1775 (29 page)

The single most important military embodiment was the Committee of Privates, organized in September 1775. Intriguingly, several of its leaders had first come to some prominence six months before, in launching the United Company of Philadelphia for Promoting American Manufactures. This organization, like several others, served “as an entryway into Philadelphia politics for several important ultraradical leaders.”
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Given existing imperial law, propagandizing for manufacturing was almost innately rebellious. Later that autumn the United Company president, Daniel Roberdeau, was elected commander of the Pennsylvania militia and James Cannon, a prominent United Company organizer, became secretary of the
Committee of Privates and later a prominent member of Pennsylvania’s 1776 Constitutional Convention.
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The rise of Philadelphia’s artisans, mechanics, and advocates of new manufactures, influential in itself, was also bound up with the emergence of a radical militia, to which we are about to turn. These developments soon offended middle-class Philadelphia, including prosperous artisans. However, before that countertide, the stages of economic and military radicalization contributed to the transformation of Pennsylvania politics in May 1776, which made it possible for both the colony and the full Congress to swing behind a declaration of independence. Philadelphia radicalism played an important role in tipping the balance.

The Radical Role of the Revolutionary Militias

In 1775, the four vanguard colonies individually prided themselves on what combined into five centuries of military history—local wars against Pequots, Abenaki, Shawnee, Cherokee, Yamasee, and Creeks, vigilant defense against French and Spanish invasions, and participation in foreign expeditions against Quebec, Port Royal, Louisbourg, St. Augustine, Havana, and Cartagena. As colonies, they maintained no regular regiments, but among the thirteen they had the lengthiest annals of militia organization and raising volunteers for expeditions and special units (for example, the “Virginia Regiment” George Washington commanded during the French and Indian War). This background was good preparation for the challenge of 1774–1775, and it was “urban” in the limited sense of being managed in colonial legislatures and capitals: Boston, Hartford, Williamsburg, and Charleston.

At the weakest edge of the preparedness debate, Pennsylvania, because of its Quaker heritage, was the lone North American province in which an assembly had steadily refused to enact legislation establishing an official militia. This fed widespread disgruntlement—a climate in which three decades of frustration over the periodic need to embody a volunteer militia increasingly united the province’s expansionist and nationalist elements, most of whom took the Patriot side in 1775. Part of the militia mindset that emerged in 1775–1776 was a bold leveling agenda. Resentful of the Quakers, it demanded not just military democracy but equality of obligation: everyone would have to serve, and those who did not would be fined in proportion to the property they owned.
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The province’s heated militia politics between 1774 and 1776 has drawn its share of attention. Progressives have seized on examples of how the need to enlist or recruit soldiers from the lower and middle tiers of colonial society obliged the Patriots’ gentry leadership to entertain economic incentives and egalitarian commitments. Similar although weaker egalitarian demands arose in Virginia and Maryland, notably in Philadelphia-influenced towns like Baltimore and Annapolis.
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However, the emergence and political influence of a radical Pennsylvania militia centered on Philadelphia is the prime example.

In many colonies, the militia of 1775 developed a second dimension as a de facto police—active on behalf of local committees of safety and inspection in suppressing Tories, political
banditti,
and potential local insurrections, and in enforcing loyalty and Association oaths. Below the Mason-Dixon Line, the militias also had a historic role of watching out for runaways or conspiracies involving indentured servants and slaves. General histories of the Revolution tend to shy away from these functions and the harsh practices involved. Without these police aspects, though, the Revolution might not have been able to entrench itself in 1775 and 1776.

On a grander strategic plane, some military historians contend that the ability of Congress and the Patriot faction in 1775 and early 1776 to take over local government, including control of the militia, while British forces were all but nonexistent outside of Boston, was critical to the Revolution’s ultimate success.
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This was surely “radical” in an institutional sense, representing the transformation of the seventeenth-century English “trained band” into what twenty-first-century analysts might call a “nation-building” framework—the Revolution’s politically potent combination of minutemen, militias, and de facto police.

