Stephenson M. Patriot Battles. How the War of Independence Was Fought

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What Made Men Fight

e fight, get beat, rise, and fight again.” It was General

Nathanael Greene’s phrase. He was looking back at his

campaigns in the South but could just as well have been

describing the whole of the American effort. Its pithy pugnacity

encapsulates almost the entire history of the war and does more than

most tomes to explain why the patriots won and why Britain was

doomed to defeat. But what motivated soldiers, American and British,

to go through the whole bloody cycle Greene described?

Motivation falls into two broad categories. The first is ideological.

Patriots experienced it as a shared sense of national purpose that

encompassed a passionate desire to defend the nation against the

imagined and real oppressions of Britain in America. On the British

side there was also an ideological commitment based on a strong sense

of national pride built up over centuries. For many though by no means

all Britons, the rebellion was wrong because it attempted to impose the

will of a relatively few fanatics, as the British saw them, who sought to

break a sacred contract. The second category of motivation is much less

cerebral. When a soldier is terrified, or starving, or outnumbered, what

makes him fight; what makes him run?

The ideological debate seems to be divided into two camps. On

the one hand, there is the argument that it was self-interest rather than

patriotic zeal that motivated the American soldiers. They were poor

and needed the benefits in the form of pay, food, clothes, and shelter that

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service in the army would provide (even if, as it turned out, the promise

most often overreached the reality). Given the lack of opportunity

in civilian life, men from the underclass chose the lesser of two evils:

destitution or soldiering. The other camp, which emphasizes the “heroic”

commitment to revolutionary ideals, even among the least intellectual

soldiers, was championed by Charles Royster in his landmark book, A

Revolutionary People at War (1979). Royster conceded the socioeconomic

description of the common American soldier. Yes, they were the poorest

members of society. Yes, they had the least opportunities. But, Royster

argued, if self-interest was the primary motivator, why did poor men

fight when the benefits—pay, food, clothing, shelter—failed to turn

up? He asks the question: if American soldiers were motivated only

by the self-interest that characterized European armies (the assumption

being that British soldiers, for example, fought only for money), why

didn’t they stay on in the army after the war? The answer may be that

there was no army to stay in. After the war Congress all but disbanded

it.

To counter the argument that most common soldiers joined up

because they had little to lose, Royster points out that the mortality

rate was very high, and therefore they indeed had a lot to lose. A

counterargument might be that enlistees did not know this at the time,

particularly early in the war, and when they did see the risks as the

war developed, enlistment dropped. Royster’s book seeks to rescue

the common soldier from mere expediency; to accord him, no matter

how ragged, how smelly, how inarticulate, the dignity and the honor

of having fought for a great cause. The truth, as it often does, has an

awkward way of lying somewhere between these two camps.

Men joined because it was the best deal on offer in a world that

did not offer them any really good deals. They also joined because they

believed in the cause. It may not have been a deeply-thought-through

ideological commitment. It may have been inflamed by populist

propaganda and wrapped-in-the-flag tub-thumpers. It may have been

a crudely colored cartoon version of the issues, but in that the War of

Independence is no different from the wars of our own time. None of

these reasons are mutually exclusive. Although it is legitimate to state

what made men fight 81

that it “is impossible to believe that Washington’s little army was held

together over eight grim winters merely by concern over economic

issues,”

the corollary is not necessarily that that every soldier was a

firebrand patriot. This was, after all, a revolution about which Louis

Duportail, a French volunteer and chief engineer in the Continental

army, could say, “There is a hundred times more enthusiasm for this

Revolution in any Paris café than in all the colonies together.”

The high rates of desertion in the Continental army in late 1777 and

early 1778—the winter of Valley Forge—indicate that revolutionary zeal

was not a sufficient motivator on its own. Deprived of bare necessities,

many chose to quit (officers as well as rank and file). Those that stayed

displayed a gritted-teeth stoicism that deeply moved Washington. On

16 February 1778 he wrote:

For some days past there has been little less than a famine in the

camp. A part of the army has been a week without any kind of

flesh and the rest three or four days. Naked and starving as they

are, we cannot enough admire the incomparable patience and

fidelity of the soldiery, that they have not been ere this excited by

their suffering to a general mutiny and dispersion.

A Continental staff officer described the men at Trenton in 1777:

“Christmas 6 p.m

. . . . It is fearfully cold and raw and a snow-storm

setting in. The wind is northeast and beats in the faces of the men. It

will be a terrible night for the soldiers who have no shoes. Some of

them have tied old rags around their feet, but I have not heard a man

complain.”

