TEACHING THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR
A. Note to Teachers:
Any competent textbook will include a narrative of the principal campaigns and battles and sieges of the war in America from 1775 to 1781; Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, Long Island, Trenton and Princeton, Burgoyne's invasion from Canada and the surrender at Saratoga, the winter at Valley Forge, and so on to Yorktown. Our purpose here is to provide a strategic context for all of those events, and to show how the conduct of the war was both a product of a unique American culture and also worked to shape that culture further. The political ideas of natural rights and federalism expressed in the Declaration and the Constitution were the heart of the Revolution, but the military struggle also was an event with immense cultural implications and consequences, and not unrelated to natural rights and to federalism! The war was a major event in the development of a peculiarly American democracy, with the militia as the peculiarly American instrument.
B. A War for Independence? Or a Revolutionary War?
"What's in a name?" Romeo famously asked; "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." A name is a level of abstraction removed from the thing itself; the map of a place is not the place. And yet, the play demonstrates that names do indeed matter; their respective family names, and the identities the names represent, bring the star-crossed lovers to their tragic end. When we name something we imply or assert what it really is, and may also be denying what it is not. Rival names may set the terms of a debate.
The "American Revolution" was a political movement beginning in the early 1760s and concluding with the establishment of a new government, with George Washington as first president, in the early 1790s. To distinguish the 1775-1783 military struggle from the larger political event, some historians name it "the War for Independence." But there are at least two good reasons for insisting that it was indeed a "Revolutionary War," with important political aspects and implications as well as military ones.
The first reason is that the war began in April of 1775 and Congress declared independence more than a year later, in July of 1776. Whatever the rebellious colonists were fighting for at Bunker Hill, it was not independence.
The other and larger reason is that the militia were of secondary importance in the war for independence, but central to the revolutionary war, particularly by forcing political commitment.
"War for Independence" suggests that the military struggle was a typical "conventional" bi-lateral one, and to some extent that was true. But revolutionary conflicts have quite different characteristics, and in particular a triangular rather than a bi-lateral shape, as two governments struggle both militarily and politically to control the same population.
To appreciate the difference we must first understand the way war was conducted in Europe during the 18th century.
C. European Warfare in the Age of Reason
Eighteenth-century European wars were fought for limited objectives using limited and rational means. Teachers may find a useful analogy to be an athletic rivalry between two schools. Each year they play the big game, according to established rules, and the winner has bragging rights and some temporary advantages in recruiting and fund-raising. But the loser accepts the defeat and works to reverse it in next year's contest. Neither school wishes to destroy the other; that would eliminate the whole rationale for fielding a team and building a stadium!
Similarly, monarchs (who were typically related through marriage) had no interest in overthrowing one another; they fought over profitable territory, or over which royal nephew would take a vacant throne, or to restore or maintain the balance of power. These were not existential struggles; the loser retired from the field to lick his wounds and prepare for the next fight. Wars were fought for tangible gain as well as for glory, and a cost versus benefit calculation normally was applied. If a war was costing a king more than he reasonably stood to gain from a victory, it was unreasonable to continue and time to negotiate a peace.
And the warring kings did not want their subjects to be too much involved in a war; they wanted to be free to make war and free to make peace as their profit-and-loss calculations changed. The role of their middle-class merchants and bankers, and of their farmers and craftsmen, was to create wealth and pay taxes, and not to get excited about whatever war their king happened to be fighting at the moment.
The kings' armies were small professional forces drawn from two economically unproductive classes: the officer corps from the aristocrats, whose code of honor forbad them from engaging in commerce; and the rank and file from criminals and vagrants and assorted ne'er-do-wells. "Boy, you've been caught shoplifting; will you be a soldier or would you rather hang?" "Please, sir, I'd love to be a soldier!" Discipline was ferociously strict. Armies fought formal open-field battles, not in the dark, not in the woods, not in the winter, in part because many of their soldiers would have deserted if given an opportunity. War was fought under rules which both sides obeyed because they made sense, and the officers on both sides could trust one another's honor.
