The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [16]
The men all enjoyed devouring the honey they were sometimes able to obtain from local farmers in summer, appreciated any free mending of their tattered uniforms from older women, and any flirtatious look they received from younger ones. They often made fun of their officers, telling jokes about them or offering their comrades impersonations designed to make the officers look ridiculous.
There was a social, intellectual, and military divide between the enlisted men and the officers. In Europe, some noblemen became officers and their distinguished station in life made them superior to the enlisted man who joined the army as a career or who were drafted. There were a few nobles in the British army, such as Lord Cornwallis and Lord Rawdon, or sons of lords, such as Lord Richard Howe, but their officers had come from important families in the merchant class, families that had always enjoyed impressive social standing in British society. They, too, considered themselves above the ordinary men they commanded.
The American officer was quite different. The officers, like the men, heralded the new, independent nation they were fighting for, but saw their sudden appointment as a captain or major as immediate entry into a “new” social order in America. Some had been members of the wealthy upper class, especially the southerner planters who had become rich off slave labor, and some had come from prosperous mercantile and shipping families in the New England and Middle Atlantic states. Many, though, had simply been elected by their men or appointed by Congress or state legislatures and had this elite life thrust upon them. They embraced it because, all of a sudden, someone was paying attention to them.
The American officers rarely fraternized with the enlisted men in camp, on the march, or anywhere else off the battlefield. That was because, many of the enlisted men charged, they spent much of their time lobbying for promotions, feuding with others whom they did not see fit for command, complaining of constantly being overlooked when colonels and generals were named, engaging in duels with each other to satisfy personal honor, and becoming embroiled in disputes with townspeople, merchants, and farmers over unpaid debts.
Almost none the officers had ever been leaders of men before and knew nothing about their responsibilities. Most were young, some twenty or twenty-one, and younger than many of the men they commanded. They had no military training. They failed to follow orders to help drill their men, visit the sick, check on firearms, or supervise men who were supposed to clean their regiment’s area of the camp. They were highly ineffective commanders and often performed badly in battle.
One twenty-one-year-old officer, John Lacey, defended himself by reminding critics that “we were all young and in a manner unacquainted with human nature, quite novices in military matters, had everything to learn and no one to instruct us.”18 Colonel William Richardson, of the Fifth Maryland Regiment, agreed that his junior officers were novices, but sneered that they were “but few removes from idiots.”19
The enlisted men, who had their own jobs to fill up their days and nights, left the officers to their own lives. The privates, corporals, and sergeants did what they were told to do, but ignored the officers during much of the war except when they needed their assistance in obtaining furloughs to go home to visit their wives and family. At times, the officers and the enlisted men of the Revolution seemed like two different kinds of soldiers in two different armies.
The enlisted men never missed an opportunity to poke some goodnatured humor at their superiors and the army itself, even if their barbs might land them