But there were losses that were far more lasting than mere beams, clapboarding, and bricks. Over the course of the brief campaign, thirty-five soldiers were killed and one hundred thirty-nine wounded from the ranks of the Continental forces. According to Papa, these casualty figures were quite low, and a credit to the officers who’d taken such care of their men.
I doubted that the families of the soldiers killed or wounded would have agreed. Among those wounded was young Gabriel Ford, shot twice through the thigh. He was the eldest son of Mrs. Ford, whose house had been used by His Excellency as headquarters. I remembered him well, a cheerful youth of promise and a pillar to his widowed mother; he’d planned to attend the college at nearby Princeton in the fall, before he’d become so starry-eyed by the army that he’d volunteered for this campaign. My sympathy lay entirely with his poor mother, who had already lost her husband, and I cannot imagine the shock and sorrow she must have felt to see her beloved son brought home to her bloodied and bandaged.
At least Gabriel Ford was expected to make a full recovery from his wounds. Much more tragic was the tale of Mrs. Hannah Caldwell, the wife of the Reverend James Caldwell and one of our army’s chaplains. During the Battle of Connecticut Farms, Mrs. Caldwell was trapped in her house with her young children and servants as the fighting raged around them. As she huddled with her son upon her lap, a British soldier fired at the window, and killed her where she sat. As her weeping, terrified children cowered to one side, more soldiers forced their way into the house, carrying off the family’s valuables and ripping the jewelry from Mrs. Caldwell’s lifeless body.
Now I am certain that there are those (particularly those whose sympathies lie with the Tory cause) who will say that this heinous act was simply an unfortunate act of war and the cost of our country’s rebellion. But the outrage of it affected me deeply, and I grieved both for Reverend Caldwell and his pitiful, motherless children.
I learned the details of Mrs. Caldwell’s horrific murder (for so surely it must be considered) not from Alexander, but from my friend Kitty Livingston, whose family property in Elizabethtown also suffered much damage at the hands of the British troops. Alexander’s account was far briefer, and I suspect this was because he wished to spare my tender sensibilities from the realities of the war.
But I also suspect that the particulars of Mrs. Caldwell’s death must have affected him, too, and on a most intimate level. As a young boy, both Alexander and his mother had been taken deathly ill of an island fever, such as too often occurs in the Caribbean. His mother perished, while he survived, but he had never forgotten the shock and sorrow of waking to find his mother’s lifeless body on the same bed beside him.
All was a solemn reminder of how tenuous our mortal lives can be, and how quickly gone from this earth. While Alexander himself regretted that he’d not seen more action during the campaign in New Jersey, I thanked God that he hadn’t, and had instead emerged unharmed.
In fact despite the swift beginning to the summer campaign, it soon wizened away with little more real fighting. While the British continued to hold New York and most of the southern states, General Washington and the Continental troops remained idle, waiting for reinforcements. In early July, they arrived: a French fleet bearing nearly seven thousand troops from France, as promised and arranged by Lafayette. The French troops landed to the north, in Newport, Rhode Island, and were commanded by Marshal Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, the Comte de Rochambeau. These Frenchmen were part of an alliance that more than doubled the size of our forces, and most people believed with giddy hope that they would be our salvation.
As can be imagined, Alexander’s ease with the French language made him much in demand as General Washington decided how best to employ the French to break the stalemate with the British and secure victory. But while His Excellency was in favor of the French immediately attacking the British stronghold of New York, Rochambeau disagreed with this plan, and refused to leave Rhode Island. To do so, he argued, would expose the French ships to the larger British navy that still held most of the coast under blockade. Instead of attacking New York, the French encamped in the city of Providence, and prepared to remain there until a plan more agreeable to them was proposed.
Alexander’s frustration was clear in his letters, and I’m sure he reflected the overall mood of the American officers and army. To have the key to victory standing idle in Rhode Island must have felt like the bitterest irony.
But Alexander’s restlessness was not limited to the state of the war. His letters to me, while as loving as ever, also returned to his old fears of being too poor or too humble to marry me. He worried that he was unworthy of me, and painted wretched pictures of how miserable I’d be wed to him and living in some mean little cottage. He told me of dreams (that were better called nightmares) where I had wearied of him, and he would come across me asleep on some grassy hillside beside another gentleman. Even when he’d pay me some sweet compliment—as he did when he called me his pretty little nut-brown maid—there was an undercurrent of uneasiness to it, as if he feared that I’d prove faithless if I were tested like the nut-brown girl in the old ballad. He was acutely conscious, as was I, of the false perception that he was marrying me for my father’s money, and he was resolved that we would live only on what he earned, without assistance from my parents.
I reassured him as best I could, but just as this had been a challenge for me when we’d been separated earlier in the year when I’d been in Philadelphia with my father, and Alexander in Perth Amboy, it continued to be so now. When we were together, I knew what words to use to reason with him and to calm his doubts, and which little caresses and endearments would act as balms to the wounds he insisted on inflicting upon himself.
But I seldom found a way to do this with pen and paper, and his own ease with words only made my lack the more noticeable. The difficulties of sending and receiving letters on account of the war made our correspondence even more labored. Letters were often delayed, with some overlapping and losing their meanings, or on occasion even misplaced entirely. The only consolation was his teasing promise to punish me for all my delinquencies in writing—a punishment which I knew from pleasurable experience would be meted out in kisses, and was so little real punishment that it nearly inspired me to cease writing altogether.