“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 before fetching a bucket of vinegar water.
“May I tend you, sir?” I asked as a fevered man retched into the straw, too ill to answer. I sponged the sweat from the back of his neck and had just given him a small sip of wine posset to settle him when my aunt was called to help my uncle amputate the frozen feet of a sentry.
Please let the sentry swoon, I prayed as his screams soon broke past the bullet upon which he was to bite down. At the very least, I hoped he’d been given rum to ease his pain, but I feared otherwise, because he wasn’t an officer and we were rationing the rum.
I turned to see his black toes and severed flesh flung into a bloody bucket, and I feared I might disappoint Aunt Gertrude’s expectations because bile rose and my stomach rolled. It was only with great effort that I made myself go about my duties, as if screams were not echoing off the high ceiling of the nave.
At length, the screaming stopped. My uncle abandoned his bloody instruments, snapped off his gore-speckled apron, and uttered a curse for which he immediately begged God’s pardon. Wearing a grim expression, Aunt Gertrude called for a stretcher.
“He can’t have died,” I said.
Soldiers could live without toes. Without fingers, feet, arms, and legs, too.
“T’was the pain,” Aunt Gertrude replied.