The violence and nonviolent protests had the cumulative effect of undermining confidence in the British government. Frightened Loyalists found the government unable to protect them, while other colonists were persuaded that the ministry and Parliament were despotic. Either way, Americans lost faith in England. Mistrust bred contempt, creating a political vacuum that was filled by radical political agencies. John Adams correctly observed that “the Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people, and in the union of the colonies; both of which were substantially effected before hostilities commenced.” By 1775 many colonists were convinced, as one town meeting stated, that the British government had “a design to take away our liberties and properties and enslave us forever.” Rather than submit to what they perceived to be an iniquitous government, the colonies united through the Continental Congress to defend themselves against England’s alleged schemes.
As resistance broadened, England’s attitude toward the colonies hardened. In late 1774 King George III stated that the New England colonies, which were at the center of colonial turmoil, were in rebellion and that “blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.” Both sides were determined to fight rather than retreat over the issue of Parliament’s authority. The stage was set for Lexington and Concord, which did not begin the Revolution, but only escalated the war to a higher level of violence.
The Strategic Balance
By the spring of 1775 colonial leaders and the British commander in chief, General Gage, were expecting a fight. In September 1774, Congress recommended that the colonies begin military preparations, and many of them stockpiled supplies and undertook militia training with a long-absent seriousness. Activity was particularly feverish in New England, where the British army was concentrated. After the Stamp Act crisis, the turbulence in the seaboard cities had replaced the frontier as the primary concern of the ministry, which had ordered Gage to redeploy most of the army eastward. Gage had a large garrison in Boston, where he fortified the city’s approaches, trained his troops rigorously, and gathered intelligence from spies, including Dr. Benjamin Church, a trusted member of the Revolutionary inner circle. Church informed Gage of the buildup of military supplies in Concord. When Gage received secret instructions to restore royal rule in Massachusetts through force, Concord was the logical target.
On April 18, 1775, Gage dispatched Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith to destroy the Concord supplies. In the early-morning hours of the 19th, as Smith’s men tramped down the road, rebels alerted the countryside. Irritated by the slow advance and worried by the prospect of resistance, Smith sent Major John Pitcairn ahead with six light companies and asked Gage for reinforcements. Pitcairn arrived at Lexington as the rising sun revealed about seventy militiamen in martial array. No one knows who fired first, but in a brief confrontation eight Americans died and another ten were wounded. The British pushed on to Concord, where a skirmish with several hundred militiamen occurred, resulting in casualties on both sides.
The fighting at Lexington and Concord did not last five minutes, but as the British withdrew from Concord a real battle began. Responding in a massive popular uprising, thousands of irate militiamen hemmed in the redcoats and fired at them from concealed positions. By the time Smith reached Lexington, his men were panicked, and only the arrival of reinforcements saved them. The reinforced column fought its way back to Boston, but about 20 percent of the 1,500 regulars engaged were casualties. Worse yet, 20,000 New England militiamen soon besieged Gage. For the first time, the British had experienced the damage that an armed and angry populace employing irregular tactics could inflict on a conventional military organization.
It looked as if the colonies were embarked upon an unequal war. A population of two and a half million (20 percent of whom were slaves), without an army, navy, or adequate financial resources, confronted a nation of eight million with a professional army, large navy, and vast wealth. Yet many colonists were confident and determined. They believed in the “natural courage” of Americans and in God’s divine protection. Congress admitted that colonial soldiers lacked experience and discipline but insisted that “facts have shown, that native Courage warmed with Patriotism is sufficient to counterbalance these Advantages.” And a British captain wrote that Americans “are just now worked up to such a degree of enthusiasm and madness that they are easily persuaded the Lord is to assist them in whatever they undertake, and that they must be invincible.” Colonists were determined because they struggled for high stakes, summed up by George Washington: “Remember, officers and soldiers, that you are freemen, fighting for the blessings of liberty; that slavery will be your portion and that of your posterity if you do not acquit yourselves like men.” The Revolution was no European dynastic squabble, but a war involving an ideological question that affected the population far more than did the kingly quarrels of the age of limited warfare. Large numbers of colonists ardently believed freedom was the issue, not only for themselves but for generations yet unborn.
While Americans claimed natural courage, God, freedom, and posterity as invisible allies, Britain encountered difficulties that negated its advantages in men, ships, and money. England had underestimated the militia’s military potential and rebel numerical strength. Officials, remembering the pathetic provincial soldiers of the last war and ignorant of the distinction between the wartime units and the actual militia, believed sustained resistance was impossible. Compounding this misunderstanding was England’s belief that the rebels were a small minority. British hopes for Loyalist support were high, but Loyalist strength was an illusion: Tories represented less than 20 percent of all white Americans.
