The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [23]
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