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

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“trulls and doxies” 179

from laziness or any other improper excuse he is immediately to dismiss

her from the regiment . . . no woman shall draw rations . . . unless they

make use of their endeavours to keep the men clean.”

No doubt other

services of a more intimate nature were sometimes provided, but it is

clear that a woman’s best chance of survival was through an attachment

to one man, very often a husband whom she followed into the service.

Prostitutes, much more tolerated in the British army than the American

(with its preoccupation with republican “virtue”), were, of course, in

attendance, but a clear distinction needs to be made between them and

camp followers.

During battle camp followers were kept in the rear with the

baggage, but there were occasions when women accidentally found

themselves, or chose to be, in the action. For instance, at the battle of

Brandywine women attached to the 6th Pennsylvania took “the empty

canteens of their husbands and friends and returned with them filled

with water . . . during the hottest part of the engagement, although

frequently cautioned as to the danger of coming into the line of fire.”

British and German women also did similar water duty at Saratoga.

Cooking was not always safe, as a soldier’s wife at Brandywine

discovered. She was preparing a “neat’s tongue” (ox tongue) when the

British artillery opened up: “Unfortunately one of the enemies shot

dismounted the poor camp kettle with the fier [sic] and all its contents

away with it.”

She, unlike the much anticipated meal, survived.

Some women took an even more active part in combat. The

legendary “Molly Pitcher” (who brought water to the American artilleries

at the battle of Monmouth Courthouse, 28 June 1778) may have been a

composite of several women rather than a specific individual.

Private

Joseph Martin described a “Molly Pitcher” of his own at Monmouth.

One little incident happened, during the heat of the cannonade,

which I was eyewitness to . . . A woman whose husband belonged

to the Artillery, and who was then attached to the piece in the

engagement attended with her husband at the piece the whole

time; while in the act of reaching a cartridge and having one of

her feet as far before the other as she could step, a cannon shot

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from the enemy passed directly between her legs without doing

any other damage than carrying away all the lower part of her

petticoat,—looking at it with apparent unconcern, she observed,

that it was lucky it did not pass a little higher, for in that case it

might have carried away something else, and ended her and her

occupation.

Others were not so lucky. Margaret Corbin fought alongside her

husband during the defense of Fort Washington on 15 November

1776 and was badly wounded. Some paid the ultimate price. After the

battle of Freeman’s Farm (19 September 1777) Lieutenant Thomas

Anburey came across some American dead: “I met with several dead

bodies belonging to the enemy, and amongst them were lying close to

each other, two men and a woman, the latter of whom had her arms

extended, and her hands grasping cartridges.”

At the British retreat

from Lexington and Concord “even women had firelocks. One was

seen to fire a blunderbuss between her father and husband from their

windows. There they three, with an infant child, soon suffered the fury

of the day [that is, they were all killed by British soldiers].”

A few women joined the army disguised as men, the most famous

being Deborah Sampson, who served as “Robert Shurtliff,”

enlisted

on 20 May 1782 at Worcester, Massachusetts, and served in the light

infantry company of the 4th Massachusetts. She was wounded (twice) at

Tarrytown. She then became a waiter to General John Paterson at New

Windsor until her discharge on 23 October 1783 at West Point.

After

the war she married and had children and as Mrs. Gannett petitioned

and was eventually awarded a veteran’s disability pension of $4 per

month. Most other women who were widows of common soldiers were

refused federal pensions (officers’ widows were excepted) until 1832, by

which time, of course, few would have been alive to receive them.

Although subsequent histories have dutifully wrapped the women

of the camp in the flag of patriotic heroism, contemporaries were often

appalled by them. “Refined” observers like Hannah Winthrop reviewed

with horror the British camp followers after Burgoyne’s surrender at

Saratoga.

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I have never had the least Idea that the Creation produced such

a sordid set of creatures in human Figure . . . great numbers of

women who seemed to be the beasts of burthen, having a bushel

basket on their backs, by which they were bent double . . . children

peeping through gridirons and other utensils . . . the women bare

feet, cloathed in dirty rags, such effluvia filled the air while they

were passing, had they not been smoaking at the time, I should

have been apprehensive of being contaminated by them.

Washington was desperately concerned that no women camp

followers should be seen during his army’s parade through Philadelphia

on 23 August 1777: “Not a woman belonging to the army is to be seen with

the troops on their march thro’ the city.” And even to an ordinary country

boy like Joseph Martin the women of the camp seemed, literally, alien

beings. At Tappan on the west bank of the Hudson in 1780 he watched

them go by: “A caravan of wild beasts could bear no comparison with it.

