It was a brand new army for a brand new country. It was a very different fighting force than the British army, with its perfectly turned-out soldiers standing ramrod straight, always in a precise formation, the carefully molded products of some of the best training in the world. The rebels formed an army of men from most of the colonies determined to win independence from the mother country. It was a military force that, at its best, would fight against tyranny just as other American armies would do so again and again over the next two hundred years. It was an untrained army that would rely on sheer courage, determination, grittiness, and amazing resourcefulness to not only survive, but to prevail. It was an army, the men outside Boston believed in the spring of 1775, as America would always believe, that was fighting for freedom and justice for all.
It was an army, however, cobbled together with soldiers from crowded seaports and pastoral valleys, that would rapidly become an enigma. The soldiers in the new American army, especially in the first two years of the revolt, acted in ways that dumbfounded their commanders and neighbors alike. The men who signed up to overthrow the yoke of the tyrannical King George III would fight masterfully one day and amateurishly the next. They would engender admiration and scorn from the British on the same morning. They would be belittled by their commanders on the same day for their bad behavior off the battlefield that they were extolled for their bravery on it. The men of the Continental Army and the militias that supplemented them would be sometimes brilliant and sometimes just awful. Its men would at times show unparalleled heroism in fights that would live in history and at other times disappoint all who knew them. They would spend ten minutes discussing a crucial battle but all week arguing over one dollar that another soldier owed them. They would be hailed as heroes one day and denounced as liars, embezzlers, forgers, and scoundrels the next. The military force that began to form in Massachusetts, greeted with cheers from the residents, would turn out to be an army that would delight and confound the republic, often at the same time.
It was an army of men who were uncertain what the future held for them and did not know where the vicissitudes of war would take them next. The soldiers’ anxieties were well summarized by Joseph Bloomfield, an officer of the Third New Jersey, who made out his will just after he enlisted. On his birthday, October 18, 1775, he wrote in his journal, “This day is my birthday, being twenty-three years of age, old enough to be better and wiser than I am. This day twelve months ago I was engaged in my profession of the law enjoying the calm sunshine of a peaceable quiet and easy life. Now I am five hundred miles from my native place amongst strangers and exposed to all the hardships and fatigues of a soldier’s life, no ways settled, not knowing where I may be destined next week.”5
The new army of the United Colonies, as the country was called in the first year of the war, impressed the residents of Boston and the colonial representatives who gathered at the second Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1775. They boldly predicted that an army of seventy-five thousand volunteers would be recruited within months. And then, congressional delegates predicted, the Americans would win independence in a brief clash. All appeared to agree with John Adams, who gave a toast early in the rebellion for “a short and violent war.”6
The American army never grew to seventy-five thousand men. Washington’s force of nearly twenty thousand men in Boston was about as large as it became, except for a slight swelling in size in the rather quiet autumn of 1778. Washington’s main army was usually between ten and thirteen thousand men, with several thousand or so in units under other generals, but few men stayed the length of the war. They were continually replaced by others and, over the course of the eight year conflict, approximately two hundred fifty thousand Americans served in the army. That represented nearly half the adult men in the country, an astonishing percentage.7
The army did not impress its commander, Washington, though, who saw nothing more than a collection of untrained, undisciplined, and ill-equipped men who did not know what they were getting themselves into by confronting the British. He was worried that the men would be unable to face the enemy with much order and that their lines would collapse under what he knew would be ferocious assaults by the Redcoats with their glistening bayonets and thundering cannon.
He was right. Many of the strengths heralded by civic leaders, ministers, and newspaper editors turned out to be weaknesses. The homegrown nature of the different militia units provided as much trouble as it did virtue. Because the militia captain was selected by his friends and neighbors, he was often quite lax in maintaining order among those whose companionship he cherished prior to the war. Some militia even had bylaws that forbid punishments by the captain.
