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

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“a choaky mouthful” 19

Nathanael Greene suggesting the wisdom of the tactics he had used at

Cowpens. “If the militia fights you will beat Cornwallis; if not he will beat

you and perhaps cut your regulars to pieces.” Put the militia in the center,

he advised, “with some picked troops in their rear with orders to shoot

down the first man that runs. If anything will succeed, a disposition of this

kind will.”

Plenty of stick, but not much carrot. Greene certainly applied

the stick but neglected to dangle the carrot of a guaranteed escape route,

and the militia crumpled at Guilford. As Colonel Henry Lee wrote in his

Memoirs, “To our infinite distress and mortification, the North Carolina

militia took to flight . . . Every effort was made by . . . the officers of every

grade to stop this unaccountable panic, for not a man of the corps had been

killed or even wounded . . . All was in vain; so thoroughly confounded

were these unhappy men, that, throwing away arms, knapsacks, and even

canteens, they rushed like a torrent through the woods.”

Apart from their checkered career in battle, the militias performed

a critical task for the patriot cause: to root out and ruthlessly suppress

Loyalist opposition. To understand the nature of this activity, it is useful

to look at the War of Independence through the lens of much more

recent history. For example, the Communist political cadres of the

Vietnam War, the IRA, and the “insurgents” of the second Iraq War

were heavily invested in intimidating and killing those they perceived

to be sympathetic to the occupying power. This is a constant element

of an anticolonial war. Some American historians are squeamish about

making such long-range connections between, say, Vietnam (or Iraq)

and the American War of Independence (and right-wing talk-show

hosts froth at the mouth when any comparison is made between the

techniques of eighteenth-century American patriots and modern Iraqi

“insurgents”), but the connections are numerous and, indeed, inevitable.

Colonial wars share a certain geometry.



the continentals



Jesse Lukens, a patriot rifleman from the South, viewed the New

England army besieging Boston in September 1775: “Such Sermons,

patriot battles 20

such Negroes, such Colonels, & such Great, Great Grandfathers.”

And exactly one year later we can hear its echo in the journal entry for

Monday, 2 September 1776 of Ambrose Serle, Admiral Lord Richard

Howe’s private secretary: “Their army is the strangest that was ever

Collected: Old men of 60, Boys of 14, and Blacks of all ages, and ragged

for the most part, compose the motley Crew.”

Who made up that “motley Crew” and why did they join the army?

Membership in this valiant band was small, select, and exclusive. Not

because of any rigorous winnowing of recruits—quite the opposite—

but because most sensible men, mindful of their families, their farms,

their livelihoods, went to considerable lengths to avoid service in an

army that could promise them only lousy conditions, low wages (if any

at all), and no small chance of being put in harm’s way, by either battle

or disease. James Collins, for instance, a youngster from the Carolina

backcountry, toyed with the idea of volunteering for the Continentals

until his father, Daniel, a veteran of the French and Indian War, gave

him some advice. James recalled his father saying: “The time was at hand

when volunteers would be called for, and by joining them [the militia

rather than the regulars] . . . I would be less exposed, less fatigued, and

if there should be any chance of resting, I could come home and enjoy it;

he said he had some experience and learned a lesson from it.”

After the initial ardor of 1775 the enthusiasm of the American people

for its army was muted. For example, it is one of the more piquant ironies

of American history that the army’s suffering at Valley Forge during the

winter of 1777–78 has been raised in the popular imagination to a quasi-

religious expression of nationhood. In fact, the army was abandoned

by the American people at Valley Forge. While the army starved and

shivered and died, the local populace traded for hard cash—not the

useless Continental paper money of the army—with the nearby British.

Stung by the whining of the substantial burghers of Pennsylvania who

demanded that the army at Valley Forge protect their property from

British depredations, Washington let them have it with both barrels.

I can assure those Gentlemen that it is a much easier and less

distressing thing to draw remonstrances in a comfortable room by a

“a choaky mouthful” 21

good fireside, than to occupy a cold, bleak hill and sleep under frost

and Snow without Cloaths or Blankets . . . I feel superabundantly

for them [the soldiers] and, from my Soul, I pity those miseries.

Albegence Waldo, a surgeon serving in the Connecticut Line,

echoed Washington’s anger when he wrote in his journal at Valley

Forge: “People who live at home in Luxury and Ease . . . have but a very

faint Idea of the unpleasing sensations, and continual Anxiety the Man

endues who is in Camp . . . These same People are willing we should

suffer everything for their Benefit & advantage, and yet are the first to

Condemn us for not doing more!”

The Continental army had been formally instituted on 4 July

1775, when Congress “adopted” the “troops of the United Provinces of

North America” then encircling the besieged British army in Boston.