Britain also misunderstood the difficulties of conquering a localized, thinly populated society. Colonial decentralization meant the colonies had no strategic heart. To win the war, England had to occupy vast expanses of territory, a task beyond its military resources because of logistical problems and manpower shortages. The British never solved the difficulties involved in waging war across three thousand miles of ocean in a relatively primitive country. Part of the problem was England’s cumbersome administrative machinery, staffed with incompetent patronage appointees, and the lack of coordination among departments. Uncertain communications across the Atlantic and over crude North American roads hindered every military operation. During the Great War for Empire, America had for the most part fed the British army, but now rations had to come primarily from the mother country. They often arrived moldy, sour, rancid, or maggoty; even worse, many ships fell victim to storms or hostile craft. No matter how many supplies came from England, the army still foraged in America for hay, firewood, and some fresh food. But foraging often became indiscriminate plundering, which alienated colonials and drove many of them into the rebel camp. The rebels also tried to deny the enemy access to supplies by conducting guerrilla operations against foraging parties.
The British populace at home was not united behind the war because some people doubted its wisdom and justness. One result of the antiwar sentiment was difficulty in recruiting troops, a difficulty aggravated by George III’s reluctance to incur the huge expenses necessary to expand the army. To fill the ranks, England hired German soldiers, collectively known as Hessians, and sent almost 30,000 of them to America. But Hessians alone were insufficient, and England also enlisted slaves, mobilized Indians, and depended on Loyalist soldiers. England still suffered manpower shortages, and these expedients were also partially counterproductive. Hiring mercenaries, using slaves, inciting “savages,” and fomenting a civil war within a civil war heightened colonial disaffection.
Perhaps England’s fundamental error was its inability to implement an unambiguous strategy early in the war. Although most authorities believed the rebellion could be crushed by brute force, some questioned the expediency of ramming Parliamentary supremacy down the colonists’ throats. Unable to form a consensus on this question, England wavered between coercion and conciliation, vacillating between a punitiv
e war to impose peace and an attempt to negotiate a settlement through appeasement. Unclear about its objectives, Britain inspired neither fear nor affection in the colonies.
Finally, England had no William Pitt to rally the population and direct the war effort. The two men most responsible for conducting the war were Prime Minister Sir Frederick North and Lord George Germain, the secretary of state for the American colonies. Neither possessed a charismatic personality or an abundance of wisdom. As for the generals, no one would mistake any of them for another Frederick the Great or, for that matter, George Washington. A series of cautious and weak commanders plagued British strategy. The odds against the colonists were not as great as they appeared. Britain’s difficulties in projecting military power into the colonies offset America’s obvious deficiencies. The war began as a balance of military weakness, ensuring a long conflict despite optimistic expectations by both sides that the war would be short.
The “Dual Army”
The Revolution created a “dual army” tradition that combined a citizen-soldier reserve (the militia), which supplied large numbers of partially trained soldiers, with a small professional force that provided military expertise and staying power. As much as Americans mistrusted a standing army, Congress realized one was necessary and created the Continental Army. By establishing this national regular army, Congress implicitly accepted the ideology of English moderate Whigs, who had argued that a regular force under firm legislative control was not only consistent with constitutional freedoms but also essential to preserve those liberties. Throughout the war the Continental Army complemented rather than supplanted the state militias, and at practically every critical juncture these disparate forces acted in concert.
Even before Lexington and Concord, the colonial assemblies had revitalized the militia system by increasing the number of training days, stiffening punishment for missing musters, tightening exemption lists, stockpiling powder and shot, and, in some colonies, creating a distinction between militiamen and minutemen. The latter were generally younger men who received special training and took the field on short notice. Rebels also purified the militia by purging Tory officers, ensuring that only “the inflexible friends to the rights of the people” held commissions. The militia’s renaissance had a profound impact. With every colony’s military establishment under rebel control, British armies encountered an unfriendly reception wherever they went. Loyalists were immediately on the defensive and never gained the initiative, as rebel militias beat down counterrevolutionary uprisings. For example, Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s royal governor, tried to mobilize Loyalists and appealed to runaway slaves, but in December 1775 the Virginia militia, reinforced by 200 Continentals, defeated Dunmore at the Battle of Great Bridge. Two months later a similar fate befell Josiah Martin, the royal governor of North Carolina, when the North Carolina militia defeated his Loyalist forces at the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge. In both states the militia had extinguished Loyalist power and expelled royal authority. Greeting enemy forces with small-scale warfare and maintaining internal security were only two of the militia’s functions. Militiamen patrolled against slave insurrections, fought Indians, repelled seaborne raiding parties, garrisoned forts, guarded prisoners of war, collected intelligence, rallied the war-weary, transported supplies, and battled British foragers.
One thing the militia usually could not do was stand alone against large numbers of enemy regulars. But in most battles militiamen did fight alongside Continental troops. The militia had a mixed battlefield record. Sometimes it behaved shamefully, sometimes valiantly. The militia’s performance often depended on the commanding officer; one who understood its limitations against disciplined regulars could utilize militiamen with surprising effectiveness. A British general, while barely suppressing his distaste for such undisciplined irregulars, perhaps best assessed the militia’s battlefield contribution. “I will not say much in praise of the militia of the Southern Colonies,” Lord Cornwallis wrote, “but the list of British officers and soldiers killed and wounded by them . . . proves but too fatally they are not wholly contemptible.”