Comradeship was a warmer fire for the soul on those terrible nights

than political philosophy could ever be. The Continental soldier Joseph

Plumb Martin described the deep attachment to his comrades.

I can assure the reader that there was as much sorrow as joy

transfused on the occasion. We had lived together as a family of

brothers for several years (setting aside some little family squabbles,

like most other families,) had shared with each other the hardships,

patriot battles 82

dangers and sufferings incident to a soldier’s life, had sympathized

with each other in trouble and sickness; had assisted in bearing

each other’s burdens, or strove to make them lighter by council and

advice; had endeavoured to conceal each other’s faults, or make

them appear in as good a light as they would bear. In short, the

soldiery, each in his particular circle of acquaintance, were as strict

a bond of brotherhood as Masons, and, I believe, as faithful to each

other.

His counterpart in the British army, Sergeant Roger Lamb,

would have recognized immediately what Martin was talking about:

“Attachments of persons in the army to each other terminate but with

life . . . it is like friendship between school-boys, which increases in

manhood, and ripens in old age.”

Martin, neither here nor in the rest of his narrative, makes much

mention of patriotism. He does, however, rail regularly against the

lack of support from civilians and government: lashing their lack

of motivation. At the war’s end he felt bitterly betrayed: “When the

country had drained the last drop of service it could screw out of the

poor soldiers, they were turned adrift like old worn out horses.”

“To shun the dangers of the field is to desert the banner of Christ,”

wrote the American cleric John Murray in 1779. Religion was an

important psychological tool to shore up the soldier’s commitment,

to motivate him, and to hold his feet to the fire. The importance of

clergymen in the Continental army was much greater than in the

British. Britain, compared with the colonies, was skeptical and secular.

“Enthusiasm”—that fundamentalist passion that had been a defining

characteristic of colonial America—was considered in bad taste in late

eighteenth-century Britain, certainly among the gentry. In the army

religious observance was more in the omission than the commission.

Thus the idea of a “holy war,” which was promoted by the patriot clergy,

particularly irked the British. To them it smacked of fanaticism: “It is

your G-d damned Religion of this Country that ruins the country; damn

your Religion,” wrote an irate Major Harry Rooke at Bunker’s Hill.

The role of the chaplain in the American army was to weld together

what made men fight 83

the trinity of the cause: godliness, patriotism, and discipline. On 27 May

1777 Congress appointed chaplains with the rank of colonel to each

brigade. They were not only to attend to the men’s morality but also to

“strengthen the Officers hands by publick and private exhortations to

obedience.” Brigade commanders were encouraged to choose clergymen

who were “zealously attached to our glorious Cause, who will not

begrudge the exertion of every nerve in the service.”

The Reverend Mr.

John Gano is a good example. He informed his congregation of short-

term enlistees that “our Lord and Saviour approved of all those who

engaged in His service for the whole warfare.”

The intervention of the

French in 1778 was marked by the Americans with religious services of

thanksgiving. Chaplains read a summary of the treaty, and at Valley Forge

Chaplain John Hurt urged the soldiery, “[Let us] redouble our diligence,

and endeavour to acquire the highest perfection in our several duties;

for the most we do for ourselves, the more reason have we to expect the

smiles of Providence.”

At the funeral for General Francis Nash, killed

at the battle of Germantown on 4 October 1777, the presiding chaplain

could not stop himself from launching into a tactical lecture.

Remember the mistake of that day, and never do you commit it.

What I mean is—never, in pursuit of a flying enemy, never separate

or break your ranks . . . But though I recommend bravery, and

applaud you for it, yet beware of rashness. Regularity and the strict

attention to orders is the life of every action . . . In retreat—(and

the bravest have often retreated) good order is equally essential.

The soldiery, however, was not always receptive. Sometimes

sanctions had to be applied to encourage the men to submit themselves to

the exhortations of the worthy: “A few hours spent digging out stumps

in a New York woodland proved effective.”

Their resistance to godly

assistance was lamented by Philip Vickers Fithian, a chaplain with the

army in New York in August 1776: “The Lords Day is come once more.

But the Sabbath is scarcely known in the Army. Profaned is all religious

Exercise. Dreadful is the thought that Men who expect an Engagement

every Day with a obstinate, wise, & powerful Enemy, should dare be

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so ungodly.”

This sense of their irrelevance as padres could put a

fearful stress on deeply committed chaplains. Abiel Leonard was the

pastor of First Congregational Church of Woodstock, Connecticut, and

one of the most influential military chaplains, praised by Washington

and Nathanael Greene. By the summer of 1777 Leonard was deeply

depressed at the lack of respect accorded to chaplains and that they

“were able to do no more good in their Place.” On 27 July 1777 he went

to Judge Coe’s tavern in Kakiate, New York, and there cut his throat.

