounts of the subsequent massacre probably exaggerated the atrocities committed against the Connecticut Yankees. But the British-led forces claimed to take 227 scalps. Later accounts put the casualties at between 150 and 340 lives.

Atrocities

In 1891, Milo M. Acker presented to the Canisteo Valley Historical Society a toned-down account of the Battle of Wyoming. He described how John Butler’s men attacked Zebulon Butler’s forces, who then panicked and ran.

“Men were transformed into demons, and while Indian marksman skillfully wounded the flying Yankees in the thigh bone, thus disabling them yet saving them for future Tories, both Tories and Indians clubbed and scalped them as they tried to conceal themselves near by or in the water,” he wrote.

One Yankee, a German immigrant named Henry Pencil, hid in the willows on the river’s edge. His brother John, who took the Pennamite side in the conflict, happened to discover him. Henry, already wounded by an arrow, struggled up the bank, crying he would serve John forever if he would spare him.

“’Mighty well,’ was the taunting reply, ‘but you are a damned rebel,’ and the Tory shot him dead,” wrote Acker. “Even the Indians were struck with horror at this deed.”

A captain named Bidlack was thrown on a fire and held down with pitchforks while he burned.

And an Indian queen named Esther forced as many as 18 men to kneel around a rock, wrote Acker. “This fiend in woman’s shape danced slowly around the ring and crushed out their brains in turn, to the rhyme of a monotonous and blood-curdling death chant,” he wrote.

The Pennamite side burned nearly every Yankee house and barn, reducing the Wyoming valley to a smoking ruin.

The Battle of Wyoming

Sullivan’s Expedition

The Indians later denied committing any ritual torture, but the massacre had enormous propaganda value. The Yankees successfully branded the battle as one of Loyalists vs. Patriots. (Ironically, King George III had upheld the Yankee claim in 1771.)

A Scottish poet named Thomas Campbell wrote a poem about the battle, Gertrude of Wyoming; A Pennsylvanian Tale. The poem was so popular that a western territory was named Wyoming after it, no doubt to the bewilderment of the Wyoming settlers.

The summer after the Pennamites massacred the Yankees, George Washington ordered Gen. John Sullivan to retaliate. In 1779, Sullivan led Continental troops and Pennsylvania militia from Easton, Pa., to upstate New York. They methodically torched 40 Iroquois villages and an enormous amount of stored corn and crops.

Many Iroquois starved to death the following winter, and the tribe never fully recovered from the Sullivan expedition. But they continued to harass the Wyoming Valley settlers for years.

Final Years of Pennamite Wars

In 1782, the Continental Congress decreed that the Wyoming Valley belonged to the Pennamites and the Connecticut Yankees had no claim to the land. Unsurprisingly, more violence broke out as Pennamite forces cleared out the Yankee settlers. They nearly succeeded.

Only 2,000 Connecticut Yankees remained, mostly women and children scattered in the woods. They suffered starvation and cold, with only primitive huts of bark and thatch to shelter them from the coming winter. Their enemies possessed all their property — houses, farms and crops.

Armed men from Connecticut and Vermont rushed to the region to defend against the Pennamites. Then in 1787, the Pennsylvania Assembly granted the Connecticut settlers the right to their lands.

By 1799 the final Pennamite War died down, when the new federal government decreed the Yankee lands part of Pennsylvania and the Yankees were Pennsylvania citizens with full rights to their lands.

If you enjoyed this story, you might also want to read about how Cleveland belonged to Connecticut.

Map of Connecticut Land Claims: By User:Kmusser – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1290884; the Wyoming Massacre, painting by Alonzo Chappel. With thanks to Kathryn Shively Meier, The Landscape of Indian and White Violence in Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, 1753-1800, in Blood in the Hills
A History of Violence in Appalachia, ed. by Bruce Stewart. This story was updated in 2023.

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