The Price of Liberty: Joseph Plumb Martin and the Forgotten Grunts

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Welcome to the PAS Report Podcast.

If you're tired of censorship, outraged by government abuses, and thirsty for real insights,

then you're in the right place. Get ready, because here, the fight for freedom never ends.

Here's your host, Professor Nick Teardano.

We've all seen the paintings, George Washington crossing the Delaware, Tall and Stulling,

Thomas Jefferson, peckably dressed, penning the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin

peering through his bifocals with a playful glint in his eye, balancing the weight of a new nation

and the weight of a seasoned philosopher. We've turned these men into icons and for good reason

they would giants among them, frozen forever in marble, but history isn't made of marble.

It's made of flesh, blood and bone.

Imagine a winter morning in the late 1770s.

You're not a general, you're not a delegate, you're a teenager.

Your stomach has been empty for nearly two days.

You code a collection of rags held together by grit, and your shoes, they disintegrated miles ago.

As you march through the frozen mud of New Jersey or the Snowes of Pennsylvania,

you aren't thinking about grand political theories.

You're thinking about the fact that your feet are leaving a literal trail of blood behind you.

This was the reality for the Continental Army.

They didn't win the revolution because they had better equipment or more money.

They didn't have either of those.

The British military was the more dominant superior force.

But the American people won because of an almost supernatural level of endurance.

Today, we're stepping away from the famous names to tell the story of an ordinary boy who saw it all.

His name was Joseph Plummorn.

He wasn't a hero in the way the history books usually define them, but without him.

And thousands like him. There is no United States of America.

And that's why we do the America's Founding Series, part of the PAS Report Podcast.

I'm your host, Nick Dredano. Make sure to follow and subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss an episode.

And share this episode with three to four patriots because our Founding should be told it should be remembered.

And it should be passed on to a generation too often denied the story of what makes America so exceptional.

It's because of people like Joseph Plummorton that we inherited this country.

And it's all responsibility to make sure their sacrifices are never forgotten.

Mom was born in Massachusetts in 1760.

And by the time the world stood still, Lexington and Concord in 1775, he was living with his grandparents in Connecticut.

He was 15 years old. Think about that for a second.

That's a high school sophomore degree. That's the age of my oldest son.

And to think that boys, that young were marching off to face hunger and disease, freezing winters and death.

It puts the sacrifice of that generation into perspective.

A perspective that most of us can barely comprehend in today's day and age.

When the local militia started drilling, Joseph felt the itch.

He felt he needed to join. It wasn't just a high-minded love of liberty though that was there.

It was the classic rustlessness of the youth.

He didn't want to be the kid left behind while the real man went off to see the world.

He served a short stint in 1775 just to taste at a life.

But in 1776, everything is going to change.

Joseph made a choice that would define the rest of his life.

And he enlisted in the Continental Army.

Now, here is the line that captures the tragedy in the triumph of the American soldier.

He thought three years was a lifetime.

He had no idea that those three years were stretching to seven years of grueling service.

At just 16 years old, he signed his name to a piece of paper,

essentially betting his life on a cause that at the time looked to be a losing one.

As he later wrote,

quote,

I was now what I had long wished to be a soldier.

I had obtained my heart's desire and much good may it do to me.

There's a touch of sarcasm in that quote,

because Joseph was about to find out exactly what war is all about.

What he signed up for.

And the first thing Joseph learned wasn't how to shoot a rifle.

It was how he was going to go hungry, how he would start.

Today, when we talk about food insecurity,

we're usually talking about rising grocery bills or empty shelves at the store,

but for soldiers like Joseph Plum Martin,

he meant something far more brutal.

Days without food, norring, hunger,

and the grim reality that survival itself had become part of the battle.

The other grunts starvation was a baseline state of existence.

They lived on something called fire cakes.

Now, it sounds kind of festive, but it wasn't.

It was just flour and water mixed into a pace and baked on a hot,

so covered stone, no salt, no yeast, no meat.

They just had enough calories to keep their hot beating so they could march

another 20 miles.

And then there are stories that the textbooks usually leave out.

And Martin recounts these stories of a fellow soldier who kept a pet squirrel

in the middle of a particularly brutal stretch of hunger.

That squirrel suddenly disappeared.

And Martin doesn't dwell on the details,

but you don't need a PhD in history to know that when men are knowing on their fingers

from hunger, a pet squirrel is going to look like a very tasty meal.

And why was this happening?

It wasn't because America was a barren wasteland,

it was because the system was broken.

The continental currency collapsed.

It was worthless.

And as the saying went, it wasn't worth the continental.

Farmers didn't want to sell to the American army for paper because the paper had no value.

They'd rather sell to a British for gold.

It was a failure of the states.

And the teenagers and the trenches were the ones that were paying the price.

When we returned from a quick commercial break,

you're going to understand why these young men kept marching, starving and suffering

through it all because they believed the cause was worth the sacrifice.

Even when victory was nowhere in sight.

So hang tight and we'll be right back.

Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing.

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Welcome back to the America's Founding Series.

Part of a P.A.S. report podcast.

Now, don't forget to share this episode with three to four other people

because we owe it to those who have sacrificed so much for our great nation

who haven't received their due in the annals of history.

It's time they get that to.

And we all know the name Valley Forge.

It's synonymous with American suffering.

It was a brutal and harsh winner.

But if the Ash Joseph Plum Martin, he tell you that was a Valley Forge.

He was 1779 at Morris Town, New Jersey.

