Stephenson M. Patriot Battles. How the War of Independence Was Fought

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feeding the beast 109

was tardy in complying, Washington took it upon himself to direct

regimental quartermasters to gather sorrel and watercress for salads,

which, he reported, had a “most salutary effect.”

The British army also

encouraged the growing of vegetables and salad greens. During the siege

of Boston the British Treasury informed General Gage that “a good

quantity of the small Salled [salad] Seed will be sent out, as it will grow,

on being sown, almost anywhere on a little earth, and may be raised

by the Soldiers on a little Space by each Mess, in sufficient quantities

for their refreshment and use.”

Washington also had interesting ideas

about the place of alcohol in a healthy diet. He bemoaned “devouring

large quantities of animal food, untemper’d by vegetables or vinegar,

or by any other drink but water . . . Beer or cider seldom comes within

the verge of the camp, and rum in too small quantities.” One gill (one

quarter pint) of rum was meant to be issued on fatigue days.

Dr. Benjamin Rush’s characteristically forceful views on the

soldiers’ diet would have been applauded today. For example, he wrote

in his Directions for Preserving the Health of Soldiers of April 1777 that

porridge was the answer.

The Diet of soldiers should consist chiefly of vegetables. The nature

of their duty, as well as their former habits of life, require it. If every

tree on the continent of America produced Jesuits bark, it would not

be sufficient to reserve or restore the health of soldiers who eat two or

three pounds of flesh in a day. Their vegetables should be well cooked.

It is of the last consequence that damaged flour should not be used in

camp. It is the seed of many disorders. It is of equal consequence that

good flour should not be unwholesome by an error in making it into

bread. Perhaps it was the danger to which flour was always exposed

of being damaged in a camp, or being rendered unwholesome from

the manner of baking it, that led the Roman generals to use wheat

instead of flour for the daily food of their soldiers. Caesar fed his

troops with wheat only . . . It was prepared by being well boiled,

and was eaten with spoons in the room of bread. If a little sugar or

molasses is added to wheat . . . it forms not only a most wholesome

food but a most agreeable repast.

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Despite the good Dr. Rush’s admonitions concerning the danger

of bread, it remained, with meat, the most important element of a

soldier’s diet. Rush, though, had a point. A regimental baker (usually

simply a designated soldier who had some experience of baking in

civilian life) could make a nice profit for himself. He took the soldier’s

one pound of flour and delivered back one pound of bread. One pound

of flour makes approximately one and one-third pounds of bread—

and so the extra 30 percent of flour became the baker’s “perk,” which

he could sell to local civilians. Additives, some good, some decidedly

less so, found their way into the soldiers’ flour ration. Rye gave a

distinctive and not unpleasant acidity; bran slowed digestion, bulked

up the bread, and decreased hunger. Underbaked bread produced

stomach acidity and promoted flatulence. However, white bread was

highly prized, and unscrupulous bakers were known to add chalk

and plaster of Paris to the flour. This practice was not confined to

the military. The eighteenth-century demand for white bread led

Tobias Smollett in Humphrey Clinker, written in 1771, to complain:

“The bread I eat in London is a deleterious paste, mixed up with

chalk, alum, and bone-ashes; insipid to the taste and destructive to the

constitution. The good people are not ignorant of this adulteration;

but they prefer it to wholesome bread, because it is whiter than the

meal of corn.” The bread supplied to the British army was often

inedible. The victualler at New York in 1776 described it as “very old

Bread, Weavile Eaten, full of Maggots, Mouldy, musty and rotten and

entirely unfit for men to eat.”

Early in 1777 Congress had appointed Christopher Ludwick as

superintendent of bakers for the Continental army. Ludwick and his

bakers established themselves at the public ovens at Morristown and

by 1780 were turning out 1,500 loaves of “hard” bread. Hard bread (as

opposed to the soft bread the soldiers made themselves) was more like

the hardtack biscuit, so familiar to sailors in the age of sail. It lasted

longer and took up less space in a soldier’s knapsack, which was a great

advantage for troops on campaign. Private Joseph Martin called it “sea

bread” and, when given the chance, stocked up.

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At the lower end of the street [he was in New York City prior to

the battle of Brooklyn in August 1776] were placed several casks

of sea-bread, made I believe, of canel and peas-meal, nearly hard

enough for musket flints; the casks were unheaded and each man

was allowed to take as many as he could, as he marched by. As

my good luck would have it, there was a momentary halt made;

I improved the opportunity thus offered me, as every good soldier

should upon all important occasions, to get as many of the biscuits

as I possibly could . . . I filled my bosom, and took as many as I

could hold in my hand . . . they were hard enough to break the

teeth of a rat.

