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

lobsterbacks 59

was met with heavy fines or punishments like tar-and-feathering or

riding a rail (“grand Tory Rides,” as a patriot called them). Although

these punishments may now seem comic (electricity has done so much

to improve our torture techniques!), they were in fact excruciatingly

painful. A patriot described the procedure for tarring.

First strip a Person naked, then heat the Tar until it is thin, and

pour it upon the naked Flesh, or rub it over with a Tar Brush,

quantum sufficit. After which, sprinkle decently with the Tar,

whilst it is yet warm, as many Feathers as will stick to it. Then

hold a lighted Candle to the Feathers, and try to set it all on Fire;

if it will burn so much the better.

Hot tar (pine was preferred) that has cooled will strip off a layer of

skin when it is removed. Riding a rail could cause severe damage to

the genitals and anus. The Committees of Safety and their enforcers

brought a Jacobin-like enthusiasm to suppressing and neutralizing

Loyalists. Cornwallis wrote to his superior, Sir Henry Clinton, on 29

August 1780: “We receive the strongest professions of Friendship from

North Carolina; our Friends, however, do not seem inclined to rise until

they see our Army in motion. The severity of the Rebel Government has

so terrified and totally subdued the minds of the people, that it is very

difficult to rouse them to any exertions.”

The young Lord Rawdon

wrote to Cornwallis, his commander in the South, on 5 December 1780

that those coming into his camp professing attachment to the Crown

were often fifth columnists: “My conduct towards the inhabitants,

and the extraordinary regularity of the troops under my command, I

must assert to have been such as ought to have conciliated their firmest

attachment; yet I had the firmest proofs that the people who daily visited

my camp . . . used every artifice to debauch the minds of my soldiers

and persuade them to desert . . . Several small detachments from me

were attacked by persons who had the hour before been with them as

friends in their camp.”

Throughout the war Britain disastrously mismanaged its Loyalist

dependents. Time after time, starting with Howe’s evacuation of

patriot battles 60

Boston in 1776, Loyalists who had exposed themselves by declaring

for the Crown during British occupations were abandoned and left to

patriot retribution—“the fury of their bitterest enemies,” as an English

officer put it. When Howe quit Boston the city was thrown into a

wild panic. A contemporary diarist reported the desperation: “We are

told that the Tories were thunder-struck when orders were issued for

evacuating the town, after being many hundred times assured, that

such reinforcements would be sent, as to enable the king’s troops to

ravage the country at pleasure . . . Many of them, it is said, considered

themselves as undone . . . One or more of them, it is reported, have been

left to end their lives by the unnatural act of suicide.”

This pattern

would be repeated when the British quit Philadelphia in 1778. Ambrose

Serle was ashamed of his country’s betrayal of its Loyal supporters in

the city.

This [the news of the army’s evacuation] was soon circulated

about the town, and filled all our friends with melancholy on the

apprehension of being speedily deserted, now a rope was (as it were)

about their necks, and all their property subject to confiscation. The

information chilled me with horror, and with some indignation

when I reflected upon the miserable circumstances . . . I now look

upon the contest as at an end. No man can be expected to declare

for us when he cannot be assured of a fortnight’s protection. Every

man, on the contrary, whatever might have been his primary

inclinations, will find it his interest to oppose and drive us out of

the country.

Like many colonial regimes since, the British were too often

ignorant and clumsy when it came to understanding the complex

dynamic between friend and foe. To some extent they were caught in the

classic colonial dilemma of trying to appease an enemy in an attempt to

win “hearts and minds” even when it resulted in undermining Loyalist

support. Howe’s policy of issuing general pardons to rebels who would

go through the motion of taking an oath of allegiance outraged Loyalists,

who denounced his “sentimental manner of waging war,” and even

lobsterbacks 61

roused Germain’s ire. He lashed Howe’s policy as “poor encouragement

for the Friends of Government who have been suffering under the

tyranny of the rebels, to see their oppressors without distinction put

upon the same footing as themselves.”

The British were trapped in this dilemma throughout the war.

Later, in the South, they stumbled around with the same uncertainty.

The Carolinian Loyalist Robert Gray detailed the mess.

