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

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“a choaky mouthful” 29

those with zero assets, represented 40 percent of the total population,

while at the other end of the scale the rich—those with assets of £5,000

or more—constituted 3 percent of the population. In between lay

the middle class, mainly composed of farmers and artisans. “Some of

them lived little above the subsistence level, spending nearly all their

incomes on necessities . . . A majority, however, earned enough to buy

a few luxuries and accumulate some property. Half of the farmers and

two-fifths of the artisans owned between £100 and £500 in personal

estate.”

The previous occupations disclosed by 273 common soldiers

of the Pennsylvania Line are an almost exact reflection of recruits to

the British army: the largest group (34 percent) were agricultural

laborers; shoemakers (23 percent); weavers (19 percent); blacksmiths

and carpenters (12 percent apiece). The 4th and 9th Massachusetts

regiments were composed largely (over 50 percent) of agricultural

laborers, almost entirely American-born, and overwhelmingly poor.

(Fewer than 10 percent of the men who listed farmwork as their

previous occupation had any taxable land.) A study of General William

Smallwood’s Marylanders (one of the crack regiments of the Continental

army) shows the typical pattern: they had very little taxable wealth, the

majority had been unskilled laborers, and their median age was twenty-

one years. The New Jersey Brigade, in which half the men were under

twenty-one at enlistment, was also made up of overwhelmingly poor

young men. Sixty-one percent came from the poorest one-third of the

population, while, on the other hand, relatively wealthy New Jersey

taxpayers who owned 100 acres or more made up only 9 percent of the

soldiery.

The stalwart yeoman farmers, sturdily independent artisans,

and businessmen of patriot mythology were canny enough to avoid

duty at the sharp end.

Smallwood’s Marylanders were interesting in another way: 40

percent were foreign-born. Of 1,068 recruits of the Pennsylvania Line, 75

percent said they were not American-born; about 46 percent were Irish:

“The middle states contributed nearly half of the total force of the main

Continental army in 1777 and 1778. The Irish presence [was] around

45 percent of their entire strength.”

One of every four Continental

patriot battles 30

soldiers was Irish. The “American” army was highly dependent on

poor non-American immigrants, mainly Scotch-Irish and Germans. By

the start of the war there were 300,000 Irish in America.

The British lieutenant William Feilding wrote to Basil Feilding,

earl of Denbigh, on 18 July 1775 that the American army “is said to be

above half Irish & Scotch, but far more the former than the latter.”

a similar vein, the Hessian captain Johann Heinrichs of the Jäger Corps

wrote to a friend in 1776 stating that the war was “not an American

rebellion [for] it is nothing more than an Irish-Scotch Presbyterian

Rebellion.” (“Nothing more than a Mac-ocracy,” said the Continental

army general Charles Lee.)

German immigration had reached about 225,000 by 1775 (58,000

in Philadelphia alone) and was heavily concentrated in the backcountry

of New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina. By 1776

one-third of the population of Pennsylvania was German.

Congress

acknowledged the Germans’ value as a pool of potential recruits,

seeing them almost as “internal mercenaries,” men who, John Adams

recognized, could free “the Natives [American-born citizens] of

the country who were needed for Agriculture, Manufactures, and

Commerce.”

On 25 May 1776 Congress ordered the formation of the

German Battalion. Its manpower was to be drawn from more than one

colony, which was unusual, as Congress normally allowed individual

states to raise and equip their own Continental Lines. Five companies

were to come from eastern Pennsylvania, and four from Maryland, all to

be commanded by Major Nicholas Hausegger of the 4th Pennsylvania.

In a somewhat more sinister example of the role of Germans in

the Continental forces, the Marechaussee Corps, under the Prussian

veteran Captain Bartholomew Von Heer, was formed on 27 May 1778.

It was to act as Washington’s mounted military police, sometimes being

placed behind troops going into battle to prevent desertion, and also to

assist the provost marshal in the grisly business of military executions.

How many Americans fought in the war? The population of the

colonies in 1775 was about 2.5 million (eighteenth-century America

experienced something of a population explosion, growing from

250,000 in 1700).

Roughly 560,000 were African slaves and therefore

“a choaky mouthful” 31

prevented from fighting in the militia or Continental army. To calculate

the number of men of eligible fighting age, we would have to deduct

women; the very old and children; Loyalists, Quakers, and other pacifist

groups; and so forth. Men also enlisted multiple times (often to get the

extra bounty), so it is difficult to arrive at a precise total. Benjamin

Franklin estimated 250,000 men of fighting age in the late 1760s,

and

Howard H. Peckham in The Toll of Independence: Engagements and

Battle Casualties of the American Revolution (1974) estimated “200,000

men in service at one time or another.”