Baking for soldiers on the move was difficult, and in July of 1777

Washington ordered that small portable ovens constructed of sheet

iron be issued, one per brigade. But by the time the ovens arrived at

the end of the year when the army was going into winter quarters at

Valley Forge, the supply of flour was extremely limited. During hard

times soldiers were reduced to making crude “fire cakes,” a simple

paste of flour and water griddled on hot stones. “Fire-cake and water

for breakfast! Fire-cake and water for dinner! Fire-cake and water for

supper! The Lord send our Commissary for Purchases may have to live

on fire-cake and water!” wailed Dr. Albigence Waldo from the Valley

Forge camp. Without salt, it was dreary food indeed.

Salt was the refrigeration of the pre-refrigeration age. (Chemical

refrigeration—dissolving saltpeter in water—was discovered in Italy

in the 1540s, but the first commercial refrigeration plant was built

by Alexander Catlin Twining at the Cuyahoga Locomotive Works,

Cleveland, Ohio, in 1850.) “Salt,” said Joseph Martin, “was as valuable

as gold with the soldiers.” And when he stumbled on a barrelful during

one his frequent foraging expeditions, he filled his pockets with it.

Used for preserving as well as flavoring meat and fish, “it was as essential

in the Revolutionary War as gunpowder and almost as scarce.”

Before

the Revolution it had been imported, mainly from Turk Island (in the

Turks and Caicos group at the southernmost extent of the Bahamian

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archipelago) and Bermuda—both British possessions. Even though a

barter trade continued throughout the war between the islands and the

colonies, there were still grave shortages and prices had to be regulated

to try and curb profiteering, but without much success. Congress, in

an attempt to alleviate the situation, ordered that all incoming ships

bringing in cargoes bought with congressional money should be

ballasted with salt. The saltworks in Virginia and New Jersey became

targets for British raids, and of the ships specifically chartered to import

salt, half were intercepted.

The lack of salt to cure meat as well as the cost of transporting

barrels of cured meat meant that cattle had to be driven considerable

distances to be close enough to the army before they could be slaughtered,

and the shortage of forage en route inevitably resulted in emaciated

beasts (“quite transparent,” wrote Joseph Martin. “I thought at the time

what an excellent lantern it would make”). Eating meat unseasoned

with salt was a common complaint, but even salted meat had limited

appeal, especially if it was old. After a year in brine it had lost much of

its nutritional value, and some of it was much older. A Hessian private

en route to America described just such an ancient delectable: “The

pork seemed to be four or five years old. It was streaked with black

towards the outside and was yellow further in, with a little white in

the middle. The salt beef was in much the same condition.”

A British

soldier described it “as hard as wood, as lean as carrion, and as rusty as

the devil.”

Tainted meat was sometimes rescued, if that is the right

word, by boiling it with charcoal, ashes, lye, or potash.

Most of the cattle and hogs eaten by the Continental army came from

the plentiful livestock resources of New England, but organizational

problems in the Commissary Department resulted in severe shortages

not only of beef on the hoof but also of salted pork by the winter of 1777.

The army at Valley Forge had practically no meat and only twenty-five

barrels of flour. On Christmas Day 1777 there was not a single animal

in the camp to be slaughtered. By 4 January 1778 the camp commissary

reported that “on this day [the army] will consume the whole of the

salt provisions Fish &c and God only knows what will be for the

troops tomorrow.”

Dr. Albigence Waldo gives some idea of what

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the troops were reduced to: “Poor food . . . nasty cookery—vomit half

my time . . . There comes a bowl of beef soup, full of burnt leaves and

dirt, sickish enough to make Hector spue.”

Joseph Martin arrived at

Valley Forge already famished, thirsty, and exhausted. Unable to find

water, he was forced to buy some with his last money. He endured

two nights and one day with nothing at all to eat except “half a small

pumpkin,” which, he reported, “I cooked by placing it upon a rock, the

skin side uppermost, and making a fire upon it; by the time it was heat

through I devoured it with as keen an appetite as I should a pie made

of it some other time.”

The Christmas of 1779 at Morristown was, if

anything, more desperate. “Our magazines,” wrote Washington, “are

absolutely empty everywhere and our commissaries entirely destitute

of money or credit to replenish them. We have never experienced a like

extremity at any period of the war.”

Even by the end of May 1780

Lafayette looked pityingly on “an army that is reduced to nothing, that

wants provisions, and has not the necessary means to make war.”

Hunger and hardship forced the soldier to make desperate

culinary innovations. In the fall and early winter of 1775 Benedict

Arnold’s little army carried out one of the most heroic expeditions in

American military history: a journey from Massachusetts up through

the wilderness of Maine to Quebec, navigating the rivers where possible,

manhandling their unwieldy bateaux in exhausting portages where not.