(George Washington had been appointed commander in chief of “all

the Continental forces” about three weeks earlier, on 15 June.) In its

adoption Congress also inherited the terms of service of these former

militia recruits, many of them members of their respective states’

“provincial regiments” and thus part of a longer service commitment

than the plain militias. Their service was due to expire at the end of

the year. From the very beginning Washington was discouraged by

the failure to induce men to reenlist for any militarily useful length of

time—one year, three years, the duration of the war, anything other

than the short terms the majority of the men would accept.

Short-term enlistments were counterproductive. The men were not

in the army long enough to make them effective, yet in that short time

they consumed resources and clogged the administrative machinery.

“It takes you two or three months to bring new men in any tolerable

degree acquainted with their duty,” said Washington to his secretary,

Joseph Reed, on 1 February 1776. “It takes a longer time to bring a

people of the temper and genius of these into such a subordinate way

of thinking as is necessary for a soldier. Before this is accomplished, the

time approaches for their dismissal.”

This constant chewing on the problem of getting men to enlist,

of getting the “nation” to fight its war of independence, was to be a

patriot battles 22

recurrent theme of his throughout the war and a constant source of

anxiety and frustration that often wobbled his belief in the public’s

attachment to the cause.

Such a dearth of public spirit, and want of virtue, and stock-

jobbing, and fertility in all the low arts to obtain advantages of

one kind and another, I never saw before and pray God I may

never be witness to again . . . Could I have foreseen what I have,

and am likely to experience, no consideration upon Earth should

have induced me to accept this command.

John Adams had recognized the problem when he had referred to the

service as being “too new” and not yet “attached . . . by habit.” George

Washington was equally clearheaded about what would or would not

induce men to leave their hearths and fight.

I do not mean to exclude altogether the Idea of Patriotism. I know

it exists . . . But I venture to assert, that a great and lasting War

can never be supported on this principle alone. It must be aided by

a prospect of Interest or some reward. For a time, it may, of itself

push Men to Action; to bear much, to encounter difficulties; but it

will not endure unassisted by Interest.

So what were the “prospects of interest” that could entice a man

to join the Continentals? In large measure they were no different from

those offered to the British army recruit. First, there was the one-off

up-front lump payment, the bounty; next, the monthly pay; then, the

promise of regular food, drink (a not inconsiderable inducement as we

shall see later), and shelter. There was sometimes the promise of land.

For example, in 1778 the General Assembly of South Carolina offered

100 acres of former Cherokee territory in addition to the 100 acres

promised by Congress.

Finally, but by no means the least important,

something which is far harder to quantify but was, and always has been,

a major factor in military recruitment, a cluster of “social” benefits for

men who had been denied them in ordinary society: the chance to join a

“a choaky mouthful” 23

group, to share comradeship, to feel enveloped and involved, to escape

the suffocating tedium of a life without prospects, to be lifted from the

ordinary, to acquire a little bit of specialness in a life devoid of distinction.

This last posed a strange paradox in eighteenth-century society. The

professional soldier of the ranks, as compared with the officer, was seen

as both a loser and an adventurer. He may have been denigrated by

society at large as a rogue, but he had about him something of the flash

and romance of the buccaneer. The uniform, the stories, a few drinks—

that could get him some respect, and it was certainly no hindrance to

bowling over the ladies! Joseph Plumb Martin, a foot soldier in the

Continental army, is a good example. He enlisted for adventure, to

escape his restrictive grandparents (who had taken him under their

wing) and his circumscribed life as a farm laborer: “I wanted to recreate

myself, to keep the blood from stagnating.”

Money, though, was highest on the list of inducements for regular

army recruits. First there was the chance to acquire a lump sum—the

bounty—which must have been highly attractive to men living either

in poverty or on the tight rein of subsistence. Bounties were nothing

new in the American military; individual colonies had been forced to

resort to them during the French and Indian War, for example. In June

1776 Congress drew up its “plan to enlist militia” and offered privates

a $10 bounty and monthly pay of $6

⁄

(forty shillings) for a three-year

service or the duration of the war. (On 27 May 1778 a differential pay

scale was introduced that gave specialists a slight increase over ordinary

infantrymen. For example, artillerymen and dragoons got $8

⁄

; fifers

and drummers received an extra two-thirds of a dollar; saddlers and

farriers received $10.)

The result, however, was anything but satisfactory as far as

Washington and Congress were concerned. First, bounties simply did

not attract sufficient men. (Of the 6,000–7,000 men of the “old” army

who were issued reenlistment papers on 12 November 1776, only 966

took the offer. After a further week or so, no more than 3,500 had agreed

to stay only until their term expired—sweetened by “a drink of rum,

and were promised another on the morrow.”) Second, a bidding war

broke out between individual colonies and the Continental army. By the

patriot battles 24

spring of 1777 Congress was forced not only to double its original $10

bounty for three years or the duration but to add a further inducement

of 100 acres per man to be awarded at the war’s end. But individual

colonies were also competing for men, some to fill the quota for the

Continental army that Congress had allocated to them on 16 September

1776 and some to fill their own provincial regiments.

