Americans used various forms of military organization in the Revolutionary War, the most prominent of which was the set of traditional forms and innovative solutions called the “Continental army.” The name meant more as the military expression of a collective political resistance than as a description of the variety of forces fighting in scattered theaters.
In simplest terms, the Continental army was the military force that delegates to the Continental Congress agreed to support financially by requisitions on the states. Each state raised a segment of the army, called its “Continental Line” because the troops were to be trained to fight according to European linear tactics. States reinforced, reorganized, and re‐created their lines many times in response to the enormous demand for armed forces during the war; they retained the responsibility for raising, clothing, feeding, and paying their own troops. Congress annually assigned each state a quota of men, leaving each legislature to decide how to fill it. Without effective central management, levels of recruitment and support varied widely. No state raised all the Continentals that Congress thought were required.
At the start of the conflict, Americans raised the same kinds of units they had previously used to fight French, Spanish, and Indian enemies. These units were separate from the militia, which remained responsible for home defense, local political control, and funneling manpower into active service units. The first “Continental” army was born on 15 June 1775, when Congress adopted the thirty‐six regiments the four New England governments had created in late April to maintain the siege of Boston after the militia, which had besieged the town after Lexington and Concord, went home. These regiments (plus one from Pennsylvania) so closely resembled their French and Indian War predecessors that the first campaign of the new conflict was, in terms of the composition of American forces, the last colonial war.
New England soldiers were volunteers who expected to be paid wages comparable to what they would receive in civilian employments, and expected to serve for only a single campaign. (Virginia in late 1775 raised troops for three years as had been its practice during the French and Indian War.) Most soldiers expected to go home in November or early December, and viewed their enlistment as a contract, the terms of which they expected their governments strictly to observe. Recruits enlisted to serve under men they knew, and disciplinary problems arose whenever the men in a unit lost confidence in an officer; discipline was based more on collective agreement among the soldiers than on anything imposed from above. Legislatures selected officers who could persuade their neighbors to enlist incorporated combat veterans of the French and Indian War in the mix of officers. By force of character and example, these men created an army out of an armed mob, and were the principal reason why New England soldiers performed so well at Bunker Hill on 17 June, two weeks before their “Continental” commander arrived from Philadelphia.
The most important military decision Congress made was to appoint George Washington as commander in chief. Regiments from every state except South Carolina and Georgia served at one time or another under Washington's command, and although many units served in other theaters, the name “Continental” army is most closely associated with the force Washington superintended from early July 1775 through late fall 1783. Washington, a veteran of French and Indian War service, insisted that officers act as gentlemen, soldiers obey those whom Congress had set over them, and the army be subordinate to civil authority. He wanted a force modeled after the British army, and capable of defeating the British with linear tactics. He disliked the militia: incapable of remaining in service long enough to be trained in linear tactics, profligate of arms and accoutrements, and unsuited to fulfilling his aspirations to military respectability (sniping at the enemy from behind stone walls was no way to earn a place among the civilized nations of Europe), militiamen remained throughout the war the bane of Washington's existence.
Washington begged Congress to enlist men for more than one year at a time. A minimum of three years of service, he argued, was required to build a proficient army. Congress, more attuned to the ideological problems that standing armies posed, and the practical difficulty of inducing their constituents to serve over the winter, never gave Washington all he wanted. In 1776, it opted again for annual enlistments, although it did expand the term of service from 1 January through 31 December and emphasized the army's “Continental” pretensions by numbering New England regiments sequentially. In late 1776, Congress authorized the states to raise eighty‐eight regiments “for three years or the war,” from 1 January 1777; thereafter, these were the officially preferred terms of enlistment. Massachusetts and Virginia were assigned the most regiments, eighteen apiece, Delaware only one.
Some states raised more Continentals than did others. Massachusetts, with roughly the same total white popu lation as Pennsylvania and Virginia (about 310,000 in 1775), raised perhaps 34,000 men—over twice as many as its two peers in population. Connecticut, with roughly 195,000 white people in 1775, raised more proportionally, and ranked second with about 16,000 Continentals. Virginia probably raised less than 15,000 and North Carolina fewer than 6,000. Of course, states raised men differently—southern states relied more on militiamen than did their northern counterparts—but as these figures indicate, New Englanders and Pennsylvanians predominated in the main army.
As the war dragged on, it became more difficult to find soldiers. States increased bounties, shortened terms, and reluctantly forced men to serve. But conscription was such a distasteful and dangerous exercise of state power that legislatures would use it only in extreme circumstances. More frequently, legislatures tried to reinforce the army with men drawn by incentive or compulsion from the militia for only a few months of summer service. The army's composition thus reflected a bewildering variety of enlistment terms. After 1779, for example, a Connecticut company might have eight or ten privates serving for three years or the war, and twice or three times that number enlisted only for the summer. Washington's complaints to Congress have obscured his genius in building an effective army out of the limited service most Americans were willing to undertake.