If, for argument’s sake, we accept Franklin’s and Peckham’s

numbers, we have a very high percentage of the men available for war

actually participating, which seems to run counter to a great deal of

evidence suggesting that the fighting was done primarily by the young

and most economically disadvantaged. However, the historian Don

Higginbotham

cites Peckham as asserting that “no more than 100,000

different [my emphasis] men actually bore arms,” which would mesh

with what we know about widespread avoidance of service among

many Americans.

Frederick the Great’s calculations on the size of his army in

proportion to the population of Prussia provides an interesting

eighteenth-century perspective. In The History of My Own Times he

estimated the Prussian population to be not more than 4.5 million souls,

from which he deducted 3.5 million women, minors, and the aged. Of

the remaining 1 million (22 percent of the total population) “capable of

bearing arms,” he calculated that not more than 70,000 of his soldiers

were native Prussians (1.5 percent of the total population and 7 percent

of the potential soldiery), “and even this is a high number to endure.” If

the same percentages are applied to the American population in 1775,

the numbers would be 550,000 capable of bearing arms and 38,500 who

fought.

As might be expected, the number of Continental rank and file

recorded in the official returns (a duty of each regimental commander

as mandated by the Articles of War) fluctuated throughout the war.

For example, the first six months of 1775 for which records exist (July–

December) show a strong and steady establishment with a monthly

patriot battles 32

average of 18,950 rank and file, with only 14 percent on average out sick.

The first six months of 1776 were a little bumpier. For example, a high

of 18,887 in February was immediately followed by 7,720 in March—the

lowest for the whole year. After Congress’s reorganization of the army

in September 1776 (known as the “eighty-eight battalion resolve”), the

numbers jumped up to the highest they would reach in the whole war:

39,892 in September and 40,962 in November. But the toll of the crushing

defeats at Brooklyn, White Plains, and Forts Washington and Lee

between August and November 1776 followed by the main Continental

army’s bedraggled retreat through New Jersey reduced the number

catastrophically: the return for December 1776 was 9,125 rank and file, of

whom almost 35 percent (3,180) were sick, leaving Washington with just

under 6,000 effectives. Following the defeat at Brooklyn in August, the

percentage of sick escalated dramatically, and, tellingly, that proportion

marked as “sick absent” (as against “sick present”) grew significantly. For

example in July, the month before the battle, 2,313 men were recorded

sick present and 259 sick absent for a total of 2,572 (16.6 percent of all

rank and file). By the time Washington’s bone-weary men reached the

Delaware in December, the reports showed 600 men sick present and

2,580 sick absent—a complete reversal of the previous patterns which is

understandable in light of their demoralization.

Although the victories at Trenton on 26 December 1776 and Princeton

in January 1777 were crucial to keeping the flame alight, the returns for

spring 1777 mark the absolute rock bottom for the rebellion. In March

Washington reckoned he had fewer than 3,000 men, of whom about 2,000

were militia whose term of service was about to expire.

The returns

for April 1777 show that Washington’s total rank and file numbered a

paltry 2,188, of whom 474 were sick. Admittedly there was the Northern

Army under Schuyler, and men in the New York Highlands, but the

commander in chief could muster only 1,714 muskets.

By the time Washington faced off against Howe at the battle of

Brandywine in September 1777, his army had recovered, hitting a high

in October of 33,021. From December 1777 through to and including

April 1778—the Valley Forge months—the average monthly count

of rank and file was just short of 20,000, with sickness rates averaging

“a choaky mouthful” 33

about 30 percent. The interesting and quite understandable pattern,

however, is that the ratio of sick present to sick absent moves strongly in

favor of those present—a clear sign of rising morale—as those months

progress.

Defeats were reflected in the sick present/sick absent ratio. The

case of Brooklyn has already been noted, and the pattern was repeated

after Brandywine and Germantown in September and October 1777

respectively. After the battle of Monmouth Courthouse on 28 June 1778

(a “technical” victory for Washington as the British quit the field, but in

reality a savaging of the Continentals by the British rear guard), the ratio

of sick present to sick absent was 951:5,116. No doubt some of those who

were absent had had the stuffing knocked out of them, but the crudity

of the army’s medical provisions must have played some part. It would

have been perfectly understandable and prudent for sick or wounded

men to have returned home, if at all possible, to be cared for.

In 1778 Washington’s main army averaged 24,000 a month with

a steadily dropping rate of sickness. In 1779 it was 21,500 but with

dramatically low sickness rates (just over 10 percent as a monthly

average). During these two years one has the sense that Washington’s

military machine was now robust, inured, and inoculated. Annealed

by battle and hardship, it had become the army Washington would

eulogize so movingly after the war, praising the “unparalleled

perseverance . . . through almost every possible suffering and

discouragement.” He saluted it as his “standing miracle.”

