Becoming Men of Some Consequence: Youth and Military Service In

Becoming Men of Some Consequence Jeffersonian America Jan Ellen Lewis, Peter S. Onuf, and Andrew O’Shaughnessy, Editors Becoming Men of Some Consequence youth and military service in the revolutionary war

John A. Ruddiman

university of virginia press charlottesville and london University of Virginia Press © 2014 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2014 isbn 978-0-8139-3617-8

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 library of congress cataloging-in-publication data is available from the Library of Congress. Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 3

“The Eyes of All Our Countrymen Are Now Upon Us”: 1 Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army 17 “We Were Young Men with Warm Hearts”: Manhood 2 in the Continental Army 57 “Feared by Many, Loved by None”: Relationships 3 between Soldiers and Civilians 90 “To Quit the Service of Their Country”: Young Men’s 4 Decisions to Leave the Continental Army 117 “Yield the Tribute Due to Merit”: Young Veterans 5 after the War 147 Conclusion 179

Notes 191 Bibliography 233 Index 261

Acknowledgments

I can hardly begin to count my debts of obligation and gratitude accumulated during this project. All shortcomings and errors are mine alone, and without the support of key institutions and assistance from my mentors, colleagues, friends, and family, I could not have done this work. This project has carried me to a great many institutions, and I am pleased to thank their librarians and staff. Kathy Ludwig at the David Li- brary of the American Revolution provided crucial early guidance. Con- rad Wright of the Massachusetts Historical Society offered key advice at several stages of this project. Stephen Nonack of the Boston Athenaeum kindly encouraged my work. Linda Showalter of the Marietta College Special Collections provided crucial assistance from afar. Ellen Clark at the Library of the Society of the Cincinnati generously welcomed me into that remarkable archive. I also would like to thank the librarians of the American Antiquarian Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, the New-York His- torical Society, the Library of the New York State Historical Association, the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum, the Rhode Island Historical Society, the Virginia Historical Society, and Manuscripts and Archives at Yale University. It was marvelous to explore their collections, and I thank them for permission to cite materials under their care. Numerous institutions have generously supported my work. I am grateful to have received funding from the David Library of the American Revolution, the Society of the Cincinnati Fellowship at the Massachu- setts Historical Society, the Mellon Fellowship at the Virginia Historical Society, the Washington College Research Fellowship at the Boston Ath- enaeum, a fellowship from the Library of the Society of the Cincinnati, the Salvatori Fellowship of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, as well as a grant from the William C. Archie Fund and a valuable research leave from Wake Forest University. Early America is a field rich with brilliant historians. I count myself lucky to have learned from their scholarship, example, and advice. Joanne Freeman has guided and encouraged me across this project. After George Washington’s death, Alexander Hamilton grudgingly admitted that the old man “was an aegis very essential to me.” I am proud to note that Joanne remains a mentor very essential to me. Her enthusiasm for the wonders of the archive continues to inspire me. My work in this book has benefited immensely from the counsel of Jon Butler and John Demos, as well as the insights and advice of Adam Arenson, Benjamin Carp, Caroline Cox, Kathleen DuVal, Holly Mayer, John McCurdy, John Murrin, Lindsay O’Neill, and Wendy Warren. Thoughtful and challenging suggestions by Richard Holway of the University of Virginia Press and its anonymous readers also greatly improved this manuscript. I am beyond fortunate that Wake Forest University has become my academic home. My students are enthusiastic and my colleagues wise and encouraging. In particular, I would like to thank Lisa Blee, Michele Gil- lespie, Michael Hughes, and Monique O’Connell for reading drafts and offering advice, and Simone Caron, Robert Hellyer, Jeff Lerner, and Tony Parent for their counsel. If I may spread my gratitude farther afield, allow me to offer thanks to Ben Waterhouse and Catherine Keyser, old friends, fellow teachers, and comrades-in-arms through many campaigns. Finally, I thank my family. My sisters, Jillian and Jayne, have listened patiently to history stories their whole lives. My endlessly encouraging parents, John and Joan, have always supported our education and endeavors. At last, let me offer my gratitude to my wife Kate for her persistent questions, patience, and love.

viii Acknowledgments Becoming Men of Some Consequence Quebec Fishkill Newburgh West Point Stony Point

Montreal Morristown New York

Princeton Hallowell Monmouth Ticonderoga S Valley Forge Trenton Germantown N Brandywine Philadelphia Saratoga I IROQUOIA Ipswich Cooperstown A Albany T Brookfield Boston N Providence

U Danbury O Newport M New York

Fort Pitt Carlisle Trenton Philadelphia N

A Winchester

C Richmond Yorktown A L A P Guilford Court House P A Kings Mountain

Cowpens

Camden Wilmington

Charleston 0 100 200 miles

Towns and battles in Revolutionary America. Introduction

They sought out the old fortune-telling woman in the war’s fifth summer. Twenty-three-year-old Dr. Zuriel Waterman, his older brother George, and their younger friend Jonathan Rice had already seen their Rhode Island home become the seat of war, first with the British occupation of Newport in 1776, then in the ill-fated attempt to dislodge the king’s forces in 1778. War had brought new opportunity and demands: after two months of medical instruction in 1777, Zuriel had entered the service of the armies of the United States, working for a brief spell as a surgeon in a New Hampshire regiment, then turning out again with the local militia in 1778. Yet life went on despite war’s disruptions, and these young friends thought it would be a lark to get a sense of how their lives could unfold. The fortune teller spoke about wives and war. Zuriel described her as “an old fat woman,” about fifty or sixty years old, and naturally “very sagacious, [and] enquiring about people.” He painstakingly recorded her predictions in his journal, revealing both the gist of their questions and the fortune teller’s intuition about the expectations of these young men. George, she said, was “to have 2 Wifes & 6 Children, to be married in 3 years, to have very good fortune in the latter part of his days.” She also sensed he “had many private enemys,” and “she describ’d one to him very right.” She told young Jonathan Rice he would “have very good luck as he enter’d his 21st year,” enjoy “very good luck upon the water,” marry in three years, and share his life with “1 Wife & 6 children.” As for Zuriel, he was “to have 2 Wifes if not 3; [with] 4 or 5 children.” Not only did he have “but few enemies,” Zuriel recorded, he would have “very good luck in a little time [and] to have every thing to my wish & be settled down when I am 27 years old.” Zuriel also noted the old woman’s assurance “that I have seen the girl I am to have”—a tall lass, slender and fair, merry and sociable—“& will see her again ’fore long.” “She further told me that I should have good luck upon the water in a little Voyage, or a privateering but not to go on long voyages or continue going to sea.” She anticipated that Zuriel Water- man would be as good as his name and “have an offer to go a privateering in 3 weeks, or 3 days; or in 2 weeks or 2 days.” Indeed, the following month Zuriel sailed on the privateer sloop Industry out of Pawtuxet. These predictions—and Zuriel Waterman’s detailed record of them— suggest the path of these young men’s thoughts and the expectations society held for them. First, the men looked to their domestic futures for glimpses of a respectable manhood fulfilled by marriage and children. Pre- dictions about merry and sociable mates were certainly welcome, but more importantly, these fortunes offered the young men tactical advice on how to advance in life. They craved secret information about their standing in the community and sought any tips about hidden enemies who could undermine their reputations or block their advancement. Most importantly, no matter however lightheartedly they asked, they sought guidance about whether military service might lead them safely to prosperity and respectability. As young men in their early twenties, Zuriel, George, and Jonathan sought the resources and relationships that marked the transition to the next stage of their lives. To achieve those goals they were ready to balance the opportunities and dangers of war with delicacy and some nerve.1 * * * The American Revolution required decisions about allegiance and action. At the heart of this generation-long upheaval lay the War of American Independence—a crucible in which the struggle over liberties burned down to the essence of sovereignty and power.2 For eight years of war, mobilization and fighting seared politics, society, and culture. Though the Revolutionary experience was immensely diverse—the war was long, its campaigns widely scattered, the forms of military service varied, and the rebelling states mismatched—the youth of its soldiers provides a connecting thread and offers insight into the communities that sent them to fight. Like Zuriel Waterman and his friends, the majority who took up arms for intense or prolonged military service were youths coming of age. “Going for a soldier” forced young men to confront profound uncertainty, and even coercion. Heavy obligations mixed with novel opportunities, however. Their expectations about manhood and their path forward in life shaped not only how young men experienced military service, but also the martial culture and fighting capabilities of American armies, the course of 4 Becoming Men of Some Consequence the war, and ultimately the new American republic. Young soldiers’ generational struggle for their own independence was a profound force within America’s struggle for independence. The young men of Revolutionary America stood at a peculiar point in their lives—clearly they were not children, but nor were they proper adults in the eyes of society. After about 1740, for example, census-takers acknowledged an essential difference between children who were “dependent” and youths sixteen and older who were “productive” members of a household.3 The gap between a youth’s first obligation for militia service at sixteen and his eligibility for the title of freeman at twenty-one similarly illustrates colonial society’s sense of the liminality of adolescent males. Though eighteenth-century colonials would not recognize the modern concepts of adolescence or teenaged rebellion, they expressed an aware- ness of this group and held expectations for their paths to full maturity.4 In a 1720 sermon, Benjamin Colman described this period of life as a “chusing time” or “fixing time” for young people. Choosing occupations and marriage partners, he insisted, was indeed “the work of your Youth.”5 The path toward full adulthood was clear for boys: in their teens through mid- twenties, they labored for their families, hired themselves out for wages, or undertook apprenticeships. An elite handful attended college or sought professional training. In this time of life, young men were to obtain the tools and resources necessary to acquire a farm, trade, or profession—the “competency” to marry, support a family, and stand as a full adult member of the community.6 As Zuriel Waterman’s fortune teller suggested, their communities defined full adulthood through social roles and relationships, rather than by simply noting biological maturity or by counting chronological age. These defining qualities for male adulthood in colonial America also intertwined with the ideal markers of manliness. Though different communities produced regional variations on these norms to suit their social order, they shared the underlying imperatives of obtaining economic competence, demonstrating social utility, and earning respect from other men.7 Marriage marked the achievement of both mature adulthood and respectable manhood. Benjamin Franklin, distributor of the common wisdom of the age, reiterated the relationship between marriage and full manhood in his Poor Richard’s Almanac. He insisted in 1744 that “He that has not got a wife is not yet a compleat Man,” repeating the idea a decade later: “A Man without a Wife, is but half a Man.” The key, Poor Richard wryly advised, was to “Ne’er take a wife till thou hast a house (& a fire) to put her in.”8 Introduction 5 A proper man had to be able to provide for as well as punish his dependents. With gender, as with race and class in early America, an individual’s superiority and independence was premised on and contrasted with others’ subordination and dependence. Colonial society not only contrasted respectable men with women, but also with boys, apprentices, servants, black slaves, and “savage” Indian men.9 At base, a proper man’s economic resources enabled his authority over others and earned him the respect of his fellow men. Combined, these qualities and relationships marked a man’s personal independence—not an escape from freedom from care or concern, but attainment of a meaningful sense of control or agency in his life.10 Examining the young men of the Revolution provides an opportunity to untangle the intertwined relationships between military service, youth, and gender. Young men—marginal, unmarried, and without property— faced a double deficit: their adulthood was pending and their masculinity incomplete. Ideally, they would leave these shortcomings behind in the normal course of their lives. War, however, could offer them a faster path to respect and competence. There is an intuitive expectation that becoming a soldier, a profoundly male role in the eighteenth century, must have had a relationship with the construction of manhood and masculine identity.11 After all, the demands of military mobilization targeted young men at a particular moment in their lives as they faced specific social deficits and aspirations. Soldiering promised novel opportunities, advancing youths toward adulthood with promises of economic compensation that would lay the foundation of future independence while offering immediate rewards of social utility and fraternal respect—together, the qualities of ideal masculinity. The logic of the male life course in Revolutionary America highlights these connections between youth, manliness, and soldiering. Life course analysis considers an individual’s transitions through the stages of life, each with definitional social roles and experiences: to begin work, leave home, marry, bear children, and retire. Following decisions and actions, it offers striking insight into the expectations and assumptions of individuals, families, and communities while also revealing how an individual’s path or strategy might diverge from the norm. Because young men experienced military service as part of a transition between life stages, the perspective of the life course is particularly valuable for framing young soldiers’ experiences and decisions, societal expectations, and their own aspirations for the future.12 Coming of age in Revolutionary America de- 6 Becoming Men of Some Consequence manded that youths obtain necessary resources, form key relationships, and receive acknowledgement from the community. The rising generation of youths in their late teens and early twenties would have to accomplish this transition in the midst of a revolutionary war—seeking their own independence at the same time that their communities struggled to establish an independent republic, to preserve the imperiled empire, or to simply survive and be left alone.13 As a result of pressure from their elders and their own aspirations for progress in their life course, young men—neither beardless boys nor established family men—bore the heaviest burden in the fight against Britain for American liberties. Demographic studies of the Continental Army’s state-based regiments suggest communities’ assumptions about soldiering. Though males aged sixteen to sixty were eligible for military service, the majority of Continentals were youths in their late teens through early twenties.14 Despite significant diversity across the rebelling provinces, the age range of the men they sent as long-term soldiers proved remarkably consistent. For Massachusetts soldiers, four in ten joined the army before they turned twenty-one, and almost seven in ten joined before age twenty- six. In one New York regiment, 72 percent of soldiers enlisted in their teens or early twenties.15 Foreign-born recruits were older, often enlisting after or to escape indentured servitude, which raised the average age of Con- tinentals in mid-Atlantic provinces. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania’s colony- born soldiers averaged twenty-one years old, and slightly more than half the New Jersey enlistees were no older than twenty-two.16 Soldiers in a Maryland regiment at the end of the war averaged only twenty-one years old at enlistment, despite a significant contribution of manpower by older immigrants.17 Virginia’s Continentals appeared to be the youngest of all, averaging about twenty years old when they joined the army.18 That perhaps fewer than one in five Continental soldiers were married also offered a telling a sign of their collective youth and social position as their chronological ages.19 Equally important, the average age of Continentals remained fairly steady across eight years of war, showing a steady turnover of troops, with young recruits filling the places of the discharged, deserted, and dead.20 From north to south and from 1775 through 1783, the war at the heart of the American Revolution was a young man’s fight. Youths and their families faced the transitions of the life course with some trepidation even in the best of times. A prescriptive piece in a colonial newspaper highlighted the emotional tension in this transition from youth to adulthood: a father advised his son, “now free” at the end of an Introduction 7 apprenticeship, that this moment represented “the crisis of your fate; and as you now manage fortune, succeeding life will be marked with happiness or misery; a few years perseverance in prudence, which at your age is but another name for virtue, will ensure comfort, pleasure, tranquility and esteem.”21 On the path to full adulthood some boys progressed quicker than others, while the poorest or least lucky never emerged into comfortable competence or gained society’s “esteem.” War and the prospect of military service added another variable for young men to consider as they tried to make their way forward. The connection between military service and advancement in life—the connection that Zuriel Waterman and his friends investigated with their fortune teller—was also the connection between soldiering and aspirations of manliness. * * * To understand the American Revolution we must investigate the interaction between individual experiences and the operation of power.22 Ex- amining revolutionary soldiers’ youth and their life course offers a novel approach to this question, building on studies in the “new military history” and incorporating findings about gender in early America. Attending to individuals’ decisions and experiences also disrupts the familiar narrative of the war, counters an unhistorical assumption about the timeless uni- versality of soldiers’ experiences, and draws new connections between the War of Independence and the broader social and political upheavals of the Revolution. Historians have long been aware of the demographics of Revolu- tionary soldiers, but they have left the import of their collective youth unexamined. In arguments about the military nature of the Revolution, soldiers’ place in the life course has essentially been hidden in plain sight. For generations, scholarship on the Revolutionary War has investigated soldiers’ motivations, debating the tangle of patriotic idealism, self-interested economics, and impulses of voluntarism versus coercive pressures. Scholars have tried to move the motivation debate forward by contrasting military mobilization within specific communities and states, examining the institutional and political evolution of the Continental Army and local militias, weighing Revolutionary ideology versus soldiers’ social origins, and excavating culture and hierarchy within the army.23 Historians of the War of Independence have reconstructed a detailed social picture of the Revolution’s soldiers. Complicating the patriotic myth of a revolutionary nation eagerly in arms, historians have shown that the men who carried the heaviest military burden—the Continentals—increasingly stepped 8 Becoming Men of Some Consequence out from the margins of colonial society.24 Whether poor, foreign born, in servitude, deracinated, or young, the men who enlisted as Continentals as the war dragged on were “something less than average.”25 The youth of these soldiers is a crucial and under-examined component of their mar- ginalization, however. Examining soldiers’ youth reveals the war as these soldiers and their communities saw, experienced, and explained it. Rather than simply asserting that Revolutionary soldiers were young, this study interrogates how age and position in the life course interacted with family, emotion, expectations for advancing in life, and gendered aspirations and prescriptions.26 Examining soldiers’ youth also addresses a gap in the growing scholarship on masculinity in early America. In general, these studies either address the colonial period and end in 1775 or open their analysis with the postwar early republic.27 This study of young men in the Revolutionary War stands in that opening, contributing also to a scholarship on masculinity and war in early America.28 The life course of young men provides crucial connections for explaining the experience of war for the Revolu- tionary generation. Just as the war was fought by a particular demographic slice of society, it also unfolded within a particular matrix of gendered and generational expectations. Consideration of gender alone, however, can too easily focus on prescriptive definitions—what a social elite expected men to be rather than how would-be soldiers performed their own identities. Age and gender intertwined in Revolutionary America as mutually constitutive forces. Attention to youth and the life course braids these strands of inquiry together, mimicking the cords of experience and culture that young men followed as they made their way forward in life. Considering the war’s events in the context of young soldiers’ expectations and experiences also productively destabilizes the familiar narrative of the Revolution. Instead of a story that begins with the midnight ride of Paul Revere in 1775, progresses through virtuous suffering endured at Valley Forge in the middle of the war, and concludes triumphantly at Yorktown in 1781, the decisions and experiences of individual young men drive the narrative. Youths could enlist for a few months, for a campaign, or for a range of years. Many who served cobbled together multiple engagements, joining and (hopefully) leaving military service in trajectories that had little relation to an arc of the war visible only in hindsight. The contingency of soldiers’ actions in turn shaped the nature of the army, the progress of the war, and the larger contours of the Revolution.29 By examining this young cadre of Revolutionary soldiers, this book Introduction 9 also confronts a persistent, unhistorical assumption that all soldiers across time and place are essentially alike—that whether before the walls of Troy, on the muddy field at Agincourt, or in the mountains of Afghanistan, the experience and meaning of war boils down to something shared and universal. Though comparisons are valuable, the particulars of time, place, and culture matter immensely. The import of taking up arms, going to battle, and (ideally) returning to a civilian life are heavily contingent, defined by circumstance as well as the particular values and structures of society.30 The War of Independence was the conclusive act by which a portion of American colonials seized political control of their communities and rejected the British Empire. That war also provided the context in which they created new republican governments and a continental confederation. Hundreds of thousands of young men made decisions about military service in this political storm. For young men coming of age during the American Revolution, their political, economic, and familial considerations about soldiering were intimately connected with their construc- tions of self, pursuits of personal independence, and progress to the next stage of the life course. As a result, young soldiers’ particular experiences emphasize the connection between the War for Independence and the broader Revolution. The youth of Revolutionary America shared a different perspective from their elders on the tremendous upheavals and disruptions caused by the war. Considering that half the colonial population was no older than sixteen in the late eighteenth century, the experiences of the rising generation warrant serious attention. For youths of the revolutionary generation, the war that began in 1775 dominated their progress towards adulthood. A Massachusetts boy born in 1755 at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War would have spent his formative years hearing news of the Stamp Act, Townshend Duties, destruction of tea, the Intolerable Acts destroying self-government in his province, and the Continental Association boycotting English goods. As patriot committees mobilized militarily in 1775, he would have been approaching the age of majority, twenty-one. A Virginian girl born in 1763 at the end of Britain’s Great War for Empire would have heard news of the British surrender at Yorktown before her eighteenth birthday and could have watched a younger brother march off as a hired substitute before the final cease fire in the spring of 1783. Across their adolescence, the war and the Revolution would have been inextricable. The young men who bore the military demands of the struggle for Independence may not have been political leaders or theorists, but they 10 Becoming Men of Some Consequence were central actors in the Revolutionary experience. The Revolution was a matter of mobilization and battle as well as political transformation and constitutional debate. Studies of the American Revolution, however, too often focus on one aspect at the expense of the other, perhaps because it is difficult to fit the destruction and chaos of the war into a positive narrative of the Revolution as an act of national creation.31 The young men of the American armies connect the broader Revolution, the war, and the decisions and experiences of families and individuals. Their aspirations and experiences mirrored the intertwined hopes for creation and the inescapable pain of destruction. * * * Military experience within the American Revolution varied widely according to time and place, making it tricky to generalize and necessitating a focusing lens. Perhaps as many as 200,000 men fought against British rule, but individuals could enlist more than once or serve in several different military capacities during the war.32 For some, their time in arms was brief—perhaps a few weeks mustered with the militia. Others undertook multiple engagements that added up to years of service. The demographic and political makeup of American society shows the significance of this mobilization. The colonial population numbered approximately 2.5 million people at the beginning of the war, growing to 3 million by its end. Of this population, half a million were enslaved Africans and African Americans (officially) barred from service, while another half million -re mained loyal to Britain. Excluding the female half of the population and the white male revolutionaries too old or young for service left approximately 500,000 men in the potential pool of military manpower to fight against Britain. Roughly 40 percent of these eligible men fought in the American cause—a substantial accomplishment of mobilization by the Congress and its rebelling states, especially in light of complicated loyalties and a rising tide of disaffection across the long conflict.33 As a result of the churning among these substantial and diverse military experiences, the Continental Army offers a useful and necessary lens to focus this inquiry into youth and soldiering. Continental service exemplified intense military service and drew its strength from the young men of colonial society. It provides an excellent laboratory in which to examine how decisions, behaviors, and relationships worked with youth, manhood, and soldiering. As an organization, the Continental Army presents productive contradictions. It was a national institution before there was a fully articulated American nation. Each regiment, however, originated in a Introduction 11 specific state and often drew soldiers from specific regions or communities within a province, allowing consideration of the local contours of political leadership, economics, and masculine expectations. The army also saw the collision of a radically politicized discourse of liberty and a profoundly inegalitarian military hierarchy. Also, while the concentration of so many young men in one place was unusual for colonial America, and military culture set itself in contrast with civilian mores, these young Continentals were never far removed from civilian communities. As young men enlisted, took commissions as junior officers, marched, fought, waited, and returned home, their actions and experiences in the Continental Army offer insight into the personal experience of the war within the broader Revolutionary movement. Though there is great value in using the Continental Army as a lens to examine youth, soldiering, and the life course during the Revolution, this focus necessarily imposes limits. First, I could not simultaneously present a comprehensive account of the entire War of Independence and an analysis of youth and military service. As a result, I have focused my attention on the forces commanded by George Washington, favoring as a result the northern campaigns and the more densely populated eastern areas near the coast.34 Most of the soldiers examined came from New England, the mid-Atlantic states, and Virginia. This does reflect the composition of the Continental Army, however. New England states contributed half of the enlistments to the Continental Army, with the mid-Atlantic states and Virginia providing roughly an additional forty percent of Washington’s manpower. Though there were major Continental Army campaigns in the Carolinas, short-term militia provided the local contribution of military manpower in that escalating and bloody irregular war.35 Following Washington’s young Continentals also suggests comparisons with military service in militia and state units or on privateers—some men served as Continentals and in these units, while others purposefully avoided long- term service. Second, looking at youth within the Continental Army largely excludes soldiers who were foreign-born immigrants; these recruits were significantly older than their colony-born comrades. Though I have left these men at the edge of this project, other studies have demonstrated their contribution to the culture and capacity of the army.36 Similarly, I have left aside the Native Americans who fought against or allied with the Revolutionary cause, because youth, manhood, and war in their communities operated along different cultural vectors.37 While I have sought 12 Becoming Men of Some Consequence to integrate the military actions of young black and African Yankees within the Continental Army with the experiences of their white comrades, examining Washington’s army excludes the larger number of Af- rican Americans who lent their support to the British cause in pursuit of their own liberty.38 Finally, using the Continental Army as a focusing lens neglects the 19,000 Americans who bore arms in British-organized units—a loyalist mobilization roughly proportional to the efforts of their Revolutionary neighbors.39 Because of their particular political and social circumstances, however, these loyalist soldiers require a comprehensive study of their own. Though the pressures of the male life course similarly played on young loyalists, they faced different political questions as rebel persecution severely disrupted their social worlds.40 Despite these limits and exclusions, focusing on young Continentals is valuable. These soldiers comprised the main strength of the revolutionaries’ war effort and of Washington’s army. The General assured Congress in 1776 that these long-serving soldiers were necessary—relying on militia meant resting on a broken staff.41 Whether he could rely on the motivations and resolve of those young men would prove a pressing question across eight years of war. The archives of the American Revolution have preserved a raucous chorus of voices from the war, and in the course of my research I have encountered thousands of these young men. Drawing on the arc of the male life course for the Revolutionary generation, I focus my analysis on a cadre of would-be soldiers in their late teens and early twenties—depending on their appearance in the war, boys born between 1750 and the mid-1760s. The archives are rich with letters, diaries, and memoirs, though these sources were more likely to originate from officers, New England- ers, or from earlier in the war when soldiers’ literacy rates were higher. As a result, I have especially prized voices from the mid-Atlantic and southern regiments. Additionally, young soldiers’ actions and emotions appear in military documents such as court marital records, the official commands of generals, and the illicit songs, poems, sketches, and “perfect nonsense” soldiers jotted on the blank pages of orderly books.42 “Size rolls” from companies and regiments record names, physical descriptions, home towns, and prewar occupations, all of which can help reconstruct individual experience and motivation. Veterans’ memoirs and pension applications in the early nineteenth century also record and contextualize military service. The pension applications created at oral depositions prove invaluable for recovering details of Revolutionary service from illiterate men or those too poor to cre- Introduction 13 ate their own written records.43 Both pension applications and veterans’ memoirs, however, require sensitivity to the inevitable reconstructions of memory.44 A memoirist’s politics, emotions, and agenda at the moment of composition can dramatically differ from the distant period being remembered. War memories cannot be accepted uncritically. With the American Revolution especially, the gravity of patriotic and nationalist narratives warped memory. However, it is still possible to chip away the coral-like accretions of time to uncover suggestive or revealing information. Explic- itly patriotic language or self-serving explanations certainly must be taken with a grain of salt. But the landscape of family relations, strong emotions, striking or traumatic events, or details that at first glance appear trivial can be tremendously informative—provided they match the context and spirit of evidence contemporary to the war.45 The ordinary individuals who emerge from this archive are remarkable for the amount of information about them that survives. It is telling, however, that their stories ring more of the personal and the familial than of the straightforwardly military. The words, actions, and trajectories of young soldiers’ lives reveal shared assumptions, experiences, and pressures in a time of war. This study of young soldiers in the Revolution explores specific experiences, decisions, and relationships that unfolded across the course of the war. The first chapter, “ ‘The Eyes of All Our Countrymen Are Now Upon Us,’ ” considers the ambitions of young men—junior officers and enlisted soldiers—in joining the army for self-advancement, for money, or to escape domestic oppression. It also shows the coercion that pushed young men toward the war and the choices youths made to avoid the Continental Army. Young men’s choices about military service profoundly limited the military capabilities of the revolutionaries. Chapter 2, “ ‘We Were Young Men with Warm Hearts,’ ” turns to experiences within the army. The youth of enlisted soldiers and junior officers proved a defining aspect of their community in camp and the relationships they formed under the burdens of army life and the terrors of the battlefield. Young soldiers’ performances of masculine identity drew together personal identity and political ideology, shaping military discipline and their experience of the war. Chapter 3, “ ‘Feared by Many, Loved by None,’ ” reveals a new and more-complex story of how soldiers and civilians interacted. Fear, anger, and mistrust could be set aside if inhabitants could see the young man masked within the soldier. While these relationships provided a check on militarism, they could not fully bind the wounds inflicted by political upheaval and war. Chapter 4, “ ‘To Quit the Service of Their Country,’ ” argues that leaving 14 Becoming Men of Some Consequence the army was the only way some young Continentals could advance along their life course, while also revealing the disillusionment, opportunism, and anxiety that shaped that decision. As with their decisions about enlisting, their choices about leaving the army determined the capabilities of Washington’s army. The final chapter, “ ‘Yield the Tribute Due to Merit,’ ” addresses young veterans’ attempts to return to the rhythms of civilian life. Finding the social and economic deck stacked against them, many failed to achieve their traditional goals of economic independence and personal authority over dependents of their own, despite growing discourse about an egalitarian citizenship shared among white men. Nevertheless, ideas about youth, military service, and masculinity proved socially and politically stabilizing in the early republic. * * * In the second year of the war a British officer jotted down his low opinion of the colonial rabble-in-arms. Clearly, the “leaders of the Rebellion” had used “flattering prospects” to fill their army with poor men who then fought “for the sake of a present subsistence, Clothing, & plunder; and the prospect of acquiring some property, and becoming men of some consequence.”46 That pretension—“becoming men of some consequence”— struck this British gentleman as ridiculous. His offhand quip, however, named the profound logic connecting military service with young men’s path along the male life course. Rather than the mere short-term rewards of subsistence and plunder, going to war might satisfy their community’s expectations, advance their economic prospects, elevate their relationships, and establish their peacetime independence. The hope of “becoming men of some consequence” shaped the military service of young men in Revo- lutionary America.

Introduction 15

“The Eyes of All Our Countrymen 1 Are Now Upon Us” ambition, coercion, and choice in joining the army

Joseph Plumb Martin was a very young boy in southern Con- necticut 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 Continen- tal 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. Farm- ers’ 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 18 Becoming Men of Some Consequence 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 Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army 19 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 Revo- lution, 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 Avo- cations” 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 20 Becoming Men of Some Consequence 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 Un- just 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, dis- interested, 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 Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army 21 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 Mas- sachusetts 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. Mar- tial valor was as much a part of Americans’ ideal of civic virtue as disin- terestedness 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 Tide- water 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 lead- 22 Becoming Men of Some Consequence ership 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 pen- ance 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 fa- Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army 23 thers, 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 tardy swain . . . / Our Country’s call, arouses all / Who dare be brave and free! / My love shall crown the youth alone / Who saves himself and me.”35 The idea of young women policing politics appealed to soldiers since it ratified their choices. A Mary- land rifleman at the siege of Boston approvingly copied down one of these newspaper stories: in Kinderhook, New York, a group of young women at a quilting frolic had set upon a Tory youth, stripped him to the waist, and humiliatingly painted him with mud, reeds, and feathers.36 Military service promised to carry youths forward in their lives. “To arms my brave boys, and away: / ’Tis honour, ’tis virtue, ’tis liberty calls,” ran one recruiting song of 1775. Their reward for soldiering would follow: “Triumphant returning with freedom secur’d, / Like men, we’ll be joyful and gay— / with our wives, and our friends, we will sport, love and drink, / and lose the fatigues of the day.”37 Buttressing these claims connecting soldiering, manliness, and patriarchal futures, patriots repeatedly told young men that a broad audience, male and female, measured their performance. As Washington proclaimed to his soldiers, “The Eyes of all our Countrymen are now upon us,” and it was up to them to “shew the whole world” their virtue and value.38 Young men internalized this message—as when one youth delighted in his father’s pride “seeing me dressed in military uniform, with epaulets on my shoulders and a sword by my side”39—and watched carefully to see how their communities judged their martial performances. “A great many people [came] to see the soldiers march,” recorded Elihu Clark in his journal in May 1775. While he made no note of political language, he specifi- 24 Becoming Men of Some Consequence cally marked the responses of young folks in his Connecticut town. “Asa Worthington,” he tersely noted, “cried a good deal.” As a newly minted sergeant, Worthington should have kept a better handle on himself—though Corporal Elihu Clark probably thought he looked better by comparison. “Peggy Foot & Hette Skinner cried some,” which struck Clark as a fitting display of female concern. Those girls cried, but disconcertingly, “Rachel laughed.” Clark expected a grateful community’s concerned and approving gaze, not flippant laughter after he had theatrically read out the muster roll—and especially not from a girl to whom he had paid a courting call earlier in the month. Reassuringly, successive tavern keepers along the eastbound road to Boston treated the company to drinks as thanks for their defense of their liberties. Clark found saying goodbye to his father the most striking interaction of all. “I felt very bad when father shook hand with me to part,” he wrote, “not withstanding that I kept up good courage.”40 Rachel’s laughter proved an outlier; Clark and his community knew how to play their parts for each other. Joseph Plumb Martin remembered how the buzz of warlike preparation and movement in the New England countryside in 1775 and 1776 stirred youths’ interest. His grandfather boarded soldiers making their way east toward Boston, and young Joseph found “their company and conversation” so entrancing that he “resolved at all events to ‘go a sogering.’ ” The lad also took note of the “conversation and disputes of the good old farmer politicians” around him, collecting “pretty correct ideas of the contest.” “I thought I was as warm a patriot as the best of them,” Martin later wrote. “I felt more anxious than ever, if possible, to be called a defender of my country.” Martin frequently attended enlisting rallies where he saw many of his “young associates” enlist. When he finally asked his grandfather for permission to join the army, however, his old guardian refused. Not allowed to enlist with the recruits being sent to New York City, Joseph “felt bitterly again” and accompanied the newly minted soldiers “as far as the town line.” He found it hard to see them go. “Many of my young associates were with them,” he recalled, and “my heart and soul went with them.” It galled him that they would “come swaggering back . . . and tell me of all their exploits, all their hairbreadth ’scapes. O, that was too much to be borne with by me.” Martin paid a true emotional cost for not enlisting with his friends. Despite their close age and association, his friends had stepped forward and advanced in the eyes of society. Their service cast his static youth and dependence in high relief.41 In the end, the hot political rhetoric of 1775 and early 1776 worked— Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army 25 military obligation pushed young men into soldiering even as their aspirations pulled them into the ranks. Amos Farnsworth captured this spirit in his diary in late April 1775 when he approvingly recorded the central command of William Emerson’s “Exelent” sermon in Concord: “He in- coridged us to go And fite for our Land and Country: Saying we Did not do our Duty if we did not Stand up now.”42 Young men were particularly susceptible to the heroic language of this patriot rhetoric. “I was not ignorant of the causes which excited this unnatural conflict,” recalled a veteran about his enlistment. “From my youth I had felt an ardent attachment to liberty” and the war gave “all real lovers of liberty and their country a glorious opportunity to signalize themselves.”43 While the patriotic imperative of memory might have reshaped his words, the actions of young men and their families were telling. “Although young and fond of home,” Hezekiah Packard later recalled, “I have no remembrance that I had any serious scruples or hesitation about enlisting.” Equally striking, this young volunteer of 1776 had no recollection that his parents “opened their lips in the way of discouragement.” Across the years he “often wondered, as I was the youngest of the family, that my mother did not . . . oppose my enlisting.”44 Both mother and son knew what was expected. The message of young men’s obligation to defend their liberties in the early years of the war had sounded loud and clear.

Appropriation and Ambition

When Philip Brooks wrote to New York’s Provisional Congress in pursuit of an officer’s commission, he knew exactly what message would advance his cause. “As a young, unmarried man,” he declared, “I can neither think myself excusable, nor a useful member of society, while content with in- differently examining the public prints at home.”45 Because the message of military obligation was so prevalent and unchallenged, youths could twist these prescriptive expectations to suit their own purposes, asserting their place in the community and refashioning themselves as independent men. Boys tried to put themselves forward as soldiers, and youths formed their own companies early in the war. Young soldiers also appropriated the language of manly obligation in texts of their own creation. Elite and upwardly mobile young men put themselves forward as officers to assert—or obtain—social station. Rather than passively accept the discourses swirl- ing about them, young men used them to fit their ambitions. With expectations about soldiering clear, some youths refused to wait 26 Becoming Men of Some Consequence patiently to reach the necessary age to be called up. The outbreak of war awoke “a high military spirit, not only among the men, but the boys also,” recalled Ashbel Green in his memoir of the Revolution. “We had companies composed of boys ten to fifteen years of age; none, I think were admitted under ten” unless they were “of uncommon growth.”46 These young teens were approaching physical maturity and sought to demonstrate the usefulness that corresponded with manly recognition. This was not merely boys playing soldier. In York, Pennsylvania, in late 1774, with political fervor and military identity running together, the older boys of the community longed to enlist in local militia companies but were barred by age. Undeterred, “the boys of the town” formed their own ad hoc company and asked two veterans of the French and Indian War to lead them as their lieutenant and sergeant. Under the instruction of these older men, the boys drilled through the winter. “Except our officers,” one of the lads later recalled, “I do not believe there was one of the company twenty years old.” He also explained that they had sought older veterans for their officers to “keep the boys[,] as we were[,] in order and prevent their running to extremes.” It was significant that the boys sought experienced leadership and tried to keep their company in good order; they imitated the volunteer companies organized by older men. These were performances of respectable manliness that staked claims to full membership in the community.47 A version of the iconic song “Yankee Doodle” provides a striking example of young men themselves embracing the link between military service and the male life course at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Set at the siege of Boston in 1775, the lyrics of this widely popular song separated callow boys from manly soldiers. A young boy narrates the song, and he is fascinated by the army camp: “Father and I went down to Camp / Along with Captain Gooding / And there we see the Men and Boys, / As thick as Hasty-pudding.” The joke at the heart of the song is that the lad can only describe the military objects he sees in relation to familiar, decidedly nonmilitary, domestic items. Cannon are “Large as a log of maple” and their caissons would be “A load for father’s cattle.” Similarly, a bayonet seems “a crooked stabbing iron,” while a mortar is “a pumpkin shell / As big as mother’s bason.” Not only is the lad ignorant of this military world, he fears it. Unlike his father or his older Cousin Simon, who saw the cannon and “tho’t he would have cock’d it,” the boy refuses to get too close to the big guns: “It scar’d me so, I shrink’d it off, / And hung by father’s pocket.” Worse, soldiers make the boy’s inexperience and fear the butt of their jokes: “another snarl of men” tell the lad they are digging graves “So tarnal Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army 27 “The Farmer and His Son’s Return from a Visit to the Camp,” a version of the iconic “Yankee Doodle.” (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society) long, so tarnal deep, / They ’tended they should hold me.” Digging was the everyday task of soldiers around Boston, but long and deep entrenchments were their military object, not graves. Terrified by the specter of death, the boy “hook’d it off / Nor stopt as I remember, / Nor turn’d about ’till I got Home, / Lock’d up in Mother’s Chamber.” Unschooled in the items and articles of war, the boy ran and hid behind his mother’s skirts.48 This version of “Yankee Doodle,” as a lighthearted war song, valorized the soldiers already in the ranks by contrasting them with unworldly boys lingering at home. Following late-colonial expectations, the adult man not only contrasted with his female counterpart, but also stood as the opposite of the immature boy.49 In addition to complimenting the young men already in the ranks, it invited youths still at home to step forward. If they were in on the joking lyrics, the song assured them, they possessed maturity and spirit enough to stand in the ranks as men. To stay at home could only be boyish. The song’s famous refrain reinforced their manly aspirations: “Mind the music and the step, / And with the Girls be handy.” This lyric combination of military competence and sexual maturity sealed the song’s central message of how soldiering separated the men from the boys.50 The poetry of Lemuel Haynes similarly provides a vivid example of a young soldier using politicized military service and the patriarchal language of obligation to claim a respectable place in his community. The circumstances of his birth in July 1753 in Connecticut doubly burdened Lemuel as a youth. An abandoned, mixed-race orphan, Haynes was brought up by a white family in western Massachusetts and bound to indentured servitude because of his racial classification. In his adopted home, Haynes pursued literacy and Christian piety, building an identity that might counterbalance suspicions about his birth or color. At twenty- one, his long indenture expired and Haynes immediately joined the militia in the summer of 1774, additionally signing up as a minuteman. These were political acts, asserting patriot principles while standing as a free member of the community. At the news of the fighting at Lexington and Concord, Haynes and forty-one fellow minutemen marched to confront the British regulars. While in the ranks at the improvised siege of Bos- ton, he penned a patriotic poem, “The Battle of Lexington,” declaring the righteousness of the American cause and encouraging armed resistance. His poem followed the political conventions of 1775: “Liberty now bleeding lay” and “calld them to withstand.” Haynes hammered on the British soldiers’ bloodthirsty destruction of property and persecution of “our aged Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army 29 Gransires” and “Mothers with helpless Infants.” Let “each Freeman” strive for liberty, declared this soldier-poet, even at the cost of his life: “This Motto may adorn their Tombs / (Let tyrants come and view) / ‘We rather seek these silent Rooms / Than live as Slaves to You.’ ”51 In these stanzas Haynes asserted his membership in a liberty-loving community despite his age or the color of his skin. At the outset, Haynes tied his authorship to the racial markers his society had assigned him: this “Poem on the inhuman Tragedy perpetrated . . . by a Number of the Ministerial Brittish Troops” was “composed by Lemuel a young Mollatto Man Mollato.” The revisions show him trying on various political and personal descriptions for maximum effect. From that beginning, which acknowledged his status as a youth and racial outsider, Haynes repeatedly tied his own soldiering to New England’s proud, militant history. “Such awful Scenes” of the Battle Road and siege of Boston “have not had Vent,” Haynes noted, “Since Phillip’s War begun.” He also referenced the Puri- tans martyred in sixteenth-century English persecutions, as well as their Great Migration in the 1630s to “This howling Wilderness.” It all pointed to his generation’s collective obligation to the past: “Our Fathers Blood did freely flow / To buy our Freedom here / Nor will we let our freedom go / The Price was much too dear.” Haynes claimed this militant history as his own—an accurate assertion that was nevertheless bold. Also, with his own experience with racial servitude, Haynes’s emphasis on the martial struggle between liberty and slavery by the “Sons of Freedom” took a double meaning. By mixing rhetoric of youthful obligation with images of slavery, and by drawing attention to his age, race, and social status, he rejected exclusion on those grounds. Standing as a soldier for liberty, the twenty-two-year-old Haynes believed he stood as an equal member of his community, and he put pen to paper to say so.52 Just as Haynes had stepped forward for military service to assert his membership in the community, the sons of the patriot elite also saw the war as an opportunity to advance themselves in life. Young and old alike knew the social value of an officer’s commission. At the beginning of the war, Nathanael Greene put it plainly: an officer’s commission afforded the “Opportunity of traveling the shortest Road to the greatest heights of Ambition.”53 For the young men of prominent families who stepped forward to lead companies, part of that ambition was advancing themselves in life and in their communities. They believed commissions were their due, and society did not dissuade them. Following the assumptions of the professional armies of Europe, Washington fervently believed appropriate 30 Becoming Men of Some Consequence social distance between officers and enlisted soldiers buttressed military discipline. Accordingly, he instructed a fellow Virginian selecting officers to “take none but gentlemen.”54 These elite men would demonstrate natural superiority and inspire obedience from the lower orders. So, at least, went the theory. While the wealth and power of the colonial American elite were well represented in the Continental officer corps, the army also saw young officers using their commissions to stake claims as gentlemen and lift themselves in the eyes of the world.55 From the war’s beginning to its end, prominent families and ambitious young men sought officers’ commissions, flooding military commanders, state governors, and congressmen with solicitations. Young gentlemen tried to get ahead of this flood of paper by traveling to the army as volunteer cadets. Placing themselves in camp and at the assistance of senior officers, the winds of war might bring opportunities to match their ambitions. Still, these cadets had to rely on their connections as much as their personal qualities. Accordingly, boyhood friends Aaron Burr and Matthias Ogden, nineteen and twenty years old, respectively, traveled to the Continental Army at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in August 1775 with a letter from John Hancock himself.56 Hancock recommended these Princeton college boys to General Washington, praising that they had arrived in camp “not as Spectators, but with a View of Joining the Army & being Active during the Campaign.”57 It worked. The two newly minted cadets grasped the main chance by volunteering to journey overland to Quebec with Bene- dict Arnold’s strike force.58 Another “young gentleman,” Samuel Young, similarly used his connections to angle for an artillery commission. After observing the cadet for six weeks in camp, Captain-Lieutenant Daniel Gano was convinced that the young volunteer had what it took. “I make no doubt of his filling an officers station with Honor,” he told his colonel.59 Family connections and recommendations exchanged among the compact patriot elite provided the lever that lifted young gentlemen into view of military superiors and then into preferment. Stories abound of family connections greasing the wheels to roll young gentlemen into the army. When Congress sought to raise new battalions in 1775, Alexander Graydon of Pennsylvania recalled simply “signif[ying] to the committee of safety, in whom the power of appointment was lodged, and of which body my uncle was a member, my wish to be employed.” Graydon received a captain’s commission without undue delay in Janu- ary 1776.60 Thomas Mumford, the well-connected Connecticut merchant who helped plan the surprise attack on Ticonderoga at the beginning of Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army 31 the war, sought a commission for his son Giles as soon as the youth was old enough. After hearing third-hand that Colonel Samuel Webb wanted “some active young gentlemen for subaltern officers,” Mumford sent the seventeen-year-old to camp bearing a paternal letter of introduction. “He is young,” Mumford apologized about the youth to Webb, “and not [of ] the best constitution; however he inherits his Father and Mother’s sentiments to give every aid and assistance in his power.” Webb obliged his fellow Connecticut patriot, and young Giles received his commission as a lieutenant January 1, 1777.61 The family’s social rank went without saying; here, one colonial gentleman addressed a fellow patriot with a language of politicized devotion. Also, knowledge of an open commission was too valuable not to use. Peter Hughes declined the artillery commission offered him in 1777 for health reasons. “But since your goodness has led you to make me the Offer,” Hughes countered to Colonel John Lamb, “permit me to Recommend my Brother Miles, who I believe is not in Place [with the army] & with whom you are well acquainted, perhaps he would gladly accept the Commission.”62 The ambitions of sons of prominent families relied on networks cemented by shared social status and political allegiance. While colonial Americans accepted the rigid equation presented by the royal armies of Europe that all officers were gentlemen and only gentlemen could be officers, their provincial societies largely lacked a sufficient number of true aristocrats. As a result of that deficit, some middling and upwardly mobile families saw the army as a way for their sons to assert gentility. John Cleaveland, a fiery churchman and patriot in Ipswich, Mas- sachusetts, was patriarch of one such family. He busied himself with three projects across the 1760s and 1770s: ministering to the spiritual needs of his congregation, preaching the liberties of America, and seeking secure and respectable futures for his sons. This third and most quotidian obligation proved vexing. Lacking land to divide among his boys and without money to buy it, he had tried to set them up with professional training. That path proved uneven. For his two eldest sons, John Jr. and Parker, the family’s insufficient finances, periods of poor health, and the youths’ lack of inclination kept them out of Yale or Dartmouth College. Parker, the second son, instead undertook the humbler study of medicine. Ebenezer, born in 1754 and the third son, had to train as a cooper. Perhaps least promising of all, the eldest son, John Jr., simply continued to work on other men’s farms. Married in 1773 but still lacking direction, John Jr. merely moved from his father’s household to work and live with his father-in-law. Despite his age 32 Becoming Men of Some Consequence and marriage, his circumstance was hardly independent. These were uneven beginnings for the youth of the next generation. The outbreak of war in 1775, however, promised something new—a way for the Cleaveland boys to finally step into their own, defending their liberties while they advanced their social status.63 When John Cleaveland hustled to minister to his fellow patriots at the siege of Boston in May 1775, he kept his sons in mind. Back in the late 1740s he had served as a chaplain in the expedition against Louisburg in French Canada, and he knew the social capital that could come with an officer’s commission. With the outbreak of war against British tyranny, this patriot father was eager for his sons to serve the cause, so long as they could “have any Birth better than a private sentinel.”64 Unsuccessful attempts to secure respectable military positions pepper his correspondence in 1775. Cleaveland twice tried without success to secure a lieutenancy for Ebenezer, his third son. A proper commission similarly proved out of reach for John Jr., and a sergeant’s warrant would have to satisfy any ambitions for advancement. The emotional and social stakes of this project—that others should recognize his family’s social worth—exploded in one letter. Concerned that his son Parker’s medical practice was a social dead end, Cleaveland arranged for an appointment as an army surgeon. When Parker lost that promised spot to another physician, his father’s anger flared in a letter to the regiment’s commander. “Relying on you as a person of honour,” Cleaveland complained, “neither of us entertained a thought of applying any where else to obtain a birth for him: and it is likely they are all supplied by this time.” The Cleavelands, the minister insisted, had been mistreated in a way no gentleman would treat an equal. “I ask no favour for my Son, only that you treat him upon honour.” Cleaveland insisted that he and his sons be acknowledged as genteel men of consequence, ignoring the paradox that he was demanding assistance necessary to cement that social status.65 Further down the ladder of social rank, and especially in the more egalitarian New England and mid-Atlantic provinces, other young men shared the expectation that an officer’s commission would bring social advancement. A strong competitive streak runs through the memoirs of young men concerning their embrace of military service. William Scudder remembered his path into the army beginning in February 1776 when he met an old friend who had just received a captain’s commission from New York’s provincial congress. “He solicited me to accept a commission and go with him, which I had no objection to,” Scudder recalled, “as I had often to Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army 33 stand cap in hand to some officers who I did not think my equals before they received their commissions and became men of consequence.” Turn- ing his ambition and self-confidence toward action, Scudder “then pursued a sword and became an officer” by raising his own company of fifty- four men.66 The story of “Long Bill” Scott of New Hampshire, as recorded by the loyalist author Peter Oliver, laid out a similar narrative of ambition motivating would-be young officers. Oliver interrogated the unfortunate lieutenant whom the British had wounded and captured at Bunker Hill in June 1775. He asked how Scott had come to be a rebel. “The case was this Sir!” replied Scott: he had lived in a “Country Town” and made his living as a shoemaker. “When this Rebellion came on, I saw some of my Neighbors get into Commission, who were no better than myself. I was very ambitious, & did not like to see those Men above me.” He was asked to enlist as a private soldier, but his “Ambition was too great for so low a Rank” and he “offered to enlist upon having a Lieutenant’s Commission.” As an officer, Scott imagined himself “now in a way of Promotion: if I was killed in Battle, there would an end of me, but if my Captain was killed, I should rise in Rank, & should still have a Chance to rise higher.”67 Even young gentlemen saw the transformative possibilities of an officer’s commission and military experience. In the spring of 1781 Major Samuel Shaw received a letter from his younger brother Nat containing “one of the most important questions” the lad could have asked: “What think you—should I make a good soldier?” To Major Shaw, only twenty- six himself, the answer was obvious: “Come on then, my dear Lad—the sooner the better.” As he explained to their parents in Massachusetts, “The profession of arms in such a cause as we are now engaged in, is both just and honorable,” and “it would be a piece of injustice to deprive a young man of . . . the heart-felt satisfaction . . . of having done his duty.”68 After these nods in the direction of patriotism and obligation, Shaw pointed out the profound benefits Nat would gain as an officer. The young major was certain this “military education” would set Nat on his way toward a respectable manhood: “The Army has been esteemed no inconsiderable school for the study of mankind; and Nat, poor Lad, as yet had no opportunity for acquainting himself with this necessary branch of Science.”69 Now in his late teens, the youth was “at an age well calculated to receive the best impressions” from the experience, especially under his older brother’s direction. Shaw was so certain the army would benefit his younger brother, he offered to buy the necessary clothes and equipment for the campaign and preemptively obtained for his brother letters of recommendation and 34 Becoming Men of Some Consequence promise of a second lieutenancy. As Shaw explained to his parents, helping Nat into an officer’s commission would “be fairly setting him afloat in the world, where he can in future take care of himself.”70 As Shaw had seen across his own years in the service, an officer’s status and connections provided an excellent first step into public view and an independent career. Though patriotic duty was given, the benefit in advancing young Nat in life was undeniable. “But it was not the gay Livery of an Officer—it was not a Prosepect of Meriment and Self gratification that led me here: no, Sir, I acted from other Motives[:] A Thirst for Honor; the Defence of my own Property & the common Rights of Mankind.” So declared John Howard, a gentleman officer twenty-four years old, explaining why he sought an officer’s sword. Seeking the approval of his superiors, Howard had to dismiss self-interested motives in order to emphasize the virtuous impulses that had “for a long Time, with united Force, invited me to join the Martial Band.”71 With the language of patriotic obligation impossible to contradict, youths and their families could appropriate it and use military service for self- advancement. Boys drilling in makeshift companies pushed themselves toward manly respectability. Youths in the ranks singing “Yankee Doodle” praised themselves as worldly and worthy soldiers. Through his service and verses, a poet like Lemuel Haynes rejected status as a social out- cast. Ambitious young men—mostly elite, some upwardly striving, and all seeking their place in the world—became officers to claim a genteel status that demanded attention and respect. The expectation that military service would advance young men in their pursuit of public regard and an independent station underlay their entry into the war.

Escaping into the Army

It is telling that in his memoir of his youth in the army, Joseph Plumb Martin tied his decision to enlist to an act of rebellion against his grandfather. The old man had done his best to dissuade young Martin from soldiering and then had forbidden his grandson to enlist. But Martin could only tolerate so much. When his grandfather broke a small promise— withdrawing permission for young Joseph to watch a ceremony at Yale College—it proved the final straw. Though not yet sixteen years old, Jo- seph Plumb Martin enlisted in the summer of 1776 for a six-month term. Beneath the emotional tension between the generations lay a conflict over who controlled the youth’s time and labor. For Martin and young men like Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army 35 him, the army offered a means to escape an uncomfortable position in a household and change the direction of their lives.72 Just as an officer’s commission promised due recognition to sons of the elite and advancement to young men of middling families, those at the bottom of American society—the subordinated, unpropertied, or unlucky—might also make a stab at personal transformation by choosing to escape into the army. In the eyes of the elite, recruits for the Continental Army too often looked like “vagabonds and paupers”—the dregs of colonial society.73 Revolutionary authorities repeatedly instructed recruiters and towns to enlist no British deserters or prisoners of war, men under sixteen or older than fifty, “nor will you muster any Recruit who through want of Health, Lameness [or] Deficiency in Size or Strength will not be able to perform all the Duties of a Soldier.”74 Nevertheless, unacceptable recruits bedeviled Washington, Congress, and the states. Elite expectations marked little difference among these objectionable soldiers; the picture changes, however, when viewed from the enlistees’ perspective. For young men among them, military service offered the prospect of escape from dreary apprenticeships, subordination in servitude or slavery, or family discord or disruption. Though army life meant suffering hardship, risking danger, and enduring military authority, this situation could mark an improvement in their circumstances.75 Some of the most marginal youths who lacked other resources or control over their own persons chose the army to strike out for themselves, seeking a path toward an independent adult manhood. There was a long folk tradition in the British Atlantic that military service on land or at sea promised a ready solution to any problems a man or boy suffered. One song sung in the streets and on stage summed up the promise of military life to constrained youths: “Our ’prentice Tom may now refuse / To wipe his scoundrel Master’s Shoes, / For Now he’s free to sing and play / Over the Hills and far away.” Popular in the Continental Army as a marching song, “Over the Hills and Far Away” represented a compelling fantasy that taking up arms offered the perfect, life-changing escape. “Courage, boys,” ran its sanguine thinking, “’tis one to ten / But we return all gentlemen.”76 One recruiter during the Revolutionary War tapped into this assumption, singing out to idle-looking youths, “All you that have bad masters / and Cannot get your due; / Come, come by brave boys, / and join with our ships crew.”77 Running to war might offer something better than the subordination they bore in their dead-end, workaday lives. 36 Becoming Men of Some Consequence The Revolution as both a military and political struggle fueled this thinking. Wartime disruption offered young men new opportunities beyond their communities. “It was not an uncommon thing,” one young revolutionary later recalled, “for lads to come out of the country, step on board a privateer, make a cruise and return home, their friends remaining in entire ignorance of their fate. . . . Others would pack up their clothes, take a cheese and a loaf of bread and steer off for the army.”78 Also, with its insistence on liberty and consent, the Revolution not only spoke to elite politicians and property owners, but also to the lower orders who heard its message of inalienable rights and all men being created equal. “We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bonds of government every- where,” teased John Adams to Abigail, and “that children and apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians; and negroes grew insolent to their masters.”79 There was truth behind his jest, and other revolutionaries recalled this spirit. On the eve of the war, Ebenezer Fox had already spent five years of his boyhood hired out near Boston, his poor tailor father having paid no attention to his “frequent complaints of a grievous nature.” In his memoir, Fox tied his personal suffering to the rising imperial crisis. Since youths continually heard political complaints, it was “perfectly natural that the spirit of insubordination that prevailed” in the province would spread among them. He and the other boys thought they “had wrongs to be re- dressed; rights to be maintained; and as no one appeared disposed to act the part of a redresser, it was our duty and priviledge to assert our own rights.” As Fox told the story of his early years, he and a friend ran off to go to sea, striking a blow for their liberty, the very same night Redcoats marched out toward Concord. Though certainly a trick of patriotic memory, it is telling that Fox could not untangle his youthful rebellion from the first spark of the War for Independence.80 Rebellion was neither an accepted nor expected part of coming of age in late-colonial America, which makes these stories of youthful escape into the army all the more remarkable. Ideally, parents and children co- operated in a stable household to advance the economic competence and sustainable independence of the rising generation.81 The disruptions of war collided with the patterns of agrarian patriarchy, however, making “the relationship between father and son the most vexed of all” in the Revolu- tion.82 The war clearly disrupted normal patterns of control: William and Jesse Earl joined the army with their master’s permission but without that of their mother—they effectively played one source of authority off Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army 37 another.83 Most importantly, escaping into the army successfully set some young soldiers apart as their own men. John Chandler put himself on this path after his father died early in the war. “Being about fourteen years old, [and] determined to enter the army at the earliest moment he could be accepted,” he enlisted in 1777 for three months, though he only passed muster “with some difficulty on account of size.” The next year, he was “necessarily imployed on the farm at home,” but he set off again in January 1779, “without the knowledge of any of his friends,” to go privateering. Captured at sea, Chandler escaped from a British prison in Georgia and made his way home to New Hampshire on foot. He arrived home “to the great joy of his Mother and friends.” Crucially, Chandler noted in his memoir, “From this time his Mother attempted no controll over him, indeed from the time he was fifteen years old, he managed for himself.” Through military service he had cut the apron strings and accelerated his transition to manly independence.84 Parents certainly attempted to regain control over sons who tried to escape to the army. Two fathers in Connecticut complained in the spring of 1778 that a recruiter, “without our consent, and contrary to a resolve of Congress . . . did presume to enlist into the Continental Army our Sons Joshua Kelly and Daniel D’Wolf[,] Two Minors . . . and has taken them away without our Knowledge Privity or Consent.”85 Both the boys’ escape and their parents’ objection were common stories. Daniel DeWolf ’s pension application from the 1830s provides the other side of the tale, however. In March 1777, not yet fourteen years old, young Daniel enlisted and worked for over half a year as a tailor for the army, stationed about seventy miles from his parents’ home. Despite his father’s petition, the army recog- nized young DeWolf ’s right to bind himself as a Continental. He did not leave the army until the end of his enlistment in 1779. Even then, DeWolf chose to continue soldiering, serving in a state unit as waiter to General Waterbury, and then as a guard on the coast of the Long Island Sound.86 Fathers could demand obedience, but their sons’ decisions about military service marked them as young men with wills and agency of their own. For apprentices and young servants who escaped into military service, the war offered an opportunity to take control of their own labor and the direction of their lives. For these young men, the factor of their remaining time bound in servitude complicated the calculations of the value of military wages and perhaps made enlistments seem comparatively shorter. Enlistment offered immediate escape and ready cash, but also could be the means for some to dodge a future in an unfulfilling trade. Thomas 38 Becoming Men of Some Consequence Painter, for example, was apprenticed to his shoemaker uncle but “found from observation” that his uncle “had hard work to get along and support his family, and of course I, could not expect to do any better than that, at that business.” Painter later wrote, “I thought it best to try my fortune by a Roving life, and having (as, is common for Boys) an inclination for a Soldier’s life, I Enlisted.”87 James Anderson twice escaped into the army to seize control of his destiny. He was sixteen when he first ran away from his Virginia master to join Washington’s army in Pennsylvania. After two years of service, he returned home only to find his old master ready to reclaim him. “To avoid servitude,” he explained in his pension application, “he went into the army again,” serving three more years.88 Henry Brown was bound to a Virginia carpenter when he broke his apprenticeship and joined the army. His sister recollected how their mother “was much dissatisfied with his leaving his trade and enlisting.” Maternal disappointment notwithstanding, after his term of service Henry refused to return home and finish his apprenticeship.89 The manpower demands of Revolutionary armies eroded normal patterns of authority in civilian life and the control masters could exert over young apprentices and servants. Through that gap, they could seek new avenues toward independence, choosing a different path to go forward in life. The stakes of such an escape were incalculably higher for enslaved black men of military age. Enslaved people in the Revolution lent their support to the party that offered the clearest path to freedom. In the Chesapeake and the Carolinas this usually meant following the British promise of freedom to servants and slaves “appertaining to rebels.” In New England, by contrast, the particular combination of mass mobilization and slavery’s relative economic marginality drew young black men into patriot units.90 In November 1775, “a Negro man, named Cicero,” about twenty-one years old, “Deserted” from his master in southern Maine. This desertion from civilian bondage was likely an enlistment; the runaway advertisement concluded, “N. B. It is supposed that, as he went off in company with a rifle-man, he intended to join the army.”91 The presence of free black men in Continental regiments—though not allowed at first—could mask runaway slaves. A Virginia runaway ad from 1777 thus offered a reward for Joe, an enslaved man about twenty-one years old who could “read and wright” and likely intended to “enlist as a freeman” in the American army.92 In some slave-rich states, disapproval for recruiting black men declined as the demands of war persisted. When Thomas Camel of Virginia turned sixteen, his master, Colonel Martin Pickett, “gave him a choice either to Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army 39 remain a slave or go into the army.” As Camel later testified for a pension, he chose the army.93 Prince Crosley of Connecticut similarly “served the three years to gain his freedom.” Soldiering for this first term freed him, but although he had his liberty, he had lost his home, so he reenlisted and served through the duration of the war.94 Crosley’s two terms of service would have been indistinguishable on a muster roll, but not, apparently, in his own understanding of his service. Even though their choices were particularly constrained, young black men, free or enslaved, might escape into the army to win their freedom or, like their white comrades, to change the direction of their lives. Other young men used military service to change their position in family hierarchies and better fit their sense of their position in the life course. David Baker was about twenty-seven years old and still living with his parents when he joined a Virginia regiment in 1776. At home his status was hardly different from boys ten or more years his junior, yet upon enlistment he found himself “immediately appointed corporal.” His age and experience at last translated into higher status.95 Similarly, William Scudder, a native of New Jersey, had married young, but his elderly father “thought it proper” that the young couple should “continue” in the paternal household. The elder and younger Scudders clashed as the father continued to assert his authority despite failing mental faculties. “For let me do right or wrong,” the son recalled, “I was almost sure of meeting with blame.” In November 1775, young William Scudder engaged as a sergeant in the First New Jersey regiment and “thought it a great office.” He finally had authority of his own and was free from his father’s control.96 By contrast, nineteen-year-old Lemuel Roberts found himself the man of the house when his father died shortly before the war’s start. After fighting at the siege of Boston, young Roberts returned home “pretty much determined to give up the ideas of having any thing further to do with a soldier’s life.” He suffered both economic and personal reverses, however, and in his memoir he particularly marked his elder brother’s return “to take charge of the family.” Displaced from his position of domestic leadership, Roberts reenlisted for another year to reclaim the social status and independence that had been stripped from him at home.97 Escaping into the army offered such men a way to change their social relations and advance their own status as men worthy of respect. Military service particularly drew youths who had been orphaned or who suffered from other profound disruptions of their families. These stories repeatedly appear with vivid emotional force in memoirs and pen- 40 Becoming Men of Some Consequence sion applications. William Benson, born in 1759 in Virginia, testified as an old man about his Revolutionary service, starting his tale with a summary of his earliest childhood: “I live with my father and mother for six years happy anuf.” He then unfolded a tale of tragedies. His father took sick and died in 1765; two years later, poverty forced his mother to break up her small family, leaving young William with his aunt and uncle. “I hollowd and cried a plenty,” he recalled about their parting. He only saw his mother once more before she died three years later. Apart from these traumatic details, Benson had nothing else to say of the rest of his youth, concluding: “I lived with my uncle Porter until I was 18 years old. Then I enlisted for three years.” After a half century, the narrative that Benson chose to tell about his military service moved directly from the early trauma of losing his father and mother to his enlistment, jumping over the interven- ing decade with his uncle.98 His choices in telling his story suggest his understanding of causality. Other orphaned youths, without parents to shield them from community pressure, found themselves pushed toward the army. William Cockrum “was quite young and having lost his parents was destitute of a home and was advised to go in the army.” He served as a drummer.99 Acting on his own initiative, Jacob Anderson, “an orphan boy” bound out in Berkeley County, Virginia, chose to end his unfortunate servitude just about the time he turned twenty. He ran off, enlisted in the army, served for six years, and as he proudly declared in his pension application, never returned to his old master’s house.100 Hugh McDonald’s memoir also suggests how family turmoil could push youths to escape into the army. McDonald had emigrated from Scot- land to North Carolina around 1774 and was only fourteen years old when he and his loyalist father were taken prisoner at the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge in February 1776. Though released, the Scots loyalists feared further harassment. That June, he was working with his father in the fields when they heard patriot horsemen were on their way. Hugh’s father hid, and the army officers ordered the boy to guide them through the settlement. McDonald recalled telling the officer “that I dare not go, for, if I did, my father would kill me.” This was no youthful exaggeration. When the patriot soldiers later released Hugh, he refused to go home. “The Colonel personally insisted on my going back to my father,” McDonald remembered, “but I told them I would not; for I had told them the consequence of my going with them before they took me.” Rather than risk returning to his abusive father, McDonald specifically sought out an officer he knew and trusted and enlisted in the Continental Army. His decision was an act Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army 41 of familial escape, not political rebellion. Another episode in McDonald’s memoir also offers a glimpse of how lowly folk understood and spread word of the possible benefits of escaping into military service. March- ing through Maryland, he heard a woman speaking Scots Gaelic to her children and asked her how they came to America. She had followed her only son, she answered, who had been “transported for a frivolous crime” and sold into a seven-year indenture. Eager to help his countryman, Mc- Donald found the convict and told him that by enlisting “he would finish his servitude at once. . . . I told him that no man dare take him out of the service and I would ensure him. Upon which I gave him two dollars and told him he should have the rest of his bounty.” That night, the son who escaped his father and the convict freed from bondage sat together in the Continental camp.101 Apprentices, servants, slaves, and sons escaped into military service during the Revolution. Some youths fled subordination, others ran from quarrelsome, disrupted, or broken homes. Some had nowhere else to go and the pull the army exerted may have been slight in comparison with a desire to take control of their lives, to belong, or simply to satisfy the need for food and shelter. Samuel Smith was one such youth without family or prospects. After his aged master relinquished housekeeping in Rhode Island, the boy was “again destitute of a home.” Accordingly, when a call came for recruits, he found himself “hired for one month to take a soldier’s place.” When that time expired, he enlisted for another three-month stint, “and when that time was served,” he recalled, “I again enlisted in the Continental Army” and served as an officer’s waiter until the end of the war. His memoir suggested neither an explicitly patriotic nor a calculated economic motive for enlisting. If anything, he described his enlistments in terms remarkably similar to his prior indentures and labor contracts in civilian life. This poor youth saw no better opportunities; in comparison with an impoverished and subordinated status, serving with the army looked good.102 Military service offered such youths a chance to strike out for themselves and make their way forward in life.