The spiraling cost of bounties was confusing for potential recruits

(who had every incentive to hold off making a commitment in order

to benefit from a higher bounty) and often counterproductive for the

Continental army. For example, Connecticut and Massachusetts added

twenty shillings a month to the Continental base pay for privates in

addition to a $33

⁄

increase on the Continental bounty. New Jersey

upped its bounty by $53

⁄

, which prompted Massachusetts and New

Hampshire to increase their bounties to $86

⁄

. Such profligacy and self-

serving on the part of individual colonies enraged John Adams: “I wish

there was a laudable Spirit to give Bounties in Money, and Land, to

Men, who would enlist during the war. But there is not. Congress offers

Ten Dollars Bounty to inlist [sic] for three years when New Jersey, New

York, Connecticut, Mass. Bay and New Hampshire are voting six,

Eight, or Ten Pounds a Man to serve for six months. This economy at

the Spigot, and Profusion at the Bung will ruin us.”

In a grand show

of humbug, John Hancock, one of the wealthiest Americans of his day,

pontificated that he was “Pained . . . at this want of Public Spirit and

Backwardness in the Soldiers.” By May 1778 the Congress approved

another hike in the bounty to $80 and on 23 January 1779 increased it

to $200 plus a clothing provision if men would serve for the duration.

And so it went on, in a pinball ricochet of competing inducements.

Nevertheless, those who could afford to pass them up did.

But not all Americans could. The poor—the backbone of the

army—needed the money and the ancillary benefits: “The hard-core of

Continental soldiers . . . the men who shouldered the heaviest military

burden, were something less than the average colonial Americans. As

a group they were poorer, more marginal, less well anchored in the

society. Perhaps we should not be surprised; it is easy to imagine men

like these actually being attracted by the relative affluence, comfort,

“a choaky mouthful” 25

security, prestige, and even the chance of satisfying human relationships

offered by the Continental army.”

The failure of volunteerism was obviously a problem, but it was

a problem with a couple of dimensions. If fewer than needed would

volunteer, some kind of coercion would have to be instituted: the draft.

But the draft set off alarm bells among the radical Whigs—the prospect

of a standing army. With a standing army came, so it was feared, the

tyranny of the state. The American revolt had drawn inspiration from

Britain’s Great Revolution of the 1640s when a king’s head had been

lopped and parliament had staked out its proprietorial turf. But there was

a problem with this heroic paradigm: tyranny of king had given way to

tyranny of the regicide. Whichever way you carved it up, it was tyranny,

and the army was the horse on which it rode. The battle throughout the

American War of Independence would be between the nationalists like

Washington who desperately wanted a professional army based on the

British model and those who felt republican virtue could be safeguarded

only by volunteerism and short-term commitments to military service.

Volunteerism was the preferred method of enlistment, as it was in

Britain despite the still popular myth that the British soldier was either

a released convict or a victim of the coercive “press.” The problem

was that volunteerism simply did not work “despite,” as Washington

wrote, the “allurements of the most exorbitant bounties and every other

inducement that could be thought of,” which served only to “increase

the rapacity and raise the demands of those to whom they were held

out.”

In response, he advocated a draft or conscription of militiamen

into the Continental army for twelve months. (Massachusetts and

New Hampshire had already instituted drafts by 1777, and the rest

of the colonies had them in place by 1778.) On 15 August 1776 Philip

Vickers Fithian, a chaplain with the New Jersey militia in New York,

noted, “Press warrants are issued to draft three Men out of every five

of the Militia, till the several Brigades be filled.”)

America followed

Britain in using impressment (forced conscription): “Not uncommonly,

as in Maryland, vagrants were inducted into the army—in that state

for a nine-month period; and so were convicted felons, who received

pardons for satisfactory military duty.”

In South Carolina not even

patriot battles 26

doubling Congress’s promise of 100 acres, cash bonuses, or 10 percent

promissory notes could induce men to volunteer, so “military duty in the

Continental forces became the punishment for vagrants, anyone who

harbored deserters, and those who hunted deer at night with fire.”

in the British army, criminals were released into the Continental ranks,

particularly by Virginia, whose governor, Patrick Henry, became the

target of Washington’s protest. Nathanael Greene, likewise, complained

about Virginia convicts serving with him in Pennsylvania in 1778, and

the southern states “lightheartedly relieved themselves of criminals by

compelling them to serve in the Continentals.”

The draft was carried out as a kind of lottery. Each state

apportioned among its militia regiments the quota it was meant to

furnish the Continentals. Militia colonels would then choose the men

to go, sometimes by simply drawing their names from a hat. There

were, however, two loopholes that favored the wealthier citizen:

The draftee could simply pay a fine of £20 within twenty-four hours

and free himself of his obligation; or he could pay a substitute to go

in his place (20 percent of the New Jersey Line, for example, were

substitutes).

