American Rifle - Alexander Rose [32]
This potent combination of cold steel, hot blood, and total control proved irresistible to many American observers, who felt that soldiers shouldn’t think for themselves. European societies commonly regarded regular infantrymen as the least productive and most degraded members of society. In Paris signs hung outside cafés reading “No dogs, lackeys, prostitutes or soldiers.” Believed to lack any sort of moral quality—courage, loyalty, self-reliance, sacrifice—soldiers were, at best, animals who, with stern mastership and up to two years’ training, could be taught to attack.82
Over here, Alexander Hamilton, then a captain, voiced suspiciously similar sentiments. He wanted to “let officers be men of sense and sentiment, and the nearer the soldiers approach to machines perhaps the better.” This was because under “sensible officers soldiers can hardly be too stupid.”83 The upshot was that frontiersmen were too independent-minded to be useful.
The upper-class General Philip Schuyler certainly believed that they were more trouble than they were worth, remarking that “gentlemen in command find it very disagreeable to coax, to wheedle, and even to lie” to frontiersmen to get them to do what they were told. They should just snap to it and follow orders unhesitatingly, like his servants. Wayne dismissed riflemen out of hand with the comment that “to say anything severe to them has just as much effect as if you were to cut up a butcher’s chopping block with a razor.” The only way a commander had any chance of controlling them was to inflict “downright blows which, with the dread of being whipped through the small guts keeps them in some awe.”84
Wayne’s outlook had been formed by his favorite reading, Marshal Maurice de Saxe’s My Reveries Upon the Art of War, first published in 1757 after the brilliant commander of the French armies during the War of the Austrian Succession had retired with an extraordinary record of victories under his belt. From the Reveries Wayne learned that “it has always been noted that it is with those armies in which the severest discipline is enforced that the greatest deeds are performed.” Wayne took the advice to heart and immediately sentenced to death soldiers who rebelled against their leaders (“a soldier who lifts his arm against an officer ought not to be permitted to live”).85 Under Wayne and his ilk, the Continental Army would fight for democracy, but it would not be one.
The assumption that fighting men were no better than beasts of burden drove Thomas Jefferson to apoplexy. He charged that their “native courage and . . . animation in the cause” was their greatest asset, not a liability. After all, at Bunker Hill the enemy had obtained its objective “by superiority of numbers, but their loss was five times greater than ours.”86 Following Jefferson, red-hot radicals like Generals Charles Lee and Horatio Gates (who penned a couplet condemning moderation and compromise: “The middle way, the best, we sometimes call, / But ’tis in politics no way at all”) felt that fighting for independence along genteel European principles would result, even if successful, only in the preservation of the “royalist” social hierarchy.87
The Revolution, they believed, was a people’s war of national liberation. Sustained by the power of patriotism, Americans could dispense with what Charles Lee disparagingly called the hidebound “Hyde Park” tactics and “puerile reviews” of the British Army and instead allow the “active vigorous yeomanry, fired with noble ardour . . . all armed, all expert in the use