Money and Coercion

“The most illustrious cause that ever engaged the attention of man, now calls for your assistance,” proclaimed “a Brother Soldier” in New England newspapers at the beginning of 1777. “Interest, freedom and glory, all invite you to the field.” The familiar chords of patriotic obligation played on, but 42 Becoming Men of Some Consequence a new melody acknowledging young recruits’ real desires had crept into the tune as the war continued. Amid flowery words of the victors enjoying “immortal youth” on the “heroic page,” the recruiter grudgingly talked up the more-tangible rewards soldiers could expect. “Never before had men so many and such noble motives to inlist into the service of their country,” he insisted. “Never before was such great bounty given by any State or Kingdom in the world, it is great as you can desire, it is even beyond the bounds of generosity, and more than your country ought to give.”103 Trying to fill the armies of the Revolution, patriots had to offer young men meaningful compensation to take up arms, and even then they had to pair monetary enticements with coercive pressure from government, community, and family. Compensation for soldiering had to take into account young men’s expectations. While Revolutionaries paid their soldiers wages for their service, Congress initially offered no bounty in 1775 or 1776 for a year’s enlistment in the Continental Army, counting on fervor for liberty to fill the ranks.104 While this worked in the naive rage militaire of 1775 and early 1776, the low compensation ran against colonial precedents that connected soldiering with promises to advance young men in life. Though patriots insisted the pay they offered soldiers was “equal to all purposes of comfortable and manly subsistence,” young men wanted more than their daily bread.105 They wanted a path toward competence and independence. The manhood talk that surrounded military service offered young recruits psychic wages that partially countered lower compensation—“Romantic hopes” that, as Adam Smith observed, “make the whole price of their blood.”106 Yet young men’s practical ambitions demanded meaningful rewards. As the war aims expanded from resistance to winning full independence and Britain brought her military might to bear against the rebel- lious provinces in 1776, George Washington convinced Congress to raise a “respectable army” with traditional bounties and longer enlistments of three years or the duration of the war. Despite the inescapable cascade of talk about men’s military obligations and ideological objections to professional soldiers, the men fighting for American liberties would be paid.107 Recruiters for Revolutionary armies had entered an existing market for youths’ time and labor. New England governments, with their stronger military tradition, knew this and offered recruits bounties at the beginning of the war to meet expectations. Young men who worked for their fathers and earned a living as hired hands or those who labored as bound servants frankly compared army pay with compensation for farm work. Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army 43 Though civilian wages could be higher, soldiers’ pay promised two possible advantages over unskilled civilian drudgery. First, the eye-catching enlistment bounties were significant and paid up front. Second, army pay likely seemed steadier, contrasting with the uneven pace of agricultural labor. Thus, the youths who marched early in the war received payment as well as praise for their military labor: a Connecticut private who brought his own weapon and equipment for a six-month tour in 1775 was paid over seventeen pounds in a state enlistment bounty, monthly pay, and subsistence. The bounty portion alone would have taken him up to ten weeks to earn as a farm hand.108 Competition between civilian and military demand for young men’s labor maddened recruiters, however. “The price of Labour with us is very high,” wailed a Revolutionary in Boston in the summer of 1776. Would-be recruits “can get better wages in the Field than in the Army.”109 If good civilian work dissuaded young men from the army, a sudden dry spell could push them towards service. When the Tra- bue brothers in war-disrupted Virginia found themselves with “no sail for produce” in 1777 they and a group of unemployed young men “concluded we would Join a company that was a going to the North under General Washington.”110 Military service made sense if it promised young men a financial boost in their pursuit of resources and property, advancing them towards independence and full adulthood.111 Whether enlistment satisfied an impulsive present need or represented a thoughtful strategy for self-advancement, Revolutionary enlistees were clearly aware of their pocketbook interests. Ezra Tilden of Massachusetts began his war diary in July 1776 with a careful accounting of his army contract. “I Enlisted into ye service of my Country,” he wrote, “to go and Campaign, to Canada; or, to Crown Point; or wherever Soldiers are to go.” To make sure he got the full measure owed, he carefully recorded the compensation promised for his service. Most important, Tilden noted, “Encouragement to go is £100 O.D.,” and this enlistment bounty would come “£52 10 s O.D. from ye Province . . . £47 10 s O.D. from ye Town.” Not provided with a blanket, he was paid dollars as compensation. And not to be forgotten, “N.B. We have £15 O.D. a Month for our wages.”112 Tilden knew exactly what was owed him and by whom. Would-be recruits also carefully scanned the market for their military labor, looking for the most advantageous offers. A colonel lamented to John Adams that “he was very sorry to hear” Congress was only offering a “Ten Dollars Bounty for those that will enlist for Three Years; for it will not procure the Men, as that Sum is given by the New England States to the new Levies only 44 Becoming Men of Some Consequence for 5 or Six Months, and our Soldiers all know it.”113 When some young men in Maine secured additional payments by shopping their services to neighboring towns that still needed soldiers, they were careful to protect their bounties by securing affidavits from their officers explaining their circumstances. They were not going to be cheated of their just rewards by tight-fisted politicians who might disapprove of the entrepreneurial terms of their enlistments.114 Young James Collins of South Carolina similarly learned how to advance his own interest when going for a soldier. He thought to enlist of his own accord in 1780, but “My father counseled me otherwise,” he recalled. “He said the time was at hand when volunteers would be called” and then the youth could get better pay and more flexible terms for his service.115 Young recruits tallied their pay and scrambled to make the most of an opportunity for military service. Accordingly, enlistment bounties were meant to be rewards of money or property that would speak to young men’s ambitions. A half century after the war a Virginian still remembered how his sixteen-year-old brother “showed him his bounty money and told him he had enlisted in the regular army.”116 For almost all youths, these bounty payments were the largest amount of money they had held in their hands at one time. Though the 1777 bounty for a three-year enlistment in the Continental Army was ten dollars, signing on for the duration of the war expanded the bounty to twenty dollars and a grant of one hundred acres of land. Moreover, states and towns continued to supplement Congress’s payment with additional enlistment bounties in order to fill their regiments.117 In 1777, the Mas- sachusetts town of Harvard offered recruits an additional bounty of thirty pounds to scrape up the necessary men.118 Bounties increased across the war to keep pace with depreciation of the Continental dollar and the dwin- dling supply of ready recruits. By 1779, Congress offered recruits enlisting for the duration of the war $200, clothing, and land. Virginia offered its recruits an additional $400 and 300 acres. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey also offered extremely liberal bounties as they tried to raise troops to fill their heavy quotas or counter British threats.119 These payments were meant to hold economic utility and emotional weight for young and propertyless men. These enlistment bounties certainly carried heavy symbolic and practical significance for young men. The bounties Marylanders received for Continental service late in the war were equal to one quarter of a typical recruit’s taxable property.120 The one hundred acres Congress promised to Continentals enlisting “for the war” similarly meant social advance- Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army 45 ment and personal transformation for unpropertied men. In long-settled New Jersey, a farm of fifty acres could be profitable, but one hundred acres marked a “stake in society” and conveyed suffrage as well as a “fine living” to the landholder.121 When the currency’s value declined and became unpredictable, instead of money, some communities offered recruits property, which spoke to young men’s desire for advancement in life. The town of Harvard thus changed their bounty from depreciating currency to a grant of eighteen calves—livestock possessed an inherent and fairly stable value that young recruits could bank with their fathers, neighbors, or former masters.122 By 1780, the increasingly desperate Virginia legislature promised Continental recruits “300 acres of land plus a healthy sound negro between 20 and 30 years of age or 60 pounds in gold or silver”—only the British invasion of the state and the raid on Richmond prevented its implementation. South Carolina similarly tried to raise Continentals later in the war by paying recruits with enslaved persons.123 Whether money, land, livestock, or slaves, these bounties were meant to speak to youths and young men, promising a path to economic competency at the conclusion of their service. Recruiting for this Continental cause proved an intensely local affair, with immediate conditions and relationships as important as youths’ individual ambitions. With soldiering so tightly tied to articulations and performances of masculine identity—and since a man’s quality was tied to the opinions of his fellow men—patriots always trotted out peer pressure as an initial tactic. For example, when, in June 1776, Northampton, Massa- chusetts, received “a requisition for men of the militia to join the army near New York,” local leaders approached Thomas Craige, a popular young man in his early twenties. They told him that “if he would enlist, other young men would be thereby induced.” They quickly made him a sergeant, and he “did persuad ten or twelve of his companions to enlist.”124 Taverns were particularly useful sites for recruiting, as recruiters challenged young men to put actions behind their bold words.125 Joseph Plumb Martin recalled, “I used frequently to go to the rendezvous where I saw many of my young associates enlist.” There lads teased each other into the service: “The old bantering began—come, if you will enlist I will, says one; you have long been talking about it, says another—come, now is the time.”126 Similarly, the looming threat of the approaching enemy or stinging memories of their recent depredations made recruiting easier, as young men rushed to defend their communities or exact revenge on the enemy and demonstrate their manly resolve. When British dragoons surprised Charles 46 Becoming Men of Some Consequence Wallace’s militia company north of Philadelphia in February 1778, they took him prisoner and mercilessly wounded his helpless and aged father. When released, “moved with a spirit of revenge for the death of his father and for barbarous usage while prisoner,” he immediately enlisted in one of Pennsylvania’s Continental regiments.127 Neither monetary rewards, nor patriotic appeals, nor fear and revenge proved sufficient to fill the Continental ranks with the necessary soldiers, however. In the spring of 1777, for example, after his “utmost endeavors,” a Virginia officer found himself with only four recruits. He knew the area was “full of young men,” but he knew he needed further assistance to “force them into the Country’s Service.”128 With each new year’s campaign the demands of military mobilization trickled down through society’s layers. Congress presented each state with a quota of Continental soldiers to raise. States divided this obligation among their towns or counties and called for volunteers. Inevitably, when an insufficient number of recruits stepped forward, it fell to state and local leaders to coerce a sufficient number of men into service. When the new regiments of long-serving Conti- nentals filled slowly in both 1777 and 1778, Congress pushed the states to fill up their quotas “by drafts from their militia, or in any other way that shall be effectual.”129 The goal in these drafts was to coerce men into the ranks with a minimum amount of social or political disruption. Practi- cally, this meant sending the young and poor to the army. The possibility of hiring substitutes provided the mechanism. In some communities, local militia captains drafted men by drawing names out of a hat. These impartially selected men could then hire others to go in their places. More commonly, rigged drafts repeatedly picked the same suspected Tories, rich men, or impoverished unfortunates for Continental service. John Adams optimistically thought in New England the “Persons draughted are commonly the wealthiest,” because they had the means to hire “their poorer Neighbours, to take their Places.”130 Virginia, by contrast, purposefully structured its drafts to target men who lacked sufficient property to vote. In 1778 the Virginia Assembly further constricted the draft to “the Single men” without children, since “the young men are properest to go, and . . . it follows that all of them should take a fair and equal chance.”131 Patriots realized they could not force householders into the ranks for the duration of the war and still maintain public support for the Revolution. As a result, states silently compromised with their recalcitrant populations and either drafted younger men or called recruits for shorter terms of service. When calls went out for volunteers or substitutes, households and Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army 47 communities glanced about for likely youths to hire for military service.132 The assumption that it was best to send unmarried, young men as soldiers held firm from the beginning of the war to the end: Christopher Vail of Long Island “took a man’s place” in July 1775 as a substitute for a six-month term of service. He was seventeen years old.133 Samuel Clark of Haddam, Connecticut, enlisted for three years in the spring of 1777, but by October either his wife (he had married in 1776), health, or changed inclination had intervened, and he convinced his younger brother Eliphalet to take his place. Samuel was twenty-seven years old; by contrast, Eliphalet was only twenty-one, unmarried, and the right match in the family for the army.134 A draft in Virginia for “eighteen months men” similarly snagged the newly married John Cave. Being “exceedingly unwilling to go on account of his family,” he hired his younger brother Benjamin as a substitute.135 Carter Chandler, though “too young to be enrolled in the militia,” nevertheless went as a substitute for the master of the household in which he lived. Then, after Cornwallis’s surrender, he agreed to substitute again, this time for eighteen months, and was promised “a Negro girl” as extra compensation.136 Younger brothers substituted for their elder siblings, sons for fathers, apprentices, servants, and slaves for their masters, and the poor for the rich.137 Local politics and familial allegiances were paramount, constraining and channeling young men’s choices. If the coercive power of community and family could be brought to bear, youths had little choice but to serve. In New England, strong patriot leadership marshaled support for the cause and towns generally filled their quotas—cajoling, paying, and drafting young men as necessary.138 In Virginia, by contrast, the pressures of war fractured society and weakened the control of the patriot elite. The state’s white underclass refused to cooperate quietly with efforts to recruit men for long-term Continental service. As a result, Virginia’s failures to meet its quotas were spectacular. In 1777, the state’s draft raised fewer than 1,000 men. For 1778, Virginia needed to raise 8,000 Continentals to meet its obligations to Congress. The Assembly knew better than to try, and only called for a draft for 2,000 men. Even so, by May 1778, Washington’s army had only received 1,242 men from these two drafts. Communities shielded their kin as best they could from Continental drafts, and only grudgingly submitted to drafts for shorter militia service. Those men they did send had the weakest claims to community protection.139 Young men’s specific aspirations and relationships shaped their response to compensation promises, coercion threats, and political alle- 48 Becoming Men of Some Consequence giances. Young men looked to futures in specific communities. This was the leverage local elites, fathers, and friends held over them. If maximizing monetary compensation alone had been a soldier’s only goal, these young men would have done better to serve with the better-paying British Army or its loyalist auxiliaries.140 After all, patriot and loyalist recruiters alike offered cash and land that promised to transform youths’ postwar lives— but the British paid in reliable gold.141 The young men of Revolutionary America did not make choices in economic isolation, however. By and large, their allegiances followed that of their families and communities. Young men from patriot-controlled communities weighed whether or in what capacity to fight for the cause of Independence; young men from loyalist families weighed if and when to take up arms for the cause of the king. Taking a bounty for service with the other side would have cut them off from whatever home they had known. Allegiance to a party was inextricable from their aspirations for membership in that community after the war. When a Scottish soldier scolded a group of captured Penn- sylvanians—“Young men, ye should never fight against your king”—he mistakenly conflated a province’s collective decision to rebel and its young soldiers’ individual decisions to enlist.142 If their people had embraced the war, or been pushed into compliance by patriot-dominated committees, it was not a question of whom they fought against. The question was how fighting might transform their lives or those relationships. In his second enlistment Joseph Plumb Martin experienced the full range of community coercion and monetary promises. “I had learned something of a soldier’s life,” he wrote, recalling his suffering in the campaign around New York in 1776, “enough, I thought, to keep me at home for the future.” Nevertheless, as the weather warmed in 1777, Martin remembered, “the young men began to enlist.” Recruiters for the new “standing army” sought likely enlistees, and as an unattached young man, Martin found himself a prime target. One of his best friends had turned recruiting sergeant, and “every time he saw me, which was often, harass[ed] me with temptations to engage in the service again.” A lieutenant, who was “a sort of . . . cousin-in-law,” similarly worked on Martin’s grandfather with “fine stories” to gain the old man’s consent for the lad to go back to war. Young Martin, however, was wary. What ultimately pushed him back to the army was the coercive power of an organized community. To meet the state’s call for troops, town leaders divided men into squads, with each group responsible for producing a recruit. The lieutenant helpfully tipped off one of these squads that young Martin was a likely prospect. That group, Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army 49 he recalled, “accordingly attacked me, front, rear, and flank.” Martin saw the writing on the wall and took payment to enlist as their substitute: “I thought, as I must go, I might as well endeavour to get as much for my skin as I could.”143 Young men like Martin were well aware of the market for their military labor and readily sought the best deal. It was in would-be soldiers’ interest to hold out as long as possible, skating the edge between coercion and increased compensation. Neither compensation nor coercion alone could fill the army, however. Politics, family and community pressure, and money all had to combine, with the force of coercion putting a thumb on the scale of young men’s decisions.

Rejecting the Continental Army

The patriots were never able to meet the quotas of recruits for the Conti- nental Army. Economic disruption made the financial rewards of soldiering uncertain and coercion proved inadequate. Stories of harsh discipline, privation, and death in the Continental Army leaked back to civilian communities, discouraging enlistments. “The Continental officers are so cruel and severe,” admitted one officer to another in the middle of the war, “men can never be got to serve under them.”144 Commenting on the state of the military hospitals, Benjamin Rush noted, “The common people are too much shoked with spectacles of Continental misery ever to become Con- tinental soldiers.”145 Even decades later, a pension petitioner repeated the conventional wisdom of the war. When he considered enlisting, neighbors “all told him never to go into the regular service, for a regular soldier lived a dog’s life.”146 Still, soldiers for the Continental Army quotas had to be found, leading a writer in the Connecticut Courant to observe snidely how “the inhabitants were busily employed in recruiting the children and servants of their neighbors, and forbidding their own to engage.”147 As respectable families rejected Continental service for their sons and tried to dragoon the most marginal into the ranks, the resulting decline in the social quality of the Continental soldiery proved a self-reinforcing process. These feelings help explain the disconnect between the significant numbers of men who served in the Revolutionary War and the perpetual shortfall of Continental soldiers available to George Washington. Youths’ economic and social ambitions for military service had seemed reasonable in the first years of the war when therage militaire paid them with glory, and in 1777 when the Continental currency was still fairly sound. Young soldiers, however, could not have anticipated the dire eco- 50 Becoming Men of Some Consequence nomic straits into which the Revolutionary movement would fall. Because bounties and pay were central for enlisting young men, the collapse of the Continental currency proved to be the central crisis of the patriot military effort. Increased wartime demands for goods and labor inflated prices and wages. This inflation collided with the depreciating the value of the Continental paper currency against its nominal specie value between 1778 and 1781. Congress tried to keep pace by printing more bills, and states offered interest-bearing notes to counter the depreciation, but they were shoveling against the tide. By 1781, the Continental dollar was worthless and Congress’s promises of compensation for soldiers hardly worth the paper on which they were printed.148 The failure of army pay and cash bounties to hold their value destroyed young men’s assumption, based in colonial tradition, that soldiering could aid their progress toward postwar competency. Instead, long-term military service appeared a fool’s errand. The collapse of the currency, however, only partially explained why Continental service proved an increasingly tough sale for youths and their communities. Young men simply saw other choices for military service that could satisfy their wartime obligations and serve their ambitions for advancement. A French observer put it succinctly: “no enticements or trick could force solid citizens to enlist as regulars, inasmuch as they had to serve in the militia anyway.”149 The same went for youths whose families or communities shielded them from coercion. State regiments, separate from the Continental levies, also provided an alternative and at- tractive form of military service. With comparable pay and shorter terms of service likely closer to home, it was no wonder men preferred enlisting in these units.150 Some young veterans, now connoisseurs of military service, moved into these state or militia units at the end of their Continental enlistments. Simon Fobes had slogged to Canada in 1775 as a rank-and-file Continental. With that experience under his belt, rather than reenlist at the end of his term, he obtained a much more congenial post as a junior officer in a Connecticut state unit on garrison duty near home.151 Men logically enlisted for the shortest periods and largest rewards. In July 1780 an officer observed that short-term recruits had arrived in the Continental camp from Boston: “Some of them rece’d £1500 paper as Bounty and 40s per month for six months—necessary as this is, it is very discouraging for the poor fellows that are [enlisted] for the war.”152 Recruiters knew would-be recruits were attentive to gradations of service and shaped their pitches accordingly. A unit of the Massachusetts state artillery advertised for recruits in late 1777 by emphasizing status, Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army 51 safety, and pay. Seeking volunteers willing to serve “in the Character of a Gentleman matross, and learn the noble Art of Gunnery,” the recruiters promised recruits would be stationed close to home “in the Town and Harbour of Boston,” and would not to be removed “but by Order” of their state government. Further, recruits were “desired to take Notice of the difference of Pay and Station.” The unmentioned object of contrast was the Continental Army. Indeed, the opening salutation, “To all Gentlemen Volunteers, who prefer liberty to slavery,” spoke as much to fears about the degradation free citizens could suffer in a standing army as to the threats Britain had aimed at her colonies.153 Recruits’ understanding of military service mattered, and clever recruiters responded accordingly. In states close to the seat of war, even short enlistments or militia service looked and felt like substantial soldiering and could satisfy obligation as well as the desire for adventure and pay. The militia system in New Jer- sey required men over sixteen, unless already in service, to stand on active duty every other month or hire a substitute. While necessary to help check the British forces occupying New York, this intense militia mobilization meant almost full-time militia duty for the young men inevitably hired as substitutes.154 Virginia’s choice to fill its Continental quotas with short- term replacements offered young men the opportunity to go as substitutes and work their way through the war. John Chambers of Halifax County had a common story: he accepted sixty dollars to serve as a substitute on a twelve month tour, arriving at Valley Forge in early 1778 and fighting at Monmouth that summer. Chambers had only been back in Virginia for a month when he heard his uncle had been drafted to serve three months. If the money was right, the young veteran was willing to go back and “offered to serve the tour in consideration of £60.”155 Young Virginians found sub- stituting for unfortunate planters more lucrative and flexible than service as a proper Continental and strung together a living (or, with luck, some savings) with multiple short tours.156 Shadrach Barnes, for example, had just turned fourteen when he first went into the army for two months as a substitute for his father. Across the next four years, young Barnes made an informal career of substitution, accumulating two full years of service out of two- and three-month substitutions “for persons selected by draft.” In the 1781 Yorktown campaign, young Barnes finally had the maturity to substitute for a nine-month term. Now seventeen years old, the youth spent his last three months as a sergeant in a state company.157 Young men, already the target of recruiters and men seeking substitutes, found these multiple short tours commonsensical. Service as a Continental regu- 52 Becoming Men of Some Consequence lar would have seemed superfluous since these young men were clearly soldiers, received pay from the state and extra compensation from the original draftees, and stood beyond the immediate control of their fathers or masters. The popularity of privateering offers particularly clear evidence of young men rejecting the Continental Army in favor of a different form of military service. Privateering answered the spirit of military obligation but also promised young men hungry for cash the possibility of quick and large financial rewards. Benjamin Rush observed in late 1776 that “many of the Continental troops now in our service, pant for the expiration of their enlistments, in order that they may partake of the spoils of the West Indies.”158 These soldiers already knew the connection between war and financial betterment, and they knew a better option when they saw it. Samuel Shaw, the young Massachusetts officer with so much to say about the Continental Army’s need for recruits, nevertheless approved of his brother’s plan to sign onto a privateer. He thought it was a good scheme and admitted, “Was I not in the Army I would follow that money getting business myself.”159 Ben Welles, writing to a fellow New Englander, put it most bluntly. Instead of continuing in the army, he would satisfy his “youthful ambition” through “patriotic persuits of Sugar Ships, [and] East India Men . . . Laden with inestimable cargoes.” After all, he had to “get money” and “take care of number one.”160 When two officers correspond- ing in the spring of 1777 heard that privateers were fitting out at Boston, they knew “the natural consequence will be that a total stop will be put to recruiting the Continental Army.”161 Young men had had good reasons to go to sea rather than the army: ship captains pledged easier service and better pay and cruises lasted weeks or months, not years, reflecting more traditional contracts for civilian labor. The young apprentice Ebenezer Fox had served as a militia substitute for his Massachusetts master in 1779 only to suffer frozen feet for his trouble. Upon his return from the Continental camp, Fox assured his master “that nothing would again induce me to officiate as a substitute for him or anybody else.” After a brief recovery, Fox signed onboard a privateer, seeking more immediate gain and easier service.162 By the end of 1776, sixteen-year-old Thomas Painter had already served two enlistments in Connecticut regiments. “Thouroughly sick of a Soldier’s life,” he later wrote, “[I] determined, if I went into the War again, to have my furniture conveyed without its being Slung at my back.” So, in the summer of 1777, he recalled, “I then determined to try my fortune Privateering.” Rather Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army 53 than reenlist with the Continentals, he made his way through the war with several cruises on privateers and spent his time ashore working for his uncle.163 Privateering made a very good fit for veteran soldiers already away from home and domestic employments. Isaiah Bagwell of Virginia’s eastern shore was only eighteen years old when his two-year enlistment in the Continental Army expired. Discharged at Valley Forge, rather than go home, he signed onboard a schooner running tobacco to France.164 Thomas Tart of North Carolina similarly served a nine-month term in the army, sailed a cruise on a privateer, and then worked as a shoemaker in Chester, Pennsylvania, while waiting for his prize money. All told, Tart’s wartime adventures had him gone from his father’s home for one year, ten months.165 In the middle of the war, privateering promised the economic rewards that were the path to manly independence—rewards that service in the Continental Army was failing to deliver. The differences between these various types of military service appeared stark from the perspective of Congress or Washington’s headquarters. Different chains of command, enlistments of various lengths, unpredictable equipment needs, and uneven training further complicated an already strained strategic situation. “As to numbers, we are pretty respectable,” Lt. Samuel Shaw of Massachusetts explained to his brother in 1780, “but alas Nat, we have more men than soldiers. The levies are mostly totally unacquainted with Service and what is worse, by the time they will be good for anything their enlistments will expire.” Worst of all, he saw how “the amazing bounties” given these short-term replacements “greatly discourages our veterans . . . and I fear if such measures are again repeated the army would hardly be kept together.”166 Though Shaw was right to worry, when viewed from the level of individuals, families, and communities, the service of their young men in these state or militia units or at sea on privateers carried significant weight. They were paid, useful, active, and armed participants in the cause. Since the war presented young men with many different types of military labor, offering the opportunity to pull together a stake at this stage of their life course, it is not surprising that some in Revolutionary America rejected service with the Continental Army. * * * “Our hardy youth rise up to manhood faster than war itself can kill them.”167 Despite this blithe assumption proclaimed early in 1776, the mobilization of young men for military service was not so simple or straightforward. Whether they were officers or enlisted, propertied or poor, young 54 Becoming Men of Some Consequence men weighed promises of transformation and social advancement as they made choices about the army. Pressure from families and communities, economic enticements, and youths’ ambitions for social transformation had to come into alignment to draw them into military service. When enticements and encouragement failed, recruiters could turn to blunt coercion. After Eli Showell refused to enlist, for example, he was thrown in a Maryland jail and left overnight. The next morning the recruiting officer threatened him with a drawn sword: “Eli, now God damn your soul . . . your life is your own, [but] if you do not enlist I will run you through.” After another night in jail, two sergeants looped “a pair of bridle reins round his neck and choked him for some time.” They threatened to kill “the son of a bitch” unless he enlisted.168 For poor youths without patrons or protectors, joining the army was not necessarily a free choice. The logic of the life course and youths’ ambitions proved persistent and difficult to overcome, however. Youths’ decision to go for soldiers unfolded within a constellation of their ambitions for advancing in life—to build up a stake through enlistment bounties and army wages, assert their status as gentlemen, or escape domestic control or the domination of servitude. The examples of earlier generations and the promises of their communities and Congress assured young men that taking up arms would advance them along the path toward manly independence. Their expectations were not unreasonable, but circumstances changed beyond their control or pre- diction. Even as drafts singled out young men for more-intense military service, youths found military engagements that balanced their domestic situation, the value of their time, the depreciation of currency, and the uneven risks of war. As a result, many gave the Continental Army a wide berth, imposing stark limits on the war effort. The young United States never assembled a Continental Army sufficient in itself to win its independence because Congress, states, and communities offered young men too many options for satisfying their military obligations and manly ambitions. Washington’s recruiting officers and the state governments could not fill the eighty-eight battalions Congress au- thorized for the campaign of 1777. As Richard Henry Lee of Virginia noted, “If the 88 Batallions were at once complete, adieu to British Tyr- anny and every chance for its succeeding.”169 That hoped-for Continen- tal Army of 75,000 soldiers could have driven the king’s regulars from America’s shores, defeating Burgoyne at Saratoga, overwhelming Howe before Philadelphia, and then marching to besiege New York City. In 1777, however, the Continental Army reached its largest size with only 39,443 Ambition, Coercion, and Choice in Joining the Army 55 men—a total that was still 20 percent below the peak mobilization of 1776.170 With the terms Congress offered recruits, the Continental Army could not compete with the other opportunities for military service. Always undermanned, the Continental Army barely maintained effectiveness through these short-term replacements and militia support. As a consequence, the Continental Army lacked the strength to conclude the war on its own. Washington had to look for luck and French aid. The resulting delays and uncertainties after 1777 provoked financial collapse, almost broke the confederation, and nearly lost the struggle for independence. Blame does not lie with the young men of the Revolutionary generation, however. They met the obligations imposed by their communities, followed the military precedents and expectations of prior generations, and sought a path toward manhood through a landscape ravaged by war.

56 Becoming Men of Some Consequence “We Were Young Men with 2 Warm Hearts” manhood in the continental army

Out at Fort Pitt at the end of May 1781, some Continental officers saw a motley group of self-styled frontier gentlemen walking their way. “Let us not take any notice of them,” one captain slyly instructed his comrades, “nor show them any respect, nor even move our hats to them.” This disdain was too much for Lieutenant John Ward, a Pennsylvanian and son of the area. He refused to hold his tongue. For his part, “He looked on some of them to be gentlemen and would treat them as such.” His father was a friend and political ally of those men. The colonel intervened to halt the bickering, scolding the lieutenant “that he was very wrong and acted out of character of an officer in taking the part of such rascals or villains . . . no officer should be seen associating with or countenancing such damned scoundrels.” Ward refused to back down—“by God,” he declared, “he had a right to think and speak his thought and he would do it.” He had only recently been transferred into this regiment, and his new peers’ opinions of him were at stake. The colonel had heard enough; he mocked the lieutenant as “a boy, and infant . . . [who] did not know his duty or he would not talk so, and told him to go away.” But Ward could not back down, and he found himself arrested “for insolence, disobedience of orders, and taking part with the enemies of the commanding officer of this district, and associating with those below the character of gentlemen.”1 The conflict in this episode is shot through with contending assertions about this young officer’s status and privilege—characteristics inextricable from his masculine identity and position in the life course. A man’s quality ultimately lay with the perceptions of his fellow men. Refusing to hear his father slandered, Ward stood fast as a gentleman among equals, proclaim- ing the value and independence of his judgment. The colonel, who had been locked in a tiresome political dispute with these local politicians, demolished Ward’s argument by mocking his pretentions. What could be further from an officer and a gentleman than a boy or infant—an inferior incapable of discerning proper behavior and unworthy of debate? To defend his family’s social station Ward had staked his army peers’ opinion of him as a fellow officer. He miscalculated and lost. Humiliated and arrested in the street, it remained to be seen whether he could rehabilitate himself at his court-martial. For young men who took up arms in the Revolution, specific masculine performances shaped their experiences and relationships in the military sphere.2 Multiple and contending varieties of masculinity grew in the diverse soil of Revolutionary America, each with expectations of what would earn a man regard from his betters, respect from his equals, and obedience from those below him. Whether it was the elite prizing displays of sentimental emotion, self-control, and mastery, or rough frontiersmen valuing signs of strength, violence, and defiance, all were premised on an authority related to a man’s command over his household. Just as their youth and position in the life course placed young men in a particular relationship with their elders and masters in civilian life, their status as soldiers—or as junior officers—also set them in a specific constellation of power relations. The purpose, composition, and hierarchy of the army camp put a twist on these norms and the performances of manliness that soldiers aimed at each other. Seeking the regard of their fellow soldiers helped young men deal with danger and discomfort, negotiate their place in the army’s hierarchy of power, and assert their sense of self. The stakes were significant. At home, communities and recruiters had promised youths that soldiering demonstrated a social utility and manliness in advance of their years and place in their life course. Enlistment bounties and officers’ commissions similarly spoke to youths’ ambitions, pointing a path to a well-regarded independence after the fighting. While in the service, however, young men still had to answer their present needs for respect and to belong. These they would have to earn in the peculiar community of the Continental Army and in the novel guise of soldiers, shaping their performances of manliness to suit the military sphere. As the clash between Lieutenant Ward and his colonel suggests, these performances were particularly fraught components of military relationships and could prove tricky to pull off successfully.3 Young Continentals’ behaviors and relationships in the army reveal how their performances of manliness—particularly to obtain the regard of their peers—shaped their experience of the Revolutionary effort. The 58 Becoming Men of Some Consequence trials of soldiers in this war have long been the stuff of national legend: bloody footprints in the snow marked the path to Independence; stoic soldiers suffered hunger and nakedness and faced the horrors of battle; proud officers came to see themselves as the embodiment of the cause; all drank deeply from springs of liberty. Soldiers’ youth offers a new point of entry into these seemingly well-known stories. The contours of their experiences and relationships should not simply be explained away as the inevitable product of war or the universal nature of soldiers. Young soldiers’ relationships and performances unfolded in specific contexts: in their transition from home to the army, in their experience of battle, in their interactions within the army camp, in the divide between officers and enlisted men, and in their assertions of soldierly identities and Revolutionary ideology.

Entering the Military Sphere

“A Soldier’s Life,” wrote William Weeks to his brother in 1777, “is such that no one can have a true Idea . . . without the Trial.”4 New recruits had to navigate a complicated transition between their civilian homes and the military sphere. Part of Week’s inability to explain the experience of soldiering in the Revolutionary War was its particular mix of the familiar and foreign: young men chose to take up arms within the familiar context of their civilian homes, but the military institution they stepped into and the relationships they formed there were novel.5 When they went to war, young soldiers did not cut themselves off from the local and intimate worlds of Revolutionary America—but they did expand their horizons. On one hand, entering the world of the army alongside friends, relatives, and neighbors eased the transition. These connections were inescapable. Francis Brooke was only sixteen when he received a lieutenant’s commission at the end of 1780. “My twin brother,” he recalled, “not liking to part with me, shortly after got the commission of a first lieutenant in the same regiment.”6 At the beginning of the war, families, towns, or counties mustered their recruits together, and the lines of military authority mirrored existing relationships. Even after 1777, when recruiters found they had to range more widely for soldiers and drew poorer and less-rooted men into the ranks, young soldiers still carried civilian relationships into the army. The Carter brothers, Barnabas and Nicholas, joined the Virginia line in 1777, both enlisting in the same regiment and same company. Their story was not uncommon.7 Yet, even when marching off with familiar faces, young soldiers had dramatically changed Manhood in the Continental Army 59 their social circumstances. Going to join the army in Cambridge in July 1775 was likely the first time the teenaged volunteers Aaron Burr and Mat- thias Ogden stepped beyond the direct observation of their elders.8 As the war continued and soldiers campaigned far from their homes, the increasingly diverse components of the Continental Army could itself shock soldiers whose former lives had been profoundly local and provincial. Joseph Plumb Martin, remembering the army’s baggage train heading south in the middle of the war, thought “a caravan of wild beasts could bear no comparison with it.” Their dialects were “as confused as their bodily appearance was odd and disgusting. There was Irish and scotch brogue, murdered English, flat insipid Dutch, and some lingoes which would puzzle a philosopher. . . .”9 The army would prove a sphere marked by new people, conditions, and demands. Young soldiers had to adjust to these new burdens. “The Soldiers Life begins to sit more easy upon me than it did at first,” wrote a young officer to a friend. “We had many hardships and fatigues to undergo which before I knew nothing of.”10 As Washington explained to Congress, “the sudden change in their manner of living” naturally burdened and disheartened raw recruits.11 Their food and lodging were certainly different. “Our men uninured to camp rations made great complaints at first,” acknowledged one officer.12 Others were less patient: Joseph Plumb Martin saw an officer toss an ear of burnt Indian corn to a hungry soldier, saying, “Eat this and learn to be a soldier.”13 Even if the outdoor work of the camp was not dissimilar from familiar agricultural labor, its pace and rhythms were new. They called the labor of maintaining camp and building defenses “fatigue duty” for good reason. Entrenching, constructing fortifications and shel- ters, cutting firewood, carrying water, and cooking were all part of long, tiring days of labor. Even officers complained of duties. One wrote home that the “fall business in Flaxseed time is nothing to be Compared with the Fatigue I undergo Daily.”14 One soldier remembered working “harder in the trenches at Yorktown than he ever did anywhere else during the same length of time in his life.”15 Interminable marches from region to region added to this burden. In the southern campaign at the end of the war, one Pennsylvanian calculated that he had traveled 2,755 miles in the space of a year.16 Exposure to the elements, scarce food and unpredictable hunger, hard work and long travel, and disease and danger were the foundation of soldiers’ experience. In addition to learning to bear these burdens, recalled an enlisted soldier, “there was such a sameness in the duty we had to do,” day after day, month to month.17 60 Becoming Men of Some Consequence Becoming a soldier required instruction and adaptation. In the Revo- lutionary War, young men did not experience a jarring, identity-stripping basic training.18 They mustered at regional rendezvous points and walked on to the army. Once in camp, regiments introduced or reinforced the details of drill and the handling of muskets—actions perhaps deceptively familiar from militia examples. Poor weapons discipline in camp marked the novice soldier, with men banging away at makeshift targets, flying geese, or campfires. “Seldom a day passes,” lamented Washington in his general orders, “but some persons are shot by their friends.”19 Youthful enthusiasm and ignorance had costs. When the Revolutionary leadership in Massachusetts introduced Washington to his command in July 1775, they apologized that “the greatest part of them have not before seen Ser- vice” and had “but little knowledge of divers things most essential to the preservation of Health and even of life.” The “Youth in the Army” in particular were “not possess’d of the absolute Necessity of Cleanliness in their Dress, and Lodging, continual Exercise, and strict Temperance to preserve them from Diseases frequently prevailing in Camps.”20 Poor sanitation and careless camp hygiene yielded an epidemic of deadly dysentery in the units besieging Boston. Oversight and discipline of such basic behavior had been the purview of the household. New to camp, these young recruits had been released from familial control, but crucial military discipline had not yet been imposed. While this transition was most marked at the outset of the war, the process would repeat with the arrival of each wave of new recruits. They would have to learn how to be soldiers. What lay in the hearts and minds of young soldiers was as crucial as the material conditions they faced. “We were all young, and in a manner unacquainted with human nature, quite Novices in Military matters,” recalled John Lacey, who had been appointed captain at twenty-one. “[We] had every thing to learn, and no one to instruct us who knew any better than ourselves.”21 What novice soldiers did not know or misperformed alternately shocked and amused. On one occasion, a general had to remind his sentries “invariably to face outwards” when on lookout.22 An- other officer recalled the folly of a night’s watch for prowling Tories—suggesting the emotional tension created by new risks and obligations. He had placed his sentinels, “all young fellows,” about a hundred yards apart and instructed that they shout “All’s well!” every half hour to their comrade on their right. The situation quickly devolved into farce. “My boys, my sentinels . . . began to cry it every ten minutes, and at last constantly on . . . [with] bellowing and a great noise.” Exasperated, he relieved those Manhood in the Continental Army 61 thirty sentries and repeated his instructions, but to no avail. The new set bawled “All’s well” through the night as before. Not to be outdone, his soldiers repeated the ridiculous scene the following night.23 While this might have been a breakdown of discipline by raw troops fearing enemies lurking in the darkness, their persistence and the farcical humor of it suggests these young soldiers were spoofing military procedure to relieve their novice anxiety. Despite danger and the demands of military discipline, their audience was each other. While Continental commanders tried to educate their green troops through their general orders and gradually formalized instruction, training remained haphazard.24 This was particularly the case for officers: several years into the war, newspapers could still assure newly appointed young officers that they would find “Common sense and the deportment of a gentlemen . . . sufficient”—knowledge of military art would follow in due time.25 Nevertheless, young soldiers and officers worked to pre- pare themselves. Pamphlets and guidebooks on the military arts were very popular among officers across the war—a Hessian who inspected captured American baggage was astonished “to see how every wretched knapsack . . . would be filled with such military works as ‘The Instructions of the King of Prussia to his Generals.’ ”26 Revolutionaries eagerly sought the details of military science, but young officers making the transition to military life also read up on how to be military men. Accordingly, in the flood of military books published during the war, young officers de- voured biographies of the ideal protestant warrior against tyranny, Gus- tavus Adolphus of Sweden.27 One young officer similarly remembered reading “the History of Charles XII, King of Sweden” in 1776—during the campaign “called ‘the times that tried men’s souls.’ ” Yet, he admitted, “it was fun then to me. . . . [and I] often thought of Charles the Twelfth.”28 Putting on the soldier was part of the transition to army life—young men had to find a military persona and identity to help them face the burdens of war. Unsurprisingly, since military language made “young” a synonym for “inexperienced” and “old” for “veteran,” new recruits’ readiest sources for guidance were older veterans. Despite their books, young men certainly needed all the informal advice they could get. Enoch Anderson gratefully remembered how a veteran British captain, retired and standing with the colonial cause, took him under his wing: “from the attentions . . . to me and from his tuition, I was considered a tolerable disciplinarian.”29 John Adlum of Pennsylvania recounted many such interactions with older vet- 62 Becoming Men of Some Consequence erans in his memoir. He recalled being “under great obligation” to one sergeant “for a great deal of advice.” He also sought counsel from an “old soldier” named Kilpatrick who had deserted from the British at Boston and joined the Americans.30 As an ex-British regular, Kilpatrick was a true expert. Uncertainty and ignorance heavily burdened inexperienced soldiers. In posing their questions to older men, veterans, and relative strangers, young soldiers got the information they craved while hiding their ignorance and anxieties from their peers. Young soldiers’ fears peaked when they faced their first battle. De- cades later, survivors remembered the questions they put to older veterans. Marching toward what would be the Battle of Monmouth, the seventeen- year-old Virginian William Kersey fell in with veterans who had seen fighting at Trenton and the Brandywine and peppered them with questions.31 On northern Manhattan in 1776, young John Adlum found himself a member of the garrison at Fort Washington awaiting an inevitable British attack. There, he came across a “very intelligent Yankee”—a mari- ner about forty years old who said he had been at Bunker Hill. Together they spoke about their military situation. Adlum expressed hope that the fort’s entrenchments and earthen walls would make them formidable to the enemy. The older Yankee disagreed. “Now . . . I don’t know what the commanding officers intend to do,” he opined to his young listener, “but I will tell you what they ought to do”—and he proceeded to analyze the weaknesses of the fortifications. The veteran Yankee also instructed his young listener about the nature of battle. “After the first fire,” he reassured Adlum, “you will soon discover the great quantity of firing will be thrown away without any very serious effect. . . . their noise is nearly as formidable to young soldiers as the balls and grapeshot themselves.” Still, he insisted, “if you will attend to what I have said you will soon despise all firing.” Despite feeling fear, the Yankee insisted, a “real brave man” could still do his duty “with alacrity and in silence.”32 Fear need not unman. Standing with friends, kin, and new guides, young soldiers could hope to prove “formidable” and worthy of the burden. Young soldiers also used these queries to signal their worth to their elders and superiors. In this vein, while standing guard during an artillery inspection early in the 1776 New York campaign, Samuel Shaw caught the notice of General Israel Putnam, a legendary veteran, and “took the freedom to ask him his opinion in regard to the enemy.” Shaw recreated their conversation for his family: “He replied frankly, that he thought they would endeavour to give us a brushing here. ‘Then,’ said I, ‘we shall have Manhood in the Continental Army 63 a little business, General.’ ‘Not a little, neither,’ replied the old gentleman; ‘for when they come up with their ships you’ll have your hands full, I warrant you.’ On this I observed, that a smart fire from eight or ten ships of the line, well returned by our batteries, would give a young person some idea of a cannonade. ‘Ay, would it,’ concluded he, laughing, ‘and of a pretty hot one, too.’ ”33 In this exchange between young and old, subordinate and commander, Shaw accomplished several things. He caught the approving attention of a superior and demonstrated his military knowledge and cool confidence in the face of danger. The general’s approving answer also offered reassurance. Narrating this scene in a letter to his family added another layer to Shaw’s performance. Through this exchange with the general, Shaw painted himself as militarily savvy, respected, and popular with his superiors. Shaw delighted in General Putnam’s approval and sought to win that same regard from the audience at home. Older commanders were aware of the emotional burdens borne by young soldiers and on occasion directly addressed them. General Put- nam took one such opportunity while reviewing and addressing his troops in early 1777. As one soldier remembered it, the general approached him and his equally young comrade and, “observing our youthful appearance, turned to us and laid his hand on the shoulder of each of us and remarked that he liked to see such young men turn out.” With their patriotic ardor affirmed, the general was further certain the lads “would make men when their beards grew.” Putnam, a veteran of the war with the French, then “took off his hat and showed us his head, which had been scalped by the Indians.”34 He, too, had once been a youth in arms, and he had survived savage battle and terrifying wounds. While demonstrating the military qualities of strength and sacrifice to the next generation, he also embodied the promise that the war could make good their expectations for advancement and respect.35 Just as young men signaled their readiness and sought their elders’ approval, in this instance Putnam signaled back to his young soldiers his regard and reassurance.

Battle

Tales tell that on the wintry morning before the Battle of Cowpens in 1781, the wagoner, rifleman, and general Daniel Morgan walked among his soldiers, joking, encouraging, and laying out their strategy. When the armies collided, his line of militia were to fire just two volleys at the Brit- ish line, then withdraw quickly, luring the enemy toward an obscured line 64 Becoming Men of Some Consequence of ready-and-waiting Continentals. This was a deadly serious business— their behavior in combat might preserve or endanger themselves and their comrades, and risk or advance their cause. Morgan promised his young men that cool, steady behavior now would matter at home: “And then when you return to your homes, how the old folks will bless you and the girls will kiss you, for your gallant conduct.”36 Morgan was a savvy battlefield commander—inth ese simple exchanges he drew connections between the tactical effectivenessth at promised a better chance of victory and survival, the soldiers’ obligations to each other, and their aspirations in the civilian sphere. Though the experience of battle in the Revolution did not much vary between older and younger soldiers—like the Almighty, grapeshot and musket balls were no respecter of persons—the military necessity behind personal performance and soldierly solidarity held particular salience to young men. Combat was the defining experience for young soldiers. Nothing in civilian life matched the terrible anticipation and resulting horror of battle. Elisha Stevens was in his mid-twenties during the fighting atth e Bran- dywine, and his immediate reaction spewed words across the page: “it Began in the morning and Held til tonight with out much Seasation of arms Cannons Roaring muskets Cracking Drums Beating Bumbs Flying all Round. men a dying woundeds Horred Grones which would Greave the Heardist of Hearts to See Such a Dollful Sight as this.”37 Still, fighting was rare, and with few exceptions a company’s time on the battlefield was better measured in minutes than hours or days. During a hot campaign, a unit might risk enemy fire in combat for a half hour every month or two.38 In those intervals, the battlefield was a profoundly intimate space of collective performance. Ideally, soldiers pressed shoulder to shoulder, “locking” together with a foot pressed to the back leg of the soldier kneel- ing in the firing line before them.39 To the modern mind, the eighteenth- century ideal of soldiers advancing without cover appears bizarre if not suicidal. But it was the unbroken density of the line that concentrated the firepower of single-shot muskets and createdth e terrifying momen- tum behind a bayonet charge. Whichever line broke first from casualties, disorder, or fear exposed its soldiers to greater risk of defeat and death. Rather than endangering an individual soldier, standing firm with comrades aligned his impulses toward self-preservation, his obligation to his peers, and their shared goal of victory.40 When units broke, the tended to flyen masse and suddenly. At the Battle of Camden in 1780, the militia collapsed when British cannons opened up. “I confess I was amongst the first Manhood in the Continental Army 65 that fled,” a veteran admitted decades later. “The cause of that I cannot tell, except that everyone I saw was about to do the same. It was instantaneous. There was no effort to rally, no encouragement to fight. Officers and men joined in the flight.”41 Individual signals of hesitation or fear could cascade and the impetus for self-preservation tip from stoic advance to headlong flight. To hold fast in the line, soldiers had to trust each other to stand firm; as a result, outward signs of calm, fearlessness, or resolve mattered immensely.42 In effective units, soldiers trusted each other and saw those visible promises; this was “behaving well” and fighting “with spirit.”43 Young soldiers facing imminent combat had to find ways to steel themselves against fear—and then demonstrate their resolve to their comrades. An army surgeon particularly noted how soldiers put on carefree masks and denied fear: “Death is a Subject not to be attended to by Soldiers.” Irrever- ent or blasphemous language also had particular power to convey confidence: “In short they Laugh at death, mock at Hell and damnation, & even challenge the Deity, to remove them out of this world by Thunder and Lightning.”44 In the intimate space of the battlefield, visible and audible displays of resolve were crucial. In the chaotic retreats from New York in 1776, Virginia troops were “greatly exasperated” that units of Connecticut militia had fled from the British without firing a shot. Directly contrasting themselves with their feckless comrades, as the Virginians drew up for battle “it was very discoverable that they were determined to fight to the last for their Country.” To steel each other they approached the fighting with “every Soldier encouraging and animating his fellow.”45 These performances blended two emotional imperatives: the behaviors that marked a good soldier—bravery, stoicism, and energy—were manly qualities that youths needed to show each other; standing fast demonstrated the disin- terested virtue that was the central ideology of the Revolution. If a youth ran, he might save himself, but if he held in line, he helped preserve his comrades and the cause.46 Commanders and soldiers alike did their best to marshal this performative aspect. James Collins, a seventeen-year-old facing combat in North Carolina in 1780, was horrified by the dead heaped on the battlefield and was ready to desert. In the face of this fear, he recalled, “Each leader made a short speech in his own way to his men, desiring every coward to be off immediately.” This address had two effects. “I confess,” Collins later wrote, “I would willingly have been excused for my feelings were not the most pleasant . . . but I could not well swallow the appellation of coward.” He 66 Becoming Men of Some Consequence stayed in the line. Equally important, as he made his choice he saw others’ calculations about reputation crystalize. “I looked around; every man’s countenance seemed to change; well, thought I, fate is fate, every man’s fate is before him and he has to run it out. . . .”47 As this young revolutionary remembered it, following the script of their leaders, he and his comrades mastered their emotions in part by watching each other’s outward demeanor. With this shared display of resolve and self-control, soldiers signaled to each other they would not break and selfishly endanger their fellows. Young officers particularly felt on display and linked their military deportment with manly performance. Ebenezer Denny, a young Pennsylva- nian officer, knew the stakes: when he saw wounded men for the first time he recorded “feelings not very agreeable; [I must] endeavor to conquer this disposition or weakness; the sight sickened me.” Shortly thereafter he marched toward the enemy ranks for the first time, and his captain offered a friendly warning: “Now Eb, for the honor of old Carlisle, do not disgrace yourself.” Personal deportment meant more than tactical bril- liance in a low-ranking officer. Then they came to it. “We could not have been engaged longer than about three or four minutes,” Denny recorded, “but at the distance of sixty yards only.” Heavy casualties left him standing in command of the company. Denny admitted to his journal, “young and inexperienced, exhausted with hunger and fatigue, had like to have disgraced myself . . . [but] with difficulty kept my place.” Luckily, the men of the company were tested veterans and kept in order as they ran beyond the reach of British fire. The young lieutenant did not lead so much as follow along. But Ebenezer Denny had done what was expected of a young officer: to stand calmly with his troops, keep hold of his arms, and keep the unit together. There were harsh consequences for failing to keep one’s head. In this engagement, horse blood sprayed across the pants of a young staff officer. Thinking himself wounded, he fainted and had to be carried from the field. Apparently, his fellow officers had envied this handsome and wealthy young volunteer, but their subsequent mocking was enough “to laugh him out of the service.”48 Unreasonable reaction to fear unmanned him in his companions’ eyes. The behavior of Alexander Hamilton at the Battle of Monmouth offers a signal example of how young officers shaped their behavior—and how their military audience judged these performances. As an aide-de- camp to General Washington, Hamilton conveyed messages and orders but commanded no troops. On that disordered battlefield, Hamilton’s dis- Manhood in the Continental Army 67 plays of foolhardy heroism and patriotic bluster drew disapproval from his superiors. Delivering Washington’s orders that General Charles Lee stand fast, Hamilton rode up “in great heat,” flourishing his sword and shouting, “I will stay here with you, my dear general, and die with you! Let us all die rather than retreat!” Lee later disapprovingly described Hamilton as “much flustered [and] in a sort of frenzy of valor.” Later, as Washington tried to stop the American retreat, Hamilton jumped from his horse, again drew his sword, and shouted, “We are betrayed; your excellency and the army are betrayed, and the moment had arrived when every true friend of America must be ready to die in their defence.” Washington’s response was disapprovingly terse: “Colonel Hamilton, you will take your horse.” The- atrics of this sort would not win the battle. Though these displays failed to match the older generals’ expectations, Hamilton’s emotions rose from deep within the romantic young officer’s sense of himself. His fearless performance helped master fear. Without troops of his own to command, Hamilton displayed his patriotic resolve to his superiors—and himself.49 In Revolutionary America, where external self-presentation defined character, young men paired their preparation for battle with their attempts to win the regard of their fellow soldiers and superiors. Displays of manly resolve, reciprocal trust, and tactical effectiveness proved mutually reinforcing. Though these performances were necessary to hold the terrors of the battlefield at bay, in truth, nothing could control the vicious randomness of war’s violence. A youth could fail in his performances of calm resolve and survive; he could do everything right and die. At the Battle of Princeton, Lieutenant Bartholomew Yates and his captain successfully rallied their Virginians to dress the line to receive a British volley. A round struck the nineteen-year-old lieutenant in the side, knocking him to the frozen ground. While he begged for quarter, a British soldier stood over him, deliberately reloaded his musket, and then fired into his chest. The soldier then bayoneted Yates thirteen times with “the poor youth all the while crying for mercy.” Another British soldier found the Virginian somehow still alive and smashed him in the head. Despite these horrible wounds, Yates lingered for a week.50 Dark humor, steadfast bravery, or virtuous resolve in the face of the advancing enemy mattered little in the end for youths brutalized, cut down, or dismembered by the storm of battle. Focusing on outward performance redirected soldiers away from their inability to control the chaos around them.

68 Becoming Men of Some Consequence Relationships and Performances in Camp

“How hard is the soldier’s lott who’s least danger is the field of action?” remarked an army surgeon. “Fighting happens seldom, but fatigue, hunger, cold & heat are constantly varying his distress.”51 Young soldiers not only were burdened by the risks and sufferings of military service, but also by those with whom they shared army life. “We get nothing here but water, [and] live but poorly,” a Massachusetts soldier admitted to his brother— but equally weighty, “[we] have no society, only amongst ourselves, and no Diversions of any Kinde.”52 The odd demographic makeup of the Conti- nental camp—profoundly male and overall quite young—created a peculiar sort of community. No other environment in late-colonial America, save a college or ship, compressed together so many young men, and the army dwarfed these communities in scale.53 These unmarried youths in their teens and twenties found unprecedented opportunities for friendship, competition, and conflict across an unusually large peer group. Sepa- rated from civilian homes and communities by distance, conditions, and demographics, their life in the army required a different set of emotions— or at least different modes for displaying them.54 As a consequence, young soldiers crafted performances rooted in competition and display to obtain their comrades’ approval and regard, shaping the behaviors and relationships of camp. The army was a social space for young men. Soldiers tried to assuage boredom with ball playing and incessant gambling.55 An order in 1779 noted the typical socializing that followed this collection of youths, and scolded the “custom too prevalent among the Soldiers of going from one post to the other.”56 Orders issued to a garrison in upstate New York offer glimpses of the disorderly interactions among young soldiers. Enlisted men repeatedly conspired with guards to rob the fort’s stores at night. Sentries on watch invariably chose to stand together and chat with off- duty soldiers. Soldiers in their barracks proved so “Verry Troublesome in fighting and Making a Noise in the Night” that the colonel ordered sergeants stationed in every room as chaperones who would be held “ac- countable for their Conduct.” And after snowstorms, soldiers found themselves embroiled in snowball fights for the record books.57 Life for young men in the Continental Army meant displays of competition or transgres- sion that aimed to win approval from an audience of peers. It was a commonplace observation that army life changed young men, but these soldiers changed themselves to suit their new environment.

Manhood in the Continental Army 69 Daniel Barber was hardly alone in recalling how “military discipline and the habits of a soldier, Soon affected a degree of relaxation in most of us” in morals and manners.58 A newspaper piece, “To the Youth in the Army,” ostensibly written by “affectionate parents,” spoke to this civilian fear about what young men chose to do in camp. “Our hearts are made to bleed, and our ears to tingle, with the reports of your wickedness, cursing, swearing, gaming, and debauchery. What! cannot you make good soldiers, unless you first commence veterans in sin? Cannot your country be saved but by the loss of your souls?” Why couldn’t their soldier-sons simply “be of good courage, obedient to your officers, and kind and friendly to each other”?59 Facing an audience of their fellow youths and sharing anxieties about status, young soldiers and officers used each other to obtain the regard that would bolster their sense of themselves as worthy men—even if those behaviors violated the expectations and norms of their civilian homes. With swearing, for example, soldiers presented a rough and confident face to the world. It was a performance that marked them as true soldiers and was as useful in camp as it was before battle. Despite his Virginia Baptist convictions, when Daniel Trabue went for a soldier, he began to “frolick, courouse, and Dance and curse and swear.”60 One member of the Revolutionary generation recalled how his mother “reproved” a group of visiting soldiers who “had learned to swear horribly” in the service. They defended their behavior, explaining “they had learned it in the army, where they thought it was right to swear, to make the soldiers brave and mind their duty.” Returned home, however, these soldiers did acknowledge, “it would be as well to dispense with it, unless it was on some extraordinary occasion.”61 In camp, swearing made men soldiers. “Nothing comes more handy, or gives such power and force to their words, as a Blasphemous Oath,” lamented a surgeon.62 Because it violated propriety, smacked of disorder, and ran counter to ideals of virtue, commanders issued “many and pointed orders” against swearing, but to little effect.63 Nevertheless, young soldiers had to carefully adjust these performances to suit circumstances even within the military sphere. Lieutenant Park Holland recalled how at the end of a formal dinner with George Washington a young officer “who had long been in the habit of using profane language . . . forgot where he was, [and] swore an oath.” Washington silenced the room with a rap on the table, “sat down his untasted wine, aroase and said, ‘gentlemen, when I invited you here it was my intention to have invited gentlemen only. I am soory to add I have been mistaken.’ ” After the general abruptly left, “a dead silence reigned for some time, which was broken by the officer 70 Becoming Men of Some Consequence himself calling us all to witness, the oath he had uttered should be his last, adding he would rather have been shot through the heart than have deserved the reproof from Washington.”64 The young officer had poorly shaped his self-presentation; he tried to recover the regard of his fellow men by declaring his respect for Washington and pledging his honor to future self-control. Just as swearing meant more than mere words for young men, their drinking in the army aimed at far more than intoxication. Consumption of alcohol combined social, competitive, and self-assertive impulses.65 Admittedly, much drinking in the army bore the hallmarks of addiction. “Left to himself,” General Edward Hand explained to Washington, “the Soldier as soon as he received his pay flies to the Sutler and lais it out in grog . . . tho he may not at the time have a Shirt to his Back, or a Shoe or Stocking to his feet.”66 Alcohol gave the soldiers their main weapon against the cold, damp, boredom, and homesickness of camp life. Drink- ing also took on particular power in a social context. Sergeant Benjamin Gilbert recorded an active social scene in his Massachusetts regiment’s winter quarters near Albany. Of the twenty-eight entries he made in camp in January 1778, twenty made explicit mention of social activity, be it card playing, going to meetings of his lodge of Freemasons, or simply drinking to get drunk with fellow soldiers. An entry without social activity— “Came home and sat alone by the fire all day”—stood out starkly both for Gilbert the diarist and for his modern reader. His more-typical entries recorded social gatherings: [ January 24] “At Night I was at Capt Shays and almost all the officers of the Reg’t and kept it up very high.”67 Gilbert’s diary reveals far more about the comings, goings, and doings of a circle of male comrades than about his daily duties as a sergeant. His social world provided far more meaning, self-definition, and sheer enjoyment than clerical assignments such as “made muster Roles for Lieut Gardner” or “gathered the weekly Reports in.”68 Whether in quiet conversation or raucous drinking, Gilbert was a young man in a community of men. Gilbert’s war diary itself shows the performative aspect of social drinking—demonstrating vigor and bonhomie. One example, which can only be described as a week-long bender, appears to have been an extended celebration of the American victory at Stony Point on the banks of the Hudson River: August 1, 1779 At Night I went & Drank Grogg with Serjt. Cook at his tent. 2nd At night Serjt. Carlton & I went Serjt. Major Weston tent and Drank Grogg freely.