In the four vanguard provinces, the militias’ role was a century or a century and a half in the making. General John R. Galvin, a Massachusetts man and former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, published a persuasive volume in 1996 entitled
The Minutemen: The First Fight: Myths and Realities of the American Revolution.
He argued, as briefly noted in
Chapter 1
, that while twentieth-century mythology has portrayed our citizen soldiers, the heroes of Lexington and Concord, as a spontaneous assemblage of untrained farmers, the reality was otherwise. Fourteen thousand Massachusetts colonials were under arms by 1775, to be “alerted by organized alarm riders via a system that dated back to the 17th century wars. They had trained intensively for a year and were armed with the same type of weapons
as the British.”
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Massachusetts minutemen dated back to an Indian war in 1645, with instructions updated in 1703 and 1757.

The many British generals of the French and Indian War who took away a disdain for Yankee soldiers were partly mistaken—most confused regular militiamen with the temporary troops raised by bounty payments for out-of-province service. For such instances, Massachusetts, Virginia, and other provinces went outside the militia system to recruit servants, apprentices, and vagabonds—“strollers” in official language. The militia, by contrast, was a more reliable cross-section of each town based on the required service of all males between 16 and 60. One historian who stressed the difference added that “the Massachusetts militia on the eve of the Revolution was probably better prepared for war than any other militia in the colonies.”
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Considerable credit belonged to Samuel Adams. In 1770, as a member of the provincial House of Representatives, Adams urged the strengthening of what he described as a neglected and poorly armed militia; by 1773, a committee was pursuing the matter. In the spring and summer of 1774, when news of the Coercive Acts arrived in Boston, Adams moved to harness popular furor. By late August, some 2,000 local militiamen—many in company formations led by their officers—joined other thousands demonstrating in Worcester. Planning was ultimately Boston centered. A few days later, when General Gage sent a detachment of soldiers from Boston to remove 200 half barrels of the king’s gunpowder from a nearby storehouse, rumors somehow spread inland that British ships were shelling Boston, or that six Americans had been killed. So aroused, some 20,000 armed New Englanders, mostly Massachusetts and Connecticut militiamen, began to march toward ostensibly embattled Boston before messengers brought truer information. Was the rumor entirely an accident? Patriot leaders agreed that it had been good practice.

These reactions made Gage reconsider his notion of sending troops 50 miles to Worcester on September 6 to protect the opening of local courts. On that day, militia companies from most Worcester County towns were on hand, led by their officers, and seemingly prepared to fight. When no redcoats came, belief spread that Gage’s bluff had been called. On September 7, the Worcester County Convention called for a reorganization of the militia—all current field officers were asked to resign so that some could be replaced—and, in the old phrase, recommended the establishment of special units ready to march at “a minute’s warning.” By the time conventions
followed in Essex, Suffolk, and Middlesex counties two weeks later, Worcester County reported having incorporated seven regiments of a thousand men each.
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The first Massachusetts Provincial Congress, meeting at Concord in early October, seeking to sidestep the provocation of a twenty- or thirty-regiment provincial standing army, opted for a provincewide extension of the minuteman concept. Under the auspices of a nine-man Committee of Safety, all local militia companies would elect new officers. With these as building blocks, new battalions, regiments, and minuteman units would be sorted out. The Provincial Congress adjourned in late October, and the Committee of Safety and the Committee of Supplies took over. Tory colonels and majors unwilling to resign were forced to do so, including Major General William Brattle, the no-longer-acceptable provincial militia commander.

With Patriot leaders aware that time pressed, training continued through the winter—on town greens or in fields, barns, and even taverns. From Cape Ann to the Berkshires, wagons with gunpowder, cannon, lead, muskets, and bayonets headed for the two principal munitions depots in Concord and Worcester. Gage had many spies, so little of this was a secret, but information leaked both ways. When the British commander marched troops to the Charlestown Battery, to remove its cannon before they could be stolen, they had just been spirited away. On March 30, 1775, Brigadier Hugh Percy, one of the British Army’s best soldiers, marched a full brigade to Jamaica Plain, five miles south of Boston, and had his men knock down farmers’ stone walls at possible ambush sites. Three weeks later the troops retreating from Concord along roads lined with mile after mile of stone walls and ambuscades had no such opportunity, and many died.