Although many men shirked militia duty by paying commutation fees, hiring substitutes, or running away, a large percentage of adult males did some service because few localities escaped mobilizing their militias. Units formed quickly, executed their short-term tasks, and vanished. British commanders never understood how these militia forces proliferated. Steeped in the traditions of limited warfare, they did not perceive that the Revolutionary War was one in which military service was being democratized and nationalized. Military authority no longer resided in a sovereign, but in the people and their chosen representatives. War aims were not tangible and limited but abstract and not easily compromised—the colonies could not be half independent—and the politically alert population cared about the outcome.
Since the militia generally adhered to its parochial traditions, Congress realized it needed a national army that could be kept in the field and sent to fight beyond the boundaries of any particular colony. It was for this purpose that it organized the Continental Army, which initially consisted of the New England militiamen penning Gage’s force inside Boston. In mid-June 1775, Congress adopted the besieging throng and then voted to raise ten companies of riflemen from Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania to give the army a more “continental” flavor. Having formed an army, Congress selected George Washington to command it. Washington had been with Braddock and with Forbes’s expedition to Fort Duquesne, and in between service with the regulars he had commanded the Virginia militia. As the crisis with England worsened, Washington played an active role in Virginia’s evolution from resistance to revolution, and he attended both the First and Second Continental Congresses. He was the only delegate attending the deliberations in Philadelphia attired in a military uniform, perhaps symbolizing his readiness to fight for American rights. Washington was a reasonably experienced soldier, a firm advocate of American liberties, impressive in looks, and articulate without being flamboyant. Equally important, he was a Virginian whose appointment, like the rifle companies, gave the army a continental appearance.
“I declare with the utmost sincerity,” Washington wrote the president of Congress, “I do not think myself equal to the Command I am honoured with.” He probably meant it, since his frontier service had given him no opportunity to become acquainted with cavalry tactics, massed artillery, or the deployment of large forces. Yet Washington eventually embodied the Revolution, with the cause and the commander so intertwined in rebel eyes that they became synonymous.
During the war with France, Washington had developed an aversion to militiamen and an appreciation for British professionals. He had experienced nothing but problems with the Virginia militia. They never turned out in sufficient numbers, and those who did he considered insolent and prone to panic and desertion. His opinion did not change during the Revolution, and most Continental officers shared his conviction that “to place any dependence upon Militia, is, assuredly, resting upon a broken staff.” Paradoxically, Washington repeatedly depended on the militia to buttress the Continental Army during innumerable crises. If the militia dismayed Washington, British regulars impressed him, and he strove to mold the Continental Army into a mirror image of Britain’s army. He insisted it should be “a respectable Army,” not only well organized and disciplined but also officered by “Gentlemen, and Men of Character.” He believed the prospect of such an army endangering civilian supremacy was remote; the slight risk was necessary because the consequence of fighting without a regular army was “certain, and inevitable Ruin.”
Although Washington intended to fight the British as they had fought the French, employing a regular army commanded by long-serving officers and using citizen-soldiers only as auxiliaries, he never quite succeeded. The reasons were a dearth of competent officers and too few Continentals. America had no reservoir of men experienced in conventional warfare, and it took long years and hard trials to develop effective batt
lefield leadership. The consistent shortage of Continental soldiers forced militiamen to fill gaps in the fighting line. Ironically, the militia’s existence was one reason regulars were so few: Given the choice between a militia unit or a Continental regiment, most men chose the former. Militia duty carried no stigma, being patriotic, necessary, and often dangerous. But brief militia service entailed little of the long-term misery Continentals experienced. The high wages paid laborers and the possibility of profit from privateering also retarded recruiting. Despite land and monetary bounties, despite the resort to state militia drafts to fill manpower quotas set by Congress, and despite varied enlistment terms—from one year to the duration of the war—the army never approached its authorized strength. For example, in the fall of 1775 Congress voted for an army of 28 regiments (20,000 men), and a year later it increased this to 88 regiments (75,000 men), but the army’s actual size was invariably less than half, and frequently less than a third, of its paper strength.
In terms of social composition the rank and file approximated that of the British army. The ranks contained some farmers, tradesmen, and mechanics, but they included many more recent immigrants, enemy deserters and prisoners of war, Loyalists and criminals (both of whom sometimes had the option of joining or hanging), vagrants, indentured servants, apprentices, free black men, and slaves. The soldiers thus overwhelmingly came from the bottom strata of society. Although the social origins of many Continentals resembled those of British regulars, the similarity fades when one asks why men served. Obviously, some Continentals, like their British counterparts, had little choice. But most American recruits served willingly. The methods of avoiding service were so numerous that few people became regulars against their will. Poor and propertyless men may have found substitute payments, bounties, and army pay attractive, but less dangerous ways to make money and acquire land abounded in American society. Financial benefits simply reinforced the primary motivation to serve, which was probably ideological. Appeals to freedom and liberty—and the vision of a better future these abstractions conveyed—could strike an especially intense chord in men of humble means and origins. One soldiers’ song emphasized this ideological motivation:
For the Common Defense Page 9