Conditions were appalling, the men often starving. One of them, Dr.

Isaac Senter, described some “sumptuous eating”: “Our bill of fare for

last night and this morning consisted of the jawbone of a swine destitute

of any covering. This we boiled in a quantity of water, that with a little

thickening constituted our sumptuous eating.” By 1 November he was

reporting:

Our greatest luxuries now consist in a little water, stiffened with

flour, in imitation of shoemakers’ paste . . . Instead of the diarrhea,

which tried our men most shockingly in the former part of our

march, the reverse was now the complaint, which continued for

many days . . . The voracious disposition many of us had now

arrived at rendered almost anything admissible. Clean and unclean

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were forms now little in use. In company was a poor dog [who

had] hitherto lived through all the tribulations, became a prey for

the sustenance of the assassinators. This poor animal was instantly

devoured without leaving any vestige of the sacrifice. Nor did the

shaving soap, pomatum, and even the lip salve, leather of their

shoes, cartridge boxes etc., share any better fate.

Captain Simeon Thayer was also on the march to Quebec and recorded

his men “taking up some rawhides that lay for several days in the bottom

of their boats, intending for to make them [into] shoes or moccasins

[but instead] chopping them to pieces, singeing first the hair, afterwards

boiling them and living on the juice or liquid that they soaked from it

for a considerable time.”

On Nathanael Greene’s march that led to his defeat at the battle of

Eutaw Springs in South Carolina in 1781, the men were starving. Some

of them had covered over 300 miles in twenty-two days: “Rice furnished

our substitute for bread . . . Of meat we had literally none . . . Frogs

abounded . . . and on them chiefly did the light troops subsist. Even

alligators were used by a few.”

A good soldier improvises and puts

the best face he can on it, as James Collins did just prior to the battle of

Kings Mountain, South Carolina, in October 1780.

Everyone ate what they could get . . . sometimes eating raw turnips

and often resorting to a little parched corn, which, by the by, I

have often thought, if a man would eat a mess of parched corn and

swallow two or three spoonfuls of honey, then take a good draft of

cold water, he would pass longer without suffering than with any

other diet he could use.

The main meal for both British and American soldiers was around

midday (as it was for most civilians). The men ate in messes of about

twelve, with one of their number designated as cook—an often thankless

job. There were no mess kitchens and very few utensils. A nine-quart

iron kettle was issued to every six to ten men. (Officers were issued the

luxury of lids, while enlisted men had to make do with open kettles.)

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The kettle weighed about three pounds, and lugging it on a march was

a chore every man contrived to avoid, but with a little guile it might be

surreptitiously infiltrated into the baggage wagon. The culinary wisdom

of the day frowned on certain cooking methods. Food, pronounced

Henry Knox, with a culinary confidence surprising in an artillerist,

“ought always to be boiled or roasted, never fried, baked or broiled,

which modes are very unhealthy.”

It would take genetic reengineering

to prevent an American man from grilling, and revolutionary soldiers

were no exception. Ramrods made excellent spits, and old iron barrel

hoops were transformed into gridirons.

The Continental soldier often had to provide his own eating

utensils, but on occasion they came as standard issue. Maryland troops,

for example, were provided a wooden trencher (plate), and bowl, as

well as wooden and pewter spoons. Each man would have his knife, of

course; and for quaffing his rum, cider, beer, or whiskey, a horn cup,

which was extremely light compared with pewter or ceramic. Officers,

as might be expected, had more refined utensils. George Washington’s

mess kit, for example, was a very elaborate affair housed in a handsome

fourteen-compartment wood chest lined with green wool. It contained

six tin plates, three tin platters, four tin pots with detachable handles,

two knives, four forks, a gridiron, two tinderboxes, two glass bottles for

salt and pepper, and eight cork-stoppered glass bottles for spirits.

The problems of supply were equally problematic for the British,

but they took a different shape. The original hope of the British

strategists was that the army would be able to live off the land, sustaining

itself from foodstuffs it would find in America. The opposite proved

to be the case. Because it could never break into the hinterland and

hold substantial areas, and thus provision itself, the British army was

effectively contained geographically to peripheral “garrisons” (Boston,

New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah, and finally, Yorktown)

and so denied access to sources of local supply. It was always somehow

stuck out on the margins. Cornwallis recognized this when he railed at

the strategy of “posts” and urged his commander in chief, Clinton, to

break out into rich, and relatively untouched, Virginia. The strategic

flow was, however, against Cornwallis, and one of the ironies of the

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war was that he ended up (and ended the war) penned in the rat hole

of Yorktown. So, unable to sustain itself entirely in-country, the British

army was dependent on supplies from the British Isles.