Manhood in the Continental Army 71 3rd At Night we had a caper up at Serjt. Cooks tent. From there to Serjt. Wheeler and then at ours. 4th At Night a number of the Serjt. in the Brigade tok a walk into the Coun- tery and had a Caper. We got back Just at Day. 5th At Night all the S Majors & Qr. M. Serjt. and number of other serjants walk out as far as Mr. Bassets. Had a heigh Caper a number of fine Girls to convers with. 6th We got back sun one [h]our high in the Morning. Stopt at the Comsy[sary]. and Drank a morning Dram and they all came to my tent and wound off with a Gentele Drink of Groog. 7th In the morning it rained. We had the orderly serjt. at our tent to take a [drink of ] sling. At Night we went to Capt. Cumminges tent and Drank Grogg. On the eighth day, Sunday, Gilbert went to a church meeting in the morning, after which he most appropriately rested.69 In this period, Gilbert noted no official duties in his diary (if, in fact, he was performing any) and only recorded his carousing. His entries developed a rhythm, suggesting a narrative purposefulness in recording the previous evening’s drinking, with each successive entry urging higher and higher “capers.” Gilbert’s amusement in recording these excesses is also striking. Heavy consumption of alcohol was a fact of life in Revolutionary America, but Gilbert’s alcoholic excesses go far beyond even the elevated standards of the 1770s.70 In the army, such excesses not only were acceptable but provided soldiers with crucial opportunities to seek the camaraderie and approval of their fellow soldiers.71 As suggested by the “fine girls” featured in Gilbert’s bender, the army camp was not solely a male space and women were central to young men’s performances of masculinity. Elite officers’ genteel wives sometimes -ac companied them to winter encampments, while the wives and children of some older enlisted men followed the army, and found employment cooking, washing, and nursing. Some of these women received recognition and rations from the Continental Army, though never full acceptance. Other women followed the army as sutlers, selling supplies and drink to soldiers. Still, in the military sphere, the ratios of men to women were heavily uneven—a distinct difference from demographically balanced civilian communities. The encampment at Valley Forge held roughly forty-four soldiers for each woman in the winter of 1777–78. By the end of the war, the Hudson River cantonment at New Windsor held twenty-six men for each woman.72 Present but rare, part of the power of femininity in the military 72 Becoming Men of Some Consequence sphere was its contrast with soldierly masculinity. In battle, for example, soldiers were to strike with manly resolve: “let the sword fall . . . drive every womanish weakness from your heart.”73 Similarly, military discipline inflicted signs of womanliness to humiliate unworthy men, with soldiers dressing malefactors in women’s clothing, painting their faces, or plaiting or curling their hair in a female style. In this way, four cowardly soldiers who hid themselves before a battle in South Carolina were flogged while “dress’d in Petticoats & Caps.”74 Contrasting a soldierly identity with womanliness produced odd performances. At the beginning of the war, with very few women living and working in the army, American soldiers were unprecedentedly dirty. Novice soldiers, perhaps uncertain what behaviors best showed them as manly warriors, refused the women’s work of washing their clothes. One observer was horrified that these soldiers apparently preferred to have their linen rot and disintegrate. Fortunately, the cleanliness of the camp improved after 1777 as more women followed the army and soldiers grew more professional and accustomed to their soldierly identities.75 The experience of Samuel Dewees points out the complicated emotional weight young soldiers felt about male and female roles and status in the military sphere. Having escaped into the army as a small, hungry, and homeless lad, Dewees was lucky to find a place as a colonel’s waiter at Valley Forge. This colonel, however, had created a peculiar military household in camp, bringing a young woman he called his niece to live with him—though as Dewees suggestively pointed out in his memoir, the colonel married the young lady after the war. Despite his physically easy situation, Dewees grew tired of “truckling at the heels of, and to the will and mandate of a woman.” Interestingly, domestic service itself did not irk him—he accepted another officer’s invitation to serve as a waiter to escape this scandalous little household. He objected to the inversion of power relations. It is telling that Dewees also vividly recalled a moment of sexualized spectacle that validated this proper patriarchal order in camp. In this instance, “a woman of ill-fame” was dragged onto the parade field before the gathered soldiers. Led by drummers beating “the W[hore’s] March,” the company proceeded to the river. There, a corporal “attempted to ‘duck’ her by plunging her head under water.” After much struggling, he succeeded, getting her under three times, and then let her go. “We gave her three cheers and three long rolls on the drum,” Dewees recalled, “and marched back without our fair Delilah, follower of Bapta goddess of Shame. . . . Such frolics as these were often made part of our duties, Manhood in the Continental Army 73 and which (being young as some of us were) we enjoyed very well.”76 For young men to enjoy the ritual shaming of sexualized women pointed to both their titillation and their aspiration to exercise their own control over women. Though subordinated themselves in a military hierarchy, these young soldiers could rest assured that their birthright—the overarching patriarchal order—remained intact.77 Women were key to young soldiers’ performances of masculinity for themselves and others. Unsurprisingly, young soldiers were always on the lookout for the fair sex—and soldiers and civilian women were often in contact within the military sphere. At the siege of Boston, for example, after collecting the orders of the day, Corporal Elihu Clark walked several miles with some fellow soldiers ostensibly to attend religious services, but also “to see some fine girls.”78 The novel military environment created opportunities for sightseeing: Ensign Henry Sewall on the first anniversary of the beginning of the war “Walk’d to Bunker Hill with a Number of Ladies.”79 These were particularly genteel means of flirting, but young soldiers also had more crass ways of grabbing the attention of local women. “The General does not mean to discourage the practice of bathing,” Washington sighed in his General Orders, “but he expressly forbids, any persons doing it, at or near the Bridge in Cambridge . . . [where] many Men, lost to all sense of decency and common modesty, are running about naked upon the Bridge, whilst . . . even Ladies of the first fashion in the neighbourhood, are passing over it, as if they meant to glory in their shame.”80 General Nathanael Greene responded to similar complaints on Long Island that soldiers were frequenting a mill pond “to swim In Open View of the Women and that they Come out of the Water and Run up Naked to the Houses with a Design to Insult and Wound the Modesty of female Decency.” What had happened to the “Modesty, Virtue and So- briety of the New England People for which they have been so Remark- able?” Greene complained. “Have the Troops Come Abroad for No Other Purpose than to Render themselves both Obnoxious and Ridiculous?”81 Streaking was a rowdy display, an inversion of civilian morality, and a devil-may-care display of sexuality before a lad’s messmates. The women were hardly the only audience, though their presence made the gag work. Soldiers pursued sexual relationships with women in and around camp for predictable reasons, but always with an element of performance for their comrades. Army camps saw lots of sex between men and women. Military regulation did not forbid liaisons, though commanders did punish outbreaks of venereal disease among soldiers and women who followed 74 Becoming Men of Some Consequence the army.82 As one lieutenant winked in his diary, the “young ladies here are very fond of the soldiers, but much more so of officers.”83 Army life, however, did not offer much in the way of privacy. “I assure you,” bragged a surgeon to a friend about the sexual availability of local women, “tho’ our room is not 12 feet square we had no less than three females here last night and expect more this [evening].”84 Benjamin Gilbert also recorded a series of encounters among his messmates in the spring of 1778 that suggest how men and women came together in and around camp. “In the fore noon,” Gilbert noted, “the Srgt went down the hill and plaid Ball. At Nigt Marcy was at our tent and lay all Nigt with Serjt. Phipps and went home at Gun firing in the Morning.” Despite erasures in the diary, it is clear the events of the following night were similar: “Serjt. Phipps [erasure] and at evening Do’d. [dittoed] allong with [Marcy]. The next week, Gilbert recorded, “Bragg Brought Marcy into Camp at Night.” The following day, Gilbert recorded, “Clear and warm. At Ngt. Marcy was here.” By the end of May, another name entered Gilbert’s book: Polly Robinson—though he noted soon after, “Bragg and marcy and Pol Robinson got under Guard and weir Tryed by a coart Martiall.” By June, Gilbert could report, “In the Morning Polly Robinson [and] Nel Tidrey was Drumed out of the Regt.”85 Gilbert’s diaries reveal numerous social interactions with young women in and around camp: they gathered to drink tea or grog and met for dancing or sex. The patterns of names and activities suggest a diverse set of relationships, with some sexual and some social. Most important, however, all these interactions unfolded under the view and attention of other young soldiers.86 Young Continental officers paid close attention to each other’s sexual performances in their correspondence with one another: they purposefully made women objects of sexual and romantic display, demonstrating their masculinity for an audience of their fellow young men.87 “You ask about girls,” replied an officer at Ticonderoga to a friend, “Alas we have none, I scarcely know what a girl is.” But he had heard that his friend’s branch of the army was beset with women. “I have too great an opinion of your courage and zeal, not to suppose you was warmly engaged,” he joked. “Hope you come off without a wound.” What better way to banter about liaisons in camp than with martial double entendre, comparing the risks of battle with the risks of disease or—perhaps more romantically—broken hearts?88 Officers bragged to each other of their conquests. A double standard about sexual behavior marked their perception of the boundaries of the military sphere. A surgeon explained his plan to hire a room with a Manhood in the Continental Army 75 local family on the grounds that one of their daughters was a “Delicious fine Girl” whom he had heard had been “debauched” a few months before.89 Another officer jokingly wrote about the pleasant and convenient company of a young lady lodged only one hundred yards away from him in camp.90 Soldiers also used politics to mark their appropriate targets: a surgeon bragged how his army colleagues “seem very fond of Bundling and the Tory Girls seem to have no objection to that kind of Amusement.”91 The rules were different for women they decided were within the military sphere. The expectations soldiers held about their power over women crackle in these letters, and race proved a multiplier in the equation. Dr. Robert Wharry on the southern campaign in 1781 wrote to a fellow officer that he had encountered “plenty of Ladies, both fair, black, and brown; (but, by the bye) few fair ones.” Continuing in this vein of sexual and racial exoti- cism, he further noted that some of the army “Lads” had made “extensive acquaintances.” As for himself, he demurred, it was “not . . . in my power to pay my devoirs [compliments] to the nice widows or their bands of Eithopians.”92 Benjamin Gilbert, on the same expedition, similarly reported how “The Ladies are exceeding Amouris but not So Beautifull as at the Northward, tho there is some rare Beauties amongst them.” He was pleased to tell his friend Lieutenant Park Holland that “Amouris Intrigues and Gallantry are every where approved of in this State, and amongst the Vulgar any man that is given to concupcience may have his fill.” Simply put: “The Ladies are exceeding fond of the Northern Gentlemen, Es- specially those of the Army.”93 When writing about women, young officers always painted themselves as popular and virile sexual subjects. These Yankee officers’ emphasis on race and region were no mistake—they were differentiating between their sexual conquests and ladies worthy of proper courtship. Sexual performances were inextricable from assertions of power. In their disordered behavior—their swearing, drinking, and interactions with women in and near camp—young soldiers performed for an audience of their peers. This was one reason why their behaviors either went beyond or contrasted so strongly with the norms or ideals of their civilian homes. At home, a young man’s control over his external deportment marked his progress toward an idealized adult manhood. Of course youths would go a bit wild, give their guardians and elders cause for concern, and tweak their community’s expectations. But in small and intensely local communities, there would be heavy costs for persistently failing to meet expectations. Who would trust an unserious, uncontrolled youth? Failure 76 Becoming Men of Some Consequence to gain their elders’ regard would foreclose opportunities for better work, increased responsibility, or the serious relationships which were all necessary to advance in life. The army, however, provided youths with a new stage out of the direct view of their old masters. Only their male peers— and the occasional senior officer—composed the audience to judge their performances of masculine and soldierly identities.94

Officers and Enlisted, Identity and Ideology

Poor Lieutenant Doughterty—court-martialed and cashiered for “Unof- ficer and Ungentleman like behavior, in associating and playing Ball with the Serjeants.” To reassert his status as an officer and a gentleman Dough- terty challenged a fellow officer to a duel—likely after being mocked for fraternizing with enlisted men. All that got him was a second charge at his court-martial.95 Power in the world of the army flowed according to an increasingly rigid hierarchy and strict military discipline, dividing young men according to rank. In a Revolutionary cause built on mutual association and unity of purpose, the ironic outcome in the military sphere was mutual disdain and mistrust between officers and enlisted men. Separated by class, young men created parallel performances of their military identities. Officers performed for officers, enlisted men for their fellows in the rank and file. Young officers felt great anxiety about their position and privilege, proving touchy and quick to duel. Even as military discipline inflicted humiliation, pain, and terror, enlisted men tried to maximize their dignity and solidarity. The operation of power in the military sphere also shaped how young men incorporated the ideology of the Revolutionary cause into their identities and performances. Continental officers should have felt great confidence—they were the vanguard of a daring movement that, as Thomas Paine assured them in Common Sense, could “begin the world over again.”96 Instead, personal anxiety weighed on the junior officers—mostly younger men—who were caught in the middle of the army hierarchy. Enlisted soldiers resisted their authority, while senior officers mostly held themselves aloof to demonstrate their own superiority. Contemporaries observed their insecurity, and officers envied the unquestioned authority of their aristocratic European counterparts.97 They looked jealously at each other as well, convinced that status in the army was a zero-sum competition. Alexander Hamilton’s ambition and identity were so thoroughly tied up with his military role that seeing others achieve rank and promotion without merit, as he explained, Manhood in the Continental Army 77 “in some degree make me contemptible in my own eyes.”98 With the civilian sphere inaccessible, to counter these insecurities young officers had to seek each other’s respect and regard. Desiring rules for disordered and unpredictable relationships, young officers energetically threw themselves into the paired gentlemanly cul- tures of sensibility and honor. Both were based in display and rested on the opinion of others. Freemasonry offered an ideal outlet and example for both. Rooted in emotion and relationship, masonry promised to order social interactions and balanced officers’ contradictory impulses toward exclusivity and egalitarianism. Lodges brought officers of different ages and ranks together, but they smoothed out the difference of social station by creating a parallel and invented hierarchy of masonic degrees. Masonry promised young men rewards of camaraderie and recognition, as well as order and advancement. Samuel Sewall, a young Massachusetts officer, captured these themes in his record of a masonic gathering: the “fraternity” convened, “marched in regular procession according to their different degrees in Masonry, to an elegant dinner prepar’d for that purpose, where Br. Porter delivered an Oration suitable to the occasion—After the repast they retired in the same order.” Sewall’s diary account broadcast what he valued: friendship, recognition, and order. He accordingly closed his report of masonic harmony with a verse from Psalms: “Behold, how good & how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.”99 Masonry was a manifestation of sensibility—a shared worldview that bound gentlemen together, ordering their feelings and performances. An officer conversant with the ideals of sensibility, as one historian explained, “looked for things to feel: friendship with other gentlemen, love for a woman, compassion for the unfortunate, ardor for his country, nobility in self-sacrifice.”100 Ma- sonry gave them an ordered way of expressing friendship and fellowship; sensibility provided them with an emotional language to show each other their quality. Even as young officers embraced relationships that sought to overcome the competition and division in their ranks, their basic anxiety about their peers’ opinion also led to an explosion of dueling. Young officers were quick to take offense and sought recourse in duels because their positions were so tenuous.101 Their commissions declared an advanced but delicate status that white men could find uncomfortably fluid. Lieutenant Overton, of a Maryland regiment, for example, “supposing his character to have been injured by a representation made by lt. Peyton of the same Reg’t called upon him for a retraction.” Peyton refused and Overton “told him 78 Becoming Men of Some Consequence at all events he must have restitution.” They agreed to meet with pistols. Overton received a ball in the thigh, but Peyton was shot through the body “& died the same day lamenting his end to be in such a manner in a private dispute & not in the cause of his Country—in which case he should have left the world in ease.” He was only twenty years old. Peyton’s civilian status was in part the source of his downfall. He was the son of a “Fam- ily of Fortune in Virginia,” but had joined the army against his father’s wishes. The winter before, he had written to his father to request money and “had in answer that when he should do his duty as a son—he should find him ready to help him as a Father.”102 In his mind, the unfortunate Peyton only had his honor as a gentlemen and rank as an officer. It had to be demonstrated: he could not retract his insult and he had to duel. The public nature of dueling—and this record of Peyton’s personal history in another officer’s diary—shows that these young gentlemen were right to think they were on display. Gossip about their character constantly swirled around them. How they handled it either earned them renewed respect from peers or their sudden disdain. By subsuming their status anxiety into honor culture, young officers found their touchiness not only forgiven, but praised in the military sphere—even though dueling was forbidden by army regulations. A fellow officer observed how Captain Trumbull “really behaves well in his Military Capacity & supports the Character of a Soldier well.” As evidence, he wrote of an instance where an officer happened to speak a bit dismissively to Trumbull, and not liking the tone, “Capt Trumbull immediately clapt his hand upon his sword & demanded an Explanation.” This touchiness about honor—not his effectiveness in the art of war—gave Trumbull the “Character of a Soldier.”103 Small slights or mistaken meanings could pro- voke duels. Lieutenant Francis Brooke remembered eating watermelons with Lieutenant Whitaker on campaign in South Carolina, “when I said something that he so flatly contradicted, that I supposed he intended to say I lied; on which I broke a half of a melon on his head.” Whitaker realized his friend’s honor was at stake and quickly salvaged the situation. “Brooke,” he asked, “you did not think I meant to tell you you lied?” Since his comrade had not given him the lie—an unforgivable provocation— Brooke could apologize for the melon. Fortunately for all, it ended there. The melon-besmeared Whitaker had already wounded a Pennsylvania captain in a duel.104 There were regional differences in honor culture: New Englanders generally looked down on the southern propensity for dueling. But even Manhood in the Continental Army 79 the young officers of the army who disdained dueling as foolish and sin- ful took up the language of honor, particularly since these sons of New England rarely matched the wealth or affectations of gentility of their brother officers from the plantation states. Samuel Benjamin of Connecti- cut carefully copied down in his diary a speech rejecting a challenge to duel that nevertheless declared his position as a gentleman fully possessed of a sense of honor: “Sir, your behavior last night has convinced me that you are a scoundrel and your letter this morning that you are a fool.” By accepting the morning’s challenge to duel, Benjamin would only degrade himself. “I owe a duty to god and my Cuntry which I deem it infamous to Violate; & I am intrusted with a life which I think cannot without folly be staked Against yours.” Benjamin cared not whether the rogue persisted with womanish whispers behind his back—but he was still a gentleman: “Remember that to prevent Assassination I have a Sword & To Chastice insolence[,] a Cane.” Though he would not stoop to duel, he would defend himself if attacked. Most important, if insulted to his face he would cane the knave—the form of violence that shamed its victim.105 Only by deploying the language of honor could an officer maintain his position in the eyes of his army peers. Their life in the army demanded constant display of status from young officers. “This dueling is a most cruel & horrid Practice,” sighed a New England officer in his diary, “and ’tis a pity that ’tis sometimes absolutely necessary.”106 Officers constructed military and manly identities in view of each other, but also used the men under their command as props: the most important division within the military sphere was between officers and the enlisted men they led. The Enlightenment ideal for military leadership encouraged emotional connection between officers and soldiers, albeit tempered by status and deference. Baron von Steuben, in rewriting the Continental Army’s drill manual, insisted that a captain’s “first object should be, to gain the love of his men, by treating them with every possible kindness and humanity.” He should “know every man of his company by name and character.”107 Continental officers loved to view themselves in this flattering light. “They look up to me as a common Father,” wrote Captain Alexan- der Scammell to his fiancée. Though his men were “undisciplin’d,” he was certain the cause was sickness, “severe Duty,” and poor shelter. “However I shall endeavor to do all that I can for them, and if possible make them pay me ready and implicit Obedience, through Love and Affection, rather than through Fear and Dread.”108 For men like Scammell it was the stance that mattered—particularly as he posed as the kind patriarch for his future 80 Becoming Men of Some Consequence wife. Perhaps some officers succeeded in inspiring obedience through -re spect. Most did not. Despite all the talk of love in the rhetoric that guided Continental officers, military discipline was harsh, violent, humiliating, and capricious. Displays of punishment proclaimed an officer’s power and purposefully stripped soldiers of agency. A French officer familiar with the violent discipline in European armies found the Continental officers “exceedingly severe.” He particularly noted how “the power of the officers over the soldiers is almost unlimited, lashing them with whips and beating them with canes for the slightest faults.”109 The spectacle of military discipline could be shocking even to those familiar with it. In one instance, a drum major found himself court-martialed for “beating & abusing” a soldier. But it was all a misunderstanding: the non-commissioned officer was actually he “in the Execution of his Office.”110 The tyranny of military discipline was made perfectly clear in one soldier’s diary: “We found that one of the men that was flogg’d Yesterday was not Sentenced by the Court Martial but Receiv’d his Punishment through Mistake.”111 Certainly, the victim of this injustice had protested the mistake as they brought down the lash, but to no effect. After witnessing the brutality of martinets and a string of shock- ingly unjust executions, young Samuel Dewees and his fellow soldiers found themselves “afraid to say or to do any thing, for so trivial appeared the offences of these men . . . [and] they knew not what in the future was to be made to constitute a crime.” Dewee recollected, “For some considerable time after this, if I found myself meeting an officer when out of camp, I would avoid coming in contact with him if I possibly could . . . by slip- ping a short distance to one side.” Observing the capriciousness of military discipline and justice left this young soldier with only fear and mistrust for officers as a class.112 One reason for officers’ brutality was that their youth and inexperience brought them little respect. Young officers had difficulty getting recognition even as recruiters. “As all the Officers were Young Men in the Vigor of Youth,” one officer apologized, “the People of the Country were in general oppos’d to them & tho,’ I believe, they universally were as diligent & attentive to the recruiting Service . . . their Success was not equal to that of some other officers of less Merit.”113 Francis Brooke, a lieutenant in the Virginia Artillery, addressed this dilemma directly: “It may seem strange that so young as I was, not seventeen years old, that I should have the command I had.” At least Brooke had his family’s prominent status on his side, even if he lacked the authority of age. “Let to command the Manhood in the Continental Army 81 company,” Brooke recalled, “I felt it a very arduous task, but I had been long enough in service to know that its discipline must be preserved, or I could not command it.” After the first day’s march, therefore, Brooke forbade his troops to go into town. Two soldiers disobeyed, were caught, and given “fifty lashes with the cat-of-nine-tails, at the Gun.” Brooke was certain that “This prompt punishment for disobedience to orders gave me full command of the company, young as I was.” The back and forth of military discipline was not over, however. That night, the two flogged soldiers deserted. Strikingly, one reenlisted with a different officer. But no matter. Brooke liked to think he had his company well in hand.114 To push back against their officers’ brutal discipline, soldiers displayed manly fortitude. A French officer who happened upon a flogging was “astonished” that two of the men “never uttered the least groan or complaint, or showed any signs of fear. Is this courage, or is the natural sensibility of mankind less acute among [this] people . . . ?”115 It was defiance. Soldiers similarly resisted participating in punishment if they questioned its justice. At the execution of two deserters a soldier remembered how the officers ordered an old soldier to serve as hangman. He “positively refused . . . and said he would die rather than accept it.” For his disobedience, he was tied at the foot of the gallows and flogged. He bore one hundred lashes without a murmur. The next man picked out of the ranks “after some hesitation” complied. As he tied the rope, a reprieve for the condemned arrived “to the joy of all the spectators.” After the soldiers were dismissed, “the intended hangman was knocked and kicked about like a dog,” while the old man “was applauded by every soldier in the garrison, and treated with all imaginable respect for his manly conduct.”116 In the face of harsh or humiliating discipline, soldiers embraced in camp the solidarity and unity that made them formidable in the line of battle. It was ironic that power and hierarchy cut such a deep divide across a republican cause based on association and unity, and which demanded dedication and sacrifice from every level of society. Still, the ideology of the Revolutionary movement proved a crucial bond that held the army together and gave young men context for their service. Continentals repeatedly heard how “the fate of millions, of a whole Continent of people, depends on the events of the present unhappy dispute.”117 Certainly, some were moved by these heroic speeches that valorized them as the central actors in a great campaign for liberty. Hezekiah Hayden wrote his parents in Connecticut at the start of the 1776 New York campaign: “Honor’d

82 Becoming Men of Some Consequence Father & Mother, The time is now near at hand which must probably Determine whether Americans are to be free men or Slaves.” Citing the struggle between liberty and tyranny, Hayden accepted that “the Eyes of all our Countrymen are upon us we shall have their Blessings & praises If hapily we are the means of saving them.” Hayden detailed the noble stakes for which they fought, and how the American soldiers must “shew the Whole World that free men contending for Liberty on their own Ground is superiour to any Slavish Mercenary on Earth.” He insisted, “We have therefore to resolve to Conquer or Die.” Word for word, Hayden’s letter to his parents came from George Washington’s General Order of July 2, 1776. This young soldier appropriated Washington’s text and silently presented it as his own in order to explain to his parents his feelings about the war and his own place in it. The Revolutionary ideology within Washington’s order so clearly spoke to Hayden that he let it speak for him. Captured a month later on Long Island, he died a British prisoner. It is unknown whether patriotic fervor provided comfort or abandoned him to despair.118 For young men, the experience of soldiering drew together Revolutionary ideology, their efforts to form and articulate identity, and the creation of a new community. The army certainly served as a school for the ideology and politics of the Revolutionary movement. John Adlum of Pennsylvania spoke at length about politics with his fellow soldiers. One of his elders, the “very intelligent Yankee” who had advised him on the nature of fortifications and fear in battle, also discoursed on politics for “two or three hours” one day in the summer of 1776. The Yankee soldier spoke about “the nature of our independence and the policy of it having been declared when it was; that until we declared ourselves independent the European powers, however they might be inclined to assist us, could not openly support us.”119 Thus was young Adlum schooled in the strategy and politics of their rebellion. Even the most mundane orders—commands that soldiers not break down farmers’ fences for firewood—sounded the language of the cause: “it is true we are Fighting for Liberty but it is with a View to the free Enjoyment of our Property . . . we are called to the Field not only to Oppose the Enemy but to give protection to the Persons and Property of the Inhabitants. . . .”120 Most importantly, while each Continental stood in a regiment tied to a particular state, these young men experienced the Continental Confederation in a far more tangible and personal way than their civilian kin. Indeed, as the war continued, the army itself became the

Manhood in the Continental Army 83 clearest manifestation of the life of the cause, and officers never ceased telling themselves and their soldiers that they embodied the true spirit of the Revolution.121 When the Continental Army instructed young soldiers in the politics of the struggle, it also connected their manly aspirations with their country’s demands. When Washington ordered the Declaration of Indepen- dence read aloud to his army, he was certain the document would “serve as a free incentive to every officer, and soldier, to act with Fidelity and Cour- age . . . knowing that the peace and safety of his Country depends (under God) solely on the success of our arms.” Washington also made explicit the connection between the Declaration and his soldiers’ ambitions for personal independence and progress through life: he assured every soldier he was “now in the service of a State, possessed of sufficient power to reward his merit, and advance him to the highest Honors of a free Country.”122 The pursuit of happiness for young men of the army meant a successful return to their domestic aspirations—“to sit under one’s own vine and fig tree with no one to make him afraid.”123 Military service also provided political lessons about the Revolution that were more concrete than words. When Hugh McDonald was marching through Richmond with his North Carolina regiment on the way to join Washington’s army, a shoemaker came to his door and shouted “Hur- rah for King George.” The Continentals let him be, but he followed them out of town, “hurrahing for King George” all the while. This was too much for the general, who ordered the shoemaker tied and ducked in the river. “We brought a long rope,” McDonald recalled decades later, “which we tied . . . round his middle, and sesawed him backwards and forwards until we had him nearly drowned, but every time he got his head above water he would cry for King George.” The general then had the shoemaker tarred and feathered. Despite this torture and the beseeching of his wife and daughters, his defiance continued. The general ordered him drummed out of town “and told him expressly that if he plagued him any more in that way he would have him shot. So we saw no more of the shoemaker.”124 For McDonald—the son of a loyalist father—participating in this torture both made clear the patriots’ power and his own complicity in that political order. Though statements of ideological fervor abound in soldiers’ writings in the early years of the war—and in officers’ writings across the entire period—as the war continued, the actions of enlisted men also reveal a combination of soldierly identity and dedication to the Revolutionary 84 Becoming Men of Some Consequence cause. Looking back at the 1777 campaign, a colonel marveled at “our poor brave fellows . . . bare footed, bare-legged, bare-breeched,” who fought on short rations and irregular pay. “Under all those disadvantages no men ever show more spirit or prudence than ours. In my opinion nothing but Virtue has kept our Army together through this campaign. There has been that great Principle, the Love of our Country, which first called us into the field, and that only to influence us.”125 At Valley Forge, Baron Steuben told Washington that no European army would have held together under those trying conditions, while Lafayette similarly praised “the patient en- durance of both soldiers and officers” as “a miracle which every moment served to renew.”126 In May 1780, with rations short up in the Hudson Highlands, a young officer wrote in his diary, “Our troops seem to posses more virtue, if possible, than the children of Israel—though in a strange land, & destitute of bread—they do not murmur!”127 Another young officer, writing to his father from New Jersey in 1780, “Whist I pittyed the poor fellows for the neglect with which they were treated, my admiration was drawn forth at the view of the patience with which they bore it. Not a single complaint have I heard made by a Soldier. . . . Every one seems willing to wait for a compensation till his country can grant it to him without injuring herself—which happy time we expect is near at hand.”128 After Yorktown in 1781, a captured Hessian officer asked himself, “With what soldiers in the world could one do what was done by these men, who go about nearly naked and in the greatest privation?” The best-disciplined European soldiers would have deserted their general under such conditions. Like his American counterparts, he credited the power of ideology: “But from this one can perceive what an enthusiasm—which the poor fellows call ‘Liberty’—can do!”129 Revolutionaries credited the strength of their ideals, but certainly the youth of soldiers made them particularly susceptible to the grandiose and messianic mission laid before them.130 These officers were wrong that their men did not grumble—but they were correct that soldiers embraced the cause and took pride in their soldierly contribution. Their resolve appears in their actions. Desertion statistics are suggestive: the longer a soldier remained in the ranks, the less likely he was to desert. Indeed, soldiers were most likely to abandon the army in the first three months of their enlistment and when still near home.131 Time spent in the army enduring hardship with comrades, forming the bonds of group cohesion, and hearing the rhetoric of the cause served to hold men in the ranks. It is particularly telling that after Benedict Arnold’s defection in 1780—in the midst of critical supply Manhood in the Continental Army 85 and pay problems—desertions briefly abated.132 In the wake of Arnold’s treasonous betrayal of the Revolution and its army, even the dissatisfied found they could hold on a bit longer. Though veteran soldiers became less likely to desert as time passed, their propensity to mutiny increased.133 In these collective protests against conditions, enlisted soldiers asserted their military identity to defy their officers. Soldiers at a Pennsylvania barracks protested their monotonous and unhealthful rations of herring and hard biscuit by affixing the fish to poles and marching them around the parade field to the beat of the rogues march. After this “fish drill,” as one soldier recalled it, they laid their piscine pikes on the parade for “an official inspection” by their annoyed officers, and then “quietly and orderly” returned to quarters.134 With conditions poor and their pay late and depreciated, in May 1780 Connecticut troops similarly mounted a protest on their parade field, refusing orders and talking back to their officers. One junior officer snapped at a grumbling soldier that he was a “mutinous rascal.” Enraged, that soldier shouted, “Who will parade with me?” The men of the regiment, without their officers, then performed their drill and maneuvers like the professionals they had become.135 The largest mutinies of the war— the separate risings of the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Continentals in January 1781—marked the ultimate performances of manly solidarity and soldierly identity. The Pennsylvania mutineers marched on Philadelphia in good order, demanding their government honor their enlistment agreements, while refusing to betray the cause or go to the British.136 Though divided from each other, soldiers and officers felt pride in their accomplishments and their contribution to the cause: “We Strut like Turkey cocks in all their vernal pride, notwithstanding that we are naked and Moneyless destitute of Women and Wine.”137 But why not strut? Esprit de corps rose with their growing confidence in their military abilities. After the Battle of Monmouth, a young New Jersey captain crowed in his diary that they had faced “the flower of the British army” and defeated “the proud King’s Guards & haughty British-Grenadiers, & gained Immortal-honor.”138 Such pride became part of their sense of self. When officers described James McCalister, a deserter from the Fifth Pennsylva- nia Regiment, they specifically noted that “when in liquor [he] boast[s] much of Burgoyne’s capture.”139 Though it was not enough to hold him in the ranks indefinitely, McCalister entangled his pride in himself with his contribution to that signal victory at Saratoga. In vino veritas. Promises of money or the force of coercion might pull young soldiers into the ranks, but they could not keep them there.140 That persistence had to grow from 86 Becoming Men of Some Consequence their own understanding of the cause and their relationships with their comrades. * * * Out at Fort Pitt, Lieutenant Ward had stood his ground as an officer and a gentleman, refusing to mock his civilian father’s associates. Like the other young men of the army, he knew his peers were judging his quality as a man and soldier. His best assertions of manly independence had only earned him his colonel’s disdain and a court-martial. That legal stage, however, gave the young officer another chance to sway an audience of his fellow officers and earn their regard. His testimony proved a masterful performance of his self-conception as an officer, a gentleman of spirit, and a true believer in the Revolutionary cause. The question, he insisted, was “whether a commissioned officer, bearing a commission from Congress and carrying arms in defense of liberty and the rights of mankind, has the privilege to think or not.” His colonel had declared a group of civilians who opposed him to be “Rascals, villains, [and] damned scoundrels.” Ward’s father was among that group and he would not slander him. “I have an affectionate father, gentlemen,” Ward insisted, “that merits no such appellation. He is a citizen and has associated with his fellow citizens, to obtain a redress of grievances . . . Many of the associators, as they are called, are gentlemen and all I believe good citizens and honest men.” To hear his father called a scoundrel and not respond with indignation, Ward continued, “would have argued that I was destitute of filial affection and that I had neither the feelings of a son nor the spirit of a man.” He followed this assertion of masculine worth with the example of George Washington, “our Illustrious Commander-in-Chief,” who daily set the example of showing respect and justice “even to the peasant.” Like Washington, Ward sought to obey Congress, which forbade “any disrespectful and indecent behavior . . . to the civil authority in any state in the union.” Ward knew both his duty and the obligations imposed by their republican cause. The keystone of his argument, however, was an appeal to his brother-officers who sat in judgment: “My honour, my character and my reputation, gentlemen, are now in your possession. To a soldier they are precious gems, and to you I cheerfully intrust them convinced . . . that as gentlemen and men of honour, you will act the part of faithful guardians by restoring that to me in its pristine state and luster.” Ward knew his audience; they returned a verdict of not guilty. Though his colonel rejected his demand for respect on a frontier street, his fellow officers accepted and affirmed141 it. Young men had to live together in the army, forming new relationships Manhood in the Continental Army 87 in an overwhelmingly male environment. With each other as the predom- inant audience, the young soldiers and officers of the army performed their acts of self-creation and sought the acceptance and regard that was a key component of masculine identity. Strikingly, the resulting behaviors fell far outside the norms of their civilian homes. This, however, worked for the time being. Presently unable to stake a claim to respectable manhood in the civilian sphere through economic independence or a household of their own, young soldiers found alternate masculine performances that satisfied themselves and their new peers. Excessive swearing and drinking, pursuit of illicit relationships with women, or dueling ran counter to an ideal of civilian manhood rooted in self-control. If these behaviors would not have obtained them regard in the civilian sphere, they nevertheless worked in the army. A shared military identity was one result of all these performances in pursuit of fraternal regard: primary group cohesion, battlefield effectiveness, and esprit de corps all held gendered and ideological components. As soldiers these young men were certain—indeed, were repeatedly told—that their sufferings and sacrifices in the defense of liberty made them paragons of virtue. In their eyes, this inoculated them from charges that their uncontrolled behaviors were unmanly: luxurious, effeminate, or wicked bachelor excess. As soldiers, they were virtuous, deserved respect and regard, and sought it from each other in ways that suited their needs and the opportunities in camp. The experience of the war cut deep divides between officers and -en listed men, but within their parallel communities their relationships and solidarity held the army together. Sergeant John Hawkins proudly wrote in his journal about his homecoming to West Point in 1781—“I was almost torn to Pieces for Joy by the Men of the Reg’t who was much pleased at my return.”142 These relationships proved central to the long-serving soldiers and officers of the Continental Army. As Joseph Plumb Martin later wrote in his memoir, “We were young men with warm hearts”—“We had lived together as a family of brothers . . . [and] had shared with each other the hardships, dangers, and sufferings incident to a soldier’s life; had sympathized with each other in trouble and sickness; had assisted in bearing each other’s burdens or strove to make them lighter by council or advice.”143 Life in the army meant separation from familiar civilian homes, exposure to unimaginable horrors of death from disease and battle, and persistent discomfort from hunger, cold, and neglect. It might seem a little thing for young men to be concerned for their honor, to seek the regard of their peers, or to behave in ways that made them feel manly pride—all 88 Becoming Men of Some Consequence while a weighty contest and uncontrollable forces boiled about them. But perhaps that assertion of a manly, soldierly identity—those performances set before their peers—increased their sense of control over the direction of their lives in the army. The new relationships and behaviors of army life helped make military service bearable for those who chose to undertake it or who could not escape it. By anchoring their sense of themselves as men worthy of regard, those youths with warm hearts could hold onto each other in the midst of terror, want, and division.

Manhood in the Continental Army 89 “Feared by Many, 3 Loved by None” relationships between soldiers and civilians

“Some Time ago,” the joke began innocently enough, “Soldiers marching thro’ Connecticutt stop’s at a House.” A young child had died a little before and “was laid out & wrapt up in a white Cloth & lay upon a Table.” The soldiers—certainly Continentals, for there were no others on those Connecticut roads—seized the sad bundle, “supposing it to be a Pig,” and ran. Only when they stopped and “took out their supposed Pig to cook it” did they realize their mistake. Horrified, they “carry’d it back & met the Child’s Relations who suspected that they had took it [and] were a coming for it.” This joke sharply revealed how far Continental soldiers had sunk in the estimation of their countrymen: it seemed soldiers of the Revolution had become ghouls as like to eat the dead as steal from the living. They were outsiders and the source of conflict. Had they been proper neighbors, they would have known the family and heard of their loss. Similarly, though the soldiers in the tale did try to set things right by heading back, another scene of confrontation was inevitable when they met the family on the road. This dark joke denied soldiers had a construc- tive place in the community.1 Though defense of American liberties required collective and organized military resistance, many in the diverse and insular communities of Revolutionary America were ill-disposed to men of war, particularly those in societies that included the descendants of Africans enslaved through warfare, Quaker pacifists, Germans emigrants who fled endemic war, and a political elite steeped in British suspicion of standing armies. The course of the war moved Revolutionary soldiers across regions and through communities of varying political allegiance. Even if they espoused the same cause, young soldiers were strangers to the inhabitants, and the dangers of war presented novel challenges. Soldiers’ and civilians’ perceptions of each other’s behavior further widened the divide between them. The pinch of hunger in a land of perceived plenty alienated young soldiers from civilians, while the populace disapproved of soldiers’ raucous behavior and rightly feared their potential for violence and unending theft. Stark division and rising tension do not tell the entire story of young soldiers’ relationships with civilians, however. While the war and soldiers’ behavior worsened Americans’ long-standing and deep discomfort with professional soldiers, civilian communities remained the ultimate arbiters of young soldiers’ progress in life—their coming of age and attaining a respectable independence. Soldiers of the Revolution might overcome that suspicion if they could appear in civilian eyes as familiar youths worthy of care, trust, and affection. By recognizing soldiers as young men, civilian families and communities could reincorporate these youths and help them back onto the expected path of their life course. Across the war, American soldiers and civilians wrangled with relationships warped by fear, soldiers’ depredations, and mutual anger. However, positive interactions and long- term relationships were also possible, so long as young Continentals put aside the soldier and presented themselves as young men ready to rejoin the normal patterns of the community and the life course through mutual obligation, productive work, and courtship.

Fearing Soldiers

In Joseph Plumb Martin’s memory the scene unfolded like something out of a myth or fairy tale. It was a summer day in 1780 in the Hudson Highlands. Walking alone, he followed the road around a corner and saw a young woman about forty yards off who in the heat of the day had “di- vested herself of some of her outside garments.” She quickly slipped on her clothes and continued toward him, at first “seemingly quite unconcerned.” But she soon changed her mind—clearly concluding that “it would not be quite safe to encounter a solider in such a place”—and ran off through the underbrush. Though Martin called after her, she only ran faster. “She seemed,” he thought, “in a violent panic.”2 During the war, inhabitants had to make split-second calculations about soldiers’ intent, their possible behavior, and even with which army they marched. These uncertainties mixed with long-held negative assumptions about soldiers. The result was warranted fear. Soldiers in wartime carried unpredictable destruction with them. The village of Charlestown, Massachusetts, became collateral damage in the Relationships between Soldiers and Civilians 91 Battle of Bunker Hill: civilian onlookers perched on Boston rooftops and the hills surrounding the harbor saw “one great blaze. . . . The lofty steeple of the meeting house formed a pyramid of fire above the rest.”3 Also in that first summer of the war, the Virginia port town of Norfolk went up in flames after a battle between patriots and British troops. New York City mysteriously burned following the British occupation in 1776.4 Con- tinentals destroyed Iroquois towns and crops in a 1779 expedition. Down in the Carolinas, patriots and loyalists “persecute[d] each other with little less than savage fury.” In their partisan war, reported General Nathanael Greene, “there is nothing but murders and devastations in every quarter.”5 Insidious disease followed in the wake of unsanitary camps and marching soldiers, spreading fear, debility, and death among communities.6 The longer the clouds of war lingered over an area, the worse the damage grew. In the so-called Neutral Ground north of occupied New York, Timothy Dwight of Yale College saw the ravages wrought by armies and militias. The inhabitants, he wrote, “feared everybody whom they saw, and loved nobody. . . . [A]ll thought beyond what was merely instinctive had fled their minds forever.” Damaged houses and broken furniture “injured both by violence and decay” went unrepaired because people lacked the means and feared “the repetition of the same injuries.” Their cattle were gone, their fences burned or thrown down, and their fields overgrown with weeds. “Where I had heretofore seen a continued succession of horses and carriages and life and bustle” on the main road between Boston and New York, wrote Dwight, “not a single solitary traveler was visible from week to week, or from month to month. The world was motionless and silent.”7 To fear the hard hand of war meant fearing soldiers, no matter the color of their banners. Americans’ long-held anxieties about soldiers, both friend and foe, mingled with these hard-learned lessons of war. Yearly sermons marking Massachusetts’s artillery elections were an honored colonial institution, and clergy used these occasions to speak at length about the causes of war and the duties of the Christian soldier. Yet even martial Massachusetts felt trepidation about its own soldiers. Instructing soldiers how to behave, ministers told them to protect lives, liberties, and property, but also warned them against rape, brutality, oppression, or using their power to avenge private wrongs. One minister preaching in the French and Indian War bluntly told soldiers that “the mighty man, whose mind is cruel and savage . . . tho he should be successful in war . . . is still an object upon which every man of humanity and religion thinks with horror; He is feared by 92 Becoming Men of Some Consequence many, loved by none.”8 Rumors and reports matched such rhetoric, fan- ning fears that soldiers were violent and rapacious men: a historical survey of newspapers in Massachusetts between 1765 to 1783 found soldiers named as assailants in nearly all the reports of rape and sexual assault in the province.9 Though patriot newspapers purposefully underreported instances of assault by Continental soldiers during the Revolutionary War, they certainly made the most of allegations about British depredations. Fears about predatory soldiers contributed to the divisive context in which young American soldiers interacted with civilians.10 This language of difference between soldier and civilian readily mixed with elite political fears that hired, professional soldiers would endanger the cause of liberty. As one true-believing patriot explained at the beginning of the war, mercenary troops “must always be composed of people of the smallest property, and perhaps the least virtue among us.” Gathered together in camps and barracks, men paid to fight would “lose the gentle- ness and sobriety of citizens.” It was an inescapable fact of history: even soldiers hired as servants for a good cause would become the people’s “masters” within a few years.11 It was a transformative process citizens could not control. “It matters not of what persons armies are composed,” the political assumption ran, “since the profession has a natural tendency to create in them new principles and ideas of fortitude, submission and reliance on the wisdom of their superiors.”12 Professional soldiers would cease to be members of the community and would serve only themselves and their Caesar. Many among the patriot elite believed it would be better to rely on militias of virtuous citizens instead. But checking the king’s hardened regulars and German mercenaries would require the Americans to field their own standing army. Fears about soldiers’ nature further widened the divide between military and civilian spheres, and civilians blamed soldiers for this separation. To begin with, soldiers hired for longer and distant deployments were younger, poorer, and more marginal—and the social quality of such recruits only declined as the war persisted. Communities sent these men to war because they lacked power and were expendable, but they also were not seen as the most trustworthy element of the people. This increasingly degraded soldiery mixed with the uncomfortable fact that the Revolution- ary movement still demanded that families offer their sons for service. When families could not escape these levies, they not only feared losing their sons to the dangers of war, but also to the moral corruption that went with soldiering. A Massachusetts minister spoke to these fears in 1781 Relationships between Soldiers and Civilians 93 when he preached to young recruits heading to the army for three-year terms. Insisting that they were chosen to be soldiers by both their community and God, the minister tasked them to maintain the moral code of their civilian homes. It was not enough that they be brave and skilled soldiers in this righteous cause, they must also consider “the duties they owe Christ their divine commander.” If they did, they would remain united with “each of us who tarry at home.”13 By that point in the war, however, long experience promised only division between civilians and the soldiers who marched past their communities. Jokes published shortly after the war crystalized these practical and political fears that soldiers were men set apart by their untrustworthy behavior and alien values. In one, a soldier steals a shirt from a farmer and refuses to make restitution. “Well, (said the farmer) if you must keep it, you will pay for it in this world or the next. ‘Faith, (replied the soldier) you will trust so long, I will take another.’ ” Another joke unfolded in the same way: “During the march of a detachment of the American army, through New Jersey, . . . a silver spoon was missed in a house where a party of the troops had been billeted.” A soldier was accused of the theft but protested his innocence. “May I never meet salvation,” he mightily swore. “May I be sunk into the endless regions of perdition, if I have seen—heard of—or taken your spoon.” No one else could have taken it, but as an honest man, the householder “was obliged to believe the soldier.” Just before he let the soldier go, however, this civilian took hold of a button on the soldier’s coat, looked him in the face, and said, “Now say upon your honour, that you have not got my spoon, and I shall be satisfied.” “Upon my honour,” the soldier muttered to himself. After thinking, the soldier pulled the spoon from his pocket and cried, “Upon my honour . . . Poh! Blast you . . . Blast your spoon—take your spoon and be d[amn]d.” The civilian was dumbstruck “that the great principles of religion and morality” weighed less on the mind of the soldier than honor, “a mere sound.” Apparently unburdened by moral conscience, the soldier swung his knapsack, joined his corps, and marched off. In both Americans’ experience and memory of the war, the soldiers of their army were dangerous men, unbound by the moral and neighborly expectations of civilian society.14

Neglect, Depredations, and Anger

Despite the fear and suspicion that divided soldiers from civilians, the army was never far from the civilian sphere. Soldiers marched past inhab- 94 Becoming Men of Some Consequence itants’ farms, billeted in their houses and barns, garrisoned their towns, and restricted their travel and business. In this combination of intimacy and separation, the sharpest and most enduring tension between Revo- lutionary soldiers and civilian society broke along a fault line of supplies. Revolutionary soldiers—Continentals, state troops, and militia—sunk to civilians’ lowest expectations because of a reinforcing cycle of soldiers’ depredations, civilians’ neglect, and mutual anger.15 Congress and the states constantly struggled to deliver food, clothes, and pay to their regiments. Conditions worsened in late 1777 after the collapse of the Continental supply department, slid again during the army’s winter encampments of 1779 and 1780, and reached a shocking nadir during the 1780 currency depreciation crisis.16 These bitter failures condemned soldiers to unpredictable periods of suffering and want, while exposing citizens to their defenders’ rough requisitions. Whether necessary, political, or merely criminal, depredations by American soldiers warped their relations with their so-called countrymen.17 While the American colonies had a deserved reputation as a land of plenty, the war’s disruption of markets, currency, and labor meant farmers could not produce the surpluses necessary to support the Continental, British, and French armies.18 Soldiers increasingly blamed civilians for these shortages, however. In the first profound supply crisis of the war, soldiers at Valley Forge readily protested their situation, hooting and calling at the roll of the morning drum like crows and owls: “No meat!—No meat!”19 Chants of “No bread, no soldier” made clear the inhabitants’ contractual obligations—both strategic and moral—to their army. Washing- ton conveyed that threat to Congress, writing that without supplies his army would “starve, dissolve, or disperse.”20 Soldiers perennially suspected civilian greed and profiteering as the cause of their distress. “I never knew so much extravagancies in my life as there is now prevailing among the farmers,” wrote an officer in Pennsylvania, decrying this warped market for food. “Let the price be what it will, they are never satisfied. Where they formerly wanted a shilling they now [are] craving for a pound.”21 The army looked to the Revolutionary governments and the surrounding communities for support, but self-interested neglect strained the contractual relationship between soldiers and civilians.22 Military necessity required Washington’s army to collect needed supplies through foraging. Ostensibly, soldiers bought these supplies from farmers and paid them with certificates. Civilians saw little difference -be tween outright theft and these paper promises. In neither case did they Relationships between Soldiers and Civilians 95 have control over their property. They found it gone, or discovered it being taken by strange men with guns. Necessary foraging also easily got beyond officers’ control. When General William Irvine had to apologize for his soldiers’ plundering to obtain food, he used the opportunity to make a political statement about civilian neglect. “What have we to say for not fulfilling our Contract & most solemn engagement with the soldier?” he asked. “It may be relied on that whenever an Army is obliged to take or provide for itself in any degree[,] licentiousness and disorders will creep in—Discipline will gradually decrease in proportion to the necessity they are drove to till at length they become a body of free Booters.”23 A detachment sent toward Bergen, New Jersey, “on a grand forage” proved severely “distressing to the inhabitants,” and those depredations necessitated executing soldiers whose behavior crossed the line between necessity and wanton violence.24 Samuel Shaw lamented to his younger brother that Westchester County, north of British-occupied Manhattan, “has been pretty thoroughly gleaned by us of the little which the enemy left there. We call this foraging—but it is only a gentler term for plundering.” Shaw saw the recourse to foraging as a matter of military necessity: anything the Continental Army left, the British would take, and without the supplies the Continentals would starve. His soldiers “were three days without meat before the measure was adopted.” From Shaw’s perspective, it was not their fault. “We trust it may be said, our country neither pays, feeds or clothes its armies. A hopeful situation for a people who have so much at stake!”25 Perceptions of civilians’ neglect helped soldiers excuse individual acts of theft. Daniel Barber recalled “home and plenty are very different from the close quarters and deprivations to which a soldier is liable.” With sly understatement, Barber acknowledged, “The devil would now and then tell us, that it was no harm sometimes to pull a few potatoes and cab- bages, and pluck, once in a while, an ear of corn, when we stood in need.” While Barber carefully qualified and limited such instances of hungry, opportunistic foraging in his memoir, the iteration of such behavior across an army could strip the countryside.26 Officers sometimes turned a blind eye, siding with their troops against the inhabitants. One captain was cashiered for buying a goose he knew his soldiers had stolen.27 In other instances, officers led their men in plundering: during a march, a regimental adjutant “jumpt over into a mans garden to steal fruits &c, [and] the men followed him like Sheep.”28 Indeed, plundering by soldiers was distinctly contingent on their officers’ vigilance in addition to the conditions soldiers endured in camp. Washington complained to his subordinate, General 96 Becoming Men of Some Consequence Sullivan, in the summer of 1777 that the soldiers of Sullivan’s division were causing more destruction than the “whole army” combined.29 Soldiers’ hunger and malnourishment explained some depredations against civilians, but soldiers also stole from civilians simply when the opportunity arose and before the gnawing pangs of hunger provoked them. An officer marching new Massachusetts recruits to the Continental Army at Fishkill on the Hudson, for example, had been carefully warned about the need for “keeping your men . . . from plundering or injuring the inhabitants.”30 These recruits had just left home, had an officer with money to feed them, and had no reason to steal. They were neither hungry nor brutalized by the war. Clearly, there was something about “going for a soldier” that loosened the inhibitions of young men, despite the threats of military discipline. At base, they were leaving a sphere of civilian expectations and control. Not all of soldiers’ plundering or destruction was the result of innocent need; sometimes they destroyed property because it offered the path of least resistance. Fence rails, for example, always provided the most convenient form of firewood. It was precut, seasoned, and nicely stacked in long rows near their campfires. Major Israel Keith was tasked with writing a letter of apology to Congressman Francis Dana for soldiers having burned about one hundred of his fence rails over a period of two or three months. General Orders had been issued, and he had added his own verbal commands, but it had done little good, Keith explained. It was likely no comfort to the congressman, but Keith did note that the “proportion [of fence burned] is not so great as has been usual with our troops in all parts of the continent where they have been.” In an attempt to shield the army from political displeasure, Keith put the damage down to class disorder: “Whatever can, in seducing a number of rude peasants to order, shall be done, and if possible, your property defended from further devastation.”31 In January 1779, General Sterling similarly had to remind his soldiers that “passing over Rye and wheat Fields will prove prejudicial to the Inhabi- tants Crops.” These farm boys knew not to trample through winter crops, but the fields were easier on their ill-shod feet than rutted, muddy, or frozen roads. More to the point, the soldiers did not care about damaging the property of their ostensible countrymen.32 In this Revolutionary War outright theft could take on political under- tones as a means of excuse. On one occasion, civilians bitterly complained that soldiers were “taking away horses and other property” while their officers approved, “under the Idea of the Inhabitants being Tories.” The general warned his troops, “Such Inhabitants as are proper Objects of Relationships between Soldiers and Civilians 97 punishment will be dealt with in a legal way. But no Officer or Soldier is to judge for himself & appropriate their property to their own use or seize it without proper orders.”33 In this same vein, near Camden, South Carolina, an officer repeatedly prohibited “Plundering & Merauding.” He ordered that “No horses or cattle are to be taken from the Inhabitants . . . and such as are taken from the Enemy, or astray, are to be Reported to Headquar- ters . . . & Considered as Public property.” Further, “No Negro is to be taken on any pretence unless he is armed or Leaving with the Enemy, or as a Spy.” Any such displaced human property was also to be turned over “to be disposed of as Circumstances may Require.”34 Soldiers were not to use convenient stories about punishing Carolina loyalists to excuse their actions. But what, after all, was the crime in stealing property from the enemy? These depredations against property proved unstoppable. Washing- ton lamented that his Continentals were continually “plundering our own friends” despite “the cautions, the earnest requests, and the positive orders” he issued. Humanity, interest, and honor all called for soldiers’ restraint: “Why did we assemble in arms? Was it not in one capital point to protect the property of our countrymen?”35 Washington found it “disgraceful” that “the peaceable inhabitants, our countrymen and fellow citizens, dread our halting among them, even for a night, and are happy when they get rid of us.”36 But as time went on, such depredations only continued. In the late fall of 1778, the army prepared to enter winter quarters at Morristown, New Jersey. “From their past experience,” Samuel Shaw wrote to a civilian friend, “I believe the good people of that State will not consider us the most welcome guests for wherever an army goes, be it ever so well disposed, more or less inconvenience, to say no worse, will attend the inhabitants.”37 At the Continental encampment at Morristown the next winter, nothing had improved: “the property of the inhabitants in the vicinity of camp is a prey to the plundering spirit of the soldiery . . . they can keep neither poultry, stock, nor any other articles on their farms.” The soldiers’ behavior was “better becoming a band of robbers than disciplined troops called forth in defence of the rights of the community.”38 Illicit plundering could quickly get out of hand, adding abuse to civilians’ list of complaints about soldiers. “The Inhabitants in the vicinity of this camp are absolutely a prey to the plundering and licentious spirit of the soldiery,” Washington lamented after almost five years of war. “From their daily complaints, and a formal representation of the Magistrates . . . a night scarcely passes without gangs of soldiers going out of camp and 98 Becoming Men of Some Consequence committing every species of robbery, depredation and the grossest personal Insults.”39 Confrontations could unpredictably escalate. Anthony Wayne ordered his entire division to parade without their arms to convey chilling news: the previous night a party of soldiers had added to “the many depradations committed in the Vicinity of Camp” with an “atrocious and unprovoked and Deliberate Murder.” Not only did the General order any soldier caught more than a mile from camp immediately flogged, but no soldier was to be out of camp after sunset. “These orders to be posted up on the door of each Hut,” he declared, “to the End that no person may hereafter plead Ignorance.”40 This was particularly concerning for revolutionaries because the licentious crimes of Hessians and British regulars had figured so prominently in patriot propaganda. Soldiers’ crimes against inhabitants, whether from necessity or alienation, proved terrifying to civilians and kept full the dockets of army courts- martial. When officers caught a soldier who had plundered property and shot at inhabitants in New Jersey, he was “immediately hanged upon a Tree by the Roadside[,] where he was left hanging.” This object lesson did not have the intended educational effect, however. Shortly thereafter, a group of a half dozen soldiers traveled as far as ten miles from camp and disguised themselves by “blacking themselves & taking of[f ] their coats and caps (the greatest military badges of distinction in their cloathing).” Having learned the importance of disguise from the summary execution of a comrade, they scouted the neighborhood, chose the vulnerable house of an elderly couple, broke in, and tied them up. Leaving the victims of their theft alive, the soldiers were identified and arrested. David Hall, one of the culprits, was twenty-one years old and had been in the service for nearly five years, having enlisted at the beginning of the war. When the army hanged him for his predatory crime, he was a member of an elite light infantry company.41 Whether planned or rash, out of pressing necessity or cold opportunism, soldiers’ depredations alienated civilian support. These strange young men with guns who preyed on civilian property seemed a far cry from the sons and farmhands families had sent to war. Civilians responded to these suspicious young soldiers with as much rage and violence as they dared. Army records are full of inhabitants’ complaints to commanders. Some took matters into their own hands. When a soldier went into a Rhode Island orchard “to get some Apples—The Owner came out with a gun & ordered him out.” Though the soldier turned and walked out, “notwithstanding the Owner fir’d & 1 Shot went into his Back & lodg’d in it.” A sergeant with a file of men went to the Relationships between Soldiers and Civilians 99 house to take the man, but found him shut up inside, armed and ready. Negotiation settled the situation and the farmer paid the wounded soldier $15 in damages.42 Tensions rose as depredations continued in an area. “Last Even’g a Part of the Waggoners went out of Camp to Steal,” noted one army diarist in 1780; the result: “one Lad of our Regiment was killed by the Inhabitants.”43 In a war to defend liberty and property, the disruption of the Revolution could devolve toward a Hobbesian war of all against all. Even simple interactions were tainted by fresh memories of theft and anger. As Joseph Plumb Martin remembered of one tense interaction, a woman went out of her way to declare that she did “not like you soldiers”—some had recently “stole every morsel of my dinner from the pot.” Martin’s rejoinder—“I suppose the soldiers thought your pot could be easier replenished than their kettles”—was not meant to soothe her feelings.44 The needs and interests of soldiers and civilians were set at opposition by scarcity, neglect, and opportunistic theft. “Without a speedy change the army must dissolve,” Alexander Ham- ilton wrote to a New York congressman in the late summer of 1780 after years observing tension, neglect, and depredations. The situation had reached a crisis: “It is now a mob, rather than an army, without cloathing, without pay, without provision, without morals, without discipline.” Ham- ilton identified the emotional stakes of the situation: “We begin to hate the country for its neglect of us; the country begins to hate us for our op- pressions of them.” Moreover, the army had lost all confidence in Congress “and give the worst construction to all they do. . . . Held together by the slenderest of ties[,] we are ripening for dissolution.”45 Hamilton felt this neglect as personal betrayal. “I hate Congress—I hate the army—I hate the world—I hate myself,” he lashed in a letter to his friend John Laurens. “The whole is a mass of fools and knaves; I could almost except you and Meade.”46 While officers poured out their anger into letters home and to each other, their soldiers revenged themselves on inhabitants’ property. For their part, the civilians who long suffered the burdens of the army’s demands and soldiers’ depredations also struck back with anger. Late in the war, an inhabitant of the Hudson River highlands went so far as to refuse a Continental lieutenant’s request for some vessel to carry water from a nearby spring to a sick soldier. The old man declared “he would not let a soldier have a cup to drink from if it were to save his life.” Provoked, the officer seized a glass pint mug, and with “the old man following him raving like a madman,” gave his soldier water and then threw the mug into the spring. When the old man “redoubled his abuse,” the lieutenant drew 100 Becoming Men of Some Consequence his sword, and “swore that if he did not immediately shut his mouth, he would bleed him.” Ordinarily, the soldier recalled, this officer was “a very mild man,” but in this inversion of the parable of the Good Samaritan, he could not help but lash out against an inhabitant’s disdain.47 The Revolutionary movement proved lucky—1780 marked the lowest point of the war, following the British capture of Charleston that spring, the destruction of Gates’s army of Continentals at Camden in August, and the defection of Benedict Arnold in September. But at this point in the war Congress changed its currency policy, eventually halting the crushing depreciation of Continental paper money that in part had made supplying the army so difficult. By that point, however, the patterns and expectations were set; bitter memories of hunger and theft would linger for both parties.

Obligation and Reintegration

How could soldiers and civilians come to any reconciliation after the harm they inflicted on each other during the struggle for independence? Yet, despite fear and mistrust, the interactions of soldiers and civilians involved more than straightforward crime or neglect. Consider the case of Continental soldiers stationed in Providence after their failed attempt to dislodge the British from Rhode Island in 1778. The Continental soldiers found the town a target-rich environment. “It is with inexpressible Grief & Astonishment,” General Sullivan addressed his troops, “that notwithstanding his repeated Orders to the Contrary,” soldiers were “plundering the Inhabitants, stealing & destroying their Hogs, Poultry, Sheep, Corn & even abusing the Inhabitants they plunder.” Sullivan also lamented that soldiers who had been complimented for bravery, and who had been “more than usually supplied with food,” would behave this way. Plundering was not the entire story of their time in Providence, however. This same order also chided soldiers for “Strolling about the streets in Town & Country the whole night” and “Dancing & Reveling in Houses.”48 Criminality and sociability walked arm-in-arm on Providence’s streets on those late summer nights. Some townsfolk suffered the soldiers’ predation; other civilians, likely younger and of the lower orders themselves, offered camaraderie to soldiers beyond the bounds of the military sphere. The rhythms and expectations of the life course that drove young men to seek a path toward their independence via military service could also help individual soldiers and civilians patch the war-torn social fabric. As soldiers, young Relationships between Soldiers and Civilians 101 Continentals were outsiders; as youths and young men, they could fit a familiar place in civilian communities and find comfort, kindness, and membership. The reconciliation of civilian and military spheres could appear in the least expected of circumstances; even in dark moments of military justice, wronged civilians could find common understanding with young soldiers. In May 1780, an inhabitant in the Hudson Highlands who was a victim of “Robbing & Plundering,” nevertheless begged the commander for leniency toward the eight guilty soldiers. A “large number of officers” concurred—the guilty men included otherwise trustworthy sergeants and corporals, and just days before, the garrison’s daily food ration had been cut almost by half. Perhaps these factors pushed the officers and wronged civilians toward leniency, which their general “reluctantly” gave, sparing the condemned one hundred lashes each. The pension application of Al- exander Glover, one of the spared soldiers, suggests additional context for the civilian’s merciful intervention. Understandably, Glover made no mention of this crime in his nineteenth-century deposition about his military service, but the 1836 application by his widow, Nancy Sprung Glover, filled in the picture. Glover had enlisted in 1779 for the duration of the war when he was about eighteen years old. Stationed in a Hudson River garrison, he and his fellow Massachusetts soldiers mixed—for good and ill—with the inhabitants. Despite his arrest for stealing from civilians, within a year of his escape from flogging Glover married Nancy Sprung, a young woman about sixteen years old who lived near the military hospital at Fishkill. (It is possible that pregnancy pushed them toward marriage.) The young family lived with the army at the Hudson River garrison until Glover’s medical discharge in 1782. The friendly intimacy between these two young people that led to marriage in 1781 may have had a connection—or at least a prefiguring parallel—in a victimized inhabitant’s decision to forgive the soldiers in the spring of 1780.49 Instances of inhabitants’ kindness stand out in army records and in soldiers’ diaries and memoirs because of their rarity and the contrast they drew with mistreatment or neglect. Henry Hallowell experienced a broad range of treatment when he left the army at the end of 1776 “& Begd on my way home.” He noted that “people generally was very kind But some was afraid of me.” While some families were “willing to let me lay by the fire or on wheat straw,” others “refused my going in But brought me to the Barn.” At least one family that sent him to their barn proved kind enough to bring him some soup.50 Soldiers recorded instances of kindness 102 Becoming Men of Some Consequence in their journals the way farmers and merchants tallied ongoing debts in account books. Pennsylvanian sergeant John Hawkins, for example, noted on a march with his battalion, “I never left a Place with more Regret than I did Suffield. The Inhabitants were all extremely kind to the Soldiery, and in particular that genteel Family I was in; Esq. Leavitt’s.”51 For civilians to treat passing soldiers with kindness, multiple factors had to align. One of Hawkins’s diary entries about a family near the Hudson River in New York suggested the dynamics that enabled positive interactions. “The People seeing I had no Blanket with me[, and] being alone & from my good Behaviour, was so kind as to let me partake of a resting on a good Bed with one of their Sons.” They were generous to Hawkins in part because he appeared to be in need and unthreatening. Walking back to camp alone was different from marching by with a company. Politics and prior experiences also were important. “This Family,” Hawkins specifically noted, “was friendly to the States.” His hosts told tales of having “often been distressed by the British and their infernal Hirelings since this war Began.” The British had held the man of the house prisoner, and the family had only been able to return home the week before “in consequence of our Army being below them,” screening the farmers from the occupying enemy to the south. In need, yet well-spoken, alone, and unintimidating, the young sergeant could be gratefully embraced by these victims of Brit- ish depredations.52 Growing familiarity with specific soldiers also could induce civilians to lower their guard. Laid up for several days in 1778 in a Pennsylvania farmhouse with some army wagoners, Joseph Plumb Martin recalled how with each passing day the initially suspicious and “rather unsociable” mistress of the house grew more generous with food. As one of the wagoners explained to young Martin, they were seeing how the “mother comes on.”53 Similarly, a family’s personal connection with the war effort could inspire kindness to other soldiers. In some instances, the young men in front of them reminded civilians of the boys they had sent to the army. After his enlistment ended, John Greenwood lost his way on the long trip back to Boston and stopped at a farmhouse: “In I went and the people were very glad to see me, for they had a son in the army and were delighted with my description of the battle of Trenton.”54 Another New England youth, Andrew Sherburne, was fifteen when he headed home from the army. “As I was passing a house,” he recalled, “I was noticed by a woman who stood in her door; she came immediately into the road to me, asked me a few questions, and insisted upon my going into the house. We were met at the door Relationships between Soldiers and Civilians 103 by another tender hearted mother; they had one or both of them a son or sons in the army. I being seated they stood over me and wept freely.”55 Joseph Plumb Martin encountered this dynamic himself in Pennsylvania in 1778. At the tavern in town, Martin found he shared his name with the landlord’s son, a lad about the same age who had been captured near New York in 1776 and died on his way home. “These good people were almost willing to persuade themselves that I was their son,” Martin recalled. “I used often, afterwards, in my cruises to that part of the State, to call in as I passed, and was always well used by the entire family.”56 Emotional connection to their own distant or missing soldier-sons helped these civilians see the youth within the soldier on their doorstep. Martin recalled another instance from late in the war when he and his comrades sought shelter. Though one house proved unwelcoming, the people of the neighboring house “were acquainted with numbers of the Connecticut soldiers, who had been here during the winter of ’79, and made many inquiries respecting them.” These New York inhabitants were themselves of Connecticut stock and accordingly sheltered and fed Martin and his comrades. About noon, Martin recalled, they pulled up at another house. This family also knew the burdens of soldiering: “While we were warming ourselves in the kitchen and chatting with the young people, the good old housewife came into the room and entered into conversation with us upon the hardships of a soldier’s life; she lamented that we had no mothers nor sisters to take care of us; she said she knew what it was, in a measure, to endure the fatigues and hardships of a camp, by the sufferings her sons had undergone in the drafted militia; they had told her how they had suffered hunger and cold, and to cap all, said she, they came home ragged, dirty and lousy as beggars.” When Martin and the others rose to leave, “the lady opened her door and said, ‘Come to your dinners, soldiers,’ with as much ease and familiarity as though we had belonged to the family.” Though mistrust and conflict meant Martin and his fellow soldiers mostly caught “scornful looks and hard words” from civilians, sympathy and understanding were still possible.57 Though they still saw the soldier, inhabitants could prove kind if they also saw the more-familiar figure of a young man standing before them. Despite the burdens and tensions of war, individual civilians and soldiers also found they could build relationships by recognizing mutual obligations and making contractual agreements. Billeting troops on civilians had long been a source of tension in British America and ultimately produced the Third Amendment in the Bill of Rights. In the Revolu- 104 Becoming Men of Some Consequence tion, direct negotiation helped build common ground between soldiers and civilian hosts. Later in the war, for example, a group of young, short- term replacements from New England arrived at the Hudson and were boarded with Dutch families. Arriving at the appointed house, one of the young soldiers turned over the billeting order for the old farmer to read. “Yes my good fellows, you shall live with me,” he replied, “I have plenty, good Bread, good Suppan & Milk.” Nevertheless, he extracted a reciprocal promise from his young boarders: “you must not kill my Poultry, nor rob my Cucumbers.” The soldier lads agreed and bound themselves to do further service for their host: “We told him . . . that [we] would protect all his Property, and prevent the Soldiers from milking his Cows or robbing any thing from his Barn or Garden.” With mutual obligations exchanged between the generations, “the old Man seemed to be pleased, [and] Or- dered a table to be sat for us.” Of course, mutual obligation was limited to the named parties. On another occasion, after taking a boat up the river from West Point “under the pretence of getting Wood,” this same memoirist distracted another Dutch farmer by offering to buy apples while his comrades stole the man’s peaches.58 It always paid for civilians to be wary of soldiers in groups unless personal and explicit promises had been exchanged. Individual relationships and neighborly promises, personally made, were what counted. Cash could provide the mortar to bind obligation and emotion, as was often the case for soldiers who paid for nursing care with families outside the camp. Benjamin Gilbert, sick in the middle of the war from a nutritional deficiency, received leave to recover and paidth e Hoyt family in Danbury to nurse him back to health. He remained friendly with that Connecticut family and their neighbors through the end of the war.59 Similarly, when Jonathan Libby found himself “taken Ill again” in June 1778, he stayed ten days with the Burmages in New Jersey, “who treated me with the Greates[t] humanity.”60 While contractual agreements and payment for this care eased families’ acceptance of soldiers, it also opened the possibility of friendship and further intimacies. Young soldiers could aid this process of acceptance and integration by taking up the traditional place of youths in these communities. By being helpful, productive, and subordinate, they could win friends and a warm spot by the fire. When his regiment traveled south to Yorktown, for example, young Samuel Dewees was left behind with some fellow musicians, invalids, and raw recruits in York, Pennsylvania. Though formally billeted at the public house run by the Zeigler family, he presented himself not as Relationships between Soldiers and Civilians 105 an obligatory burden but as a potential member of the household. He was accepted. “I drew my rations and handed them to the family. I lived here (I may state) at home, for I ate at the table with the family, and was treated as one of the family.” With few military duties except to practice his fife, Dewees undertook “many little jobs of work for the family” and ultimately lived with the Zeiglers for half a year.61 Other soldiers found hired work a ready means to bridge the divide between military and civilian spheres. While in the slow winter season between campaigns in the middle of the war, Elijah Fisher decided to make the most of his time and made an agreement “with Mr. I. Wallais for to Clear a peace of Land for him, the Condishons are as follows. I was to clear as much land fitt for mooing and in my fullfilling my oblegation Mr. Wallais was to give me one hundred Dollars paper Currincy.” When Fisher’s enlistment term ended the following year, he returned to Mr. Wallais for work. The family and Fisher got on well: “I stayes there and follows my Riting and sifering. . . . Mr. Wallais was as Desirus of my learning as myself and used to showe me.” Fisher found this family “as Cleaver folks (or that used me the best) that I found in my travels.”62 In his journal Fisher credited the Wallaises for their kindness, but his familiar role as a hired hand aided their acceptance. In working for their household in the middle of the war, Fisher had returned to the pattern of employment and subordination that settled agricultural communities expected of their landless young men. With mutual agreement about their productive social role, young soldiers could be brought into the fold of domestic households.

