Militiamen had to provide and maintain their own weapons. Militia laws detailed the required weaponry, which underwent a rapid evolution in the New World. Initially a militiaman was armed much like a European soldier, laden with armor, equipped with either a pike or matchlock musket, and carrying a sword. But Indian warfare was not European warfare, and most of this weaponry proved of limited value. By the mid-1670s colonial armaments had been revolutionized. Armor, which made it difficult to traverse rugged terrain and pursue Indians, had disappeared. Pikes were equally cumbersome and of little use against Indians, who neither stood their ground when assaulted nor made massed charges. At times the matchlock was superior to Indian bows and arrows, but its disadvantages were many. It took two minutes to load, and it misfired approximately three times in every ten shots. The weapon discharged when a slow-burning match1 came in contact with the priming powder, but keeping the match lit on rainy or windy days was difficult, and the combination of a burning match and gunpowder in close proximity often resulted in serious accidents. By the midseventeenth century, the matchlock had given way to the flintlock musket. Depending on flint scraping against steel for discharge, flintlocks could be loaded in thirty seconds and misfired less often. Swords remained common weapons, but colonists increasingly preferred hatchets for close-quarter combat. Although both weapons were valuable in a melee, hatchets were also useful for a variety of domestic purposes.
Militia laws emphasized the importance of a well-armed citizenry in numerous ways. To ensure that each man had the requisite weapons and accoutrements, colonies instituted a review of arms, imposing the duty of conducting it on militia officers, muster masters, or other specially appointed officials. Each colony’s law detailed how destitute citizens could be armed at public expense, and legislatures provided for public arsenals to supplement individually owned armaments. Colonies also required that even men exempted from attending musters should be completely armed and equipped. Although the basic tactical unit in all the colonies was the company, or trainband, regional variations and changes over time were as important as the superficial uniformity. No standardized company size existed, some companies containing as few as sixty-five men and others as many as two hundred. Some trainbands elected their officers, but in others the governors appointed them. Southern colonies, with widely dispersed populations, often organized companies on a countywide basis; while in New England, with its towns and villages, individual communities contained their own trainbands. As populations increased and the number of trainbands grew, colonies organized companies into regiments to preserve efficient management. As one last example of the variety and change within militia units, the initial all-infantry composition evolved into a mixture of infantry and mounted units, the latter providing increased maneuverability and speed, which were valuable assets in Indian warfare.
Militia officers, like colonial politicians, overwhelmingly came from the upper classes, and men moved with ease from important political positions into high military offices and vice versa. The practice of plural officeholding, whereby a man simultaneously held political and military office, epitomized the integration of political and military leadership. For example, in Salem, Massachusetts, between 1765 and 1774, twelve of the twenty-nine active militia officers also held important positions in the municipal government. Similar instances could be cited for other colonies.
The militia was, above all else, a local institution, and officers rarely ordered their men to serve far from home. Each colony organized its militia for its own defense, a principle frequently embodied in legislation prohibiting the militia’s use outside a colony’s boundaries. Every colony faced Indian attacks, worried about rival Europeans, and experienced financial stringencies. How could Virginia help South Carolina without rendering itself less secure, or New York assist Pennsylvania without subjecting itself to increased danger? It could not—or at least it believed that it could not.
Within a colony civil authority controlled military matters, establishing America’s revered tradition of civilian control over the military. However, a shift occurred in the governmental branch exercising predominant influence over the militia. Initially the governors dominated, often receiving their power directly from the King, who gave them wide latitude in appointing officers and waging war. But people considered the governor analogous to the King, the colonial assemblies analogous to Parliament. In England the King and Parliament, and in the colonies governors and assemblies, battled for supremacy. The legislative branch emerged triumphant in both Britain and America. By the mideighteenth century a governor’s military authority lacked substance without the cooperation of the legislature, which had gained almost exclusive control over expenditures, including military appropriations. Using the power of the purse as a lever, legislatures gradually assumed control of the militia. By the Revolution, civilian authority over the military meant legislative control.
As the frontier advanced, the militia decayed. The rot appeared first in the more densely settled seaboard regions, where the Indian threat had diminished by the waning years of the seventeenth century and spread into the interior. Militia service became more of a social or ceremonial function than a military function. The fewer muster days witnessed little serious training and instead became occasions for picnics for the privates and elegant dinners for the officers. Men clamored for more restricted age limitations and an expanded exemption list and complained about the burden of maintaining weapons and equipment. Increasingly men sought militia officership not from a sense of duty but because, as one critic wrote, they had “an amazing infatuation” with military titles as symbols of social prominence. Authorities everywhere laxly enforced the militia laws.
