1775 (44 page)

Vermont leaders did send 700 to 800 militia and Green Mountain Boys under Seth Warner to help repel Burgoyne’s Bennington expedition in 1777. But after proclaiming the independent Republic of Vermont, they sulked politically. Between 1780 and 1783, one survival tactic was to continue vague talks with General Frederick Haldimand in Canada about a possible Vermont relationship with Britain.
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Congress also remained recalcitrant. Vermont became the fourteenth state only in 1791, but between 1775 and 1777, it had done yeoman service for the new nation.

New England, Congress, and the Revolutionary Politics of Command

No debate pushed itself to the congressional forefront as powerfully, in the spring of 1775, as that of responding to the military crisis in New England. Even before the Second Congress convened on May 10, Massachusetts had gone a long way to oblige the delegates in Philadelphia to provide military assistance. This was ensured, as we have seen, in part by speeding southward a vivid first account of April 19. Because messenger Bissell reached Manhattan in three days and Philadelphia in five, Patriots in the cross-pressured middle colonies had Boston’s side of Lexington and Concord in plenty of time to encourage
rage militaire
as Congress assembled.

First, though, the delegates had to deal with an erroneous rumor. A report arrived on May 11 that the British had rerouted troops bound for Boston in order to put them ashore in New York. Panicked delegates from that colony, led by James Duane, promptly urged Congress to approve sending a defensive army of perhaps 5,000 men. Its purpose would not be to contest the soldiers’ landing but to remain outside the city and “overawe and confine” any farther British advance.
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Not for several weeks did delegates confirm that those four regiments had been routed back to Boston. In the meantime, New York developed more interest in Patriot soldiery.

A different uncertainty followed news that New Englanders had seized Ticonderoga and Crown Point. Conciliation-minded delegates wanted to secure and safeguard the cannon taken to keep them out of New England hands. And because of rumors that the British might be mounting a southward expedition from Canada, some worrywarts even wanted to return the two forts.

No documentation exists of what the delegates told one another during those May days. They met in sworn secrecy, devoid of record keeping—sensible enough, given possible prosecutions for treason. Initial hemming and hawing to justify Ticonderoga’s capture portrayed it as the defensive action of nervous locals—“several inhabitants…residing in the vicinity of Ticonderoga.” Excitable local folk, the argument went, had been motivated by “indubitable evidence that a design was formed by the British ministry to make a cruel invasion from the Province of Quebec.”
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This was far-fetched.

May’s misconceptions and mistakes are not worth disentangling. New reports and evidence in hand soon made the seizure of the two forts no longer appear very risky. On May 13, Benedict Arnold had taken small craft up Lake Champlain to Canada and seized the only sizable British vessel on the lake. Dispatches captured at the same time clarified that British forces in Canada were in disarray. No invasion was coming.
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Now
rage militaire
could be indulged. As May ended, Congress requested Connecticut’s Trumbull to garrison Ticonderoga with one thousand men and to keep the cannon there. The New York Provincial Congress, for its part, was requested to supply foodstuffs to the new garrison. On June 2, Trumbull ordered Colonel Benjamin Lyman and his Connecticut regiment to proceed north. On June 7, Congress decided that an American army should go to Canada—and here was the caveat—but only if Canadians wanted those forces to come. Delegates still preferred a “defensive” Canadian posture in which they were merely helping another colony. As of June, though, New York had still not raised a single regiment, and its weak Provincial Congress understood the importance of outside assistance. New York delegates in Philadelphia were now obliged to cooperate with those from New England.
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After a month of hectic activity, Congress had also begun to grapple with two other central questions, both involving Massachusetts. That province, as we have seen, had sought advice on how to restructure its own government, which Congress offered on June 9. The next question was the critical one: Should it “adopt” the New England troops besieging Gage in Boston? The answer came in less straightforward fashion. On June 9 the delegates in Philadelphia asked New York’s Provincial Congress to send 5,000 barrels of flour to the “Continental army” in Massachusetts. A day later they urged the New England colonies to supply the army with all the
gunpowder they could manage. In both cases, Philadelphia promised to reimburse the cost.
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This mixture of decision and equivocation reflected regional quibbles. On one hand, delegates like Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Thomas Cushing and Robert Treat Paine of Massachusetts insisted that New England soldiers would not accept a commanding general from another section.
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But other members, especially from the southern colonies, specified naming a commander from outside New England as a condition for adopting a Yankee army. John Adams, who backed George Washington, argued persuasively on his behalf; and when Thomas Johnson of Maryland nominated the Virginian on June 15, Washington was chosen unanimously. According to the U.S. Army’s Center for Military History, “on or before June 14, the Continental Congress ‘secretly adopted’ New England forces besieging Boston and New York forces guarding strategic positions; and openly on this day, Congress appointed [a] committee to draft regulations for new Continental Army and authorized addition of 10 companies of riflemen to be drawn from Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia.”
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Whatever the exact sequence, the logjam was broken and Congress turned to further military-related decisions. Below Washington as lieutenant general commanding, four major generals were chosen: Artemas Ward of Massachusetts, Charles Lee of Virginia, Philip Schuyler of New York, and Israel Putnam of Connecticut. The latter had been boosted by his May 27 defeat of the British in the minibattle of Noddle’s Island in Boston Harbor. Horatio Gates of Virginia was named adjutant general. Thomas Mifflin and Stephen Moylan, both Pennsylvanians, were named quartermaster general and muster master general, respectively.