The want of paying sufficient attention to our Militia produced

daily at this time the most disagreeable consequences. In the first

place, when the Rebel Militia were made prisoners, they were

immediately delivered up to the Regular Officers, who, being

entirely ignorant of the dispositions & manners of the people treated

them with the utmost lenity & sent them home to their plantations

upon parole . . . the general consequence of this, that they no sooner

got out of our hands than they broke their paroles, took up arms,

and made it a point to murder every Militia man of ours who had

any concern in making them prisoners, on the other hand whenever

a Militia Man of ours was made a prisoner he was delivered not to

the Continentals but to the Rebel Militia, who looked upon him

as a State prisoner, as a man who deserved a halter, & therefore

treated him with the greatest cruelty. If he was not assassinated

after being made a prisoner, he was instantly hurried into Virginia

or North Carolina where he was kept a prisoner without friends,

money, credit, or perhaps hopes of exchange. This line being once

drawn betwixt their militia & ours, it was no longer safe to be a

loyalist.

The “collateral damage” that is inevitable in insurgency warfare

hurt friend as well as foe. The Quaker merchant Robert Morgan watched

as British troops in Philadelphia in November 1777 destroyed Loyalist

houses because they were being used by patriot snipers: “This morning

about 10 o’clock the British set fire to Fair Hill mansion House, Jon’a

Mifflin’s and many others . . . The reason they assign for this destruction

of their friends’ property is on acco. of the Americans firing from these

patriot battles 62

houses and harassing their Picquets.” But what astonished Morgan was

the ignorant glee with which British troops burned the furniture of the

Loyalists, something, he points out, “Gen’l Washington’s Army cannot

be accused of. There is not one instance to be produced where they have

wantonly destroyed and burned their friends’ property.”

And in the end, for Britain, there was simply an implacable blank

wall. When Cornwallis (perhaps the only British senior commander

who felt a genuine bond with the Loyalists)

urged shifting the

main theater of operations into Virginia following the failures—his

failures—in the Carolinas, Sir Henry Clinton wrote to his pugnacious

subordinate: “Your Lordship will, I hope, excuse me, if I dissent from

your opinion . . . there is no possibility of re-establishing order in any

rebellious province on this continent without the hearty assistance of

numerous friends. These, my Lord, are not, I think, to be found in

Virginia; nor dare I positively assert, that under our present circumstances

they are to be found any where else, or their exertions when found will

answer our expectations.”

Still, Clinton could not help himself when

he added, “But I believe there is a greater probability of finding them in

Pennsylvania.” He still had an ear cocked to the siren’s call.

“Men of Character”

THE OFFICER CLASS

eorge Washington knew what he wanted. Just as he modeled

his Continentals on the British army—“a respectable army”

as he put it—rejecting a militia model as being wholly

inadequate to fight his war, so too did he strive to mold his officer corps

into an institution with decidedly European characteristics—a place for

gentlemen.

You must have good officers, [and] there are, in my Judgement, no

other possible means of obtaining them but by establishing your

Army upon a permanent footing, and giving your Officers good

pay, this will induce Gentlemen, and Men of Character to engage;

and till the bulk of your Officers are composed of such persons

are actuated by Principles of honour, and a spirit of enterprise,

you have little to expect from them—They ought to have such

allowances as will enable them to live like & support the Characters

of Gentlemen.

When he wrote this, in the early stages of the war, Washington was

struggling mightily with an army composed mainly of unruly militia

regiments and an officer corps that seemed to him utterly unprofessional,

patriot battles 64

ill-trained, and, above all, ill-bred: “Their officers generally speaking

are the most indifferent kind of people I ever saw.” Too many officers,

in his opinion, were not leaders of men but led by their men. The diary

of Aaron Wright, a New Jersey private, underlines Washington’s point.

Although Wright and his fellow common soldiers were “sworn to be

true and faithful soldiers in the Continental army, under the direction

of the Right Honorable Congress,” Wright goes on to say:

After this we chose our officers . . . When on parade, our 1st lieut.

came and told us he would be glad if we would excuse him from

going, which we refused; but on consideration we concluded it was

better to consent; after which he would go; but we said ‘ You shall

not command us, for he whose mind can change in an hour is not

fit to command in the field where liberty is contended for.’ In the

evening we chose a private in his place.