There was ‘Tag, Rag, and Bobtail;’ ‘some in rags and some in jags,’ but

none ‘in velvet gowns.’ . . . They ‘beggared all description;’ their dialect,

too, was as confused as their bodily appearance was odd and disgusting;

there was the Irish and Scotch brogue, murdered English, that insipid

Dutch and some lingos that would puzzle a philosopher to tell whether

they belonged to this world or some ‘undiscovered country.’”

It is a

fine snapshot of the mob—the slobbering, foul-smelling, and potentially

murderous beast that a terrified “polite” eighteenth-century society

tried to control with religion, the noose, and the whip.

In the British army a certain proportion of enlisted men’s wives

(about 10 percent, chosen by ballot) were allowed to travel to America

with their husbands, and there may have been as many as 5,000 wives

with the British army over the span of the war.

Some shared fully

in the dangers their menfolk faced. Two were particularly notable.

Baroness von Riedesel left a fascinating memoir of the horrors she and

her three children endured as the wife of the commander of German

troops of John Burgoyne’s ill-fated expeditionary force that went down

to defeat at Saratoga in 1777. Lady Harriet Acland (sometimes spelled

Ackland), the young and pregnant wife of bluff and hard-drinking

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grenadier Major John Dyke Acland, was also at Saratoga and went to the

American lines to nurse him when he was badly wounded and captured

at Bemis Heights on 7 October 1777. Lieutenant William Digby paid

tribute to Harriet’s fortitude on an earlier occasion when the Aclands’

tent burned down: “Lady Harriot Ackland, who was asleep in the tent

when it took fire, had providentially escaped under the back of it; but

the major was much burned in trying to save her. What must a woman

of her rank, family and fortune feel in her then disagreeable situation;

liable to constant alarms and not knowing the moment of an attack;

but from her attachment to the major, her ladyship bore everything,

with a degree of steadiness, and resolution, that could alone be expected

from the experienced veteran.”

The baroness had her own terrifying

ordeals at Saratoga and in the subsequent march into captivity, and they

too were borne with “steadiness and resolution.”

Ordinary women also sacrificed. At the battle of Princeton (3

January 1777) several British women were taken prisoner; the wife

of a grenadier was killed in the action prior to the British capture of

Philadelphia, as was a woman “who kept close by her husband’s side”

at Fort Anne in July 1777.

But of their anonymous lives we know next

to nothing. A tribute to the women of the British army in America by

Sergeant Roger Lamb of the 23rd Foot serves as a memorial: “If war

sometimes in bad men, calls forth all the viper passions of our nature,

in women it is the obverse; it rouses into action an heroism otherwise

unknown, an intrepidity almost incompatible with their sex, and arouses

all the dormant susceptibilities of their mind.”

Cuff and Salem, Dick and Jehu

BLACKS IN THE WAR

he conventionally accepted figure for black men serving in

the Continental army is 5,000, and one eminent historian has

claimed that by 1780 one in six soldiers was a man of color.

These figures so baldly stated seem to imply that the patriot cause was, in

an uplifting way that appeals so much to us, integrated: a brotherhood of

blacks and whites fighting shoulder to shoulder for a shared freedom, a

shared country: “The black soldier or sailor was in fact eager to fight on

two fronts—for his own freedom and for the freedom of his country.”

But on closer inspection the picture is not quite so heartwarming.

As we shall see with native Americans, patriot and British

leaderships were in a dilemma when it came to the question of inducting

blacks into their armies. On the one hand, the prospect of a plentiful

supply of black men had its attractions; on the other, the possibility that

such recruitment might give blacks ideas above their station ran the

risk of unraveling the whole fabric of colonial society, particularly in

the South. For their part, blacks, like Indians and indeed like the poor

whites on whom the major burden of fighting rested, sought to use the

war in whatever way they could to gain advantages within a system that

was unapologetically exploitative.

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At the very outset of the war the Massachusetts Committee of

Safety explicitly denied the right of anyone except “freemen” to serve in

its forces because it would “be inconsistent with the principles that are to

be supported, and reflect dishonour on this colony; and that no slaves be

admitted into this army upon any consideration whatever.”

Four days

after becoming commander in chief Washington, as might be expected

from a Virginia slave owner, prohibited the enlistment of blacks. His

attitude was representative of the white oligarchy. For example, Horatio

Gates instructed recruiters in July 1775 to reject “any deserter from the

Ministerial army, nor any stroller, negro, or vagabond,”

and General

Philip Schuyler in 1777 lamented that the presence of “Negroes” did

nothing but “disgrace our arms.”