Royal armies routinely employed foreigners, even in preference to natives who (except for the vagrants and criminals) were more useful working productively at home. The Army of France was not precisely the "French Army" when about 40% of its regiments were Irish and German and Swiss and other foreigners. The Irish Brigade, the "Wild Geese," was one of the best units the French deployed, composed of men who hated the British for occupying their home. There was a religious element, as well, as the Irish Roman Catholics were glad to serve a Catholic French king against the British heretics. The British did something similar after they defeated the wild Scottish clansmen in 1745, allowing them to keep their pride and forming them into elite British regiments such as the 42nd Highlanders, the famous Black Watch. Notice that in this system of warfare the hiring of foreign troops such as the Hessians was normal and unexceptional; in fact some Hessian regiments served in Britain during the Stuart uprising in '45. Yet King George's employment of foreign troops, the Hessians, outraged the American colonists. America was different.
D. Bilateral versus Triangular wars:
A war between the King of France and the King of Spain is bilateral; each monarch and his government fields an army drawn from his own population and resources. In a triangular revolutionary war, however, two rival governments are contending for the same civilian population, and whichever can best control that population can then draw from it vital resources of men and material and (most importantly) of political legitimacy. (Two rival governments fighting also sounds like a civil war, and the Revolutionary War was in fact such a war within the British empire, the King-in-Parliament against a coalition of colonial legislatures acting through the Continental Congress.)
On the surface the war between the Congress and the British Crown looks conventional; each government's army maneuvered and fought set-piece open-field battles and sieges in the European fashion, seeking to hold or capture the major cities of Boston and New York and Philadelphia and Charleston. But underneath was a quite different struggle for the "hearts and minds" of an American population divided among committed Patriots and equally-committed Loyalists and a large number of want-to-be-neutrals. John Adams broke the colonists into thirds in just that way, though it is likely that the committed on either side were far outnumbered by a passive majority in the middle. But could they remain passively neutral? An appreciation of the revolutionary shape of the war must focus on two groups: the Patriot militia, and the Loyalists.
E. WHAT WAS THE MILITIA, AND WHAT FUNCTION DID IT PERFORM?
Every colony had long had some version of militia, except Pennsylvania under Quaker rule. The militia was basically every free man, armed. The specifics varied from colony to colony, but with only a few exceptions such as, perhaps, ministers and millers, every man from age 15 or 16 up through 50 or 60 was enrolled. Each county's militia mustered periodically, typically on a Sunday after church. There was little or no training, but (in theory) each man was required to show his weapon and demonstrate that it worked by firing a round. The guns were not standardized and generally doubled as hunting weapons. Fines were levied on men without weapons, unless they could prove indigence, in which case they might be issued a public weapon bought from the fines, and would then have to show that they still had it and had not sold it for liquor.
Militia officers were appointed by the governor, and formed "courts martial" within each county. Unlike today, when a court martial is convened to try a specific case, the militia court martial of each county was a permanent institution, roughly equivalent to a modern draft board. A minister of the Gospel might be entitled to an exemption from militia service, but the local court martial had to issue it; every man in the county fell under their authority. A court martial might grant an exemption for illness or special circumstances that prevented a militiaman from leaving home.
In peacetime, and with two exceptions, the militia system tended to atrophy, with the requirements relaxed or unenforced. The exceptions were the frontier, where even during peacetime Indian raids might happen, and also in areas with large slave populations needing to be controlled. The "slave patrols" were often drawn from the militia. So the militia provided a decentralized armed force for local protection or security. In periods of peace they were little needed.
The Revolutionary War dramatically enlarged the importance of the militia, and also changed how it functioned. Massachusetts, for example, as it prepared to resist the Intolerable Acts, required all militia officers to resign, fearing that they might be loyal to the Royal Governor who appointed them. The new officers were elected by the men they would be commanding.
In the cities the militia sometimes became political machines, especially in Philadelphia where the radically democratic state constitution of 1776 was eventually overthrown by moderates who sometimes confronted angry armed militiamen; see the Battle of Fort Wilson in October of 1779, in which wealthy and influential Patriot James Wilson (a Signer of the Declaration) fortified his house to withstand an attack by local militia, also Patriots. Six men were killed and seventeen wounded; the governor pardoned everyone on both sides.
