Becoming Men of Some Consequence

Youth and Military Service in the Revolutionary War

John A. Ruddiman

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780813936178
• eBook ISBN: 9780813936185
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Young Continental soldiers carried a heavy burden in the American Revolution. Their experiences of coming of age during the upheavals of war provide a novel perspective on the Revolutionary era, eliciting questions of gender, family life, economic goals, and politics. "Going for a soldier" forced young men to confront profound uncertainty, and even coercion, but also offered them novel opportunities. Although the war imposed obligations on youths, military service promised young men in their teens and early twenties alternate paths forward in life. Continental soldiers' own youthful expectations about respectable manhood and their goals of economic competence and marriage not only ordered their experience of military service; they also shaped the fighting capacities of George Washington's army and the course of the war.

Becoming Men of Some Consequence examines how young soldiers and officers joined the army, their experiences in the ranks, their relationships with civilians, their choices about quitting long-term military service, and their attempts to rejoin the flow of civilian life after the war. The book recovers young soldiers' perspectives and stories from military records, wartime letters and journals, and postwar memoirs and pension applications, revealing how revolutionary political ideology intertwined with rational calculations and youthful ambitions. Its focus on soldiers as young men offers a new understanding of the Revolutionary War, showing how these soldiers' generational struggle for their own independence was a profound force within America's struggle for its independence.

1	“The Eyes of All Our Countrymen Are Now Upon Us”
	AMBITION, COERCION, AND CHOICE IN JOINING THE ARMY

Joseph Plumb Martin was a very young boy in southern Connecticut when he saw “the stir in the country” from the Stamp Act and its repeal in 1765. Being born in late 1760, as he wrote in his memoir, “I was so young that I did not understand the meaning of it.” Martin had just turned thirteen, however, and was old enough “to understand something of the works going on,” when the Sons of Liberty destroyed the tea in Boston Harbor. As Parliament’s Intolerable Acts roiled the colonies, young Martin heard brash talk about defending liberty with arms. He began “to inquire a deal about the French War.” His grandfather obliged him, telling tales of soldiers’ valor and suffering while he and the boy did a man’s work in the fields. As the old man likely intended, the stark stories dissuaded the boy. “I thought then,” wrote Martin later, “nothing should induce me to get caught in the toils of an army.” Time would tell. After all, as he remembered of 1774, “the smell of war began to be pretty strong.”¹

Soldiering was an obligation of manhood—and yet it was a role that largely fell to young men before they achieved full adult independence. Taking up military service was rarely a free and unfettered choice for youths. Subtle pressure or unmasked coercion constrained their choices, shaped their decisions, and pushed them toward the ranks. Still, communities and recruiters had to take into account young men’s expectations and life goals. Consequently, military service promised youths increased respectability in their communities and advancement along the path to adulthood. The aspirations and ambitions of young recruits show that “going for a soldier” rested on more than uncomplicated patriotism or mercenary economic interests.

The Revolutionary War presented young men with new options for self-fashioning within a range of military roles. It built on the military precedents in militia service and memories of earlier wars. At the war’s beginning, hot political language in sermons and songs tied fears of a conspiracy against American liberties to the obligation of armed resistance. Youths, however, also appropriated soldiering to assert and advance themselves. Sons of the colonial elite and striving sons of society’s middle ranks sought officers’ commissions to cement their positions. Such ambition was not confined to the elite; some unfortunate youths saw military service as a way to escape their domestic circumstances. Questions of monetary compensation and coercive pressure, however, only grew more fraught as the war continued and as soldiering failed to meet young men’s ambitions to advance in the life course. Youths increasingly rejected long-term military service as a result. Resting military mobilization on a foundation of youthful ambitions dangerously limited the capabilities of the Continental Army.

MEMORIES AND EXPECTATIONS

When Joseph Plumb Martin asked his elders about the Seven Years’ War, he tapped into a vein of memory in Revolutionary America that linked soldiering with progress through the life course and tied patriotic virtue to military resolve. Experiences with local militias, memories and precedents of imperial wars, and the traditional compensation for soldiering all pointed young men toward military service as a way to advance in life.

