The First American Army (9 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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T
he 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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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 service.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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The Virginians saw sights that amazed them, such as the vast beauty of Lake Champlain in New York. The Pennsylvanians saw sights that befuddled them, such as their very first moose, spotted in Maine, that they described to friends in rather comical terms, admitting with great embarrassment that they had assumed that moose only lived in Russia. Soldiers delighted in traveling to legendary places they had only read about in books. The enlisted men who accompanied Benedict Arnold to Canada told friends that they were excited to be in a foreign country. Some, such as Lt. James McMichael from Pennsylvania, wrote of other states as if they were faraway lands, decrying the language of German-Americans that he could not understand, describing the complexions of residents in those other states as “tawny” or “ruddy” and concluding, like an amateur anthropologist, that the people of New Jersey resembled those of Great Britain.
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One group of young enlisted men just outside of Boston had been ordered not to visit the city because of smallpox, but sneaked into the town anyway just so that, one awestruck private wrote, “We could say, if we lived, that we went to Boston.”
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Some were excited to spot famous people, the celebrities of the era. Some enlisted men wrote home with delight that they met Benjamin Franklin in Canada. Others met John Adams in Boston. Most at one time or another met the governor of a state. Some encountered foreign diplomats who visited camp. The supreme thrill, though, was any sighting of George Washington. Men would write home of glimpsing Washington even if they had merely seen him gallop down the road on his handsome horse. An actual meeting with him would make for a story told and retold for generations.

Some saw the war as the adventure of a lifetime. That was certainly the reason Joseph Plumb Martin signed up in Connecticut’s fifth battalion two days after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. He wanted to become, he wrote, “what I had long wished to be, a soldier.”
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And when the various enlisted men formed into neat lines on their village greens and marched off to war to the applause of their friends and neighbors they felt not just pleased but, as a company, something very special. They were, as a young chaplain wrote of his comrades, “an elegant regiment.”
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For some, the war was very personal. John Greenwood joined the army as a fifer because of his friend Samuel Maverick, killed by the British in the Boston Massacre. Some students at Princeton University joined after the British ruined university buildings when they marched through the town. Sam Shaw joined because for months hated British troops had been quartered in his Boston home. Elisha Bostwick of Connecticut fought because the British hanged Nathan Hale, his friend and neighbor. Dan Granger, just thirteen, walked into the American camp in Boston and talked a colonel into letting him take the place of his brother because he feared the brother, very ill, might die if he did not return home. Doctor Lewis Beebe signed up, in part, to flee the grief he felt following the death of his young wife. Jeremiah Greenman of Rhode Island, a seventeen-year-old with no job or future, wrote that he joined “to make myself a man.”

The men in the army also saw themselves as the military extension of the political and social revolution taking place around them in America and embraced their role. Wrote one philosophical soldier to a newspaper, “We fight to rejoice that the Almighty Governor of the universe hath given us a station so honourable and planted us the guardians of liberty, while the greatest part of mankind rise and fall undistinguished as bubbles on the common stream.”
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And some, like Lemuel Roberts, joined the service in a simple burst of patriotism. He wrote, “The whole continent now became attentive to the call of liberty; the alarm was universal and feeling my bosom glow with love for my country, I turned out on the first alarm.”
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That exuberance exhibited by Roberts and so many others was evident to the British. One of Her Majesty’s soldiers wrote that “what religion was there [during the Huguenot wars in France] liberty is here, simply fanaticism, and the effects are the same.”
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