Courtship and the Life Course

Neighborliness, payment, and work could make strange young soldiers acceptable to civilians and open the door to more-intimate friendships. In his pension application, Jonathan Libby remembered taking leave “to Recruit my health” and “tarried three Weeks at the house of Mr. Michael Wiant in New Marlborough” in western Massachusetts. While there, he “contracted an acquaintance with a young Lady of that Place.” At the end of his enlistment, he took a detour on his trip home and spent five months courting the young woman. He noted, however, “as it was best to do Noth- ing Rashly[,] we parted on Honorable Terms the night before I set out for home.” Libby had found acceptance and an opportunity to reunite the military and civilian spheres of his life, but at the end of his enlistment chose to return to his own people further to the east.63 As Libby’s wartime 106 Becoming Men of Some Consequence record suggested, relationships between young men and women on terms approved by civilian communities could help reintegrate soldiers. Unlike the sexual performances young soldiers put forward in camp to impress each other, courtships more or less in accord with the expectations of civilian families could heal the rift between military and civilian spheres and put young men back on the path forward in life. Socializing between men and women proved a useful and normalizing connection between soldiers and civilians. Fear and fascination could go hand in hand. As one wartime song put it: “Hark! the distant Drum, / Lasses all look frighted; / But, when Soldiers come, / Girls how you’re delighted.”64 Sally Wister, a Quaker adolescent in eastern Pennsylvania, demonstrated exactly this range of feelings in October 1777. Though her family had fledth eir home in the threat of the British advance, they could not escape the war. Her encounters with the soldiers began with the terrifying appearance of dragoons seeking to buy horses. She noted, however, that “the officer and men behav’d perfectly civil” and only rode away “after adieus in number.” Soon thereafter, Sally and her family went to the main road to see the army pass. General Smallwood chose the house where they had sought refuge for his headquarters—“which,” Sally noted, “secur’d us from straggling soldiers.” With no predators to fear, the girls of the household turned hunters: “when we were alone [our] dress and lips were put in order for conquest and the hopes [of ] adventures gave brightness to each.” With many young officers of a headquarters staff forth e girls to stalk, it was not surprising one “fell violently in love with liddy at first sight,” while Sally herself swooned over a major from Maryland. Writing to a friend via her journal, Miss Sally Wister exclaimed, “how new is our situation, I feel in good spirits tho surrounded by an Army [and] the house full of officers, yard alive with soldiers.” Much to her surprise, these men of war proved a “very peaceable sort of men . . . they eat like other folks, talk like them, and behave themselves with elegance, so I will not be afraid of them. that I wont. adieu I am going to my chamber to dream I suppose of bayonets and swords, sashes, guns, and epaulets.” For young men and women in a war zone, flirting proved a form of interaction that drew life back toward normal.65 While interactions with women in camp followed a script that suited young soldiers’ performances for each other, these interactions between young men and women unfolded in ways much more familiar to the mores and norms of the civilian sphere. “Went to a Corn Husking,” recorded Sergeant Benjamin Gilbert, “wheir we had a good Dance after Husking Relationships between Soldiers and Civilians 107 and got back to camp half an hour before Day.”66 In this instance, Gil- bert and his fellow soldiers had been integrated into the familiar social rhythms of harvest time in the Hudson River Valley, rather than solely using women in camp for their construction of military masculinity. As a result, proper courtships proved the most dramatic mode of reintegrating young men—even if still soldiers—into civilian communities. After all, soldiers of a friendly army were new faces in small communities, offering new partners for conversation, dancing, flirting, or marriage. Young enlisted men wooed farm girls and servants. Army life for young officers had a bit of the debut in it for them as well. “Tell the Col[onel],” remarked one officer at the end of a letter home, “that Harry [his son] is well, turned a Beau, & courting Every body he sees.”67 When the army holed up for the winter or established a cantonment, officers and local ladies were certain to make each other’s acquaintance. A surgeon at West Point wryly noted how a young officer had been “mortally wounded—with one of Cupid’s arrows, I mean, shot from the small blue eyes of a minister’s daughter who resides near Chester.” The poor fellow was able to endure “an absence from this charmer of his soul of five whole days, one hundred and forty four hours and more minutes than I have now time to calculate.” The officer set off to make her a visit and “apply some of her smiles & coquetry as a balm to his bleeding heart.” The good doctor teased young love, but not disapprovingly. After all, he was writing to his wife.68 The experience of John Robert Shaw, a young British deserter who joined the Continental Army, similarly showed how young men could slip into civilian communities while still serving in the army. Garrisoned at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Shaw arguably was doubly an outsider as a lowly enlisted soldier and an Englishman. However, this proved to matter little in the ethnically diverse crossroads town. Indeed, after “a considerable time” in town, Shaw “began to grow weary of the single life” and “paid . . . addresses to a certain young woman,” Mary O’Hara, an Irish immigrant from Sligo, who worked for an innkeeper. After a short courtship, Shaw later wrote, “we were married at the home of Mr. Robert Johnson, a respectable citizen, who gave us a good dinner, and in the evening, I was conducted to the barracks, with my new bride, by a number of soldiers of the first respectability.” Shaw did his best as a new soldier-husband “to render my connubial life as comfortable as the nature of our circumstances would permit.” As further evidence of his growing connections in the civilian sphere, he got work with a merchant in town, “by the recommendation and interest of one Robert Gibson.” With his ability to work and his 108 Becoming Men of Some Consequence marriage to a young immigrant woman who “always supported a good character,” Shaw bridged the worlds of the civilian and military spheres.69 Young men hoped their time in the army would move them forward in life—and with marriage a key accomplishment, they kept a sharp eye out for suitable opportunities. George Johnson wrote to a friend from a winter camp at Morristown in February 1777 to report “that I am alive, in good health & Spirits; almost in Love with a damnable great fortune, who looks up to me as a Man of Consequence.” He noted this was “the only good personally resulting from . . . the present post.” He was sanguine, even boastful, about the affair: “In short I can possess her, fortune & all, if I please. But the times will not admit any Incumbrance. These rascally red coats will may rouse me from her Embraces, perhaps for those of a colder object. If she will wait till Peace crowns our Efforts, I am her Man.”70 The war, though presently an obstacle, had brought Johnson within reach of many a young gentleman bachelor’s dreams. Though Johnston was boasting to a fellow officer, he had his sights set on a respectable civilian status. While proximity to eligible girls certainly made liaisons easier, distance did not necessarily present a problem. For young officers with connections, letter writing could give them a wider romantic audience for which to perform. Alexander Hamilton proposed just such a correspondence with Catharine Livingston, an unmarried woman about twenty-six years old, perhaps at the matchmaking suggestion of her younger sister, Sally. Ham- ilton had become well acquainted with the Livingstons when he first arrived in North America to begin collegiate study. Sally had suggested he write to Catharine about politics. Hamilton agreed, but flirtingly insisted, “I will not consent to be limited in any particular subject . . . if you have no objection, for variety and amusement, we will even sometimes make excursions into the flowery walks, and roseate bowers of Cupid. You know, I am renowned for gallantry, and shall always be able to entertain you with a choice collection of the prettiest things imaginable.” Though Hamilton did not take this lady seriously as a political agent, he did condescendingly acknowledge, “contrary to the vulgar opinion, woman is not a simple, but a most complex, intricate and enigmatic being.” Perhaps this was not the most charming of openings. Hamilton may have been overeager. After all, Martha Washington did name a particularly amorous camp tomcat “Hamilton.” Indeed, with Miss Livingston the young aide rather directly cut to the chase: “You and I . . . [are] deeply interested to pray for victory . . . and peace; as, among other good effects, they would remove those obstacles, which now lie in the way of that most delectable thing, called Relationships between Soldiers and Civilians 109 matrimony;—a state, which, with a kind of magnetic force, attracts every breast to it.” Hamilton, though ridiculously bombastic in his prose, wrote to reconnect with the civilian sphere. In this performance for a female audience, he put forward what he felt and what he thought a young lady wanted to hear.71 As a wooer, Hamilton presented a manic parody of the aspirations of young gentlemen officers. Again returning to a tone of condescending flattery, he told Miss Livingston how he had showed her response to a fellow officer, “during which, the liveliest emotions of approbation were pictured on his face, ‘Hamilton!, cries he, ‘when you write this divine girl again, it must be in the stile of adoration: none but a goddess, I am sure, could have penned so fine a letter!’ ” In case this line of flattery was too subtle, Hamilton insisted, “all for love is my motto.” Indeed, he declared, “Were it not for the evident necessity and in defence of all that is valuable in society, I could never be reconciled to a military character; and shall rejoice when the restoration of peace on the basis of freedom and independence shall put it in my power to renounce it.”72 Hamilton, as a soldier and would-be lover, expressed the belief that the officer and husband were set at opposition and one would have to pass before taking up the insignia of the other. Young officers commonly acknowledged a division between their military profession and the normal paths of life. Many emphasized their ambitions to reconnect with civilian life. The irony for Hamilton was that his military status and connections were the manifest signs of his intelligence, virtue, and gentlemanly spirit. Without them, was he only, as John Adams would later growl, the bastard son of a Scotch peddler? This tension hums in officers’ correspondence regarding women and their hopes for a domestic authority that would advance, complete, and validate their manhood. In a letter to a comrade, William Finney described a trip to Monmouth: “I got so enamour’d with the Ladys of that place that I have wandered about camp ever since in my Nightgown and slippers, lamenting the hard fate of us poor animals who have no certain abiding place.” He was convinced that he and his fellow soldiers “in som Degree Experience the punishment of Tantalis . . . for when we conceive our selves on the Varge of Felicity the Dredfull Mandate pronounced by the Drums (strike ye Ten[t]s & com away) disappoints all our Expecta- tions.” He had just experienced this disappointment. “I had a fine gurle in Toe,” he explained, “expecting Every succeeding overture, would pave the way for the matrimoney Bonds.” His lady was no fool, however, and 110 Becoming Men of Some Consequence understood the continuing burden of the war: “hir grand objection was, [‘]y’ll leave me when the campaign opens,[’] a convincing truth I could not denie, so before I could [bring] . . . the fare one to the Nuptual Ties for the winter Seson, the Dread-alarme was sounded.” Finney thus returned “to ye Male Monestry, on ye banks of the Millstone, there to live secluded from the Injoyment of the virtuous fair.” The only escape was to “shaith yr sword and retire from the Din of Arms.” The choice between leaving the ladies and abandoning his rank as an officer struck him as a “Hard Fate, [and] Distressing thought.” Lamented Finney, “is there no remedie[?]”73 To ease his mind, Finney continued his letter to his fellow officer in a light but telling vein. A satiric idea had struck him, and he asked his male correspondent to share it with “the Ladys of yr acquaintance, taking their votes for [or] against.” Finney joked that his grand plan was to ask Con- gress to “Intitle all Military men, and Officers of the staf[f], to a Wife in each state.” If his correspondent could “procure a Majority of Femail voates in favor of the Motion, I am sure the sceam will take.” The men were certainly for it, “and Congress will not be so ungenerous as to reject a Joint petition of both parties concerned.” Imagine the “Ingaging prospect”—“a Wife in each State, Rum, shugar & tobacco at modest prices, a suite of Uniforms annuly, Half-pay during Life, &c. who would not be a soldier[?] Huzza. Curs the Torys. Am[e]n.” Finney’s joke satirized young officers’ dilemma of how to woo and win a wife while enduring the economic, material, and political disruptions of the war. In his parodic fantasy, piling marriage on marriage addressed the central dilemma he faced at that stage of life—how to make permanent, socially advancing connections while maintaining a useful military identity.74 Alexander Hamilton did not need such an innovative solution to answer the demands of the male life course. In the winter of 1779, likely on a husband-hunting expedition, Elizabeth Schuyler and her aunt arrived at the Continental encampment at Morristown. This camp in northern New Jersey also proved the crossroads for both love and the military and civilian spheres. There, Hamilton and Schuyler formed an attachment—Hamil- ton being fairly handsome and profoundly ambitious, while Schuyler was fairly pretty and the daughter of a profoundly powerful family. Strikingly, Hamilton refused Elizabeth’s suggestion that they elope as her sisters had. Hamilton craved the legitimacy, security, and advancement that would come with the full approval of her father, Philip Schuyler. In December 1780, they married in her parents’ grand house in Albany. Without a family of his own, Hamilton was accompanied by his friend and fellow aide, Relationships between Soldiers and Civilians 111 James McHenry.75 Too often, historians have viewed this match through the lens of Hamilton’s future career as a member of Congress, delegate to the Constitutional Convention, Secretary of the Treasury, and leader of the Federalist faction in the 1790s. In 1780, however, he was simply a young, self-styled gentleman grappling for honor and acknowledgment in both military and civilian spheres. Hamilton’s connection with the powerful Schuylers was only one of several political relationships he had cultivated as a young officer—but it proved a relationship that dramatically changed his path. As one of Wash- ington’s aides, Hamilton moved in the highest circles of the Continental Army, and he used that military status to develop contacts in civilian politics. Immediately after his appointment as an aide in 1777, for example, the New York Committee of Correspondence extended a flattering invitation, asking Hamilton “to convey a true idea of what is going on in the military line.” Hamilton accepted the connection “With eagerness,” grabbing the opportunity to cultivate relationships with the political elite of his adopted state. In a politic disclaimer that nevertheless allowed Hamilton to assert himself as a man of particular insight and consequence, he told the committee he would report “his private sentiments” only, which were “never to be interpreted as an echo of those of the General.”76 Hamilton was certainly ambitious, and his paramount desire was for acknowledgment as an independent actor. With his Schuyler in-laws as new allies in the civilian sphere, laboring as a glorified clerk in the army seemed less necessary. In February 1781, within two months of his marriage to Elizabeth Schuyler, Hamilton suddenly and capriciously broke with Washington and resigned from the General’s staff. Hamilton explained his resignation to his friend James McHenry in the language of a wronged gentleman: “The Great man and I have come to an open rupture. Proposals of accommodation have been made on his part, but rejected. I pledge my honor to you that he will find me inflexible. He shall for once repent of his ill-humour.” Hamilton insisted that Washington had treated him in “the most affrontive manner” by accusing the young officer of disrespect. “I answered very decisively, ‘Sir, I am not conscious of it, but since you have thought it necessary to tell me, so we part!’ ”77 Hamilton voiced his dilemma directly: “I have always disliked the relation office of an Aide de Camp . . . as having in it a kind of personal dependance.”78 Under his new aegis of the Schuyler family, however, Hamilton finally could—and did—strike out on his own, personally and politically. Not all young Continentals’ efforts to connect the civilian and mili- 112 Becoming Men of Some Consequence tary spheres concluded as advantageously as Alexander Hamilton’s. The tale of Ezra Ross suggests the twists that path could take. Like many youths in Ipswich, Massachusetts, Ross joined the army in the patriotic rush of 1776. He was only sixteen when his enlistment ended in early 1777. Sick and hungry, he made his way back toward northeastern Mas- sachusetts. In Brookfield, just about ten miles north of the Connecticut line, the Spooner family took in the exhausted and broken-down young soldier. Joshua Spooner was a prominent man in his mid-thirties. His wife Bathsheba had just passed her thirty-first year and had care of Joshua’s household and their children. Bathsheba also nursed young Ross back to health “with every kind office and mark of tenderness.”79 As a result of their kindness, Ross and the Spooners became friendly. Ross was older than any of Joshua’s children and more socially worthy than his hired help. For his part, young Ross was “a fine looking youth,” and Bathsheba was a very beautiful woman. Across his recuperation in the early spring of 1777, they formed “a very warm attachment” and parted friends.80 In August 1777, Ezra Ross once again went to war, heading for Albany to join the forces gathering to oppose Burgoyne’s invasion from Canada. His journey once again took him past Brookfield, where Bathsheba was delighted to see him. She “then added to the number of her kindnesses, and engaged a visit on his return.” Ross spent four months in the campaign, fighting in the failed bid to recapture Ticonderoga and then in the vicious battles at Saratoga. A British sergeant characterized the action, writing, “A constant blaze of fire was kept up, and both armies seemed determined on death or victory.”81 Ross survived, and, true to his word, visited the Spooners in Brookfield in December. His hosts, however, shared an increasingly uncomfortable marriage. Bathsheba declared feeling an “utter aversion” to her husband, who appeared to have been given to abuse and drink.82 That winter of 1777–78, Ross lived in their household. He was a companion to Joshua, accompanying him on short business trips. In this time, Bathsheba also took young Ross as her lover. According to Ezra, Bathsheba had asked him why he looked so low spirited. He had replied, “It was my long absence from home.” She coyly suggested that he “wanted someone to lodge with . . . [and] She asked me if such a One as herself would do?” As suave as any seventeen-year-old could be, Ross “made answer If she was agreeable, I was.”83 Bathsheba was a forceful woman and the daughter of a prominent Massachusetts family. Still, her affair with Ross certainly set them both on a dangerous path. Trapped in an unhappy marriage, with divorce unobtainable, Bathsheba Spooner saw Relationships between Soldiers and Civilians 113 in young Ezra Ross an opportunity to retain her property and status while being rid of her husband. According to the later newspaper reports, after her “amorous overtures,” Mrs. Spooner told Ross “that if he would kill her husband, she would become his lawful wife.” Ross “at first started at the appearance of so much guilt; but upon her persuasions and the fancied happiness of marrying a woman so much above his rank in life, and the allurements of wallowing in Mr. Spooner’s wealth he fatally consented.”84 Ezra Ross’s experiences as a young soldier and his position as a young man seeking his way forward in life reveal the full meaning of his actions and place in the Spooners’ story. Bathsheba offered him all that a young man at that stage of life sought: erotic love, marriage, and an independent living. He had sought those qualities of adult manhood through military service. Was a capital crime and a mortal sin harder or more shocking than what he had seen in the last two campaigns? Bathsheba obtained poison and proposed that Ezra slip it into Joshua’s drink while the two men were traveling, but the youth found himself unable to do the deed. Bathsheba was pregnant by Ross at that point, in the winter of 1778, and she realized that time for her plan was running short. She pulled two British prisoners from Burgoyne’s captured army from the road as they walked toward Cambridge and promised them money and goods to do the murder. On the evening of March 1, 1778, these two sprung on Joshua Spooner as he returned, drunk, from town, beat him to death with a log, and threw his body in his well. Ezra Ross returned to the house in time to see the British soldiers handling the corpse, and then he helped them hide it. Their conspiracy quickly unraveled, however, and the two British soldiers, Ezra Ross, and a five-month-pregnant Bathsheba Spooner were tried and hanged late that spring. The scandalous murder was news all over New England.85 Ministers reduced the story to a straightforward morality tale: “They that get Wealth by bloody Ways, / and slight the righteous Rules, / Do leave them here admidst their Days, / and die at last like Fools . . . / Be sure young Men do you attend / to what the Scripture says, / ‘that he that’s wicked overmuch,’ / ‘shan’t live out half his Days.’ ”86 Questions of wickedness aside, Bathsheba Spooner had tried to change her life by ridding herself of one husband with the intent to take another who would owe her his status. Ezra Ross had similarly sought to fix his place in the world. He had entered the service of his country and had suffered for its independence. A respectable, independent manhood had been the moral and material promises of his country. Through a twist of fate, he saw in the overtures 114 Becoming Men of Some Consequence of Bathsheba Spooner an easy, albeit illicit, route to that manhood. Many youths like Ezra Ross lost their lives on bloody battlefields or in sickly camps in pursuit of their independence. Ross lost his on a gallows, after pursuing the same object. * * * An officer shook his head at the “Shocking condition” of his soldiers’ clothing as they marched through New York in 1777. Worse, he wrote, “they were ridiculed here and when we were abroad the other Day, they were hooted at by ye Inhabitants in ye Towns we passed thro’ for their Rags and nakedness, tis hard, tis shamefull.”87 Soldiers answered disdain in kind. A Pennsylvania captain boasted of having had “the happiness of treating some of the male Butterflies with the most humiliating contempt” when he passed through British-evacuated Philadelphia in 1779.88 Though rhetoric of a singular American people unified against Britain in their defense of liberty was useful, it was nevertheless a fiction. The Revolution was in part a civil war, with perhaps 20 percent of the white population rejecting Independence as wicked folly and over 20,000 loyalists bearing arms for King and Parliament. A plurality of Americans certainly just wished to be left alone.89 Though Revolutionary governments and committees wrested thirteen colonies from British control, and specific communities did stand united in support of Independence, the bonds across regions and provinces were tenuous. Even hearty patriots wearied under the burdens of war, and cracks of division spread and widened. The division between inhabitants of the independent states and their soldiers was a terrible danger to the Revolution. As the war dragged on and enthusiasm faded into complacency or apathy, the Continental Army became the central institution and physical manifestation of the collective cause. Republican ideology, civilians’ warranted mistrust of soldiers, and soldiers’ depredations yielded increasing alienation and anger, however. Civilians’ fear and disdain for those soldiers and Continentals’ plundering and anger at their countrymen’s neglect undermined the tenuous legitimacy of the movement. Though the Revolution required an army and that army required support, civilian families and companies of soldiers often looked at each other with anger and betrayal. Those neglectful inhabitants were not Revolutionary soldiers’ enemies, and though a professionalism and esprit de corps encouraged a soldierly identity, those young men-in-arms preferred kind words and support from the civilians around them. Though soldiers’ behavior in camp set them apart from civilian society and their depredations against inhabit- Relationships between Soldiers and Civilians 115 ants’ property alienated them from their so-called countrymen, they were not permanent exiles. Their close proximity to the civilian sphere—and the potential for normal relationships—kept young soldiers of the Revo- lution from drifting too far from the normal progress through their life course. By presenting themselves to civilian communities as young men, soldiers and officers made themselves familiar and less threatening. When they made personal and contractual agreements and took up the social roles appropriate to their position in the life course—as dependent members of a household, as laborers, or as suitors—they could find themselves reincorporated into civilian society. Under specific circumstances, civilians could recognize the familiar figure of a young man underneath the otherwise strange and threatening visage of the soldier. Washington’s scrupu- lous leadership is usually credited for forestalling the great republican fear that the army would separate from the people and destroy their liberties. Credit also lay with his young soldiers, however. Their simple and normal aspirations for their lives—for independence, respect, and love in civilian communities—served as a sheet anchor that prevented their drift into militarism. Their time as soldiers was meant to further, not replace, those traditional pursuits, though managing their return to civilian life would prove a challenge in itself.

116 Becoming Men of Some Consequence “To Quit the Service of 4 Their Country” young men’s decisions to leave the continental army

“You asked me, my dear father . . . what bounds have I set to my desire of serving my country in the military line?” wrote John Laurens, George Washington’s brash, twenty-three-year-old aide-de-camp, at the beginning of the third year of the war in January 1778. “I answer glorious death or the triumph of the cause in which we are engaged.”1 In the chill November winds of 1779, by contrast, twenty-three-year-old Sergeant Benjamin Gilbert counted down the days left in his three-year enlistment: “Cold and Windy. This Day Two Months I am a free man.”2 At every point in the American War for Independence, young enlisted soldiers and officers grappled with the decision of when and how to leave the military service. The Continental Army, with its particularly long and intense service, offers a vivid picture of that process. As young Colonel Laurens and Sergeant Gilbert suggest, feelings about returning home ranged from outright rejection to desperate eagerness. Quitting the army was a landmark event in young soldiers’ Revolutionary experience and was as personally significant as their enlistment and experiences in the ranks. The decisions young men made about how and when to leave the army depended on the interplay of political ideology, economic pressures, hometown realities, definitions of manhood and honor, and their own perceptions of the benefits and costs of their service. Ultimately, their aspirations and resources for attaining a respectable manhood and advancing in life shaped young Continentals’ feelings and decisions about leaving the army and returning home. The overwhelming majority of young men who served in the Con- tinental Army left it before the war ended—about three years of service appears to have been what most could bear.3 Despite this reality, soldiers’ decisions to leave the army fit poorly with the narrative of the Glorious Cause and have been deemphasized since the war itself. When Thomas Paine told disheartened militias and one-year enlistees at the end of their terms in the last days of 1776 that only the “summer soldier and the sun- shine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country,” he defined the patriotic limits for thinking about men leaving the army.4 The persistent gravity of Paine’s words has pulled historians’ attention away from the overwhelming majority of Continental soldiers who chose to return home before the end of the war. Both the political and military leaders of the Revolution and their historians have narrowly focused on the collapse of naive military enthusiasm early in the war and the nature of desertion—forms of departure with the strongest ideological implications and institutional consequences.5 Looking at these soldiers as young men at a specific point in their life course aligns historical analysis with the interests and perspectives of these actors rather than with the institutions or prescriptive ideological discourses that sought to control their service. Revolutionary officers and soldiers littered the records of the army with their resignations, desertions, and failures to reenlist. Their public actions and personal accounts reveal how they eagerly anticipated or anxiously pondered their return to civilian life. For these young men, their time in the army, whether long or short, ideally formed a discrete phase in their lives. In the enthusiastic first years of the war, young men had to reconcile rising disillusionment with the military obligations imposed by their communities. During the economic crisis of the war’s middle years, young soldiers’ desire to seize opportunities outside of the army and resume passage through the life course—to get on with building adult male lives—strongly influenced decisions to leave the army. At the end of the war, the army’s disbanding and uncertain postwar prospects provoked tremendous anxiety among young Continental officers. Would the end of the war and the return to civilian life un-man the officers who had spent their youth to secure their country’s liberty? While elite officers and humble enlisted men acted differently, according to the demands of social rank, their feelings of disillusionment, opportunism, and anxiety about leaving the army constantly shifted, contended, and overlapped across the course of the war. These emotions and the decisions to leave the army grew from young Continentals’ shared and central dilemma of how to return successfully to civilian life and advance along the path toward adult manhood.

118 Becoming Men of Some Consequence Disillusionment

Young men left the ranks of the Revolutionary forces from the earliest days of the war at the siege of Boston. Despite the heated rhetoric of Liberty or Death, few were personally ready to wage a war without end. Soldiers of that first Continental Army, organized in the summer of 1775 out of the volunteers and militia besieging British-held Boston, had only temporarily laid aside their civilian lives. Their service was defensive and a patriotic duty, not a long-term vocation. They were unwilling to serve beyond their contracted time. One company of Massachusetts militia, convinced that they had done their duty, simply walked home in June 1775. Enraged, Cambridge’s Committee of Safety denounced these soldiers for “Deserting the cause of their country” in a letter to the soldiers’ home town of Bradford. Members of Bradford’s committee convinced their soldiers to reenlist or provide substitutes; these town fathers then sheepishly asked that the army receive the Bradford company back “into favour as if this had never happened.”6 With the nature of the conflict uncertain, the civilian community served as one arbiter of soldiers’ obligations and the duration of their service. For enlisted soldiers, the expiration of their contracted terms of enlistment satisfied honor and political obligation. In the fall of 1775, soldiers in the fortifications surrounding Boston were itching to return home; by early 1776, out of the approximately fifteen thousand soldiers in the Amer- ican lines, eight out of ten of them had returned home. In November 1775, George Washington reported to Congress that he feared half of the officers beneath the rank of captain were leaving the army. Traditional colonial contractual expectations for military service gave soldiers a legitimate reason to head home at the end of their enlistments, despite repeated and ideologically charged requests for further service. New Englanders countered rhetoric about soldiering as a manly obligation and a test of honor by holding to the letter of their enlistment terms. By departing the army on schedule, they asserted their independence and declared their status as free men who controlled their own time and their own persons. They had only temporarily accepted the civil limitations of the soldier. Without a time limit, military subordination too closely mirrored the subordinate status of women, servants, and slaves.7 The Connecticut Continentals at the end of 1775 provide a striking example of the conflict between soldiers’ ideas about contractual obligation and the army’s expectations. The Connecticut troops’ time was up

Young Men’s Decisions to Leave the Continental Army 119 at the beginning of December 1775, which was a month before the regiments from other states were released. When their officers made efforts to extend the Connecticut enlistments to match that of the other troops at the siege of Boston, one lieutenant found “not a man would engage.” When December arrived, the Connecticut troops marched for home just as their enlistments stipulated, ignoring the abuse of the irascible and short-tempered General Charles Lee. One Connecticut soldier recorded the general’s rant in his diary: Lee said, “ ‘Men, I do not know what to call you, [you] are the worst of all creatures,’ [he] flung and curst and swore at us, and said if we would not stay he would order us to go [fight] on Bun- ker Hill and if we would not go he would order the [Virginia] riflemen to fire at us.” Afterward, Lee posted on his headquarters door an order commanding civilians, “as you value the sacred rights and liberties of your country,” do not feed or shelter any soldier returning home. That night, the Connecticut soldier noted, “the paper was took down as soon as it was dark, and another put up [saying] that General Lee was a fool and if he had not come here we should not have known it.” Undeterred by General Lee’s threats, the Connecticut men knew their rights, had fulfilled their enlistment obligations, and returned home.8 The Connecticut soldiers’ assertion of manly independence in departing did not go uncontested, however. General Lee smugly reported that the Connecticut men had “marched off bag and baggage,” but “in passing through the line of regiments, they were so horribly hissed, groaned at, and pelted that I believe they wished their aunts, grandmothers, and even sweethearts, to whom the days before they were so much attached, [were] at the devil’s own place.”9 Lee and the remaining Continentals chose to see the Connecticut troops as boys running home to the care of women rather than as staunch republicans holding to the terms of their enlistment agreements. Lee’s emphasis on “aunts, grandmothers, and even sweethearts” was central to his insult—these young soldiers were not leaving to care for wives or children. The hissing soldiers from the other regiments agreed. Lee made this message explicit in his order for “Publicans and other Housekeepers” to shun these soldiers: they were “disaffected miscre- ants” who had “forfeited all title to be treated not only [as] fellow citizens but as men.”10 Connecticut civilians apparently played their appointed role as enforcers of the soldierly ideal. According to a contemporary historian of the Revolution, more than a few Connecticut soldiers were “stopped by the country people and compelled to return.”11 Facing “such an unfavor- able Reception at Home,” General Nathanael Greene noted, “many are 120 Becoming Men of Some Consequence returning to Camp again already.”12 As young men, their proper place was in the fortifications around Boston. With the acknowledged end of contracted enlistments, young men had a valid reason to return home, and they were eager to get there. By the end of 1775, many of the Revolutionary soldiers who returned home from Boston were disheartened by the fatigues of army life. General Greene found his soldiers “so sick of this way of life, and so home sick” that he did not expect them to reenlist.13 Another young officer mocked these recalcitrant veterans, explaining to a friend, “The Soldiers can give no other reason for not Enlisting, than the old Woman’s, They wou’d not, cause the[y] wou’d not.”14 Many had flown to arms under “the delusive expectation,” observed historian David Ramsay, that a few decisive battles would settle “the whole dispute. . . . Experience soon taught them to risque life in open fighting, was but a part of the soldiers’ duty.”15 Exhaustion, exposure, and boredom made up the balance. The wave of disillusionment crested with the disasters of the 1776 campaign. The American forces withdrawing from Canada were ravaged by smallpox and harried by British troops. In and around New York City, hundreds of American soldiers died and thousands fell captive. At Fort Washington alone, the British captured almost three thousand American soldiers. An officer recalled that desertion from Manhattan was so severe in the face of the British onslaught that he had to post a guard at Kings- bridge at the northern tip of the island to staunch the flow of soldiers heading home.16 Many Continentals deserted or headed home as their terms expired in the near-collapse of the American cause in the fall of 1776—desertion, casualties, and sickness nearly destroyed Washington’s forces in the mid-Atlantic. In mid-August 1776, Washington had nineteen thousand effective soldiers. He fled across the Delaware in early Decem- ber with perhaps two thousand.17 With survival uncertain and victory unimaginable, soldiers fled the army to save themselves. Defeat and disillusionment fueled each other. “I gos to See my Brother that was belonging to Col. Hichcok’s Ridgment,” Elijah Fisher recorded in November 1776, “and coming there I finds my Brother Enoch was Dead . . . which shook me vary much for I did hope to have found him well.” This shock pushed Fisher over the edge. Although he had been able to bear a chronic “stich of Pain” in his side for several months, his brothers’ death proved too much to take. The next day, Fisher secured a medical discharge and went home, “being unable to Endure the fatages of the army”—fatigues that burdened both his mind and body.18 Young Men’s Decisions to Leave the Continental Army 121 Even the young men who survived and stayed with the army through the defeats of ’76 were eager to get home at the end of their term, and reenlisting was by no means certain. Consider the experience of Obadiah Brown of Massachusetts. Brown had been badly wounded in the arm in the fighting around New York City. Despite his wound, he still considered further service. He wrote in his diary two days before the end of his enlistment, “I thought if I was att home I would not [en]List again till my arm got will.” A fortnight later, he arrived home and understandably “felt glad of it.” The comforts of home made up his mind about returning to the army. His arm healed, but he did no further service with the Conti- nentals.19 The burdens of defeat, wounds, and disillusionment convinced many soldiers like Brown that it was time for others to take their place in the army. Even after the dramatic victory at Trenton, some soldiers were uninterested in the bounties offered for an extra six weeks in the ranks. One of these young men, John Greenwood, had already reenlisted once and “was determined to quit as soon as [his] time was out.” Having suffered from “the itch,” vermin, and freezing nights lying “huddled close together like hogs” with his fellow soldiers, he declined further service. Though promised an ensign’s commission, Greenwood told his lieutenant, “I would not stay to be a colonel.”20 By the end of the 1776, disillusionment had also spread to young soldiers’ families. In a telling pension application, a veteran framed his leaving the army as his parents’ decision. At twenty-three years old, Sylvanus Wood had stood as a minuteman on Lexington Green. After three tours across 1775 and 1776, he was offered the first lieutenancy in a Continental company. Wood only served four months in the rank before resigning. He recalled for his pension application, “I told the colonel I would stay with all my heart if I was not overpowered at home . . . I saw my parents and offered them all I was worth if they would be willing I should stay in the army. But no offer whatever would answer.” They demanded that their twenty-five-year-old son return home. Wood then “concluded to leave the army,” though, as he insisted in his pension application, he did so only “with great reluctance.”21 It is possible Wood exaggerated his eagerness to continue in Continental service in his pension statement and held up his parents’ refusal to mask his own war weariness. If so, it was an excuse that resonated and provided cover in both 1776 and 1830. For young soldiers ready to quit the field at the end of 1776, their families’ objections to further service could insulate them from community censure. To do so,

122 Becoming Men of Some Consequence however, young veterans had to admit that they were not yet their own masters. In the first two years of the war, young men left the army through desertion or at the end of their stipulated terms disillusioned by the fatigues and dangers of army life. Patriotism was now tempered by a hard- won realism—a realism bought by personal experience or carried home by veterans with harrowing tales of want, disease, battle, and death. These soldiers had answered the discourses of manly obligation; it was time for some other men to step forward and serve.

Opportunism and the Life Course

Young soldiers who left the Continental Army in the middle years of the war, however, got out of the service to pursue the best opportunities in a disordered world. Their reasons mirrored their motivations for enlistment. Recruits’ expectations for Continental service had shifted with the introduction of sizable enlistment bounties in 1777 and increasing community pressure to induce the young and poor to serve. These promised rewards offered poor young men the money or land to build independent households after a few years of service. The inflation in prices and, after 1778, the catastrophic depreciation in the value of Continental currency compared to specie, opened a dramatic gap between soldiers’ economic expectations at enlistment and their quickly deteriorating economic reality as they continued to serve. After 1778, patriots had fewer fears that they could lose their War for Independence, compounding Continentals’ discontent with the risks and boredom of camp life and heightening their aggravation with civilians who had apparently “returned to their former habits of lucrative business.”22 Not only had the changed economic calculus for service in the middle of the war dissuaded young men from joining the army, it also encouraged them to leave it. As a result, young Continentals in the middle years of the Revolution- ary War faced two dilemmas: how might they reconcile continued service with their economic and social ambitions, and how could they return to civilian life without further harming their prospects? For some, this meant accepting the risks of desertion. Others left the army at the end of their enlistments and then refused to reenlist, disappointing the hopes of military and civilian leaders. For young officers, opportunism in leaving the army in the middle years of the war depended on the interplay of their

Young Men’s Decisions to Leave the Continental Army 123 military and civilian ambitions, their ideas about honor, and the options available to them in civilian life. The experiences of Private John Adlum and Captain Alexander Gray- don, both young Pennsylvanians, illustrate the reactions of young men when their service in the Continental Army did not meet their aspirations. At the outbreak of the war, John Adlum was an ambitious and up-and- coming young man. Though the son of a poor deerskin tanner, young Adlum’s mental talents and personality had caught the attention of prominent men in York, who encouraged his education. Military mobilization offered an opportunity to defend his community and further prove himself. Adlum was captured in November 1776 at Fort Washington in New York. Only seventeen years old, he escaped the deadly British prisons in New York City by serving as a waiter for a group of captured Continental officers who then arranged his return to Pennsylvania under a parole of his own—a promise not to fight again until formally exchanged. Adlum’s time under arms and in the company of officers had encouraged his ambitions for a commission of his own. Apparently, he would have received it but had to wait until “exchanged” for a British prisoner. Blocked in his military ambitions, Adlum instead threw himself into building a livelihood and a civilian career and served no further during the war. Instead, with the help of his civilian patrons, Adlum completed his education and resumed his path to personal independence by working as a surveyor.23 Like Adlum, Captain Alexander Graydon also was captured at Fort Washington. As the son of a wealthy and connected Pennsylvania family, Graydon naturally had entered the army as a commissioned officer. He passed his time as a prisoner-of-war in relatively comfortable captivity in New York City. He was released on his parole in the summer of 1777 and then formally exchanged in the spring of 1778. During this time on parole, Graydon found himself in an awkward position. He wrote in his memoir, “I was not at liberty to act [in a civilian profession] . . . but however willing I might have been to consider myself a soldier, or to obey orders I had no regiment to join or men to command.” Graydon found his time as a prisoner of war “not unlike . . . entering into a monastery . . . in the one case, a man was said to be civilly dead, so, in the other he was militarily so.” Lingering in this state, neither able to pursue military service nor free to resume his civilian career, Graydon lamented he might as well be “as dead as an antediluvian, as to all purposes of worldly advantage.” Finally classi- fied as a “supernumerary” officer after his exchange, Graydon resigned his

124 Becoming Men of Some Consequence commission, ending a brief military career that brought neither glory nor advancement.24 Graydon’s actions and opinions about leaving the army, though ret- rospective, offer insight into his goals as a young gentleman in his early twenties. Some of his fellow officer-prisoners had scrambled for reinstatement after their exchange, he recalled, “but none without the chagrin of seeing new men, and numbers who had originally ranked below them, now above them.” Graydon, rejecting this inevitable slight to both his honor and ambition, never applied for reinstatement. In his memoir, he temporized that “had my country really wanted my services, and there been an opening, in which I could have been provided for, without too much degradation . . . I should have laid aside all private considerations and embraced it.” After all, he felt a “hankering after the business of the tented field,” and he insisted that he “had grown fond” of serving in the army, though the “dog’s life as it is.” Graydon’s actions in the spring of 1778, however, show he was done with military service that did nothing to satisfy his ambitions for advancement. When later drafted for militia service, he refused to stand in the ranks with “the Peasantry of the Country” and paid a fine to be released. “After having held the Rank of Captain in the Continental Army,” Graydon explained to Pennsylvania’s government, “his feelings would have been wounded by being obliged to perform the Duty of private Centinel.” Moreover, the British withdrawal from Philadelphia had removed his local interest in the prosecution of the war. Graydon saw further service as degrading, whether as an officer slighted in promotion or especially as a member of the militia rank-and-file. Tellingly, he immediately married after his exchange and resignation. Only by returning to civilian life and starting a family could Graydon resume his place as a respectable gentleman in his community and get on with his life.25 Adlum and Graydon, young and ambitious men from opposite sides of the social hierarchy, came to a similar decision in the middle of the war. Adlum wanted to climb into the respectable ranks of his community. Graydon desired the respect and authority owed to his family’s station. After their release from captivity, military service no longer could answer their goals. At that point, both laid aside the life of a soldier and resumed their passage through the life course as civilians—Adlum by seeking an upwardly mobile profession and Graydon by marrying and taking his place in civilian society. Young enlisted Continentals serving in the middle years of the war

Young Men’s Decisions to Leave the Continental Army 125 also weighed whether continuing in the army suited their personal ambitions and economic needs. The rapidly declining economic situation hit soldiers hard. Caught between rising prices and depreciating paper currency, soldiers’ and officers’ pay quickly became worthless. From 1775 to 1777, the Continental currency had lost a quarter of its purchasing power, but the precipitous decline accelerated in late 1778 and 1779. At the end of August 1778, four and a half paper dollars bought one silver dollar. By April 1779, the ratio had crashed to twelve to one, and by that June it was fifteen dollars paper to one dollar specie.26 Pay and enlistment bounties made in Continental paper became worthless. As a result, many young men who had enlisted in pursuit of economic competency knew they had to get out of the army. Their dilemma was how to leave service in the middle of the war without endangering their position or prospects back home. For enlisted men, this meant a choice between desertion and waiting out their terms. Desertion had costs, but so did remaining in the army. Leaving the army in the middle of the war meant balancing dangers and economic risks with potential opportunities back in civilian life. Desertion was the fastest way enlisted soldiers could get themselves out of the army, but it presented immediate and lingering consequences for young men. There was a fundamental motivational divide among deserters between men who absconded soon after enlisting, those who fled for immediate safety, and those who left to pursue opportunity. Approxi- mately one fifth to a quarter of Continentals deserted across the entire war, with great fluctuation among states and circumstances. Desertions spiked during periods of extreme deprivation, often making escape a matter of simple survival. Most deserters were men who had just joined the army, however. Continentals were most likely to desert within three months of their enlistment. These men had changed their minds about submitting to several years in the ranks and had not yet formed cohesive bonds with their fellow soldiers.27 Some of these deserters had only joined the army as bounty-jumpers: taking the reward for enlistment, they immediately deserted and then signed up again with a different officer. Washington complained that bounty-jumping was “a kind of business” for some soldiers, and one private noted in his diary the firing-squad execution of a soldier who had illicitly enlisted seven times for bounties.28 These men were more akin to con artists than would-be soldiers. Some desertions had more to do with having nothing to lose. Some Continentals, especially those of the Virginia line, were thought to be prone to desertion because some were prior deserters from the militia who 126 Becoming Men of Some Consequence had been pressed into Continental service as punishment, or were convicts or servants purchased for service as substitutes for their masters.29 Both contemporary observers and historians found that foreign-born men were more likely to desert than their native-born recruits. In 1778, a loyalist leader estimated that three out of four deserters from the American army were foreign born.30 It is possible these men were less deeply rooted in civilian society and faced barriers to quick bond-formation in the ranks. Provided they avoided recapture with its attendant threat of flogging or execution, such men did not risk losing much in the civilian sphere as deserters. By contrast, the more rooted a Continental was in a civilian community and the longer he served into his term of enlistment, the less likely he was to desert.31 The dilemma for young Continentals with some civilian prospects was how to escape from the army without damaging their postwar aspirations at home. While relatives and neighbors were often willing to protect deserters by not turning them over to civilian authorities, this required a significant degree of collusion and might not offer permanent refuge.32 The Committee of Safety in Essex, New Hampshire, for example, printed a list in July 1779 of the 147 deserters from the state’s three battalions, and instructed the civil and military officers, as well as “all other Persons, who have the Good of their Country at Heart,” to apprehend them.33 Lieuten- ant Colonel Dudley Colman similarly instructed his wife to tell the selectmen of Newbury, Massachusetts, to be on the lookout for the deserter Roger Lord. Knowing Lord’s friends or relations could be helping him, Colman warned his wife “not to mention this publickly least he should get intelligence of it and avoid being taken.”34 In 1780, Massachusetts offered rewards for citizens to turn in deserters and threatened fines ranging from £500 to £1,500 on militia officers, privateer captains, or anyone who sheltered or employed “a known deserter.”35 Continental officers on recruiting trips in their home states were always on the lookout to pick up deserters, and contacted local authorities to report desertions by men of the community. The risks of desertion were clear. Sarah James wrote to her husband Elisha in the fall of 1777, “I hope it wont be a greate while befor you will Come home If you are alive and wall du git desmist as soon as you Can but [do] not run away and be advertisd as david and versil ware.”36 Sarah James did not want her husband to return only to be “advertisd” and forced into hiding. There were limits to the protection relatives and communities could give their deserters, constraining the choices of Continentals as they considered illicit escape from the army. Young Men’s Decisions to Leave the Continental Army 127 Even if home communities were willing to forgive desertion, these soldiers still faced economic and social disruption. One general warned his soldiers that the life of a deserter was “so exquisitely miserable.” He was “suspicious of his very Friends (if a deserter can have a friend).” Worse, the deserter lived “with an Abject meaness . . . Shri[n]king from the gaze of every eye he meets . . . and dreading the notice of the very Air he Breaths.” Stripped of “the heartfelt pleasure of Social confidence,” the deserter would be “pursued continually by apprehension, and terror, until overtaken by of- fended Justice . . . he sufferes that shameful Death he so richly merits.”37 Though the general was extravagant with his language, he offered a real warning that desertion meant alienation and social death before physical execution by the army. For young Continentals with any prospects at home, the army warned that desertion could only cut off the social ties and resources necessary for advancing in life. Faced with the reality that friends and relatives could not hide them indefinitely, some deserters fled to the frontiers for refuge, seeking a new start and new community. David Cobb, a Massachusetts lieutenant colonel, was told by a soldier of his regiment that “numbers of deserters” had gone into the northern New England backcountry “to settle some wild lands” and refused to return.38 Stepping out of the ranks on a march or wandering from camp in an unobserved moment was simple. Making one’s way in civilian life as a deserter as if nothing had happened was far more difficult. Deserting to pursue the demands of the civilian male life course was an uncertain gamble, so some Continentals sought creative alternatives to get out of the army. One captain exploited this impulse by taking payments from gullible soldiers to write their discharge papers. These Continentals might have hoped the legitimacy of a paper trail would protect them. The captain’s court-martial revealed, however, that he not only defrauded the army, but that he also sold out the soldiers he discharged by reporting them as deserters.39 Other soldiers sought a legitimate escape from the army by hiring other men to serve out the remainder of their enlistments. This appeared a sufficient danger to the integrity of enlistment terms that generals had to issue formal orders forbidding the practice.40 Many young Continentals had enlisted after 1776 for economic advancement, but the uneven wartime economy made it increasingly clear that military service wasted their time and only delayed economic competence and independence. Whether by risking desertion, playing a clever gambit, or refusing reenlistment at the end of their term, the need to follow better opportunities meant many young men were done with Continental service. 128 Becoming Men of Some Consequence Young Continental officers also felt the persistent tug of promised opportunities and the threat of personal stagnation in the army as the war dragged into its third and fourth years. Like the enlisted men they commanded, officers had to manage their departure from the army in a way that would not damage their civilian prospects. Many young Continental officers were sons of prominent, prosperous families. They possessed far greater resources to build independent lives and careers once they left the army than the humbler soldiers they commanded. At least in principle, they also could resign their commissions at any point. As John Laurens warned a fellow young officer trying to resign, however, “every officer is bound by the Laws of Hounour . . . to retain his Commission as long as he has any prospect of being serviceable to his Country.”41 Failure to have a sufficiently worthy excuse for leaving the army could severely damage an officer’s reputation and subsequent prospects in civilian life. Before a battle in the Saratoga campaign, for example, one officer lost his nerve and precipitously resigned his commission to escape the impending combat. His commander grudgingly accepted, wrote out a discharge, and handed it over. The resigning officer was horrified to read the details of his -cow ardice explained in punishing detail on the back side of the certificate. Realizing his impending humiliation at home, he was at a loss for what to do. A sympathetic wit suggested that the cowardly officer tear the sheet in half and paste it back together on top of another piece of paper—and tell anyone who asked that the certificate had accidentally torn. With his shame safely hidden by this dash of Yankee ingenuity, the ex-officer happily set off for home.42 Extricating themselves from military obligation with honor would require some creativity. Consequences in civilian life after leaving the army constrained officers. In 1776, General Charles Lee explicitly used shame and the threat of civilian retaliation to dissuade resignations. Lee instructed officers with “an intention to quit the Service of their Country at this important crisis . . . to Send their Reasons in writing, that he may lay them before the Committee of Safety and Continental Congress, who are the best Judges of the merit or demerit of their Resignations.” If this threat of exposure before the political elite was insufficient to prevent resignation, Lee raised the stakes by giving all such officers permission to leave immediately, refusing to accept service “from the Backward, unwilling, and lukewarm.”43 Likewise, when Captain Alexander Graydon and several fellow officers threatened to resign to protest being passed over for promotion, their colonel called their bluff. He warned that quitting the army, Graydon re- Young Men’s Decisions to Leave the Continental Army 129 called, “would ruin us, in the public opinion, and embitter our future lives; it would recoil upon ourselves, and be an everlasting blister to our sensibility.”44 They backed down. For enlisted men, leaving the army in the middle of the war was a matter of getting back on a path to economic competence and social advancement. For young officers, resigning without an acceptable reason threatened their reputations and honor—the currency with which they hoped to build civilian careers, marriages, and respectability. To overcome such a stigma, officers needed justification for resignation that would satisfy the dictates of honor—reasons to give their commanders, their communities, and themselves. Illness, poor health, or wounds were all acceptable excuses. In resigning, one officer explained to his commander, “the fatigues of a Military Life . . . [are] by no means agreeable to my constitution and . . . my health will not admit of remaining in Ser- vice.”45 Financial hardship, by contrast, offered insufficient justification for resignation: “the private concerns of every officer in the army will suffer,” Washington acknowledged, but it “must have been expected, as a matter of course, at their first acceptance of their commissions.”46 Officers who could point to the economic suffering of their dependent wives and families had a way to counter the demands of military honor, however. “Military Glory and a hearty attachment to the cause of my country, had nearly overbalanced every other consideration,” wrote one lieutenant in his resignation. “But my feelings are most visibly touch’d when I reflect on the situation of my Family, which demands my particular attention.”47 The lieutenant weighed two sets of respectable masculine emotions: passionate patriotism and martial honor versus sensibility and husbandly duty. He sacrificed a military identity, but only in favor of a domestic manhood of equal respectability.48 Younger officers without domestic or professional roots in the civilian sphere felt the economic consequences of continued service differently. These junior officers sensed life passing them by as they served in the army. Major Israel Keith of Massachusetts had denied in 1776 any intention of leaving the army, insisting, “I might as well think of getting clear of the plague or an earthquake as the present calamity.” The unexpected marriage of his younger brother, however, cast in high relief the fact that life went on outside of the army and raised the idea that perhaps the war and a military life were escapable after all. It was telling that Keith vigorously disapproved of his younger brother’s marriage, which in part may have reflected his own jealousy and discomfort at his lack of personal progress toward the next stage of life.49 Young officers saw themselves missing opportunities 130 Becoming Men of Some Consequence their peers easily seized. Lieutenant Samuel Shaw was about twenty-five years old when he shared this realization with his brother in 1779: “I have made a discovery lately or others have done it for me.—What do you think it is? I am old and growing older every day! . . . Indeed, my young brother, I hope we shall have peace before we grow much older. Here’s Bill I suppose married or about being married—how it is with Ben I can’t say—nor have your told me with regard to yourself. Don’t you sometimes think of these matters, and cast about how a family is to be maintained? I’m afraid if this unlucky war should continue I shall be the batchelor of the family.”50 Shaw signed himself “your old friend and brother.” Twenty-five was hardly geriatric, but it was near the average marrying age for young men in New England.51 Shaw measured himself against his civilian brothers and peers and found himself wanting. He saw the long war delaying him from finding a profession, starting a family, and moving along in life. His best hope was that the war would end before too long. By the middle years of the war, some young officers saw continued service as a threat to their future success and surrendered their commissions to get on with their lives. Three officers offer instructive examples. James Monroe was twenty years old in 1779 when he resigned as an aide- de-camp to seek his own command in a state regiment. After his new commission fell through, he bitterly wrote his old general that in leaving the army he “had retired from society, with almost a resolution never to return to it again.”52 Disappointed in his military career, he would study law instead. Captain John Marshall also had the decision to leave the army made for him. A reorganization of Virginia’s Continental regiments left him without troops to command by December 1779. He went home on furlough to return with the new companies, but they were never raised. While he waited, Marshall briefly studied law early in 1780 and finally resigned his commission in February 1781 after having been engaged in civilian life for a little over a year.53 Twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant- Colonel Aaron Burr also left the army at this point in the war. Disgusted with political pettiness within the officer corps and suffering ill health, he resigned and also immediately pursued a civilian career as an attorney.54 Blocked or disappointed in military promotion, these three young officers turned to civilian careers as attorneys as a likely avenue toward renewed public status and civilian leadership. While these men later rose to the pinnacle of power in the early republic, as young officers in their twenties they were just simply trying to find the least bad option. William Tudor, a young officer from Boston and aide to Washington Young Men’s Decisions to Leave the Continental Army 131 in 1776, highlights young men’s personal and professional calculations as they weighed whether to continue in the army or return to civilian life. With the crisis of the fall of 1776 behind him, Tudor wrote to William Thompson, a civilian friend in Boston, to gauge reactions to his possible resignation. In response to these queries, Thompson urged Tudor to quit the army, arguing that only by leaving the army could Tudor make progress in his civilian life. The army could neither offer sufficient remunera- tion nor a permanent career. Besides, Thompson told Tudor, “The civil, domestic life, and not the military seemed your principal wish.” In contrast with Tudor’s limited prospects for promotion to “Superior Command,” Thompson thought “there was a very promising prospect if not a certainty, of your having full and very lucrative employment in the Business of your profession, which would advance your private Interest.” Most importantly, Thompson promised his officer friend, “Your Reputation would not suffer . . . nor the public Cause be injured as many a one would be glad to succeed you.” In the end, Thompson insisted that Tudor “owed a proper Regard to yourself as well as the public.”55 As Tudor and Thompson’s correspondence reveals, young officers could not simply cast aside the demands of honor and republican virtue that demanded continued service. Seeking reassurance, they remembered the ladies and turned to female correspondents to gauge opinions at home and test various masculine performances. Would the stalwart soldier, the ambitious man of worth, or the devoted lover bring the fastest and furthest advancement? Most importantly, young officers could use this correspondence to defend their decision about leaving the army in the middle of a war, addressing both the expectations of the civilian sphere as well as their own ambitions. Accordingly, across 1776 and 1777, William Tudor wrote about leaving the army to Delia Jarvis, a Boston loyalist he had been un- successfully courting since before the war. William alternately used Delia’s supposed wishes to frame his hopes to return home and his resolve to stay with the army. In May 1776, he apologized, “I shall not very soon see Boston.” The reason? “I do not chuse to quit the Army,” he explained, “till I have the General’s intire Approbation.” Tudor was certain “my Friends” (and by association, his female correspondent) “would not aprove my taking any Step that should hurt my Honour.”56 From Harlem, during the New York City campaign, Tudor again told Delia Jarvis about “some very pressing Wishes from several Friends” that he leave the army. “I would do it,” he insisted, “could I reconcile such a Step at this Time to my Feelings.” In this instance, Tudor left it to her to decide: “Shall I return? I assuredly 132 Becoming Men of Some Consequence will if you say yes.” If Delia urged his return, however, he would take it as an engagement to marry: “In the monisyllable yes, is included a grant of every Boon I shall dare to ask you when I do return. Bid me come home & I will fly to obey you.”57 For her part, Delia was unimpressed with his entreaties: “You may write me in a more sober stile or better not at all. for me, I never expected to be more contented than I am at present”—unmarried.58 When the fortunes of war turned against the Americans across the fall of 1776, Tudor’s willingness to leave the army evaporated. William wrote to Delia, “My Hopes of soon returning to Boston are vanished.” He could not desert Washington or his country, and, he insisted, “It would certainly be Desertion in a Court of Honor.” This time, Tudor framed his resolve to stay by insisting that Delia’s friendship “would revolt at the idea of . . . quitting it’s Service disreputably.”59 William explained his changing decisions to stay or resign in relation to Delia’s supposed approval. Of course, in these letters he did not ask her opinion so much as tell her what he thought it was. Tudor’s letters to Boston not only provided a field on which to assert and defend his honor, but also a place to display an appropriate and manly sentimentality and civilian ambition.60 With the new army coming together in early 1777 after Washington’s victories at Trenton and Princeton, however, Tudor felt comfortable returning to Boston on a furlough. Though still holding his commission, he was able to test the civilian waters, resume his legal practice, and convince Delia to marry him. Only when William and Delia married in March 1778 did he formally resign his commission.61 Tudor did not put aside the soldier until he was certain civilian life could provide sufficient personal and masculine status. Across the course of the first few years of the Revolutionary War, Tudor had weighed continued service in the Continental Army against political idealism, personal obligation to his General and the cause, the potential of his civilian profession as an attorney versus his ambitions for a military career, and the pursuit of the woman he loved. By the middle of the war, the combined pressure of advancing his civilian career and starting his own family lured him out of the army. In resigning his commission, Tudor not only gained a better-paying, more-comfortable, and safer manly status, he also seized the final components for respectable adult manhood and completed the transition into the next phase of his life course.

