Conquered into Liberty by Eliot A. Cohen

Author:Eliot A. Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2011-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

This post has been too much neglected

However irksome the challenges for Burgoyne’s army may have looked, they were mere inconveniences compared with the predicament of the Americans at Ticonderoga and Crown Point. Very shortly after the withdrawal of Carleton’s fleet in November 1776, much of the army had left Ticonderoga and Mount Independence for Albany and points south, accompanied by Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold. Colonel Jeduthan Baldwin, the self-taught engineer who had constructed much of the fortifications, took leave as well, departing on December 4 for a short visit home, to Brookfield, Massachusetts, which he reached two months later after dutifully checking in with headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After a week at home, the same sense of duty had him trudging back to Ticonderoga, arriving there on February 24, 1777, in a driving snowstorm.

That winter of 1776–77 at Ticonderoga was grim—as grim in its own way as the far more famous encampment at Valley Forge. The small garrison was under the competent command of Colonel Anthony Wayne, a short, fiery thirty-two-year-old who had served in the provincial assembly of Pennsylvania, but soon abandoned politics for his natural vocation—war. The troops consisted of a handful of regiments from New England and the middle colonies who loathed one another, a problem compounded by the sheer hardship of the winter. Over the years the garrisons of Ticonderoga had stripped the immediate area around it of firewood, and it was a matter of “unexpressible concern” to the commander simply to get enough fuel to stave off the bitter North Country cold. 13 Morale had been none too high even as the British had approached during the previous campaign, a disconsolate General Gates telling his sullen garrison that “the General is very unhappy to see the want of that spirit, alertness, and industry so necessary for the immediate completion of the forts, and redoubt, prevail so shamefully in this army. The fleet have played a noble part, let it not be said hereafter, that the cause of all America was injured by the supineness of the Northern Army.” 14

Supine or not, however, the northern army’s numbers shrank swiftly once the British had withdrawn to Canada in November 1776. By the end of the month Colonel Wayne, commanding one regiment each from Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, plus three from his native Pennsylvania, had some 2,450 rank and file on his books—of whom fewer than half, 1,100 in all, were fit for duty, with nearly as many sick and the rest on furlough or detachment. 15 Colonial antipathies made a miserable set of circumstances worse. When Wayne ordered the Third New Jersey from its barracks at Ticonderoga to the exposed hillside of Mount Independence, the troops suspected Pennsylvania prejudice against their state. And when the son of the colonel of the Sixth Massachusetts began mending the broken shoes of soldiers in his father’s regiment, the Pennsylvania officers expressed their disgust at this undignified democratical spirit by sneers, followed, after a drinking bout, by smashing his workbench to pieces.

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