1775 (30 page)

Among the plantation colonies, Virginia and South Carolina had long-standing militias but were not trailblazers like the two New England regimes. Even so, by the 1770s, Virginia and South Carolina militias were funded by the House of Burgesses and Commons House of Assembly. Royal governors could do little without legislative collaboration.

The Old Dominion’s militia record was unimpressive during 1774 and 1775, despite traditions going back to Virginia’s early-seventeenth-century beginnings as a military regime that had sought soldier-settlers.
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As the eighteenth century opened, the militia’s role was minimized by Virginia’s great distances. Mounted soldiers “ranged” between the frontier forts—thereby originating the term
ranger.
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Over the next half century, the colony was so little menaced by Indians, French, or Spanish “that the militia virtually ceased to exist there.”
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Military effectiveness was greater in more compact, town-centered New England, where militias were part of the culture.

Some Virginia militia came into their own in 1774, fighting the Shawnee in what was named Lord Dunmore’s War. Many of the battalion and regimental commanders involved—Andrew Lewis, William Christian, William Preston, and Adam Stephen—would serve together again in the Revolution. The other local military units to emerge in 1774 and proliferate in 1775 were the independent companies organized by Patriot-faction planters, prominently including firebrand Patrick Henry. Unpaid but hard to control, these volunteers were a far cry from a large and reliable soldiery, and plans to reorganize the militia began in July 1775.

Portions of tidewater Virginia verged on anarchy. Governor Dunmore had fled Williamsburg, taking refuge on HMS
Fowey,
promising freedom to slaves who would run away to join his forces, which many soon did. But because Virginia had virtually no funds and tax revenues were in abeyance, preparedness had to be obtained on the cheap. The solution proposed by the Patriot convention in August—a regular body of 1,000 men, plus 8,000 “minutemen” who would be paid only when called up—produced few of the hoped-for enlistees. Meanwhile, Dunmore’s unfolding bid to recruit black slaves and white indentured servants stirred a dialogue among lower- and middle-income whites about their own economic frustrations and needs. The upshot, between July and October 1775, was that relatively few minutemen could be enlisted. Too much service was required, at times inconvenient for farmers; slave overseers were excused, which produced resentment; pay disparities between officers and men rankled; and officers were appointed, not elected. Virginia’s best troops were those taken on the Continental establishment and paid by Congress.
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South Carolina managed better. Its provincial forces and militia had spent much of the previous half century charged with defending the southern borderlands of British North America. Rarely were these expenses reimbursed. By the 1770s, the Commons House of Assembly, which handled the funds, had developed enough micromanagement of military affairs to utilize four relevant committees: Powder Receiver’s Account, Armory and Fortifications, Commissary Accounts, and Militia and Town Watch.
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According to one expert, by “using legislative committees to apply military grants and in exercising the right to nominate military officers, the lower houses in the southern royal colonies wielded greater authority over military affairs in their respective colonies than did the House of Commons in England.”
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Like Virginians fighting the Shawnee in 1774, South Carolina’s soon-to-be-Patriots had the bonding experience of an Indian war, which also disenchanted them with the culture and reliability of British generalship. South Carolinians from Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter to William Moultrie and Christopher Gadsden all served in the Cherokee War of 1761. Militia Colonel Henry Middleton and Colonel James Grant, the British commander, developed enough mutual disdain to fight a duel.

Southern Patriot militias played a vital role in 1775 and early 1776, including that of the new southernmost colony, Georgia. One military historian, looking at Georgia between 1754 and 1776, placed it alongside
Massachusetts, South Carolina, and Virginia as colonies in which the militia played a key role in the coming of the American Revolution.
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Later chapters will amplify Whig militia successes in defeating the first Loyalist risings or British incursions into South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. In a nutshell, December 1775 saw South Carolina Whig militiamen under Colonel Richard Richardson crush Loyalists under Patrick Cunningham. The next month Georgia militiamen under Colonel Lachlan McIntosh were ordered to Savannah to repel a British flotilla, which eventually departed with thirteen rice-laden ships rather than attack the city. Then in February, North Carolina militiamen under Colonels Richard Caswell and Alexander Lillington defeated a rising of loyal Scottish Highlanders from upper Cape Fear at the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge. Virginia militiamen and minutemen did well in October and December 1775 engagements at Hampton and Great Bridge, respectively.