Young Men’s Decisions to Leave the Continental Army 133 Anxieties and the End of the War

Anxieties surrounding leaving the army ran particularly high at the end of the war. An event at West Point on May 31, 1783, illustrated the stakes for young soldiers and officers alike. General Washington had announced the final ceasefire several weeks earlier. Artillery bombardier Thaddeus Thompson nevertheless stood before a court-martial for “insolence and drunkenness.” It was a commonplace charge, but this case had curious circumstances. It started when Captain Andrew Moodie had come to the barracks to investigate a ruckus. “What do you say sir?” Moodie had demanded. Bombardier Thompson laughingly replied, “I thought the war was over.” Rather than return to quarters as ordered, Thompson followed the officer down to the parade field. Exasperated, Captain Moodie threatened him with arrest for insubordination. Thompson blithely replied that “he supposed the war was over and he would soon be free.” Enraged, the captain seized the bombardier, spun him around, and kicked him back to the barracks. Undeterred, Thompson emerged yet again, “seemed disposed to be riotous,” and was arrested. At his court-martial, Thompson swore that “he had no intention to insult any authority” by saying the war was over, explaining “that he said it in a Jacose manner.” He also insisted he “was not in liquor at the time.” Other witnesses confirmed Thompson’s sobriety and that his laughter had more the sound of joy than mutiny. Oddly enough—and unlike similar cases in the Hudson River encampments at that period in the war—the officers on the court acquitted him.62 The end of the war was a time of conflicting emotions among long- serving soldiers. The prospect of leaving the army could either relieve or magnify young soldiers’ anxieties, depending on their postwar prospects. It is easy to understand Thompson’s joy. As a fifteen-year-old Connecti- cut lad, he had enlisted in 1777 for the duration of the war. Having finally reached the end, his prospects as a civilian must have looked better than his underfed and unpaid years in the army. Captain Moodie’s rage shows the other side of the coin. Moodie, an officer since 1775, had overreacted and turned violent when a subordinate flaunted the imminent evaporation of his power and status as an officer. In this light, Thompson may have been lucky that Moodie only kicked him for a while.63 As the war wound down, leaving the army was never far from young Continentals’ minds. Anxieties surrounding leaving the army fluctuated with their postwar prospects and degree of control over returning to civilian life. Late in the war, soldiers who felt they were missing out on civilian

134 Becoming Men of Some Consequence opportunities were eager to leave, confronting their officers if they felt they were unreasonably kept beyond their enlistment terms. Some young officers, on the other hand, tried to manipulate or even delay the transition to civilian life, either as a group, as in the Newburgh Conspiracy, or as individuals, by rigging reassignments and furloughs in 1783. As the world of the Continental Army dissolved, young men pursued the social and economic transformations that defined adult, manly independence— transformations some young veterans only achieved with difficulty. Mutinies by groups of enlisted men late in the war were a particularly extreme measure soldiers took to regain control of the terms of their service. Historians have looked at the late-war mutinies, large and small, and come to important but divergent conclusions, yet they have neglected the practical significance of these mutineers’ central demands: immediate discharge and promised pay.64 These demands directly related to soldiers’ civilian aspirations and their resumption of passage through the life course. Across the whole war, small groups of soldiers had rejected their officers’ orders—acts of mutiny under the Articles of War—but the enlisted uprisings late in the war, from 1780 through 1783, were larger and voiced specific demands. These mutineers were attempting to regain control of their military service and, if at all possible, end it on their own terms and with immediate compensation.65 That they were willing to take this extreme step and risk execution reveals the degree of importance enlisted soldiers ascribed to their goals and the anxiety that undergirded their efforts. Soldiers’ assertions of independence and self-determination unfolded over surprisingly small stakes. On December 31, 1779, for example, a small group of three-year Massachusetts Continentals declared that their enlistments were complete and they started packing to return home, despite the warnings of their officers that they were engaged to the end of February 1780. For the sake of those two extra months, and eager to control the terms of their service, an entire company of Continentals walked away from West Point only to be rounded up and court-martialed. Neither these soldiers nor the army saw this as a straightforward act of desertion. The soldiers believed they had honorably completed their service. The army, however, saw them as mutineers. Sergeant Samuel Shattuck was tried and flogged as the ringleader.66 Years of experience with the Con- tinental Army had shown Shattuck and his comrades that soldiers were wise to be anxious about the terms of service. Soldiers’ memories of their enlistment agreements counted for less than their officers’ interpretation of records. Late in the war, enlisted Continentals feared the arbitrary ex- Young Men’s Decisions to Leave the Continental Army 135 tension of their terms of service and were anxious to define clearly the end of their service. The army had not fulfilled its promises for pay, food, or clothes. What proof did they have that the army would release them at the end of their terms? “You say in your Letter,” a Continental responded to his wife, “that you are afraid that I shall stay in the Cause of Liberty Till I shall mak my self a slave.”67 Soldiers had to careful enforce the terms of their enlistment lest their military service cross the boundary into invol- untary servitude. This anxiety over the terms of service erupted on a huge sale with the mutinies of the Pennsylvania and New Jersey lines in 1780. At the end of that year, almost two entire brigades of Pennsylvania Continentals (between 1,500 and 2,000 soldiers, the majority of whom were Germans, or Irish and English immigrants) objected to being held to service through the duration of the war and mutinied. Arguing they had enlisted either for three years or for the duration, they insisted that the shorter of the two lengths of service was operative. They marched toward Philadelphia, demanding to be discharged, “paid without fraud,” and not punished for their revolt. Joseph Reed, dispatched by the Executive Council of Pennsylvania, negotiated with the mutineers, and in the resulting agreement, almost the entire Pennsylvania line claimed the discharge offered to the three-year men. Since many found no employment available in the dead of winter, General Anthony Wayne observed that they were soon “as Impatient of liberty as they were of Service” and that he expected to reenlist two thirds of these veterans—albeit with payment of the larger, late-war enlistment bounties.68 In this mutiny, as well as in the subsequent and less-successful revolt of the New Jersey line, the Continentals attempted to regain control of the terms of their service and assert the self-sovereignty that was the currency of manhood in a society divided among slaves, servants, freeholders, and gentlemen. Only then would they reenlist, and only if it suited their purposes. After the French and American victory at Yorktown, and especially after the April 1783 cease fire, enlisted soldiers were suspicious about delays in disbanding the Continental Army. Soldiers’ fears oscillated between not being paid and not being released. The privates of both the British and American armies had long grumbled “that the war might and would have been ended long before now, if it was not for the great men, who only want to fill their purses.”69 In the spring of 1783, Congress instructed Washington to dissolve the army through furloughs—but the soldiery had not been paid since December 1782. David Ramsay, an early historian of 136 Becoming Men of Some Consequence the war, believed that the furloughs for private soldiers at the end of the war were in part a gambit to disperse the army individually so as to reduce the risk of the “tumult or disorder” of mutiny.70 If that was Congress’s plan, it nevertheless provoked a new round of protests. By May 1783, the Con- tinentals in Hudson River cantonments were “loud and insolent,” as they feared betrayal or the unnecessary delay of their freedom. Soldiers were on the verge of mass-desertion and clamored to go home. Some colonels, however, wrote desperately to Washington, begging that their regiments not be dismissed unpaid.71 Soldiers also voiced carefully calculated economic concerns: Connecticut soldiers belonging to a Continental artillery regiment composed mostly of New Yorkers angrily demanded to know if they would receive a similar financial settlement from their state as the New Yorkers in the regiment had from theirs.72 In May 1783, a Continen- tal regiment of Virginia dragoons mutinied for pay and discharge, and its members were apparently satisfied by the settlement offered by the Vir- ginia government.73 Across the final years of the war, enlisted Continen- tals were anxious to leave the army, receive their long-delinquent pay, and take their chances back in civilian life, trusting only in the demonstrated inconstancy of Continental authorities, civilian and military. For reasons similar to those of the enlisted men they commanded, Continental officers also distrusted the financial promises of Congress at the end of the war, and were extremely nervous for their postwar financial condition. An aside copied into an orderly book encapsulated officers’ anxieties about life after the war: “What signifies a Soldier in time of peace?—Posh! A Soldier naked! Is that such a Wonder? What are they good for else but hanging or starving, when we have no occasion for them?”74 The officers’ anxiety about returning to civilian life exploded in the early spring of 1783 in a conspiracy pitting officers against Congress. In March, two anonymous “Newburgh Addresses” denounced the callous financial irresponsibility of the Continental government and called on fellow Continental officers to remain in arms until Congress and the states made them whole financially by funding their pensions. Historians have traditionally viewed the Newburgh Conspiracy in terms of congressional machinations, factions within the army’s general staff, and attempts to reform the Articles of Confederation. Viewing the conspiracy from below, however, reveals the central place in this crisis of long-serving, young Continental officers and their anxieties about leaving the army and entering postwar life.75 The voice of the Newburgh Conspiracy was embodied in the anony- Young Men’s Decisions to Leave the Continental Army 137 mous addresses written by Major John Armstrong, a twenty-four-year- old aide-de-camp to General Horatio Gates. Armstrong, a Pennsylvanian who had joined the army in 1776 as seventeen-year-old volunteer cadet, wrote the addresses with the knowledge of General Gates but was not a cat’s-paw or proxy.76 Armstrong had spent his entire adolescence as a Continental officer, and he belonged to a cadre of hundreds of young men who had essentially only ever been soldiers. Apart from the army, they had no foundation for their public identities or their status as independent men. Those officers “without wealth or family influence,” as one civilian contemporary observed, feared their “respectability would be lost by separation and their pretensions derided.” Certainly, they had found the self-importance and pomp of an officer’s life “more inviting and pleasant” than the civilian lives to which they were returning.77 Continental officers’ earlier demands for pensions were similarly motivated by both financial need and a craving for continued public recognition and respect for their role in leading the United States to independence.78 For young officers, these fears were magnified by their liminal civilian position—clearly, they were no longer boyish youths, but they were not necessarily respectable men. In his first “Address,” Armstrong spoke directly to his fellow young officers’ concerns about their masculine status in the postwar civilian sphere. Though cloaked in anonymity, he explicitly revealed his youth and subordinate rank. Writing to young Continental officers as one of their own, he prophesized that Congress’s financial neglect would leave them emascu- lated after the war: “When these very swords, the instruments and companions of your glory, shall be taken from your sides,” the veteran officers would lose every “mark of military distinction . . . but your wants, infirmities, and scars!” Could they consent to “grow old in poverty, wretchedness, and contempt. . . . to wade through the vile mire of dependency, and owe the miserable remnant of your life to charity?” They would exchange the honor of their service for “the ridicule” and “worse, the pity of the world! Go, starve, and be forgotten!” Just as humiliation and oblivion were the inversion of honor and glory, poverty and dependence were the opposite of manly competence and independence. The substance of Armstrong’s diatribe against Congress spoke to the ambitions and anxieties of his fellow officers, young men like himself.79 Armstrong called his brother officers to action as true men of arms and honor. To accept Congress’s recent promises meant “sinking into cowardice.” “To be tame,” Armstrong declared, “when injuries press hard 138 Becoming Men of Some Consequence upon you, is more than weakness.” To submit “without one manly effort of your own” would permanently “fix your character.” He urged his fellow officers to “change the milk and water style” and “reject the sueing, soft and unsuccessful” tenor of their earlier petitions. Instead, “assume a bolder tone, decent, but lively, spirited and determined”—all qualities of a true man in or out of the army. By remaining in arms until Congress met their financial demands, they would hold onto the manly identity that an impoverished return to civilian life would extinguish. If Congress still refused them, Armstrong proposed that the officers remove to “some unsettled country” and abandon the unworthy republic to its enemies and then “mock as their fear cometh on.”80 Not only did this language present the republic as womanish and fickle, it also presented young officers with a vision of a utopian society in which young veterans would find the soldierly attributes of bravery, virtue, and honor—rather than economic competence—as the sole definition of adult manhood. Shocked by this revolt, Washington attempted to regain control of his subordinates by appearing at the meeting demanded by Armstrong’s letter. Famously, his prepared statement did little to turn the gathered officers away from threatened mutiny. The reason, in part, was his misreading of his audience. He denounced the author of the anonymous addresses— perhaps a British agent—for stirring irrational passions. This insulted the officers before him, who, like Armstrong, saw their grievances as legitimate and held a high sense of themselves as patriots. Washington asked them to trust Congress, which was now beyond their ability to do. He asked his officers to trust him as a faithful friend of the army—after all, his reputation was “inseperably connected” to it. But their concern was postwar competency, not intangible renown. Washington’s most striking misstep was to mock Armstrong’s proposal to “remove into the unsettled Country.” Could “our Wives, our Children, our Farms, and other property” be abandoned, Washington asked, or “are we to take the two first (the latter cannot be removed), to perish in a Wilderness, with hunger, cold and nakedness?” Washington’s hypothetical question meant nothing to young officers without wives, children, farms, or property of their own, and only fanned their anxious rage against Congressional neglect and incompe- tence.81 With the crowd of officers still against him at the end of his prepared remarks, Washington stalled for time, attempting to read aloud a letter with reassuring statements from the Congress. Having trouble with the small and unfamiliar text, Samuel Shaw reported, the General “made a Young Men’s Decisions to Leave the Continental Army 139 short pause, took out his spectacles, and begged [their] indulgence as he put them on, observing . . . that he had grown gray in their service and now found himself growing blind.”82 This otherwise unimaginable sign of Washington’s personal frailty proved the decisive and memorable moment in this affair. In this personal display, Washington reminded his officers of their feelings of personal loyalty and obligation to the man who embodied their Revolutionary struggle, as well as their sense of themselves as a patriotic cadre. The officers wept. While their mutinous comrades were overcome by the sentiment of the moment, Washington’s lieutenants grabbed control of the meeting and drafted a statement of support for Congress and Washington which denounced the anonymous threats.83 One officer raged at his comrades’ fickleness for having “damned with infamy two publications which during the four proceeding days most of them had read with admiration, & talked of with rapture!”84 They had been undone by their love and loyalty toward the “father of the country.” While promises and careful political rhetoric could not convince Washington’s officers, sentiment and obligation could inspire his loving military sons to renewed deference. The Newburgh crisis was an extreme and collective effort by young officers to control and cushion their departure from the army—but it was not the only attempt. Before and after the conspiracy, officers jockeyed to avoid discharge from the army in regimental reductions. In the fall of 1782, for example, Congress ordered a reorganization of the Continental Army and a consolidation of under-strength regiments. Washington reported to Congress’s Secretary at War that this move unnerved his officers: “Soured by penury and what they call the ingratitude of the Public . . . without one thing to sooth their feelings, or frighten [away] the gloomy prospects,” these officers were “goaded by a thousand stings of reflexion on the past, and of anticipation on the future” just as they were “about to be turned into the World.” But, Washington admitted, “could the Officers be placed in as good a situation as when they came into service,” the contention among them “would be not who should continue in the field, but who should retire to private life.”85 Lieutenant Oliver Rice of Massachusetts wrote home that this reduction would force “a number of officers to retire after faithfully serving their country for seven or eight years, without any compensation (at present) than seeing their wages on paper . . . four shillings to the thousand.” For his own part, however, he confessed to his brother, “I am at present indetermined which will . . . be most to my advantage . . . [to] retire at this arrangement without any money or a prosepect of it, or to 140 Becoming Men of Some Consequence continue longer in the same miserable situation.”86 A month later, Rice reported that though a number of officers had agreed to retire, “necessity has induced me to give my answer to tarry, as I had neither money, credit, nor confidence sufficient to induce me into a publick house here. . . . To beg my way home,” he insisted, “shall be my last resource.”87 At the very end of the war, some enlisted men joined their officers in trying to remain in the army as it slowly disbanded. After April 1783, the army offered soldiers enlisted for the war furloughs to go home. Nev- ertheless, some enlisted men chose to stay with the army. Two striking orders distributed at Newburgh in June 1783 similarly reveal some soldiers and officers actively choosing not to leave camp, despite the opportunity. Enough soldiers had declined their furloughs and remained in camp that a general order instructed them to inform their commanders so men with shorter enlistments could go home in their place. A week later, the officers who had chosen to remain in camp but “were not attached to any particular corps” were ordered to take charge of the enlisted men who remained.88 Joseph Plumb Martin recalled this turn of events: a friend convinced him to exchange his furlough with a Massachusetts soldier in order to stay with the army.89 These efforts to remain with the army were the other side of anxiety about leaving at the end of the war. The army offered camaraderie and status to men who had nothing waiting for them in civilian life. Those with postwar prospects, relationships, and resources went home; those without lingered in camp. Benjamin Gilbert, in 1783 a twenty-seven-year-old lieutenant, provides a fascinating example of a young officer trying desperately to remain in the army during the last months of the war. His detailed diaries and a rich letterbook provide a remarkable opportunity to study his actions, self- presentation, and mentality. His behaviors at the end of the war reveal severe anxiety surrounding a forced transition back to civilian life and point to the common burdens and fears of young Continentals at this stage of the war. Gilbert had begun his war in 1775 as a nineteen-year-old private. Tired and disillusioned, he almost left the army in 1779 at the end of a three- year enlistment, but an officer’s commission enticed him back to camp. Officership offered him pretensions to gentility and better connections in his home community. Trading on his new rank, he cultivated a potentially serious courtship across several years with Patience Converse, the daughter of a prominent family in his hometown of Brookfield, in central Massachusetts. Promoted from ensign to lieutenant and assigned to an Young Men’s Decisions to Leave the Continental Army 141 elite light infantry company, Gilbert was on his way up as the war wound down after Yorktown. Fully engaged with the officer culture of the camp, he genteelly danced with local girls, dined and argued with his fellow officers, and even shared the occasional dinner with generals, including one at the table of His Excellency, George Washington.90 For Gilbert, anxiety about leaving the army hit him in 1782 when he faced an untimely and coerced return to civilian life. That September he learned that Patience Converse was pregnant from their trysts during his March furlough. Her family demanded that he return home to marry her. Gilbert begged the Converses to accept a delay of a “matrimonial coales- cence,” since he anticipated being honorably discharged that winter in the pending army reorganization and reduction of regiments.91 Despite this assurance to the Converses, a month later he specifically asked his general to let him “tarry” in the service.92 Gilbert explained to his family, “I cannot, consistent with a Military Character, Retire. . . .” Despite poor pay and clear obligations back home, Gilbert insisted, “a Military calling is my present support.”93 Instead of returning home, he remained in the army, trying to make a quick economic foundation for himself by speculating with fellow officers in confiscated loyalist land.94 Gilbert chose to stay in the army because at home he would have been unable to support his potential wife and child. This would brand him a total failure as a man within his community.95 His commission had made possible a courtship that had promised status and personal advancement in his civilian life. To return home immediately would mean his humiliating social demotion from gentleman officer to hired hand on his father’s farm. He had to stay in the army to buy time for his land speculation schemes. Gilbert was caught between irreconcilable demands, and his meticu- lous diary entries reveal his increasing anxiety about his masculine dilemma through records of escalating bouts of drinking in camp and flirting with local girls. After one grog-fueled bender, he winked in his diary: “drank too freely which operated to the disadvantage of the said Gilbert.” On another occasion, he bragged in his diary of how he and his fellow officers “acted the part of proper Helions all Night.”96 By February, he had reached a new low of behavior, boasting to a fellow officer about visits to a new brothel near camp. As his anxiety increased, Gilbert’s behavior grew more rakish. Accompanied by two other young Continental officers, Gil- bert made “very agreeable” weekly brothel visits during the late winter and early spring of 1783—the same period during which his land-speculation

142 Becoming Men of Some Consequence schemes collapsed, he was fending off angry letters from the Converses, and he was hearing reports of his sullied reputation at home.97 These alcoholic and sexual performances deflected anxieties about status, manliness, and future progress in civilian life. While prescriptive literature of the era presented the uncontrolled bachelor as the antithesis of true manliness, the Continental Army was a separate sphere in which young men could assert alternative standards of masculinity that did not require economic competence or authority over legitimate dependents. Lacking the professions, wives, and dependents that defined manliness, Gilbert and his hellions asserted direct sexual dominance by exploiting the women around camp.98 The timing of their escapades was also significant and suggests the broader masculine anxieties of young men in the Con- tinental cantonments: while Gilbert and his fellow “Helions” anxiously whored, John Armstrong and the Newburgh conspirators anxiously plot- ted. Interestingly, Gilbert made no mention of the Newburgh Addresses or of Washington’s meeting with the officers on March 15. In general, Gilbert was a typical officer in his obsession with Congress’s financial malfeasance toward the army; instead of conspiracy, however, it appears that Gilbert had found his own outlet for his frustrations and anxieties.99 Gilbert had botched his transition from young bachelor to married patriarch when his poverty collided with Patience Converse’s pregnancy. To compensate, he vigorously asserted his military masculinity as a dashing soldier and virile rake in the approving company of fellow officers. Winter passed into the spring of 1783 and the Continental Army started disbanding—threatening Gilbert’s refuge from the responsibilities of civilian life and forecasting his impending failure back home. Worse, the declaration of treaty terms forbidding seizure of loyalist property destroyed his land-speculation schemes—the pillar of his postwar financial plans. As he wrote to his father, “Peace makes it requisit that I make some arrangements for domestick Life. Should I . . . fail in my attempt, I should be as miserable, as I have been endeavouring, this Eight years to make my Country happy.”100 Yet Gilbert insisted that he was trapped in the army and could “make no arrangements,” and as a result suffered “continual agjutation of mind, praying for a speedy desolution of the army.”101 His admission of anxiety was truthful; his claims to be eager to return home were not. Despite Gilbert’s insistence that he was trapped in the army, in June 1783 he once again seized another opportunity to keep his lieutenancy by exchanging commissions with another officer. That young

Young Men’s Decisions to Leave the Continental Army 143 man went home; Gilbert remained with the army.102 With his military position at least temporarily secured and a return home once again delayed, the intensity of his anxiety apparently subsided. His diary certainly reveals a decline in wild behavior. Instead of drinking and frequenting the brothel, he again played the proper gentleman by sharing tea and conversation and displaying his genteel sensibility by taking nature walks with fellow officers around West Point.103 Even then, the world of the army was clearly coming to its end, and Gilbert could not indefinitely delay the collision of his mismatched military and civilian masculine identities. But he might try. When finally furloughed late in the summer of 1783, which was the effective equivalent of discharge, Gilbert still did not return home to Pa- tience Converse and the daughter he had never seen. Instead, he made a fresh stab at transitioning to civilian life, again using his officer’s rank as credit in the civilian sphere. Gilbert had destroyed his prospects at home in Brookfield, Massachusetts, by willfully abandoning Patience, so he instead turned south to Danbury, Connecticut, and stayed with a family who had befriended him earlier in the war. Unaware of Gilbert’s rakish behavior, the town embraced the dashing young lieutenant in the early months of the peace. He spent the fall courting—chastely—the nineteen-year-old Mary Cornwall, making a new sortie toward the next stage of his life course.104 Gilbert had repeatedly delayed a humiliating return to civilian life and its unachievable masculine ideal—first by dodging a discharge in the fall of 1782, then by trading his commission in June 1783 to remain in camp, and finally by lingering for months in the affirming atmosphere of Danbury. Gilbert was not alone in his attempts to preserve his military identity after the dissolution of the army. Lieutenant Park Holland, one of Gil- bert’s fellow hard-drinking “Helions,” offers an instructive example. Hol- land recalled how he and his comrades “passed the pleasantest part of our army life” at Newburgh, though he noted there were many sad days to balance the pleasant ones as the war wound down.105 Like Gilbert, Holland also chose “to tarry” in the army, wringing a little bit more value from of his commission and delaying the full transition back to civilian life. At the close of the war, Holland accepted an appointment to settle the accounts of three Massachusetts Continental regiments. He spent a year adjusting accounts, balancing the books, and distributing pay certificates to veterans all over Massachusetts. In his memoir, Holland insisted that this delay “was very disagreeable to me” and that he “was very impatient to return 144 Becoming Men of Some Consequence home, having never been there but once during my service.” The business of settling the accounts, however, left him “so constantly employed, the time passed more pleasantly and quickly than I thought possible,” and he noted “the pleasure it gave me, to see so many of my friends amply repaid me for all the trouble.” This situation was ideal: Holland maintained his comfortable military identity and was gainfully employed. Only when this assignment concluded did he being “to think of other business”—namely, what he would do with himself now that the war was over. Like his friend Gilbert, the officers who dodged regimental reorganization in 1782, and the enlisted men who refused their furloughs in the spring of 1783, Park Holland had found a way to preserve his military identity for an additional year, delaying the reckoning and difficult transition demanded by the “other business” of building a civilian competency.106 * * * Decisions to leave the Continental Army grew out of the widening gap between young Continentals’ expectations at enlistment and the masculine expectations of the civilian life course. As they considered leaving the army, each Continental had to balance his sense of honor, his political beliefs, and the economic, social, and psychological components of his self-construction as a man. Young Continentals had tried to make the best of a disrupted society. The stakes were high. In leaving the army, young soldiers faced their future in civilian life—even as they left a military world with definitions of manhood that better suited their youth, lack of resources, and bachelorhood. If they managed their return to civilian life awkwardly—or illegally—they risked disgrace or further disruption. If they stayed in the army, they risked impoverishment, discomfort, illness, injury, or death. All of these factors point to a crucial but overlooked reality of the Revolutionary experience: leaving the army was an important and potentially difficult decision for young Continentals. The decision was highly contingent and in no way a passive or unthinking course of action. In choosing to leave, young men actively shaped their present and future lives, and they knew the opportunities and consequences of returning to civilian life. In the end, military identities and opportunities could only last as long as the war and the army that had called them into being. In his memoirs, an old general compared the situation at the end of the war, in June 1783, with the conflict’s first days. In April 1775, he recalled, “the roads were full of militia, pressing towards Boston, to commence a dubious war.” Eight years later, those roads running east and south from the Hudson River Young Men’s Decisions to Leave the Continental Army 145 Highlands “were now filled with veteran soldiers, covered with laurels, returning from the field to their peaceful abodes.”107 The balance in this image between the beginning and end of the war was politically and emotionally satisfying, but it obscured the full significance of that final march for young veterans. For better or worse, they were returning home to pick up where they had left off and resume their passage through civilian lives. For some, it was a relief and the end of anxiety; for others, it was only the beginning. Whether they made their way disillusioned by mistreatment at the hands of their countrymen, eager to seize opportunities back in those peaceful abodes, or anxious about the uncertain transformations in the lives ahead of them, they walked toward the twin tasks of building independent lives and an independent republic.

146 Becoming Men of Some Consequence “Yield the Tribute Due 5 to Merit” young veterans after the war

By January 1783, Elisha Fisher had spent seven and a half years in and out of military service. While everyone knew a declaration of peace was imminent, the demands of both the war and everyday life continued uninterrupted. He wrote in his journal, “As I could not git into bessness I would try the sees.” Fisher may have done better staying ashore. A British cruiser took his unlucky ship as a prize, and Fisher found himself confined aboard the infamous prison-ship Jersey in New York Harbor. He was far more fortunate than the thousands of his fellow colonials who died in such hulks over the course of the war. It was only a matter of weeks before Fisher and his fellow prisoners-of-war heard the proclamation of peace read aloud, learning “that all prisoners on both sides ware to be desmest and no more hostaletys to be committed.” He noted the celebration in his journal: “all the preasoners gave three howzas on board the presen ship.” Released on shore, Fisher went about British-occupied New York City to explore and beg. There was little else he could do to keep body and soul together. “Your servent gentlefolk,” the veteran soldier and sailor suppli- cated as he entered shops, “I wish you much Joy with the nuse of peace, I hope it will be a long and lasting one.” Fisher wrote that some were “very well pleased” and wished him the same. Others admitted that their circumstances were reduced, but that “now they hoped they would be better.” The rest of his patter asked, “What then do you think of us poor prisoners that have neither Money nor frinds and have been long absent from our homes?” Some would pity him and give a half dollar or a quarter, and “some less than nothing but frowns.” Elisha Fisher began his postwar life as a homeless beggar.1 Fisher found his situation little improved after a British cartel ship transported him and other released prisoners back to Boston in May. The market for labor was flooded: “There was so meny that Come from the army and from see that had no homes[,] that would work for little or nothing but there vitels[,] that I could not find any Employment.” After several days, Fisher recorded his bleak situation: “I Com down by the markett and sits Down all alone allmost Descureged and begun to think over how that I had ben in the army, what ill success I had met with there and all so how I was ronged by them I worked for at home, and lost all last winter [as a prisoner] and now that I could not get into any besness and [had] no home . . .” “You may well think how I felt,” Fisher continued, addressing himself and posterity, “but then [it] Come into my mind that there ware thousands in wors sircumstances then I was.” At least he had “food and ramaent,” and he had done nothing that reflected badly on himself. He had to “leave the avent to Provedance” and continue on. “After that I felt as contented as I need to be,” Fisher assured himself as he prepared for another day of making his way in the new quiet of peace.2 When young soldiers left the army, they returned to civilian lives that in part had been on hold. Some successfully transferred the personal gains and status they accumulated in military service back into civilian life. Oth- ers, like Elisha Fisher or Benjamin Gilbert, were simply older after their years of service, having made little progress toward the independence and respectability of full adult manhood. Many had stepped into the ranks as extremely poor men and returned to what homes they had no better off than before their service. Despite high hopes for the peace, returning to the civilian sphere proved complicated. Mistrust of soldiers combined with unlucky and disrupted economic and political circumstances in the early republic. To resume their course through life, young veterans had to marshal their relationships and labor to obtain their competencies. For many, it would prove a difficult road.3

Great Expectations

In 1780 one of Washington’s aides, David Humphreys, looked toward the end of the war and voiced the hopes of his brothers-in-arms. He poeti- cally predicted that when “the horrid sounds of war shall cease, / And all the western world be hush’d in peace,” their country would reward her soldiers for “The task of glory done / Th’ immortal prize by your bold efforts won.” The soldiers of independence would then go “where happier climes invite, / To midland seas, and regions of delight . . . / Where fair Ohio, rolls his amber tide, / And nature blossoms in her virgin pride.” In their west- 148 Becoming Men of Some Consequence ern patrimony, soldiers would “crown the toils of war, with rural ease.”4 Speaking for his fellow officers in the midst of the army’s suffering due to civilian neglect, currency collapse, and public debates about postwar pensions for officers, Humphreys put down a marker for young soldiers’ aspirations that peace would usher them into economic competence and manly independence at long last, and that the Revolutionary governments would finally honor the debts of gratitude and money they owed the army. Ordinary soldiers held similar hopes. At the end of the war, Joseph Plumb Martin hatched a plan with an army friend to head to western New York, where “there was plenty of good land to be had . . . and there we would get us farms and live like heroes.”5 The hopeful stakes of resuming their path forward in the civilian sphere weighed heavily on soldiers. Whether it would meet their expectations remained to be seen. The dissolution of the Continental Army in late 1783 intensified these simultaneously celebratory and expectant messages. Washington told his soldiers—and the country—in his widely republished farewell orders that the Continentals were “retiring victorious from the field of War to the field of agriculture.” Washington assured them that “little is now wanting to enable the Soldiers to change their military character into that of the Citizen, but that steady and decent tenor of behavior which has generally distinguished . . . [the] Armies through the course of the war.” The industrious “pursuits of Commerce and cultivation of the soil” assuredly would lay open “the certain road to competence.” The Atlantic fisheries could offer profitable employment for the adventurous, while “the extensive and fertile regions of the West will yield a most happy asylum to those . . . seeking for personal independence.” Let the veterans exercise “good sense and prudence” and all manner of things would be well.6 Chaplain Israel Evans echoed Washington’s hopes in a sermon to veteran soldiers and civilians in late 1783. Not only would “the brave soldier claim the honor of being a free and independent citizen of the United States of America,” but “Plentious harvests shall rise and crown his toils, and spacious fields shall offer their growing wealth in grateful tribute to the victorious Hero.” Individual industry and natural abundance would reward young veterans with a respectable manhood in peacetime.7 While Humphries, Washington, and Evans tried to counter fears that soldiers’ economic suffering would continue in the civilian sphere, others openly wondered if they could manage the transition smoothly. At the end of the war, for example, thirty-six-year-old Massachusetts colonel Henry Jackson learned that his aged father was “fearfull that the Military pride Young Veterans after the War 149 of his Son will prevent his returning to the honest business of distilling Rum & thereby frustrate the former intentions of a very kind Parent.” Jackson’s friend David Cobb, the bearer of this paternal concern, had reassured “the old Gent’n” that his officer-son’s commission “would be happily exchanged for a distill House.” Cobb reported to Jackson that he further told the old man that “I believed that you had such a fondness for the businss, that it was probabl[e] you would add a Tavern to it.”8 There was a hint of winking in Cobb’s letter to Colonel Jackson—the questions and answers were simultaneously comic and serious. Was the old family business worthy of a colonel? Had the war changed the relationship between father and son? Time would tell. Jackson’s father was wise to worry; in his memoir, Park Holland emphasized young veterans’ conflicted emotions as they managed the transition from military camp to civilian home. “Few are aware,” Holland wrote, “what a serious disadvantage it was to the most of us to be taken six or seven years (the best part of our lives) from the employment and society we had been accustomed to.” The war had changed them: “Our ‘hands had in a measure forgotten their cunning,’ ” Holland recalled, “and we returned to our homes changed men. . . . Very few of us dug upon our farms and toiled at our trades, with the interest and contentment of former days.” Holland was only about thirty-two years old after the war, but he had spent almost a decade intertwining his life with the Continental Army.9 For younger officers, uncertainty about their postwar status and profession could be crushing. “My dear Ben,” William North wrote to his friend and fellow aide-de-camp to General Steuben, “I walked into town this evening—& walked out again—I wish I had been in hell before I entered the army. It has given me passions which I can never gratify & Ideas which will make my life miserable in future.” North was likely more than a bit drunk when he scrawled his vague and desperate plans on that New Jersey November midnight: “I am determined to go to Virginia, to Carolina—to marry—to kill myself—to go into business—& to do nothing . . . Money is my panic. . . . I am very miserable. It is the lot of man to be useless. Why should I murmur[?]”10 After an exciting military career serving as an aide to a Baron, drafting letters to aristocratic French generals, and gliding through the cream of American society, where could Wil- liam North go but down at the end of the war? War had elevated young officers—would they simply return to working as a hand on their father’s farm, a clerk in another man’s shop, or a student under another’s tutelage? Again, time would tell. 150 Becoming Men of Some Consequence John Armstrong, the youthful voice of the 1783 Newburgh Conspiracy, similarly weighed his postwar career options with his father, weighing what might properly suit his nature. He feared he had “wasted the best part of his Life” as a soldier and would “find that the Stalls in his former Profession are full.” “As it now stands,” the youth confessed, “I know not how to turn myself ”—though he approached the vocational question more practically than the histrionic William North. Practicing law held promise, Armstrong acknowledged, “but not without extreme labor [and] drudgery. . . . assiduity itself will not do, to succeed you must be a student for life.” Armstrong similarly felt himself “entirely disqualified” for a career in trade. “I want the love of wealth that warms the merchant’s breast,” and, he thought, he lacked the “industry . . . to draw lines almost invisible between a good and bad bargain.” His appetite for risk lay on the field of battle, not in the counting house. “What then am I to do? I believe after all I must accept your proposal and go into the enviable quiet of a farmer’s life. I may have industry eno’ to raise hogs and horses.” Through young Major Armstrong’s letter to his father, himself a general, ran a thread of an officer’s pride—that scribbling over the law or keeping a shop were -be neath a gentleman. Young Armstrong, like Cincinnatus, thought he would go back to his plow, albeit as a rising and genteel landholder in Pennsyl- vania.11 Anxieties about their situation and their futures weighed heavily on young Continentals at the end of the war and during their reorientation to civilian life. Benjamin Gilbert experienced the transition to the civilian sphere as a crisis and had certainly made a rake’s progress through the last months of the war. Conniving to remain in the army despite calls to return home and wed his pregnant paramour, Patience Converse, he had preserved his status as an officer, assuaged his anxieties by carousing, and further delayed the social reckoning by courting Mary Cornwall, a young woman in Connecticut. By November 1783, however, Gilbert was out of excuses and out of the army. He returned to his Massachusetts home twenty-one months after he had left Patience Converse pregnant during one of their furlough trysts. When he failed to make restitution—or even visit—her family had him arrested for abandonment. Dead broke, Gilbert probably borrowed the £30 fine for damages from his father. Confronting his failure at home and essentially returned to the same social status he had left behind eight years earlier when he was nineteen years old, Gilbert drifted. He lived on his father’s farm but did very little productive work. Instead, he paid calls to local military men and received visits from old Young Veterans after the War 151 army friends as they passed through town, hanging onto the last shreds of his military identity.12 Gilbert also dealt with his disappointment and uncertainty about his civilian future by returning to his old army habits of excessive carousing and sexual adventuring. Across the winter of 1783–84 he recreated in the towns around Brookfield the sexually permissive environment of the Hudson River army encampments. Even as he negotiated with the Con- verses over necessary compensation for abandoning Patience, Gilbert began paying visits to one Colonel Baldwin’s house and his daughter Betsy. By Christmas 1783, Gilbert recorded in his diary in his familiar shorthand, “Ld wh B. Bald” [Laid with Besty Baldwin]. His affair with Betsy continued through January and February, their evenings alternating between frolics spent with mutual friends and his sisters, and regular nighttime trysts. Despite a letter sent in late February to “Miss Polly [Mary] Corn- wall,” his love-interest in Danbury, Gilbert expanded his Massachusetts roving, recording an evening spent “agreeably” at one “widow Carter’s” in nearby Dudley. The next night, Gilbert returned to Dudley and again “spent the Evening Agreeably in company of the Young People of that Neighbourhood.” He rounded off the evening at Mrs. Carter’s, bragging to his diary how he “Ld wh Cr. Carr”—either the widow or her daughter. With the civilian manly ideal of stability, prosperity, and husbandly virtue presently unachievable, Gilbert assuaged his disappointment by enjoying virile masculinity. While no longer a soldier, Gilbert could still play the rake.13 In their behaviors, correspondence, and memories, young Continental veterans of all kinds manifested anxieties and aspirations for the direction and purpose of their postwar lives and their reintegration into society. Despite their greatest hopes or ambitions for taking up military service, most soldiers at the end of the war returned home empty-handed and stripped of larger purpose. John Cleaveland, the unpromising son of a Massachusetts minister, had risen to an officer’s rank during the war, but with peace looming he was unsure of his plans or calling. Writing to his brother Parker, a doctor, he addressed the end of the war: “how it will finally terminate I [k]now not, doubtless for the best good of the whole[;] I am of but little consequence simply considered, in that way which I can best answer my Existance, I ought to be willing to serve.” Cleaveland was sadly certain “we are two apt to look principally at our own Good.” He had given his youth to serve his country but was unsure what to do next. Taking a stance of continued self-sacrifice was satisfying, though with the 152 Becoming Men of Some Consequence war ended, it was unclear what that cause might be. After several more years, John Cleaveland realized a calling to the ministry might satisfy his need to provide useful service. During the war, he had led men to save American liberties from tyranny; in the republic, he would follow in his father’s footsteps and lead men to save their souls from sin.14

Heading Home

The process of reorienting to civilian life proved difficult for many young veterans. “Congratulate me on my freedom,” Lieutenant Oliver Rice wrote home on Christmas Day, 1783. “Have obtained my discharge from the Army . . . [and] changed my condition from a public servant to a private gentleman. Gentleman indeed, destitute of money, Horse, or anything that the World calls valuable.”15 Young veterans’ immediate experience of going home was complicated by strong emotions, limited resources, civilian suspicions about soldiers, and an interpretation of the war that denied the professional soldiers of the Continental Army credit for victory. Such circumstances undermined Washington’s confident words about imminent prosperity and manly competence.16 Arriving home at the end of military service was memorable for young soldiers and their families. The particular hooks that snagged in their memories suggested the subtle emotional contours of the experience of reentering the civilian sphere. Decades after David Moore left camp as a Virginia youth of seventeen, he still remembered “getting home when the wheat was in Blossom.”17 Jabez Fitch returned home at the end of the 1775 campaign only to find “the people all asleep and the house guarded by a dog, the doors also being fastened.” Fitch wrote it down as a joke, riffing on the divide between military life and civilian life that he was crossing: “before we could make the necessary preparation for taking the garrison by assault we were generously admitted by the defenders, with the usual ceremonies, &c.” Proud of his efforts in the early part of the war, Fitch bridged the military and civilian with a bit of army talk and metaphor in his diary. He also closed his journal there: “And the rest of the acts of Jabez I hope to see written in some future narrative.”18 His return home marked the end of his self-conscious recording of his own history. With their arrival back home, many soldiers ended journals they had begun with their enlistment in the early years of the war, self-consciously marking the close of a period in their lives. Years after the war, family members also maintained their own memories of their veteran kin returning. David Brooks Young Veterans after the War 153 had been gone from his Prince Edward County home in Virginia for over four years. He had marched to Valley Forge in the late fall of 1777, and then suffered in British captivity for a year after the capture of Charleston in 1780. His younger brother Bartholomew and neighbor Joseph Smith both recalled that when David returned home, “all the neighbors came to see him and were much pleased to see him again and to hear him tell of his dangers, toils and fatigues.”19 After months or years, arriving at home could provide wonderful relief, but it only marked the beginning of the process of reintegration. Shortly after returning home at the beginning of 1777, for example, Simeon Lyman wrote in his diary, “I went to Meeting and heard a sermin, It seamed very strange to hear preaching a gain.”20 The simple habits and rhythms of home were notable changes for returning soldiers. By the later years of the war, the return and reintegration of veterans was more difficult. Their reappearance could be rather shocking—some walking into their homes in uniform, others like James Bland limping up to their door in lice-infested rags.21 Part of the trouble young Continental veterans faced in returning home was the distrust so many in Revolution- ary America felt toward soldiers. Civilians feared their degraded morals, profanity, drunkenness, and sexual promiscuity.22 Even a soldier’s own family was not immune to fear. Samuel Carpenter’s parents had worried about their soldier-son for years. When they visited kin, “much would be said about the war and they always said a great deal about their son Samu- el’s being in the war and hard fought battles he had been in.” Decades later, one of Samuel’s cousins recalled how his “father and mother expressed great fear and uneasiness concerning his safety and despaired of his ever returning home.” When Samuel finally arrived at his father’s house under the eastern edge of the Blue Ridge near the end of the war, the fears from his absence immediately found a new target: “Several other soldiers came with him . . . and stayed all night, which caused the family much uneasiness on account of what had been said about the bad conduct of soldiers in many instances.” Family lore held that Samuel’s father “kept awake all night to watch the strange soldiers.”23 Similarly, William Asberry, a soldier of the Virginia line for six years, came into the Piedmont community of Goose Creek at the end of the war “and proposed to marry Susan Glass- cock.” One of her relatives later recalled that “her father and all the family objected because he was a soldier and was thought a dissipated man. All thought his habits as contracted in the army were such as to unfit him for

154 Becoming Men of Some Consequence marriage.” Nevertheless, Susan knew her mind and married the tall, slim, and blue-eyed veteran.24 Other families tucked mention of debauched soldiers into the corners of their recollections. Oliver Stevens praised his father and uncles, “who survived the tug of war, [and] returned with unblemished characters.” His kin, he insisted, stood in contrast with the “very many young men, who, when they enlist into the army, go in with unblemished character but when they return home they will have imbibed all the bad habits of a soldier’s life.” As his family’s historian, however, Stevens had to admit that after service in the Revolutionary War, his uncle Elijah “was somewhat given to drink,” though Stevens supposed he “died a reformed man.”25 At the end of the war, it was unclear whether families could reform the debauched wreckage of soldiers into orderly, productive, and reliable heads of their own households. The suspected decline in the social quality of Continentals across the course of the war only reinforced these civilian opinions. After insisting and compelling youths to serve as soldiers, communities hesitated before the prospect of their reintegration. Part of the reason American civilians met their Continental veterans with suspicion rather than overflowing gratitude was a growing divide in Americans’ thoughts about how they had won their independence and about who had borne the burden of the war. Washington’s farewell orders again offer a useful touchstone. Victory, declared the General, “at a period earlier than could have been expected,” against “so formidable a power,” and with “the unparalleled perseverance of the Armies of the U. States” across “eight long years, was little short of a standing miracle.” Washington acknowledged the “singular interpositions of Providence,” but pointedly credited the soldiers of the Continental Army. They had borne suffering and distresses, and “the extremes of hunger and nakedness.” They had accomplished the unprecedented creation of “a disciplined Army . . . from such raw materials.” They had extinguished “the most violent local preju- dices . . . [to] instantly become but one patriotic band of Brothers.” In this final thanks to his soldiers, Washington conspicuously excluded from his praise the militia, the states, the Congress, the diplomats, and the French army and fleet. Instead, he chided “some envious individuals who are unwilling to pay the debt the public has contracted, or to yield the tribute due to merit.”26 Though newspapers widely reprinted Washington’s call for citizens to acknowledge and reward his Continentals for their central role in winning the war, the tide of memory was already running in the other

Young Veterans after the War 155 direction. Americans could not see the Continentals—young, marginal, poor, ethnically foreign, or racially alien—as the embodiment of the military effort that successfully defended their liberties. Though the military burdens had been borne by the few, credit would spread across the many.27 On April 19, 1783, the eighth anniversary of the beginning of the war, Zabdiel Adams preached a memorial sermon at Lexington that suggested the limits for remembering and celebrating the war. Even after eight years, the stakes of the conflict remained clear to this New England patriot: they had fought to prevent being made slaves—“hewers of wood and drawers of water.” So many had suffered. Settlers on the frontiers faced the wrath of Britain’s Indian allies. Women had been ravished. He lamented the “enor- mous taxes . . . laid upon us” and the “oppressive . . . load we have borne in the defence of our liberties and lives.” How many brave sons, “the young and healthy and robust, the boast of their country, the pride of their parents, and the flower of the army, have miserably perished in jails and prison- ships, through neglect and studied cruelty?” Though he claimed the dead, he eschewed living soldiers. Addressing the officers present, Adams made this attitude clear: “we cannot but lament those lusts and passions of men which make your profession necessary,” though he grudgingly admitted their service did “entitle” those gentlemen in arms to “deserved esteem.” In counterpoint, it was the virtuous, “well-regulated militia” who had won the great victory at Saratoga and provided “a greater security than standing armies.” Even if the army had been necessary during the war, such men were “ever dangerous in peace.”28 The minister certainly fit the observation of a German traveling through the postwar republic: “they profess on all occasions a hatred for soldiers, or wish to appear as if they hated them.”29 A divergence between Adams’s spoken sermon and the text printed for later circulation further demonstrated how the Continental Army was rapidly receding from the memory and meaning of the war—even in 1783 and at a commemoration attended by veteran Continental officers. In his spoken sermon purporting to illustrate “the rise, progress and conclusion of the American war,” Adams had failed to mention the deeds of the Con- tinental Army. The printed version addressed this gap with a backpedaling footnote. “When I thus commended our militias,” he clarified, “I certainly mean no reflection on our standing army. . . . much have they done, under Washington one of the wisest and best of generals, towards bringing forward the present happy era.” It was only in this later addition, not in his spoken text, that Adams remembered—or was prodded—to praise “their toils and labors, their patience and perseverance, under particular discour- 156 Becoming Men of Some Consequence agements, [that] are unexampled and history.” Now that the Continental Army was “about to leave the camp,” he hoped “they cheerfully return to the peaceful walks of life” in the different states that “employed” them. In peace he hoped these veterans would “have equal justice done, and a reasonable compensation for all their former sufferings.” This acknowledgment reduced the meaning of Continental service in the grand narrative of the war for American liberty to a mere question of contractual fairness. As the war ended and Americans organized their memories and presented meanings of the struggle, they stripped living Continental soldiers and veterans of any special recognition, if not of republican virtue entirely.30 Continental soldiers or veterans could get good mention in the decade following 1783 if they were dead or crippled—these victims of the Revolu- tionary War posed no threat to the political order. In the early republic, by contrast, enlisted soldiers were equated with disorder and social protest.31 The 1783 Sermon on the Evacuation of Charlestown offered a limited list of veterans who merited praise and reward: “The wounded soldier, who has lost a leg or an arm, or both legs in the defence of his country, calls loudly for your approbation, and immediate assistance.” Similarly, “Let not the deceased soldier’s widows and orphans want bread, in any of your states.” A third group did not need charity but deserved respect and deference: “Your officers—your volunteers deserve your notice . . . these are the men, and these only, who deserve promotion in the United States; these ought to be the men, who should sit in the Senate, and assist in enacting such laws, as will be a terror to the disaffected, and a praise and safeguard to those who have been doing well.” Neither charity to desperate dependents of dead and crippled soldiers nor deference to gentleman officers threatened to disrupt further the roiled social order. Hale young veterans of the enlisted line—entirely omitted from this sermon—were another matter.32 At the end of the war, in 1783, young veterans who had left the army and sought reintegration into civilian communities faced individual suspicion as well as neglect of their contributions. Continental soldiers were immoral, even dangerous. Disputes over monetary compensation stood foremost in public discussions of the disbanding army, rather than patriotic gratitude. Praise for soldiers as a group or class of citizens fell on generals, the militia, and the dead. Pity fell on the crippled soldiers and their impoverished dependents, men whom the war had unmanned. Young veterans would have to find their own way. As was the case during the war, one path was getting civilians to see the citizen inside the soldier. Consider Young Veterans after the War 157 the case of John Balmer, a Virginian who had enlisted for the war in the quiet Tidewater county of Southampton. After leaving the army in the early 1780s, he headed for home, but stopped with a fellow veteran in the North Carolina Piedmont and made a new start. Half a century later, people still remembered how Balmer had looked “very ragged and dirty, being covered with vermin. . . . [He] had every appearance of one who had been engaged in the service as a soldier.” Mrs. Elizabeth Chappell “washed and boiled his clothes but was at much trouble to get them free from dirt and vermin,” and the veteran “had to lay on the floor for some time until he was cloathed.” That marked the beginning of two years Balmer spent working and living with the Chappell family, “until he could get clothes, etc.” that would allow him to resume his pursuit of independence. Throughout this time, Balmer “conversed frequently respecting the difficulties and hardships” of soldiering. Parks Chappell, only about ten or twelve when Balmer joined his father’s household, heard the veteran “re- count many trials and difficulties he had in the war, especially that he was at the battle of Guilford.” John Balmer, after the exhaustion, suffering, and horror of several campaigns, found a way back into civilian society through a fellow veteran’s assistance, opportunity for hired work, and the attention of patient listeners in a surrogate family. Fifty years later, though quite poor, he was still their neighbor, having found his path back to civilian life.33

Dismal Economics and Disrupted Politics in the Early Republic

With civilian neglect of the army entering a new phase at the end of the war, George Washington’s farewell orders lingered on the obligations the people owed their soldiers. Congress and the states still owed their soldiers substantial delayed wages, Washington acknowledged, but if they levied the necessary taxes, their veterans could “expect considerable assistance in recommencing their civil occupations.” Cutting into a running political debate in 1783, Washington presented brutal rhetorical questions to pressure recalcitrant civilians to see their best interest. “Shall not the brave men,” Washington asked, “participate in all the blessings which they have obtained; in such a republic, who will exclude them from the rights of Citizens and the fruits of their labour?” Surely the states would reject “a national bankruptcy and a dissolution of the union.”34 Washington’s officers echoed his call that the states deliver “the Just, the promised rewards 158 Becoming Men of Some Consequence of their long severe and dangerous services,” and, they insisted, “our warm- est wish is to return to the bosom of our Country to resume the caracters of Citizens, and it will be our highest ambition to become useful ones.”35 Chaplain Israel Evans’s December 1783 sermon directly demanded that civilians honor their obligations to the army. “Oh! Americans think not your promised rewards are greater than should be given to the soldier’s courage, and the soldier’s arms!”36 Unfortunately for these young veterans, the disturbed economics and politics of the early republic did little to ease their way. It was a difficult and uncertain time for young veterans to try to build independent lives, even as their expectations and hopes for personal independence burned hot after the war. Continental veterans returned to a civilian sphere burdened by large- scale disruptions to the economy. The long war had dealt a terrible blow to the American economy and opened faults within its politics, complicating veterans’ attempts to regain lost time and advance in life. Individual incomes had severely declined, and only recovered slowly and unevenly: it was not until 1800 when per capita income regained its 1770 level.37 De- struction and disruption in the Revolution destroyed a generation’s worth of economic growth in America. The recovering economy of the early republic also dealt farmers—the overwhelming majority of citizens—a hard hand to play. Profits from agricultural surpluses lagged behind faster growth in business during much of the 1790s, creating additional political tensions. Worse, the export and shipping sectors of the young economy of the United States were tied to the fluctuations of European markets and politics. Despite the expropriation of loyalist property and Indian land, the postwar republic did not see radical changes in land-ownership patterns— colonial elites maintained their station and there was no major redistribu- tion of property.38 Peace was better than war, but gains were unevenly and unpredictably distributed. Within these larger tempests, soldiers returning to civilian life faced setbacks specific to their military service that proved profoundly damaging. Many were discharged far from home and had to bear the effort and expense of the journey back. Soldiers dismissed after a campaign or enlistment term in December or January, as well as the Continentals released in the late fall in 1783, found themselves out of sync with the seasonal rhythms of an agricultural economy.39 At the end of enlistments and at the conclusion of the war, veterans entered a labor market that had no demand for them. Similarly, disorganization in accounting and pay distribution dogged soldiers. In a bitter irony, Congress had tried to get short-term Young Veterans after the War 159 interest-bearing “Morris notes”—a proxy currency—to the main army at the end of the war, but the notes arrived a week after most of the enlisted soldiers had been furloughed and departed.40 As a result of these circumstances and mistakes, the Maryland State Council noted that veterans were “daily returning to the State, without cloths, without money, & without friends and rendered by their wounds & infirmities totally destitute of the means of subsistence.”41 This was not a promising reintroduction to civilian life. Individual veterans certainly felt these inconveniences. Moses Clack was a private in the Third Regiment of Dragoons when he accepted a furlough in South Carolina at the end of the war, though “subject to further call until the definitive treaty was signed.” As a result of heading home when he did, Clack never received a certificate for the $80 Congress owed him—it still galled him decades later.42 Getting promised compensation proved maddeningly difficult after discharge. Veterans could hire an agent, often one of their officers, to collect and deliver their state’s settlement certificates. Park Holland, who worked on behalf of a few Massachusetts regiments, spent much of 1784 in this business.43 It proved a slow and uncertain process. By August 1784, a year after the end of the war, even a geographically compact state like New Jersey had not issued all of its depreciation notes to its demobilized soldiers.44 “To get my wages,” recalled Benjamin Gould of New Hampshire, he had sent his discharge papers to Boston with a comrade. He was lucky and got paid.45 Samuel Dewees, from Pennsylvania, was far less fortunate. His agent, he recalled, “drew all my pay and cheated me out of every cent of it.”46 All this movement and accounting was time-consuming. One Vir- ginian, Henry Boyd, joined the fight for liberty in 1775 and was done with service by 1777 or 1778, but he did not receive the precisely calculated 46 pounds, 5 shillings, and 4 pence he was owed for his service until August 1783, and he waited until 1786 to receive a warrant for his 100 acres of bounty land.47 These cheats and delays kept crucial funds out of the hands of young veterans just when they needed them most to make a new start in civilian life. Indeed, a group of officers rested their petition for aid on the grounds that had they “received an actual payment at this important moment, when they were to reenter life . . . it would have proved more advantageous to them than any subsequent relief.”48 The worst abuse veterans suffered at the end of the war was the exploitative purchase of their settlement certificates by speculators. Observer and historian of the Revolution David Ramsay noted that the “war-worn soldier who received at the close of the contest only an obligation for the 160 Becoming Men of Some Consequence payment of his hard earned dues, was from necessity obliged to transfer his rights for an insignificant sum.”49 Many cashed out just to afford food and clothes to get back home and pay expenses while they sought employment. Worse, such certificates were sold for less than one eighth of their face value. The predation began in camp, though some officers sought to stop it: “The General thinks it necessary to caution the soldiers against the foolish practice . . . of disposing of their Notes and Securities of pay, at a very great discount,” one commander warned, “when it is evident the speculators on these Securities must here after obtain the full payment of their nominal value.”50 An officer of the Virginia line similarly decried that the regulars had received their certificates, but were “selling them for mere nothing”—one soldier exchanging a £48 certificate for £4 “paid in hand.” The officer thought something had to be done to halt “such base advantages,” and feared the soldiers would be ruined. His only suggestion was that auditors stop issuing certificates, which would have left the soldiers with nothing in hand and raised the risk of mutiny.51 Not all officers were as solicitous of their soldiers’ long-term interests, however. Pliny Moore wrote to his father in March 1783 that “Gentlemen from Albany” had come to his post on the Mohawk River and purchased soldiers’ wages at a discount. The scam was bad enough, Moore explained, that the regiment issued orders against inducing soldiers to sell. But despite this, Moore told his father exactly how to “purchase some of the Nine Months Mens wages cheap”—specifically, he recommended a ratio of 1:20, “or 3 Dol’s for 9 Months Wages,” and that his father “be particular not to purchase any deserters pay & to know if they have not Sold it before.”52 This process continued after the war. Between 1783 and 1784, Continental Army judge-advocate John Laurance and General Alexan- der McDougall purchased the bounty lands of dozens of soldiers under McDougall’s command in the First and Second New York Regiments. The statement of Andrew Rose provides an example of the boilerplate document by which he signed over “all the Land which I . . . may at any time hereafter be entitled to from the state of New York for my service in the army of the united States as a private soldier for during the war with Great Britain.” For 600 acres, the private received £6 8 s., total.53 Low- ranking officers also got in on this game if they could raise the necessary funds. In 1785 Samuel Tallmadge made claims on 1,200 acres of New York land for his service as a lieutenant, but he also submitted claims to an additional 1,200 acres from the rights he purchased from privates Cornelius Van Ness and Thomas Marshall. Obtaining these land warrants at a deep Young Veterans after the War 161 discount right at the end of the war furthered his own postwar aspirations for competency to the disadvantage of his subordinates.54 Certificates for bounty land, in particular, only had speculative value: western lands had to be surveyed and allocated before they could be lawfully settled.55 Native American resistance in the Ohio Country further disrupted many grand plans throughout the early 1790s. At one extreme of delay, New Jersey did not issue actual deeds for its bounty lands until 1826.56 Many impoverished veterans saw the writing on the wall and took whatever depressed price they could get for their bounty land, unable to ignore present needs for the sake of future opportunity. Taken together, veterans’ sale of their certificates for pay and land to speculators marked a tremendous transfer of future capital out of the hands of the young and laboring classes and into the pockets of the landed and mercantile elite. These certificates had tremendous potential value, but only if held to maturity. Abigail Adams proved a shrewd speculator in these securities, purchasing and holding them until they rose in value with the stabilization of the republic’s political and economic order.57 Also, the Congress and states generally accepted certificates at face value as payment for taxes and fines or as payment for confiscated Tory lands or western claims, giving speculators an immediate and excellent return on their investment.58 The newspapers of 1784 were full of advertisements for land and goods—accepting as payment cash, barter, or soldiers’ notes (at a discount). It only added insult to injury for soldiers to see their de- ferred compensation circulating as a form of paper currency and just out of reach—in biblical terms, their birthright sold for a bowl of pottage. As late as 1786 and 1787, speculators were advertising to buy certificates, continuing the transfer of future value out of the hands of the veteran soldiers. The cumulative effect was summed up by Angus McCoy: “I never received anything for my military services other than certificates, which I traded for little or no value.”59 For young veterans, these losses meant less money for buying land, livestock, tools, or goods at a key turning point in their lives. In the early republic, Americans debated whether governments should calculate the interest owed speculators holding Revolutionary certificates from a note’s depreciated value or “at par,” which was by its original denomination. Only by refashioning youthful and impoverished Continen- tal veterans as patriotic patriarchs could citizens see the implications of this triangular relationship between soldiers, speculators, and taxpayers. In 1785, opponents of rewarding speculators with government payments put forward the character of “John Steady,” a fictional composite of their ideal 162 Becoming Men of Some Consequence revolutionary. “I am an old soldier,” read the letter in newspapers, “who served faithfully through the whole of the war; but it was no more than I ought to have done, for it was my bargain.” Though his wife and children suffered for eight years, he never deserted because he hoped the war would soon end and his country would treat him well. He had held his end of the bargain. Want and poverty, however, forced him to sell his pay certificates to a broker. The offer of eighteen pence for twenty shillings—one thirteenth of the face value—“froze my blood, and the tear started from my eye. In very despair, I laid down the certificate and took the money without opening my lips.” The shock brought on the rheumatism he had “got by laying in the snow at Trenton”—a telling nod to the victory that changed the course of the war. Crippled by pain, he had to bind out his children, and his wife died of a broken heart. The old soldier accepted his tragic lot in life, but insisted, “the man that got my paper has made profit enough upon it already.”60 This character of John Steady was a political creation that spoke to the discomfort Americans in the early republic felt toward veterans of the Continental Army. Only by imagining the veteran as a suffering and wronged patriarch could they be sympathetic. Even then, the argument did not propose making the veteran whole, but rather attacked the idea of further rewarding speculators with revenue raised by new taxes. Young veterans were invisible in political arguments after the war because their struggle to make their way forward in life was customary and anticipated. The lost potential, the disadvantage and delay wrought by the war proved undetectable and unarticulated. The economic and familial collapse of a crippled veteran, however, struck a discordant note that resonated in political arguments. The husband who had lost his competency and authority over his family because of honorable service to his country deserved pity; young men, unruly and suspicious at the best of times, could shift for themselves.61 Like the fictional “John Steady,” young veterans also failed in the difficult postwar economic conditions. A year after the end of the war, Park Holland remembered finding an old messmate, Edward Chalenor, during a visit to Boston. Joining the fight for liberty in 1776, Chalenor had risen through the ranks and attained a commission as a junior officer. Holland remembered him “naturally as clever a fallow as ever lived—I now found him as poor as want.” A hatter by trade and a native of Boston, Chalenor was “in no business.” He had resigned his commission in the spring of 1779, but getting out of the army had done him little good. When Holland asked Chalenor why he had no employment, “he replied he should be very Young Veterans after the War 163 thankful to [work] but the truth was he had not owned a shirt for some time.” Moved by his old friend’s collapse into poverty, Holland gave him some money for clothes. Chalenor returned to work the next morning, “and before I left the city he became quite another man, and said he felt as happy as a prince.” But his revival faded and his luck did not hold; Hol- land recalled that Chalenor died the following winter.62 Years of military service had yielded his old friend nothing.

Getting Back on Track

In 1782, friends and fellow aides-de-camp James McHenry and Alexander Hamilton found themselves in analogous civilian positions: these young veterans held political office but were not yet financially independent or secure. They possessed political status that was incongruous with their positions in their personal lives. Ironically, because McHenry and Hamil- ton were serving in elected office, they remained dependent on the older generation. McHenry addressed the dilemma directly: “I find that to be dependent on a father is irksome, because I feel that it is in my power to be independent by my own endeavours.” An independent income brought personal independence. “It is high time,” McHenry declared, “for you and I to set about in good earnest, doing something for ourselves.” He pushed Hamilton, who similarly depended on his Schuyler in-laws, “Have we not both of us continued long enough in the service of the public . . . ? Should not I exercise my profession or some profitable business & should not you, putting off the politician, exert yourself only to acquire a profession?” McHenry had heard the news that Hamilton had been chosen to attend Congress. If he took his seat, McHenry warned him, it would cost him “another year of time that is become more precious than ever.” Instead, McHenry told his friend to “perfect your happiness” by completing legal study. “It appears to me, Hamilton, to be no longer either necessary or a duty, for you and I to go on to sacrifice the small remnant of time that is left us. We have already immolated [it] largely on the altar of liberty . . . it is incumbent upon us to be useful in another line.”63 It was time for Ham- ilton and McHenry to establish their independence. As hot and bright as the political fires of the early republic burned, the straightforward personal ambitions of young veterans to regain lost time and make their way forward in life dominated their attention. In this way, their domestic ambitions mirrored the priorities of the broader society, which helped mask the significance of young soldiers’ efforts. Young 164 Becoming Men of Some Consequence veterans’ ambitions were simple but significant. Discharged at the end of the war, young Samuel Chase of New Hampshire looked to his future and created a small personal library. He bought a book on public speaking, an almanac, and the semi-pornographic Aristotle’s Masterpiece. The book on public speaking would teach him how to assert himself and gain the attention of other men. The almanac held wisdom and predictions about people and planting, fortune and farming. Aristotle’s Masterpiece promised to reveal the secrets of the fairer sex.64 Army life had given Chase a taste of a broader world, but he knew what he had to do to build a successful civilian life. After glory and disappointment, these young veterans followed the pragmatic conclusion of Candide, Voltaire’s tempest-tossed everyman: we must cultivate our garden.65 Young veterans used all the connections and resources they could to get back on track and make up time they had lost in military service. While the war continued, drawing on connections within the military sphere offered opportunities to some. When Sylvanus Wood, a Lexing- ton minuteman-turned-Continental, resigned his commission in 1776 at the insistence of his parents, he was at first not entirely sure what to do with himself in civilian life. Then he saw “a chance to make shoes for the army”—combining his trade and inside connections promised a sure payoff. He accordingly “bought leather, hired journeymen, made shoes, and delivered them for the soldiers,” but the depreciating money he was paid, he remembered, “would not purchase my stock, so I lost my time for 1777.”66 Wood’s memory of his economic efforts are indicative of young men’s understanding of their own life course. Their time was as precious and limited a resource as their capital, their connections, and their endur- ance at labor. In the disrupted economy of Revolutionary America, no course of action was a sure thing. Young men followed the chance that looked most promising for helping them get on with their lives. Other young veterans found their military experiences offered specific opportunities after the war. When Samuel Dewees left the service, his identity as a soldier advertised his suitability for particular labor. His old neighbors, he recalled, “believing that I was a kind of no-scare fellow, and not afraid to stay by myself anywhere,” hired him to go out into an un- inhabited valley over the mountains with a drove of hogs to fatten them on acorns and chestnuts. Dewees consented, and they gave him a good rifle “and all the other necessaries for this hog expedition and campaign.” Dewees’s memoir suggested there was not much mechanical difference between defending the liberties of America from British tyranny and de- Young Veterans after the War 165 fending seventy bell-wearing pigs from wolves and bears. He could follow orders and endure discomfort.67 Other veterans found their path forward in life ran through the woods. Surveying particularly suited the skills and ambitions of young officers just come out of the army: it required youthful vigor, a modicum of education, and connections to the land-speculating elite. In a way, surveying had a traditional connection with soldiering: as young veterans of the Seven Years’ War, George Washington, Anthony Wayne, George Rogers Clark, and Rufus Putnam all spent time surveying frontier land.68 After the Revolution, these well-connected Continental field officers turned to their former subordinates for assistance with new projects. Rufus Putnam, in particular, helped pull Benjamin Gilbert out of his rakish spiral in 1784 by teaching him surveying. With a civilian focus and new western plans brewing, Gilbert’s behavior once again appeared to stabilize as he prepared for a renewed pursuit of respectability and independence on the New York frontier.69 Putnam also enlisted Park Holland’s assistance in surveying tracts of land in Maine. It was good timing: Holland had finished making payments to Massachusetts veterans “as far as possible” and had begun “to think of some other business.”70 Surveying fit the bill and provided opportunity to scout inexpensive frontier land for his own purchase. In the early republic, young veterans found building on their military relationships a natural course of action in charting a path forward. Soldiers intimately knew the characters and abilities of the men with whom they served and could enter new ventures as peers and equals. After serving through the war, Jeremiah Greenman recalled returning home to Rhode Island at twenty-five where he “entered a contract with Mr. Masury[,] formerly an officer of the Regt[,] to put our small interest together (which we had been fighting, bleeding, and all most dying for,—for the space of 8 long years in the Army of the United States,) in order for to trade and try for a lively hood.” Greenman and Joseph Masury had risen through the ranks together, and as comrades and friends they started a retail store by combining their commutation payments from Congress.71 It was telling that young veterans found themselves pulling together to advance in life. After Major Samuel Shaw realized his family’s floundering land speculations down east on the Maine coast could not support another ambitious young gentleman, he set his sights on the far east, sailing as an unsalaried supercargo to China in 1784. He accepted the berth on the condition that a similarly unemployed army comrade accompany him. They planned to split the profits of the position. While Shaw sighed that he “made not a 166 Becoming Men of Some Consequence guinea” from the voyage, he sailed east again in 1786, 1791, and 1794, and while ashore worked at the War Department for his former commander, Henry Knox.72 Across his postwar career, Shaw drew on his old army connections in pursuit of the main chance. Just as relationships within a family or community drew youths into the army, wartime relationships could persist and offer veterans a foundation on which to build. Shared wartime sacrifices certainly reinforced bonds. After losing three of his brothers during the war, for example, John Burrows joined his surviving brother on a farm in Bucks County, Penn- sylvania. Further binding the families together after the intense losses in the war, he married his brother’s wife’s sister.73 Alexander Childress similarly found new meanings in prewar relationships. He had first enlisted to serve for two years in the Fifth Virginia under Captain John Pleasants. Though Childress transferred to an artillery company for an additional term, after the war he returned to Henrico County and “entered into the service of Capt. John Pleasants as his miller . . . and continued there many years.”74 Just as civilian class hierarchies reappeared in the army, veterans could transfer military relationships back to the civilian sphere. Samuel Chase had served as a waiter in the headquarters of General John Stark— a resident of a nearby New Hampshire town—after running away from home to join the army. During winter furloughs and for several years after his discharge, Chase recorded stints working as a teacher and laboring on Stark’s farm.75 A strong military record certainly could commend a young veteran to his betters. In his three years in the Virginia line, John Ballenger had been promoted to sergeant, served in an elite unit of light infantry, and volunteered for the daring assault on Stony Point. Only twenty-one when he left the army, after the war he worked in Loudon County as an over- seer for George Gray, a Continental officer.76 His earlier experience with executing orders, overseeing discipline, and acting on his own initiative was equally valuable on Gray’s plantation. Postwar economic connections mirrored the Continental hierarchies that forged the original connections among officers and men. Far more common than smoothly resuming hometown connections or transferring military friendships and patronage, however, young veterans struggled to resume civilian life in new locations. Veterans’ increased geographic mobility was evidence of both the challenges they faced and the opportunities they sought. Some started life anew where the war had left them. John Greenwood was a young New Englander who had served in the army and at sea, suffering capture four times as a privateer, and ended Young Veterans after the War 167 the war in New York City. Rather than return home, he set to work there, repairing watches, compasses, barometers, and other instruments. Having obtained a basic knowledge of dentistry as a boy from his father, he set up practice in the city. It proved a lucky choice. By 1800, he was the leading dentist in Manhattan and advertised himself as “Dentist to his Excellency George Washington.”77 Other young veterans, having no property and few prospects, scattered like quail to the frontiers. Their wartime experiences might have broadened their parochial horizons and lessened their fears of the unknown. Virginia’s veterans had been bred to be farmers but lacked property. Unsurprisingly, in the years after 1785 over half of Virginia’s veterans moved west, into Kentucky, Tennessee, or land Virginia had reserved for its veterans in Ohio.78 The Massachusetts maritime town of Ipswich also offers a similar case study of increased mobility after the war. Of the men who came of age in the generation before the Revolution, three fifths remained in the village as adults. By contrast, half of the youths of the Revolutionary generation not only left the community, but also departed at an earlier age.79 The demands of competency and independence drew veterans toward Maine and Vermont, up into New York and the Ohio Country, and out to Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia. Veterans often did not have much choice but to strike out for new ter- ritory. Veteran John Chandler recalled in 1783 that “he made up his mind that it would be better for him to go into a new country than to depend on giting a property, or even a comfortable living in his native town . . . having no property to begin with.” That summer, he accordingly set off “to explore the Eastern Country” of Maine up the Kennebec River.80 Similarly, in the spring of 1780 Jonathan Carpenter of Rehoboth—who had gone as a Mas- sachusetts soldier in 1775 and 1776, been captured at sea as a privateer, and spent seventeen months imprisoned in Portsmouth, England—set out “to travil to the Northward to seek my fortune” in Vermont. After three years of expeditions to the north and winters spent working back in Rehoboth, Carpenter finally cleared his farm.81 Elijah Fisher, who had almost fallen into despair in Boston in May 1783, sold his state certificates for $80, worked building stone walls, and made his way to the far eastern end of Maine by June. In his wartime diary, he had recorded the time he worked for other men for pay. Now, Fisher’s tally of days worked clearing land, building fences, and sowing crops were his own, though he still jealously husbanded his time.82 For these young veterans cutting out farms, the process was slow and precarious. Samuel Benjamin, a veteran lieutenant, went to Maine in the fall of 1782 to find land and bought 120 acres for £30. 168 Becoming Men of Some Consequence Lacking ready money, he had to stake future harvests: 25 bushels of corn and 25 of rye, deliverable in December 1784, and then that amount again at the end of 1785.83 It took time, resources, and relationships to move to the frontiers. Young veterans rarely set out alone—instead they followed the paths of neighbors and kin. Jonathan Carpenter undertook his relocation to Vermont in partnership with his fourth cousin and brother-in-law.84 Without these connections and resources, the deeply impoverished veterans could not afford to seek a new start on the frontier. Still, veterans’ most valuable resource for getting back on track was their labor, and they generally took up any task they could. Henry Sewall had been an aide to General William Heath, but in the summer of 1783 this young officer found himself no different than any other farmhand. He helped his father get in the grain and hay on the Massachusetts farm, then headed for Maine with his brother. That fall, Sewall set up his store in Hallowell on the Kennebec, but he found his labor more in demand than his goods. He spent his days in backbreaking work building chimneys for hire. His diary recorded no explicit emotional response to his leaving the army, to the end of the war, or to his return to civilian life. Consequently, it is unclear what he felt about being thrown into the everyday drudgery of survival, stacking rocks and mixing mortar for chimneys after serving as an aide-de-camp to a general and having seen the flower of the French army parade before His Excellency, General Washington. But, perhaps fittingly, he began the new year of 1784 reading Paradise Lost.85 With these travels, labors, and farms, young veterans started to establish their independence, which pointed them toward marriage—the signal step forward in the arc of a man’s life. After John Chandler bought land in Maine on credit, in August 1783 “he married Miss Mary Whittier of Nottingham.” As he described it, “This was the best work he had ever done, and . . . [this] last contract the best he ever made.”86 The timing of marriage suggests its importance to young veterans and their desire to stay on course with their lives. Men at the far end of their twenties often did not wait until the end of their service or the conclusion of the war to find a wife. Charles Burrage of Virginia had enlisted in 1777 for three years when he was about twenty-nine years old. On a furlough home in No- vember 1778, he married, tarried at home for a month, and then returned to the army.87 The story of Aaron Brister, a slave turned soldier in Prince William County, Virginia, also suggests the arc running from service to independence to marriage. An adolescent in 1776, Brister likely was enlisted as a substitute and served for almost two years. While still in the Young Veterans after the War 169 service, he married Betsey Tolibel, a young enslaved woman. Fighting with the Continentals earned Brister his freedom; marriage and a household of his own marked his manhood. But Virginia proved an awkward place for a free black man. After about a decade and a half, and apparently with other free black Virginia families, he moved his household to land taken from the Iroquois in central New York.88 Far more common, however, were veterans who married soon after they left the service and regained a sufficient degree of economic stability. The Alvey brothers, John and Robert, of Prince William County, Virginia, had gone to war in 1776 and both married after leaving the army. John married at the end of his two-year term; Robert served at least through Yorktown in 1781 and married within a year of his return home.89 Simeon Lyman of Connecticut served until the end of 1779 and lived at home with his father in between enlistments or while on furloughs. Like many of his comrades, however, he was married about a year after leaving the army, and then set up his own household.90 For young Continentals who served to the end of the war, memoirs, pensions, records, and diaries are full of references to 1783 marriages. Lieutenant Samuel Tallmadge was twenty- eight years old when released from the Continental Army in June 1783. Within a fortnight or two, he married Mary Hilton of Albany in Kinder- hook. Tallmadge, a patriot refugee from British-occupied Long Island, likely met the Hiltons during his time as a junior officer stationed along the Hudson River. Kinderhook was only a day’s travel by boat from the camp at Newburgh, a reasonable range for courting in the quiet days at the end of the war. With his country’s respectable independence secured, Tallmadge now sought to advance his own.91 While prescriptive pieces at the end of the war urged young men and women toward marriage as the natural and salutary order, and as a way to heal communities after the disruptions of war, there was little sign that young veterans needed encouragement or delayed longer than their circumstances made necessary.92 With a stake built up from his surveying work, Park Holland followed his peers, marrying in January 1785 and setting up housekeeping in June in Petersham, Maine. “For five years I made farming my business,” he later wrote, “and I may safely add they were five of the happiest years of my life.” With wife and a growing family, he had attained his competency. His new community acknowledged his worth and elected Holland captain of the militia company. Later, he “was generally chosen Town Clerk, Selectman, Assessor, &c.,” and represented his town in the state assembly for two years.93 He had successfully completed 170 Becoming Men of Some Consequence the transformation and progress from one stage of his life course to the next. His army friend and fellow veteran officer-surveyor, Benjamin Gil- bert, followed a similar arc, demonstrating the path veterans followed to resume their proper advancement through life. After his wild winter in 1784, Gilbert had buckled down to learn surveying and had definitively left his father’s house in Brookfield, Massachusetts, in June 1784 for a future in upstate New York. He briefly taught school there and bought 200 acres just northeast of Cooperstown in the newly founded town of Middle- field.94 As he labored to improve his farm, Gilbert shifted his displays of masculinity from the dalliances of the idle bachelor to those of the industrious yeoman. His letters from New York to his father in 1785 were full of requests for tools, descriptions of smaller-than-expected harvests, and reports of his high hopes for next year.95 By 1786, Gilbert had achieved sufficient economic stability to wed Mary Cornwall—the young woman he had begun courting in Danbury in the fall of 1783. Bringing her to his farm at Middlefield marked Gilbert’s successful attainment of economic independence, cemented his status as head of a household, and completed his long struggle to secure full manhood and respected masculinity. In his wartime diary and letters to fellow soldiers, Gilbert had described his own behaviors and women’s sexual availability to win the regard of his fellow men. Starting over in New York, Gilbert transformed himself from wild bachelor to responsible, hard-working patriarch, but his compulsion toward masculine performance remained consistent. After their marriage, he wrote to Mary’s father in May 1786: “Mrs. Gilbert is become a hearty Woman. She is able to do more business now in one week than she was in four when she left your House. Our little Dairy with the other business incident to the care of a Family employ her who[le] time so that She is delivered of that bane of human happiness, Iddleness. She feels herself contented and happy . . . [fearing only] the encroachment of the Wolves which are the constant disturbers of our Nights repose.”96 Stripped of her first name in her husband’s correspondence, the new Mrs. Gilbert’s most important quality in her husband’s reporting was her improved and proper industriousness. Benjamin Gilbert’s comments about his wife pointed to her changes, but the more radical transformation was his. In this letter, Gilbert presented himself, the young husband, as a worthy successor to his father-in-law—had he not increased his bride’s productivity four-fold in their house and dairy? In Middlefield, Gilbert’s need to win the regard of his fellow men persisted, and he took to local and state politics in Young Veterans after the War 171 the 1790s—the epitome of public masculinity in the early republic. Allied with the powerful Federalist land magnate, Judge William Cooper, Gil- bert served as sheriff for Otsego County for eleven years and was elected to three terms as an assemblyman in the state legislature.97 After eight years of fighting for his country and displaying his masculinity with fellow soldiers through the bottle and the bed, Gilbert had transformed himself into a proper husband, father, independent farmer, and leader. In the roll- ing hills of New York, Benjamin Gilbert had made himself a man.