Galvin’s book is by far and away the best chronicle of how long and how well managed Massachusetts’s preparation for Lexington and Concord had been. Conflict was less an accident waiting to happen than an expectation. On March 30 the Provincial Congress had resolved “that whenever the Army under command of General Gage, or any part thereof to the Number of Five Hundred, shall march out of the Town of Boston, with Artillery and Baggage, it ought to be…opposed; and therefore the Military Force of the Province ought to be assembled.”
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Had Gage marched two regiments to Worcester in early September, war might have come then, but Patriots profited from having another six months.

Early in September 1774, Gage had written to Lord Dartmouth that
Connecticut was “as furious as they are” in Massachusetts. On September 8, delegates from two eastern Connecticut counties met in Norwich. “Anticipating that they might soon ‘be under the disagreeable necessity of defending our Sacred and Invaluable Rights, sword in hand,’ they called on their two dozen towns to supply themselves with a full stock of ammunition, and suggested to the General Court that the provincial militia be strengthened by the raising of at least 5,000 soldiers.”
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Thirty-seven hundred of the militiamen who started for Boston after hearing September’s gunpowder alarm came from Connecticut, which relative to its population essentially matched Massachusetts in 1774–1776 militia readiness.
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Its minuteman concept also dated back to the seventeenth-century Indian wars. Connecticut’s eighteenth-century practice, again like that of Massachusetts, had been to raise troops for
out-of-colony
service through bounty payments, a relationship volunteers saw as essentially contractual. With that help, Connecticut had fielded an army of 5,000 during the late 1750s.
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This bounty approach floundered during the Revolution, but it did enable Connecticut mobilization in 1775–1776 to get off to an important fast start.

After eastern Connecticut’s September 1774 convention endorsed mobilization, the provincial House of Representatives agreed to commission new companies and encourage the resignations of a handful of Tory militia officers. In one military historian’s words, these actions made the militia “the officially-sanctioned intimidator of the timid and uncertain, and silenced the few men who might have supported increased imperial control.”
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Through the autumn and winter, most Connecticut towns formally adopted the association voted by the First Continental Congress and chose committees to implement it.

In Massachusetts, Tory officeholders had started fleeing the province in 1774, despite the nominal protection of Gage and his soldiers. In Connecticut, though, a charter colony where British rule had almost no reach, the Patriot faction could apply the colony’s full authority. A few persecuted or assaulted Tories fled in 1774, but in January and February 1775, small Tory conventions in the western counties of Fairfield and Litchfield attacked Whig politics and affirmed allegiance to “the King, Lords and Commons.”
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Governor Trumbull, who had declined to protect Tories harassed by mobs, now identified them in a March address to legislators as “depraved, Malignant, avaricious and haughty.” Whig legislators acted to investigate military officers accused of Toryism and appointed a committee to pursue Tory activity
in suspect communities like Newtown and Ridgefield. Several militia units were purged or dissolved.

By the autumn of 1775, even conservative western towns were disarming or jailing local Tories and calling for enactment of a comprehensive, colonywide anti-Tory law. To George Washington’s applause, Connecticut in December enacted an anti-Tory statute that, by one description, “made it a crime to be loyal to the empire in word or deed.” Adherence to Britain became treason against Connecticut, prompting Tories in Britain and other colonies to damn Trumbull as “the Rebel Governor.” Washington, though, had already turned to him to provide troops to help suppress Toryism in several New York counties.
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In 1775 and 1776 and arguably through most of the war, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut authorities saw suppressing Loyalism as the militias’ most important task.
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In this, Connecticut arguably pioneered.