By far the greatest egalitarian and radical militia enterprise unfolded in Pennsylvania. As we have seen, military unpreparedness had become an Achilles’ heel of the Quaker government as the population grew and surged westward. This was understood on both sides of the Atlantic. In the early 1740s, during that decade’s war with France and Spain, Governor George Thomas told the Board of Trade in London that no military effort could be expected while the Society of Friends controlled the provincial Assembly. Thomas went so far as to suggest that Parliament pass an act excluding Quakers from membership in the legislature.
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Benjamin Franklin, a transplanted New Englander alert to the usefulness of militia, took a lead in 1747 by organizing a volunteer militia association. He did so after the Assembly refused to act even as enemy privateers hovered near Delaware Bay. Following in the footsteps of Governor Keith, Franklin criticized Quaker obstinacy and urged the “middling people, the Farmers, Shopkeepers and Tradesmen,” to sign up. Within days, more than 1,000—over one third of the city’s adult white male population—had done so. In all Pennsylvania, some 10,000 enlisted.
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Nor did the militia issue go away. It smoldered, and then again burst into flames. In November 1755, with French forts and Indian war dances in Pennsylvania’s own backyard, the upper Ohio Valley, some 700 Germans, protesting weak western defenses, marched on Philadelphia. Although still rejecting an official militia, the Assembly passed legislation to authorize a volunteer one. In December, Franklin, now cooperating with the Assembly, organized a general election of militia officers in all ten city wards. Then he
paraded his volunteer soldiery. In the words of historian Nash, “the militia struggle politicized nearly every element of Philadelphia society. The proprietary leaders organized an independent militia, recruited five companies of supporters and counterdemonstrated in the streets. Even Franklin’s old organization of leather apron men, the Junto, became so obsessed with politics that its Anglican majority harassed supporters of the popular party into resignation. Religious groups split along political lines and clergymen became parapolitical leaders.”
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In mid-1763, when Pontiac’s War once again lit up the West with burning cabins, the defense issue was rejoined, and minimal response from the Assembly rekindled western anger. Furious Scotch-Irish frontiersmen, the Paxton Boys, killed peaceful Conestoga Indians and later marched on Philadelphia, cheered by increasingly sympathetic Germans. Quaker pamphleteers portrayed the march as the “latest installment in a perpetual Presbyterian holy war against the mild and beneficent government of the Kings of England.” However, Pastor Henry Muhlenberg, the leader of provincial Lutherans, mocked how “sundry young and old Quakers formed companies, and took up arms to repel the Scotch-Irish.” He recalled how “the pious lambs in the long French, Spanish and Indian wars had such tender consciences, and would sooner die than raise a hand in defence against these dangerous enemies, and now at once like Zedekiah, the son of Chenaanah, with iron horns rushing upon a handful of our poor distressed and ruined fellow citizens and inhabitants of the frontiers.”
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Muhlenberg helped to translate anti-Quaker tracts into German.

Such controversy tells us much. It obviously reinforces the arguments in
Chapter 3
about how much religion came to count in the politics of pre-Revolutionary Pennsylvania. It also suggests that backcountry Pennsylvanians were just as sensitive to Indian issues and fears as southern backcountry residents, to be discussed in
Chapter 6
. More immediately, though, the episode underscores the unique political psychology that militia issues could tap among frustrated Pennsylvanians. Without this three-decade frustration, the degree of radicalization that took over the militia movement could not have gestated.

