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

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introduction xx

mad) have now been adopted by America. The War of Independence

laid the foundation of the nation and subsequent historiography for

the cult of the nation. America is at the far end of an arc that began

with the victory at Yorktown on 19 October 1781. The nation, once

a meetinghouse alive and energized by debate, is now a megalithic

cathedral, reverberating with the endlessly rebounding boom of self-

referential and self-reverential echoes.

PART ONE

THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF WAR



They faced each other, these men of the American and British

armies, across a killing ground of perhaps forty or fifty yards. At that

distance they would have clearly made out individual faces, perhaps not

exactly looking into the “whites of the eyes” but certainly close enough

to recognize the commonality of their shared predicament and their

soon to be shared fates. It was like gazing into a mirror. Apart from the

fact that they were on opposite sides, more united than divided them.

In many, indeed most, ways the common soldiers of the War of

Independence, British, American, German, could look across the gulf

that divided them and see true brothers of the battlefield. They were

each overwhelmingly drawn from the poorer and often the poorest

strata of their respective societies. They were predominantly young and

almost entirely without prospects (either before they entered the service,

or during, or after), and few of them, given a more liberal choice of

destiny, would have elected to be where they now were.

In fact they could also have been looking across the gulf of centuries

and seen their reflections in the faces of many modern American and

British servicemen of our “volunteer” forces for whom the promise of

a steady job, training, and even college education provides a foot on the

ladder denied them in civilian life. Then, as now, those with influence,

moxie, and/or money afforded themselves a few more (less dangerous)

options, as illustrated by at least two recent presidents and two vice

presidents. To adapt a classic Pattonism, “It’s not your job to die for

your country, but to get the other poor bastard to die for your country.”

In some important ways war does not change very much.

Like their British counterparts, patriot men were drawn into the

regular army through a variety of means, many of which, in one way

or another, could be considered “coercive” rather than the result of an

act of free choice in the fullest sense. The majority were technically

volunteers (both sides resorted to the “press”—the forced enlistment

of vagrants and those undesirables who were in receipt of parish aid;

both sides offered criminals the chance to redeem themselves with their

muskets), yet the single most important factor in their decision to enlist

was economic necessity. In stark counterpoint to the “heroic” myth of

sturdy, independent yeoman laying down the plow to follow the flag out

patriot battles 4

of pure patriotic zeal—so beloved in popular histories and Hollywood

movies, and still so stubbornly pervasive, despite an overwhelming

amount of scholarship to the contrary—men joined the Continental

army and the militia from the lowest ranks of society because it offered

enlistment bounties, the promise (usually broken) of regular pay, the

enticement (invariably disappointed) of regular food and clothing, and

the chance (mainly illusory) of a roof over their head.

Eighteenth-century warfare demanded from the foot soldier an

acceptance of subordination, a fortitude and obedience, and, above all,

a willingness to accept suffering. On the battlefield this was suffering of

an acute and, for us, almost unimaginable level of stress. For example,

standing in compacted ranks while enduring hours of close-range

bombardment as Lord Stirling’s Americans did during the battle of

Brooklyn or waiting to receive a massed volley at almost point-blank

range, as the British did at Bunker’s Hill or Guilford Courthouse. The

poor, on whom both armies relied to fill the ranks, had a strength drawn

from lives that were hard and invariably short. Although revolts among

the soldiery would erupt during the war, particularly in the American

lines, and desertion was a constant problem, what is remarkable was

their capacity to endure.

“A Choaky Mouthful”

THE AMERICAN SOLDIER

fter the first heady flush of enthusiasm following the

spectacular successes over the British at Lexington, Concord,

and Bunker’s Hill during that glorious spring and summer of

1775 when close to 20,000 American patriots of all stations of society

from the New England states had snatched up their motley collection

of arms to support the insurrection, worthy patriots refused to join

the ranks in impressive numbers. From that time on, the war, far

from being a populist, “democratic” affair, became a military burden

shouldered almost exclusively by the poorest segments of American

society. No matter how persuasive the rhetoric of freedom, the siren

call of self-interest and the urgent demands of survival were often

more compelling. John Adams, writing on 1 February 1776, saw it

clearly, if ruefully.

The service was too new; they had not yet become attached to it

by habit. Was it credible that men who could get at home better

living, more comfortable lodgings, more than double the wages,

in safety, not exposed to the sicknesses of the camp, would bind

themselves during the war? I knew it to be impossible.

patriot battles 6

And it would drive George Washington into regular conniptions

throughout his tenure as commander in chief.

