The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [24]
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.”6
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.7
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.”8
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.9
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