Cork in western Ireland was the great depot into which beef, flour,

pork, rum, munitions, and clothing flowed on their way to the army

in America. The quantities were prodigious. In 1776 alone 1.8 million

pounds of beef, 7 million pounds of pork, almost 10 million pounds

of flour, and 1.7 million pounds of oatmeal and rice were shipped.

Each British soldier in North America consumed one-third of a ton of

food per year, much of it sent from Britain.

Fodder was too bulky to

justify the cost of shipping it from Britain, and this in itself had strategic

consequences. For example, General Howe’s decision to maintain wide-

flung cantonments like Trenton and Princeton in New Jersey in 1776

was largely dictated by the need to find provisions locally, particularly

forage, but it exposed a vulnerability that Washington exploited

brilliantly. Time and again British commanders complained to London

that their strategic options were severely limited by shortages of supply.

In September and October 1778 Sir Henry Clinton, for example, wrote

to Lord Germain: “Your Lordship will be startled when I inform you

that this Army has now but a fortnight’s Flour left . . . Our Meat with

the Assistance of Cattle purchased here will last about forty days beyond

Xmas, and a Bread composed of Peas, Indian Corn and Oatmeal can be

furnished for about the same time. After that I do not know how we

shall subsist.”

It was a sentiment that Washington would have heartily

endorsed.

The quartermaster general for the British army in North America

was Sir William Erskine (until June 1779, Lord Cathcart thereafter).

The Commissary Department was split between Canada and the

rest of Britain’s North American possessions from Nova Scotia south

to Florida. Nathaniel Day was commissary general for Canada,

while three men held the post for the rest of North America: Daniel

Chaumier (February 1774–February 1777), Daniel Weir (February

1777–September 1781), and Brook Watson (March 1782–December

1783). Many factors conspired to make life immensely difficult for the

commissaries. As in the American army, corruption was widespread

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(Chaumier was certainly involved in some very dubious business, and

was dismissed because of it), and theft and fraud were rife. Nathaniel

Day railed at the light-fingered Canadians he employed: Their

“propensity for pilfering is such that it obliges me to send Conductors

[inspectors] to protect the provisions. Notwithstanding all my efforts to

protect it, I have had the Mortification to see the Butter taken out of the

Firkins [casks] and Stones etc. put in lieu to compleat the Weight and

so dexterously headed [resealed] that the best eye could not perceive the

deception.”

Back in Britain contractors took their piece of the action

at the source: short-weighting, hiding defective provisions under good,

and so on with impressive creativity: “The merchants begin to sniff the

cadaverous haut goût of lucrative war,” observed Edmund Burke, one

of the leaders of the opposition to the war in the House of Commons.

Glut and shortage often threw the shipments out of kilter. Sometimes

there was not enough butter but too many peas; or a mountain of flour

but insufficient beef. Careless stowage on the transports and shoddy

packaging accounted for grievous losses. And when the provisions

finally did arrive, they could sit around on the wharves rotting for lack

of transportation to the interior.

If the American supply machine was severely hampered by the

failure of a central authority, so too was the British. Its bureaucracy was

simply not sufficiently evolved to cope with the logistical complexities

of the war in America as well as other parts of its empire simultaneously.

In Britain three boards shared responsibility for transporting the

myriad requirements of the army across the Atlantic. The Treasury

Board undertook shipping all provisions through private contractors;

the Ordnance Board carried artillery, engineers, and munitions; the

Navy Board transported infantry, cavalry, hospital stores and, after

1779, grudgingly took on the responsibilities of the Treasury Board.

As can be imagined, there was constant infighting and finger-pointing,

especially between the Navy and Treasury boards.

The shortage of shipping was crippling, and the length of time

transports were held in America aggravated the situation. John

Robinson in England implored Howe in April 1776: “The immense

Quantity of Tonnage employed and wanted, have drained this Country

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of Ships so that without . . . distressing the Commerce of the Kingdoms,

Transports are not to be had . . . The Distress for Want of Transports is

so great that it would be of the utmost Benefit . . . if it should be possible

for you . . . to spare some of your largest Ships and return them home

to be employed as Victuallers.”

But it was not only the quantity but

also the quality of the ships that exacerbated the issue. They were, more

often than not, banged-up old tubs, and to travel in them for the six to

eight weeks of an average transatlantic voyage was to experience a circle

of hell that would have turned Dante green. Captain Jacobs, a British

Guards’ officer, left this animated description: “There was continued

destruction in the foretops, the pox above-board, the plague between

decks, hell in the forecastle, the devil at the helm.”