Diary of a Common Soldier in the American Revolution, 1775-1783: An Annotated Edition of the Military Journal of Jeremiah Greenman

xliv, 333 pp. "Jeremiah Greenman (1758-1828) was born in Newport, Rhode Island, and was the only surviving child of his parents, Jeremiah Greenman, Sr. and Amy Wiles Greenman. After his seventeenth birthday the 'unskilled and barely literate' youth decided to go to war 'to make a man of himself.' Jeremiah Greenman joined a Rhode Island regiment of the Continental Army on May 20, 1775 and served in the military for eight years. During this time, he traveled as far north as Quebec in Canada, and as far south as Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. As a soldier, Jeremiah kept a journal. In it he wrote about his march with Benedict Arnold through the wilderness to Quebec in 1775 and his imprisonment in a Quebec prison. He participated in the Battle of Red Bank in 1777 in Delaware and spent a bitter winter at Valley Forge in 1777-1778. He received three combat wounds and had two separate and “lengthy sojourns” in British prisons. He was promoted four times in the field, and by 1781 held the rank of lieutenant. The war taught Jeremiah “to write, keep accounts, to command, and above all, to believe in the future." - HistoryIsFun