As for the eight brigadier generals named, seven came from New England, and their selection was more or less proportional to each colony’s contribution of soldiers. However, further complications developed from how the seniority assigned by Congress in the new Continental forces clashed with the provincial seniority and rank assigned during the recent army reorganizations in Massachusetts and Connecticut.
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Bluntly put, there was Massachusetts and Connecticut deadwood to be pruned: officers no more than well connected politically, too old, or lacking in suitable command experience.

Skepticism also touched the major generals. Artemas Ward had never commanded a large force in battle and drew criticism for lack of
involvement on June 17 at Bunker Hill. Israel Putnam, in turn, was seen as over his head in more than a regimental command. Such were the delayed snags of the extensive revamping of the New England militias during late 1774 and early 1775. Parenthetically, the three new British major generals—Howe, Clinton, and Burgoyne—arriving in Boston in May, had never before commanded in that rank, were all members of Parliament as well as serving generals, and were picked partly because of prior views either sympathetic or not hostile to the Americans.
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Whether the deficiencies on one side balanced those on the other is hard to say.

The annals of the U.S. Army date its founding at June 14, 1775, and by June 30, Congress had approved rules and regulations for governance of the new Continental force.
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It was a heady experience, and politicians who should have known better made silly boasts. James Warren, now president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, enthused to Samuel Adams that “the army of the United Colonies are already superior in valour, and from the most amazingly rapid progress in discipline, we may justly conclude will shortly become the most formidable troops in the world.”
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On July 6, 1775, then, it was something of an anticlimax for Congress to proclaim the
Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms.
Forces of the United Colonies had been “taking up arms” for the past six months and were more than a little giddy about their prospects.

New England Provision and Supply Capacity

In supply and provisioning, the Patriot cause was fortunate that the war began where it did as well as when it did. Since the 1750s, New England had developed a considerable provisioning business, nurtured by British military demand during the French and Indian War and broadly supported by eager markets in the British and French West Indies. Yankee fish and barreled meat, as well as cheese, hides, and livestock, were cheaper in Jamaica or Martinique than similar produce brought in from Britain or France. Fish had been Massachusetts’s leading product, just as autumn meat packing constituted Connecticut’s largest industry in 1774.

Especially after Britain cut off access to the fisheries, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island were hardly prepared to supply an intensive war fought over several years. In 1775, though, they were well positioned to provision twelve months of needs in the northern theater principally involving their own soldiers and some from New York. Dried
fish kept for at least a year, so large supplies remained available in Massachusetts. Connecticut, in turn, initially provided large quantities of livestock, barreled meat, and cheese. That province even had a “wheat belt”—from western Litchfield County to Hartford and the Connecticut River Valley—that produced well in 1775, despite ranking far behind the larger croplands of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York.
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Over eight years of war, Connecticut became known as the “provisions state” because of an unusual convergence of circumstances. The colony’s governor through 1783, Jonathan Trumbull, was himself a merchant whose background included provisioning colonial troops during the French and Indian War. By rapidly embargoing exports, Trumbull made sure that, beginning in 1775, Connecticut’s commercial agricultural surpluses were reserved for Patriot military consumption. The initial exception lay in exporting provisions for arms and gunpowder.

No survey of Connecticut’s role in supplying the Revolution would be complete without noting the province’s leadership in producing cannon. Local historians have described how the iron-rich hills of northwest Connecticut and adjacent towns in New York and Massachusetts “glowed at night with the glare of furnaces and the dim glow of charcoal burners.”
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The statistics of their rarely noted achievement are nothing less than stunning.

In November 1775, Washington’s need for heavy guns to drive the British out of Boston led him to send his chief of artillery, Colonel Henry Knox, to bring back as many as possible of the large cannon, howitzers, and mortars at Fort Ticonderoga. In the meantime, Governor Trumbull prepared to seize and operate the Salisbury Iron Furnace. On January 2, Trumbull ordered Colonel Jedediah Elderkin to confirm the furnace’s suitability for casting cannon, and on February 2, the Connecticut Council of Safety voted to establish a provincial cannon foundry. Trumbull, operating from his Lebanon war office, initially also functioned as general superintendent of the foundry and kept express riders busy riding with messages and orders.
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Not only did the Salisbury Furnace fully meet the needs of Connecticut’s army regiments, provincial navy, and privateers, but the Continental armies and navy were also huge beneficiaries. According to one calculation, “the Salisbury Furnace supplied from 35 percent to 42 percent of all the cannon used by the Americans in the Revolution.”
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Connecticut military historian Louis Middlebrook, after doing a study of the forge in the 1920s, estimated that 75 percent of all American cannon were cast at
Salisbury. Middlebrook was probably indulging in localist hyperbole, but the lesser estimate may be close to the mark.
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During 1775, the colony’s commissaries and purchasing agents—led by Joseph Trumbull, the governor’s son, and Hartford’s Jeremiah Wadsworth—made impressive enough records to rise into national roles. As one logistical study concluded, “what must be stressed is that during the first five years of the war, Connecticut held a central, vitally important position in the interstate system of supply organized by the Commissary and Commissary of Purchases departments, with which the state government cordially cooperated.”
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In 1775 and well into 1776, Connecticut was not only a reserve depot of soldiers but New England’s cannon foundry, reserve granary, and packinghouse. The region’s “fortress” aspect included an important early capacity to self-sustain.