The number of rank and file started to drop in 1780 (14,000 in an

average month but still with low sickness levels), and as war weariness

really began to take hold it plummeted in 1781 to around 6,000 per

month. With his army almost drained of lifeblood, Washington knew

how desperately it needed the 12,000 soldiers and sailors that the comte

de Rochambeau brought with him from France in July 1780. So pitiable

was the size of the Continental army that it caused the American high

command considerable embarrassment; so much so that Alexander

Hamilton thought it “good policy to keep out of sight [of the French]

the disappointments we have met with in the number of men &c.”

The 12,000 men of the initial French expédition particulière (of

patriot battles 34

which about 4,000 were infantry) were, ironically for an army come to

aid a people in revolt against a monarchy, a microcosm of the ancien

régime. The army officer corps was strictly noble and represented

about 6 percent of the total force. Officer salaries, however, exceeded

that for the whole of the other ranks combined.

As with the British

and American high commands, the French indulged itself in the

spirited animosity that grew out of close association at court. They

drew together in their dislike of Lafayette—who had gone native (in

this they shared with their British counterparts a disdain for officers

who, in their estimation, had forsaken the European tradition) and was

also considered “pretentious.”

Rochambeau was given a free hand in choosing the men and

officers he wanted to take to North America. He chose steady but not

stellar regiments that were pretty much at full strength (67 officers

to 1,148 men each): Bourbonnais, Saintonge, Soissonnais, and the

“German” regiment Royal Deux-Ponts which, he reasoned, would be

doubly useful because it might be a convenient repository of deserters

from Britain’s German auxiliaries. Three thousand more men, from the

Touraine (Lafayette’s father had been killed leading the regiment at the

battle of Minden in 1759), Agenais, and Gâtinais, would be brought by

Admiral the comte de Grasse in August 1781.

The ordinary French foot soldiers were drawn from the artisanal

class, certainly not the dregs of French society, and came from every part

of France, although the departments of Alsace and Lorraine were the

seedbeds of the French army. They were professional soldiers but not

veterans; hardly any had seen battle. Most were in their early twenties,

starting out on their first eight-year hitch, but with a leavening of older

soldiers the median age was twenty-seven. The oldest was eighty, the

youngest twelve.

They were certainly stylish in their tight-fitting white uniforms

(the Deux-Ponts, however, wore “celestial blue” in line with other

German regiments), gaiters with twenty-four buttons, and shoes with

one-inch-high heels, and their hair was drawn back and tied with a

black ribbon. A single curl descended in front of each ear. On their

tricorne hats was a white cockade which after a while was joined by

“a choaky mouthful” 35

a black one, the preferred color of the Continentals, to symbolize the

alliance. Armed with the dependable 1777 model Charleville musket, the

French expeditionary force of 1780 “was probably the most sophisticated

military instrument ever dispatched to the New World.”

The benefits of the alliance, however, were not always universally

appreciated. The French, after all, had always been the traditional enemy

in North America, and papists to boot. John Adams, for example, had

written himself a note on 1 March 1776: “What connexion may we safely

make with her? No military connexion; receive no troops from her.”

Charles Lee was characteristically blunt when he wrote in an undated

letter to James Monroe, “The remedy is worse than the disease,”

and went on to speculate, with his trademark sarcasm, that before

long America would be welcoming the Russian army to its shores. By

September 1779 nobody gave a fig for Lee or his opinions, and the time

had passed for Adams’s punctilio. Washington’s Continental army was

as thinned out as breakfast gruel, and he made sure Lafayette passed

the message back to Paris that French soldiers would be most welcome.

In fact one of the very few occasions on which the commander in chief

seems to have broken through that famously icy reserve and shown

downright dance-a-jig joy was when he learned that Admiral de Grasse’s

fleet had defeated the Royal Navy on 5 September 1781 at the battle of

the Chesapeake Capes and had arrived safely back in Chesapeake Bay.

“I caught sight of General Washington,” wrote Rochambeau, “waving

his hat at me with demonstrative gestures of the greatest joy.” They

embraced, reported Baron Closen with italic emphasis, “warmly.”

Lobsterbacks

THE BRITISH SOLDIER

hey were the best of men; they were the worst of men. Many

historians of the war want it both ways. On the one hand, the men

of the British army are invariably described as “veterans,” highly

trained and experienced: tough nuts to crack. “The British army was

the best in the world.” On the other hand, British soldiers are invariably

described as “scum,” the refuse of society, jailbirds, “their ranks replenished

with vagabonds and criminals.”

