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Proportionately, only one other American war, the Civil War, was more costly than the War of Independence.
The colonists learned how to minimize the chances of an enemy ambush, sometimes employed a hit-and-run style of fighting, often utilized a mobile strategy, and not infrequently adopted terror tactics that included torture; killing women, children, and the elderly; the destruction of Indian villages and food supplies; and summary executions of prisoners or their sale into slavery in faraway lands. In time, warfare in the colonies came to be associated with a manner of fighting that England’s career soldiers variously called “irregular war,” “bush war,” or simply the “American way of war.”1
The armies raised in the colonies in the French and Indian War, like those fielded during earlier American wars, remained armies of amateurs. Only the highest-ranking officers were likely to have had any prior military experience, and not infrequently the field officers were as callow as their men.
The redcoat professionals were spit and polish, but the provincial forces usually had a rag-tag look.
Few colonial soldiers wore uniforms, they were equipped with a rich variety of weapons, entire units appeared to be ungainly on the parade ground, and the soldiers often looked slovenly and tousled. All this appalled Britain’s regular officers,
In March 1770 British soldiers guarding the Customs House fired into an unruly crowd, killing five and wounding several more. The radicals called the incident the Boston Massacre, and turned the bloody event into a propaganda extravaganza.
The Coercive Acts unified the provinces as had nothing previously. America responded with a Continental Congress that met in Philadelphia in the fall of 1774, and twelve of the thirteen colonies sent delegates.
“one-third of the men of their respective towns, between sixteen and sixty years of age, be ready to act at a minute’s warning.” These “minutemen,” it further recommended, “should be immediately equipped
Two hours before the regulars marched, Revere—astride Brown Beauty, the fastest mount that could be found for him—had reached Lexington with his dismaying tidings.
Some one thousand Rhode Islanders were in camp, roughly two-thirds the number the colony had promised. Their commander was General Nathanael Greene, a thirty-three-year-old Quaker iron-master who had never experienced combat and, indeed, had never even been part of a military unit before the previous autumn.
A second brigadier general in Connecticut’s army, Israel Putnam, was better known and more respected as a soldier. “Old Put,” as he was called, was a fifty-seven-year-old fireplug of a man, five feet six inches tall, wide, thick, and muscular with a face, according to one writer, that resembled “a cherubic bulldog mounted on a jaw cut like a block of wood.”
Connecticut gave the job to Ethan Allen, the leader of a band of frontier vigilantes called the Green Mountain Boys. Massachusetts put Colonel Benedict Arnold in charge of its force.
Tall and wafer thin, with a pinched and homely face, Lee was given to quirky behavior. He was habitually unkempt, slovenly even, and voluble. Opinionated and prone to ceaseless monologues, he also never learned to curb his penchant for delivering a searing riposte. Lee had never married and insisted that he preferred dogs to most people. He spoke “the language of doggism,” Lee said, adding that he found canines attractive because, unlike many people, they were neither bigoted nor inclined to put their “convenience, pleasure, and dignity” ahead of his. He traveled everywhere with his pack of
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Gates was strikingly different from Lee. Less well educated, Gates was married and a devoted father. He was polite, friendly, and mild-mannered. Like Lee, Gates was ambitious and eager to soldier again, and he took pains in 1774 to let influential colonists, including Washington, whom he visited, know that he was available should war erupt. Both Washington and Congress believed that the new army could draw on his administrative experience.32
Washington was cut from different cloth. He was reserved by nature and, if not given to self-effacement, had a habit of dissembling both about his ambition and his suitability for coping with monumental challenges. But when Washington acknowledged that he was “Imbarked on a tempestuous Ocean,” and wondered anxiously if he was up to the demands that he would face, he was free of pretense.35
Perhaps the most frequently stated warning was that “the Americans, by a lingering contest, will gain an independency.”13
The war that Congress embarked on in May 1775 was not a war for independence. Congress was waging war for reconciliation, but on its terms. During the first fifteen months of hostilities, America fought to reconstitute the British empire into a confederation of sovereign states united under a common king, but one in which Parliament’s authority, if it existed at all, was severely circumscribed.39
He lashed out at the “dirty, mercenary Spirit” of those who wanted to return home to save their small farms, blind to the fact that scores of slaves toiled in his absence to keep Mount Vernon intact.
Ten months after it began, the American invasion of Canada was over, a calamity of epic proportions. In the course of nine months more than 12,000 men had been poured into the Canadian venture, of which at least 500 had died and another 500 had been taken captive. Many more had been wounded or were finished as soldiers as a result of debilitations suffered from frostbite, disease, or mental anguish. Two armies had been decimated, two commanders were dead, and tons of precious equipment had been abandoned. The misadventure had culminated in a sorry spectacle in which soldiers refused to fight
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“It is not choice then, but necessity that calls for Independence, as the only means by which foreign Alliance can be obtained,” Richard Henry Lee of Virginia confessed early in June.