In the British army the role of religion had a similar function.

By emphasizing the moral virtue of submission to authority, military

effectiveness would be strengthened. An influential religious tract of

the day, The Soldiers Faithful Friend, intoned: “The duty of a peaceable

and quiet submission to commanders is more incumbent on you as

a soldier than in any other contract for service . . . Whenever you act

turbulently or unsoberly, you bring scandal on your corps, and possess

people with prejudice against your profession. This ought to put you

on your guard as a good subject, as well as a good soldier and a good

Christian.”

Church attendance was compulsory, and twelve pence

could be deducted for the first noncompliance and imprisonment for

a second offense. Officers could be court-martialed. Nevertheless,

the British soldier, like his American counterpart, seems to have

been stubbornly resistant to the motivations of religion, and church

attendance was desultory. In this the British soldier was not much

different from many of his countrymen. An eighteenth-century

bishop of Durham wailed, “The deplorable distinction of our age is

an avowed scorn of religion in some and a growing disregard of it

in the generality.” The great Methodist preacher John Wesley went

further: “Ungodliness is our universal, our constant, our peculiar

character . . . High & low, cobblers, tinkers, hackney coachmen, men

and maid servants, soldiers, tradesmen of all rank, lawyers, physicians,

gentlemen, lords are as ignorant of the Creator of the World as

Mohametans & Pagans.”

British army chaplaincies were purchased just like officer

commissions. Absenteeism (sometimes for years on end) was widespread.

The provision for regimental chaplains was laid down in the Articles

what made men fight 85

of War, but many chaplains treated their positions as sinecures, hiring

substitutes to do, or not do, the work. General Thomas Gage complained

that he had only two chaplains with his army at Boston who “did duty

occasionally . . . and none were properly fixed to any particular battalion,

so that none knew who was their proper Chaplain.”

In striking contrast to British troops, the Germans were overtly

and sometimes loudly pious (something which does not seem to have

prevented them from gaining a reputation as the war’s most energetic

plunderers). Ambrose Serle ruefully noted the difference. Writing from

Staten Island in the summer of 1776, he observed, “It was pleasing to

hear the Hessians singing psalms in the evening, with great solemnity;

while to our shame, the British navy and army in general are wasting

their time in imprecations or idleness.”

The British general Lord

Rawdon was struck by the same comparison. During the amphibious

assault on Kips Bay on 15 September 1776,

the Hessians, who were not used to this water business and who

conceived that it must be exceedingly uncomfortable to be shot at

whilst they were quite defenseless and jammed together so close,

began to sing hymns immediately. Our men expressed their feelings

as strongly, tho in a different manner, by damning themselves and

the enemy indiscriminately with wonderful fervency.

Not infrequently, histories of the War of Independence claim

that, in contrast to the American army, the British lacked motivation.

Statements like “Though patriotism was a more compelling force in

America than across the Atlantic . . .”

and “The American soldier,

unlike British derelicts and Hessian mercenaries, faced the invaders

by an act of free choice and beat them”

are common. Apart from the

fact that economic necessity significantly narrowed the “free choice” of

American soldiers, it is worth looking at the other side of the equation.

Just as it is difficult to reconcile the heroic efforts of ordinary American

soldiers if their only motivation was self-interest, the same is true for

British soldiers. If only fear or automatism motivated them, it is not

possible to explain the performance of the ordinary British soldier in

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battle, which, time and again, was heroic.

For instance, at Germantown, Lieutenant Martin Hunter describes

the difficulty officers had in getting their men to retreat: “This was

the first time we had retreated from the Americans, and it was with

great difficulty we could get our men to obey our orders.”

At the

point of surrender at Saratoga Lieutenant William Digby recorded:

“All thoughts of a retreat were then given over, and a determination

made to fall nobly together, rather than disgrace the name of British

troops . . . We were called together and desired to tell our men that their

own safety, as well as ours, depended on making a vigorous defence; but

that I was sure was an unnecessary caution,—well knowing they would

never forfeit the title of Soldiers.”

The British lieutenant Thomas

Anburey recorded the extraordinary esprit de corps among the defeated

British troops at Saratoga.

