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

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When enforced drafting into the militia was tried in 1757, it resulted

in widespread rioting and had to be abandoned. The British army was,

until the introduction of conscription in 1916, technically a volunteer

force—in theory if not always in fact.

Broadly speaking, there were two principal ways in which the

government could get soldiers. The first, and most widely used, was

beating up (a term alluding to beating the drum to attract would-be

recruits rather than physical coercion). The second was impressment.

Beating up was usually conducted by a small team of regulars: a

recruiting officer who was often an NCO, perhaps a drummer, and one

or two others, all dressed in their finery, who would visit the towns and

villages within the catchment area of the regiment involved. Winter was

often a fruitful time, particularly in agricultural areas where seasonal

dips in employment made laborers particularly vulnerable, as were

carpenters, bricklayers, and stonemasons. The recruiter’s job was to sell

the adventure, the camaraderie, the glorious traditions of the regiment,

the sterling qualities of its colonel, as well as the financial “benefits” of

army life, all washed down with liberal amounts of alcohol (and in this

American recruiters were no different from their British counterparts).

Alcohol played an important role at all levels of eighteenth-century

society and was a major factor in army life.

In times of peace, service was usually a lifelong commitment, but

when the pill had to be sweetened to induce men to sign up for America,

the commitment for volunteers was three years. Enlistees were paid a

bounty, and, as in recruiting for the Continental army, the difficulty

of attracting sufficient numbers of men led to increases in the bounty

during the period of the American war. It started at a guinea (£1 and one

shilling) but rose to £3 in 1778, and three guineas in 1790. In addition, the

recruit got the “king’s shilling” (actually a crown), which was invariably

spent immediately on quaffables. Out of the bounty (which the recruit

did not get in his sticky fingers), there were deductions for kit and

clothing (not until 1856 would British soldiers be issued free kit and

uniforms on enlistment), which reduced the net bounty considerably.

Occasionally, patriotic towns raised subscriptions among the citizenry

to offer bounties to stimulate enlistment. Such, for example, was the

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case with Bath, Bristol, Birmingham, Warwick, Coventry, and Leeds in

1778 when 15,000 men were added to the rolls.

Cavalrymen received

a higher bounty of £4 fourteen shillings at the start of the war, and

in general the cavalry attracted a “better” class of recruit, which was

reflected in the lower desertion rates compared to the infantry.

The pay of a British private has been described as “a racket in which

everybody received money but the soldier himself.”

He was paid eight

pence per day (there were twelve pence to the shilling; twenty shillings

to one pound sterling), a rate that that had been established in 1660 by

parliament. (It would rise to the princely sum of one shilling per day

in 1797 and remain there for a further seventy years.) Of the fifty-six

pence per week gross basic pay, forty-two pence was earmarked for

“subsistence,” supposedly for food, but other items were also included.

For example, six pence a week went for shoes, stockings, and repair of

arms; one penny per week was a fee split between the regimental surgeon

and paymaster, and fourteen pence a week for the “gross off-reckoning”

which included what we might call overhead: payments to the paymaster

general, to Chelsea Hospital (the home for military pensioners that had

been founded in 1690), and to the regimental agent. The arithmetic has a

Micawberesque neatness to it: fifty-six pence in; fifty-six pence out.

To supplement his pay, the soldier was often forced to look for

moonlighting work. Redcoats at Boston prior to the outbreak of

hostilities hired themselves out as laborers, which caused a good deal

of resentment among the local workforce and led to violence. But

what was true in the British army was also true among many armies

in the eighteenth century. For example, the Connecticut Journal of 14

June 1775 reported that men of the American Continental army hired

themselves out in the “husbandry business” for eighteen pence per day.

In Prussia, short on funds but large on army, moonlighting was built

into the system, and French soldiers hoped for garrison duty at Brest,

where “everyone could find a job.”

The Press Acts, the legal mechanism that enabled the British

government to forcibly draft men, were resorted to at several critical

points for British arms in the eighteenth century, but two fell within

the period of the war against America: 28 May 1778 and 9 February

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1779. All “able-bodied, idle, and disorderly Persons, who could not,

upon Examination, prove themselves to exercise and industriously

follow some lawful Trade or Employment, or to have some Substance

sufficient for their Support and Maintenance” were eligible. They were

essentially the poorest of the poor, those who were “on the parish,”

that is, subsisting on the meager provisions of the local poor law. The

assumption was that the state had a claim on those who were a burden

on society. Impressed men did not receive a bounty; instead, the parish

was reimbursed to the tune of twenty shillings for a single man and forty

shillings if the man left a family dependent on parish relief. All voters

(men of property) were exempt from the press, as were farm laborers

during the harvest season and apprentices whose masters demanded

their release. There was no escape from the press through substitutes

because, in the words of Sir Charles Jenkinson, secretary of war, men

who procured a substitute would “be left at liberty to return to the very

neighborhood where they had proved obnoxious.”