Failure and Disappointment

Young veterans like Holland and Gilbert were lucky. The war destroyed far more lives than it immediately advanced—roughly one Revolutionary soldier in ten never came home. For the survivors, the long-term costs of their service proved bitter dregs to drink. Many who returned came burdened with physical and mental scars. Army service certainly took a toll on young men’s bodies; poor nutrition, epidemic disease, poorly healed wounds and injuries all added up to “broken constitutions.” Surviving a battlefield wound often meant that the soldier had been struck in an extremity, which, after amputation, left him unable to work. These invalids deluged their states, Congress, and George Washington with petitions in the 1780s and 1790s. From the public they received a discourse of sentimental sympathy and little else. A 1790 poem described one such veteran, “Deep in a vale, a stranger now to arms, / Too poor to shine in courts, too proud to beg, / he, who once warred on Saratoga’s plains, / Sits musing o’er his scars, and wooden leg.”98 One veteran, Benjamin Fowler, made his call for alms directly to the reading public with a broadsheet poem explaining how his military service in the Revolution had blighted his life. “good people all, both great and small / Pray unto me attend,” he began. “In some time past (I’ve thought it best) / Of the war I did partake; / With anxious care, and hardships there; / My nature I did break.” He claimed he had served “Full eight long years” to defend his country, telling of going with Montgomery into Can- ada, “Where many men did die; / Of small-pox there, I had a share, / And lost my precious eye.” Now with the war over, he lamented, “My nature’s done, my strength is gone, / I know not what to do; / No strength to work, how can I shirk, / Unhappy am I.” Nevertheless, though homeless, alone, and soon to lose a leg to cancer, he promised, “I’m loth also, to beg and go, / Nor ever will I steal.” Sentiment, not patriotic or national feeling, 172 Becoming Men of Some Consequence was the heart of his argument for pity: “My tender heart doth feel the smart, / And sinks within my breast; / I can’t reveal, how I do feel, / With sorrow I’m opprest.” The broken veteran begged for pity and relief: “gentlemen and ladies then, / I ask not for a dollar; / That Heaven may bless, six-pence or less / Bestow on poor Ben Fowler.” By telling his tale and declaring his honesty, this veteran tried to recoup a respectability he either lost or never obtained in the course of the war. His reference to Montgom- ery and the Canada campaign was of particular importance; it marked him as an eager New England volunteer of 1775 who had suffered as the kin of his audience had suffered. He actually had served under Benedict Arnold, but the traitor’s name was best left unmentioned. Similarly, his broadsheet made no mention of his “wandering and unsettled life” after the war. By 1794, he claimed in an invalid pension how he had “for several years sub- sisted on charitable contributions,” being unable to labor. As a veteran, he could only claim pity as his due.99 Between wounds and broken constitutions, veterans found their capacity for productive labor diminished. After Tarleton’s Legion of Horse wounded, stripped, and left Edward Brus for dead in 1780, he never fully recovered, and thereafter had “never been capable of enduring hard labor.”100 Lemuel Roberts similarly insisted in his 1809 memoir that though he was only fifty-nine, his “suffering in the public cause” left him “reduced to the inability of seventy or upward.” He was certain that his role in the war meant that he had “not been able to perform more than half the labor” he otherwise might have done in his life.101 The effects of wounds lingered, bringing some to an early grave. Henry Brown was a Virginian wounded at Germantown and was left with a bullet fragment lodged in his jaw. It was months before he was again fit for service. His family recalled that the one-ounce ball was not extracted until eight years, four months, and eight days after the 1777 battle. It caused great pain both before and after extraction, “having left a running scar which would frequently rise, break and run.” Brown’s widow was “fully of the opinion that the wound was the cause of his death” in 1798.102 The war also carved scars onto the hearts and minds of veterans. Amos Carpenter received a severe head wound at Germantown that left him “wholly unfit for service,” and was released from the army early. His dis- ability was at least in part psychological: “the noise of fire arms, especially cannon, made him deranged.” After a year at home, he tried to return to the army and was directed to go out as a spy against the Indians. While the noise of the battlefield was too much for him, he could still handle the Young Veterans after the War 173 deadly quiet of the woods.103 Joanna Brown married her cousin Aris in the fall of 1779—“he was one of Gen. Washington’s life guard . . . perhaps [a] sergenant or corporal.” Sadly, he “lost his health shortly after their marriag and was subject to fits of insanity ever afterward.” The cause, his family supposed, was “exposure in the army.”104 Young men with the greatest of advantages could suffer the horrors of war equally with their humblest subordinates. Samuel Jennison, Harvard class of 1774, was only seventeen when commissioned as a lieutenant in January 1777 in the Sixth Mas- sachusetts. He endured heavy fighting later that year at Saratoga when his regiment was thrown against the British lines. After two and a half years in the army, Jennison resigned in July 1779. Despite his privileged background, after his time in the army he suffered apparent psychological problems that led to repeated economic failures and a broken marriage.105 Something happened to poor young Jennison at Saratoga that he could not overcome. Sadly, he was far from alone. His Harvard classmate, Benjamin Brown Plaisted, an artillery officer, suffered a complete mental breakdown after only four months on garrison duty. He left the army in early 1777 and a year later the selectmen of Boston declared him non compos mentis. He died when the war drew to a close in 1783.106 The war blasted the lives of many unfortunate young men. In addition to enduring the burden of physical or mental wounds and postwar poverty, the young black veterans of the Continental Army also faced rising racial barriers within the early republic. Prince Crosley, of Lyme, Connecticut, was a comparatively fortunate exception. After earning his freedom in the war, his old town welcomed him back. He married shortly “after Peace was declared,” paralleling the path of his white comrades who used their military service to assert their civic station and obtain fraternal unity.107 By contrast, most black men of New England who had enlisted to escape slavery or assert membership in their communities found little assistance or sympathy after the war. Some returned to work for their old masters. Others found themselves cut adrift. In Hop- kinton, New Hampshire, Saco Barnard’s former owner refused to allow his ex-bondsman to return and live at his old home.108 Similarly, many impoverished black New Hampshire veterans found themselves “warned out” of towns in the years following the war. They moved in search of better opportunities, but their new towns refused to accept them as members of the community.109 West African–born Jeffrey Brace won his freedom through military service in Connecticut, but encountered crushing and constant racism in Vermont after the war.110 The added burden of dis- 174 Becoming Men of Some Consequence crimination limited these veterans as they strove to build independent lives. Joseph Green, a mixed-race veteran in Massachusetts was particularly unfortunate, despite his efforts to follow the expected path of the male life course. After serving in a Continental regiment for several years, he married Sarah Phillips, a mixed-race girl from his hometown, while on furlough in January 1782. They returned to the army together, where Sarah took up work in camp. The early years of peace did not work out the way Green and his wife hoped. Three years after his discharge from the army, a Worcester court found him guilty of breaking into three homes in one night and sentenced him to hang for grand larceny. The newspaper reports of his execution made no mention of his status as a veteran, nor did they hint at the motivation for his turn to crime. In the eyes of the early republic, Joseph Green was simply a racially suspect criminal.111 Veterans of the Continental Army found the postwar deck stacked against them; speculators’ exploitative purchase of their certificates, the republic’s disrupted economy, civilians’ suspicion of soldiers, and the physical and mental costs of war sucked veterans deeper into a mire of dependency and poverty as the years rolled on. Statistical analysis of veterans’ pension applications reveals a stark and damning correlation: the more time men devoted to military service during the war, the worse off they found themselves in their postwar lives. Though the rural village of Peterborough, New Hampshire, grew increasingly prosperous throughout the 1790s and early 1800s, the fate of its Continental veterans sketched a dark picture in the town records. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, by social and economic measures the men of the Revolutionary generation who had only briefly served as militia or in state units during the war were indistinguishable from their non-veteran peers. The veteran Continentals of the town, however, were falling behind. They owned less property. Their personal and real wealth, as measured by taxes, fell dramatically after 1813, while their non-veteran peers only suffered a slight decline. By 1815, the taxable wealth of long-serving Continental veterans was about half that of the men who had not fought in the war. The gap widened further as time passed. By 1820, 88 percent of Continentals had fallen below the town’s average taxable estate.112 They were quickly losing their economic independence at the time of life when they should have been helping the rising generation toward their own competence. Compared with their non-veteran peers, aging Continentals in Peter- borough manifested deficits in two other areas that were significant markers of manhood: political leadership and patriarchy. Continental veterans Young Veterans after the War 175 found themselves at the edges of community leadership as time passed, holding only a few, minor offices like fence viewer or hogreeve, while the veterans of the militia or state troops and non-veterans of the Revolu- tionary generation were honored with major positions like selectman or state representative.113 Tracking with their straightened economic situation, veteran Continentals also fathered fewer children than their peers in the town’s Revolutionary cohort. By contrast, the veterans of militia or state units showed no difference in household size from those men who had avoided Revolutionary service altogether.114 Even after accounting for Continentals’ humbler social origins, these veterans of longer and more-intense service ended up poorer and more marginal than their peers or kin who avoided the burdens of broken constitutions or traumatized psyches.115 The arc of the life course points to an explanation. Despite their hopes for the rewards of military service, during the war many soldiers came to suspect that they were wasting precious time. When Congress proposed pensions for surviving Revolutionary veterans in 1819, they similarly acknowledged that those young soldiers “gave up the only opportunity, for themselves, of becoming qualified for any occupation which, in times of peace, could assure them the means even of a comfortable subsistence.”116 Though these explanations fit the observations of a suffering cadre of aging veterans, Americans stripped out possible contingency and flattened out what had actually happened during the war and in the first years of the republic. “Having Devoted my youthful days to the service of my country,” Jeremiah Greenman declared fifty years later, “I was deprived of the opportunity which young men general[ly] possess of acquiring any mechanical art or perfecting my self in any profession.” This summed up the common wisdom then circulating but ignored the context of his earlier experiences. When Greenman first enlisted in 1775, at seventeen, he had left little behind him. He had some education but no trade or property. The war apparently looked like an opportunity and Greenman diligently followed it, serving in the ranks and gaining an officer’s commission. The disappointment was in how military service and the rocky road through the postwar years failed to secure his generation a lasting path to a prosperous and independent manhood.117 * * * Soldiering had changed Elisha Fisher. In the spring of 1782, he was laboring for a prosperous Massachusetts farmer who styled himself a colonel. They fell into an argument after Fisher asked how much of his pay was 176 Becoming Men of Some Consequence being docked for room and board. Likely caught out, the colonel called Fisher “A Direty meen Low spirited bitch.” A veteran of many years, Fisher refused to take the abuse. “I told him I had ben about the world and in jentlemans Company and Naver heard that carecter of myself before.” He would be the judge of his own behavior. Shaking the dust of that farm from his feet, he took his leave and hired himself out to a farmer in the neighboring town. When that man tried to cheat him of his pay, Fisher again wrote in his diary, “I told him that I would have what I agreed for if I had anything . . . he said how have you the empedence to look me in the faice and tall such lye. I told him that I was not afraid to Look him or any other man in the faice in a good cause.” Though his service had burdened Fisher in body and mind and failed to deliver competency, serving in the war had changed him. In his journal he proudly wrote these stories demonstrating his broader sense of self-worth. He had been about the world and he would continue looking for the shade of that vine and fig tree where he could sit and where none would make him afraid.118 Soldiers of the Revolution left the army and entered the postwar republic with great expectations. Unfortunately, the difficulties they faced heading home—particularly being cheated out of their compensation and facing civilian mistrust—complicated their transition. The economic and political upheaval in the early republic offered additional hurdles. But they had no choice but to struggle to find a way forward in their lives. With their labor, the necessary embrace of mobility, and any resources and relationships they could scrounge out of their wartime experiences, they continued their pursuit of independence. Many scattered to cheaper frontier land out of necessity. They sought competence and married, asserting themselves however they could as respectable and worthy men in their communities. Ultimately, long service in the Revolutionary War failed to answer young men’s expectations. While they had sought competence and independence and the regard of their families and communities, soldiering had in fact wasted their strength, health, and time. While the psychic and physical wounds from the war certainly burdened some young men, falling behind their peers in the struggle to attain a competency and personal independence also imposed emotional burdens. For young men who were proud of their service and accomplishment as Continental soldiers, it was particularly galling. In a republic that increasingly proclaimed the social equality of white men, Continental veterans measurably and increasingly fell behind their peers as time moved forward.119 This stagnation and decline among young veterans of the Revolution was tragic. Their endur- Young Veterans after the War 177 ance had helped win American independence and establish the citizen, the consent of the governed, and We, the People as the source of political sovereignty in the republic, but the youths of the Continental Army generally fell short in cementing their position as men of some consequence and achieving the goals of the life course, so conservative and traditional.

178 Becoming Men of Some Consequence Conclusion

“To all brave healthy, able bodied and well disposed young men,” rang out the familiar message of the recruiting posters. Troops were “now raising under general washington, for the defence of the liberties and independence of the United States Against the hostile designs of foreign enemies.” Seeking “youth of spirit” for this “honourable service,” the recruiters did their utmost to catch young men’s attention. En- listees would find their present comfort satisfied with a supply of “good and handsom cloathing” and a “large and ample portion of provisions.” The offered rewards also pointed to the future. Since “subsistance and comfort [were] provided by law, without any expense to him,” a soldier could “lay up for himself ” the entirety of the “liberal and generous” bounty of twelve dollars “together with sixty dollars a year in gold and silver money.” The brave youth could then spend “a few happy years in viewing the different parts of this beautiful continent, in the honourable and truly respectable character of a soldier, after which, he may, if he pleases return home to his friends, with his pockets full of money and his head covered with laurels.” Money, adventure, respect, and the possibility of a step forward in life all spoke to young men—taking up arms offered opportunity or a new start.1 Though the spirit of ’76 echoed in this broadsheet, it actually appeared in late 1798 or early 1799. Indeed, the printers were so effective in evoking the Revolution—with talk of General Washington, Liberties, and Independence—that for almost two centuries historians have generally assumed that it ran off a press during the War of Independence.2 In 1798, Americans feared that war with France was imminent. Referencing the Revolution in that moment of national crisis followed naturally. Heeding the call of his country, Washington once again came out of retirement, this “To all brave, healthy, able-bodied and well-disposed young men. . . .” (Courtesy of the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Connecticut) time to command the “New Army.” War fever swept young Federalists, mirroring the rage militaire of 1775. Though these youths had no memory of that war—the sixteen-year-olds had been born around 1783—they had heard the stories of Revolutionary glory and knew what society expected from them. Their would-be colonels and generals had been young men during the Revolution; despite what they had seen, they repeated the promises they had been told two decades earlier. Though so much was changing in the young republic, the assumptions tying together youth and military service had remained remarkably stable and pointed out the lessons and memories Americans had taken from their War for Indepen- dence.3 During the Revolution, soldiering had intertwined with young men’s position in their lives and their relationships in their communities. War had offered a patriotic chance to defend their parents, future wives, and as- yet-unconceived children. It had promised them the economic resources to advance into adult independence. For some, it opened the door to escape and start anew as their own men. And if youths balked, the power of the Revolutionary state and pressure from families and local elites pushed the most expendable among them into the service. Whether by choice or from coercion, the young Revolutionary War recruits stepped into a military sphere which required new behaviors to gain the regard of their fellow soldiers. Some had come to Washington’s army politically motivated, while others had the rhetoric of liberty and manly duty take on new meanings as they stood in the ranks. Surrounded by other young men and suffering danger and deprivation, their experience of the Revolu- tion proved markedly different from that of the inhabitants among whom they marched and fought, and from whom they stole to keep body and soul together. Soldiers might build positive relationships with these angry strangers and so-called countrymen, however, if the civilians could come to see a familiar youth in the soldier standing before them. These connections through work, friendship, and courtship offered young Continentals a path back into the civilian sphere. As the years of war continued and soldiers saw the collapse of the currency and the emptiness of Congress’s promises, however, these young men of the army realized that they had to get out of Continental service if they expected to make their way forward in life and catch up with their brothers at home. Disappointments continued after the war. Veterans attempted to regain the road toward competency and obtain the regard of their fellow citizens. Some never made it to that destination. All of this shaped the meanings of the war and offered Conclusion 181 political lessons in the new republic—one set for veteran officers and the rising elite, one set for their enlisted soldiers and the common man. * * * Despite disappointments during the Revolutionary War, as the 1798 recruiting broadside suggested, the elite of the American republic continued to see soldiering as a patriotic, salutary, and advantageous path for youths. When the federal government sought volunteers for that new army to defend America against French aggression in 1798, or to fight the Brit- ish again in 1812, the stories, speeches, and sermons young recruits heard echoed with messages unchanged since 1776.4 Repeating what he himself had been told as a young man, George Morison insisted in his 1803 memoir that soldiering was good for a youth’s political and moral soul. Recall- ing sleeping beneath a thin blanket on a rock in the Canadian wilderness in 1775, he opined, “Soldiers, used to manly toil, know not the pains of indolence. . . . Their school is the school of fortitude. Their heroic labor, their love of glory, their steady attachment for each other constitute their health and their happiness, [and] keep up a constant glow of soul, which the indolent and luxurious never feel.”5 Just as fire tempered steel, adversity strengthened republicans. For the ambitious youth, war still beckoned as before, pointing the path to worldly advantage. When his twenty-year-old son was appointed an aide-de-camp during the War of 1812, Nathaniel Pendleton was certain the youth was “now taking the first step in the career of life. It is at a time when great and important Scenes are acting. . . . Much of the Success of your future pursuits will depend on the impression made by your first acts.” The elder Pendleton, though sounding more than a little like the pompous and trite Polonius of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, remembered his own time as a young aide. The General, he explained, had “shewn great kindness in taking you into his family before you can possibly know . . . the duties of your office.” Nevertheless, he was sure the military sphere would open the world for his son, provided the youth did his duty, defended his honor as a gentleman, respected his elders, kept good company, rose early in the morning, and improved his handwriting.6 After the Revolutionary War, the young elites of the republic used their military identities and relationships to lay claim to status and the mantle of leadership. Young officers used fashion to set themselves apart: most Philadelphians wore a sedate, English-style of clothes, a European traveler noted, while “a few young gentlemen, especially those of the army, ap- proximate to the French cut.”7 Similarly displaying their public service and 182 Becoming Men of Some Consequence advertising their continued public-mindedness, members of the Society of the Cincinnati proudly flashed their eagle badges on patriotic occasions. Officers continued to use their military ranks for the same reason, setting themselves above their peers and putting themselves forward as worthy leaders. Though elected to Congress and the vice-presidency, Aaron Burr remained “Colonel Burr” to his death. Alexander Hamilton held tightly to his title as brevet-colonel until his appointment as major-general of the army during the ridiculously overblown 1798 Quasi-War with France. In his political wilderness thereafter he was “General Hamilton.” Though Continental officers had created the Society of the Cincinnati to preserve their fellowship after the war, they also intended it to focus their political influence. By the late 1780s, the new Federalist faction proved the ultimate officers’ club and the party through which they tried to direct the republican experiment.8 In these assertions of status, officers responded to the disruption -un leashed by the war. The Revolution had been a struggle over political power—resulting in the rejection of British imperial rule and giving rise to arguments over authority within the new states.9 After the trials of the war, some Americans wondered if things had gone too far. As one loyalist darkly observed, “The people have been taught a dangerous truth, that all power is derived from them.”10 The Revolutionary historian David Ramsay was similarly afraid in 1783: “This revolution has introduced so much an- archy that it will take a half century to eradicate the licentiousness of the people.” Would that mankind could enjoy “the blessings of freedom” while avoiding “the extravagancies that usually accompany it.”11 That cautious spirit infused Ramsay’s history of the Revolution. While he marveled at how “it seemed as if the war not only required but created talents,” Ramsay also worried about disorder. “To overset an established government un- hinges many of those principles, which bind individuals together. A long time, much prudence, will be necessary to reproduce a spirit of union and that reverence for government, without which society is a rope of sand.” The war had laid “a foundation . . . for the establishment of a nation,” but had formed it “out of discordant materials.”12 Strikingly, Ramsay delayed the publication of his history until after the Constitution was safely ratified. As he explained to Benjamin Rush, “The revolution cannot be said to be compleated until [the Constitution] or something equivalent is established.”13 Veteran officers, who embraced the new constitutional order, agreed. The Revolutionary elite were right to worry. The lower ranks of so- Conclusion 183 ciety—where almost all young veterans had returned—had also learned hard lessons: their leaders had feet of clay. With the exception of Wash- ington, had they not fallen short? The heroic Benedict Arnold had de- fected. Congress had proved incompetent. State governments had failed to aid their soldiers, and after the war undertook policies that harmed them. Across the new nation, however, their betters demanded obedience and deference—but if deference had existed at all, the experience of the Revolution and war had certainly undermined it.14 After wielding the whip of military discipline, fickle officers demonstrated that they were not to be trusted with unlimited power. Rowdy Continentals and fractiously democratic militias also had gained extensive experience in disobeying orders and skirting authority—authority buttressed in wartime by threats of physical violence far greater than any town father, landlord, wealthy merchant, or great planter could safely direct against their fellow white men. Why should the lower orders obey them now?15 The response of the Revolutionary elite to a traditional rural “regulation” was equally telling. After western Massachusetts farmers mustered “for the Suppressing of tyrannical government” that had refused to redress their grievances about taxes and foreclosures, Boston merchants hired a private army of 4,400 men to restore obedience. Only when that army marched west did these “Shaysites”—named for their alleged captain, Daniel Shays—turn from noncompliant protest and petition to true armed resistance. Although they were driven from the battlefield, what these regulators could not win with arms they won with ballots in the next election, turning out the governor and legislators who had oppressed them.16 Political turmoil and armed rebellions continued throughout the 1790s as Americans struggled to define their republic. Yet the Revolution did not tear itself apart. Credit usually goes to the political elite for this successful “founding.” Fortune certainly smiled on their unusually functional mix of paranoia, wisdom, and luck. The ordinary young men of the Revolutionary armies also played a role in steadying the republic. Because the goals of young soldiers had been so traditional, so profoundly shaped by the drive to reach the next stage of their lives and to earn the regard of their fellow men, those goals proved to have limited power to transform the new politics. Though the new order was not perfect—their fellow citizens did not unquestioningly accept young officers as representatives of an aristocracy of merit, and circumstance and policy certainly had cheated poor soldiers of their promised rewards—veterans did hope they could fulfill their traditional life course aspirations in their 184 Becoming Men of Some Consequence republic. As a cadre, they proved neither radical nor reactionary; rather, they accepted the order they had fought to establish. After their spasm at Newburgh in 1783, young officers set aside thoughts of uprisings—they knew they would rule the republic in due time. As for enlisted veterans, the rhetoric of the Revolution only forged stronger links between manhood, soldiering, and citizenship, assuring them they had an honorable place in a republic where all men were created equal. They had taken up arms in an intensely political and shared struggle, but their ultimate goals were private and individual and could only be answered by steady effort and the passage of time. For even the poorest young veteran, that was how to build a competency, gain authority over a household of their own, and enjoy the regard of their fellow citizens. That so many veterans would fail to find that independence would prove tragic, but not radicalizing. It was a process that unfolded slowly, across years, and at the level of the invisible individual. The soldierly identity that would have encouraged them to band together, rise up, and overthrow had been laid aside. The manliness of the husband and householder was superior and more enduring than that of the youthful soldier. Ironically, this meant that the traditional republican fear of standing armies was fundamentally misplaced. These young men of the army were never a threat to the Revolution. They had become soldiers in pursuit of the deeper goal of personal independence, and they knew that their individual destinies were inextricably bound up with their republic. For that reason, like Cincinnatus, they had laid down their arms and returned to their plows.17 Ordinary people’s memories of the war also proved difficult to muster toward concrete political action. The politically fraught experience had been shared, but memories of the Revolution proved too strong, strange, and complex to become arguments. As a result, they remained stories. “Simeon was called Sergeant Lyman by his comrades after his return from the army”—decades later his friends still remembered this.18 But what did it mean as the years passed? As he slid into poverty and old age, a gap must have widened between his declining civilian status and his old army rank. The most obvious extension of memories of the war was in veterans naming their sons after their military heroes. Isham Browder of Virginia “named a son Harbert Claiborn who was an officer of the company or regiment in which he served.”19 Dr. Isaac Senter named two sons for heroes of the Revolution: Horace Gates Senter and Nathanael Greene Senter.20 Nathaniel Pendleton, an aide to General Nathanael Greene, named a son after his general, going so far as to address the boy as “Greene” so all would Conclusion 185 be certain the boy was the namesake of the Revolutionary hero.21 Such names made memories of the war an ongoing part of the family, but they still were personal, not political, touchstones. Ultimately, soldiers’ stories proved hard to understand. Searching his memory for his pension deposition, one old Continental explained, “His memory is very imperfect to the rest of his services except the last tour . . . all the intermediate events seem to him like a dream.”22 It was a feeling shared by many: “And now, when I think over these past Events, and transactions, they appear more like dreams, than realities.” If it were not for the corroboration of friends, that veteran wrote, “I should almost doubt, the truth of my own narrative.”23 Who could blame them? As Yale’s Ezra Stiles noted at the end of the war, “We have lived an age in a few years. We have seen more wonders accomplished in eight years than are usually unfolded in a century.”24 As the young men of the Revolution disappeared into the mass of Americans and returned to the familiar paths of civilian life, the meaning of the war took root in their personal emotions and individual relationships. The playwright and veteran officer Royall Tyler explained their motivation to hold on to these memories, but also suggested their limited political value. “Those who were not in the field in the late glorious contest, and those who were, have their respective merits,” explained his aptly named character, Colonel Manly. “But, I confess, my old brother- soldiers, are dearer to me. . . . Friendships made in adversity are lasting; our countrymen may forget us; but that is no reason why we should forget each other.”25 These memories and relationships remained individual and personal. When Park Holland was out surveying in Maine with his patron, Rufus Putnam, they stumbled across the store of two old army acquaintances, “one Col. Crane,” an artillery officer, and Major Trescot, who commanded light infantry under Lafayette. After fighting for liberty, they were selling fish. “I need not state that this was a pleasant meeting to us all,” Holland later wrote. They passed the remainder of the day “convers- ing upon the scenes of the late war, our past lives and future prospects &c. very happily.”26 Though emotionally satisfying, there was little practical connection between their war stories and postwar endeavors. In his memoir, Park Holland explained that keeping in touch with distant army friends was difficult after the war: “we had not then post routes by every man’s door, nor newspapers and periodicals by which we now hear the transactions of the remotest corners of the world.”27 Though spread across the expanding republic, they maintained contact where they could, creating an emotional proximity that geography denied. “It has always ben 186 Becoming Men of Some Consequence my wish to have paid one Visit to Marietta & seen my Old Friends,” Park Holland wrote to Rufus Putnam in Ohio. “If I could have made it convenient to have moved into your Country and have Laid my Bones by the side of my Old Friends it would have been most pleasing but Fortune has orded it other ways.” Despite distance, there were shared certainties. Since Putnam had surveyed in Maine, Holland proudly reported the progress of settlement, noting that while the soil on the banks of the Ohio was likely more fertile, river navigation was easier in Maine, “which is one proof among many other that Nature deals out her Bountys in an Equal proportion to All.” As Holland told it, brother veterans settled at the eastern and western extremes of the republic did not need to be jealous of each other.28 Their political opinions—embodied in an idealized George Washing- ton—proved strong bonds for veteran officers, especially as political power slipped from their grasp as power shifted to the next generation. The day Park Holland heard the news of Washington’s death in 1799, he wrote Putnam to “most Heartily Condole with you . . . although his Body will Moulder like others, yet the Remembrance of him will not be forgotten.”29 Holland used the momentous occasion to reach out to an old commander and friend as he himself passed into middle age. After the Jeffersonian victories that followed 1800 swept many Federalists from offices and posts, Continental officers had renewed reason to condole with each other. In 1807, Benjamin Gilbert wrote Putnam from his home in Cherry Valley, New York, commending the letter’s bearer, Colonel Elijah Holt, as “a true Deciple of Washingtons administration, and deserves well of every friend to the constitution and federal principals.” Both Gilbert and Putnam had suffered a “share of persecution in the political Revolution” after 1800, losing their government appointments. Writing to a fellow officer of the Fed- eralist school, Gilbert assured himself, “but I hold fast my integrity and consider my principals politically right.”30 Unity and brotherhood would persist despite political defeat. As these veteran officers moved inexorably toward death, they welcomed signs of continuity and comradeship, though these were more personal than political and best lent themselves to sentimental performances. For old Rufus Putnam, though he knew he would not see his younger army friends again, he insisted, “It is of [little] consequence whether we meet any more in this world or not, if we are so happy as to belong to the true Spiritual Grand Lodge above of which Jesus Christ is the Grand Master.”31 Similarly, veteran officers delighted in meeting the children of Conclusion 187 their old comrades, seeing continuity in their progeny. “Your Son is a fine young man, pleasant & agreeable in his manners,” one aged officer wrote a comrade in 1815. “I had but a short time with him . . . [yet] I felt an atachment to him, and could Recognise the father in his countenance, his forehead & Eyes particularly[.] I have not forgot your person, I often see you in my mind as plain as when we was together.”32 Facing mortality, veteran officers insisted on the transcendent power of memory. “I believe I am the youngest of the whole band, and I am far descended down the vale of years,” Gamaliel Bradford wrote to an old commander in 1819. “I am fifty five and this is late in the afternoon of life—the last time you saw me I was not over twenty, a mere boy.” Yet Bradford was certain, he insisted, “I think I should recognize my old captain, so well are his former looks imprest on my mind and memory.” If given the chance, they could “talk over old events, and live over old scenes.”33 As the years passed, veteran officers’ use of the war changed from political to personal. As they reached old age and the last stage of their lives, however, some veterans at last transformed their memories of the war into arguments. Officers published memoirs to push back against anarchic democracy and reclaim control of a Revolution they feared had gone too far.34 By contrast, enlisted Continentals used their pension applications after 1818 to insist that they had honorably and indefatigably served, claiming the respect they had been long denied. More than a few invented pleasant and anachronistically egalitarian legends about shaking the hand of various patriot greats—George Washington, especially. Stories of soldiers deserting, plundering civilians, or rising in mutiny largely disappeared from their official statements, though they could persist in closely held family stories—safely beyond the public and political sphere.35 Joseph Plumb Martin’s stark picture of wartime sufferings took a different track, but still argued for the dignity and worth of the humble soldier. He showed little trust in the officers who claimed the privilege to command others, echo- ing the egalitarian spirit of a rising Jacksonian age. Of the fierce battle at Red Bank on the Delaware in 1777, he explained, “There has been but little notice taken of it, the reason of which is, there was no Washington, Putnam, or Wayne there. Had there been, the affair would have been ex- tolled to the skies. . . . Great men get great praise; little men, nothing.”36 Not only did Continental veterans deserve gratitude, Martin insisted, but they also merited fairness after being cheated and neglected: “The country was rigorous in exacting my compliance to my engagements to a punctilio, but equally careless in performing her contracts with me, and why so? 188 Becoming Men of Some Consequence One reason was because she had all the power in her own hands and I had none.” As Martin saw it in 1830, “Such things ought not to be.”37 * * * Winthrop Sargent, Harvard class of 1770, son of an elite family of merchants from the Massachusetts North Shore, had joined the fight for independence early in the war. Though an artillery captain, a friend of Henry Knox, and an aide to General Robert Howe, Sargent served through the war without much distinction. Perhaps his signal moment was serving as an emissary from the army to Congress during the Valley Forge winter—though he had been selected for this honor on the hardly significant grounds that he was the only officer with a complete suit of clothes. After the war, he hoped for a position in government or a diplomatic post, but nothing came through. Henry Knox, heading the War Department, threw him a bone in 1786 with an assignment to survey the seven ranges of the Ohio. While on the trip, he encountered three officer comrades—Colonel Harmar, Major Doughty, and Major Wyllys. In addition to reminiscing about times in the late war, they spoke of the future: “We talked over and anticipated a future establishment in this [Ohio] Country, where the veteran soldier and honest man should find a Retreat from ingratitude.” They bitterly fantasized that they would “never more . . . visit the Atlantic Shores,” but that their children, “like Goths and Vandals . . . [would] del- uge a people more vicious and villaneous than even the Pretorian Bands of Ancient Rome,” and thus claim the honor, respect, and authority the American republic owed them.38 As he and his fellow elites surveyed the land for their designs, Sargent also noticed the white squatters in the Ohio Country who advanced ahead of organized settlement and legal deeds. He derided them as “lawless banditti”—a people “totally destitute of any kind of hospitable civility.”39 If enlisted veterans of the Continental Army were among their number, Sargent did not care to notice. The vision he and his class held for the West and for the republic would contest with theirs over the next generation. Despite his privileged family, his long career with the Continental Army, and his membership in a self-identified aristocracy of merit, Sargent’s ability to control the republic’s direction was fleeting and elusive. Three years before his death, Winthrop Sargent recorded a striking dream. He noted “for the first time in my life” that he had dreamt of George Washington. In his dream, the General and Lady Washington had given Sargent “a most cordial Reception.” Indeed, Sargent recorded, the famously taciturn general “Took me in his Arms and affectionately Conclusion 189 embraced me.” Washington then presented his former subordinate with “a most elegant sword.” Sargent was about to apologize to his General and explain “that age & Enfeeblement had made a great change with me,” when he suddenly realized, “I seemed capable of brandishing” the weapon. Age had melted away. As dreams do, Sargent’s vision jumped to a new scene. Washington was on his horse, “riding along the Line of the American Army upon the morning of the Battle of Brandywine.”40 Winthrop Sargent and the republic were young again—facing war and danger, but assured of ultimate victory. Perhaps in a small way, Sargent’s dream imposed order and narrative on historical change. It went back to the beginning, accepting the old, familiar challenge of British tyranny and a struggle for independence, rather than face the unimaginable, undiscov- ered country of death and the strange, unforeseeable future of a republic his generation had given their youth to create and defend.

190 Becoming Men of Some Consequence Notes

Abbreviations AAS American Antiquarian Society DLAR David Library of the American Revolution GW Writings The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources GW Papers The Papers of George Washington Hamilton Papers The Papers of Alexander Hamilton HSP Historical Society of Pennsylvania L-NYSHA Library of the New York State Historical Association LOC Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division MHS Massachusetts Historical Society NYHS New-York Historical Society PEM Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum RIHS Rhode Island Historical Society VHS Virginia Historical Society SOC Collection of the Society of the Cincinnati

Introduction 1. Entries for 26 August 1779 and 1 September 1779, Zuriel Waterman Journal, Richard Waterman Family Papers, RIHS. For additional information on Water- man’s life, see Waserman, “Dr. Zuriel Waterman.” 2. For ideas about liberty and power in the Revolution, see Bailyn, Ideological Origins. On sovereignty as the central struggle, see Griffin,America’s Revolution. 3. Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities, 88. 4. Demos, “Adolescence in Historical Perspective”; Beales, “In Search of the Historical Child.” 5. Colman, Early piety again inculcated, 33. A popular etiquette book similarly promoted competence and marriage as the transition to adulthood: “Whenever you are settled in the World in an independent Way . . . I advise you to marry. . . . It is the best and safest Condition of Life upon many Accounts” (Burgh, Youth’s Friendly Monitor, 10–11). 6. On this period of “novice adulthood,” see C. Wright, Revolutionary Genera- tion, 221. On the requirements of coming of age in New England, see L. Wilson, Ye Heart of a Man, chap. 1; and Lombard, Making Manhood. For a Southern example, see Glover, Southern Sons. For examples of a growing scholarship on children and youth in early America, see the edited collections by James Marten, Children in Colonial America and Children and Youth in a New Nation, and particularly the essay by Caroline Cox in the latter volume: “Boy Soldiers: Effects of War on Society in the American Revolution.” See also Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 53–74; Sundue, Industrious in Their Stations; Brewer, By Birth or Consent; and Ditz, “ ‘Narrating the Youth’s Progress.’ ” 7. Foster, New Men, 1–9; cf. Rotundo, American Manhood. Despite diversity within British America, “dominant standards of manliness were embedded in structures of colonial household governance and servitude” and defined “social relations of mastery and dependence” (Ditz, “The New Men’s History,” 11). For a discussion of the regional evolution of gender traditions in early America, see Lyons, Sex among the Rabble, 6. 8. Benjamin Franklin, 446, 492, 543. 9. Lombard, Making Manhood, 8–13. See also Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs; and Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage. Revolutionary society followed in turn (see Kann, A Republic of Men, 3, 78). 10. Late-eighteenth-century Americans saw independence in economic terms. Political independence was only one manifestation of the form, with citizenship and suffrage directly contingent upon a man’s economic standing (see Gunderson, “Independence, Citizenship, and the American Revolution,” esp. 71, 74; and Boydston, Home and Work, 43). 11. Sobel strikingly posits that many men in the Revolutionary War “came to feel that they could improve their insecure sense of manhood by becoming soldiers” (Sobel, Teach Me Dreams, 135). On the gendering of military service in colonial America, see Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man, 64. 12. On life course analysis, see Giele and Elder, Methods of Life Course Re- search, 22; Giele and Elder, The Craft of Life Course Research; and MacLean and Elder, “Military Service in the Life Course.” The older term “life cycle” concerns sequential phases of development with each phase centering on the resolution of a central emotional or psychological issue (see Erikson, Childhood and Society). Conrad Wright employs an instructive mix of life course and life cycle analysis in a study of Harvard College graduates (Wright, Revolutionary Generation, 222–25). Shakespeare’s “seven ages of man” (As You Like It, act 2, scene 7) provides a classic example of early modern conceptions of life’s stages. See also Sobel, Teach Me Dreams, 223. 13. Successfully achieving this transition was by no means certain. Depen- dence and subordination were the majority social position: well over half of adults in the colonies and early republic were dependents in households and legally subordinated (Shammas, “Anglo-American Household Government in Compara- tive Perspective,” 123). Ditz also points out that these figures do not include adult 192 Notes to Pages 5–7 children who were still dependent but technically free (Ditz, “The New Men’s History,” 12). 14. For a useful compilation of quantitative data and summary of a generation of scholarship, see Selesky, “A Demographic Survey of the Continental Army that Wintered at Valley Forge,” 5–20. 15. Neimeyer, America Goes to War, 16, 18. 16. Among Pennsylvania’s troops, 11 percent were age seventeen or younger, while 75 percent were aged eighteen to thirty-two (Applegate, “Constitutions Like Iron,” 434; Neimeyer, America Goes to War, 19–20). In one sample, the average age of native-born Americans at enlistment was twenty-one, while foreign-born recruits had a median age of twenty-nine (Ferling, A Wilderness of Miseries, 125). Approximately 10 percent of New Jersey recruits were under eighteen; just over half were no older than twenty-two (Lender, “The Enlisted Line,” 111–12). 17. A study of the 1782 Maryland recruits shows that 40 percent were foreign born. Nevertheless, the soldiers were also young: almost six in ten were younger than twenty-five (Papenfuse and Stiverson, “General Smallwood’s Recruits,” 121). 18. Among Virginia troops, 90 percent were under twenty-five at enlistment, with the median age between twenty and twenty-one (Sellers, “The Common Soldier in the American Revolution,” 154). Demographic records on Continentals from the Carolinas and Georgia are spottier, but these states collectively only contributed about 7 percent of all Continental enlistments. They fielded most of their Revolutionary soldiers as short-term militia (Heitman, Historical Register, 691). 19. Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 296. Statistical analysis of pension applications similarly shows young enlistees marrying only after their military service (Resch, Suffering Soldiers, 227–28). 20. Sellers, “The Common Soldier in the American Revolution,” 155. Analysis of veterans’ pension applications similarly reveals an average enlistment age of about twenty-two years old, with half the men in the sample enlisting between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six (Resch, Suffering Soldiers, 219: Table 20, “Enlist- ment Age”). 21. Pennsylvania Packet, 16 December 1771. 22. On the continued need for a “full-scale, frontal treatment of inner life experience among average people who lived in and through the Revolutionary era,” see Demos, Circles and Lines, 51–52. For excellent examples of this approach, see Young, Masquerade; and Mead, “Melancholy Landscapes.” 23. In the estimation of field pioneer John Shy, soldiers’ motivation has proved an “irresistible question” that nevertheless gets bogged down in “an analytical swamp . . . with romantic idealism and behaviorist cynicism as competing extremes of the argument” (Shy, “Looking Backward, Looking Forward,” 9). On military mobilization in specific communities, see, e.g., Gross,Minutemen and Their World; J. Lee, Price of Nationhood; Knouff, Soldiers’ Revolution; and McDon- nell, Politics of War. For the institutional evolution of the army and militias, see Higginbotham, War of American Independence; Martin and Lender, A Respectable Notes to Pages 7–8 193 Army; R. Wright, The Continental Army; E. Carp, To Starve the Army at Pleasure; H. Ward, George Washington’s Enforcers; Rosswurm, Arms, Country, and Class; and W. Lee, Crowds and Soldiers. On soldiers’ political motivations versus their social origins, see Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 373–78. On culture and hierarchy in the army and its interaction with civilians, see Royster, A Revolutionary People at War; Mayer, Belonging to the Army; Cox, Proper Sense of Honor; and Bodle, Valley Forge Winter. 24. On soldiers’ social origins, see Lender, “The Enlisted Line”; Sellers, “The Common Soldier in the American Revolution”; Papenfuse and Stiverson, “Gen- eral Smallwood’s Recruits”; Neimeyer, America Goes to War; and Resch, Suffering Soldiers. 25. Shy, A People Numerous and Armed, 173; Shy, “Looking Backward, Looking Forward,” 5–7. Studies continue to complicate this picture, however. Both Resch (“The Revolution as a People’s War”) and Sargent (“The Massachusetts Rank and File of 1777”) demonstrate that New England towns continued to send a cross- section of their sons to war, while McDonnell (Politics of War) contrastingly paints a stark picture of Virginia’s ineffective mobilization, riven by class and slavery. 26. Shy rightly warns against oversimplification: “Social identities (e.g. “poor” and “young”) are rarely satisfactory inferential data for perhaps the most tangled problem of human existence, why we do what we do” (Shy, “Looking Backward, Looking Forward,” 9). 27. For a concise overview of this scholarship, see Foster, New Men, 1–9. 28. A growing body of studies touch on masculinity in early American military experience: see Ahearn, Rhetoric of War; Larimer, “Step Forth Like Men”; Lind- man, “ ‘Play the man . . . for your bleeding country’ ”; Little, Abraham in Arms; and Way, “Venus and Mars.” See also Knouff,Soldiers’ Revolution, which reveals how the disparate class-inflected masculinities of urban Philadelphia, its rural hinter- land, and the Pennsylvania frontier converged during the Revolution. 29. For a recent critique of periodization and narratives that unduly reflect institutional and national myths, see Howell, “Starving Memory.” 30. For a particularly scathing attack on “the myth of the universal soldier,” see Lynn, Battle, xv. Hamner, Enduring Battle, productively considers how combat experiences change across time. 31. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, plumbs the transformations wrought in the Revolutionary era but nevertheless only spends a handful of pages directly addressing the war (see Shy, “Looking Backward, Looking Forward,” 4–5). Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots, points to the intertwined nature of political and military mobilization. Royster’s A Revolutionary People at War remains the touchstone cultural inquiry into the Continental Army’s contribution to Revolutionary ideology and politics. By contrast, Kulikoff highlights the war’s profound disruption to the American economy and infrastructure—destruction and loss of productivity that took a full generation to recover (see Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers, epilogue; see also Mitchell, Price of Independence). Sung Bok Kim, in “The Limits of Politicization in the American 194 Notes to Pages 9–11 Revolution,” questions the assumption that military violence always aided political action and organization during the American Revolution. 32. Middlekauff,Glorious Cause, 561; Cox, “The Continental Army,” 162. Peck- ham cautiously suggests that 100,000 individuals took up arms (Peckham, War for Independence, 199–200). See also Higginbotham, War of American Independence, 389. 33. Shy, A People Numerous and Armed, 249; Shy, “Looking Backward, Looking Forward,” 14. 34. For military violence on the trans-Appalachian frontier, see Griffin, Amer- ican Leviathan; and J. Fisher, A Well-Executed Failure. For the southern theater, see D. Wilson, The Southern Strategy; and Treacy, Prelude to Yorktown. 35. The state by state ratios of Continental versus militia mobilization are instructive. New Hampshire raised Continentals and militia in a rough ratio of 3:1; Massachusetts and Connecticut, 3.5:1; Pennsylvania, 2.5:1; Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland, 1.5:1. Virginia’s ratio was roughly 1:1. By contrast, North Carolina raised almost 2 militia for every 1 Continental enlistment, while South Carolina and Georgia raised 3 militiamen for every 1 Continental enlistment. The more control a state’s Revolutionary government could exert, the more Continentals they managed to field. Virginia’s Continental mobilization under- performed because of its weak and divided state government. Militia mobilization increased with local threats from British or loyalist forces. Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey faced constant threat from occupying or seaborne British forces, and accordingly mobilized their militias. Similarly, in 1780 the war in the Carolinas exploded into a vicious partisan fight waged by irregulars and militia that ran parallel to the campaigns of the Continental and British regulars. For a rough estimate of troop numbers, see Heitman, Historical Register, 691; on Vir- ginia, see McDonnell, Politics of War; and on the partisan war in the south, see Hoffman, Tate, and Albert,An Uncivil War. 36. Immigrant enlistees to the Continental Army were almost a decade older than their colony-born comrades. For immigrant soldiers’ contributions, see Nei- meyer, America Goes to War, chaps. 2–3; and Knouff,Soldiers Revolution. 37. On the Continental Army’s Native American allies, see Neimeyer, America Goes to War, chap. 5, as well as Glatthaar and Martin, Forgotten Allies, and Cal- loway, American Revolution in Indian Country. 38. On Africans and African Americans in the Revolution, see Quarles, Ne- gro in the American Revolution; Frey, Like Water from the Rock; Egerton, Death or Liberty; and A. Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists. 39. P. Smith, “The American Loyalists,” esp. 266–67, 269. 40. Investigation of loyal Americans is enjoying a renaissance: see Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles; Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion; Buskirk, Generous Enemies; and Cal- hoon, Barnes, and Davis, Tory Insurgents. 41. Washington to Congress, 24 September 1776, in GW Writings, 6:110–12. 42. On general orders and orderly books, see Ruddiman, “ ‘A Record in the Hands of Thousands,’ ” 765. Notes to Pages 11–13 195 43. There are approximately 80,000 pension application files submitted by veterans and their widows between 1818 and the 1850s. These are held in the Na- tional Archives, Record Group 15 (M804). For legislation concerning these pensions, see Dann, Revolution Remembered, xv–xviii; and Resch, Suffering Soldiers, chaps. 4–6. 44. Accuracy of memory suffers from both the errors of individual recollection and collective distortion (see Kammen, “Some Patterns and Meanings of Memory Distortion in American History”; and Schudson, “Dynamics of Distor- tion in Collective Memory”). On veterans engaging in a “life review” in situations like pension applications, see Paul Thompson, Voice of the Past, 133–38, 184–85. For a dizzying example of the possible combination of fabrication and fact in a Revo- lutionary memoir, see Chaco and Kulcsa, “Israel Potter.” 45. On memoirs and the creation of the history of the Revolution, see Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party; and Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution. On challenges inherent in war memoirs, see Thomson, Anzac Memories. Studies of memory in old age suggest remembrances of details and emotions from adolescence remain remarkably sharp and accurate, even as short-term memory fails (Schachter, Searching for Memory, 297–300). 46. Entry for 16 October 1776, in Mackenzie, Diary, 1:81. Mackenzie assumed the rebellion’s leaders were Puritans stirring up the embers of the English civil war, and their soldiers mostly troublesome Irish immigrants.

1 “The Eyes of All Our Countrymen Are Now upon Us” 1. J. P. Martin, Narrative, 5. Martin published his memoir in Maine in 1830. 2. On colonial militia and military establishments, see Chet, Conquering the American Wilderness; Higginbotham, War and Society in Revolutionary America, 19–41; and Shy, “A New Look at Colonial Militia.” 3. Ahearn, Rhetoric of War, 22–23, 34. 4. A. Green, Life, 95. 5. Cox, Proper Sense of Honor, 9. See also Kestnbaum, “Citizenship and Com- pulsory Military Service”; and Cress, Citizens in Arms. Militia laws cemented a colony’s social order: Virginia’s 1757 militia law asserted ideals of “localism, per- sonalized authority, and social stratification by honor, dignity, and duty” (Robarge, A Chief Justice’s Progress, 23–24). In the militia, young men stepped into public view “years before their age and position would normally permit” (Wallach, Obe- dient Sons, 38; see also F. Anderson, People’s Army, 34–39, 53; and R. Thompson, “Adolescent Culture in Colonial Massachusetts,” 127–44). 6. Hamilton to Edwards Stevens, 11 November 1769, St. Croix, in Hamilton Papers, 1:4. 7. Approximately 16,000 men enlisted in 1759 and in 1760; 9,200 men enlisted in both 1761 and 1762 (H. Ward, George Washington’s Enforcers, 1–2). For the politics of colonial mobilization and participation, see F. Anderson, Crucible of War; F. An- derson, People’s Army; and Titus, Old Dominion at War. At least 10,000 colonials also enlisted in regular British regiments (Way, “Soldiers of Misfortune”). 196 Notes to Pages 14–19 8. F. Anderson, People’s Army, 38–39; Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen, 250–51. On young men in New England’s development of a semi-professional military system, see Eames, Rustic Warriors, 142, 148–49; Higginbotham, War and Society in Revolutionary America, 28–29; and F. Anderson, “Hinge of the Revolution.” 9. Titus, “Soldiers When They Choose to Be So,” 157–58. Only one quarter of Pennsylvania’s provincial soldiers were colony-born (M. Ward, “An Army of Ser- vants,” 75–93; Shy, Towards Lexington, 15). Colonial Virginia focused its recruiting on the lower orders and only drafted unpropertied men who could not vote (see McDonnell, “ ‘Fit for Common Service?,’ ” 105). 10. Burnham, Life of Col. Jonathan Burnham, 4. See also Lombard, Making Manhood, 74–75; and F. Anderson, People’s Army, 33. Veterans could comprise a significant presence in colonial communities: in Ipswich, Massachusetts, one quarter of the men on the 1771 tax rolls had fought in the Seven Years’ War ( Jedrey, World of John Cleaveland, 123–24). On New England veterans’ safe return and general satisfaction, see Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut, 193. 11. Davies, Curse of Cowardice, 11, 16. Davies’s Virginia sermon quickly became a classic, was sent to England, and was reprinted in New Jersey and Massachu- setts. 12. Connecticut Gazette, 10 February 1775. 13. Elliott, “Recruiting Journal, 1775,” 98. 14. [Barry], The General, Attacked by a Subaltern, 5. 15. Park Holland Memoir, 1, Holland Family Papers, MHS. 16. Samuel Dexter Affidavit, Worcester, 25 May 1776, United States Revolu- tion Collection, box 2, folder 3, AAS. 17. McDonnell, Politics of War, 1–15. 18. Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 103–4, 146, 165, 169, 174. 19. Washington to Bryan Fairfax, 24 August 1774, in GW Papers, Colonial Series, 10:154–56. On slavery as a political metaphor in republican thought, see Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 179. While a potent metaphor, however, slavery was in no way merely symbolic for colonial Americans. 20. Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 255. See also Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 20. 21. Cresswell, Journal, 42;1 see also Carter, Diary, 2:817–18. 22. Cresswell, Journal, 19. 23. C. L. Shaw, “Joseph Hawley, The Northampton Statesman,” 491, 496. 24. Elliott, “Recruiting Journal, 1775,” 97. 25. Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 25. 26. Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 45; Gross, Minutemen and Their World, 71. 27. Park Holland Memoir, 2, Holland Family Papers, MHS. Holland was marching for New York City in the summer of 1776, but his company had first formed the year before. 28. Entry for 8 June 1775, in Fithian, Journal, 25. See also McDonnell, Politics of War, 80. Notes to Pages 19–23 197 29. Committee of Safety, Worcester, 8 May 1775, United States Revolution Collection, box 2, folder 1, AAS. 30. Nehemiah 4:14. See, e.g., Jones, Defensive war in a Just Cause sinless, 22. 31. Referencing 2 Samuel 10:12. See Davies, Religion and Patriotism the Con- stituents of a Good Soldier, 6, 23; Perkins, Sermon, Preached to the Soldiers, who Went from West-Hartford, 14; and Linn, Military Discourse, Delivered in Carlisle, 22. 32. Jones, Defensive war in a Just Cause sinless, 20. 33. Force, American Archives, 5th ser., 2:244. Royster emphasizes the rhetoric of defending posterity in Revolutionary propaganda but does not consider how youths would interpret it (Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 7–9). 34. Higginbotham, War of American Independence, 262. Higginbotham cites the Virginia Gazette, 21 September 1776. This story reportedly also was printed in the 9 February 1776 South Carolina and American Gazette (see Hawks, Swain, and Graham, Revolutionary History of North Carolina, 235). Another group of North Carolina women appeared at the Salisbury Committee of Safety meeting on 8 May 1776 with a similar resolution (see Hunter, Sketches of Western North Carolina, 144–46). 35. “Collinet and Phebe, a New Song,” published in Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy and reprinted in G. Anderson, Freedom’s Voice in Poetry and Song, 707. 36. F. Moore, Diary of the American Revolution, 1:141; McCurtin, “Journal of the Times at the Siege of Boston,” in Balch, Papers Relating Chiefly toth e Maryland Line, 22. 37. G. Anderson, Freedom’s Voice in Poetry and Song, 615. 38. General Orders, 2 July 1776, in GW Writings, 5:212–13. The image stuck in soldiers’ minds. One veteran referenced it on the first page of his 1803 memoir: “The eyes of all mankind were turned upon us” (Morison, Interesting Journal, 7). 39. Tallmadge, Memoir, 7–8. See also Ferling, Wilderness of Miseries, 123. 40. Entries for 1, 25, and 26 May 1775, Journal of Elihu Clark Jr., Peter Force Collection, LOC. For Worthington’s rank, see Johnston, Record of Connecticut Men in the Military and Naval Service during the War of the Revolution, 7, 50. On soldiers marching off to war in each generation, see Ferling, Wilderness of Miseries, 86. 41. J. P. Martin, Narrative, 7–8, 14. 42. Entry for 30 April 1775, in Farnsworth, “Diary,” 79. 43. Morison, Interesting Journal, 7–8. 44. Packard, Memoir, 6–8. 45. New York Secretary of State, Calendar of Historical Manuscripts, Relating to the War of the Revolution, 1:242. 46. A. Green, Life, 55. See also Sherburne, Memoirs, 16–17. 47. Adlum, Memoirs, 2–5. A similar dynamic appeared in youths’ prewar dem- onstrations in Boston (see Bell, “From Saucy Boys to Sons of Liberty,” 207–9). 48. The Farmer and His Son’s Return from a Visit to the Camp. The folk origins of “Yankee Doodle” are difficult to pin down, but in 1775 American patriots ap- 198 Notes to Pages 23–29 propriated and revised the lyrics. After the war, Royall Tyler referenced the song’s popularity and endless verses in his play The Contrast (act 3, scene 1): Jonathan, the rustic Yankee, claims to know “only” 199 verses. Broadsides printed in the mid- 1780s codified the “Visit to Camp” folk lyrics that were circulating in the 1770s. While Edward Bangs likely did not solely compose these “Visit to Camp” verses, it is suggestive that tradition ties him, a young minuteman in his early twenties, to this soldier-oriented version (Lemay, “The American Origins of ‘Yankee Doodle’ ”). 49. Lombard, Making Manhood, 8–10, 96–97; McCurdy, Citizen Bachelors, 6–9. 50. For another imprint of the song, see “Yankey’s Return from Camp.” 51. For the full text of Haynes’s poem, see Bogin, “ ‘The Battle of Lexington.’ ” For a similar example of these themes, see A New Liberty Song. 52. Bogin, “ ‘The Battle of Lexington,’ ” 501–6. After facing continued discrimi- nation, including the Continental Army’s initial ban on black soldiers, Haynes also penned a more explicit attack on slavery in 1776 referencing the Declaration of Independence (see Bogin, “ ‘Liberty further extended’ ”; see also Salliant, Black Puritan, Black Republican, 51–53). 53. Nathanael Greene to Samuel Ward, 14 July 1775, in N. Greene, Papers, 1:99. 54. Washington to Colonel George Baylor, 9 January 1777, in GW Papers, Rev- olutionary Series, 8:17. 55. Royster also explores this idea in A Revolutionary People at War, 86–87. See also Higginbotham, War and Society in Revolutionary America, 89. 56. Burr, Memoirs, 1:58. 57. GW Papers, Revolutionary Series, 1:132. 58. Isenberg, Fallen Founder, 21–22. 59. Gano to John Lamb, 26 June 1777, John Lamb Papers, NYHS. 60. Graydon, Memoirs, 125. 61. Thomas Mumford to Webb, [November] 1776, in Webb, Family Letters, 28; Heitman, Historical Register, 407. 62. Peter Hughes to John Lamb, 30 May 1777, John Lamb Papers, NYHS. Un- like most high-ranking officers, John Lamb had been a fairly humble shopkeeper before the war. His fervent political activism with the Sons of Liberty brought him advanced rank. 63. For Cleaveland’s efforts for his sons, see Jedry,World of John Cleaveland, 136, 144, 154–62. On intergenerational efforts to secure financial independence, see Greven, Four Generations; and Vickers, Farmers and Fisherman. On gentility, see Bushman, Refinement of America. See also Opal, Beyond the Farm. 64. John Cleaveland to sons John Jr., Ebenezer, Parker Cleaveland, 28 Novem- ber 1775, John Cleaveland Papers, PEM. 65. John Cleaveland to Col. Paul Dudley Sargent, 14 December 1775, Ispwich, ibid. 66. Scudder, Journal, 7. 67. Oliver, Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion, 129–30. See also Shy, A People Numerous and Armed, 168–71. Notes to Pages 29–34 199 68. Shaw to [father] Francis Shaw, 13 May 1781, New Windsor, and Shaw to [brother] Nathanael Shaw, 13 May 1781, Samuel Shaw Papers, MHS. 69. Shaw parroted the Earl of Chesterfield’s advice book—exceedingly popular among Continental officers—that royal courts and army camps were “the only places to learn the world in” (see Chesterfield,Letters, 119). 70. Shaw to Francis Shaw, 13 May 1781, New Windsor, and Shaw to Nathanael Shaw, 13 May 1781, Samuel Shaw Papers, MHS. 71. Howard to Henry Knox, 14 May 1776, Gilder Lehrman Collection, NYHS. 72. J. P. Martin, Narrative, 9–15. 73. Echeverria and Murphy, “The American Revolutionary Army: A French Estimate in 1777,” 154. 74. Samuel Holden Parsons to Ralph Pomeroy, 25 February 1781, American Revolution Collection, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. Parsons was transmitting Washington’s instructions for recruiting in Connecticut. 75. Lender, “Mind of the Rank and File,” 24–25. Lender asserts that after 1777 the common denominator among recruits was the hope that they would come out of the army at least a little better than they went in. This slim optimism could play strongly on young men with less life experience or who faced immediate deficits. 76. The Recruiting Officer, in Farquhar, Dramatic Works, 2:31–32, 36. On its popularity as a marching song, see H. Ward, George Washington’s Enforcers, 169. 77. Fox, Revolutionary Adventures, 57. 78. Sherburne, Memoirs, 19. 79. John Adams to Abigail Adams, 14 April 1776, in Adams and Adams, Let- ters, 154. This was part of John’s response to Abigail’s request that the Congress “remember the ladies” when formulating new laws. 80. Fox, Revolutionary Adventures, 16–17. 81. Wallach, Obedient Sons, 34. This expectation was not always met: Benjamin Franklin may be the most prominent runaway of the eighteenth century, famously escaping from his brother’s Boston print shop to Philadelphia. See also Greven, Four Generations. 82. Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution, 170. Disruptions of war weakened patriarchal control and empowered sons by providing the appearance of additional options. See also Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims. 83. Dodge, Memorial, 19–20. 84. John Chandler Autobiography, 3–4, 14, MHS. 85. Peter Kelly and Eligah DeWolf to General McDouglas [sic], 23 April 1778, John Laurance Papers, box 1, folder “Partial Listing,” NYHS. 86. Daniel DeWolf (Hannah), Pension Application Record W1245, Revo- lutionary War Pension and Bounty–Land–Warrant Application Files (M804), National Archives, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as “Pension File” with the accompanying file number; microfilm editions for the Revolutionary War pension files at the National Archives are widely available in various depositories and from Ancestry.com.). 87. Painter, Autobiography, 9. 200 Notes to Pages 34–39 88. James Anderson [aka Asher Crocket] (Sarah), Pension File W2533. Crock- ett enlisted under a false name to throw off pursuers. 89. Henry Brown (Francis), Pension File W8380. On servants and apprentices illicitly in the Virginia line, see McDonnell, Politics of War, 260–61. 90. Perhaps 20,000 enslaved men and women attempted to escape slavery in the disruption of Britain’s southern campaigns. Though this dwarfs the 5,000 black men who served in the Continental Army, digging further into the statistics is revealing. In New Hampshire, 221 black men served in the American cause, representing practically all the African American men of military age in the state (Knoblock, Strong and Brave Fellows, 7). A Continental Army roll from August 1778 shows black soldiers spread fairly evenly across the regiments and comprising about 10 percent of the troops (Neimeyer, America Goes to War, 83). 91. “Deserted from the Subscriber . . . [ Jonathan Bowman],” New England Chronicle, 24 November 1775. 92. Virginia Gazette, 8 August 1777; McDonnell, Politics of War, 282. 93. Thomas Camel [or Campbell], Pension File R1609. On black veterans’ strategies for obtaining deserved pensions in the face of racist obstructionism, see Van Buskirk, “Claiming Their Due.” 94. Prince Crosley, Pension File W24833. 95. David Baker (Dorothy), Pension File W1802. 96. Scudder, Journal, 6. 97. Roberts, Memoirs, 27. 98. William Benson (Sarah), Pension File W5218. 99. William Cockrum, Pension File S30962. Cockrum was certainly no older than fifteen when he enlisted, being “about 70” years old in 1833. 100. Jacob Anderson, Pension File S37675. John Melvin, the son of Anderson’s old master, testified to help Anderson win his pension. 101. H. McDonald, “Memoir,” 829–30, 836–37. 102. Samuel Smith, Memoirs, 8. 103. “Massachusetts Bay: To the Soldiers of this State,” Norwich Packet, 20 January 1777. See also Boston Gazette, 6 January 1777, and Newport Gazette, 6 Feb- ruary 1777. 104. Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 64. 105. Connecticut Courant, 29 January 1776. 106. “Young volunteers never enlist so readily as at the beginning of a new war. . . . Their youthful fancies [imagine] a thousand occasions of acquiring honour and distinction which never occur. These romantic hopes make the whole price of their blood” (A. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 128). 107. On patriots’ suspicion of hired soldiers, see Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 37–40. 108. By comparison, a hired farmhand might earn five pounds a month, provided he found consistent work. These military wages were lower than those paid at the end of the French and Indian War—patriotic obligation initially did its part to even accounts. Pay for Continental soldiers would increase as the Revolution- Notes to Pages 39–44 201 ary War continued (see Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut, 231; and Buel, Dear Liberty, 39). 109. Thomas Cushing to Robert Treat Paine, 10 June 1776, Robert Treat Paine Papers, MHS. 110. As a sixteen-year-old in 1776, Daniel Trabue had already served in militia deployments in the state. At the last minute in 1777, however, Daniel fell ill and remained home, and his brother William and other young men from the area marched to Washington’s army. William served a three-year enlistment, until September 1780 (Trabue, Westward into Kentucky, 43). 111. Army pay appealed to younger men who had not yet established themselves in a trade, but it was not enough to draw older, more prosperous men. In Rhode Island in 1776, e.g., tradesmen like tailors, coopers, or carpenters could earn 100 shillings a month, while laborers might earn 60 shillings. By comparison, the monthly wages of Continental soldiers were 40 shillings, while a militiaman in Maryland was paid 37 shillings and a soldier in a New York State regiment earned 53 shillings per month. Enlistment bounties aimed at narrowing this gap (Neimeyer, America Goes to War, 125). 112. “O.D.” was an abbreviation for depreciated “old denomination” bills still circulating in Massachusetts. Tilden not only recorded what he was owed, but also accounted for the vagaries of the currency (see entry for 20 July 1776, Ezra Tilden Diary, Stewart Mitchell Collection, MHS). 113. Daniel Hitchcock to Adams, 22 July 1776, in John Adams, Papers, 4:404–6. 114. Four Enlistment Affidavits, Boston, 6 September 1777, SOC. 115. Collins, Autobiography, 23–24. 116. Charles Bowling [or Bawling], Pension File S16041. 117. See, e.g., Resolves 14 January 1777, New Hampshire. 118. Higginbotham, War of American Independence, 391. 119. New Jersey, e.g., offered supplemental bounties of $20 in cash, 100 acres of land, and a clothing allowance in 1777. By 1778, the state had increased the cash offering to $40. Depreciation and demand expanded the offering to $250 in 1779, and $1,000 in 1780. Collapse of the Continental dollar forced a switch to specie in 1781, with the state offering 12 pounds, 10 shillings sterling (Lender, “The Enlisted Line,” 79). 120. Papenfuse and Stiverson, “General Smallwood’s Recruits,” 124. 121. Lender, “The Enlisted Line,” 120. The 1777 bounty of 100 acres similarly promised to transform the unpropertied Virginia enlistees into voting citizens if they survived the war. 122. Higginbotham, War of American Independence, 391. 123. Philyaw, “A Slave for Every Soldier,” 380–82. 124. Dann, Revolution Remembered, 52. 125. Many Pennsylvania recruits recalled enlisting at taverns, which Knouff points out were public spaces where masculine displays and politics converged (Knouff,Soldiers’ Revolution, 48). 126. J. P. Martin, Narrative, 16. 202 Notes to Pages 44–46 127. Charles Wallace, Pension File W2286; Knouff, Soldiers’ Revolution, 66–67. 128. Quoted in McDonnell, Politics of War, 274. 129. Entry for 28 February 1778, in Ford et al., Journals of the Continental Con- gress, 10:202–3. 130. John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 26 May 1777, in John Adams,Papers, 5:203. 131. McDonnell, Politics of War, 305–7. 132. On families picking which sons would go for soldiers, see Baller, “Farm Families and the American Revolution.” 133. Christopher Vail Memoir, Peter Force Collection, LOC. 134. Affidavit, Haddam, Conn., 16 October 1780, SOC; Eliphalet Clark, Pen- sion File S44767; Daughters of the American Revolution, Lineage Book, vol. 25 (1898): 84. 135. Benjamin Cave, Pension File S3116. 136. Carter B. Chandler, Pension File S8198. Fox also went in place of his master (Fox, Revolutionary Adventures, 44, 48–49). 137. Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 129. 138. See Sargent, “The Massachusetts Rank and File of 1777”; and Resch, “The Revolution as a People’s War.” 139. McDonnell, Politics of War, 11, 308, 318, 415–17. See also Van Atta, “Con- scription in Revolutionary Virginia.” 140. Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 197. Writing about a boyhood friend and fellow Continental who deserted to the British, Joseph Plumb Martin thought it was the love of a girl of a loyalist family that “easily inveigled him away”—though as a “smart active fellow,” that Connecticut youth “soon got command” of a partisan band operating out of New York. It is telling that romantic and social advancement rather than mere monetary rewards explained this youth’s passage through that disordered world ( J. P. Martin, Narrative, 220–21; see also Mead, “ ‘Adven- tures, Dangers and Sufferings,’ ” 121). 141. A loyalist paper called “All aspiring Heroes” to join the Queen’s Rangers Hussars, promising “Any spirited Young Man” a bounty of 40 guineas for service, “mounted on an elegant Horse” (Royal Gazette, 5 May 1779). Certainly, the disruption of war drove some youths into Continental or loyalist regiments simply in search of food and shelter (Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies, 36). Like their patriot counterparts, loyalist regiments could only recruit from populations where they already held political control (Knouff,Soldiers’ Revolution, 54–57). 142. Graydon, Memoirs, 207. See also Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 50. 143. J. P. Martin, Narrative, 59–61. 144. Lt. Col. David Cobb to Henry Jackson, 8 June 1780, in Hunt, Fragments of Revolutionary History, 150. 145. Benjamin Rush to Horatio Gates, 4 February 1778, in Rush, Letters, 1: 198–99. 146. Abraham Childers, Pension File R1922. 147. Connecticut Courant, 30 June 1777. Notes to Pages 47–50 203 148. Across 1777, the paper Continental dollar had held its value, but by Janu- ary 1778, $100 had a purchasing power of $68. By 1779, $100 held the purchasing power of only $13, and by February 1780, $100 Continental paper dollars were worth “a mere 50 cents in hard money.” Worse, Congress’s official rate of exchange and depreciation could not keep pace with what the market would bear. “While the official exchange rate was 40 to 1,” the black market rate in Philadelphia “ex- ceeded 100 to 1.” By the end of 1781, people understandably refused to be paid in Continental paper (Neimeyer, America Goes to War, 125–26). 149. Echeverria and Murphy, “The American Revolutionary Army,” 154. Both Kestnbaum and Royster similarly argue that economic disruption and harsh conditions in the Continental Army pushed established, propertied men to find other ways to support the Revolutionary movement (Kestnbaum, “Citizenship and Compulsory Military Service,” 12–13; Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 65–69, 127–29). 150. Buel, Dear Liberty, 118. 151. Simon Fobes, Pension File S16119. 152. [Unidentified author], entry for 15 July 1780, Diary, 21 April–25 September 1780, VHS. 153. A matross, the basic member of a gun crew, was roughly equivalent to an infantry private. Interestingly, this advertisement glosses over the low rank, emphasizing the elite military skill and potential for promotion (Independent Chron- icle, 19 December 1777). For additional examples in Massachusetts and South Carolina, see To all Gentlemen Volunteers; and All Gentlemen Volunteers. Virginia similarly recruited state troops in 1777 by differentiating between the terms and benefits of state versus Continental service (see An Act for raising volunteers to join the Grand Army). 154. Dann, Revolution Remembered, 121. 155. John Chambers, Pension File S1651. 156. McDonnell, Politics of War, 270. 157. Shadrach Barns [or Barnes], Pension File S30840. These stories of young Virginians working their way through the war as substitutes are legion; see, e.g., John Blackwell, Pension File S30873. 158. Benjamin Rush to Richard Henry Lee, 21 December 1776, quoted in Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 114. 159. Samuel Shaw to [unknown], 22 November 1776, Camp Near White Plains, Samuel Shaw Papers, MHS. On the scale of American privateering, see Bolton, Private Soldier under Washington, 45; and Gilje, Liberty on the Water- front, 106. 160. Ben Welles to Major Henry Livingston, Stanford, 13 April 1778, Miscel- laneous Bound Manuscripts, MHS. 161. John Wiley to Lamb, 12 April 1777, John Lamb Papers, NYHS. 162. Fox, Revolutionary Adventures, 55–57. 163. Painter, Autobiography, 10, 16. 164. Isaiah Bagwell, Pension File S6550. 204 Notes to Pages 51–54 165. Thomas Tart, Pension File S7676. 166. Samuel Shaw to Nat Shaw, 10 August 1780, Samuel Shaw Papers, MHS. 167. Providence Gazette and Country Journal, 9 March 1776. 168. Deposition of Eli Showell, 8 March 1778, quoted in Hoffman,Spirit of Dissension, 232. 169. Richard Henry Lee to Thomas Jefferson, 29 April 1777, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Digital Edition. 170. Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 197. See also Lessing, Sinews of Independence.