As the common militia based on universal and obligatory service deteriorated, a new phenomenon emerged, partially filling the military void. In George Washington’s words, some men always had “a natural fondness for Military parade,” enjoyed soldiering, and willingly devoted time and money to it. Thus “volunteer militia” companies arose, distinct from the common militia, with their own uniforms, equipment, organization, and esprit de corps. Like so much of the American military heritage, independent volunteer militia units traced their roots to England, especially to London’s Honorable Artillery Company, chartered in 1537. The first similar New World organization was the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Boston, founded in 1638. Exclusive little societies of fifty to one hundred enthusiastic and relatively affluent men, the volunteer organizations kept the martial spirit alive in regions more and more remote from immediate danger.
The Diversity of Colonial Military Forces
Paradoxically, trainbands and regiments were not combat units, rarely functioning in warfare as colonial assemblies organized them on paper. In fact, legislatures did not design the common militia as a fighting force except, perhaps, for extreme local emergencies. Instead it served primarily as an induction center, a training school, and a reservoir of partially trained manpower. Upon reaching the requisite age, a man automatically joined his local trainband; then he underwent periodic training for the next thirty years or so and acquired at least a rudimentary knowledge of military practice. In wartime, authorities formed expeditions by tapping this manpower pool, drawing men out of the trainbands on an individual basis and organizing them into fighting units.
In theory the militia could provide local defense during an emergency, such as an Indian or rival European assault on an exposed settlement. During such crises settlers had little hope of assistance from the colonial government. The unexpected nature of an attack and the poor communications precluded an appeal to the government for timely aid. And the nature of the resulting warfare—usually little more than guerrilla skirmishes amidst the enveloping wilderness—placed a premium on local self-reliance. Knowing they might be unable to exert much influence over events in isolated areas, colonial officials delegated a great deal of power to local officials, but this decentralization of authority was of questionable value. Suppos
e an Indian war party suddenly descended upon a frontier outpost. Even if word of the attack reached local militia officers, travel was so slow that a complete trainband could not be mobilized and dispatched in time to save the settlement. Nor would it have been wise to send the trainband out: If all the able-bodied men in an area rushed to one beleaguered location, the entire vicinity would be left unprotected against further enemy depredations. Even for local defense the militia, as organized on paper, was of limited effectiveness.
As a practical solution for the problem of local defense, pioneers adopted a stronghold concept. Garrison houses, blockhouses, and stockades dotted the frontier. When danger threatened, inhabitants crowded into these fortified structures. The men at the loopholes were militiamen, but, few in number, they acted as individuals rather than members of a militia unit. The stronghold concept had disadvantages. Maintaining a large number of people created logistical problems, not only for arms and ammunition but also for food and water. Abandoning homes and farms for the security of a garrison house or stockade left other property vulnerable to destruction. The colonists, in effect, allowed themselves to be surrounded, leaving no avenue for retreat. Fortunately for them, Indians rarely conducted siege operations, and strongholds could often survive. Strongholds may have preserved settlers’ lives, but the smoky plumes from burning homes, the steady stream of refugees, and the long roll call of abandoned settlements all attested to the militia’s inability to provide defense when and where colonists most desperately needed it. The militia failed to perform its theoretical local defense function, and in a war’s early stages the frontier invariably retracted toward the more heavily populated seaboard.
The militia was more effective as a local police force or as a standby posse comitatus. It preserved the domestic peace, protected propertied and privileged colonists from the disadvantaged elements within society, and quelled movements against the established political order. Militiamen frequently performed riot control duty. In the south, colonies merged their slave patrols with the militia and converted it into an internal police force to recover fugitive slaves and suppress slave insurrections. New Englanders in essence converted their militia into a civil police by mating it with the night watch. As a final example, when the Regulators of western North Carolina demanded substantial local governmental reforms and defied colonial authority during the late 1760s and early 1770s, the governor mobilized a thousand militiamen, who routed the Regulators at the Battle of Alamance in May 1771. Thus a sharp distinction arose between the militia as a domestic police and a colony’s expeditionary military forces.
When authorities launched a military expedition, they did not “call out the militia” per se. Instead they commissioned officers specifically to command the expedition and established manpower quotas for militia districts. Sometimes the commanding officers appointed for an expeditionary force were regular militia officers, but oftentimes they were not. Based upon a formula related to population, the quotas demanded a certain number of men from each affected trainband. Sound reasons supported the quota system. A community needed most of its able-bodied men to defend it from an enemy that often seemed to appear magically where least expected. Settlements also required men at home to plant, tend, and harvest the crops. What good would be accomplished by creating a large army only to have the soldiers in the field and their dependents at home face the grim specter of starvation?