In any case, not

many could have afforded to procure a substitute.

Some men mutilated themselves by cutting off the thumb and

forefinger of the right hand rather than suffer impressment, while

others joined the militia which, as Jenkinson pointed out, was no bad

thing “for the Men being troublesome and obnoxious, became at once

of use to their Country, to whose defence they contribute as much by

voluntary Service in the Militia, as they had been impressed into the

regular Army.”

In fact impressment was not a substantial source of

recruits. For example, during the whole of the 1779 press 2,200 men were

procured, and there was even a backhanded benefit for volunteerism.

During the same period the rate of volunteerism rose by 33 percent over

normal with an intake of 7,000.

Many, it seemed, would rather jump

(and get the bounty) than be pushed.

Recruiting officers were restricted to enlisting men between the

ages of seventeen and forty-five who were sound in body (they had

to undergo a rudimentary medical exam) and at least five feet six and

one-half inches tall. Although recruits were hard to come by as the war

progressed, the height criterion was adhered to. At the end of the war

the average height of a British foot soldier was five feet seven inches

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(five feet nine inches in the cavalry), with an average age of thirty years.

The men had joined up when they were, on average, twenty years old,

and by 1782 had an average of nine years’ service under their belt.

The men who would be shipped out to America, far from being

criminal “scum,” were representative of a wide swath of the British

laboring poor; men who had fallen on hard enough times to make service

in the army, if not the most appealing prospect, at least a viable one.

Twenty percent of the recruits in the Coldstream Guards and the 58th

Foot, for which good records survive, were from the textile industry.

(Weavers had been particularly hard hit by the mechanization of the

Industrial Revolution.) Forty percent of the Guards and 15 percent of

the 58th were displaced agricultural laborers.

As in the Continental

army, they tended to be young (45 percent of the population of Britain

was under twenty years old), although not quite as young as their

American counterparts. Sixty percent of them were English and Welsh;

24 percent Scots; 16 percent Irish. (Perhaps due to some genetic Celtic

wizardry, the artillery had a substantial majority of Welsh and Scots—

63 percent.)

These percentages had shifted as the eighteenth century

progressed. At the time of the French and Indian War, as revealed by

the 1757 returns, 30 percent of recruits to the British army had come

from England and Wales, while over 50 percent were from Scotland.

(Another 15 percent were made up of American-born and European,

particularly German, enlistees.)

Although Scotland still accounted for

a sizable chunk of the total (especially in proportion to its population,

which of course was much smaller than England’s), it was, ironically,

the drain of Scots immigrants to America earlier in the century that

accounts for a lower percentage of Scots soldiers.

The victory of the Hanoverian army over the Jacobites at Culloden

in 1746—a victory of disciplined musketry over the broadsword and

pike—had destroyed the old clan system. In its aftermath, the wearing

of the tartan and the carrying of arms were forbidden to clansmen.

Destitution also followed in its wake. The Highland clearances—large-

scale appropriations of land for cattle and sheep farming by landowners

who had proved their loyalty to the Hanoverian cause—had driven

great numbers of clansmen from their livelihoods. And in one of those

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ironies of history, thousands of dispossessed Scots joined the British

army; they not only joined but became, and have ever since been, a

fighting elite, with an esprit de corps that was, and is, remarkable. They

were to become perhaps the finest infantry in the war against America.

For example, the 71st Foot (Fraser’s Highlanders) would see more

action in America than any other British regiment, from the battle of

New York in 1776; Brandywine in 1777; Stony Point, Briar Creek, and

the defense of Savannah in 1779; Camden in 1780; and the great battles

of 1781: Cowpens, Guilford Courthouse, and Yorktown.

The British army, far from the being “the greatest in the world,”

was one of the least significant among the armies of Europe. When

Frederick the Great contemplated the balance of military power in

Europe, this is how he saw the comparative strengths of the armies.

France: 180,000

Austria: 160,000

Prussia: 150,000

Sardinia: 50,000

Spain: 40,000

England: 20,000

Admittedly the armies of France, Austria, and Prussia were national

troops with a very significant contingent of mercenaries (all eighteenth-

century nations used them liberally), and Frederick’s numbers

represented only those forces that could be committed to European

warfare. Britain, more than any of the others listed, had extensive

commitments to its colonial possessions. Nevertheless, it is a salutary

correction to the “greatest army” myth. Britain, as seen at least by

Frederick the Great, was only a bit player in the military picture of

eighteenth-century Europe as far as its land forces were concerned.

The “greatness” to which many historians of the War of Independence

allude—Britain’s success against, primarily, France during the Seven

Years’ War—was built largely on its navy, which certainly was the most

powerful in the world. Ironically, Britain’s failure in America might

quite plausibly be laid at the Royal Navy’s feet.

