On October 7 the wounded from the Battle of Germantown began to arrive and in a fortnight 450 patients were being treated. A rain lasting six days set in and the suffering was indescribable. The Moravians furnished many blankets and much clothing for the destitute soldiers. During December many sick soldiers were brought to Bethlehem from hospitals in New Jersey. The loss was enormous due to lack of proper facilities with which to treat the patients, and the mortality during eight months and ten days was 120.
Among the surgeons from Pennsylvania were William Shippen, Jr., John Morgan, Thomas Bond, Jr., William Smith, Bodo Otto, Aquila Wilmot, James Houston, S. Halling and Francis Allison, Jr.
On August 28, 1778, the remaining sixty-five patients were removed to Lancaster and Yellow Springs, and Bethlehem ceased to be a hospital base during the war.
Flight of Tory Leaders from Pittsburgh,
March 28, 1778
General Edward Hand, the commandant at Fort Pitt, had failed in two expeditions, and the resultant effect was disastrous to the American cause on the border, especially in the spring of 1778. During the previous winter the British, under General Howe, had occupied Philadelphia, the capital of the colonies; the Continental Congress had been driven to York, and Washington’s Army, reduced to half-naked and half-starved condition, had suffered in camp at Valley Forge, so there was not much to win adherents to the cause of liberty among those otherwise inclined.
Governor Hamilton, the British commander at Detroit, sent many agents, red and white, to penetrate the border settlements to organize the Tories into effective military units. In February and March, 1778, a daring and shrewd British spy visited Pittsburgh and carried on his plotting against the colonies almost under the nose of General Hand. Most of the Tories of this neighborhood were at the house of Alexander McKee, at what is now called McKees Rocks. Another place of assembly was at Redstone, where a British flag flew nearly all of that winter.
Captain Alexander McKee, the Tory leader at Pittsburgh, was an educated man of wide influence on the frontier. He had been an Indian trader and for twelve years prior to the Revolution had been the King’s deputy agent for Indian affairs at Fort Pitt. For a short time he had been one of the justices of the peace for Westmoreland County, and he was intimately acquainted with most of the Indian chiefs. In 1764 he received a grant of 1,400 acres of land from Colonel Henry Bouquet, at the mouth of Chartier’s Creek, and he divided his time between his house in Pittsburgh and his farm at McKees Rocks.
In the spring of 1776, McKee was discovered to be in correspondence with the British officers in Canada, and he was put on his parole not to give aid or comfort to the enemies of American liberty, and not to leave the vicinity of Pittsburgh without the consent of the Revolutionary Committee.