Lexington and Concord further aroused two major Pennsylvania groups to join the new militia “associations”: the mechanics of Philadelphia and the hinterland Scotch-Irish and Germans. In the words of one chronicler, they were “the disenfranchised element—the people who had been petitioning for more counties and greater representation; the mechanics and artisans of
Philadelphia who had been denied any share in the government by the ruling aristocracy; the frontiersmen who felt that the Assembly had not given them adequate protection against the Indians.”
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In June 1775, the Committee of the City and the Liberties of Philadelphia petitioned the Assembly to be allowed to equip, train, and drill able-bodied men—and despite substantial caveats, the Assembly could not refuse.

To an extent, the legislators were ratifying a fait accompli. Thirty-one companies of Philadelphia militia had already been organized that spring. However, ideological tremors were just beginning. “By the fall of 1775,” said Gary Nash, “the Philadelphia militia had become a school of political education, much in the manner of Cromwell’s New Model Army. Organizing their own Committee of Correspondence, the privates began exerting pressure on the assembly to take a more assertive stand on independence. They also made three radical demands for internal change: first, that militiamen be given the right to elect their own officers, rather than only their junior officers, as the assembly had specified in the militia law; second, that the franchise be conferred on all militiamen, regardless of age and economic condition; and third, that the assembly impose a heavy financial penalty, proportionate to the size of his estate, on every man who refused militia service, and use this money to support the families of poor militiamen.”
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During roughly the same autumn months, Virginia officials faced related, but lesser, economic demands in trying to reorganize that colony’s military structure.

The evolution of committees in Pennsylvania, however, left Virginia and Maryland far behind. Names like Committee of Privates and Committee of Officers never migrated below the Mason-Dixon Line. Poorer Virginians might have been more deferential, but they also lacked Philadelphia’s great urban political crucible.

Thus, events and developments in Pennsylvania provide the principal American Revolutionary parallel—and only a partial one—to the circa 1646–1647 onset of left-radicalism in the victorious English Parliamentary army. During the English Civil War, militia extremism was a late-stage phenomenon, not the early-stage eruption it was under Philadelphia’s unique circumstances. As English soldiers’ demands for democracy in both church and state grew, moderate schemes to curb or disband them only brought further tumult. Then in 1649, after King Charles I was tried and executed, England more or less became a republic, but within several years, it fell under military rule more authoritarian than left-radical.

In the seventeenth century, too, the most important militias were urban. As the English Civil War opened in 1642–1643, the trained bands, the militia forebears of that era, were rarely a factor. Most declined to leave their counties on behalf of either king or Parliament. The notable exception came in London, where trained bands numbering some 18,000 men moved overwhelmingly into the Parliamentary army. These bands furnished “the reserve on which Parliament relied in every emergency” during 1642 and 1643, much as New Englanders, especially Connecticut troops, would be the vital Patriot reserves of 1775 and 1776.
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For better and worse, Patriot leaders in the thirteen colonies were well aware of English Civil War precedents. As they too tried to mold citizen-soldiers into hard-fighting, reliable units, Cromwell’s famous 1644–1645 “New Model” success came often to mind. In 1775 Virginia’s George Mason sought, somewhat unrealistically, to “new-model the whole militia.”
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That did not happen, although some of the Continental regiments organized in 1775 and 1776 did, in a sense, New Model themselves into strong units.

Arguably, the Patriots’ attention to militias and minutemen during 1774 and 1775 was as effective in timing—through its early-stage consolidation of the American Revolution—as the later-stage New Model Army proved to be at Naseby and the other battles during 1645 and 1646 that consolidated Parliament’s victory in the English Civil War. Eighteenth-century New England, perhaps wiser from memory, did much of its New Modeling
before
widespread hostilities.

1775: The Militia’s Importance as a Foundation of Revolution

Let us conclude with the thesis raised earlier: that by taking control of local government, militia structures, and police power across most of the thirteen-colony landscape in 1774–1775, insurgents established the framework that eventually brought success in the War for Independence. In contrast to the naïveté that citizen-soldiers must prevail through virtue, this policy represented a steely realpolitik.