The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [25]
The men in the state militias often squabbled among themselves. Men from city militias balked at living next to men from rural units. Ethnic groups resented each other. Men from the middle states mocked men from New England. There was considerable resentment early in the war that Congress often replaced Massachusetts men with Virginians, giving the army an unbalanced southern look. At the same time, the Virginians complained bitterly that despite a few promotions, they had to serve under hundreds of Massachusetts officers who gave the army an unbalanced Northern look. In the early days, this animosity often resulted in fistfights among the enlisted men. The infantrymen who battled each other sometimes struck officers and many times threatened to kill them. When they were court-martialed for such offenses, the enlisted men complained that the disciplinary board, made up of officers, was unfairly stacked against them. Thousands refused to pay attention to firearms training and, as a result, dozens killed or wounded themselves and others by accidentally discharging their muskets.11 Many who joined the army to participate in what they saw as the great adventure of their lives became homesick within weeks.12 All of this created chaos.
The militia units were separate from the regular troops of the Continental Army. Men volunteered to join the Continental Army and served from between one and three years. Soldiers in the militia volunteered, or were drafted by their states, for short-term enlistment, usually three months but sometimes eight or twelve. None had to reenlist when their time was up.
Militiamen were extremely parochial. They were fighting for the United States, to be sure, but they were really fighting for their state and county. Their allegiance to their home areas was so great that regiments and artillery units sometimes left camp to travel home to defend their native state against an attack or rumored attack, as did a Pennsylvania artillery unit in the winter of 1777. No one stopped them. This localism was so great that troops from Pennsylvania continually referred to their colony not as their “state” but as their “country.” Most states elected governors during the war years, but the leaders of some states were elected as “presidents.”13 Disputes became heated when clothing shipments for the soldiers of a particular state arrived in camp but nothing arrived for soldiers of another state quartered nearby. Some states provided chaplains for the men’s spiritual needs and others did not. Doctors accompanied some state units and others had no medical services at all. The men became bitter over these discrepancies, too.
Despite the frequent complaints of the commander in chief in the early days of the war, scathing criticism from Congress and the press, and the considerable frustration of the people, the Continental Army not only survived but conquered. The soldiers were able to do so despite eight long years of brutal winter camps and heated summer battles, and the deaths of over ten thousand men. For nearly a decade, the Continental Army was battered, ill-equipped, undermanned, badly funded, raggedly clothed, and poorly fed. They consisted of a collection of enlisted men, militia volunteers, Indians, black freedmen, slaves, fifers and drummers, sixty-six-year-old grandfathers and thirteen-year-old kids, artillery specialists, French infantrymen, Prussian drill instructors, and Polish cavalry leaders. And ultimately they defeated the greatest army on earth.
They achieved their historic victory because in George Washington they had a superb leader, to be sure, but they also did it because they were brave men. Even their most strident critics recognized that. Throughout the war, from the firestorm of Bunker Hill to the final assault on Lord Cornwallis’s army on the banks of the York River at Yorktown, Virginia, congressmen,