The essential function that the militia system served was to mobilize men for field service, which forced them to commit to a political position. Sooner or later the British army would enter the state, and the militia would be called out. As individuals. So every man had either to obey, or to refuse. Obedience meant he had now joined the revolution, shouldering a musket to fight the king's soldiers. Refusal meant labeling himself as either a coward or a traitor, a Loyalist. Remaining neutral was impossible, however much he might want to stay quietly at home; join the fight, or else become a Loyalist. Choose a side.
F. THE MILITIA AS WASHINGTON SAW THEM
Although George Washington's early military experience was on the frontier against the French and Indians, his perspective was that of a British officer. He served as aide to General Braddock in the disastrous expedition to Fort Duquesne (and heroically commanded the rearguard as the column retreated out of the ambush), then commanded the Virginia Regiment of British provincial troops, uniformed and drilled in regular European fashion. He was no frontier ranger nor bushwhacker; he knew all the rules of European warfare and was punctilious in following them. So he wanted to make the Continental Army into a regular force, similar to that of the British and capable of fighting them head-to-head on equal terms. And after three years of painful defeats and with the help of drillmaster Von Steuben, he succeeded; the last open-field confrontation between the main armies, at Monmouth, in June of 1778, was a bloody draw.
Washington had a deep and deserved disdain for the militia, which as a battlefield force was sorely lacking. Without drill or stern discipline or bayonets, militia could never stand against regulars unless behind fixed fortifications such as at Bunker Hill, and then rarely for long. They could not maneuver effectively. They were so fragile tactically that reliance on them might result in disaster. Continental commanders employed militia only reluctantly, under dire need, and always with trepidation. And the nineteenth century historiography of the war reflects this justified dismissal of the militia on a battlefield as more of a liability than an asset.
But by 1779 the British had decided to organize a militia of their own, from the Loyalists in the south. Why? Because they had come to see, at least dimly, just what an obstacle to their victory the Patriot militia really were. The British could control only the area immediately surrounding their armies. The Patriot militia controlled everywhere else, allowing Continentals to be raised (often by a draft upon the militia) and supplies to be gathered and local authorities to continue to govern.
G. STRATEGIC OVERVIEW AND OUTLINE OF THE WAR:
The military struggle had three phases, each in a different theater (moving north to middle to south) and each seeing the British working from different strategic assumptions and using the Loyalists differently.
First phase, 1774 – 1775: the focus was on New England, and especially around Boston. The British saw themselves as engaged in what today would be called a "police action," suppressing dissent and enforcing Parliament's laws. Loyalists were thanked but otherwise ignored. This phase ended with the British evacuating Boston.
Second phase, 1776-1778: the focus was on New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The British treated the Continental Congress and George Washington's Continental Army as a conventional European-style enemy who would sue for peace once its army was defeated and its big cities captured. Loyalists were recruited into regiments to bolster the army's strength. This phase ended with the British holding New York City and Philadelphia, but with Washington's army still in the field and Burgoyne's army forced to surrender at Saratoga. That surrender in turn brought the French alliance and turned the struggle into a world war, with Spain also a belligerent against a Britain whose fleet and army was stretched thinly all over the world. A French fleet threatened British control of India, and the large British garrison in Ireland had to be maintained. The worst British strategic nightmare, for about a century, was that the French might slip past the British navy and land the Irish Brigade on that island, which would immediately explode into a mass rebellion and sweep away British rule. There were few troops left to fight in America, which was why the Hessians were hired and Loyalist regiments organized.
Third phase: 1779 – 1783: the British moved south, hoping to mobilize the Loyalists and to challenge Patriot control of the civilian population. They eventually developed a counter-revolutionary strategy based on forming a Loyalist militia to control the countryside. This approach might have worked, but the British ultimately lacked the resources, especially of reliable troops, to carry it out in the face of Patriot guerillas combined with Nathaniel Greene's small but mobile Continental army. Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown did not end this phase, nor the war, which raged fiercely in the Carolinas and around the world during 1782.
