“Have a care, Mac,” Colonel Tilghman scolded, as if worried to offend my maiden ears. But everyone else laughed. And in truth, I knew not what to make of Hamilton’s rakish reputation.
“Make way!” came a command from down the narrow, frozen lane where we stood watching the men’s antics. Clutching hands to keep our balance, we trudged into a deeper drift of untrodden snow as a war-weary company of men paraded by. Their threadbare uniforms were familiar, of course, as were the abused muskets upon their shoulders and the malnourished gaunt upon their frostbitten faces. But one thing was strikingly different about these soldiers.
They were black.
A thing that perhaps shouldn’t have so surprised me, for I’d heard Papa talk about the black troops who served at Saratoga. But a few of these men wore the gold epaulets of an officer, a thing that I’d never before heard about or seen.
Our escorts saluted the white colonel at the head of the column, who returned the gesture and shouted out more commands to his men.
“The First Rhode Island,” Hamilton said to me as they passed, perhaps sensing my surprise. “Our first black regiment.”
McHenry nodded and spoke in his thick brogue. “And we’ll need ’em, too. We lose too many men to disease and desertion to refuse blacks in the army now, and those with reservations voice their concerns no longer.”
“The British recruitment of slaves has convinced most Americans that we should do the same,” Tilghman said, glancing amongst us ladies, as if he wished to make sure we knew his sentiments on the matter. “As if the standard of humanity did not make them deserving of freedom enough.”
“And the other men don’t mind serving with them?” Angelica asked, and I knew precisely why, for our father had complained that black troops disgraced our arms.
But I was glad that Angelica had asked, instead of me, because Hamilton actually frowned at her. “The contempt we’ve been taught to entertain for Negroes makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience. As my dear Laurens’s project in South Carolina is sure to prove.”
This was the second time I’d heard him mention John Laurens, and I’d since learned that the southerner was another of Washington’s aides, now away on different business, and an officer, like Hamilton, with an unfailing ability to work his way into the gazettes. Laurens’s most recent fame came as a result of suggesting we give freedom to slaves willing to fight in the army.
“Laurens seeks to raise a black regiment in South Carolina?” I asked. I could scarcely contemplate it. If a northern plantation owner with only a few slaves like my father hadn’t approved of Laurens’s scheme, I could only imagine how outlandish—and dangerous—southern planters would deem the idea.
But Hamilton seemed to admire his friend’s audacity. “If Laurens has any fault, it is an intrepidity bordering upon rashness, but in that he is excited only by the purest motives.”
It was rash. But now I found myself surrounded by men fighting for freedom—everyone’s freedom, it seemed—and I couldn’t help but feel . . . sympathetic to the idea.
For didn’t the men of that Rhode Island regiment marching past show the same fidelity, do the same duty, draw upon the same courage, and make the same sacrifices? What more could a country ask of its citizens, let alone its slaves?
Chapter Eight
THE LONGER I spent in the company of the army, the more I felt within my breast the desire to contribute to the cause. So I went the next day with my aunt and uncle to the Presbyterian Church that had been commandeered for a hospital. As we approached the adjoining cemetery, we found two soldiers with axes breaking the frozen ground for a grave. A stiff corpse lay in the snow, arms bent at a grotesquely unnatural angle, his mouth locked, as if in a silent shriek.
“Will there be no coffin for the poor soul?” I asked.
“There’s no time if it’s a contagion.” My uncle had been instrumental in inoculating the army against smallpox—and me and my siblings as well when we were younger—checking this most dreaded epidemic after Valley Forge. Still, the soldiers suffered typhus and flux, fevers and dysentery, measles and mumps. “When we made winter quarters here three years ago, we were forced to dig a mass grave. Sickness in the army was much worse then, and smallpox carried away a fourth of the town, too.”
No wonder the people of Morristown treated us coldly. If the army brought with it pestilence and hardships, the townsfolk could scarcely be happy to have the army back again. And the words of the irritated sentinel came back to me now, haunting me with their literal meaning.
They’re just sick to death of us.
“You’re a good-hearted girl, Betsy,” my uncle warned. “But what you’ve seen in an Albany hospital won’t prepare you.”
Carrying a bundle of bandages, Aunt Gertrude patted my shoulder. “Pay him no mind, dear. Dr. Cochran has mistaken you for some milk-and-water miss. He forgets you’re a Schuyler.”
Like my mother, Aunt Gertrude had learned rudimentary medicine at the barn my family turned into a hospital at Schuyler Flatts during the French and Indian War. She was sturdy and strong and expected me to be the same. So with that reminder ringing in my ears, I braced myself to witness with mine own eyes the horrors my uncle thought would shock me.
Inside the church, officers lay upon church pews, but the rank and file rested on naught but piles of straw. Nurses moved amongst the groaning mass of patients, emptying chamber pots, combing hair for lice, and dousing everything with vinegar as a purifier. It was too cold to remove my pelisse coat and fur-lined hood. I had no choice but to shed my calfskin gloves, however, so I left them upon the altar