Unrestricted drinking created unruliness in the ranks and was unchecked by the hometown officers. The public areas of camps were messy; stacks of garbage and old food could be found everywhere. Men ignored the common latrines and relieved themselves wherever they chose. This practice became so prevalent that the mayor of Philadelphia complained in 1776 of the local army barracks that they were “as dirty as a pigsty, with ordure in cellars, outhouses, yards, etc. the stench of which is intolerable.”8
The farmers and merchants had no military training upon arrival and many did not believe they needed any. Soldiers rebelled at the drills that they were forced to undergo, certain that their ability to shoot scampering squirrels with their bulky rifles in the forest was all the skill they needed. As their friends and ministers had told them repeatedly, many believed that the war would be over and the British chased back to London, their tails between their legs, within a few weeks. Why train? All were reluctant to take orders from their local leaders, their friends, and were certainly in no mood to take them from newly arrived colonels and generals, all strangers, some from states very far away and some with British accents.9
The militiamen loathed the mundane and often distasteful work that camp life required, such as repairing huts, mending canvas, building fires, completing precision drills, or cleaning latrines, and they hated the brand new discipline imposed upon their lives even more. They resented the higher accord in the army given to their captain, higher pay for the officers, and the lesser punishments meted out to officers for a common offense, such as stealing wooden fence rails from local farmers to make fires. Their resentment grew as the army grew and all whined when new orders forced them to scramble out of their tents at 4 a.m., before sun up, to dress, eat, and then work until nearly noon.10
The men in the state militias often squabbled among themselves. Men from city militias balked at living next to men from rural units. Ethnic groups resented each other. Men from the middle states mocked men from New England. There was considerable resentment early in the war that Congress often replaced Massachusetts men with Virginians, giving the army an unbalanced southern look. At the same time, the Virginians complained bitterly that despite a few promotions, they had to serve under hundreds of Massachusetts officers who gave the army an unbalanced Northern look. In the early days, this animosity often resulted in fistfights among the enlisted men. The infantrymen who battled each other sometimes struck officers and many times threatened to kill them. When they were court-martialed for such offenses, the enlisted men complained that the disciplinary board, made up of officers, was unfairly stacked against them. Thousands refused to pay attention to firearms training and, as a result, dozens killed or wounded themselves and others by accidentally discharging their muskets.11 Many who joined the army to participate in what they saw as the great adventure of their lives became homesick within weeks.12 All of this created chaos.
The militia units were separate from the regular troops of the Continental Army. Men volunteered to join the Continental Army and served from between one and three years. Soldiers in the militia volunteered, or were drafted by their states, for short-term enlistment, usually three months but sometimes eight or twelve. None had to reenlist when their time was up.
Militiamen were extremely parochial. They were fig
hting for the United States, to be sure, but they were really fighting for their state and county. Their allegiance to their home areas was so great that regiments and artillery units sometimes left camp to travel home to defend their native state against an attack or rumored attack, as did a Pennsylvania artillery unit in the winter of 1777. No one stopped them. This localism was so great that troops from Pennsylvania continually referred to their colony not as their “state” but as their “country.” Most states elected governors during the war years, but the leaders of some states were elected as “presidents.”13 Disputes became heated when clothing shipments for the soldiers of a particular state arrived in camp but nothing arrived for soldiers of another state quartered nearby. Some states provided chaplains for the men’s spiritual needs and others did not. Doctors accompanied some state units and others had no medical services at all. The men became bitter over these discrepancies, too.
Despite the frequent complaints of the commander in chief in the early days of the war, scathing criticism from Congress and the press, and the considerable frustration of the people, the Continental Army not only survived but conquered. The soldiers were able to do so despite eight long years of brutal winter camps and heated summer battles, and the deaths of over ten thousand men. For nearly a decade, the Continental Army was battered, ill-equipped, undermanned, badly funded, raggedly clothed, and poorly fed. They consisted of a collection of enlisted men, militia volunteers, Indians, black freedmen, slaves, fifers and drummers, sixty-six-year-old grandfathers and thirteen-year-old kids, artillery specialists, French infantrymen, Prussian drill instructors, and Polish cavalry leaders. And ultimately they defeated the greatest army on earth.
They achieved their historic victory because in George Washington they had a superb leader, to be sure, but they also did it because they were brave men. Even their most strident critics recognized that. Throughout the war, from the firestorm of Bunker Hill to the final assault on Lord Cornwallis’s army on the banks of the York River at Yorktown, Virginia, congressmen, generals, and their officers always praised the fortitude and raw courage of the foot soldiers in that first American army.
When it came to fighting, the men were eager. One soldier preparing for a fight against the British near Bristol Ferry, in Rhode Island, rammed two cartridges down his musket barrel instead of one as a friend looked on. When asked why he double-loaded, the soldier answered proudly, “I’ll be damned if I don’t give them a good [fight].” George Fleming, a captain in the Second Artillery Regiment, wrote to another officer who had gone home on furlough in the middle of the war about the enlisted men that “the company continue much as when you went away—always ready to go through fire and water.”14
In a letter to a newspaper, one soldier bragged that “[we will] bring thousands into the field, push the enemy with vigor, drive them from our towns, storm them in their strongholds, and never pause until we force them from our shores.”15
They were proud of what they had suffered. Some men who had been shot during the war, such as Lt. James Monroe, later the fifth president, hit in the chest at Trenton, refused to have the musket ball removed, telling friends and family that the ball would be a reminder of their service to the United States all of their lives.
And they were proud, as the amateur songwriter from New York said, of what they had done. Young Private Granger was with the American army that defeated the British at Saratoga in one of the major victories of the war. Upon returning home, he met inquisitive neighbors in his village asking about the engagement, and he described the battle at length, then recounted all of the wagons, cannon, gunpowder, and muskets the British had given up at its conclusion. He paused, sighed, and then added with great satisfaction that it was “the first British army that had ever surrendered to any nation, it was said.”