It made Valley Forge look like a summer retreat.

It was the hard winter.

The snow was feet deep.

The temperatures stayed below zero for weeks.

And at this point, the supply chain had completely broken down.

Martin describes what historians call the starving time.

He wrote, quote, we were absolutely, literally starved.

I saw several of the men roast their old shoes and eat them.

They didn't stop at shoes.

When the shoes were gone, they took their cartridge boxes,

little other pouches that held their ammunition and they boiled them.

They weren't looking for nutrition.

They were just trying to soften the leather and the glue enough to have something.

Anything in this stomach so they didn't feel the acid eating them from inside out.

Now this is where the political reality hits home.

This was real life while these men were boiling leather to survive.

The Continental Congress had little power to compel the states to send help.

Each state was focused on its own borders, its own survival.

They were essentially 13 separate countries trying to fight one war

and Washington's national army was to stepchild that no one wanted to feed.

It became a real problem.

It was a systemic failure of leadership and yet Joseph Plum Martin didn't deserve.

A lot of soldiers, they stayed, they fought, and they fought with Anna.

And the war wasn't just freezing.

It was also burning hot in June of 1778.

At the battle of Mammoth, Martin describes a day so hot that men were dropping dead from thirst

and heatstroke before the British even fired a shot.

This is the battle where Martin witnessed one of the most famous legends of the war.

And he later recalled seeing a woman stepped in to help man a cannon after a husband collapse from the heat.

This was one of those real life moments that later emerged into a legendary figure we know as Molly Pitcher.

It showed that the revolution wasn't just a bunch of men fighting for independence.

It was in all hands on deck struggle for survival that included women too.

But Mammoth was not the end.

The war dragged on for years, grinding men down through more marches, more hunger, more uncertainty, more sacrifice.

And by the time Joseph Plum Martin reached Georgetown in 1781,

he was no longer the boy who had chased adventure.

Now he was a hardened soldier, paid for victory the hard way through sweat, through tears, through blood.

Washington commanded the army, but men like Joseph Plum Martin carried it on their backs.

And there, at the siege of Yorktown, he finally saw the tide turn.

He describes the pride of the Ragtag American continental army standing in their tatted clothes,

watching the polished professional British army march out in surrender as legend goes the British band played the world turned upside down.

But for the ordinary soldier, victory didn't come with a pension and a handshake.

When the war finally ended in 1783, Joseph was sent home with almost nothing.

He was given certificates for his seven years of service, certificates that were basically IOUs from a government that was unable to pay its bills.

He had a walk home, no horse, no carriage, no parades.

Just the same two feet that it carried him through seven years of battle, seven years of hell.

And he eventually settled in Maine as a farmer living a quiet life, but he never forgot.

In 1830 as an old man, Joseph Plum Martin finally wrote it all down.

He didn't do it for fame, he didn't do it for fortune.

He did it because he was scared.

He saw the rising generation, the children, the grandchildren of the revolution, living in comfort and taking their country for granted.

Just imagine what Joseph Plum Martin would think today if he were alive.

He felt that he and other soldiers would turn to dress like old worn-out horses, feeling that the public and the government quickly forgotten the literal blood of their feet on the foes and ground.

And he was bitter toward the government, but the amazing part is that despite all he endured, all the sacrifices he and so many other ordinary Americans made in the revolution.

He never wavered or expressed regret for fighting for our independence.

He remained a true patriot, he believed in the cause, and he famously noted that his conscience never accused him of failing his duty to his country.

His book was lost for over a century before being rediscovered in 1950s, and it serves as a direct warning for us today.

We live in a world of instinct gratification.

Heaten the winter, air-conditioned in the summer, food delivered straight to our door, endless entertainment at the push of a button.

We argue over things like men and women's sports, whether a nation has a right to determine who can come into its country and who can't.

Yet the foundational principles of our republic are often ignored in these days, and that's not an understanding.

I see it every semester where I'd have nearly 200 students only a handful could pass a basic citizenship exam.

But when we look at Joseph Plum Martin's life, it forces us to ask a very uncomfortable question.

Would we endure what they endured? Would we boil our shoes for an idea?

Would we leave a trell of blood in the snow for a concept of liberty we hadn't even fully realized or grasped yet?

The revolution was won by remarkable people who had every reason to quit. They had every excuse to give up, but they didn't.

They fought on, they stayed, because they believed that the individual was more important than the state.

That liberty was a prize worth any price, including our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

That's what binds us together as Americans. We don't have thousands of years of shared history, shared culture, shared customs, shared traditions.

What binds us together is that we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

Unfortunately, today too many view the government as the entity that grants us our rights.

And if that's the case, we already lost a battle that Joseph fought.

Rights are ours by birth. They are inherent. God give it. The government's only job is to protect them, and as Joseph's story shows, the government often fails that even its most basic responsibilities,

yet today too many Americans, they want outsourced their freedom, their responsibilities, and even their independence to the very institutions that were never meant to rule over them.

They were meant to serve us, and we always did the ordinary soldier to remember, because as John Adams once said, and as Joseph Plum Martin's life proved,

Liberty once lost is lost forever. If you found the content of this episode informative, make sure to share it with three to four great patriots.

Take 30 seconds, write a good review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify that helps get the podcast discovered by others.

And I want to thank you for joining me. I'll be back next week with more great episodes at PAS Report Podcasts.

Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing, another checkered flag for the books. Time to celebrate with Jamba. Jump in at JambaCasino.com. Let's Jamba.

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