The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [27]
Army recruiters stressed the manliness of the soldier. Men who fought in the army, they told the young men gathered around them in villages throughout the colonies, were true men while those who stayed home to tend to their families and run their farms and businesses were not. Recruiting agents in Pennsylvania frequently used the phrase “manly resistance” to the Redcoats in their enrollment speech.4 Part of this argument contended if you were not a brave man you must be a coward; there was no middle ground. Soldiers believed it and saw soldiering as a magnificent chance to show not just their friends but the whole world that they were real men. One wrote home at the beginning of the war that “the dangers we are to encounter I know not but it shall never be said to my children your father was a coward.”5
Men were eager to protect their homes and families. It was very personal. Army recruiters did not dwell on political theory when trying to sign up their infantrymen. The war, they said, was being fought by men to defend their loved ones, especially their wives and girlfriends, and their land. Recruiters and politicians always emphasized the need for men to fight for their women. Letters from women urging men to join the army were printed in newspapers throughout the Atlantic seaboard. Some newspapers routinely printed stories about the courage of wives at home while their husbands were off fighting for their country. Other stories stressed the patriotic feelings of single women who similarly wanted the men of their town to fight in the service.6 Recruiters from Thompson’s Rifle Battalion of Pennsylvania even told men that if they did not join the army all would witness “our towns laid in ashes and our innocent women and children driven from their habitations.”7
There were financial reasons. Most young men in the colonial era did not earn much money as subsistence farmers, laborers, or apprentices. They believed that they could earn more in the army, even if, like New Hampshire’s William Scott, they had no opinion about the Revolution. “I know nothing of it,” said Scott, “neither am I capable of judging whether it was right or wrong.”8 Later, as the war dragged on, soldiers volunteered to collect cash and land bounties that were paid for recruits, bounties that added up to a considerable amount of money for men who could barely make ends meet.
There were soldiers who were just hungry for fame, such as George Morison, a private in one of the Pennsylvania rifle companies, who signed up because “the eyes of all mankind were upon us . . . I panted to partake in the glory of defending my country.”9
Many young men who joined the army had never left their counties. For them, a lengthy trip to far away cities was the journey of their lives. “Most of us had not . . . been twenty miles from home. We were now leaving our homes, our friends, and all our pleasant places behind and which our eyes might never again behold,” wrote Connecticut’s Dan Barber.10
The Virginians saw sights that amazed them, such as the vast beauty of Lake Champlain in New York. The Pennsylvanians saw sights that befuddled them, such as their very first moose, spotted in Maine, that they described to friends in rather comical terms, admitting with great embarrassment that they had