[We were] in this state of weakness, no possibility of retreat, our

provisions nearly exhausted, and invested by an army of four times

our number that almost encircled us . . . In this perilous situation

the men lay continually upon their arms, the enemy incessantly

cannonading us, and their rifle and cannon shot reaching every

part of our camp . . . True courage submits with great difficulty to

despair, and in the midst of all these dangers and arduous trials, the

valour and constancy of the British troops was astonishing: they

still retained their spirits.

Brigadier General John Glover was also in the Saratoga battles and

reported, “The enemy in their turn sometimes drove us. They were

bold, intrepid and fought like heroes, and I do assure you Sirs, our men

were equally bold and courageous & fought like men.”

The effects on ordinary British soldiers of the crushing defeat at

Yorktown were recorded by Captain Samuel Graham of the 51st foot.

It is a very sorry reminiscence, this. Yet the scene made a deep

impression at the moment, for the mortification and unfeigned

sorrow of the soldiers will never fade from my memory. Some

what made men fight 87

went so far as to shed tears, while one man, a corporal, who stood

near me, embraced his firelock and then threw it on the ground,

exclaiming, “May you never get so good a master again!”

None of this, nor the extraordinarily courageous frontal attacks

at Bunker’s Hill or Guilford Courthouse, for example, were the acts of

“derelicts.” In the smoke, noise, and unholy confusion of battle there

were always opportunities “to flinch and fumble, struggle or stumble,

and avoid coercion.”

But as Sylvia Frey, an American historian of the

British army, says, “During the American Revolution British troops

fought with a revolutionary ardor.” How was this possible?

The British sense of national virtue was as strong, and as complex,

as the newfound nationalism of the colonists. It had been built over

centuries, a potent brew of fact and mythology. “Albion,” “Britannia,”

with its traditional freedoms, its constitution, its parliamentary

government, was inspirational not only for Britons but also for

Americans who constantly referred to it as a benchmark. The American

Revolution, in some interesting ways, was less a revolution and more

a conservative and nostalgic movement to restore in the colonies the

traditional freedoms of “old England.” Britons were proud: “Crucially,

Albion was uniquely successful in war, conquest and colonization;

eupeptic patriotism and profit became the heads and tails of Britannia’s

golden guinea.”

In fact, they were often arrogantly proud and

dismissive of their American “cousins.” And they paid a price for it.

The great muscle that powered the British army was attached to the

regiment.—“the ultimate and most important motivation in battle.”

The tribal bond of the regiment transcended notions of patriotism and

religion, or any other lofty but generalized ideas that were meant to

inspire. “Everything that one can make of the soldiers consists in giving

them an esprit de corps or, in other words, in teaching them to place their

regiment higher than all the troops in the world,” wrote Frederick the

Great.

The symbol of this immensely powerful bond was the colors.

There were two per regiment: the royal standard and the regiment’s.

They were made of silk, about six feet by six feet, and carried on a

patriot battles 88

ten-foot staff. When a regiment was presented with its colors, they

were consecrated in a religious ceremony. Lieutenant Colonel Francis

MacLean addressed his regiment at a consecration of the colors of the

Royal Highland Emigrant Corps in 1777.

Though we do not worship the colours, yet the awful ceremony of

this day sufficiently evinces, that they are with us, as in ancient times,

the object of particular veneration; they hold forth to us the ideas

of the prince whose service we have undertaken, of our country’s

cause which we are never to forsake, and of military honour which

we are ever to preserve. The colours, in short, represent everything

that is dear to a soldier; at the sight of them all the powers of his

soul are to rouse, they are the post to which he must repair through

fire and sword, and which he must defend while life remains . . . to

desert them is the blackest perjury and eternal infamy . . . to lose

them, no matter how, is to lose everything; and when they are

in danger, or lost, officers and soldiers have nothing for it but to

recover them or die.

Carried in the center of the front rank, they attracted the hottest fire,

and so to be allotted (awarded might be a better word) the task of

carrying them (usually given to the most junior officers—ensigns—

flanked by sergeants of the color guard, and passed on down through

the junior officer ranks if the bearers fell) was an honor. At Waterloo,

for example, Sergeant William Lawrence was finally called on to carry

the colors of the 40th Foot because “[earlier] that day fourteen sergeants

[had been] already killed and wounded while in charge of these colours,

with officers in proportion, and the staff and colours were almost cut

to pieces.”

To lose the colors in battle was not only a matter of the deepest

shame but also, in a purely practical sense, the signal of defeat. (To

“strike the colors” on a warship, for instance, was the sign of surrender.)

At Saratoga the baroness von Riedesel had the Brunswick colors sewn

inside a pillow to prevent them from falling into enemy hands.

Albuera, a particularly bloody battle in Spain during the Napoleonic