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In 1760, at the height of the Seven Years’ War, Britain had mustered

about 203,000 men (including German mercenaries).

But by the eve

of the American war fifteen years of peace had reduced that number

to about 48,500,

of whom approximately 36,000 were infantry,

7,000

cavalry, and 2,500 artillery. Of this total, 7,000 men were already in or

en route to America and Canada, while another 10,000 were in the West

Indies, Minorca, and Gibraltar. In April 1775 Britain would have 7,000

men in North America, and its army would reach its peak of 50,000

in February 1778.

These were relatively small numbers (as British

commanders in chief continually pointed out). For example, Frederick

the Great had 77,000 and his French adversary approximately 85,000 at

the battle of Hohenfriedberg in 1745, numbers that would be dwarfed

during Napoleon’s wars. Bonaparte had more than 100,000 men each

in seven of his battles. At Wagram, for example, 167,000 Frenchmen

were pitted against Archduke Charles’s 130,000.

At Waterloo

Wellington had 107 regiments of infantry and 40 regiments of cavalry,

which, with gunners and his German auxiliaries, gave him a total of

60,000 combatants. By comparison, the numerically largest battle of the

American war was at Brooklyn (on 22–29 August 1776), where 15,000

British faced 9,500 Americans.

Were the redcoats battle-hardened veterans as so many historians

claim? As far as the mass of the British soldiery was concerned, it would

have been doubtful if it could boast of many who had seen action. In

1775 the British army had not fought a major land battle since 1759:

at Minden on 1 August under George II (the last British monarch to

personally lead his army in battle) and at Quebec under James Wolfe

on 13 September. In the fifteen years that had since elapsed there would

have been only a sprinkling of rank and file who had seen action back

then.

A small number of NCOs would also have had battle experience

from that earlier period, but most privates would have passed out of

the service. In fact the American militia probably mustered a much

higher proportion of men who had seen action during the French and

Indian War because age did not prevent them from serving the patriot

cause. On the other hand, it was true that many of the British senior

command—Thomas Gage, William Howe, Henry Clinton, John

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Burgoyne, and Guy Carleton, for example—had been blooded either in

Europe or in America, as indeed had patriot commanders like Charles

Lee, Frederick von Steuben, and Johann de Kalb in Europe; and

Horatio Gates, Philip Schuyler, Richard Montgomery, Daniel Morgan,

and, of course, George Washington in the French and Indian War.

In wartime, during periods of intensive recruiting, the ratio of

raw recruits to seasoned soldiers rose. In peacetime, the percentage of

recruits in the infantry represented about 16 percent of the establishment

(9 percent in the cavalry), but during the war with America it rose to 27

percent (19 percent in the cavalry), and by the end of the American war

the average infantry regiment could muster only 59 percent of its paper

establishment, and the percentage of recruits had risen to 24 percent—

an arc that is perfectly consistent with most wartime armies.

The young British lieutenant William Feilding, who was in action at

Bunker’s Hill, reported on the performance of this largely inexperienced

force: “I can only say from the oldest soldiers here that it was the hottest

fire they ever saw not even the battle of Minden which was reckoned

one of the greatest actions ever gained by British Troops . . . many who

had never seen a Ball fired . . . behaved with the greatest courage.”

Lord Rawdon, who was also in the battle, saw things a little differently:

“Our confidence in our own troops is much lessened since the 17th of

June. Some of them did, indeed, behave with infinite courage, but others

behaved remarkably ill. We have great want of discipline among officers

and men.”

Whether they did well or ill, there is a sense that these men

were inexperienced, and that years of peacetime inactivity had dulled

their war-fighting skills. Nor could their German allies claim to be

veterans. Mostly young farm laborers and impoverished artisans, they

were lambasted by a British officer: “Government has been Cheated

by their sending one half Militia, and the greatest part of the others are

Recruits, very few Viterons [veterans] amongst them.”



A typical British infantry regiment (or battalion—the terms were pretty

much interchangeable) consisted of eight “battalion” companies and

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two “flank” companies (one of grenadiers, the other of light infantry),

so called because when the battalion was drawn up in its battle lines,

they were positioned on each flank or wing: the grenadiers on the right,

the position of honor, and the “light bobs” on the left. On paper, though

rarely in reality, each company had fifty-six privates. (In actuality

there were fifty-three because three were fictitious “contingency” men

whose pay was collected by the company captain to defray, theoretically

at least, the cost of weapons’ repair and other company expenses.)

In addition, each company would have a captain, a lieutenant, an

ensign (the most junior officer rank), three sergeants, three corporals,

a drummer, and a fifer. A colonel, a lieutenant colonel, and a major

formed the headquarters staff, and a chaplain, surgeon, surgeon’s mate,

and quartermaster completed the establishment.