H. The First Phase: Police Action, late 1774 to early 1776:
Eighteenth-century England had no civilian law enforcement such as we would think of "policing" today. The first London police force, the "Bobbys" or "Peelers" (after Robert Peel who organized them), were formed after 1800. Any law enforcement not done by local magistrates and sheriffs was the responsibility of the army. Any civil disorder or unlawful assemblies were easily suppressed by a few hundred regular soldiers; no unarmed mob could stand against disciplined volley fire and bayonets.
The British difficulty in America, of course, was that the unruly colonists were armed and possessed at least a rudimentary organization in the militia. The British regulars were still far superior to militia in battle, but were heavily outnumbered, sometimes by as much as ten to one. General Hugh Percy, who saved the British retreating from Concord from total annihilation, wrote afterwards:
During the whole affair, the rebels attacked us in a very scattered, irregular manner, but with perseverance and resolution, nor did they ever dare to form into a regular body. Indeed they knew too well what was proper, to do so. Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob, will find himself very much mistaken. They have men amongst them who know very well what they are about, having been employed as rangers against the Indians and Canadians, and this country being very much covered with wood, and hilly, is very advantageous for their method of fighting.
When the Americans moved onto hills overlooking Boston harbor, the British had either to drive them off, or abandon the city, as a few cannon on a hill can make a harbor deadly for wooden ships. The result was the battle of Bunker Hill, a British "victory" that saw a British force of 6000 take more than 1000 casualties. This bloodbath made British commanders during the rest of the long war hesitant to attack entrenched Americans, preferring instead to maneuver against their flanks.
The siege of Boston lasted almost a year, from April 1775 to March 1776, during which time the Americans attempted but failed to bring Canada in as the 'fourteenth colony." (The French Canadians had been well treated by the British and remained loyal.) And the Continental Congress adopted the army around Boston as its own, and sent George Washington to command it. Fort Ticonderoga's tiny British garrison was captured by militia led by Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen, and Henry Knox's gunners then dragged its arsenal of artillery over the Berkshire Mountains, on sleds during the winter, to join the newly organized Continental Army. When Washington emplaced these guns on heights south of the town, the British agreed to evacuate.
I. The Second Phase: Conventional Warfare, mid-1776 to 1779:
Washington had to defend New York City in 1776, in spite of the risk of fighting on an island against an enemy with naval supremacy, and he had an army of about 20,000 to face 32,000 British and Hessians. He lost, badly, managed to ferry his army to the mainland to escape, and then fought a series of losing battles as the British slowly pursued him across New Jersey before he escaped across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania.
There was a political element to this 1776 campaign. The Howe brothers had authority from the king to grant widespread pardons, but only after the Americans were defeated. Large numbers of New Yorkers, as well as many in New Jersey, did recant or disavow any support for the revolution. Washington countered that by having revolutionary documents read aloud to his troops, including the Declaration itself and also pamphlets by Tom Paine and others. What we today call "public opinion" was important, and both sides tried to influence it. Had not Washington won his two small victories at Trenton and Princeton (and paraded his prisoners through towns and cities) the revolution might have collapsed as the "Spirit of ‘76" evaporated.
The British expected 1777 to be the "year of the hangman" and so it might have been except for a major strategic blunder. Burgoyne's plan for a three-pronged invasion converging on Albany, to split New England off from the rest of the ex-colonies, was too ambitious, and allowed the Americans to operate on "interior lines" against British forces who had no way to communicate with each other. But it might have worked anyway if Howe had pushed up the Hudson as Burgoyne intended.
The problem was that the British command in London did not order that, but only suggested it to Howe. After Trenton-Princeton, however, Howe rightly considered George Washington to be the most dangerous enemy, and took his army south to capture the American capital of Philadelphia, giving another opportunity to destroy Washington as he was forced to defend it. Howe defeated Washington again, at Brandywine, and captured Philadelphia, but the Congress moved to Lancaster, and Washington survived and even counter-attacked at Germantown. The year ended with the British in control of the two largest American cities, New York and Philadelphia, and Washington's army battered (but not broken). But in the meantime something dreadful happened to Burgoyne.