The militia offered colonial youths an obvious connection between soldiering and advancing in the life course. Even though communities might only muster their companies annually, these amateurish and often intoxicated peacetime gatherings nevertheless transmitted military ideals from one generation to the next.² Parading before their gathered neighbors to the sound of shouted orders and the music of drum and fife, militia companies drilled, discharged firearms, and sometimes topped the day with a “sham fight” that presented a bloodless vision of battle. Farmers’ sons or apprentices could be forgiven for “some flights of romance or fantasy” as they watched from the edge of the field or shouldered arms in the ranks for the first time.³ Daydreams aside, militia service was explicitly the responsibility of men and not boys. Joining the militia ranks for the first time marked a rite of passage for sixteen year olds. Ashbel Green explained in his memoir of the Revolution that boys would “look forward” to militia eligibility “with great and even impatient desire.” He remembered longing “for the time to arrive when I should be enrolled in the adult militia, in much the same manner as an apprentice commonly wishes for the time when he shall be free from the control of a master, and be at full liberty to act for himself.”⁴ Ending an apprenticeship and entering the militia were both transitions from youthful subordination to a more responsible and respectable station in the community. It was no accident Green entangled them in his memory. The exclusion of women, immature boys, black men, Indians, and “loose, idle, dissolute persons” from the militia further signaled the beginning of militia service as part of a youth’s progress towards manly independence.⁵

Memories of Britain’s wars also told young men that soldiering could answer their pursuit of social advancement. A few years after the end of the Seven Years’ War, Alexander Hamilton was about fourteen years old, suffering the “grov’ling … condition of a Clerk” in the Caribbean. The key problem, he explained to a friend, was that his youth excluded him “from any hopes of immediate Preferment” from powerful men. “[I] would willingly risk my life tho’ not my Character to exalt my Station…. I shall Conclude saying I wish there was a War.”⁶ Hamilton knew how his world worked. Colonial mobilization in the Great War for Empire had been impressive. Between 1759 and 1762 alone, over 51,000 provincial troops had stood in the field beside British regulars.⁷ These soldiers were not militia, however. With each year’s new campaign, colonial governments recruited young men, laborers, and recent immigrants to man their provincial regiments. This military employment promised to boost a young man’s prospects. Volunteers for a campaign of six to eight months received enlistment bounties and pay that offered the landless or underemployed sons of New England an escape from the “prolonged dependence” of their teens and twenties.⁸ While Virginia heavily recruited recent immigrants and indentured servants into its provincial ranks, it is telling that most of Virginia’s colony-born recruits were from Tidewater counties—the region farthest from the military violence of the frontier but where poor and young white men faced a labor surplus, underemployment, and straitened prospects.⁹ Though risky, military service in a provincial campaign or two promised adventurous and footloose young men a boost up the social ladder toward independence.

Jonathan Burnham, a Massachusetts volunteer in the Seven Years’ War, exemplified how enlistment could move a young man from dependent subordination to a respectable household of his own. Long apprenticed to a blacksmith, nineteen-year-old Burnham saw a wartime opportunity to invest in himself: he purchased the remainder of his time from his master in 1758 and marched off to fight the French. He reenlisted with his province’s forces for General Wolfe’s 1759 offensive against Quebec and then joined a third campaign in 1760. A lucky soldier in a victorious army, Burnham returned home to Ipswich in 1761, married the daughter of his old master, and opened a tavern. Burnham had used his military service to attain a respectable and independent manhood. By the outbreak of Revolution, Burnham had become a leader in his community and an officer in the patriot militia. Like Burnham, most provincials came home in one piece and were satisfied with their service. Particularly in the compact and intimate communities of New England, veterans like Jonathan Burnham provided a visible example for young men of the Revolutionary generation of how war could clear a path toward independence and the next stage of their lives.¹⁰