2 “We Were Young Men with Warm Hearts” 1. Proceedings of a Court Martial at Fort Pitt, 29 June 1781, Collection of Court-Martial Proceedings, Peter Force Collection, LOC. On Ward’s transfer, see “Second Pennsylvania Regiment, 1781,” 850; and Heitman, Historical Register, 568. 2. On performativity in the construction of gender—volitional behavior adapted for a specific audience that creates identity, has utility for the individual, and fits within the expectations of genre—see Butler,Gender Trouble; but cf. Brickell, “Masculinities, Performativity, and Subversion.” See also Jabour, “Male Friendship and Masculinity”; and Haggerty, Men in Love. 3. As Mary Beth Norton notes, “Exhibiting manly qualities in early America was a complicated task.” Men had to weigh whether self-restraint or aggression, dominance or deference, would best serve. What was appropriate for one man or in one circumstance might not be for another (see Norton, Preface to Foster, New Men, ix; see also Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers). On the Continen- tal Army as a peculiar community containing a variety of soldiers and civilians, men and women, see Mayer, Belonging to the Army; and Mayer, “Wives, Concu- bines, and Community.” On the disparate treatment of soldiers and officers and how military hierarchy reproduced and heightened an existing civilian hierarchy through treatments of soldiers’ bodies, see Cox, Proper Sense of Honor, xiv–xix, 71, 73–118. 4. Bingham, Five Straws Gathered from Revolutionary Fields, 13. 5. For a parallel inquiry into this mix of familiarity and novelty in army life, see Knouff,Soldiers’ Revolution, 77. 6. Brooke, “A Family Narrative,” 83. 7. Barnabas Carter (Rebecca), Pension File W713; Nicholas Carter, Pension File S46431. See also Discharge, 21 July 1783, issued to Nicholas Carter, 1st Virginia Regiment, VHS. 8. Isenberg, Fallen Founder, 61. 9. J. P. Martin, Narrative, 197–98. 10. Charles Clinton Beatty to Enoch Green, 10 September 1776, in Beatty et al., “Letters of the Four Beatty Brothers,” 202. 11. Washington to President of Congress, 24 September 1776, in GW Writings, 6:110–11. 12. Elmer, “Journal Kept during an Expedition to Canada in 1776,” 2:100. Notes to Pages 54–60 205 13. J. P. Martin, Narrative, 43. 14. Ebenezer Huntington to [father] Jabez Huntington, 25 June 1775, in “Let- ters of Ebenezer Huntington,” 704. 15. William Candler, Pension File S9159. 16. McDowell, “Journal,” 334. 17. Dann, Revolution Remembered, 127. 18. Hamner, Enduring Battle, 99, 101–2. Bodle argues, by contrast, that constant marching and practice of the manual exercise may have provided a rough equivalent of modern basic training (Bodle, Valley Forge Winter, 34). 19. General Orders, 30 August 1776, in GW Writings, 5:500; Royster, A Revo- lutionary People at War, 59. Knouff connects recreational shooting with soldiers’ feelings of empowerment—the ability to fire a gun at will connected citizenship, military service, and manliness (Knouff,Soldiers’ Revolution, 90). 20. New England Chronicle, 29 June 1775. See also GW Papers, Revolutionary Series, 1:53. 21. Lacey, “Memoirs,” vol. 25, p. 12. 22. Orders, 14 July 1779, William M. Bell Orderly Book, MHS. 23. E. Anderson, Personal Recollections, 8, 15. 24. On orders as a vehicle for military training and ideological instruction, see Higginbotham, George Washington and the American Military Tradition, 71; and Ruddiman, “ ‘A Record in the Hands of Thousands.’ ” For Steuben’s reform of training via his “blue book,” see Lockhart, Drillmaster of Valley Forge, 169–96. 25. Pennsylvania Packet, 28 January 1778. 26. Montross, Rag, Tag, and Bobtail, 271–72. Particularly popular were the many editions of H. Bland, Abstract of Military Discipline (first published 1702), and Simes, Military Guide for Young Officers. The military autodidact Henry Knox owned an edition of the Simes volume (see Henry Knox Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Boston Athenaeum). 27. Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies, 76. 28. E. Anderson, Personal Recollections, 29. 29. Ibid., 8. “Old Countrymen” were Britons living in colonial America. 30. Adlum, Memoirs, 24, 37. 31. William Casey [or Kersey] (Mary), Pension File W29906 ½. 32. Adlum, Memoirs, 21, 24, 37, 51–52, 55–56. 33. Samuel Shaw to Francis Shaw [father], 3 May 1776, in S. Shaw, Journals, 11–12. 34. William Hutchinson, in Dann, Revolution Remembered, 146. 35. On strength, violence, and sacrifice as qualities of military masculinity, see Lindman, “ ‘Play the man . . . for your bleeding country,’ ” 241. 36. Johnson, Traditions and Reminiscences, 449–50. See also Babits, Devil of a Whipping, 55. 37. Elisha Stevens: Fragments of Memoranda, 2. Ferling argues that the un- grammatical stream of words highlights the soldier’s emotional reaction (Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 249). 206 Notes to Pages 60–65 38. Hamner, Enduring Battle, 211. Lee identifies three main categories of warfare in the Revolution: unrestricted military violence against Indians; partially restrained violence by militia that was prone to escalation; and a regular limited war practiced by the Continental Army in line with Enlightenment ideals and the Revolutionary ideal of virtue (W. Lee, Crowds and Soldiers, 212; see also Lee, Barbarians and Brothers). 39. Middlekauff, “Why Men Fought,” 140–41. 40. Hamner, building on Keegan’s Face of Battle and Kellett’s Combat Motiva- tion, argues that the logic of linear combat rested on a three-legged stool: units were most effective when an individual’s task of self-preservation (stay alive!) aligned with the collective task of the mission (capture those cannon!) and the social force of primary group cohesion (protect your comrades!) (Hamner, Endur- ing Battle, 12–16, 177). 41. Dann, Revolution Remembered, 195. 42. Hamner argues that cohesion in battle was not a “vague, brotherly affection,” but tangible trust that a soldier would not endanger his comrades (Hamner, Enduring Battle, 78, 183). 43. Militia companies that lacked preexisting civilian bonds were more likely to break in combat. The Philadelphia militia at Princeton and the New England militias in the Saratoga campaign had to protect their honor before their neighbors and performed well. Southern militias—strangers drawn from thinly settled, ethnically diverse counties—were generally less successful in linear combat (Mid- dlekauff, “Why Men Fought,” 141–42; Middlekauff,Glorious Cause, 509–10). 44. Kirkland, “Journal of a Physician” 332, 352. On soldiers’ nonchalance, see Ferling, Wilderness of Miseries, 101. 45. John Chilton to [Martin Pickett], 17 September 1776, Keith Family Papers, Section 1, VHS. 46. Middlekauff, “Why Men Fought,” 148; Middlekauff,Glorious Cause, 515. 47. Collins, Autobiography, 52. See also Sobel, Teach Me Dreams, 135–36. 48. Denny, Military Journal, 8–9, 36–37. 49. Flexner, The Young Hamilton, 231; C. Lee, Papers, 3:201; Custis, Recollec- tions and Private Memoirs of Washington, 219. Court-martialed for his actions at Monmouth, Lee used gossip about Hamilton’s behavior to undermine the aide’s testimony. On young officers’ irrational and highly symbolic displays of bravery, see Massey, John Laurens, 82. 50. Virginia Gazette, 31 January 1777. See also Samuel Stelle Smith, The Battle of Princeton, 23. 51. Campfield, “Diary,” 119. 52. [Unidentified author], letter of 22 June 1779, U.S. Revolution Collection, box 3, folder 2. AAS. See also Baller, “Farm Families and the American Revolu- tion,” 31. 53. For relationships in the collegiate and maritime spheres, see Jackson, “The Rights of Man and the Rites of Youth”; and Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront. 54. One chaplain described this as “camp feelings,” implying a “kind of tough, Notes to Pages 65–69 207 heedless pose” soldiers took in camp (Ebenezer David to Nicholas Brown, 2 Au- gust 1777, in David, Rhode Island Chaplain, 36; see also Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 164). 55. On gambling, see, e.g., General Orders, 3 October 1775, Richard Montague Orderly Book, Boston Athenaeum; and General Orders, 24 October 1778, Bland Family Papers, section 5, VHS. On ball playing, see entries for 3, 14, and 17 April 1779, in Dearborn, “Journal”; see also the entry for 2–4 June 1777, Greenleaf Diary, Moses Greenleaf Papers, MHS. 56. General Orders, 17 July 1779, Peeks-kill, NY, Col. Thomas Nixon’s Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, New York and New Jersey, 10 July 1779–13 September 1780, in Early American Orderly Books, 1748–1817, reel 9, no. 92, NYHS. 57. See Orders for 9 December 1778, 1 February 1779, 5 April 1779, and 25 July 1779, Orderly Book, Fort Schuyler, SOC. For additional snowball fights, see Dann, Revolution Remembered, 38, and Isaac Artis, Pension File S39943, who recalled a gigantic snowball fight in 1778 between the Virginia and Pennsylvania troops. 58. Barber, “Account,” 85. 59. “To the Youth of the Army,” Norwich Packet and the Connecticut, Massachu- setts, New-Hampshire, and Rhode-Island Weekly Advertiser, 16 September 1776. See also John Adams to Nathanael Greene, 9 May 1777, in John Adams, Papers, 5:185. 60. Trabue, Westward into Kentucky, 130. 61. Hibbard, Memoirs, 14. 62. Kirkland, “Journal of a Physician,” 352. 63. Orders, War Office, 30 March 1779, and Brigade Orders, 1 August 1779, Col. Thomas Nixon’s Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, New York and New Jersey, 10 July 1779–13 September 1780, in Early American Orderly Books, 1748–1817, reel 9, no. 92, NYHS. 64. Park Holland Memoir, 11, Holland Family Papers, MHS. 65. On soldiers drinking, see Knouff, Soldiers’ Revolution, 88–89. For civilian comparisons, see Peter Thompson, Rum Punch and Revolution; and B. Carp, Reb- els Rising, esp. chap. 2. 66. General Edward Hand to Washington, n.d., quoted in H. Ward, George Washington’s Enforcers, 23. Martin and Lender argue this was more than alcohol- ism—the army was supposed to provide clothes, so soldiers refusing to spend their own devalued pay on these necessaries was thus a form of protest (Martin and Lender, Respectable Army, 129–30). 67. Entries for 1–27 January 1778, in B. Gilbert, Citizen-Soldier, 21–24. Captain Shays was Gilbert’s Massachusetts neighbor and the nominal leader of the armed rebellion in 1786. 68. Entries for 3 and 12 January 1778, ibid., 21, 22. 69. Entries for 1–8 August 1779, ibid., 56. 70. On the copious alcohol consumed in Revolutionary America, see Rora- baugh, Alcoholic Republic, 7–14. 71. Knouff connects the drinking culture of the army to civilian tavern culture 208 Notes to Pages 69–72 and an “informal manhood” that offered an alternate manifestation of masculine norms (Knouff,Soldiers’ Revolution, 88–89). 72. On this “Continental Community” of both men and women, soldiers and civilians, see Mayer, Belonging to the Army. For ratios, see ibid., 133. 73. Pennsylvania Packet, 28 January 1778. 74. Rankin, Francis Marion, 21. 75. Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 59–60. 76. Dewees, History, 146, 226, 165–66. 77. Sobel argues that “great anger at women marks many of the life narratives of men in this period. In a world that too often seemed out of their control, men often focused on women as particularly dangerous, as well as potentially controllable” (Sobel, Teach Me Dreams, 136–37). British enlisted soldiers also wrangled with their superiors over the patriarchal order in camp and resisted elite attempts to emasculate and infantilize them (see Way, “Venus and Mars”). 78. Entry for 11 June 1775, Journal of Elihu Clark Jr., Peter Force Collection, LOC; see also entries for 21 June and 2 October 1775. 79. Entry for 19 April 1776, Henry Sewall Diary, MHS. 80. General Orders, 22 August 1775, GW Papers, Revolutionary Series, 1:346. Washington denounced soldiers for swimming “utterly inconsistent with decency” and asked troops to show “more Decency” when swimming (see Orders, 7 July 1777 [first quotation], and Orders, 5 August 1779 [second quotation], inGW Papers, Revolutionary Series, 10:213 and 16:56, respectively). 81. Orders, 18 May 1776, in N. Greene, Papers, 1:215. 82. Kirkwood, Journal and Order Book, 94, 105. Orders did warn against con- tracting venereal diseases and examined and expelled infected camp followers (Mayer, Belonging to the Army, 134, 244). 83. McMichael, “Diary,” 141. 84. Samuel McKenzie to Jonathan Potts, Bennington, 27 August 1777, Jona- than Potts Papers, HSP. 85. See entries for 28 and 29 April; 6, 7, 29, and 30 May; and 5 June 1778, in B. Gilbert, Citizen-Soldier, 30–32. For changing norms about sex in the civilian sphere, see Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man, chaps. 2–3; and Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America, chap. 7. 86. For an interesting parallel example in the early republic, see Bodle, “Sol- diers in Love.” While emotional intimacy between men was a socially useful performance of the sentimental ideal, sexual intimacy between soldiers was forbidden and had to be kept hidden. The two courts-martial that mention sex between men present it as nonconsensual assault. Men suspected of consensual homosexual acts could be drummed out of the army on less-scandalous charges, preserving the reputation of the institution (see Benemann, Male–Male Intimacy in Early America, 93–120; cf. Godbeer, Overflowing of Friendship). 87. On the place of women in officers’ correspondence, see Massey,John Lau- rens, 81–82. 88. N. Rice to Israel Keith, 21 October 1776, Israel Keith II Papers, MHS. Notes to Pages 72–75 209 89. Samuel McKenzie to Jonathan Potts, Bennington, 27 August 1777, Jona- than Potts Papers, HSP. 90. Barnabas Binney to James McHenry, Pluckemin, 5 November 1779, James McHenry Papers, LOC. 91. Samuel McKenzie to Jonathan Potts, Bennington, 27 August 1777, Jona- than Potts Papers, HSP. 92. Robert Wharry to Reading Beatty, 1781, quoted in Bodle, “Soldiers in Love,” 221–22. 93. Benjamin Gilbert to Park Holland, August 1781, in Shy, Winding Down, 47. 94. On the anxieties and low expectations in Revolutionary America surrounding the transgressive behaviors of young bachelors, see McCurdy, Citizen Bachelors. See also Isenberg, Fallen Founder, 55, 61. 95. Orders, 14 April 1779, Captain Jacob Bower’s Orderly Book, SOC. Dough- terty was from Maryland. For another example of officers mixing with enlisted men, see Orders, 25 October 1780, in Orderly Book, 13 February 1780 to 29 April 1780, Continental Army, Pennsylvania 2nd Regiment, DLAR. 96. Thomas Paine: Collected Writings, 52. 97. Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 91. Young officers also increasingly viewed themselves as separate and different from both the enlisted men below them and the surrounding civilian society (see Massey, John Laurens, 81–82). 98. Hamilton to George Clinton, Valley Forge, 13 February 1778, Hamilton Papers, 1:426. 99. Entry for 27 December 1779 (referencing Psalms 133:1), Sewall Diary, MHS. See also entry for 17 October 1779, ibid., for a similar Masonic dinner; but cf. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood. 100. On sensibility as a worldview for officers, see Knott,Sensibility and the American Revolution, 18–19. For their search for emotions to experience and share, see Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 88–89. 101. Questions of honor—and other competitions over status—are fraught when hierarchy is novel (Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism, 50–51). On dueling in the Continental Army, see Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 208–11. 102. Entry for Saturday, [n.d.] 1780, Tenach [Teaneck, N.J.] near English Neighborhood, Theodore Woodbridge Papers, LOC. 103. Josiah Burr to Lydia Smith Burr [mother], 24 January 1777, Burr Family Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. 104. Brooke, “A Family Narrative,” 95. 105. Samuel Benjamin, folder 10 [undated, ca. 1780, written after the report of Arnold’s treason], Samuel Benjamin Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. Born in 1753, Benjamin was approximately twenty-seven years old. On the meanings of different forms of ritual violence, especially caning, see Freeman, Affairs of Honor, 172. 106. Entry for August 1780 (p. 67), [unidentified author], Diary, 21 April 21–25 September 1780, VHS. The diarist had commented on two duels. 107. Steuben, Regulations, 138. 210 Notes to Pages 76–80 108. Scammell, “Letter,” 197–98. 109. Robin, New Travels through North America, 36. 110. Brigade Court Martial, 19 September 1778, in Order Book 1778: Orders Issued by John Sullivan to Continental Troops Stationed at Providence, Rhode Island, VHS. 111. Orderly Book and Journals Kept by Connecticut Men, 292. 112. Dewees, History, 231–32, 236. On discipline in the army, see Cox, Proper Sense of Honor, 73–118. 113. Samuel Parsons to Washington, 15 July 1777, in Webb, Correspondence and Journals, 1:299–300. 114. Brooke, “A Family Narrative,” 87–88. 115. Robin, New Travels through North America, 36. 116. J. R. Shaw, Autobiography, 62–63. A general similarly observed that “Sev- eral Soldiers who have carried into Execution the Sentence of a Gen’l Court Mar- tial have by some of their Comrades been made a subject of Derision” (Orders, 29 April 1780, Col. Thomas Nixon’s Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, New York and New Jersey, 10 July 1779–13 September 1780, in Early American Orderly Books, 1748–1817, reel 9, no. 92, NYHS). A court martial of 2 July 1777 similarly revealed soldiers retaliating against a drummer who was too vigorous with the lash (see Kirkwood, Journal and Order Book, 95–96). 117. [Elmer?], “Valedictory Address,” 184. 118. Hezekiah Hayden to Deacon Nathaniel Hayden, 4 July 1776, American Revolution Collection, Connecticut, DLAR. For Washington’s orders of 2 July 1776, see GW Papers, Revolutionary Series, 5:180. See also Ruddiman, “ ‘A Record in the Hands of Thousands,’ ” 767. 119. Adlum, Memoirs, 51–52. 120. Wing Orders, Headquarters Orange Town, 16 August 1780, in Lauber, Orderly Books, 880. 121. Conway, War of American Independence, 174–75; W. Lee, Crowds and Sol- diers, 217; Royster, Light-Horse Harry Lee, 30. 122. General Orders, 9 July 1776, in GW Writings, 5:245. 123. Maier, American Scripture, 131–32, 156. 124. H. McDonald, “Memoir,” 835–36. 125. John Brooks to [unknown], 5 January 1778, in Brooks, “Letter of Col. John Brooks,” 244. 126. Quoted in Bowman, Morale of the American Revolutionary Army, 59. 127. Entry for 31 May 1780, Sewall Diary, MHS. 128. Cogswell, “Unpublished Letter.” 129. Ewald, Diary of the American War, 340–41. 130. Jean Piaget offers a classic though ahistorical formulation of this relationship: when social cooperation and high self-esteem combine in an adolescent, it “often appears as a form of Messianism,” in which “he counts on playing a decisive role in the cause he has undertaken to defend” (see Piaget, Six Psychological Stud- ies, 66–67). Notes to Pages 80–85 211 131. Lender, “The Enlisted Line,” 206–14; Tate, “Desertion from the American Revolutionary Army,” 7–10. 132. Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 72. 133. Lender, “The Enlisted Line,” 219–20. See also J. K. Martin, “A ‘most undisciplined, profligate crew.’ ” 134. Dewees, History, 179. 135. J. P. Martin, Narrative, 183. 136. Knouff argues that the mutinies were demands for respect as soldiers and valued participants in the Revolutionary community—the mutineers never rebelled against the cause, only their officers, demanding redress from their government (Knouff,Soldiers’ Revolution, 100). Neimeyer, by contrast, presents these late-war mutinies as strikes for better wages and conditions and manifestations of a class consciousness (Neimeyer, America Goes to War, chap. 7; see also Nagy, Rebellion in the Ranks). 137. Letter of 4 November 1781, Saratoga, in “Jeremiah Fogg to William Parker,” 485. 138. Bloomfield,Citizen Soldier, 136–37. 139. Orders, 10 November 1778, Henry Bicker Orderly Book, HSP. See also Knouff,Soldiers’ Revolution, 89. 140. Royster finds soldiers’ economic motivations for enlistment inadequate to explain their persistence in the ranks and credits instead their political devotion (Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 373–78). Martin and Lender also wrestle with the question of economic versus ideological motivations (see Martin and Lender, Respectable Army, 65–69, 87–98). 141. Proceedings of a Court Martial at Fort Pitt, 29 June 1781, Collection of Court-Martial Proceedings, Peter Force Collection, LOC. 142. Entry for 3 August 1781, John Hawkins Journal, HSP. 143. J. P. Martin, Narrative, 280. Anderson’s observation of the Seven Years War is apt: trying military experiences create a “powerful sense of camaraderie . . . that is perhaps the strongest emotional bond they have formed outside their families of origin” (F. Anderson, People’s Army, 24).

3 “Feared by Many, Loved by None” 1. Entry for 5 May 1779, Zuriel Waterman Journal, Richard Waterman Family Papers, RIHS. 2. J. P. Martin, Narrative, 199–200. 3. Ramsay, History of the American Revolution, 1:187–88. 4. For more on the emotions and implications surrounding the destruction of towns at the beginning of the war, see B. Carp, Rebels Rising, 215–16. 5. Greene to Alexander Hamilton, 10 January 1781, in Hamilton Papers, 2:529. See also W. Lee, Crowds and Soldiers. 6. On epidemic disease moving between soldiers and civilians, see Fenn, Pox Americana.

212 Notes to Pages 85–92 7. Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, 3:345. On the destruction inflicted by “50,000 young men . . . who did not have much to do” in the theater of war surrounding New York City, see Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies, 6. 8. John Haven, Sermon Preached, quoted in Burgess et al., Dedham Pulpit, 308; see also Alexander, “Colonial New England Preaching on War.” For a comparison of British soldiers’ encounters with their own civilians, see Conway, “British Sol- diers at Home.” 9. Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man, 63. Significantly, the period surveyed included demobilization after the Seven Years’ War, the occupation of Boston by British troops, and wartime patriot propaganda about sexual violence by British and Hessian soldiers. 10. On sexual assault in Revolutionary propaganda, see Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America, 230–38. 11. “Caractacus,” in Dunlaps Pennsylvania Packet, or, The General Advertiser, 21 August 1775. 12. [Barry], The General, Attacked by a Subaltern, 6. 13. Willard, Duty of the Good and Faithful Soldier, 5, 10, 19, 22. 14. American Jest Book, 41–43. 15. Martin and Lender, Respectable Army, 129–31. 16. E. W. Carp, To Starve the Army at Pleasure, chaps. 3, 4, 7. 17. On plundering as a negative cycle, see Lender, “The Enlisted Line,” 182. On the positive example of the French army and the qualities of the Continental soldier, see Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 74. Lee argues that in southern campaigns, thanks to better logistical planning and discipline, Continentals were comparatively better visitors than locally based militia units. Enraged by local violence, these militia units were unrestrained by discipline or laws of war and turned their wrathful plundering on supposed Tories (see W. Lee, Crowds and Soldiers, 216; and W. Lee, “Restraint and Retaliation,” 163–90). 18. Kulikoff,From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers, 256–61. 19. Entry for 21 December 1777, Albigence Waldo Diary, MHS. 20. Washington to President of Congress, 23 December 1777, in GW Writings, 10:192. Valley Forge marked a major turning point for soldiers drawing connections between their supply situation and civilian neglect. The year 1780 proved another high point in anger toward civilians. Bodle also argues, however, that Washington overstated his army’s suffering to ensure congressional action (Bodle, Valley Forge Winter, 73, 113–16, 127–28). 21. Peter Aston to Col. Ephraim Blaine, 6 May 1779, William Armstrong Papers, Peter Force Collection, LOC. 22. Mobilization required reciprocal ties between the army and civilians, and erratic supply undermined that connection (see Royster, “A Society and Its War,” 176). 23. William Irvine to General John Armstrong, 5 September 1780, Joseph Reed Papers, NYHS.

Notes to Pages 92–96 213 24. Entry for 24 August 1780, Caleb Gibbs Diary, LOC. 25. Samuel Shaw to Nat Shaw, Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., 10 August 1780, Samuel Shaw Papers, MHS. 26. Barber, “Account,” 86. 27. Brigade Court Martial, 12 September 1778, in Order Book, 1778: John Sul- livan’s Orders to Continental Troops stationed at Providence, Rhode Island, VHS. 28. “Narrative of Henry Hallowell,” in Sanderson, Lynn in the Revolution, 1:169. 29. Washington to Sullivan, 25 July 1777, and General Orders, 26 July 1777, in GW Papers, Revolutionary Series, 10:420. 30. Samuel Page to Samuel Benjamin, 13 October 1779, Samuel Benjamin Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. 31. Israel Keith to Francis Dana, 25 December 1777, Israel Keith II Papers, MHS. 32. Stirling’s Orders, 5 January 1779, Captain Jacob Bower’s Orderly Book, SOC. 33. General Orders, 9 June 1777, in Heth, “Orderly Book.” 34. Entries for 22 and 23 April 1781, Capt. Pendleton Orderly Book, High Hills of the Santee, 8 April 1781–2 January 1782, Nathaniel Pendleton Papers, LOC. 35. General Orders, 4 September 1777, Crane’s Continental Artillery Reg’t, 25 March–7 September 1777, in Revolutionary War Orderly Books at the Massachusetts Historical Society, reel 5, item 1A. 36. General Orders, 25 July 1777, ibid. 37. Samuel Shaw to Rev. Eliot, 20 November 1778, Samuel Shaw Papers, MHS. 38. Orders, 28 December 1779, Third Continental Artillery Regiment, 9 Au- gust 1779–31 March 1780, Revolutionary War Orderly Books at the Massachusetts His- torical Society, reel 5, item 1B. Plundering ran tightly in line with the army’s supply situation. Soldiers’ anger toward a Congress that could not pay them properly and home states that failed to deliver supplies flowed onto the civilians nearest to the army (Bodle, Valley Forge Winter, 134, 202–3). 39. General Orders, Morristown, 28 January 1780, in GW Writings, 17:459–60. 40. Division Orders, 25 January 1779, Captain Jacob Bower’s Orderly Book, SOC. 41.Entries for 25 August and 10 September [1780], Theodore Woodbridge Papers, LOC. 42. Entry for 3 October 1777, Zuriel Waterman Journal, Richard Waterman Family Papers, RIHS. 43. Entry for 10 September 1780, Anonymous Journal, 7 June–2 October 1780, Connecticut Ninth Regiment, Peter Force Collection, LOC. This event occurred near Paramus, New Jersey, near British-occupied New York City. 44. J. P. Martin, Narrative, 159. 45. Hamilton to James Duane, 3 September 1780, in Hamilton Papers, 2:406. 46. Hamilton to John Laurens, 12 September 1780, ibid., 2:428. Richard Kidder

214 Notes to Pages 96–100 Meade was a fellow aide. Other young officers echoed Hamilton’s political rage (see, e.g., Ebenezer Huntington to his brother Andrew, 7 July 1780, in “Letters of Ebenezer Huntington, 1774–1781,” 724–25). 47. J. P. Martin, Narrative, 202. 48. General Orders, Providence, 21 September 1778, in Order Book, 1778: John Sullivan’s Orders to Continental Troops Stationed at Providence, Rhode Island, VHS. A later order similarly denounced the “frequent” and “scandalous unmili- tary practice of Soldiers Stroleing a mong the Inhabitants in the Vicinity of the Camp . . .” (Brigade Orders, 28 April 1780, Col. Thomas Nixon’s Sixth Massachu- setts Regiment, New York and New Jersey, 10 July 1779–13 September 1780, in Early American Orderly Books, 1748–1817, reel 9, no. 92, NYHS). 49. Garrison Orders, 1 May and 4 May 1780, in Orderly Book kept by Capt. Dodge White while serving under Maj. Gen. Howe in the Hudson Highlands, 20 April–16 June 1780, American Revolution Collection, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. The orderly book does not record the inhabitant’s name; possible connections with Nancy Sprung are unknown. See also Alexander Glover, Pension File W21187. For a similar example in New Jersey, see civilian Cornelius Bogart’s “earnest” intervention for guilty soldiers (Orders, 9 May 1780, Capt. Ja- cob Bower’s Orderly Book, SOC). While leniency was common for other crimes, generals did not usually forgive plundering (see Higginbotham, War of American Independence, 413–14). 50. “Narrative of Henry Hallowell,” in Sanderson, Lynn in the Revolution, 157. 51. Entry for 9 April 1779, John Hawkins Journal, HSP. 52. Entry for 2 August 1781, ibid. See also Mead, “Melancholy Landscapes,” 46–47. 53. J. P. Martin, Narrative, 114. 54. Greenwood, Young Patriot, 89. 55. Sherburne, Memoirs, 31. 56. J. P. Martin, Narrative, 115. Philip Mead has found that Martin’s memory was accurate, but there was a happier ending than the memoirist knew: the other Joseph Martin returned safely home in 1780 (see Mead, “ ‘Adventures, Dangers and Sufferings,’ ” 120–21). 57. J. P. Martin, Narrative, 252–53, 284. 58. Quaife, “Boy Soldier under Washington,” 553–56. 59. B. Gilbert, Citizen-Soldier, 11. 60. Entry for June 1778, Diary and Memorandum Fragment, Jonathan Libby, Pension File W24557. 61. Dewees, History, 233. 62. Entries for 10 February 1779 and February 1780, in E. Fisher, Journal, 11, 13–14. 63. Entries for 25 September 1779–21 March 1780, Diary and Memorandum fragment, Jonathan Libby, Pension File W24557. 64. G. E. Stevens, Songs Comic, Satyrical, and Sentimental, 88.

Notes to Pages 101–107 215 65. Wister, Journal and Occasional Writings, 43–50. Bodle highlights Wister’s experience as an example of civilians’ self-education in a war zone (Bodle, Valley Forge Winter, 86–89). 66. Entry for 22 October 1779, in B. Gilbert, Citizen Soldier, 59. 67. George Johnston to [unnamed], Morristown, 12 May 1777, William John- ston Family Papers, LOC. Johnson referred to the exploits of Harry Peyton. 68. Dr. Samuel Adams to Sally [Preston] Adams, West Point, 11 August 1779, Sol Feinstone Collection, DLAR. 69. J. R. Shaw, Autobiography, 57–58. Shaw’s late-war experience in Pennsylva- nia mirrors that of Alexander Glover and Nancy Sprung near Fishkill, New York (see note 49 above). Bodle similarly argues that positive interactions with inhabitants in the northern theater of the war helped soldiers reintegrate with civilian life while still in the army (Bodle, Valley Forge Winter, 254). 70. George Johnston to Col. Leven Powell, 28 February 1777, Morristown, William Johnston Family Papers, LOC. 71. Hamilton to Catharine Livingston, 11 April 1777, in Hamilton Papers, 1:225– 27. For a novel, homosocial contextualization of the oft-told “tomcat” anecdote that presents Hamilton as a man’s man as well as a ladies’ man, see Godbeer, Overflowing of Friendship, 128. 72. Hamilton to Catharine Livingston, May 1777, in Hamilton Papers, 1:258–60. 73. William Finney to Captain William McPherson, Millstone, 28 April 1779, Edward McPherson Papers, LOC. 74. Ibid. 75. Flexner, The Young Hamilton, 280. 76. Hamilton to New York Committee of Correspondence, 20 March 1777, in Hamilton Papers, 1:209. 77. Hamilton to McHenry, 18 February 1781, in Hamilton Papers, 2:569; see also Hamilton to Philip Schuyler, ibid., 2:563–68. Flexner unhelpfully considers Hamilton’s decision in a formal Freudian context, noting that Hamilton chafed under the old man’s control and expectations (see Flexner, The Young Hamilton, 334). 78. Hamilton to Philip Schuyler, Hamilton Papers, 2:565. 79. “Petition of Jabez and Johana Ross,” in Navas, Murdered by His Wife, 160. 80. Navas, Murdered by His Wife, 11. 81. Ibid., 36–38; Lamb, Original and Authentic Journal, 193. 82. MacCarty, Guilt of Innocent Blood Put Away, 25; Massachusetts Spy, 7 May 1778. 83. Ebenezer Parkman Journal, quoted in Navas, Murdered by His Wife, 38–39. 84. Massachusetts Spy, 7 May 1778. In Murdered by His Wife, Navas provides the definitive treatment of Bathsheba Spooner’s life, the murder of Joshua Spooner, and the political and gender implications of their relationship in Revolution- ary Massachusetts. Though brilliantly and conscientiously focused on recovering Bathsheba Spooner’s mind and marital circumstances, Navas has left aside a deeper consideration of Ezra Ross’s motivations as an actor in this affair. 216 Notes to Pages 107–114 85. Massachusetts Spy, 7 May 1778; New-England Chronicle, 30 April 1778; Nor- wich Packet and the Connecticut, Massachusetts, New-Hampshire, and Rhode-Island Weekly Advertiser, 11 and 18 May 1778; Connecticut Courant, 12 May 1778; Buchanan, Ross, and Brooks, Dying Declaration. See also Navas, Murdered by His Wife, 38–40, 45–66. 86. Mournful Poem. 87. Simeon Thayer to Jonathan Arnold, Peekskill, 27 June 1777, quoted in Ap- plegate, “Constitutions Like Iron,” 445. 88. Henry Archer to Anthony Wayne, 28 July 1779, quoted in Ferling, Wilder- ness of Miseries, 99. 89. McDonnell, “The Struggle Within,” 113–14.

4 “To Quit the Service of Their Country” 1. John Laurens to Henry Laurens, 23 January 1778, in Laurens, Army Cor- respondence, 110–11. 2. Entry for 17 November 1779, in B. Gilbert, Citizen-Soldier, 60. 3. Resch’s quantitative analysis of Revolutionary War pension applications shows fewer than a third of applicants claimed more than three years of service. Both the average and most-common durations of service were about three years. Resch also reports that three quarters of his sample applicants first enlisted in 1775, 1776, or 1777, which suggests both ideological and economic motivations were at work. Of the young soldiers who lived long enough to apply for pensions, however, few served through the entire war as Continentals (Resch, Suffering Soldiers, p. 220: Table 21, “First Enlistment,” and Table 22, “Length of Service”). 4. Paine, “The American Crisis, Number I,” 238. 5. For the collapse of the enthusiastic rage militaire, see Royster, A Revolution- ary People at War, 48–53, 96–97, 127–31. On desertion, see Lender, “The Enlisted Line,” 204–20; Edmonson, “Desertion in the American Army during the Revolu- tionary War”; and Neimeyer, America Goes to War, chap. 7. Royster offers a suggestive but brief presentation of some long-serving Continental officers’ emotional anguish as they left the army at the end of the war (Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 344–45). 6. Letter from Bradford Committee of Correspondence to Cambridge Com- mittee of Safety, 4 July 1775, United States Revolution Collection, box 2, folder 2, AAS. 7. Ferling, Wilderness of Miseries, 125. For the varying strength of the American army besieging Boston in 1775, see R. Wright, The Continental Army, 15–44. On company officers’ resignations, see Washington to Congress, 28 November 1775, in GW Writings, 4:121. For analysis of contractual ideas or “moral economy” surrounding military service by colonials in the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution, see F. Anderson, People’s Army, chap. 6; and Neimeyer, America Goes to War, 5, 163–64. 8. Entry for 22 October 1775, in Fitch, “Diary,” 71; entry for 1 December 1775, in Lyman, “Journal,” 128. The Connecticut troops left Boston in two waves: a group Notes to Pages 114–120 217 of more than eighty soldiers on 1 December, and the remainder on 12 December (Buel, Dear Liberty, 55; Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut, 238). 9. Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 12 December 1775, in C. Lee, Papers, 1:226. 10. Lyman, “Journal,” 133 (emphasis added). 11. Ramsay, History of the American Revolution, 1:242. 12. Nathanael Greene to Samuel Ward Sr., 31 December 1775, in N. Greene, Papers, 1:170–74. 13. Nathanael Greene to Samuel Ward, 10 December 1775, ibid., 1:160–61. 14. Gilbert Saltonstall to Nathan Hale, 18 December 1775, in Seymour, Docu- mentary Life of Nathan Hale, 64. 15. Ramsay, History of the American Revolution, 1:241–42. 16. Graydon, Memoirs, 172. 17. Martin and Lender, Respectable Army, 53, 57. 18. E. Fisher, Journal, 5. 19. Entries for 28 December 1776 and 8 January 1777, Obadiah Brown Diary, MHS. 20. Greenwood, Young Patriot, 85–86. 21. Sylvanus Wood, Pension File W19657. See also Dann, Revolution Remem- bered, 6–9. 22. Ramsay, History of the American Revolution, 2:451. 23. Adlum, Memoirs, vii, ix. 24. Graydon, Memoirs, 200–208, 283–84, 326. 25. Graydon was engaged to marry before he received his commission (see Graydon, Memoirs, 326, 329, 331–32, 335–36, 342). For his letter to Joseph Reed and the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania in which he refused militia service with the “peasantry,” see Pennsylvania Archives, 2nd ser., 3:437–38. Graydon’s memoir attempts to demythologize the Revolution, presenting an unromantic picture of his own coming-of-age and the political wrangles of the new republic (see Arch, “Writing a Federalist Self ”). 26. Wade and Lively, This Glorious Cause, 146. A wholesale price index starkly demonstrates the economic troubles. Based on a standard of 100.0 in the year 1850, the price index was 78.0 in 1775, 108.0 in 1776, 329.6 in 1777, 598.1 in 1778, 2,969.1 in 1779, 10,544.1 in 1780, and 5,085.8 in 1781. Improved fiscal control by Robert Morris in Congress dropped the index to 132.6 for 1782, and 119.1 in 1783 (see Jensen, New Nation, 39–41; see also Irvin, Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty). 27. Tate, “Desertion from the American Revolutionary Army,” 7–9. Lender’s study of New Jersey Continentals concurs, finding that 40 percent of all deserters were in the first three months of service, while 64 percent of deserters left within the first six months. Fewer than 20 percent of desertions occurred after a year of service, and only 6 percent of deserters had put in more than two years of service (Lender, “The Enlisted Line,” 214–15). Neimeyer similarly finds that 50 percent of all desertions from the New York, Maryland, and North Carolina lines occurred within the first six months of enlistment (Neimeyer, America Goes to War, 138). In contrast, however, Tacyn’s study of the First Maryland Regiment finds that of the 218 Notes to Pages 120–126 ninety-nine deserters for whom an exact term of service can be determined, few appear to have been bounty-jumpers or immediately faint-hearted. Eighty-two percent served at least one year before deserting, while 69 percent served at least two years before deserting. This situation was likely the result of combat casualties and the destruction of primary group cohesion (Tacyn, “To the End,” 161). 28. Martin and Lender, Respectable Army, 132–33. 29. Tate, “Desertion from the American Revolutionary Army,” 26. 30. Galloway, “An Account of the Number of Deserted Soldiers . . . ” (1778), cited in Ferling, Wilderness of Miseries, 109. Neimeyer points out the prominence of poorer men from the British Isles in the Continental ranks, especially in regiments raised in the mid-Atlantic states (Neimeyer, America Goes to War, chaps. 2–3). 31. Tate, “Desertion from the American Revolutionary Army,” 7–9. Lender argues that though the likelihood of desertion declined with length of service, soldiers’ propensity to mutiny increased (Lender, “The Enlisted Line,” 219). Lender’s analysis of the New Jersey line reveals that the highest desertion levels occurred in 1777 because all the encouraging factors combined: the newly enlisted Jersey troops lacked cohesion; they were still close to home; and the army suffered severe shortages of pay and supplies. Lender calculates that of the 1,408 Jersey troops on the rolls in 1777, 593 deserted (42 percent). In contrast, of the 1,586 Jersey Conti- nentals in 1778, only 330 deserted (21 percent), thanks to improved training and cohesion, which countered their proximity to home in the Monmouth campaign. Desertions for 1779 and 1780 show a consistent desertion rate of only 10 percent, a rate comparable to contemporary European armies (Lender, “The Enlisted Line,” 206, 209; see also Alexander, “Footnote on Deserters from the Virginia Forces during the American Revolution”; and Alexander, “Desertion and Its Punishment in Revolutionary Virginia”). 32. Tate, “Desertion from the American Revolutionary Army,” 29. Tate argues that deserters could resume a normal life because of civilian abettors, but his evidence is limited to truant New York militiamen in September 1776 (see Force, American Archives, 5th ser., 2:241–42). Analysis of deserters from a group of Virginia Continentals enlisted in late 1780 illustrates how their likely destina- tions shaped soldiers’ choices. Former sailors were the most likely to desert; they simply had to get to a port to escape the army’s pursuit. Blacksmiths were the second most likely to desert; Virginia’s ironworks desperately needed their skilled labor. Finally, property owners were more likely than landless laborers to desert; the landed farmer had a home to return to for sanctuary, whereas the landless had been promised bounty land for enlisting (Goldenberg, Nelson, and Fletcher, “Revolutionary Ranks,” 185). 33. List of the Soldiers who have deserted from the three New Hampshire Battal- ions, in the Continental Service. 34. Colman to his wife, 3 July 1778, Dudley Colman Papers, MHS. Roger Lord may have returned to the army and the good graces of his officers. A man of that name appeared on Massachusetts returns for 1777, reenlisted in January 1780, and Notes to Pages 126–127 219 was promoted to sergeant in July 1780 (see microfilm roll 450, Compiled Service Records of Volunteers Who Served in the Revolutionary War). 35. “An Act to prevent and punish desertion, and for apprehending and securing deserters from the Continental Army” (broadside), Massachusetts, [5 May] 1780, SOC. 36. Sarah James to Elisha James, Scituate, 5 October 1777, Elisha James Family Letters, MHS. 37. Headquarters, Highlands [New York], 26 April 1780, Col. Thomas Nixon’s Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, New York and New Jersey, 10 July 1779–13 Sep- tember 1780, in Early American Orderly Books, 1748–1817, reel 9, no. 92, NYHS. 38. David Cobb to Henry Jackson, 8 June 1780, in Hunt, Fragments of Revolu- tionary History, 149. 39. Headquarters, Valley Forge, General Orders, 11 May 1778, in Order Book, 1st Virginia Regiment, May–June 1778, VHS. 40. Headquarters, Robinson’s house [N.Y.], 17 January 1780, Col. Thomas Nixon’s Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, New York and New Jersey, 10 July 1779–13 September 1780, in Early American Orderly Books, 1748–1817, reel 9, no. 92, NYHS. 41. John Laurens to Lieutenant Hazard, [n.d.], quoted in Massey, John Lau- rens, 98. 42. Park Holland Memoir, 7, Holland Family Papers, MHS. 43. “Orders, Suffolk, 24 April 1776,” in Stubblefield, “Orderly Book,” 165. 44. Graydon, Memoirs, 180–81. 45. Gawen Barton to Col. Henry Jackson, 8 September 1778, Sol Feinstone Collection, item no. 118, DLAR. 46. George Washington to Theodorick Bland, 8 November 1777, in T. Bland, Papers, 1:73. 47. Lt. John Benjamin to Colonel John Lamb, 13 November 1780, John Lamb Papers, NYHS. Benjamin was about fifty years old (Heitman,Historical Register, 99; Orcutt, History of the Old Town of Stratford and the City of Bridgeport, Con- necticut, 1:336). 48. For the obligations of husbands and fathers, see L. Wilson, Ye Heart of a Man, chaps. 4–5. Though focused on pre-Revolutionary New England, her findings are suggestive for other parts of Revolutionary America. On the connection between honor and sensibility among Continental officers, see Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution, 165, 188–93. 49. Israel Keith to Cyrus Keith, 15 November 1776, Israel Keith II Papers, MHS. 50. Samuel Shaw to Nathanael Shaw, 29 October 1779, New Windsor, Samuel Shaw Papers, MHS. 51. In a study of Hingham, Massachusetts, from 1761 to 1780, average age of men at first marriage was 24.6; from 1781 to 1800, the average age had crept up to 26.4 (D. S. Smith, “The Demographic History of Colonial New England,” 177). 52. Montross, Rag, Tag, and Bobtail, 328. See also Ammon, James Monroe, 26–29. 53. Robarge, A Chief Justice’s Progress, 37. 220 Notes to Pages 127–131 54. Isenberg, Fallen Founder, 52–53. 55. William Thompson to William Tudor, 3 April 1777, Tudor Family Papers, MHS. 56. William Tudor to Delia Jarvis, 28 May 1776, ibid. 57. William Tudor to Delia Jarvis, 30 September 1776, ibid. 58. Delia Jarvis to William Tudor, 8 October 1776, ibid. 59. William Tudor to Delia Jarvis, 24 December 1776, ibid. 60. On the sentimental, literary, and political themes in the correspondence of Tudor to Delia Jarvis and John Adams, see Kelly, “While Pen, Ink & Paper Can Be Had.” Alexander Hamilton similarly used the supposed emotions of his fiancée Elizabeth Schuyler to justify his decision to remain in the service (see Hamilton to Elizabeth Schuyler, [n.d.] August 1780, in Hamilton Papers, 2:397). 61. Tudor, “Memoir”; Shipton et al., Biographical Sketches, 17:252–65. There was an epidemic of officers taking furloughs only to resign at their expiration. Alex- ander Hamilton was so enraged by this abuse that he proposed courts-martial for those officers who resigned while on leave (Hamilton Papers, 1:415). At the end of 1779, General Orders similarly condemned the practice of resigning during furloughs (see Orders, 7 December 1779, 3rd Continental Artillery Regiment, 9 August 1779–31 March 1780, in Revolutionary War Orderly Books at the Massachu- setts Historical Society, reel 5, item 1B. 62. Court-martial, West Point, 31 May 1783, John Lamb Papers, box 5, Courts- Martial folder, NYHS. The presiding officers apparently believed the soldier had no intention of insubordination, which highlights the extremity of Moodie’s violent reaction. Other courts had no trouble convicting soldiers for ostensibly similar insubordination. On 11 May 1783, e.g., two Massachusetts Continentals were flogged “For behaving in a riotous and mutinous manner . . . and disobeying, and actually opposing the orders of an officer” (Order Book, Washington’s Headquar- ters, Main Army, Continental Army, 28 April–17 August 1783, in Revolutionary War Orderly Books at the Massachusetts Historical Society, reel 5, item 6). 63. Thaddeus Thompson, Pension File W29931. For Andrew Moodie’s service, see Heitman, Historical Register, 397. 64. Royster (A Revolutionary People at War, 195, 295, 301) emphasizes how quickly the major mutinies were contained and dispersed, while Martin and Lender (Respectable Army, 162–66) argue that the soldiers’ alienation from civilian society and their growing internal cohesion made the mutinies possible in the first place. Neimeyer (America Goes to War, chap. 7) argues that the mutinies demonstrate a developing class consciousness among Continental soldiers. 65. For a detailed examination of the events of mutinies from 1780 through 1783 and their often brutal suppression by Continental officers, see Neimeyer, America Goes to War, 147–58. See also Van Doren, Mutiny in January. 66. West Point, 9 January 1780, Garrison Court Marital, Moses Greenleaf Papers, folder 67.1–80.1, MHS. 67. Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, Providence, 13 October 1778, in Wade and Lively, This Glorious Cause, 145. Notes to Pages 131–136 221 68. Anthony Wayne to George Washington, 21 January 1781, Washington Pa- pers, ser. 4, reel 73, LOC, quoted in Neimeyer, America Goes to War, 151. 69. Entry for 16 December 1780, in Schaukirk, “Occupation of New York City by the British,” 434. 70. Ramsay, History of the American Revolution, 2:641 71. See GW Writings, 26:238–332; and Hatch, Administration of the American Revolutionary Army, 179–80. 72. General Benjamin Lincoln to Colonel John Lamb, 5 March 1783, John Lamb Papers, NYHS. 73. Governor Harrison to the Virginia Council, 31 May 1783, Bland Family Papers, section 7, VHS. 74. Entry for 30 January 1783, Orderly Book of Maj. General Gates, Horatio Gates Papers, New York Public Library [microfilm viewed at DLAR]. See also H. Ward, George Washington’s Enforcers, 197. 75. F. McDonald, “E Pluribus Unum,” 22–29; Kohn, “Inside History”; Nelson, “Horatio Gates at Newburgh”; Skeen, “The Newburgh Conspiracy Reconsid- ered.” Kohn notes but does not analyze the youth of the central officers in Gates’s clique. See also W. Fowler, American Crisis. 76. For details of Armstrong’s career, see Skeen, John Armstrong, Jr. 77. Former Congressman William Duer of New York to Rufus King of Mas- sachusetts, quoted in Higginbotham, War of American Independence, 440. 78. Higginbotham also points out some officers’ qualms about returning to a republican society without formal hierarchies (ibid.). 79. For the full text of the Addresses, see Ford et al., Journals of the Continental Congress, 24:295–97. 80. Ibid. 81. Entry for 15 March 1783, Capt. Ebenezer Smith Orderly Book, SOC. See also GW Writings, 26:223–27. 82. Shaw to John Eliot, April 1783, in S. Shaw, Journals, 104. See also Diary Transcript, March 1783, p. 48, Bernardus Swartwout Papers, NYHS. 83. Kohn, “Inside History,” 209–10; Martin and Lender, Respectable Army, 192–95. 84. Timothy Pickering to Samuel Hogdon, 16 March 1783, Pickering Family Papers, MHS. 85. Washington to Secretary at War [Benjamin Lincoln], 2 October 1782, in GW Writings, 25:227–28. 86. Oliver Rice to Jonathan Rice, Verplancks Point [N.Y.], 23 October 1782, Sol Feinstone Collection, item no. 1207, DLAR. 87. Oliver Rice to Jonathan Rice, 15 November 1782, ibid. 88. Orders, 6 June and 14 June 1783, Washington’s Headquarters, Main Army, Continental Army, 28 April–17 August 1783, in Revolutionary War Orderly Books at the Massachusetts Historical Society, reel 5, item 6. 89. J. P. Martin, Narrative, 281.

222 Notes to Pages 136–141 90. For Gilbert’s January 1780 promotion, see B. Gilbert, Citizen-Soldier, 9–11. For Gilbert’s courtship, see entries for 9 and 25 February 1780; 13 and 25 March 1780; 28 April 1780; 16 May 1780; 5, 18, and 25 June 1780; 2 and 10 July 1780; 28 January 1782; 4, 18, and 24 February 1782; and 10, 13, 15, and 19 March 1782, ibid., 15, 60, 63–75. For his promotion to light infantry lieutenant, see Gilbert to Aaron Kimbell, 30 April 1782, in Shy, Winding Down, 55. For Gilbert’s dinner with Wash- ington and his staff, see entry for 16 May 1782, in Benjamin Gilbert, Manuscript Diary, p. 9, L-NYSHA. 91. Gilbert to Colonel Converse, 30 September 1782, in Shy, Winding Down, 69. 92. Gilbert to Brigadier General John Paterson, 12 November 1782, ibid., 71. 93. Gilbert to cousin Daniel Gould, 16 November 1782, ibid., 72. 94. Gilbert to his father, 11 and 18 January 1783, ibid., 77, 79. 95. Men in New England faced public consequences when they failed to maintain sexual self-control in courtships. Consequently, other men in his hometown were the key audience for Gilbert’s correspondence (see Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man, 85–87; and Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America, 260–63). 96. Entries for 2, 23, and 26 October 1782; 28 November 1782; and 13 and 24 January 1783, in Benjamin Gilbert, Manuscript Diary, pp. 47, 51–52, 60–61, 69–70, 72, L-NYSHA. 97. Gilbert to Capt. Jonathan Stone, 1 March 1783, in Shy, Winding Down, 86–87. For visits to the brothel called “Wyoma,” see entries for 20 and 28 February 1783; 5, 10, 14, 18, 24, and 30 March 1783; 3, 7, 13, and 20 April 1783; 4 and 18 May 1783; and 13 and 20 June 1783, in Benjamin Gilbert, Manuscript Diary, pp. 79–103, L-NYSHA. Gilbert was accompanied to the brothel by twenty-six-year-old En- sign Jonathan Wing and Dr. James Edwards Burr Finley, a twenty-five-year-old surgeon in the Fifth Massachusetts Regiment and the son of the president of the College of New Jersey. All three officers were in their mid- to late twenties and had served for much of the war. Just as Gilbert was not alone in his behavior, his fellow officers likely shared his anxiety about the return to civilian life. 98. “Great anger at women marks many of the life narratives of men in this period. In a world that too often seemed out of their control, men often focused on women as particularly dangerous, as well as potentially controllable” (Sobel, Teach Me Dreams, 136–37; see also Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage). 99. Strikingly, in the letter where Gilbert boasted about “establishing a sera- glio,” he also noted the problems with officers’ pay and the uncertain state of his land-speculation plans, essentially presenting all the components of his masculine anxieties and compensating performances to a fellow officer (see Gilbert to Cap- tain Jonathan Stone, 1 March 1783, in Shy, Winding Down, 67). 100. Gilbert to father, 17 March 1783, ibid., 91.

Notes to Pages 142–143 223 101. Gilbert to cousin Daniel Gould, 6 May 1783, ibid., 105. 102. Entry for 11–12 June 1783, in Benjamin Gilbert, Manuscript Diary, p. 101, L-NYSHA. 103. Entries for July–August 1783, ibid., pp. 103–18. 104. Entry for 20 October 1783, ibid., p. 124. 105. Park Holland Memoir, 12, Holland Family Papers, MHS. 106. Ibid., 12–13. 107. Heath, Memoirs, 351–52.