In some respects, Clinton was the most capable of Britain’s generals in America in 1776. He was industrious, meditative, and prudent, and his ability to see the big picture was unsurpassed, leading many to regard him as the best strategic planner on the British side. But he was not without limitations. He lacked self-confidence and was never popular with those he commanded. Touchy, suspicious, quarrelsome, and often acerbic, he was utterly incapable of making friendships. Today he would be called a loner—Clinton characterized himself as “a shy bitch,” his most memorable, and perplexing, stab
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From start to finish, Britain’s southern campaign had been a fiasco. Among other things, it revealed both the liabilities of preparing military plans three thousand miles away in London and the drawbacks to relying on unproven information gathered weeks before and hundreds of miles away.
manned by two Massachusetts regiments under Colonel Glover,
Perhaps never during the entire war was the Continental army in such mortal danger as at mid-day on September 15, but it was saved by the excessive caution of the British command.
Howe had displayed no proclivity for a frontal assault since Bunker Hill, which Washington, in fact, had acknowledged only three weeks earlier.
Charles Cornwallis, a thirty-seven-year-old veteran officer. He hailed from an old and influential aristocratic family that had been nationally prominent for four centuries. After a prep school education at Eton—where he suffered a disfiguring injury playing hockey that left him with a permanently quizzical expression—and a stint at an Italian military academy, Cornwallis entered the British army at age eighteen.
Cornwallis was a man of contradictions. Though deeply in love with Jemima, the army was his first love, and the passion above all else that drove him was a quest for military glory. A career soldier, he eschewed the affectation and pretentiousness that so often went hand-in-glove with holding high military rank, acting with honesty, tolerance, justice, and genuine compassion toward the men whom he commanded. More staid than Howe, less cerebral than Clinton, he was a dedicated soldier who could be counted on to get the most from his men and to pursue his objective with resolution, energy, and
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But the greatest difference in the composition of the Continental army after 1777 was that the enlistees were more likely than their predecessors to be poor, landless, unskilled, itinerant semi-employed or unemployed, unmarried, and not infrequently foreign born.
In the first two years of the war, America had fielded an army composed largely of men drawn from what that class-conscious age defined as the “middling sort.” After 1777 the soldiery came overwhelmingly from among what they called the “lower sort.”42
Upward of 2,500 of Washington’s men perished that winter, very nearly one man in seven of the Continentals that were with him late in December.
More than seven hundred of the army’s horses perished as well.25
In reality, Howe’s problem with attacking Valley Forge lay in Bunker Hill’s ineradicable hold on him.
What few in Congress appear to have understood was that Vergennes had a hidden agenda. He was committed to protecting Spain’s interests in North America against the cravings of the United States and to advancing French ends.
Within six months of the British landing, up to 1,500 former slaves were working as cooks, laundresses, nurses, and butchers for the British army.23
Like the fictitious “Molly Pitcher,” some may have briefly fought.
The most famous of the female soldiers was Deborah Sampson, a twenty-one-year-old woman from rural Massachusetts who had been a teacher and weaver in civilian life. She entered the army as “Robert Shurtliff” early in 1782 and served for seventeen months, fighting in two engagements in the Hudson Highlands. She was wounded twice though, incredibly, her gender went undetected by the physicians who treated her. When she was finally discovered in the summer of 1783 while being treated for camp disease, the army treated her leniently, probably because the war was nearly over and she had served with
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(Washington’s so-called body servant—that is, his personal slave, William Lee—was at his side throughout the war.)
Most officers dressed in a genteel manner, wearing tailored uniforms, shirts made from expensive fabric and well-crafted shoes or boots. Few enlisted men wore a true military uniform. Most wore work clothes or what at the time was called the hunting shirt, a long, loose-fitting garment made from deerskin, wool, or linen. When the army was on the move, the men marched, but officers—at least field grade officers—rode on horseback.
Typhus and typhoid (called “putrid fevers” at the time), dysentery (the “bloody flux”), viruses (“fevers”) that produced severe pulmonary and respiratory disorders, and smallpox created the greatest havoc.
Smallpox and typhus, in that order, were the leading killers among rebel troops.
but the nub of the problem was that this was the premodern period of medicine. Anesthesia was unknown, knowledge of germs was a century down the road, and antibiotics would not come into being for more than 150 years.
For every soldier killed in combat, more than two died of disease, a better ratio than had existed previously and superior to that of many of Europe’s professional armies.
Major Henry Lee (the father of Robert E. Lee)
Campaigning ordinarily consumed less than half of each year and combat was rare. Few soldiers experienced more than one or two major battles a year, each a single day encounter.
(a cavalryman was a trooper, an infantryman a soldier), fifty-four of which were dragoons (the counterpart to the infantry’s private).
Few property-owning farmers and successful tradesmen with a family at home remained in the army. By 1779 most soldiers were young, single, and propertyless.
A growing number of soldiers by 1779 were also African Americans. Congress had prohibited their enlistment after the fall of 1775, but each of the New England states, having difficulty meeting its manpower quota, quietly ignored the law.
In August 1778, some 755 African Americans were serving in the Continental army, about 5 percent of the soldiery at that time.33 Some served in the same companies as whites, the last of America’s integrated military units for nearly 175 years. More than a dozen blacks are known to have become noncommissioned officers.34
scholars now believe that altogether some five thousand blacks served in the Continental army in the course of the war. As about 100,000 men are believed to have been in the army during this conflict, blacks would have comprised 5 percent of the Continentals who served. As most blacks enlisted in 1778 or later, and as they joined for the duration and served longer than many white soldiers, it is possible that during the final crucial years of the war as many as one Continental army soldier in ten was an African American.40
Never again in this war would Washington act daringly unless he did so in league with his ally and his action enjoyed the sanction of a French general.