Militia districts filled their quotas by a combination of volunteers, draftees, substitutes, and hirelings, with volunteering being the preferred method. To spur volunteering from among the men in the trainbands, governments usually offered volunteers a bounty. Even lucrative bounties rarely enticed sufficient volunteers, in which case militia officials drafted men out of their trainbands. However, a draftee could avoid service by obtaining a discharge from the governor or a high-ranking militia officer, by providing a substitute, or by paying a commutation fine. Authorities used the money collected from fines to hire additional men or to buy arms and ammunition for destitute soldiers or the community arsenal. A draftee unable to obtain a discharge or a substitute and too poor to pay the fine had one last option to avoid soldiering: He could flee. Movement of men from town to town evading wartime service was a common problem.
The men serving in expeditions increasingly came from society’s lower classes. Individuals of wealth and status were often exempt and unlikely to volunteer, and they could easily secure a discharge, find a substitute, or pay the commutation fine. In fact, colonies sometimes consciously excluded more prosperous citizens from active duty. For example, in the mid-1750s Virginia sought to raise 1,270 men for service. Local justices of the peace, field officers, and militia captains were to hold a court of inquiry, examining the occupations of men between the ages of eighteen and fifty on the muster rolls and making a list of all able-bodied men “as shall be found loitering and neglecting to labor for reasonable wages; all who run from their habitations, leaving wives or children without suitable means for subsistence, and all other idle, vagrant, or dissolute persons, wandering abroad without betaking themselves to some lawful employment.” The court was also to list “such able-bodied men, not being freeholders or housekeepers qualified to vote at an election of burgesses, as they shall think proper. . . .” A second court would meet the quota by drafting men from among those on the list, which automatically omitted the colony’s best citizens.
Yet, as always, colonial military affairs were not subject to easy generalizations, and an acute threat could result in an expeditionary force that more nearly represented a colony’s social composition. For example, at a time when Virginia was raising its army almost exclusively from among the poorest elements of its population, Massachusetts was acting quite differently. Far more immediately threatened by the French in Canada than was Virginia, Massachusetts fielded military forces during the 1750s that were not heavily weighted toward the permanently poor and vagrants but instead reflected the colony’s overall social composition.
From whatever social class they came, once enlisted for an expedition the men who filled the ranks believed they had a legal contract with the provincial government that could not be breached without the mutual consent of both parties. Their military ethos contained little of the emphasis on loyalty, subordination, and discipline that characterized European armies. When a colony failed to fulfill its legal obligations by not providing sufficient rum and food, by forcing men to serve beyond the expiration of their term of service, or by demanding additional duties not covered in the initial contract, colonial soldiers felt that their contract was void. Once authorities broke the contract, the troops felt no compunction against staging a mutiny or deserting in mass, even in the midst of a campaign. To the colonial soldiers these actions were legal and sensible, but to British regulars serving alongside the provincials during the colonial wars, such violations of military discipline were intolerable. No wonder British Major General James Abercromby, who observed colonial troops during the French and Indian War, complained that they were “the rif-raf of the continent.” All too often they were! Not only were they primarily indigents and down-and-outers, but they did not behave as European professional soldiers thought they should behave.
Expeditions composed of militiamen drawn from the common militia’s manpower reservoir represented only one type of military activity. Sometimes authorities sanctioned the formation of ad hoc volunteer companies bearing no official relationship to the militia. Two famous examples occurred in New England during King Philip’s War. One company, commanded by Captain Samuel Moseley, was a conglomeration of apprentices, servants, seamen, and even a few convicted pirates who had in fact been captured by Moseley and gained their release from prison by agreeing to serve. Captain Benjamin Church, one of the most remarkable Indian fighters in American history, led the other. In July 1676, the governor of Plymouth Colony authorized Church to raise a volunteer company of about 200 men, consisting of not more than 60 whites augmented by approximately 140 friendly
Indians. Volunteers, who often came from the lowest social strata, were normally outside the formal militia structure, which excluded Indians, criminals, servants, and men on the move, such as seamen. Bold and aggressive, these men served in anticipation of a rich reward of captured Indian booty and prisoners, who could be sold as slaves.
Some colonies also periodically tried to develop a static defensive line by building forts along the frontier. Virginia, for example, built four forts in 1645–1646 and undertook similar projects throughout the colonial era. Garrisons raised from the militia manned the strategically situated forts. In contrast to typical militia expeditions, garrison troops served for extended periods of time (up to a year in some cases) and in that respect resembled temporary standing armies. Forts often created more problems than they solved: The wooden structures decayed, they were expensive to build and maintain, garrison troops inevitably suffered from low morale, and, perhaps most important, Indians easily infiltrated between the forts. To ameliorate this last problem, Virginia also created “scout” or “ranger” units that patrolled the frontier between and beyond the forts on long-range reconnaissance missions, hoping to expose or disrupt attacks before they descended in full force upon settled areas. Thus colonial military forces were extremely diverse. Supplementing the peacetime common militia, from which authorities organized wartime expeditions through a quota system, were volunteer militia units, garrison troops and rangers, and volunteer companies completely outside the militia framework.
For the Common Defense Page 3