While colonial precedents connected young men’s soldiering with progress through the life course, colonial communities had long expected young men to bear the heaviest military burden, and phrased their messages accordingly. “ ‘Cursed is he,’ ” preached a minister to Virginians, “who having no Ties sufficiently strong to confine him at Home, ‘keepeth his sword from blood.’ ” He laid the obligation to fight the French in 1758 at young men’s feet: “Ye young and hardy Men … God and nature formed you for Soldiers, [you] who are so free from the Incumbrance of Families, and who are perhaps but of little Service to society while at Home.”¹¹ A writer calling himself “Americanus” reiterated these principles in February 1775 but gave his reasons for sending young men to war a polish of sentiment rather than the whiff of brimstone. Anticipating an armed confrontation with Parliament, this colonial patriot proposed that all young men aged “between sixteen and twenty-three years” enroll in units marked for extended service. “Our Men, during that seven Years,” he explained, “are not incumbered with Families, or the perplexing Connections and Avocations” they would soon acquire. Without the “Cares and Concerns” of men “more advanced in Life,” this younger cadre should bear more intense military obligations. It would do them good, Americanus explained, since these young men possessed “both Mind and Body” particularly formed “for Action and Improvement.”¹² A South Carolina captain drumming up soldiers in the summer of 1775 similarly described his recruits as “young men” and “very proper for the Service as they have little, and some no property, but live on the cattle of the Neighboring stocks, and the Deer they kill by fire hunting at Night.”¹³ Though sometimes disdainful or condescending, the message was clear: by soldiering, young men at society’s margins could become men with utility and purpose. From one generation’s war to the next, young men were better suited for war than established husbands and property owners.

As political tensions with Britain rose, colonials found new meanings in these stores of military memory. Political radicalization and military confidence bolstered each other. One loyalist, warning fellow colonials against military resistance to Britain, tried to check the power of war stories that “most, if not all … have heard repeatedly from their fathers, when recounting the achievements of their youthful days.”¹⁴ Military experiences proved a touchstone for understanding the conflict between mother country and colonies. It was no coincidence that Park Holland, a young soldier of 1776 started his memoir of the Revolutionary War by noting that his brother, twelve years his senior, “was out in the French and Indian wars of 1756.”¹⁵ He situated his own service within his family’s broader military experience. Some patriots explicitly connected their communities’ earlier military efforts with the political imperative to defend their liberties with arms. When a Massachusetts loyalist warned his neighbor that fighting the king’s soldiers meant certain death and damnation, that patriot replied boldly, “I would as Redily fight them in Opposition to … the Kings Unjust Laws as I would the Savages.”¹⁶ New England’s military confidence emboldened their resistance to British power. Virginia’s patriot elite, by contrast, looked nervously at their own relative lack of martial experience and undertook a crash course of military preparation.¹⁷ This relationship between political ideology and military resolve provided the context for communities’ escalating resistance to Britain and the environment in which the young men of 1775 faced the threat of war.

The clash between liberty and tyranny lay at the heart of the political worldview of American colonials. A people who were virtuous, disinterested, and independent could preserve their liberty and enjoy its fruits. Ambitious courtiers and hirelings, however, always threatened to destroy virtue by corrupting government and society. Tyranny and slavery inevitably followed. Parliament’s attempts to reform administration and taxation within the British Empire after the Seven Years’ War struck the colonial elite as a devious conspiracy to subordinate American interests. Rather than nurturing her colonial children as a loving parent, Britain threatened their liberty and prosperity.¹⁸ As the crisis unfolded after 1764, political resistance alternately flared and faded, but the events of 1774 fit the worst suspicions held on both sides of the Atlantic. Sons of Liberty in Massachusetts had resisted imperial reforms and defied Parliament by destroying taxed tea. In return, they saw their colonial charter revoked, their legislature dissolved, a military governor installed, and their chief port blockaded and occupied by regular troops. Enraged patriots in Massachusetts rejected the new royal administration, harassed its officials, established a provisional shadow government, and gathered military supplies. Other colonials also saw the writing on the wall. “An Innate Spirit of freedom,” explained George Washington in a private letter, revealed how Parliament’s actions were “repugnant to every principle of natural justice.” He had no doubt this attack on “the Valuable Rights of American’s” was a deliberate conspiracy “carried into Execution by the hand of Power.” The “Crisis,” Washington insisted, was clear: “we must assert our Rights, or Submit to every Imposition that can be heap’d upon us; till custom and use, will make us as tame, & abject Slaves, as the Blacks we Rule over with such arbitrary Sway.”¹⁹

Displays of patriotic resolve and militancy went hand in hand. Martial valor was as much a part of Americans’ ideal of civic virtue as disinterestedness or political incorruptibility. Undertaking military rituals and displaying readiness for war gave colonials opportunities to reveal “the warrior that was expected to exist in every free man.”²⁰ In Virginia’s Tidewater in the fall of 1774, an English traveler observed how “nothing but War is talked of.”²¹ He also noted how Parliament’s intransigence had left his Virginia hosts “much exasperated”—they “talk as if they were determined to dispute the matter with the sword.”²² For those in oppressed Massachusetts, the choice between war and slavery was clear. “We must fight if we cannot otherwise free ourselves from British taxation,” declared one patriot leader, and resist with arms or become “hewers of wood and Drawers of water to British lords and bishops.”²³ A colonel at a muster in South Carolina similarly raised the specter of bondage, explaining that “since the Battle of Lexington he was convinced America was to be hard rode, & drove like slaves if the Americans were inactive or inattentive.”²⁴ The result in 1775 was a rage militaire—an enthusiasm for taking up arms to defend liberty.²⁵