And most of all, they were proud that they had fought for the United States. One soldier was thrilled that his younger brother was going to join the army late in the war. He wrote to his father that “the profession of arms in such a cause as we are now engaged, is both just and honorable, and I am persuaded it would be a piece of injustice to deprive a young man of an opportunity of having it in his power at some future period, to look back on the present and enjoy the heartfelt satisfaction flowing from a consciousness of having done his duty.”16
This attitude rarely flagged, even under the most depressing conditions in winter camps and under heavy musket fire. The nadir of the soldiers’ war was undoubtedly the winter camp at Valley Forge, where over two thousand of the fourteen thousand American troops died of disease and wounds. Yet the tenacity of those who survived touched the hearts of all. In one lengthy letter to Congress outlining the condition of the army during that treacherous winter, a group of generals at Valley Forge wrote of the common soldiers that “there is no difficulty so great but that the troops are willing to encounter. There is no danger so imminent but they despise in comparison to the freedom of America . . . They delight in discipline, subordination, and perseverance: with these they expect to triumph over lawless domination and welcome the returning sweets of peace and plenty.”17
Chapter Six
WHY THEY FOUGHT
The motivations of the men who enlisted in the Continental Army were numerous. All soldiers in all wars believe that God is on their side, and the enlisted men in the United States military felt that way, too. The Great Awakening was an evangelical movement that had swept through America in the colonial era. Its advocates, usually Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist ministers, told Americans that the old preaching of the Anglican church that all were condemned to hell at birth was wrong. They insisted that men and women could attain heaven by leading good lives and helping mankind. They also preached that God was not within the official church, but within the souls of the people.
By the 1770s, the idea of doing good for mankind and establishing a new and better moral order came to mean for many defeating the British Army.1 This was constantly instilled in the men by hometown preachers and later chaplains in the service. This pulpit crusade began as soon as the war commenced. Less than two weeks after the engagements at Lexington and Concord, Corporal Amos Farnsworth jotted in his journal about a sermon by Rev. William Emerson, “[He] encouraged us to go and fight for our land and country, saying we did not do our duty if we did not stand up now.”2 Many of the men pouring into the Boston area at the start of the war did not see themselves as just soldiers in the Continental regiments, but God’s army. They fought for the independence of their nation and with it the salvation of their souls.3
Army recruiters stressed the manliness of the soldier. Men who fought in the army, they told the young men gathered around them in villages throughout the colonies, were true men while those who stayed home to tend to their families and run their farms and businesses were not. Recruiting agents in Pennsylvania frequently used the phrase “manly resistance” to the Redcoats in their enrollment speech.4 Part of this argument contended if you were not a brave man you must be a coward; there was no middle ground. Soldiers believed it and saw soldiering as a magnificent chance to show not just their friends but the whole world that they were real men. One wrote home at the beginning of the war that “the dangers we are to encounter I know not but it shall never be said to my children your father was a coward.”5
Men were eager to protect their homes and families. It was very personal. Army recruiters did not dwell on political theory when trying to sign up their infantrymen. The war, they said, was being fought by men to defend their loved ones, especially their wives and girlfriends, and their land. Recruiters and politicians always emphasized the need for men to fight for their women. Letters from women urging men to join the army were printed in newspapers throughout the Atlantic seaboard. Some newspapers routinely printed stories about the courage of wives at home while their husbands were off fighting for their country. Other stories stressed the patriotic feelings of single women who similarly wanted the men of their town to fight in the servi
ce.6 Recruiters from Thompson’s Rifle Battalion of Pennsylvania even told men that if they did not join the army all would witness “our towns laid in ashes and our innocent women and children driven from their habitations.”7
There were financial reasons. Most young men in the colonial era did not earn much money as subsistence farmers, laborers, or apprentices. They believed that they could earn more in the army, even if, like New Hampshire’s William Scott, they had no opinion about the Revolution. “I know nothing of it,” said Scott, “neither am I capable of judging whether it was right or wrong.”8 Later, as the war dragged on, soldiers volunteered to collect cash and land bounties that were paid for recruits, bounties that added up to a considerable amount of money for men who could barely make ends meet.
There were soldiers who were just hungry for fame, such as George Morison, a private in one of the Pennsylvania rifle companies, who signed up because “the eyes of all mankind were upon us . . . I panted to partake in the glory of defending my country.”9
Many young men who joined the army had never left their counties. For them, a lengthy trip to far away cities was the journey of their lives. “Most of us had not . . . been twenty miles from home. We were now leaving our homes, our friends, and all our pleasant places behind and which our eyes might never again behold,” wrote Connecticut’s Dan Barber.10
The First American Army Page 6
