Joseph Plumb Martin - The Memoirs of a Revolutionary Soldier

The British, soon after this, left the White Plains, and passed the Hudson, into New-Jersey. We, likewise, fell back to New-Castle and Wright's mills. Here a number of our sick were sent off to Norwalk, in Connecticut, to recruit. I was sent with them as a nurse. We were billetted among the inhabitants. I had, in my ward, seven or eight sick soldiers , who were (at least, soon after their arrival there,) as well in health as I was: all they wanted was a cook and something for a cook to exercise his functions upon. The inhabitants here were almost entirely what were in those days termed tories. An old lady, of whom I often procured milk, used always, when I went to her house, to give me a lecture on my opposition to our good king George. She had always said, (she told me,) that the regulars would make us fly like pigeons. My patients would not use any of the milk I had of her, for fear, as they said, of poison;—I told them I was not afraid of her poisoning the milk, she had not wit enough to think of such a thing, nor resolution enough to do it if she did think of it.

The man of the house where I was quartered had a smart looking negro man, a great politician; I chanced one day to go into the barn where he was threshing. He quickly began to upbraid me with my opposition to the British. The king of England was a very powerful prince, he said,—a very powerful prince; and it was a great pitty that the colonists had fallen out with him; but as we had, we must abide by the consequences. I had no inclination to waste the shafts of my rhetoric upon a negro slave. I concluded he had heard his betters say so. As the old cock crows so crows the young one; and I thought, as the white cock crows so crows the black one. He ran away from his master, before I left there, and went to Long-Island to assist king George; but it seems the king of terrors was more potent than king George, for his master had certain intelligence that poor Cuff was laid flat on his back.

This man had likewise a negress who (as he was a widower) kept his house. She was as great a doctress as Cuff was a politician, and she wished to be a surgeon. There was an annual thanksgiving while we were here. The sick men of my ward had procured a fine roasting pig, and the old negro woman having seen the syringe that I picked up in the retreat from Kipp's bay, fell violently in love with it, and offered me a number of pies, of one sort or other for it. Of the pig and the pies we made an excellent thanksgiving dinner, the best meal I had eaten since I left my grandsire's table.

Our surgeon came amongst us soon after this, and packed us all off to camp, save two or three, who were discharged. I arrived at camp with the rest, where we remained, moving from place to place as occasion required, undergoing hunger, cold and fatigue, until the twenty-fifth day of December, 1776, when I was discharged, (my term of service having expired,) at Philip's manor, in the State of New-York, near Hudson's river.

Here ends my first campaign. I had learned something of a soldier's life; enough, I thought, to keep me at home for the future. Indeed, I was then fully determined to rest easy with the knowledge I had acquired in the affairs of the army. But the reader will find, if he has patience to follow me a little longer in my details, that the ease of a winter spent at home, caused me to alter my mind. I had several kind invitations to enlist into the standing army, then about to be raised, especially a very pressing one to engage in a regiment of horse, but I concluded to try a short journey on foot first. Accordingly, I sat off for my good old grandsire's, where I arrived, I think, on the twenty-seventh, two days after my discharge, and found my friends all alive and well; they appeared to be glad to see me, and I am sure I was really glad to see them.

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