Political opinions, military service, and membership in a community intertwined. The bonds of kinship and community left young men with little choice but to step forward when called. One quarter of the men standing on Lexington’s green on April 19, 1775 were related to their captain, John Parker, by marriage or blood.²⁶ Another young volunteer remembered marching “in company with 30 of our neighbors and friends.”²⁷ Across 1774 and 1775, patriots had purged dissenters from their local leadership and militia companies; when the war came, there was little objection to marching out. An observer in Virginia also noted that when a member of the militia proved “backwards … in his Attendance,” hotter patriots dragged him before the company and threatened him with “Tar and Feathers…. Their necessary Appendanges, Scoff and Shame, are popular Terrors, and of great influence.”²⁸ When patriots controlled a community they could muscle dissenters or loyalists into line, using military mobilization to enforce political unity. In Worcester, Massachusetts, the patriot Committee of Safety denounced almost twenty men, including a doctor and two militia officers, who had lost “the good opinion of their fellow townsmen.” The committee righteously declared the self-evident truth that “every person in this day of distress, who is not An Enemy to his Country should aid and assist, all in their power to extricate it out of its present difficulties.” Thus, these accused Tories could “join the American troops, or find others [to enlist] in their stead” to rehabilitate themselves.²⁹ Military participation was the hallmark of political membership—or penance done to regain it. While elite men could lose status for holding the wrong political opinions, early in the war youths could rise in the estimation of their towns by answering the obligation of soldiering in defense of liberty, laying claim to respectability in advance of their years or families’ social station.

The language of men’s patriarchal obligation to defend their dependents intensified the connection between soldiering and the life course for young men. Patriot preachers found the prophet Nehemiah particularly compelling: “Be not afraid of them: Remember the Lord, which is great and terrible, and fight for your brethren, your sons and your daughters, your wives and your houses.”³⁰ War, manhood, and religion intertwined in the ubiquitous scriptural admonition: “Be of good Courage, and play the Man for your People, and for the Cities of your God.”³¹ If they submitted to “arbitrary measures,” a Pennsylvania minister warned his fellow men, their sons would never know “the comforts of liberty,” and would suffer “like beasts of burden, only made for their masters’ use.” “If the groans and cries of posterity in oppression can be any argument,” he exhorted, “come now, my noble countrymen, fight for your sons and daughters.”³² The battle standard of the Thirteenth Regiment visually represented this military obligation owed to the future generations. Evoking the farmland of New England with a pine tree and field of corn, the banner also depicted a wounded officer. Pointing to children sheltering under the pine, the officer proclaimed the motto: “For posterity I bleed.”³³ While aimed at fathers, these messages of patriarchal duty ricocheted among the sons of the Revolutionary generation, who heard these messages about dependents and posterity differently than their elders. After all, describing soldiers as manly husbands and fathers spoke to young men’s ambitions, not their present station. By taking up arms, they defended their own ambitions for an independent future.

Patriot pamphleteers similarly assured young men that their military obligations and their romantic ambitions were linked. Newspapers eagerly spread stories of women who promised their love to patriots alone. In 1776, printers shared the news that “the young Ladies of the best Families” in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, had formed their own “voluntary Association” to refuse the romantic overtures of any young gentleman unwilling to fight in defense of their country.³⁴ A song ostensibly composed “by a Young Lady in Virginia” conveyed a similar message: “The drum commands our arming bands, / And chides each tar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 “The Eyes of All Our Countrymen Are Now Upon Us”: Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army
• 2 “We Were Young Men with Warm Hearts”: Manhood in the Continental Army
• 3 “Feared by Many, Loved by None”: Relationships between Soldiers and Civilians
• 4 “To Quit the Service of Their Country”: Young Men’s Decisions to Leave the Continental Army
• 5 “Yield the Tribute Due to Merit”: Young Veterans after the War
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index