Technically, a British battalion complete with its flank companies

had 642 officers and men and could muster 560 muskets (privates

plus corporals). But the difference between paper strength and battle

strength was enormous, due to losses through illness, casualties,

desertion, or shortfall of recruitment. For example, of the eleven British

line regiments at New York in 1778, the average number of effectives

per regiment was 411.

Lieutenant Frederick MacKenzie reported the

rank-and-file strength of the 23rd Foot (Royal Welch Fusiliers) after

the Lexington-Concord escapade, in which the regiment had taken

four killed, twenty-six wounded, and six missing, as:

Grenadier company 29

Light infantry company 35

Eight battalion companies 218 *

Total 282

* an average of 27 per company

Even before the action the regimental total would have been only 318.

The first grenadier companies had been raised in 1667 in the French

army by selecting the tallest and strongest men (those physically best

suited to toss grenades) of the Régiment du Roi and by the late 1670s

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had been adopted in the British army.

Although by the time of the

American war they had long ceased to be grenade throwers, they were

still distinguished from the ordinary foot soldier by their height and

build, and their role as shock troops conferred an elite status. Britain,

unlike many European countries, did not create specific regiments of

grenadiers, and British grenadiers in America are frequently confused

with the Grenadier Guards (known in this period as the 1st Foot Guards

and who were given their name only in 1815 in recognition of their

achievement at Waterloo fighting as guardsmen, not because they were

grenadiers).

The confusion is fueled perhaps by the fact that there was

a brigade of Guards in the war made up of fifteen men seconded from

each of the sixty-four companies of the three Guards regiments: 1st Foot

Guards, 2nd Foot Guards (Coldstream), and 3rd Foot Guards (which

was named the Scots Guards in 1877), and further muddled by the fact

that grenadier companies from a wide assortment of regiments and at

various times in the war were taken from their regiments and brigaded

together to fight as independent corps: the 1st and 2nd Grenadiers (as

indeed were the light companies).

The creation of these separate grenadier and light infantry corps has

been identified as an organizational weakness that put British regiments

at a significant disadvantage when it came to exchanges of volleys

with their patriot counterparts. The argument goes that American

regiments—at least according to the theoretical reorganization Congress

approved on 4 November 1776—would have had eight companies each

containing seventy-six privates who (when added to the four corporals

per company) would have totaled 640 muskets per regiment, compared

with the 536 muskets of a British battalion shorn of its flank companies—

a 16 percent advantage to the Americans.

However, what appears on

paper rarely appears on the battlefield. The Continental army, with the

best will in the world, would never come close to the theoretical strength

mandated by Congress. In September 1776, for instance, the main army

under Washington stood at 31,000. Over half of its men—17,670—were

militia, and of the 13,283 Continentals 11,590 were rank-and-file musket

men. Sickness and detached postings further reduced the number of

muskets available to 6,081 spread over twenty-five regiments, an average

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of only 243 muskets per regiment.

Likewise, under the reorganization

of the Continental army of 4 November 1776 North Carolina was

mandated by Congress to raise nine regiments for a total of 7,000 men.

By July 1777 those nine regiments totaled only 1,094, of whom 963 were

musketeers—an average of only 107 muskets per regiment.



britain’s german auxiliaries

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There were over 300 states in “Germany” in the eighteenth century: a

ragbag patchwork of small electorates, princedoms, duchies, margravates,

landgravates, bishoprics, and free cities, many of them not much larger

than New England townships. Each had its court to maintain, and each

was constantly in need of money. Their armies were assets that could,

to use a modernism, be “monetized.” The use of foreign mercenaries

was part and parcel of eighteenth-century warfare. Frederick the

Great’s army, for example, was heavily dependent. In 1751 his army

consisted of 83,000 foreigners and 50,000 native Prussians:

“Mercenary

troops are absolutely necessary,” he had declared. Twenty percent of the

French wartime army was composed of mercenaries: Germans, Swiss,

Italian, Irish, and Scots.

Given the German origins of the eighteenth-

century British monarchy, it is not surprising that German mercenaries

had been a staple of Hanoverian warfare. Hessians had fought for the

Crown in Europe in 1739, 1740, and 1742. At Culloden in 1746 they had

been a contingent of the duke of Cumberland’s army. They had even

been hired out to contending armies. In 1743 Hessian fought Hessian:

6,000 under the banner of George II and an equal number fighting

against them for the Austrian emperor, Charles VII.

The accession of the House of Hanover and Brunswick to the British

throne in 1714 brought with it an intricate network of connections with

several German principalities. For example, George I married Sophia

Dorothea of Brunswick-Lüneberg; George II married Caroline of

Brandenburg-Ansbach. Their son Frederick married Augusta of Saxe-

Coburg-Gotha, and their daughter Mary married Frederick II of Hesse-

Cassel. George III was married, particularly happily, to Charlotte Sophia