Read Online The First American Army by Bruce Chadwick - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Bruce Chadwick
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“I must lie in prison ’til the wars are over and not have the pleasure to receive one letter from home; for I find by unhappy experience that friends in America are very scarce. It is very surprising that I cannot find one friend to write to me. This mystery is very dark to me, and I cannot account for it” (most likely Mrs. Foot, like many others, simply did not know where her husband was being held). 8
The windows of the convent where Jeremiah Greenman was housed did give the men good seats for the weeks-long, rather feeble siege of the town that Arnold tried to oversee from his hospital bed. Greenman regularly observed fires in St. Roche’s, outside the city, and at distant farmhouses that he surmised were caused by British bombardment. He and the men were certain that another American attack on Quebec would begin shortly and that they would soon be freed. Greenman noted, “We live very happily and contented, though we are in such a dismal hole, hoping the first dark night that our people will be in and redeem us.” The chance to watch the war ended in a few days when their jailers nailed thick wooden planks across their windows to prevent any further viewing.
By March 1, a smallpox epidemic had raced through the convent, as it had struck throughout the Quebec area. Greenman wrote that nearly sixty men had been afflicted (actually, by that time several hundred prisoners as well as American troops outside the city had come down with the pox). They were taken to the hospital to fight it. In a discriminatory and cruel decision, Governor Carleton had permitted officers, but not enlisted men, to be inoculated by Quebec doctors, so Greenman and his fellow enlisted men in the convent were constantly at risk.
“Very cold and disagreeable,” he wrote of his days in confinement. The seventeen-year-old Greenman did not have to remain in prison, though. A miraculous opportunity presented itself on March 1. An American loyalist who was a trader, Captain James Frost, arrived at Quebec with his small fleet of ships that had just sailed up the St. Lawrence River. He was given a tour of the prison, along with several British officers who had arrived with him. Frost was allowed to walk past some of the cells and look at the prisoners. He was startled to see Jeremiah Greenman in one. Frost had been a friend of Greenman’s father before the war and knew the boy, too.
Frost asked the guards to remove Greenman from his cellblock for a conference and pulled him far away from the officers, a firm hand on Greenman’s by now rather weak arm, turning to shield his actions from the jailers. Frost reached into his jacket and gave Greenman some money. Then he carefully explained to the teenager that if he would sign a king’s pardon, or admission of guilt, the captain, who had friends in high places in Quebec, could not only have the boy set free, but released into his custody. Then, as his guardian, he could put him on board one of his ships as a general seaman and take him home to his family in Rhode Island.
An undernourished but proud Greenman looked right at him, thrust the money into his pocket, and nodded his thanks. But he refused the extraordinary offer. “I told him I had entered the cause of my country and meant to continue in it until our rights was declared.” The officers laughed at him but Frost did not. The teenager turned, summoned the guard, and went back into confinement, ignoring his chance to go home. 9
Greenman and the others passed their time in prison with ingenious inventions. They played every word game they had ever learned and told endless war stories. When they ran out of stories they discussed every girl each of them had ever met. Needing some musical entertainment to perk up their downtrodden spirits, they tore the buttons off their coats and somehow turned them into a fife that a musician among them played to cheer them up.
On most days the prisoners discussed the many rumors that floated through the
The windows of the convent where Jeremiah Greenman was housed did give the men good seats for the weeks-long, rather feeble siege of the town that Arnold tried to oversee from his hospital bed. Greenman regularly observed fires in St. Roche’s, outside the city, and at distant farmhouses that he surmised were caused by British bombardment. He and the men were certain that another American attack on Quebec would begin shortly and that they would soon be freed. Greenman noted, “We live very happily and contented, though we are in such a dismal hole, hoping the first dark night that our people will be in and redeem us.” The chance to watch the war ended in a few days when their jailers nailed thick wooden planks across their windows to prevent any further viewing.
By March 1, a smallpox epidemic had raced through the convent, as it had struck throughout the Quebec area. Greenman wrote that nearly sixty men had been afflicted (actually, by that time several hundred prisoners as well as American troops outside the city had come down with the pox). They were taken to the hospital to fight it. In a discriminatory and cruel decision, Governor Carleton had permitted officers, but not enlisted men, to be inoculated by Quebec doctors, so Greenman and his fellow enlisted men in the convent were constantly at risk.
“Very cold and disagreeable,” he wrote of his days in confinement. The seventeen-year-old Greenman did not have to remain in prison, though. A miraculous opportunity presented itself on March 1. An American loyalist who was a trader, Captain James Frost, arrived at Quebec with his small fleet of ships that had just sailed up the St. Lawrence River. He was given a tour of the prison, along with several British officers who had arrived with him. Frost was allowed to walk past some of the cells and look at the prisoners. He was startled to see Jeremiah Greenman in one. Frost had been a friend of Greenman’s father before the war and knew the boy, too.
Frost asked the guards to remove Greenman from his cellblock for a conference and pulled him far away from the officers, a firm hand on Greenman’s by now rather weak arm, turning to shield his actions from the jailers. Frost reached into his jacket and gave Greenman some money. Then he carefully explained to the teenager that if he would sign a king’s pardon, or admission of guilt, the captain, who had friends in high places in Quebec, could not only have the boy set free, but released into his custody. Then, as his guardian, he could put him on board one of his ships as a general seaman and take him home to his family in Rhode Island.
An undernourished but proud Greenman looked right at him, thrust the money into his pocket, and nodded his thanks. But he refused the extraordinary offer. “I told him I had entered the cause of my country and meant to continue in it until our rights was declared.” The officers laughed at him but Frost did not. The teenager turned, summoned the guard, and went back into confinement, ignoring his chance to go home. 9
Greenman and the others passed their time in prison with ingenious inventions. They played every word game they had ever learned and told endless war stories. When they ran out of stories they discussed every girl each of them had ever met. Needing some musical entertainment to perk up their downtrodden spirits, they tore the buttons off their coats and somehow turned them into a fife that a musician among them played to cheer them up.
On most days the prisoners discussed the many rumors that floated through the
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