The First American Army (8 page)

T
he battles of Lexington and Concord, reported in colonial newspapers throughout the Atlantic seaboard, galvanized many Americans against the Crown. At the behest of Massachusetts leaders, thousands of men, young and old, left the security and comfort of their homes in the cities and on farms and joined local militia units. The formation of these companies was greeted with celebrations. In Williamsburg, Virginia, an afternoon of festivities was capped by a parade of soldiers attended by hundreds of cheering residents of the state capital. The editor of the leading newspaper in the colony wrote that Virginians were happy “that the domination of Great Britain was now at an end, so wickedly and tyrannically exercised for these twelve or thirteen years past.”
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These militia units then marched to Boston, where an army of nearly twenty thousand men was gathering to force the British out of the busy port city. There, under the command of several generals and later George Washington, the newly appointed commander in chief, these men became the first American army.

The militia companies were raised locally and were not national units like today’s army. Residents of the same town or county joined the same militia troop, along with cousins who lived nearby. Friends and men who worked in the same stores or farms joined up together. The men went to war in their own crude uniforms, carrying their own muskets. The leader of their militia was not appointed by superior officers or strangers, but elected by his own men. The officers came from all walks of life. One British army lieutenant, accustomed to professional soldiers serving as officers, was astonished that among a group of American prisoners he found a blacksmith, hatter, butcher, tanner, shoemaker, and tavernkeeper.
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The army included fathers and sons, cousins and siblings. All six brothers of the How family of Methuen, Massachusetts—David, Jonathan, James, Jacob, Isaac, and Farnham—enlisted at the same time.
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The units, with popular homegrown leaders, quickly came to represent the people of a county and, collectively, the new United States in the eyes of the American people.
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The British did not find themselves facing a professional military force, but a true people’s army.

The first American army was a sight to behold as it grew at the perimeter of Boston. Men from all over the New England states poured into the army camp. Huge tracts of white tents, brightly illuminated by campfires in the evening, expanded every day as more men arrived. Some crusty forty- and fifty-year-old veterans of the French and Indian War trudged into camp, their old uniform coats and breeches a little too tight on their frames, and regaled the men with their old war stories. Wideeyed teenaged boys, seated around campfires, listened to them with rapt attention. Everyone was ecstatic over the arrival of the bands of swaggering riflemen, in their frontier buckskin shirts, who had become legends for their marksmanship and lust for a fight. Townspeople in Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont (then a part of New Hampshire), and the other New England states marveled at the sight of newly formed militia groups marching smartly down their roadways in the early morning, the men shouldering muskets and tucking pistols into their belts, bragging to each other about the quick destruction they would unleash on the British.

These militia units would double and triple in size as they approached the greater Boston area. Farmers watched soldiers walk down the road alongside their fields and, moved by their patriotism, dropped their rakes and hoes, kissed their wives and children goodbye, went to their houses, fetched their muskets, and ran after the army, joining the rear echelon as it moved along. Merchants in small towns, equally moved, did the same, dragging old muskets that had not been fired in years out of their closets and slinging them over their shoulders after bidding their families farewell. Tiny bands of musicians, usually with very young drummers and fifers, serenaded the men with songs, both old and new. Enormous colorful banners filled the air, along with the throaty cheers of the men after innumerable toasts with ale. It was a time of heady anticipation.

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Many who joined the army to participate in what they saw as the great adventure of their lives became homesick within weeks.
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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 fighting 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.”
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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.