However, by the end of December

1775 Washington was forced to change his position in response to the

British threat to arm Virginia slaves. In a panicky letter to the president

of Congress on 31 December 1775, Washington warned that if blacks

could not be brought into the Continental army, “they may seek employ

in the ministerial army.” Gingerly Congress conceded that free blacks

could serve.

Blacks had served in the New England army besieging Boston, as

they had during the Concord and Bunker’s Hill battles. Colonel William

Prescott paid a particular compliment to Salem Poor, who at Bunker’s

Hill “behaved like an experienced officer as well as an excellent soldier.”

It has been estimated that there were 4,500 free blacks in Massachusetts,

of whom about 500 served in the Continental army.

For example, Peter

Salem (who had been freed by his masters, the Belknaps of Framingham)

served in Captain Simon Edgel’s Framingham company of minutemen

in the Concord and Bunker’s Hill battles.

During the British retreat

from Concord on 19 April 1775, Lieutenant Frederick MacKenzie of

the 23rd Foot (Royal Welch Fusiliers) makes the particular observation

that “as soon as the troops had passed Charlestown Neck the Rebels

ceased firing. A Negro (the only one who was observed to fire at the

royal troops) was wounded.”

Did MacKenzie mean the only black

man he had observed during whole retreat, or the only one to fire at

that late stage of the battle?

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The presence of blacks in the army besieging Boston offended

the southern congressmen who visited the camps. And not only the

southerners: Alexander Graydon of Pennsylvania observed “a number

of Negroes, which to persons unaccustomed to such associations had a

disagreeable, degrading effect.”

It was all too much. Edward Rutledge

of South Carolina introduced a resolution into Congress on 26 September

1776 to purge all Negroes from the army. This was opposed by New

England and Pennsylvania on the grounds that such a measure was

impracticable, and a compromise was reached in which black soldiers

already in service could stay, but no new ones would be admitted.

As the war progressed, the severe manpower shortages began to

put pressure on white leaders to admit blacks more officially into the

army. On 2 May 1777 Connecticut passed legislation declaring that

any two men who bought the services of a substitute were exempted

from service themselves—and that substitutes could be black. To help

promote the transaction, the legislators rewarded a slave master who

freed a slave to become a substitute not only by exempting the master

from the draft but also by absolving him of all maintenance costs for

the slave who served.

The role of blacks as substitutes was widespread

during the war. For example, in Concord, Massachusetts, where there

were relatively few blacks, they made up 8 percent of the men Concord

sent to the Continentals.

It is not hard to see the attraction, both for

white men who could afford to buy black substitutes and for recruiting

officers, who, in Massachusetts, got $10 per recruit and “were not overly

squeamish about enlisting Negroes [so that] slaves and free Negroes

unobtrusively filtered into states’ levies, generally signing up for three

years and receiving the same bounty as whites.”

By 1778 the Continental army has been described as being “well

sprinkled with blacks.” In the official return of 24 August 1778 there

were 755 black men spread over fourteen brigades.

What ratio of black

to white might this represent? We know, for example, that Washington

had 15 brigades at Valley Forge with a paper total of 17,491 rank and file

(of whom only 7,600 were fit for duty—but that is another story). With

an average brigade strength of 1,166, it can be assumed that fourteen

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brigades would total somewhere in the region of 16,300; so the ratio of

black to white was 1:21, or 4.6 percent black.

In February 1778 Rhode Island authorized the formation of

a battalion of freed slaves, the state footing the bill of buying their

freedom. The first slaves to enlist were Cuff Greene, and Dick and

Jack Champlin, for whom the state paid £120. White reaction to the

law was so strong that it was repealed on 10 June 1778, but during the

five-month period somewhere between 130 and 300 black men from

Rhode Island had joined the Continentals. For some their service left

them with a sense of betrayal, powerfully expressed with slashing irony

by Jehu Grant in his pension application of 1836.

Their [British] ships lay within a few miles of my master’s

house . . . and I was confident my master traded with them, and

I suffered much from fear that I should be sent aboard a ship of

war. This I disliked. But when I saw liberty poles and the people

all engaged for the support of freedom. I could not but like and be

pleased with such thing (God forgive me if I sinned in so feeling) . . .

These considerations induced me to enlist into the American army,

where I served faithful for ten months, when my master found and

took me home. Had I been taught to read or understand the precepts

of the Gospel, “Servants obey your masters,” I might have done

otherwise, notwithstanding the songs of liberty that saluted my ear,

thrilled through my heart.