Another American historian makes

the astonishing assertion that “three British regiments in the American

Revolution were composed entirely of reprieved criminals.”

In this

version men were snatched from the streets or disgorged from the prisons

and then brutalized into mechanical obedience. “This hackneyed and

hostile overview of the British Army has enjoyed a particular resonance in

North America . . . it fits snugly with the comforting knowledge that such

‘professional’ British redcoats were subsequently worsted by ‘amateur’

American patriots.”

Of course there were criminals in the British army,

as there were in the Continental army. If recruitment comes from the least

privileged, it will certainly scoop up a good few unsavory characters. And

this is probably as true today as it was then.

If the assessment of some popular historians is to be believed, the

reprieved criminals in the British army had all committed murder or

lobsterbacks 37

other violent acts; but in eighteenth-century Britain it did not take

much—poaching, the theft of a loaf of bread, rent arrears, trespassing,

literally hundreds of petty crimes—to land the hapless culprit in

the slammer. For example, a justice of the peace in Surrey wrote

ingratiatingly to Lord Barrington, secretary of war, on 10 September

1777 that “John Quinn an Irish American 29 Years of Age near six

feet high very dirty and ragged seemingly of slow understanding was

this morning convicted before me of Orchard Robbing. He is willing

to serve as a soldier. I have therefore committed him to the House of

Correction in Guildford to await your Orders.”

No doubt the secretary

of war was reassured.

As far as attracting men to the colors, the experience of Britain

during the war was not much different from that of America. Not many,

or rather not as many as necessary, found it an attractive proposition.

If one had work, and pretty regular work, there was little financial

incentive to enlist. But many were not so lucky. Several factors were

in play in eighteenth-century Britain that drove men into the ranks

from what a contemporary called “the compulsion of destitution.” As

in America, population rates were rising sharply: 5.7 million in 1750,

8.6 million by 1800,

with large surges after 1750 when the annual rate

of increase rose from 3 to 10 percent. This, together with the impact

of industrialization on what had been labor-intensive trades (such as

shoemaking, weaving, and spinning), as well as on those who were

highly dependent on seasonal work (agricultural laborers, carpenters,

bricklayers, masons; and small subsistence farmers who were forced off

their lands by rising property prices), created a highly competitive low-

wage job market. Poverty was seen both as a just reward for personal

shortcomings (laziness, stupidity, “creature urges”) and as necessary to

the maintenance of the fabric of society. One of the most influential

of British economists and agricultural reformers, Arthur Young, wrote

cynically or sarcastically, “Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower

classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious.”

The economic tectonic plates of depressed wages and rising

prices (the cost of living doubled between 1770 and 1795)

ground

against each other, and those trapped between would be fodder for

patriot battles 38

the army: “Military service [was] preferable to starvation.”

Only the

lowliest stratum of the British proletariat—agricultural laborers—was

considered beneath a soldier. Which was saying something when one

considers how contemptuously soldiers were regarded. A Royal Navy

saying of the eighteenth century described a pecking order of disdain:

“A messmate before a shipmate, a shipmate before a stranger, a stranger

before a dog, a dog before a soldier.” The navy always seemed to win

the hearts of the people; the army their contempt. One reason was

that if you were an unlucky citizen with spare room in your home, an

unwashed and uncouth soldier might come to live with you.

Billeting of soldiers in private houses and inns was commonplace

in eighteenth-century Britain. There were no barracks or government

funds for purpose-built military housing. The soldiery was spread

around the country in various policing roles (chasing down smugglers;

putting down civil uprisings) and had to lay their not-too-fragrant

heads somewhere. Billeting was widely resented in Britain and also

became one of the bones of contention in America before the war. The

parish constable, the official usually responsible for allocating billets,

made sure he did not antagonize the bigwigs (the term bigwig derives

from the large bagwigs worn by the powerful in the late seventeenth

and early eighteenth centuries) of his community, “Squire, Parson,

Gentleman or able Farmer, by sending so disagreeable a Thing to their

Houses as a Red Coat.”

Enforced conscription was not an option in Britain. First, there

was widespread mistrust of a standing army—as indeed there was

in the colonies—as a potential instrument of absolutism. Second, the

landowning class, which formed the bulk of the members of parliament,

would not pay for a conscripted army through taxation or make the

political concessions it might involve: “A whole nation could not be

called to arms without at least the illusion of political partnership;

and the ruling classes of the eighteenth century had no intention of

paying the price of total war.”

Third, the people simply would not

accept it, and the machinery of rule, through monarch and parliament,

was not as absolute as in, say, Prussia, Russia, or France, where more

draconian methods could be employed to coerce men into the ranks.