Joseph Martin Plumb Thesis

Joseph Martin Plumb had to steal food from the citizens and collect it from wherever he could because the army was not providing it for the men: “Our stomachs being empty…I soon became very faint” (Martin 101). The army was not taking care of the men properly and that is why he was acting the way he was. Throughout the entire book his number one complaint is food. Everything circles back to him not having food and he seems to worry/focus about that a lot. His daily life consisted of not eating: “I had now to enter again on my old system of starving; - there was nothing to eat” (Martin 102). From the very beginning they kept the men starving: “… excepting starvation…” (Martin 41). All the above reasons go to show why he ends up stealing

food as often as he does and why he should get paid since they were not taken care of during the war.
Joseph steals food on many accounts. He will steal it right from his own people if he has to:
I, feeling a pretty sharp appetite after my expedition, went to the side of the brook where the nurses had been cooking and eating their dinners; I found a kettle standing there half full of stewed peas, and, if I remember rightly, a small piece of pork with them. I knew the kettle belonged to the nurses in our room and therefore conceived myself the better entitled to it contents; accordingly I fell to and helped myself (Martin 58).
On a few occasions they went and scavenged for food: “it was finally determined that two or three … should sally forth and endeavor to procure something by foraging” (Martin 72). In this instance they managed to find a goose. This was kind of like a snack for the men since there were so many of them trying to eat one goose. Joseph seems to recall that he got a wing. Part of their other problem with this kind of food is that they did not have the supplies to cook it properly. As they were travelling the men has to carry their cooking utensils with them including a heavy pot. Most of them, including, Martin dropped their pots to lose weight and they did not see a point in carrying it since the rarely had food to cook. The men were not being treated well throughout the entire war. It is pathetic that these men volunteered their lives to go out and fight for a cause they felt mattered to them and they were not even provided the most basic of needs, therefore they should be paid as a way to say sorry and make up for the decrepit conditions.
A prominent issue facing the men was the cold and wetness due to a lack of clothing and shelter. Joseph expressed his outrage about the clothing issue:
Let the reader only consider for a moment and he will be satisfied if not sickened. In the cold month of November, without provisions, without clothing, not a scrap of either shoes or stockings to my feet or legs, and in this condition to endure a siege in such a place as that, was appalling in the highest degree (Martin 74).
The pathetic thing is that most of this time they are lacking clothing: “The army was not only shirtless but naked; the greatest part were not only shirtless and barefoot, but destitute of all other clothing, especially blankets” (Martin 88). It would seem to me that clothing would be a given for them to have, yet they did not receive that. The men are faced with hunger, cold, and the brute force of Mother Nature.
Shelter was not the most prominent issue in this war, but it was a problem at times. Generally they only got shelter when they planned on staying in areas for a little while and they had to build it themselves. In one instance they were travelling and stopped for the night: “ [With] the canopy of heaven for our tent” (Martin 107). This shows how they were out in the open. Should the elements of Mother Nature come down they would have been right in her path. The men deserved better treatment than this.
All of the men deserve pay based on their courage alone.

Being in any kind of war would be a difficult thing to do between missing family, facing death daily, and the hardships of being treated like garbage by the people who need the army. These men were out in the field all the time trying to keep the British at bay. Courage and will was eminent: “[We] wished nothing more than to have them engage us, for we were sure of giving them a drubbing, being in excellent fighting trim” (Martin 86). The men were clearly ready to see some action on the field. There was another point where the men were about to engage with the British and the sick/gimp men were told to stay behind but they were so ready for a fight that the they were having trouble keeping them at bay. The thought of plunder brought up a great deal of enthusiasm: “the men did not need much haranguing to raise their courage, for when the officers came to order the sick and lame to stay behind as guards, they were forced to exercise their authority to the full extent before they could make even the invalids stay behind” (Martin 109). The guys in the army had copious amounts of energy and will to fight off the British. The entire time in the war conditions were extremely poor and these men could have just said they quit and walked off, but they were in it because they wanted to have the thrill of taking down the enemy and doing something

great.