In April of 1778 Massachusetts legalized the enlistment of blacks. In

March 1781 New York promised a land grant of 500 acres to any master who

would give up a black servant who would serve for three years. However,

it would be misleading to imagine that these attempts to gain blacks for the

army sprang from some kind of Yankee altruism. Blacks were as disparaged

in the North as in the South. The French traveler Jacques Pierre Brissot

de Warville, writing of the northern colonies, observed: “There still exists

too great an interval between them [free blacks] and the Whites, especially

in the public opinion. This humiliating difference prevents those efforts

which they might make to raise themselves.”

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Even in the South by the summer of 1780 the pressure of the war

began to bend the will of those who had resisted black involvement.

As early as November 1775 the royal governor of Virginia, Lord

Dunmore, had lobbed something of a bombshell into the patriot camp

when he issued an incendiary proclamation urging slaves of patriot

masters to join his “Ethiopian” regiment. About 800 answered the call

(including 100 from Loyalist masters).

General Sir Henry Clinton

further set the cat among the pigeons by declaring in his “Phillipsburg

Proclamation” of 30 June 1779 that any runaway slaves coming over

to the British would be emancipated. Thomas Jefferson estimated

that 30,000 slaves defected from Virginia alone (and perhaps 20,000

from South Carolina).

In fact so great was the response that it blew

back in Clinton’s face. Dismayed by the reaction he had triggered, on

30 August 1781 he instructed Cornwallis, commander of British forces

in the South, to “make such arrangements as will discourage their

joining us.”

Like the Americans, the British were reluctant to put armed ex-

slaves in the ranks, preferring to use them as laborers, scouts, inland

waterway pilots, and, occasionally, spies.

In fact, Loyalist regiments

began to purge blacks from their rolls because they incited disrespect

from regular British regiments.

On the limited occasions when ex-

slaves were used by the British as soldiers, for example, at the siege of

Savannah in 1779, it horrified the Americans and was, said Nathanael

Greene on 30 March 1781, “sufficient to rouse and fix the resentment

and detestation of every American who possesses common feelings.”

Many Britons shared Greene’s abhorrence. Edmund Burke, one of the

leading opponents of the war in the House of Commons, warned that

using armed slaves to suppress the patriot rebellion in the South would

unleash “barbarian” mayhem as they would make “themselves masters

of the houses, goods, wives, and daughters of their murdered lords.”

The debate in the South concerning black enlistment in the patriot

cause was, as can be imagined, as painful as the horns of a dilemma

could make it. One can trace something of this in the sequence of

exchanges that took place between John Laurens, a Continental officer

and son of Henry Laurens (a prominent South Carolinian plantation

patriot battles 188

owner and from November 1777 until December 1778 president of the

Continental Congress), Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington.

The young Laurens (then twenty-four years old) wrote to his father on

14 January 1778 proposing that Continental forces should be augmented

by southern slaves. Not only, he argued, would there be military benefit,

but, perhaps more important in his view, his proposal “would bring

about a twofold good”: “first I would advance those who are unjustly

deprived of the Rights of Mankind to a state which would be a proper

Gradation between abject Slavery and perfect Liberty—and besides I

would reinforce the Defenders of Liberty.” There would be a substantial

military benefit: “Men who have the habit of Subordination almost

indelibly impress’d on them, would have one very essential qualification

of Soldiers.” But, as important, a great moral evil would be expunged:

“I have long deplored the wretched State of these men . . . the Groans

of despairing multitudes toiling for the Luxuries of Merciless Tyrants

[and] have had the pleasure of conversing with you sometimes upon the

means of restoring them to their rights.”

John Laurens put his argument to Alexander Hamilton, then aide

to Washington, and Hamilton responded much more to the appeal of

military expediency than any antislavery notions. In a letter to John Jay

of 14 March 1779

Hamilton applauded Laurens’s argument for its

military rationality because it “promises very important advantages,”

and goes on to say: “It is a maxim with some great military judges, that

with sensible officers soldiers can hardly be too stupid . . . Let officers

be men of sense and sentiment, and the nearer the soldiers approach to

machines perhaps the better.”

Hamilton’s response casts an interesting

light not only on the question of using slaves in the army but also on the

American military hierarchy’s thoughts about soldiers in general.

Washington’s response to Laurens’s proposition is also illuminating.

He wrote to Henry Laurens on 20 March 1779 that he had not ever given

much thought to the idea of enlisting slaves (surely disingenuously), but

his main concern was the preservation of the institution of slavery itself.

Would not giving some the freedom to fight disaffect all the rest? “I am

not clear that a discrimination will not render Slavery more irksome

to those who remain in it.”

John Laurens’s plan, predictably, went