Washington, the patrician Virginia planter, and a man who always

kept a fastidious distance from those of lower rank, was aghast at the

easy familiarity between officers and their men. This New England

“leveling” spirit appalled him.

To attempt to introduce discipline and subordination into a new

army must always be a work of much difficulty, but where the

principles of democracy so universally prevail, where so great an

equality and so thorough a leveling spirit predominates [it is even

harder]

. . . . You may form some notion of it when I tell you that

yesterday morning a captain of horse . . . was seen shaving one of

his men on the parade near the house.

The British general Sir Guy Carleton was equally shocked when

he reviewed the American officers he had captured at Quebec in 1775:

“You can have no conception what kind of men composed their officers.

Of those we took, one major was a blacksmith, another a hatter. Of

their captains there was a butcher . . . a tanner, a shoemaker, a tavern-

keeper etc. Yet they all pretended to be gentlemen.”

Henry Knox, a

“men of character” 65

major general in the Continental artillery, put it a little more bluntly

when he wrote to his brother on 23 September 1776: “There is a radical

evil in our army—the lack of officers . . . the bulk of the officers of the

army are a parcel of ignorant, stupid men, who might make tolerable

soldiers, but are bad officers.”

The early American officer corps had to be purged, and within a

few weeks after his arrival at Cambridge the commander in chief could

report that he had made “a pretty good slam” at doing so. A regimental

chaplain, William Emerson (grandfather to Ralph Waldo Emerson),

saw the new broom sweeping clean: “Great overturning in the camp

as to order and regularity. New lords, new laws. Now great distinction

is made between officers and soldiers. Everyone is made to know his

place and keep it.”

But there remained huge problems. Although

Congress reserved the right to appoint general officers, field officers

were appointed by individual colonies. Reform was a knotty problem,

made more difficult not only by the jealously guarded “rights” of each

colony but also because of a euphoric confidence that attended those

early successes of American arms: “The army of the united colonies

are already superior in valour, and from the most amazingly rapid

progress in discipline, we may conclude will shortly become the most

formidable troops in the world,” James Warren, a patriot leader from

Massachusetts, could brag to Samuel Adams in August 1775. It was

from this sticky treacle of self-congratulation that Washington would

have to extricate his army.

As the war progressed the American officer corps increasingly

reflected Washington’s ideals. It became more homogeneous in its social

caste and in its feeling of separateness from civilian society. Increasingly,

it came to resemble its British counterpart. Shared suffering welded

the Continental officer class into a tight-knit exclusivity, and at war’s

end this sense of brotherhood and shared grievances would almost tip

America over the edge into military dictatorship.

The old militia officer corps, although not exactly a democratically

elected body, was influenced by a certain egalitarianism. For example,

in the French and Indian War more than half of the officers in the

Massachusetts provincial regiments identified themselves with manual

patriot battles 66

occupations.

Corporal John Adlum, a member of the Pennsylvania

Flying Camp, was captured at New York in 1776 and during his

interrogation gave an interesting insight into the social composition of

the American officer corps during this early phase of the war.

The four companies of the town were commanded by Capt. Charles

Lukens, the sheriff of York County (and to which I belonged), Capt.

William Bailey, a respectable man, a coppersmith, Capt. Rudolph

Spangler, a silversmith, and Capt. Michael Hahn. I am not certain

as to his occupation, but I believe it was a smith . . . Lieutenant

Sherriff, who was appointed brigade major and who had been a

schoolmaster in Yorktown; Lieutenant Holzinger . . . was a fellow

prentice . . . to Michael Doudle, a tanner . . . of Captain Trett’s

company I only recollect Ensign Myers, a blacksmith, and who

was the most uncouth-looking man in the army and one of the

greatest dunces.

A French officer was disconcerted to find that “there are shoemakers

who are Colonels; and it often happens that the Americans ask the

French officers what their trade is in France.”

Colonial America,

however, although much more socially dynamic than the Old World,

was still hierarchical, and this balance was reflected in its officer

cadre—a very mixed bag indeed. For example, the colonel of Ipswich,

Massachusetts, militia regiment was the wealthiest man in town,

but the fourth wealthiest was only a lieutenant, while a captain and

two lieutenants were “poor.”