Benedict Arnold had delayed any British invasion from Canada for many months by building a small fleet on Lake Champlain; the British then had to build a fleet of their own, and hunt down and destroy Arnold's fleet, which they did at Valcour Island in October 1776. But by then the snow was starting to fall and the British advance had to wait until the following spring.
The second of Burgoyne's three converging columns was St.Leger's, coming up the Mohawk River Valley from Lake Ontario. St Leger had only a few regulars, but many Loyalists and Indians. The Loyalists were mostly from the Mohawk valley themselves, having been driven out by the Patriots the year before. They rearmed and reorganized and came back seeking revenge. They were checked by a small Continental garrison at Fort Stanwix and then by New York militia at the battle of Oriskany, a bloodbath with both sides fighting fanatically against a hated foe. St Leger withdrew to Canada. (Teachers may use this episode to point out a general rule: civil wars tend to pick up and intensify pre-existing smaller conflicts. If students have heard of the Hatfields and McCoys, the feuding mountain families, tell them that when the Civil War comes along, if the Hatfields become Rebels, the McCoys will, must, become Yankees. Or vice versa, as long as they have an opportunity to shoot each other. This phenomenon was even more visible in the Carolinas during the Revolutionary War.)
As Burgoyne's army advanced southwards towards Albany, several of his native warriors killed Jane McCrae, the fiancé of a Loyalist officer with Burgoyne. This atrocity dealt a decisive blow to Burgoyne, as Continental general Philip Schuyler, who was no great shakes as a commander but an excellent politician, sent officers throughout New York and New England to recount, in more and more lurid detail, the scalping of Jennie McRae. The militia turned out by the thousands. When Burgoyne fought his first (drawn) battle against General Gates' blocking army, he had 7200 men against Gates' 9000. A second battle, eighteen days later, saw Burgoyne's 6600 facing 12,000. By the time Burgoyne, unable either to retreat or to advance, finally surrendered, the America forces had grown to 15,000 with more on the way. The victory was primarily won by the Continentals led by Benedict Arnold, who was badly wounded and his leg amputated; a monument on the battlefield displays a boot and honors "the hero of Saratoga" but (because of his later treason) does not mention Arnold's name. But the Saratoga campaign is an example of a popular mobilization that was unknown in Europe at the time and which anticipated the far greater levee en masse of the French revolutionary wars.
J. The Third Phase: British Counter-revolutionary warfare in the South, 1780-1783
The British effort in the south began with the conquest of Savannah and Georgia, and then the siege of Charleston whose surrender, in May of 1780, cost the Americans more than 6000 men, as large an army as Burgoyne's. August brought Cornwallis's defeat of Gates at Camden, S.C., another disaster. Gates lined up his troops with militia on one flank and DeKalb's excellent Continental brigade on the other. The militia broke and ran, and the British were able to lap around to surround DeKalb, who was killed along with most of his men. The fleeing Virginia militia mostly dropped their weapons to run faster, and the state (then with Thomas Jefferson as governor) had great difficulty in replacing them, although French muskets could be purchased with tobacco and smuggled in past the British blockade.
The tide turned when Continental general Danial Morgan devised a better system for integrating militia with regulars, and used it to destroy a British force at the Cowpens in January of 1781. Morgan deployed in three lines, with frontier sharpshooters in the first and militia in the second; both were ordered to fire once, reload, fire again, and then to withdraw – being given permission to do what they would have done anyway. Their retreat, after killing or wounding a number of British officers, drew a furious British charge that disorganized the redcoats who then met Morgan's third line of steady Continentals – who by this point in the war were as well trained and formidable as their opponents. Morgan's rheumatism then forced his retirement, but he described his tactical system to Nathaniel Greene, who used it effectively two months later against Cornwallis at Guilford Court House. The British technically won, as they held the field (which was the standard measure of victory, and which did let the winner recover both sides' wounded and dropped weapons), but Cornwallis's army was being whittled away. He then invaded Virgina in the campaign that ended with his surrender at Yorktown.
But while Greene's and Cornwallis's armies were maneuvering and fighting each other, another war was going on, of equal significance but of a quite different nature.