Sometimes whole communities like Epping, New

Hampshire, in 1777, escaped the draft by hiring substitutes from

neighboring villages and towns. Charles Royster, in his milestone

book A Revolutionary People at War, presents a somewhat tortured

justification of the substitute system: “Both can claim to have done a

virtuous act . . . one man has kept his personal freedom and given up

money, while the other has gained money and given up some of his

personal freedom.”

The problem with Royster’s argument is that the

man who paid the money avoided the risk of death, while the man

who took the money often did so out of economic necessity rather

than free choice. The substitute did not merely surrender “some of his

personal freedom,” as though he were doing nothing more important

than giving up a little free time, but ran a very real chance of death

from battle or disease. In fact the man who paid for a substitute made

a shrewd investment.

Also tapped for military service in America were “Redemption-

ers”—indentured servants from Britain (mainly Scotch-Irish) who

“a choaky mouthful” 27

were working to pay off the cost of their passage and were, essentially,

the property of their masters. Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Maryland

allowed them to enlist without first having to secure their master’s

approval.

Nor were criminals exempt from service: “Not uncommonly,

as in Maryland, vagrants were inducted into the army . . . and so

were convicted felons, who received pardons for satisfactory military

duty.”

As in Britain, recruiting officers were sent out into the communities

to “beat up” for enlistees. In July 1777 Congress established a system

of district recruiters who received $8 for each recruit and $5 for every

deserter apprehended. Such juicy incentives led to widespread graft.

By all accounts, 1777 was the high point of graft among Continental

Army recruiting officers. Officers drew bounty money, reported

enlistments and disbursements, then reported the desertion of the

recruit. No doubt, such reports were often true, but many of the

reported recruits had never exsisted. Officers gambled away public

money or spent it on their own pleasure . . . The officers’ graft

was crude and unimaginative compared to the inventiveness with

which towns and citizens cheated quotas and conscription in the

war years. They sent British deserters, prisoners of war, bounty

jumpers, and the physically unfit; towns claimed credit for enlisting

men who were already in the army . . . Enterprising businessmen

could pay a willing recruit the official bounty and then offer him

to draftees as a substitute. The higher bidder among the draftees

sent the recruit to the army, and the entrepreneur pocketed the

difference.

Whatever the ordinary Continental soldier could get his hands

on in terms of bounty and pay was quickly negated by the devastating

drop in the value of the dollar as the war progressed. By the fall of 1777

hyperinflation had destroyed the value of Continental paper money.

By September 1779 one dollar was worth thirteen cents. In May 1780

General Johann De Kalb paid $850 Continental for “indifferent” food

and lodging for four for one night.

Private Martin wrote in 1779, “I had

patriot battles 28

it is true, two or three shillings of old continental money, worth about

as much as its weight in rags.” The Virginia Continentals fighting with

Nathanael Greene in the Carolinas in 1781 had not received a penny’s

pay for two years.

As in the British army, the soldier also had “stoppages” deducted

to replace uniforms, arms, or equipment that may have been lost

or destroyed. So out of the roughly $75 a year, it was not unusual

for a Continental private to receive only about $12 after deductions.

Private Elijah Fisher complained bitterly: “If I had anone [known] of

[stoppages] before I had Engaged I ever would have gone . . . They

will promise them so and so and after they have got them to Enlist

they are Cheated out of one-half they ought to have by one or another

of the officers.”

It is interesting to compare the soldiers’ pay with the civilians’.

For example, an agricultural laborer averaged two shillings a day or

£30 per year, assuming he worked a solid six-day week throughout the

year, which was highly unlikely given the inevitable seasonal layoffs

and sickness. If he was hired by the year as live-in help (food and

lodging provided), he could expect about £12 per year (which is about

what a common soldier could expect after stoppages). An artisan (a

carpenter or bricklayer, for instance) could make a little more: £40–45,

assuming he did not “live-in.” Small farmers, who comprised about 30

percent of the total population but 40 percent of the white population,

could expect to generate £30. At the other end of the spectrum, large

landowners could anticipate an income of £1,000–2,000 per year.

Judges were paid about £300, while a royal governor might make over

£3,000.

A single man needed £10–13 a year for food, and another £13 for

clothing and lodging. About £2

½ went for clothes (a pair of “coarse

laborer’s shoes” cost seven shillings and sixpence; a pair of breeches £1),

while the cheapest urban dwelling cost around £10 a year. The family

man had a tougher time. If he was an artisan, he might make £45 a

year, of which £20 would go for food, another £4 or so for clothes, and

£4–6 per year for each child. So an artisan with three children would

be living within a very tight margin of financial viability. The poor,