Officers would tend to come from the

wealthier segments of society, whether elected or not. Half of the militia

officers on Concord, Massachusetts’s tax list came from the town’s most

wealthy 10 percent; and in Goshen, New York, about one-third came

from the top 10 percent and two-thirds from the richest 20 percent.

the New Jersey Line, for example, 84 percent of the officers were drawn

from the wealthiest one-third of society, many of them coming from

the wealthiest 10 percent.

The Maryland Line was similar. Senior

regimental officers came from the colony’s political leadership. William

Smallwood and Francis Ware, the colonel and lieutenant colonel

“men of character” 67

respectively, had both been members of the Maryland Convention, as

had four majors.

The less wealthy were not disbarred from becoming

officers (as they were not in the British army, as we shall see), but

the general picture is fairly clear. As in the British army, wealth and

influence were important factors, particularly at the higher levels of

command.



At the outbreak of the war there were 3,700 infantry officers and 400

cavalry officers in the British army. Sixty-six percent of them had bought

their commissions, and it is this fact that seems the most difficult to

reconcile with modern ideas of an effective officer corps. The conclusion

that many popular historians jump to is that British officers must have

been, ipso facto, effete amateurs. Certainly, there were deadbeat young

twits who had bought their way into rank, but the overall picture is a

little different. At the highest levels of military command there is no

doubt that the wealthiest and the most powerfully connected dominated,

but at every level in between the officer corps was much more diverse.

About 25 percent of regimental officers and 50 percent of proprietary

colonels (“proprietary” because the colonel owned the business and ran

the regiment like a CEO) and general officers tended to come from the

highest echelons of British society. But the greatest source of officers

came from the broad swath of “good families”—the noninheriting

younger sons of respectable stock.

The commission purchase system (abolished in the British army

in 1871) is usually the single issue pounced upon by the “lions led by

asses” school of historians: the victory of privilege over merit; tradition

over efficiency. In fact, it proved to be more open to talent than might

appear at first glance. All ranks below that of colonel could be purchased.

(Colonels were appointed by the king.) The lower the rank, the less

expensive the price. (Exceptions were the engineers and artillery, whose

officers required technical expertise; they constituted a meritocracy

whose ranks were filled by middle-class technocrats, much to the distaste

of aristocratic officers. Wellington, for one, could not abide them.)

patriot battles 68

A vacancy occurred when an officer retired, sold out, transferred,

was killed, died, or was cashiered. Assuming the reason did not fall in

the last three categories, the seller usually had to offer his commission

to the most senior officer of the grade immediately beneath his. If that

officer declined, it was offered to the next senior, and so on, creating

a chain reaction of promotions. A retiring officer had a choice to

make. Either he could sell out and take the purchase price as a lump-

sum pension fund, or he could elect to go on half pay. If he chose the

former, the price he received was his original purchase price plus a

supplement. Since he had bought his office from the government, it was

the government that now paid back the purchase price. The purchaser

repaid the government, which held the funds in bond as an assurance of

good behavior; thus, if an officer was cashiered, he would lose his bond.

The purchaser paid the supplement—the “profit” on the commission—

directly to the retiring officer (a negotiation usually handled by the

regimental agent). The negotiations could be complicated. Here, John

Peebles, the senior lieutenant of the 42nd Foot, describes the Byzantine

horse-trading that went on to move himself up a rung in 1777. His

colonel had asked him to pay a little over the regulation price to the

vacating Captain Lieutenant Valentine Chisholm, who was too ill to

carry on in the service.

I thought it was too much [an extra £50], and am of the opinion

that Mr Chisholm should either sell or serve . . . if he sold the

regulation price was as much as he could expect in the current state

of affairs, however to facilitate the matter & make it as well for

poor Chisholm as we could I agreed to give the £50, 20 of which

Lts Rutherford and Potts agreed to make up equally betwixt them

on the above conditions & Ensign Drummond gives £30, which

with the regulation price from Ens. Campbell makes up the 600

guineas to Chisholm if I succeed to this captaincy.

Death also brought its reward, if not for the demised, then

certainly for his fellow officers. This was the opportunity for a free leg

up—a windfall from the fallen—because the families of the dead man

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

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