After Charleston fell, Governor John Rutledge of S.C. appointed three men to command the state's militia: Francis Marion in the tidewater, Thomas Sumter in the piedmont, and Andrew Pickens on the frontier. Sumter and Pickens mostly operated with large field forces (several hundreds of men) but Marion, in the more heavily populated eastern region, developed guerilla tactics that anticipated those used in later centuries in places like China and Viet Nam.
"Guerilla warfare" means far more than just hit-and-run, though it does mean that. Mao Zedong said that the guerrilla swims among the people like a fish swims in the sea. Teachers may also use the metaphor of the werewolf: peaceful and innocuous in the daylight, a ferocious beast when the sun goes down. Most of Marion's guerillas lived at home, as farmers, their weapons hidden away. They would gather when called upon, make an attack, and then return to their homes to pretend again to be innocent civilians. Marion's "main force" of leaders and couriers numbered only a dozen or two, a small enough force to move fast and hide easily. So the British might respond to an attack by 200 men, but end up chasing only 20 as the other 180 went home.
This only works if the other civilians are either supportive of the guerillas' cause, or too terrified to report them. It is an intrinsically political mode of warfare. And if the civilian population is divided, it means the guerillas will mostly be attacking their own neighbors.
There were many "battles" fought across the Carolinas and into Georgia during 1780-1783, most of them small, and rarely involving many or any British troops. The British worked hard to organize and employ the Loyalists as militia, to keep control of areas the army had conquered. Patriot guerillas' first concern was always to prevent the Loyalists from organizing, or to break them up if they did. The central event of this neighbor-against-neighbor war was the defeat of British colonel Ferguson at Kings Mountain in October 1780. About a thousand Loyalist militia were defeated and either killed or captured by an equal number of Patriot militia; Ferguson was the only British soldier on the battlefield. Nine of the Loyalists were hanged after a trial, one of the few times during the war that political enemies were killed other than on a battlefield.
Continental general Nathaniel Greene understood the value of Marion's raids, and sent "Light Horse Harry" Lee's small force of Continentals to support them. This put the British in a dilemma. To subdue the Patriots and control the civilian population they had to disperse into local strong points around which the Loyalists could rally and be organized. Marion's raids were aimed first and most at preventing the Loyalists from doing that. But isolated British garrisons were vulnerable to attack by Greene's small Continental army, even though it was not strong enough to defeat Cornwallis' larger army. The British faced twin threats remarkably similar to what the US faced in Viet Nam during the 1960s: a scattered guerilla force, the Viet Cong (VC), intimidating civilians in the villages, but also a North Vietnamese Army (NVA) main force operating in large battalions. To counter guerillas and challenge their control of the population, one had to disperse one's troops into every locality; but to defeat the enemy main force one had to concentrate. Dispersal and concentration are opposites, and an army can only do both at once if it has a very large troop strength. The British, by 1781, simply lacked the manpower, even though they had come to understand their strategic problem and had what might have been a winning strategy in organizing a Loyalist militia.
Even after Yorktown (October 1781) a fierce civil war raged in the Carolinas, as rival militias and a lot of bandits fighting only for themselves reduced much of the south to a Hobbesian state of nature with neither law nor order. Revolutionary versus counter-revolutionary warfare is among the most horrible forms that an intrinsically horror-filled thing, war, can take.
K. A POSTSCRIPT:
In April of 1865, as Robert E. Lee was about to surrender to General US Grant, some of his officers urged him to order the army, not to surrender, but to disperse, to continue the war as guerillas. The son of Light Horse Harry Lee knew exactly how to do that, and Confederate guerillas under John Mosby ("the Grey Ghost") had made the supposedly conquered counties of northern Virginis into "Mosby's Confederacy" and uncontrollable by the Union, almost to the outskirts of Washington, D.C. Such a "last ditch" Confederate resistance probably would not have worked, but it certainly would have ignited a race war and atrocities and reprisals enough to create a situation such as the Carolinas in 1782: a war of all against all, horror piled upon horror. Lee wisely rejected the advice and ended the war. And it seems very likely that part of his thinking in doing so was his knowledge of the Revolutionary War as it played out in the south.
L. The Second Amendment to the US Constitution, 1791:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
sails to the Skeleton Seas, and finds inspiration as she goes.