5 “Yield the Tribute Due to Merit” 1. E. Fisher, Journal, 21–23. 2. Entries for 14 and 16 May 1783, ibid., 23–24. Fisher apparently consolidated multiple small diaries shortly after the war, creating layers of immediate observations and later interpretations. 3. Studies of military demobilization traditionally look to political and economic factors. On the Revolution, see Browne, “U.S. Soldiers and Veterans in War, Peace, and Politics.” For treatments of other demobilizations, see F. An- derson, Crucible of War, 560–63; Holberton, Homeward Bound; Reid, Freedom for Themselves; and Allport, Demobbed. For a recent sociological review of life course analyses and postwar experiences, see MacLean and Elder, “Military Service in the Life Course.” 4. Humphreys, Poem, 12–13. 5. J. P. Martin, Narrative, 281. 6. “Farewell Orders to the Armies of the United States,” in GW Writings, 27:224–26. 7. Evans, A Discourse, Delivered in New York, 8–9. 8. David Cobb to Henry Jackson, Cambridge, 2 March 1783, David Cobb Papers, VHS. 9. Park Holland Memoir, 17, Holland Family Papers, MHS. 10. William North to Benjamin Walker, near Princeton, November 1783, Sol Feinstone Collection, item no. 1301, DLAR. On emotional intimacy in the North– Walker correspondence, see Benemann, Male–Male Intimacy in Early America, 93–120. 11. John Armstrong to William Armstrong, 26 February [1780], William Arm- strong Papers, Peter Force Collection, LOC. While this letter may have been written in 1780, from the emotions it expressed it may be as likely from 1783 and the beginning of the Newburgh Conspiracy. 12. Entry for 9 December 1783, in Benjamin Gilbert, Manuscript Diary, p. 133, L-NYSHA; see also Shy, Winding Down, 95. Cleared of the shame of abandonment, Patience married another man a year later. On premarital pregnancy in Revolutionary America, Patience Converse, and analysis of her actions, see God- beer, Sexual Revolution in Early America, 261–62. For a reading of Gilbert’s sexual behavior in the context of male sexuality in colonial Massachusetts, see Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man, 81, 85–87. 224 Notes to Pages 143–152 13. See entries for 4, 11, 17, and 24 December 1783; 8, 28, and 30 January 1784; 10, 20, 25, and 26 February 1784; and 12 March 1784, in Benjamin Gilbert, Manuscript Diary, pp. 132–45, 148, L-NYSHA. As the drumbeat of these dates indicates, Gil- bert was aggressively social. See also Shy, Winding Down, 99–100. 14. John Cleaveland Jr. to Parker Cleaveland, 23 November 1783, John Cleave- land Papers, PEM. For John Jr.’s calling to ministry, see Jedrey, World of John Cleaveland, 162. 15. Oliver Rice to Jonathan Rice, Banks of the Hudson near West Point, 25 December 1783, Sol Feinstone Collection, item no. 1209, DLAR. 16. It was not until the twentieth century that society widely questioned whether men could “pass blithely from battle to peace and back again without psychological damage” (Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism, 37). Though differences between eras complicate comparative analysis, there are studies with suggestive findings. Theories posit that greeting, celebrating, and supporting returning veterans minimizes psychological and readjustment problems, implying that civilian neglect damaged American veterans of the Vietnam War. Rates of postwar psychological breakdown nevertheless remained steady and comparable between the veterans of World War II and those of Vietnam (see Dean, Shook Over Hell, 91). 17. David Moore, Pension File S16980. 18. Fitch, “Diary,” 91. 19. David Brooks, Pension File S1641. Memoirs from the Revolution commonly mentioned men going off to fight and discussed the concessions households made for a soldier’s absence, but they “tended not to discuss the further adjustments when soldiers returned” (see Williams, “Childhood, Memory, and the American Revolution,” 16). 20. Entry for 5 January 1777, Journals of Simeon Lyman, enclosed in his Pen- sion File, W20548. 21. James Bland, Pension File W5837. 22. Ferling, Wilderness of Miseries, 87. Ferling argues that veterans were “often shunned” at the end of wars in colonial America, and that the Revolution was no different. 23. Samuel Carpenter, Pension File W6631. 24. William Asberry, Pension File W2988. 25. Elisha Stevens: Fragments of Memoranda, 8. 26. “Farewell Orders to the Armies of the United States,” in GW Writings, 27:224–25. 27. Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, chap. 7. 28. Z. Adams, Evil Designs of Men Made Subservient by God, 21, 27–29. 29. Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation, 2:206–7. 30. Z. Adams, Evil Designs of Men Made Subservient by God, 28–29. In 1830, Joseph Plumb Martin wrote against this persistent assumption that “the Revolu- tionary army was needless, [and] that the militia were competent for all the crisis required” (J. P. Martin, Narrative, 289). Notes to Pages 152–157 225 31. Sturr, “Soldiers’ Stories of the American Revolution,” 88. 32. Aethiopian [pseud.], Sermon on the Evacuation of Charlestown, 9, 14–16. For more on the image of the discourses of suffering, neglect, and obligation surrounding the memory of the Revolutionary War in the early republic, see Purcell, Sealed with Blood. 33. John Barmer [or Balmore, Balmer], Pension File S8042. 34. “Farewell Orders to the Armies of the United States,” in GW Writings, 27:223–25. 35. “An Address to his Excellency, George Washington,” Garrison West Point, 10 November 1783, United States Revolution Collection, oversize box 1, folder 10, AAS. 36. Evans, A Discourse, Delivered in New York, 9. 37. McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, 266–67, 373–74; Price, “Reflections on the Economy of Revolutionary America,” 320. See also Conway, War of American Independence, 238; and Kulikoff,From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers, epilogue. 38. Conway, War of American Independence, 171–72. 39. Tacyn makes this observation about one Maryland regiment at the end of the war, but seasonal labor was a factor every year (Tacyn, “To the End,” 250). 40. F. McDonald, “E Pluribus Unum,” 68. 41. Tacyn, “To the End,” 248. 42. Moses Clack (Ann), Pension File W2921 43. Park Holland Memoir, 12–15, Holland Family Papers, MHS. 44. Lender, “The Enlisted Line,” 259. 45. Benjamin Gould, Pension File W21197. Gould, born in 1761, enlisted in April 1781 and was discharged in the fall of 1783. 46. Dewees, History, 274. 47. Henry Boyd, Pension File S2089. Boyd’s memory and records of what he was owed for his service crisply persisted through 1832, when he presented his deposition for a pension in Washington County, Tennessee. 48. “Petition of the Officers of the Massachusetts Line, 3 August 1790,” in De Pauw, Documentary History of the First Federal Congress of the United States of America, 7:177–78. 49. Ramsay, History of the American Revolution, 2:650. 50. General Orders, 21 May 1783, Washington’s Headquarters, Main Army, Continental Army, 28 April–17 August 1783, Revolutionary War Orderly Books at the Massachusetts Historical Society, reel 5, item 6. 51. Thomas Hamilton to William Davies, 7 March 1782, in Palmer et al., Cal- endar of Virginia State Papers, 3:87. McDonnell notes that by 1786 almost all the certificates issued by Congress had passed out of the hands of the original holders (McDonnell, Politics of War, 481). 52. P. Moore, Letter, 6–7. 53. John Laurance Papers, NYHS. John Lawrence was also buying land certificates from his soldiers at the end of the war, and he purchased McDougall’s 226 Notes to Pages 157–161 certificates from his heirs in 1791–92. For more on Continental officers and land speculation in the early republic, see Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors; cf. Oberly, Sixty Million Acres, 8–11. 54. Lauber, Orderly Books, 14. Earlier colonial wars offered precedent for this exploitation. Virginia provincials received as little as £1 per 200 acres of bounty land after the Seven Years’ War—Colonel George Washington told his brother Charles to offer veterans that amount in 1770, since “those who may be in want of a little ready money, would gladly sell” (GW Papers, Colonial Series, 8:301; see also Philyaw, “A Slave for Every Soldier,” 376). 55. The Ordinance of 1787 and the preceding ordinances distributed land in 4,000-acre lots for townships to encourage compact, orderly, and economically sustainable settlement. This policy decision inserted speculators or groups like the Ohio Company as middlemen between veterans’ land-bounty warrants and legal deeds to land (Cayton, Frontier Republic). 56. Lender, “The Enlisted Line,” 268. As Joseph Plumb Martin insisted in 1830: “The soldiers were ignorant of the ways and means to obtain their bounty lands, and there was no one appointed to inform them. The truth was, no one cared for them . . . [and] no care was taken that the soldiers should get them” ( J. P. Martin, Narrative, 283). 57. Holton, “Abigail Adams, Bond Speculator.” 58. Lender, “The Enlisted Line,” 260. 59. Dann, Revolution Remembered, 314. 60. Independent Gazetteer, 12 February 1785. 61. The 1785–86 rebellion in western Massachusetts named for the Conti- nental veteran Captain Daniel Shays was one outcome of the political upheaval over high taxes and postwar fiscal and monetary policy. This “Regulation” resisted the Boston-centric state government that had backed laws and policies that had enriched the few at the expense of the many. Richards raises this argument in place of the standard interpretation of Shays’s Rebellion as a response to debt among “destitute farmers” (see Richards, Shays’s Rebellion). Veteran Continental officers led the private army that the Boston elite raised to suppress the rebellion. Rank-and-file participants in Shays’s Rebellion, however, were almost all young men who had either limited or no experience in the Revolution. The economic frustration of aging sons certainly fueled the western crisis, offering an echo of the hopes and fears of the life course that drew New England youths to the Revolu- tionary War in 1775, 1776, and 1777 (see Nobles, “Politics of Patriarchy in Shays’s Rebellion”; and Wallach, Obedient Sons, 49). Perhaps the Shaysites assumed their “regulation” uprising would follow the script of the 1780 mutiny of Pennsylvania’s Continental line—a bloodless confrontation that resulted in negotiation and reasonable redress of grievances. 62. Park Holland Memoir, 16–17, Holland Family Papers, MHS; Heitman, Historical Register, 148. Like Park Holland, Chalenor had been in Captain Daniel Shays’s company in Putnam’s regiment in the middle of the war (see Paige, History of Hardwick, Massachusetts, 276). Notes to Pages 162–164 227 63. McHenry to Hamilton, 11 August 1782, in Steiner, Life and Correspondence of James McHenry, 43–44. 64. Entry for 4 November 1783, Diary, Samuel Chase, Pension File W22776. 65. Voltaire, Candide, 245. 66. Dann, Revolution Remembered, 6–9. 67. Dewees, History, 279. 68. Ferling, Wilderness of Miseries, 128. 69. Entries for 16–19 March 1784, in Benjamin Gilbert, Manuscript Diary, pp. 147–49, L-NYSHA. 70. Park Holland Memoir, 14, Holland Family Papers, MHS. 71. For his service as a lieutenant and adjutant, Greenman received a lump sum of $2,400—an amount hurt by depreciation and payment in certificates but still a useful amount of cash. The young officers’ store failed after only a year (Green- man, Diary of a Common Soldier, xvii). 72. Items 54a, 56, 56a, 58, 60, 61, Samuel Shaw Papers, MHS; see also S. Shaw, Journals, 111–13. Nat Shaw died during the 1791 voyage, and Samuel Shaw died at sea in 1794. 73. “Revolutionary War Reminiscences of John Burrows,” 12, VHS. 74. Alexander Childress (Temperance), Pension File W10604. 75. Entry for 15 July 1783, Diary, Samuel Chase, Pension File W22776: “I went to Genl Starks to tarry with Him. The same day The Gen begun to Cut his Grain . . .”; for 18 April 1785: “I went to Genl Stark’s to work”; for 3 June 1785: “I went to Hopkinton”; and for 14 June 1785: “I went to Genl Stark’s again.” 76. John Ballenger, Pension File S31543. 77. Greenwood, Young Patriot, 149–50. 78. Sellers, “The Common Soldier in the American Revolution,” 158–59. 79. Jedry, World of John Cleaveland, 164–65. Jedry attributes this increased mobility to “weakened local loyalties”—the war and the attendant economic disruptions broadened horizons. 80. John Chandler Autobiography, 15, MHS. 81. Carpenter, Journal, 50, 56, 68, 70–71, 88, 102. 82. E. Fisher, Journal, 25, 27. 83. Entry for 10 October 1782, Diary, folder 10, Samuel Benjamin Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. 84. Carpenter, Journal, 70–71. 85. See entries for 2 August 1783 through 5 January 1784, Henry Sewall Diary, MHS. For commentary on Sewall’s diary and a view of Hallowell, see Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale, 30–31, 92–93, 111–12. 86. John Chandler Autobiography, 15–16, MHS. 87. Charles Burrage (Catharine), Pension File W8342. 88. Aaron Brister (Betsey), Pension File W17341. 89. Robert Alvey (Susan), Pension File W8321. 90. Simeon Lyman, Pension File W20548. 91. Lauber, Orderly Books, 13. 228 Notes to Pages 164–170 92. On prescriptive literature and concerns of sexual disorder at the end of the war, see Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man, 19–20, 108–9. 93. Park Holland Memoir, 18, 30–31, Holland Family Papers, MHS. 94. Shy, Winding Down, 100. 95. Gilbert to father, 16 July 1785, 26 September 1785, and 10 December 1785, in B. Gilbert, Citizen-Soldier, 77–79. 96. Gilbert to Captain John Cornwall, May 1786, ibid., 80. 97. Shy, Winding Down, 100–101. On Gilbert’s participation in Cooper’s Fed- eralist political machine, see Taylor, William Cooper’s Town, 178–80, 192–93, 240, 254, 267–69, 284. 98. “The American Soldier,” in Freneau, Poems, 3:51. See also Herald of Free- dom, 11 February 1791; “An Affecting and True Story,”Th e American Museum, or Universal Magazine 7 (March 1790): 129–32; and Purcell, Sealed with Blood. 99. B. Fowler, Lamentation of Poor Benjamin Fowler. Based on corroborating evidence from his invalid pension application, it is likely this Rhode Islander had this broadsheet printed before 1794 (see American State Papers, s.v. Class 9: Claims, 1:91; see also Benjamin Fowler, [R.I.] Pension File [unnumbered]). For a similar text, likely from the 1820s, see Miner, “Lines Written by a Revolutionary Soldier,” SOC; and Elnathan Miner, Pension File S41871. 100. Edward Brus [or Banks], Pension File S39172. 101. Roberts, Memoirs, 96. 102. Henry Brown (Francis), Pension File W8380. 103. Amos Carpenter (Margaret), Pension File W5239. 104. Aris Brown ( Joanna), Pension File W8386. 105. C. Wright, Revolutionary Generation, 93. Wright argues that Jamison must have suffered psychological damage akin to modern definitions of post-traumatic stress disorder, and he thinks Saratoga was the cause. 106. Ibid., 114. See also Shipton et al., Biographical Sketches, 18:467–68. 107. Prince Crosley, Pension File W24833. 108. Knoblock, Strong and Brave Fellows, 25. 109. Knoblock identifies London Dailey and Cato Wallingford as warned out of Exeter in 1784, and Jude Hall as being expelled in 1785, 1792, and 1817. Litchfield warned out Caesar Porter in 1786; Aaron Small had to leave Goffstown in 1790; and Boston Bell left Londonderry in 1795 (ibid., 26). 110. Brace, Blind African Slave, 49–62. 111. Joseph Green (Sarah), Pension File W27415; Massachusetts Spy, 4 May 1786. 112. Resch, Suffering Soldiers, 48–49; see also ibid., Table 1: “Peterborough Co- hort Average Tax per Year,” 210. 113. Resch, Suffering Soldiers, 49. Militia or non-veterans held 91 percent of the political offices in 1801, and this division between Continentals and their peers remained consistent across the early nineteenth century. 114. Ibid., 49–50; also, see Appendix B, Tables 3 and 4, on marriage age and household size, respectively. 115. Ibid., 50, 61. Notes to Pages 170–176 229 116. US Congress, House, Resolutions, Laws, and Ordinances, 202. 117. Jeremiah Greenman, Pension File W23146; Greenman, Diary of a Common Soldier, xiv–xv. 118. E. Fisher, Journal, 19–20. Royster argues that the war expanded soldiers’ horizons and “made them bolder in demanding respect, especially wages” (Roys- ter, A Revolutionary People at War, 244–45; see also Mead, “Melancholy Land- scapes,” 73–75). 119. Sobel argues that in the wake of the Revolution white men of all classes “were compelled to renegotiate their positions of dominance and were often unsuccessful,” and that they “increasingly focused their anger on women as well as blacks.” The invisible young Continental veteran was at the center of this (Sobel, Teach Me Dreams, 137).

Conclusion 1. To all brave, healthy, able bodied and well disposed young men. 2. This arresting image has incorrectly served as the ubiquitous illustration for recruitment in the Revolutionary War. For a rare example that correctly dates the broadsheet, see Grafton, The American Revolution, 272. The fact that Colonel Aaron Ogden was the regimental commander definitively connects the poster with the 1798 New Army and the Quasi-War with France (see Hamilton to Jona- than Dayton, 6 August 1798, in Hamilton Papers, 22:50–51; and ibid., 22:129–30, 582). 3. The naval Quasi-War with France is better known for the XYZ Affair, the excesses of the Alien and Sedition Acts, and President John Adams’s peace mission that fractured the Federalists. Alexander Hamilton served as Washington’s second-in-command for this force and delighted in arranging the details, down to the tilt of soldiers’ hats (Wood, Empire of Liberty, 239–45, 263–67). Aaron Ogden, the lieutenant colonel listed on the 1798–99 recruiting broadside, had served as a junior officer in the Continental Army (Heitman,Historical Register, 418). 4. See, e.g., “Princeton, July 5th” and “Offering of Patriotism,”Gazette of the United States, 11 July 1798; Porcupine’s Gazette, 10 July 1798; and “Greenfield, Octo- ber 6,” Porcupine’s Gazette, 22 October 1798. 5. Morison, Interesting Journal, 19. The publisher’s introduction particularly emphasized the memoir’s positive example for youth. 6. Nathaniel Pendleton to Nathanael Greene Pendleton, [undated, ca. 1814], Nathaniel Pendleton Papers, LOC. Pendleton Sr.’s advice is echoed in Samuel Shaw’s 1781 letters on the prospect of his younger brother Nat becoming an officer (see chap. 1 above). 7. Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation, 1:100. 8. See Hünemörder, Society of the Cincinnati. Veterans also continued their devotion to freemasonry after the war (see Higginbotham, War of American In- dependence, 440). On Continental officers and Federalism, see Wood,Empire of Liberty, 79, 108–9; and Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 21–25). 9. In Becker’s classic phrase, the Revolution was both a question of home rule 230 Notes to Pages 176–183 and who would rule at home (see Becker, History of Political Parties, 22). Griffin’s America’s Revolution updates this formulation, arguing that “questions of sovereignty” defined the rise, progress, and aftermath of the Revolution. 10. Colden, “Letter,” 83. The continued persecution of loyalists in violation of the terms of the peace treaty spurred this letter. The Revolutionary governments were alarmed by these excesses and “wish to suppress them,” Colden noted, “but know not how.” 11. David Ramsay to Benjamin Rush, 11 July 1783, in David Ramsay, 1749– 1815, 75. 12. Ramsay, History of the American Revolution, 2:631, 637. 13. Ramsay to Benjamin Rush, 17 February 1788, in David Ramsay, 1749– 1815, 119. 14. For instructive debates on power, authority, and deference, see the round table discussion, “Deference or Defiance in Eighteenth-Century America?” in the June 1998 issue of the Journal of American History, as well as the special issue of Early American Studies entitled “Deference in Early America,” edited by Billy Smith and Simon Middleton. 15. Historians typically credit Revolutionary militias as democratic institutions that leveled social divisions and undermined barriers (Conway, War of American Independence, 173–74). 16. Daniel Shays was one of the few Continental officers promoted from the enlisted ranks (Richards, Shays’s Rebellion, 23, 26–26, 63). 17. Traditional imperatives of the life course thereby aided the rise of the liberal, individualist order of the early nineteenth century. Focused on their own pursuits of happiness, as Jack Greene argues, Americans were unable to pursue collective goals after the Revolution, leading to the collapse of loyalist persecution and the acceptance of western land policies that favored the well-connected few. Publicly minded issues such as abolishing slavery, advancing women’s rights, im- proving education, or fulfilling promises to Indians could not gain the necessary political traction in this rising liberal order of the self-made man (Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 366–70). 18. Simeon Lyman, Pension File W20548. 19. Isham Browder (Elizabeth), Pension File W1133. The officer was likely John Herbert Claiborne. 20. Senter, “Journal,” 85. Horace Gates, Senter’s first son, was born in 1780— timing that further suggests an intention to honor the hero of Saratoga. 21. Nathaniel Pendleton to Nathanael Greene Pendleton, [undated, ca. 1814], Nathaniel Pendleton Papers, LOC. 22. John Clements, Pension File S12511. 23. Painter, Autobiography, 72. 24. Stiles, United States elevated to glory and honor, 36. The feeling was not limited to soldiers or politicians: an officer’s wife felt “she lived more in one year at this period of excitement than in a dozen of ordinary life” (quoted in Demos, Circles and Lines, 53–54). Notes to Pages 183–186 231 25. Tyler, The Contrast, 61. 26. Park Holland Memoir, 14–15, Holland Family Papers, MHS. 27. Ibid., 17. 28. Park Holland to Rufus Putnam, 26 December 1799, Rufus Putnam Papers, Special Collections, Marietta College. 29. Ibid. 30. Benjamin Gilbert to Rufus Putnam, 15 November 1807, ibid. 31. Rufus Putnam to Park Holland, 14 June 1804, ibid. 32. John Hewson to Rufus Lincoln, Philadelphia, 23 November 1815, in Lin- coln, Papers, 218. Hewson and Lincoln were prisoners together on Long Island; Hewson lived near Lincoln’s daughter. 33. Gamaliel Bradford to Rufus Lincoln, Boston, 30 January 1819, ibid., 231–32. 34. See, e.g., the politicized reminiscences of Thacher (Military Journal) and Graydon (Memoirs). David Ramsay’s 1789 History of the American Revolution also fits this political mold. On contending politics in veterans’ memoirs, see Sturr, “Soldiers’ Stories of the American Revolution,” esp. 291–92; and Arch, “Writing a Federalist Self.” 35. Knouff particularly highlights the fact that veterans of the Pennsylvania line never acknowledged their participation in the massive mutiny of January 1780 (Knouff,Soldiers’ Revolution, 244). 36. J. P. Martin, Narrative, 95. 37. Ibid., 287–88. Arguing that wronged veterans deserved gratitude and pensions, Martin’s memoir offered “a scathing and sorrowful critique of the Revolu- tionary era” (Kaplan, “Theft and Counter-Theft,” 515–16). 38. Diary entry for 15 July 1786, Winthrop Sargent Papers, MHS. See also Shipton et al., Biographical Sketches, 17:614–26; and C. Wright, Revolutionary Gen- eration, 113–14, 120–21. 39. Diary entry for 6 August 1786, Winthrop Sargent Papers, MHS. 40. Diary entry for 28 August 1817, ibid.

232 Notes to Pages 186–190 Bibliography

Manuscript Collections

American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. United States Revolution Collection, 1754–1928 “The Farmer and his Son’s Return from a visit to Camp,” 1786

Boston Athenaeum, Boston, Mass. Henry Knox Collection Richard Montague Orderly Book: Cambridge, 1775

David Library of the American Revolution, Washington’s Crossing, Pa. Dr. Samuel Adams Papers, 1758–1819 (New York Public Library microfilm) American Revolution Collection (Connecticut Historical Society microfilm) Compiled Service Records of Volunteers Who Served in the Revolutionary War (M881). National Archives, Washington, D.C. (microfilm) Orderly Book, 13 February 1780 to 29 April 1780, Continental Army, Pennsylvania 2nd Regiment (Morristown National Historic Park Library microfilm) Sol Feinstone Collection (American Philosophical Society microfilm) Horatio Gates Papers (New York Public Library microfilm) Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty–Land–Warrant Application Files (M804) (National Archives microfilm)

Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Henry Bicker Orderly Book, 1778–1779 (Collection Am.634) John Hawkins Journal, 1779–1782 (Collection Am.0765) Jonathan Potts Papers (Collection 521)

Library of Congress, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Washington, D.C. Anonymous Journal, 7 June–2 October 1780, Connecticut 9th Regiment, Peter Force Collection William Armstrong Papers, 1762–1814, Peter Force Collection Journal of Elihu Clark Jr., 1775, Peter Force Collection Collection of Court-Martial Proceedings, Peter Force Collection Caleb Gibbs Diary, 1780 William Johnston Family Papers, ca. 1775–1866 James McHenry Papers, 1775–1862 Edward McPherson Papers, 1738–1936 Miscellaneous Correspondence, 1777–1782, Peter Force Collection Miscellaneous Manuscripts William A. Oldridge Collection of George Washington’s Headquarters Staff Writings, 1775–1962 Nathaniel Pendleton Papers, 1781–1810 Christopher Vail Memoir, Peter Force Collection Theodore Woodbridge Papers, 1780–1813

Library of the New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, N.Y. Benjamin Gilbert, Manuscript Diary, 1782–1786

Marietta College Library, Special Collections, Marietta, Ohio Rufus Putnam Papers

Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston William M. Bell Orderly Book, May 27, 1779 to 25 July 1779 Obadiah Brown Diary, 1776 John Chandler Autobiography, 1838 Dudley Colman Papers, 1771–1849 Moses Greenleaf Papers Holland Family Papers, 1774–1849 Elisha James Family Letters Israel Keith II Papers, 1767–1803 Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts, 1776–1778, 1779–1784 Robert Treat Paine Papers Pickering Family Papers, 1767–1844 Revolutionary War Orderly Books at the Massachusetts Historical Society (microfilm) Winthrop Sargent Papers, 1771–1948 Henry Sewall Diary, 1776–1842 Samuel Shaw Papers, 1775–1840 Ezra Tilden Diary, July 1776–8 December 1777, Stewart Mitchell Collection Tudor Family Papers, 1773–1822 Albigence Waldo Diary, 1777–1778

New-York Historical Society, New York Early American Orderly Books, 1748–1817 (microfilm) John Lamb Papers 234 Bibliography John Laurance Papers Gilder Lehrman Collection (on deposit at NYHS) Joseph Reed Papers Bernardus Swartwout Papers

Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass. John Cleaveland Papers

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260 Bibliography Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

Adams, Abigail, 162 and decision to leave the Continental Adams, John, 37, 44, 47, 110, 230n3 Army, 123, 125; in privateering, 53; as Adams, Zabdiel, 156–57 threat to liberty, 21; of young veterans, Adlum, John, 62–63, 83, 124, 125 164–65 adolescence, liminality of male, 5 American Revolution: archives of, 13–14; adulthood: defining qualities for male, 5; bonds of kinship and community and emotional tension in transition from service in, 22–23; Boston Tea Party, 17, youth to, 7–8; marriage as marker of, 21–22; as civil war, 115; collapse of Con- 5–6; social roles and relationships in tinental currency, 46, 50–51, 56, 95, 101, defining, 5; soldiering in advance to- 123, 126, 181, 204n148, 218n26; concerns ward, 6, 8, 17. See also manhood that it had gone too far, 183–84, 188, African Americans: Brister, 169–70; in 230n9; Declaration of Independence, 84; colonial population, 11; Continental economic disruption during, 159; expecta- Army and, 13, 199n52, 201n90; Haynes, tions about manhood and, 4–5; familiar 29–30; as ill-disposed to soldiers, 90; narrative of, 9; ideology of, 82–84; map of join British in pursuit of freedom, 13, Revolutionary America, 2; memories 39–40; militias exclude, 19; soldiers have of, 185–86; myth of revolutionary nation, sexual relationships with black women, 8–9; normal patterns of control dis- 76; veterans, 174–75 rupted by, 37–38; political turmoil and Albany (New York): Continental Army’s armed rebellion after, 184; population winter quarters near, 71; map of Revo- of colonies during, 11; pursuit of collec- lutionary America, 2 tive goals after, 231n17; rage militaire of alcohol use, 71–72, 88, 172, 208n71 1775, 22, 43, 50, 181; the Revolutionary Alvey, John, 170 generation, 13; taxes and administrative Alvey, Robert, 170 reform seen as threat to liberty, 21–22; ambition: bounties and officer’s commis- War of Independence in, 4, 8, 10; youth sions speak to, 58; in choice of military of Revolutionary America, 10. See also service, 14, 17, 18, 26–35, 50–51, 55, 58, 182; loyalists; War of Independence “American Soldier, The” (poem), 172, 229n98 Boyd, Henry, 160, 226n47 Anderson, Enoch, 62 Brace, Jeffrey, 174–75 Anderson, Fred, 196n5, 197n8, 212n143, Bradford (Massachusetts), 119 217n7 Bradford, Gamaliel, 188 Anderson, Jacob, 41, 201n100 Brandywine (Pennsylvania): Kersey at Anderson, James, 39 battle at, 63; map of Revolutionary apprenticeships, 5, 6, 18, 19 America, 2; Sargent’s dream of battle Aristotle’s Masterpiece (1684), 165 at, 190; Stevens at battle at, 65 Armstrong, John, 138–39, 143, 151 Braudy, Leo, 225n16 Arnold, Benedict, 31, 85–86, 184 Brister, Aaron, 169–70 Asberry, William, 154–55 Brooke, Francis, 59, 79, 81–82 Brookfield (Massachusetts): Gilbert in, Bagwell, Isaiah, 54 152, 171; map of Revolutionary America, Baker, David, 40 2; Ross-Spooner affair at, 113–15 Baldwin, Betsy, 152 Brooks, Bartholomew, 154 Bailyn, Bernard, 191n2 Brooks, David, 153–54 Ballenger, John, 167 Brooks, Philip, 26 ball playing, 69, 77 Browder, Isham, 185, 231n19 Balmer (Barmer), John, 158 Brown, Aris, 174 Bangs, Edward, 199n48 Brown, Henry, 39, 173 Barber, Daniel, 70, 96 Brown, Kathleen, 192n9 Barnard, Saco, 174 Brown, Obadiah, 122 Barnes, Shadrach, 52 Brus, Edward, 173 battles: manly resolve in, 66, 67, 68, 73; Bunker Hill, Battle of, 34, 63, 92 soldiers’ fear of their first, 63; young Burgh, James, 191n5 men’s concern about their performance Burnham, Jonathan, 19–20 in, 64–65. See also by name Burr, Aaron, 31, 60, 131, 183 Becker, Carl, 230n9 Burrage, Charles, 169 Benjamin, Samuel, 80, 168–69, 210n105 Burrows, John, 167 Benson, William, 41 Bergen (New Jersey), 96 Camden (South Carolina): map of billeting troops, 104–5 Revolutionary America, 2; militia black Americans. See African Americans collapses, 65–66; soldiers plundering Bland, James, 154 civilians at, 98 Bodle, Wayne, 206n18, 209n86, 213n20, Camel, Thomas, 39–40, 201n93 216n69 camp: camp feelings, 207n54; cleanliness books, military, 62, 206n26 of, 73; life in, 60, 61; relationships and Boston: Fisher at after war, 147–48; map performances in, 69–77; women in, of Revolutionary America, 2; siege of, 72–76, 107–8 33, 61, 74, 119–21; Tea Party, 17, 21–22 Carlisle (Pennsylvania): Denny and honor bounties: for enlistment, 43–46, 49, 51, of, 67; map of Revolutionary America, 54, 58, 123, 202n111; land for veterans, 2; Shaw garrisoned at, 108 161–62, 227n54; for reenlistment, 122 Carpenter, Amos, 173–74

262 Index Carpenter, Jonathan, 168, 169 Cobb, David, 150 Carpenter, Samuel, 154 Cockrum, William, 41, 201n99 Carter, Barnabas, 59–60 coercion: in choice of military service, 14, Carter, Nicholas, 59–60 17, 18, 46–50, 55, 181; families and com- Cave, Benjamin, 48 munities shield young men from, 51 Cave, John, 48 Collins, James, 45, 66–67 Chalenor, Edward, 163–64, 227n62 Colman, Benjamin, 5 Chambers, John, 52 Colman, Dudley, 127 Chandler, Carter, 48 commissions. See officer’s commissions Chandler, John, 38, 168 compensation, monetary. See monetary Chappell, Elizabeth, 158 compensation Chappell, Parks, 158 Connecticut: Continental Army troops Charleston (South Carolina): British cap- leave Army after siege of Boston, ture of, 101, 154; map of Revolutionary 119–21, 217n8; Continental versus mili- America, 2 tia mobilization in, 195n35; enlistment Charlestown (Massachusetts), 91–92 bounties in, 44, 45; map of Revolution- Chase, Samuel, 165, 167 ary America, 2. See also Danbury Childress, Alexander, 167 Continental Army: African Americans civilians: fear of soldiers, 91–94, 115, 155–58; and, 13, 199n52, 201n90; age of soldiers reincorporation of soldiers into civilian in, 7; alternatives to, 50–56; bounties for society, 91, 116; soldier-civilian relation- enlisting in, 43–46, 49, 51, 58, 122, 123, ships, 90–116; soldiers’ courtship of 202n111; as central institution of collec- local women, 106–15; soldiers plunder, tive cause, 115; creating alternatives for 96–101, 115–16, 188, 213n17, 214n38, getting out of, 128; disbands, 143–44, 215n49; soldiers social relationship with, 149; disobeying orders and skirting au- 101–6 thority in, 184; duration of enlistments Clack, Moses, 160 in, 9; entering military sphere, 59–64; Claiborne, John Herbert, 231n19 escaping uncomfortable conditions by Clark, Elihu, 24–25, 74 joining, 35–42; esprit de corps, 86, 88, Clark, Eliphalet, 48 115; fear of soldiers, 91–94, 115, 155–58; Clark, George Rogers, 166 inegalitarian military hierarchy of, 12, Clark, Samuel, 48 77; as less than average, 9; loyalists in, class: contrasts in, 6; military rank related 13; manhood in, 57–89; memories and to, 77; in mutinies, 221n64; soldiers’ expectations and enlistment for, 18–26; plundering related to, 97; veterans versus militia mobilization, 195n35; transfer military relationships into ci- moral corruption associated with sol- vilian sphere, 167 diering, 93–94; as outsiders as source Cleaveland, Ebenezer, 32, 33 of conflict, 90–91; reasons for join- Cleaveland, John, 32–33 ing, 17–56; recruiting shortfalls for, 48, Cleaveland, John, Jr., 32–33, 152–53 50–51, 55; regimental reductions of 1782, Cleaveland, Parker, 32, 33 140–41, 145; regional composition of, clothing: condition of Continental sol- 12; as school for politics, 83–84; service diers’, 115; officers’ fashions, 182 fails to meet young men’s expectations,

Index 263 Continental Army (continued) desertion, 126–28; from disillusionment, 177; the socially marginal in, 8–9, 36, 50, 121; at end of the war, 137; factors in 59, 93, 156, 176; soldier-civilian relation- decision to desert, 219n32; length of ships, 90–116; soldiers’ anxieties at end service associated with, 85–86, 218n27, of the war, 134–45; Steuben’s drill man- 219n31; versus other reasons for leaving ual for, 80; supply problems for, 95–97, the Army, 118, 123 214n38; wages in, 51, 202n111; young Dewees, Samuel: after the war, 165–66; men’s decision to leave, 117–46. See also billeted with Zeigler family, 105–6; camp; desertion; enlisted men; foreign- cheated out of his pay, 160; on military born recruits (immigrants); military discipline, 81; on women in camp, 73 discipline; mutiny; officers; veterans DeWolf, Daniel, 38 Continental currency, collapse of, 46, discipline, military. See military discipline 50–51, 56, 95, 101, 123, 126, 181, 204n148, disillusionment, leaving Continental 218n26 Army due to, 119–23 Converse, Patience, 141, 142, 143, 144, 151, Ditz, Toby L., 192n7 152, 224n12 drafts, 47, 48, 52–53 Cooper, William, 172 drinking, 71–72, 88, 172, 208n71 Cooperstown (New York): Gilbert dueling, 77, 78–80 settles near, 171; map of Revolutionary Dwight, Timothy, 92 America, 2 Cornwall, Mary, 144, 151, 152, 171 Earl, Jesse, 37–38 courtship, 106–15 Earl, William, 37–38 Cox, Caroline, 192n6, 194n23, 205n3, 241n112 egalitarianism: “all men are created equal,” Cowpens (South Carolina): map of Revo- 37, 185; growing discourse about, 15; lutionary America, 2; Morgan at battle in legends of patriot greats, 188; mi- at, 64–65 litias associated with, 231n15; in New Craige, Thomas, 46 England and mid-Atlantic states, 33; Crosley, Prince, 40, 174 officers’ contradictory impulses toward currency, Continental, collapse of, 46, exclusivity and, 78 50–51, 56, 95, 101, 123, 126, 181, 204n148, Emerson, William, 26 218n26 enlisted men: anxieties at end of the war, 135–37, 141; decision to leave the Con- Dana, Francis, 97 tinental Army, 125–28, 130; dedication Danbury (Connecticut): Gilbert and to Revolutionary cause of, 84–85; defy Hoyt family at, 105, 144; map of Revo- their officers, 86; expiration of enlist- lutionary America, 2 ments, 119; local women courted by, David, Ebenezer, 207n54 108; maximize their dignity and soli- Davies, Samuel, 20, 197n11 darity, 77; in new order after the Revo- death, soldiers deny fear of, 66 lution, 185; Sermon on the Evacuation Declaration of Independence, 84 of Charlestown on, 157; social distance deference, 80, 140, 157, 184, 231n14 between officers and, 31, 79, 86, 88 Demos, John, 191n4, 193n22 esprit de corps, 86, 88, 115 Denny, Ebenezer, 67 Essex (New Hampshire), 127

264 Index Evans, Israel, 149, 159 forming, 205n2; superiority and inde- executions, 81, 82, 99, 127 pendence and, 6. See also manhood; women “Farmer and His Son’s Return from a Georgia: Continental versus militia mo- Visit to the Camp, The” (song), 27–29 bilization in, 195n35; Revolutionary Farnsworth, Amos, 26 soldiers from, 193n18 fear of soldiers by civilians, 91–94, 115, 155–58 Germantown (Pennsylvania): Brown Federalists, 181, 183, 187 wounded at, 173; map of Revolutionary fence rails, taken for firewood, 97 America, 2 Ferling, John, 225n22 Gibson, Robert, 108–9 Finley, James Edwards Burr, 223n97 Gilbert, Benjamin: after war, 148, 151–52, Finney, William, 110–11 166; anxieties at end of the war, 141–44, Fisher, Elijah, 106, 121, 168 223n99; brothel visits by, 142–43, 144, Fisher, Elisha, 147–48, 224n2 223n97; on drinking among soldiers, Fishkill (New York): map of Revolution- 71–72; exchanges commissions with an- ary America, 2; military hospital at, 102; other officer, 143–44; on harvest dance soldiers plundering civilians at, 97 in Hudson River Valley, 107–8; looks Fitch, Jabez, 153 forward to end of his enlistment, 117; Flexner, James Thomas, 216n77 marriage of, 171; pays Danbury fam- flirting, 74, 107, 108, 109, 142 ily for nursing care, 105, 144; political flogging, 73, 81, 82, 99, 127 career of, 171–72, 187; relationship with Fobes, Simon, 51 Betsy Baldwin, 152; relationship with foraging, 95–96 Mary Cornwall, 144, 151, 152, 171; rela- foreign-born recruits (immigrants): in tionship with Patience Converse, 141, colonial mobilization, 19; as more likely 142, 143, 144, 151, 152; on sexual encoun- to desert, 127; in mutinies of 1781, 136; as ters between soldiers and local women, older, 7, 12, 195n36 75, 76; as surveyor, 166 Fort Pitt (Pennsylvania): map of Revolu- Glasscock, Susan, 154–55 tionary America, 2; Ward incident at, Glover, Alexander, 102, 216n69 57, 87 Glover, Nancy Sprung, 102, 216n69 Foster, Thomas, 192n7, 194n27 Gould, Benjamin, 160 Fowler, Benjamin, 172–73, 229n99 Gray, George, 167 Fox, Ebenezer, 37, 53 Graydon, Alexander, 31, 124–25, 129–30, Franklin, Benjamin, 5–6, 200n81 218n25, 232n34 freedom. See liberty Green, Ashbel, 18–19, 27 Freemasonry, 71, 78, 230n8 Green, Joseph, 175 furloughs: for disbanding the Army, 136– Greene, Jack, 231n17 37; officers resign after taking, 221n61; Greene, Nathanael, 30, 74, 92, 120–21, soldiers decline, 141, 145; winter, 167 185–86 Greenman, Jeremiah, 166, 167–68, 176, Gano, Daniel, 31 228n71 Gates, Horatio, 138, 185, 231n20 Greenwood, John, 103, 122 gender: and age as intertwined, 9; per- Griffin, Patrick, 191n2, 231n9

Index 265 Guilford Court House (North Carolina): Holt, Elijah, 187 Balmer at battle at, 158; map of Revolu- honor: culture of, 78–80; end of the war as tionary America, 2 threat to, 138, 145; leaving the Army and, 117, 129, 130, 132; soldiering as test of, 119 Hall, David, 99 Howard, John, 35 Hallowell (Maine): map of Revolutionary Howe, Robert, 189 America, 2; Sewall settles in, 169 Hughes, Peter, 32 Hallowell, Henry, 102 Humphreys, David, 148–49 Hamilton, Alexander: on promotions without merit, 77–78; as aide to Wash- ideology: of American Revolution, 82–84; ington, 67, 112; ambition of, 111; at Battle in decision to leave Army, 117, 217n3; in of Monmouth, 67–68; on congressional requests for reenlistment, 119 neglect of the Army, 100; correspon- immigrants. See foreign-born recruits dence with Catharine Livingston, (immigrants) 109–10; independence sought after war, independence: civilians as arbiters of 164; as lady’s man, 109, 216n71; marriage soldiers’, 91; and clash between liberty to Elizabeth Schuyler, 111–13, 216n77, and tyranny, 21; Declaration of Inde- 221n60; military rank used by, 183; on pendence and soldiers’ desire for, 84; officers resigning at end of furloughs, divisions over who had won, 155–57; 221n61; wishes for war to gain advance- economic versus political, 192n10; end ment, 19; in XYZ Affair, 230n3 of the war as threat to officers’, 138; Hamner, Christopher H., 206n18, 207n40 independent income for, 164; leaving Hancock, John, 31 the Army as assertion of, 119; manly, 38, Hand, Edward, 71 54, 55, 67, 87, 120, 135, 149; many soldiers Harvard (Massachusetts), 45, 46 made little progress toward, 15, 148; Haven, John, 92–93, 213n8 militia service in advance toward, 19, Hawkins, John, 88, 103 101; as premised on others’ dependence, Hayden, Hezekiah, 82–83 6; soldiering in advance toward, 17, 20, Haynes, Lemuel, 29–30, 35, 199n52 43, 181; soldiers assert at end of war, 135; Heath, William, 145–46, 169, 224n107 veterans seek to establish, 169, 175, 185 Hewson, John, 188, 232n32 inflation, 46, 51, 123, 126, 218n26 Holland, Park: anxieties at end of the war, Ipswich (Massachusetts): map of Revo- 144–45; on Chalenor, 163–64; on fam- lutionary America, 2; veterans leave ily’s military experience, 21; on keeping the community, 168; veterans of Seven in touch with old comrades, 186–87; Years’ War in, 197n10 marches to New York, 22, 197n27; mar- Irvine, William, 96 riage of, 170–71; on soldiers’ sexual relationships, 76; as surveyor, 166; on Jackson, Henry, 149–50 veterans’ conflicted emotions, 150; on Jacksonians, 188 Washington’s death, 187; works to get James, Elisha, 127 veterans their promised compensation, James, Sarah, 127 160; on young officer swearing in pres- Jeffersonians, 187 ence of Washington, 70–71 Jennison, Samuel, 174

266 Index Johnson, George, 109 Lincoln, Rufus, 188, 232n32 jokes, 90, 94 Livingston, Catharine, 109–10 Lockridge, Kenneth, 192n9, 223n98 Kaplan, Catherine, 232n37 Lombard, Anne, 192n6 Keith, Israel, 97, 130–31 Lord, Roger, 127, 219n34 Kelly, Joshua, 38 loyalists: attempts to suppress, 23; in Kersey, William, 63 British-organized units, 13, 115; con- Kestnbaum, Meyer, 204n149 tinued persecution of, 231n10, 231n17; Kings Mountain (North Carolina), 2 defiance by, 84; drafts of Tories, 47; Knoblock, Glenn A., 229n109 recruitment by, 49, 203n140, 203n142; Knouff, Gregory T., 202n125, 206n19, on the Revolution having gone too 208n71, 212n136, 232n35 far, 183; soldiers steal from, 97–98; on Knox, Henry, 167, 189 stories of Seven Years’ War, 21; treaty Kulikoff, Alan, 194n31 forbids seizure of property of, 143 Lyman, Simeon, 154, 170, 185 Lacey, John, 61 Lafayette, Marquis de, 85, 186 Mackenzie, Frederick, 15, 196n46 Lamb, John, 32, 199n62 Maine: Holland surveys in, 166, 186; map Lamb, Miles, 32 of Revolutionary America, 2; Shaw fam- Laurance, John, 161, 226n53 ily land speculations in, 166; veterans Laurens, John, 100, 117, 129 settle in, 168, 169, 170, 187; young men shop Lee, Charles, 68, 120, 129, 207n49 for bounties in, 45. See also Hallowell Lee, Richard Henry, 55 manhood: acceptance and regard as Lee, Wayne E., 207n38, 213n17 component of, 88; American Revolu- Lender, Mark Edward, 200n75, 208n66, tion and expectations about, 4–5; in 212n140, 218n27, 219n31, 221n63 the Continental Army, 57–89; defining Lexington, Battle of, 22, 29, 156 qualities of, 5, 192n7; end of the war as Libby, Jonathan, 105, 106–7 threat to definitions of, 138–39, 142–43, liberty: African Americans join British in 145; immature boys and adult men con- pursuit of, 13, 39–40; ambition seen as trasted, 29; leaving the Army and, 117, threat to, 21; Haynes’s poem on, 30; in 118; manly independence, 38, 54, 55, 67, national legend of the Revolution, 59; 87, 120, 135, 149; manly resolve, 46, 66, in patriotic rhetoric, 26; professional 67, 68, 73; marriage as marker of, 5–6, soldiers seen as threat to, 93, 116; radical 170; multiple and contending varieties politicized discourse of, 12; rage mili- of masculinity, 58; peers’ perceptions taire of 1775 and enthusiasm for defense and, 57–59, 88–89; performing, 14, 58, 72, of, 22, 43; respectability earned by de- 74, 205n2; respectable, 4, 20, 34, 35, 88, fense of, 23; rhetoric of united people 114, 117, 130, 133, 138, 148, 149; scholarship in defense of, 115; sacrifices in defense on masculinity, 9, 194n28; soldiering as of, 88; versus tyranny in colonial world- obligation of, 17, 119; soldiering in ad- view, 21; young men advancing their vance toward, 6, 8, 20–21, 24, 43, 46, 181, social status while defending, 33 185; virile masculinity, 76, 143, 152; young life course analysis, 6, 8, 9, 176, 192n12 men seek glimpses of their, 4

Index 267 marches, 60 ment bounties in, 45; Harvard bounties, marriage: as marker of adulthood and 45, 46; map of Revolutionary America, manhood, 5–6, 170; men’s average age 2; resistance to British military gov- at first, 220n51; soldiers’ courtship of ernment in, 22; reward for turning in local women, 106–15; veterans seek, deserters, 127; Shays Rebellion, 184, 169–72; young men seek competency to 227n61; Worcester, 23, 175. See also Bos- marry, 5 ton; Brookfield; Ipswich Marshall, John, 131 Masury, Joseph, 166 Marshall, Thomas, 161 Mayer, Holly, 194n23, 205n3 Martin, James Kirby, 208n66, 212n140, McCalister, James, 86 221n63 McCoy, Angus, 162 Martin, Joseph Plumb: after war, 149; McDonald, Hugh, 41–42, 84 anxieties at end of the war, 141; asks his McDonnell, Michael A., 197n9, 226n51 elders about Seven Years’ War, 17, 18; McDougall, Alexander, 161, 226n53 on coercion and money in enlistment, McHenry, James, 112, 164 49–50; denied permission to enlist, 25, Mead, Philip, 215n56 35; on dignity and worth of ordinary Meade, Richard Kidder, 100, 214n46 soldier, 188–89, 232n37; enlists as act of memoirs, 13–14, 188, 196n44, 225n19 rebellion, 35–36; on entering military mid-Atlantic states: contribution to Con- sphere, 60; on loyalist recruited by love, tinental Army, 12; egalitarianism in, 33; 203n140; on peer pressure in enlist- foreign-born recruits from, 7. See also ment, 46; on soldiers as brothers, 88; on New Jersey; New York State; Pennsyl- soldiers as ignorant of how to obtain vania bounty lands, 227n56; on soldiers’ rela- military discipline: breakdown among tionships with civilians, 103, 104, 215n56; sentries, 62; brutality of, 77, 81, 82; as on soldiers stealing from civilians, 100; changing young men, 70; executions, on view that militia were preferable to 81, 82, 99, 127; flogging, 73, 81, 82, 99, Continental Army, 225n30; on warlike 127; necessity and decline in, 96; new preparations in New England, 25; on recruits between familial control and, woman’s fear of soldiers, 91 61; signs of womanhood inflicted by, Maryland: age of Revolutionary soldiers 73; social distance between officers and from, 7, 193n17; Continental versus mi- men buttresses, 31; young men’s perfor- litia mobilization in, 195n35; enlistment mance of masculine identity shapes, 14 bounties in, 45; map of Revolutionary militias: as alternatives to Continental America, 2; militia wages in, 202n111 Army service, 51, 52; breaking in com- masculinity. See manhood bat, 207n43; Continental Army versus Masonry, 71, 78, 230n8 mobilization of, 195n35; Continental Massachusetts: age of Revolutionary veterans compared with, 176, 229n113; soldiers from, 7; anxieties about sol- depredations against civilians by, 213n17; diers in, 92–93; Bradford militia, 119; desertion from, 126–27; disobeying Charlestown damaged during Battle of orders and skirting authority in, 184; Bunker Hill, 91–92; Continental versus dissidents purged from, 23; drafts from, militia mobilization in, 195n35; enlist- 47; egalitarianism associated with,

268 Index 231n15; elites prefer to professional Newburgh (New York): Holland on soldiers, 93; Paine encourages reenlist- pleasant army life at, 144; map of ments, 118; Revolutionary War service Revolutionary America, 2; Newburgh and experience with, 18–19; social order Conspiracy, 135, 137–40, 143, 185; soldiers cemented by, 196n5; in victory at Sara- declining furloughs at, 141 toga, 156; wages in, 202n111; Washing- New England: black veterans in, 174; ton’s farewell orders ignore, 155 bounties for enlistment in, 43; contri- monetary compensation: in choice of bution to Continental Army, 12; drafts military service, 6, 18, 42–47, 49–50, in, 47; egalitarianism in, 33; enlistment 201n108; veterans’ difficulties getting quotas met in, 48; history of warfare in, promised, 160; wages in Continental 30; military confidence in, 21; recruits Army, 51, 202n111. See also bounties for Seven Years’ War from, 19; war- Monmouth (New Jersey): American con- like preparations in, 25. See also Con- fidence grows after battle at, 86; Finney necticut; Maine; Massachusetts; New on women of, 110; Hamilton at battle Hampshire; Rhode Island; Vermont at, 67–68; Kersey at battle at, 63; map of New Hampshire: black veterans in, 174; Revolutionary America, 2 Continental versus militia mobilization Monroe, James, 131 in, 195n35; list of deserters from Essex, Montreal, 2 127; map of Revolutionary America, 2; Moodie, Andrew, 134, 221n63 veterans in Peterborough, 175–76 Moore, David, 153 New Jersey: age of Revolutionary soldiers Moore, Pliny, 161 from, 7, 193n16; Battle of Red Bank, Morgan, Daniel, 64–65 188; Continental versus militia mobi- Morison, George, 182 lization in, 195n35; deeds for bounty Morris, Robert, 218n26 lands issued by, 162; desertion levels in Morris notes, 160 troops from, 219n31; enlistment boun- Morristown (New Jersey): Army winter ties in, 45, 202n119; farms in, 46; map quarters at, 98, 109, 111; map of Revolu- of Revolutionary America, 2; militias tionary America, 2; soldiers plundering in, 52; mutinies of 1781, 86, 136, 212n136; civilians at, 98 soldiers foraging near Bergen, 96. See Mumford, Giles, 32 also Monmouth; Morristown; Prince- Mumford, Thomas, 31–32 ton; Trenton Murphy, Orville T., 51, 204n149 Newport (Rhode Island): British oc- mutiny, 135–37; absent in memoirs, 188; cupation of, 3; map of Revolutionary Newburgh Conspiracy threatens, 139, America, 2 140; suppression of, 221n64; by veteran New York City: British prisons in, 124; soldiers, 86, 219n31 disasters of 1776 campaign in, 121; fire after British occupation of 1776, 92; Native Americans, 12 Fisher at after war, 147; Greenwood naval service, 53–54 settles in, 168; map of Revolutionary Navas, Deborah, 216n84 America, 2; retreats from in 1776, 66 Neimeyer, Charles P., 217n7, 219n30 New York State: age of Revolutionary Neutral Ground (New York), 92 soldiers from, 7; Continental versus

Index 269 New York State (continued) O’Hara, Mary, 108 militia mobilization in, 195n35; map Oliver, Peter, 34 of Revolutionary America, 2; militia opportunism, leaving Continental Army wages in, 202n111; Neutral Ground, 92. due to, 123–33 See also Albany; Cooperstown; Fishkill; Ordinance of 1787, 227n55 Newburgh; New York City; Saratoga; orphans, 40–41 Stony Point; Ticonderoga; West Point Norfolk (Virginia), 92 Packard, Hezekiah, 26 North, William, 150, 151 Paine, Thomas, 77, 118 North Carolina: Continental versus mili- Painter, Thomas, 38–39, 53–54 tia mobilization in, 195n35; map of Rev- Parker, John, 22 olutionary America, 2; Revolutionary patriarchy: agrarian, 37; military service soldiers from, 193n18. See also Guilford and patriarchal language, 23–24, 29; Court House remains intact in camps, 73, 74; veterans Norton, Mary Beth, 205n3 seen as patriarchs, 162, 163, 175 peer pressure, in choice of military ser- officers, 77–82; anxieties at end of the war, vice, 46 135, 137–45; brutality of, 81, 82; on camp Pendleton, Nathaniel, 182, 185–86, 230n6 living, 60; continue to use their military Pennsylvania: age of Revolutionary sol- ranks, 183; dress of, 182; enlisted men diers from, 7, 193n16; Continental ver- defy, 86; junior, 12, 14, 58, 77–82, 119, sus militia mobilization in, 195n35; map 210n97; leave the Continental Army, of Revolutionary America, 2; militia 119, 129–33, 221n61; local women courted company formed in York, 27; mutinies by, 108, 109–11; manly performance in of 1781, 86, 136, 212n136; recruitment in combat by, 67–68; memoirs of, 188; in taverns in, 202n125; recruits for Seven national legend of the Revolution, 59; Years’ War from, 197n9. See also Brandy- in Newburgh Conspiracy, 135, 137–40, wine; Carlisle; Fort Pitt; Germantown; 143, 185; in new order after the Revolu- Philadelphia; Valley Forge tion, 184; “an officer and a gentleman,” pension applications, 13–14, 175, 188, 196n43 58, 79, 87; in old age, 187–88; proper performativity: in camp, 69–77; of mascu- associations of, 57–58; Sermon on the linity, 14, 58, 72, 74, 205n2; sexual perfor- Evacuation of Charlestown on, 157; social mances, 75, 76, 107, 143 background of, 129; social distance be- Peterborough (New Hampshire), 175–76 tween men and, 31, 79, 86, 88; in Society Philadelphia: British withdrawal from, of Cincinnati, 183; speculate in bounty 115, 125; Continental mutineers march lands, 161–62; training of, 62; wives in on, 86, 136; Howe defeated before, 55; camp, 72. See also officer’s commissions map of Revolutionary America, 2 officer’s commissions: for social advance- Piaget, Jean, 211n130 ment, 18, 26, 30–35, 36; speak to youths’ Pickett, Martin, 39–40 ambitions, 58; young men become ju- Plaisted, Benjamin Brown, 174 nior officers, 12 Pleasants, John, 167 Ogden, Aaron, 230n2, 230n3 plundering of civilians, 96–101; absent Ogden, Matthias, 31, 60 from memoirs, 188; by militia, 213n17;

270 Index no leniency shown for, 215n49; soldiers Richmond (Virginia): British raid on, alienated from their countrymen by, 46; incident with loyalist at, 84; map of 115–16; supply situation correlated with, Revolutionary America, 2 214n38 Roberts, Lemuel, 40, 173 politics: army as school for, 83–84; Fed- Rose, Andrew, 161 eralists, 181, 183, 187; Jacksonians, 188; Ross, Ezra, 113–15, 216n84 Jeffersonians, 187 Royster, Charles, 194n23, 198n33, 204n149, Princeton (New Jersey): map of Revolu- 212n140, 217n5, 221n63, 230n118 tionary America, 2; Yates at battle at, 68 Rush, Benjamin, 50, 54, 183 privateering, 53–54 Providence (Rhode Island): map of Revo- Saratoga (New York): Jennison at battle lutionary America, 2; soldiers plunder at, 174; map of Revolutionary America, civilians at, 101 2; McCalister at battle at, 86; militia in Putnam, Israel, 63–64 victory at, 156 Putnam, Rufus, 166, 186, 187 Sargent, Walter, 194n25 Sargent, Winthrop, 189 Quakers, 90 Scammell, Alexander, 80–81 Quasi-War (XYZ Affair), 179–81, 183, Schuyler, Elizabeth, 111–13, 221n61 230n3 Schuyler, Peter, 111, 216n77 Quebec (Canada): Arnold’s expedition to, Scott, “Long Bill,” 34 31; map of Revolutionary America, 2; Scudder, William, 33–34, 40 Wolfe’s offensive against, 20 sensibility, culture of, 78 Senter, Horace Gates, 185, 231n20 Ramsay, David, 121, 136–37, 160–61, 183, Senter, Isaac, 185 232n34 Senter, Nathanael Greene, 185 rape, 92, 93, 156 sentries, 61–62, 69 Red Bank, Battle of, 188 Sermon on the Evacuation of Charlestown Reed, Joseph, 136 (Aethiopian), 157 regimental reductions of 1782, 140–41, 145 settlement certificates, 160–63, 175, 226n51 Resch, John, 194n25, 217n3 Seven Years’ War: land settlements for respectability: end of the war as threat veterans, 227n54; Martin asks about, 17, to officers’, 138; military service for 18; Parliament’s reform efforts after, 21; increasing, 17, 20, 23, 29, 109; militia social advancement through service in, service increases, 19; respectable man- 19–20; York, Pennsylvania, militia led hood, 4, 20, 34, 35, 88, 114, 117, 130, 133, by veterans of, 27, 166 138, 148, 149 Sewall, Henry, 74, 78, 169 Revere, Paul, 9 Shattuck, Samuel, 135 Rhode Island: Continental versus militia Shaw, John Robert, 108, 216n69 mobilization in, 195n35; map of Revo- Shaw, Nat, 34–35, 54, 230n6 lutionary America, 2; wages in, 202n111. Shaw, Samuel: brother encouraged to seek See also Newport; Providence officer’s commission, 34–35, 230n6; on Rice, Jonathan, 3, 4 enlistees as unprepared for service, 54; Rice, Oliver, 140–41, 153 exchange with General Putnam,

Index 271 Shaw, Samuel (continued) Tacyn, Mark Andrew, 218n27, 226n39 63–64; on foraging by soldiers, 96; goes Tallmadge, Samuel, 170 to sea after war, 166–67; on missing Tart, Thomas, 54 opportunities while in the Army, 131; Thacher, James, 232n34 on privateering, 53; on Washington and theft from civilians. See plundering of Newburgh Conspiracy, 139–40 civilians Shays Rebellion, 184, 227n61 Thompson, Thaddeus, 134, 221n63 Sherburne, Andrew, 103–4 Thompson, William, 132 Showell, Eli, 55 Ticonderoga (New York): map of Revo- Shy, John, 193n23, 194n26 lutionary America, 2; Mumford in Smallwood, William, 107 attack on, 31; Ross in failed attempt to Smith, Adam, 43, 201n106 recapture, 113 Smith, Joseph, 154 Tilden, Ezra, 44–45, 202n112 Smith, Samuel, 42 Tories. See loyalists Sobel, Mechal, 192n11, 209n77, 223n98, Trabue, Daniel, 44, 70, 202n110 230n119 Trabue, William, 44, 202n110 Society of Cincinnati, 183 training, 61–62 Sons of Liberty, 17, 21–22 Trenton (New Jersey): “John Steady” said South Carolina: Continental versus to have been at, 163; Kersey at battle at, militia mobilization in, 195n35; enlist- 63; map of Revolutionary America, 2; ment bounties in, 45, 46; map of Revo- reenlistments after victory at, 122 lutionary America, 2; Revolutionary Tudor, Delia Jarvis, 132–33 soldiers from, 193n18. See also Camden; Tudor, William, 131–33 Charlestown; Cowpens Tyler, Royall, 186, 199n48 Spooner, Bathsheba, 113–15, 216n84 Spooner, Joshua, 113–15, 216n84 Vail, Christopher, 48 Stark, John, 167 Valley Forge (Pennsylvania): in familiar state regiments, 51–52, 176 narrative of the Revolution, 9; map of “Steady, John” (fictional character), 162–63 Revolutionary America, 2; Sargent as Steuben, Frederick William, Baron, emissary from Army to Congress dur- 80, 85 ing winter of 1777–78, 189; supply prob- Stevens, Elijah, 155 lem at, 95, 213n20; women at, 72 Stevens, Elisha, 65 Van Ness, Cornelius, 161 Stevens, Oliver, 155 venereal disease, 74, 209n82 Stiles, Ezra, 186, 231n24 Vermont: black veterans in, 174, 229n109; Stony Point (New York): Ballenger at veterans settle in, 168, 169 assault on, 167; celebration after vic- veterans, 147–78; ambition of, 164–65; tory at, 71–72; map of Revolutionary bounty lands for, 161–62; crippled, 157, America, 2 172; economic difficulties faced by, substitutes, 47–48, 52–53 158–64; expectations of, 148–53; failure Sullivan, John, 97, 101, 215n48 and disappointment for, 172–76, 181; supplies, 95–97, 214n38 geographic mobility of, 167–69; get- swearing, 70–71, 88 ting back on track economically and

272 Index socially, 164–72; getting promised com- Boston Tea Party, 22; composition pensation, 160; independence sought of forces of, 12; on Declaration of by, 169, 175, 185; marriage of, 169–72; Independence, 84; disasters of 1776 memoirs of, 13–14, 188, 196n44, 225n19; campaign, 121; draftees in army of, 48; militia and state versus Continental, farewell orders of, 149, 153, 155, 158; final 176; in new order after the Revolution, ceasefire announced by, 134; General 184–85; in old age, 187–88; pension ap- Order of July 2, 1776, 83; Gilbert dines plications of, 13–14, 175, 188, 196n43; with, 142; Hamilton as aide to, 67, 112; return home, 153–58; settlement certifi- invalid veterans petition, 172; and New- cates for, 160–63, 175, 226n51; stagnation burgh Conspiracy, 139–40; on officers and decline among, 177–78; wounded, leaving Continental Army, 119; officers’ 172–74 personal loyalty to, 133, 140; on raw Virginia: age of Revolutionary soldiers recruits, 60, 61; reactions to death of, from, 7, 193n18; bounty in, 46; burning 187; on regimental reductions of 1782, of Norfolk, 92; Continental versus mili- 140; Sargent’s dream of, 189–90; seen as tia mobilization in, 195n35; contribution keeping Army from destroying liberty, to Continental Army, 12; drafts in, 47, 116; on social distance between officers 48; enlistment bounties in, 45, 202n121; and men, 30–31; on soldiering and map of Revolutionary America, 2; manliness, 24; on soldiers plundering military preparation in, 21; recruits for civilians, 96–97, 98–99; on supply prob- Seven Years’ War from, 19, 197n9; sub- lems at Valley Forge, 213n20; as sur- stitutes in, 52–53; veterans move west, veyor, 166; swimming near Cambridge 168. See also Richmond banned by, 74, 209n80; unacceptable recruits in army of, 36; and various types Walker, Benjamin, 150 of military service, 54; veterans invent Wallace, Charles, 46–47 legends about, 188; Ward cites example Ward, John, 57–58, 87 of, 87; in XYZ Affair, 230n3; young offi- War of Independence: age of soldiers in, cer swears in presence of, 70–71; young 7; in American Revolution, 4, 8, 10; soldiers as main strength of, 13 contradictions in, 11–12; lowest point of, Washington, Martha, 109 101; map of Revolutionary America, 2; Waterman, George, 3, 4 motivation of soldiers investigated, 8, Waterman, Zuriel, 3–4, 5, 8 193n23; number of enlistments in 1759, Wayne, Anthony, 99, 166 62, 196n7; potential pool of military Webb, Samuel, 32 manpower, 11; recruiting poster of 1798 Weeks, William, 59 recalls, 179–81, 180, 230n2; soldiers’ anxi- Welles, Ben, 53 eties at end of, 134–45; variety of mili- West Point (New York): map of Revolu- tary experience in, 11. See also battles; tionary America, 2; soldiers walk away Continental Army; militias from, 135; Thompson-Moodie incident Washington, George: at Battle of Mon- at, 134, 221n63 mouth, 68; on bounties for enlistment, Wharry, Robert, 76 43; on bounty lands for Seven Years’ White, Dodge, 215n49 War, 227n54; on British response to Wiant, Michael, 106

Index 273 Wilmington (North Carolina), 2 Worcester (Massachusetts), 23, 175 Wilson, Lisa, 192n6, 220n48 Worthington, Asa, 25 Winchester (Virginia), 2 Wright, Conrad, 192n12, 229n105 Wing, Jonathan, 223n97 Wister, Sally, 107 XYZ Affair (Quasi-War), 179–81, 183, women: in camp, 72–76, 107–8; fear of 230n3 soldiers by, 91; flirting, 74, 107, 108, 109, 142; men’s anger at, 74, 209n77; men’s “Yankee Doodle” (song), 27–29, 35, 198n48 military service encouraged by, 24, 25; Yates, Bartholomew, 68 militias exclude, 19; rape, 92, 93, 156; York (Pennsylvania), 27 soldiers’ anger at, 143, 223n98; soldiers’ Yorktown (Virginia): British surrender courtship of, 106–15; soldiers leaving at, 10, 136; in familiar narrative of the Army seen as running home to, 120; Revolution, 9; map of Revolutionary soldiers’ sexual relationships with, America, 2 74–76, 88 Young, Samuel, 31 Wood, Sylvanus, 122, 165

274 Index Recent Books in the jeffersonian america series

Sam W. Haynes Unfinished Revolution:Th e Early American Catherine Allgor, editor Republic in a British World The Queen of America: Mary Cutts’s Life of Dolley Madison Michal Jan Rozbicki Culture and Liberty in the Age of the Peter Thompson and Peter S. Onuf, editors American Revolution State and Citizen: British America and the Early United States Ellen Holmes Pearson Remaking Custom: Law and Identity in Maurizio Valsania the Early American Republic Nature’s Man: Thomas Jefferson’s Philosophical Anthropology Seth Cotlar Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall John Ragosta of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Legacy, Republic America’s Creed

John Craig Hammond and Matthew Robert M. S. McDonald, editor Mason, editors Sons of the Father: George Washington and Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage His Protégés and Freedom in the New American Nation Simon P. Newman and Peter S. Onuf, Ruma Chopra editors Unnatural Rebellion: Loyalists in New York Paine and Jefferson inth e Age of Revolutions City during the Revolution Daniel Peart Maurizio Valsania Era of Experimentation: American Political The Limits of Optimism: Thomas Jefferson’s Practices in the Early Republic Dualistic Enlightenment Margaret Sumner Peter S. Onuf and Nicholas P. Cole, editors Collegiate Republic: Cultivating an Ideal Thomas Jefferson,th e Classical World, and Society in Early America Early America Christa Dierksheide Hannah Spahn Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History Slavery in the Plantation Americas

Lucia Stanton John A. Ruddiman “Those Who Labor for My Happiness”: Becoming Men of Some Consequence: Youth Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and Military Service in the Revolutionary War

Robert M. S. McDonald, editor Light and Liberty: Thomas Jefferson andth e Power of Knowledge