How did some and not other Americans end up looking down the

business end of the barrel of a musket across that fateful fifty yards of

killing ground? There were essentially three organizations in which

they could volunteer or be forced to “volunteer.” The first was the

states’ militias; the second, the states’ troops who were normally drafted

or “levied” from the militia for short terms of service and for specific

tasks, such as guarding strategic points within the state; the third, after

Congress “adopted” the “motley Crew” of citizen-soldiers on 14 June

1775 who were besieging the British at Boston, the Continental army—

the regulars. All three types might appear on the monthly returns of

regular army strength if militia and state troops had been co-opted to

serve with the Continentals.



the militia



The institution of the militia had been built into the fabric of the earliest

colonies. The necessity not only to protect their settlements but also,

where expedient, to expand their holdings, meant that technically every

able-bodied man from the ages of sixteen to sixty was required to turn

up, armed, for regular training and, if necessary, make himself available

for longer periods of service. For example, the Patriot Committee of

Frederick County, Virginia, proclaimed in the spring of 1775: “Every

Member of this County between sixteen & sixty years of Age, shall

appear once every Month, at least, in the Field under Arms; & it is

recommended to all to muster weekly for their Improvement.”

In the beginning it had been a decidedly convenient arrangement

for Britain to set up what were essentially trading satellites charged

with the responsibility of defending themselves with little financial

drag on the mother country. It was only after the French and Indian

War (1754–63) that the cost/profit ratio of Britain’s American empire

shifted in an uncomfortable direction. Britain’s national debt rose from

£75 million to a whopping £130 million.

And in part, it was Britain’s

“a choaky mouthful” 7

attempt to balance the increasingly wayward ledger books of its colonial

investment that drove the colonies into insurrection.

Within each state not all were equally bound by the militia contract.

Some, the lowest of the low in colonial society—slaves, Indians, white

indentured servants and apprentices, and itinerant laborers—were

exempt, not from some humanitarian impulse on the part of the white

oligarchy but because it would too dangerous to arm groups that

might at some future time turn their military experience in the wrong

direction. In any event these people were property, someone else’s

property, and the rules and rights of property were at the sacrosanct

heart of colonial society. It would be only during the severest pressures

of the war that these rules would be bent or broken. At the other end of

the social scale the more powerful could escape the inconveniencies of

militia service by paying a fine or hiring a substitute, an avoidance long

established in the colonial tradition: “No Man of an Estate is under any

Obligation to Muster, and even the Servants or Overseers of the Rich

are likewise exempted; the whole Burthen lyes upon the poorest sort

of people,” wrote Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia to the

Board of Trade in 1716.

A comparison of the original 1669 militia ordinance and the 1774

Militia Act for North Carolina shows how wide a gap had opened

between the generally inclusive demands of the original (“all inhabitants

and freemen . . . above 17 years of age and under 60”) and the much

more lenient expectations of the latter which excluded many categories

of freeholders, including clergymen, lawyers, judges, millers, overseers,

and constables.

The hierarchy of Virginia was acutely aware of the

political fallout if too many militia obligations were placed on what

we would now call its “core constituency,” and the General Assembly

regularly restricted militia service to those who were “not free-holders

or house-keepers qualified to vote at the election of Burgesses.”

Even back in the 1750s when George Washington was colonel of

Virginia’s state troops, he would get a taste of the problems that would

gall him throughout the War of Independence. With the exemption of

what he would have described as the “right sort of people,” Washington

was forced to draw “upon the lowest orders of society, whom he once

patriot battles 8

portrayed as ‘loose, Idle Persons that are quite destitute of House and

Home.’”

And it would be just such as these who were to carry the

main burden of the patriot cause whether in the militia battalions or

Continental army. Most of the time, in those days of his colonelcy, the

militia simply did not turn up (like trying to “raize the Dead,” he wailed),

and when they did turn up they were aggravatingly “bolshie”: “Every

mean individual has his own crude notion of things, and must undertake

to direct. If his advice is neglected, he thinks himself slighted, abased,

and injured; and, to redress his wrongs, will depart for his home.”

Within the intricately structured and close-knit societies of colonial

America membership in the militia was something more than just an

obligation; it was a part of being an acceptable member of the alpha

group—white, male, property-owning—that held the largest stake and

stood to benefit most from the self-protection the militia afforded. It was

held together by “intricate networks of personal loyalties, obligations,

and quasi-dependencies.”

When the Concord, Massachusetts, militia

assembled in March 1775, its colonel, Thomas Barrett, transmitted his

orders through “a son and son-in-law, both captains, to a second son

and a brother, both ensigns, down to yet another son and a nephew,

both corporals, and ultimately to several other nephews in the ranks.”

In societies so closely interlinked by marriage, property arrangements,

local politics, and business, where everyone pretty much knew everyone

else and had dealings with each other over a whole raft of activities,

lies an explanation why, during the war, the militia were so notoriously

disinclined (much to Washington’s chagrin) to serve under any but their

own officers or indeed showed little sympathy for fighting away from

their home base.

The militia bands themselves reveled in their independence,

especially among the New England colonies with their long tradition of

“leveling.” (More than half of the company officers in the Massachusetts

militia who were mobilized during the French and Indian War identified

themselves with manual occupations.)

Officers were often elected by

the men, but it would be a sentimentalization to see this as some sort of

happy band of equals. Officers, as could be expected from a hierarchical

society, tended to come from the upper echelons: “We consider that our