Because Congress reckoned military service by individual enlistments—one man serving one time for terms that ranged from one day in the militia to “during the war” in the Continentals—it is impossible to know precisely how many men served in the Continental army. Multiple and consecutive enlistments were commonplace; men crossed from Continental to militia units and back again; recordkeeping left much to be desired during intense campaigning; many muster rolls were lost around New York in 1776, Canada in 1775–76, and in the South in 1780–81. Francis Heitman, an early twentieth‐century authority, estimated that 250,000 individuals performed military service supporting American independence during the war, or about one in four white men (African American men also served in significant numbers in New England units, especially regiments from Rhode Island). Perhaps as many as 120,000 men served in some part of the Continental army. The largest number of Continentals in Washington's army at one time was probably 32,000 men in November 1778; of these, only 21,500 men were fit for duty. The core of the army—men who repeatedly reenlisted and officers who served for several consecutive years—probably numbered less than 15,000 men. Washington's Continentals always had to be reinforced by summertime recruits or militiamen before they could take the field.
A Continental soldier's service record could be extremely complex. In Massachusetts, for instance, a minuteman might enlist for the rest of 1775 in what became the Continental army, reenlist in 1776, again in 1777 for three years, again in 1780 for a year, and again in 1781 for the war. Or, tired of continuous Continental service, another 1775 veteran might serve in the militia in 1776 and 1777, and, because he knew his experience was a valuable commodity, enlist in the Continental army for nine months in 1778, nine months in 1779, and six months in 1780, each time collecting the bounty money offered by a government increasingly desperate to fill its quota. A third veteran of 1775 might eschew Continental service altogether and serve in the militia sent to Rhode Island or the Northern army, lending his experience to units that might otherwise appear to have little military value. Similar patterns elsewhere, many even more complex in southern states, illustrate the amalgam of tradition and innovation that was the Continental army.
Who served? Because enthusiasm was highest in 1775, the earlier units offered a better social, economic, and ethnic cross section of society than later units. American society was never perfectly reflected in its army: the colonies had traditionally left the fighting to men willing to accept money to serve, whether voluntarily or under threat of compulsion. As in late colonial armies, some soldiers came from economically disadvantaged groups (including free blacks and Indians), and enlisted because the army offered the best prospects of survival. But the Continental army was not drawn from the dregs of society; nor was it intended to be. Many young men viewed military service, and especially enlistment bounties, as a means to accumulate money. When inflation eroded the value of currency, towns used creative methods to recruit, among others, young men just entering the manpower pool. In Massachusetts in early 1781, for instance, an eighteen‐year‐old who agreed to serve for three years in the Continental army received an enlistment bounty of a few dollars in specie and several hundred dollars in paper money, plus six three‐year‐old cattle to be delivered when he completed his service. The town thus paid him with cattle not yet born, which he might not live to collect!
The quest for economic advancement does not imply lack of patriotism; if the discontinuous character of Continental army service was a nightmare for recruiting officers and Washington, it allowed soldiers the flexibility to combine self‐interest with commitment to the cause. Moreover, many men enlisted and reenlisted in the Continental army for reasons that had less to do with economic or ideological motives than with adventure, camaraderie, and the opportunity for more responsibilities than they might exercise as a civilian—all the factors that have motivated soldiers at other times and in other wars.
Despite its continual turnover in personnel, the Continental army became an effective fighting force. It became a sophisticated, mobile human community, with a population that during the summer campaigning season in most years was exceeded only by Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The army absorbed tremendous amounts of money and resources to feed, cloth, equip, house, train, transport, and pay its members, and to build and maintain its own infrastructure, including services like baking bread, butchering cattle, constructing shelter, and repairing clothing. Later in the war, especially in 1778–81, a corps of light infantry, formed each year from the best soldiers from each regiment, furnished much of its fighting power. Under Anthony Wayne, light infantrymen captured Stony Point with great élan in 1779; at Yorktown in 1781, ten companies under Alexander Hamilton demonstrated that the American army could field forces equal to the best of Europe. American soldiers did not always look the part. In the South, especially in 1780–81, Continental soldiers counted themselves lucky to have even threadbare uniforms. But their clean muskets, neat cartridge boxes, and quick response to battlefield commands showed them to be the equal of their opponent. Out of sometimes unpromising elements, Americans had crafted a unique military force, one that in the end performed the tasks demanded of it.
[See also Army, U.S.: Colonial and Revolutionary Eras; Conscription; Continental Navy; Revolutionary War: Military and Diplomatic Course.]
Bibliography
- Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and the American Character, 1979.
- Robert K. Wright, Jr., The Continental Army, 1983
