This entry is a subentry of U.S. Army.
In military terms, England's colonies moved slowly but steadily from amateurism to a kind of military semiprofessionalism in the century before the American Revolution. The militia, though often effective for social control and police functions, proved inadequate for participating in the eighteenth‐century imperial wars, since they were poorly trained, sometimes even lacking firearms, and were restricted by law to brief duty within their own colonies. The term semiprofessional, as used here, means forces that constituted a hybrid between the militia and a standing army. They comprised men who enlisted for a year or more in return for a bounty, served if necessary outside their own provinces, and faced stricter military law than that applied to the militia. They performed under officers who might aspire to military expertise, having read European treatises on training and tactics and having sought to learn firsthand from observing British officers in the field. Such provincial units, including Col. George Washington's Virginia Regiment in the 1750s, were called upon to join intercolonial expeditions, possibly assigned to cooperate with British armies against French and Spanish citadels in the New World.
In some respects, the Continental army during the Revolutionary War at first appeared to resemble an extension of semiprofessional colonial forces. Except for several former British regular officers, most of its general officers had held provincial commissions in the final imperial conflict. In military justice, its Articles of War were less harsh than those of the British army. Its soldiers were enlisted for a year or less. But in 1776, the evolution of an American professional army continued, a process that saw it increasingly look like European military establishments of the day. These changes included longer enlistments, stricter martial law, more uniform tactical arrangements, and employment of Prussian and French military procedures and personnel. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, as inspector general, and Louis Duportail, head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, played critical roles in these developments.
Certainly, one reason that Washington and his abler subordinates learned quickly and had less to comprehend than would be true of commanders in a later age was that the nature of warfare scarcely changed in the mid‐eighteenth century. Armies continued to move from column to line, employing linear formations in open battle, and engaging in siege operations when moving against fortresses and cities. (In a sense the War of Independence began with the siege of Boston and ended with the siege of Yorktown; and the most one‐sided American defeat resulted from the successful British siege of Charleston.) Moreover, British commanders who opposed American generals had been relatively junior officers themselves in the Seven Years' War (the French and Indian War) and had seen hardly any active duty between the wars.
Nor did the Revolutionary War produce any new seminal military literature on either side. Officers still lacked a body of strategic doctrine to analyze a problem in systematic fashion. We find no parallel to what transpired in Prussia in the concluding stages of the Napoleonic era, where the War Academy stimulated the first modern analytical studies of conflict, highlighted by Carl von Clausewitz's On War.
American army administration hardly anticipated future trends. The command system illustrates this point. Washington, as commander in chief, acted as the principal conduit of information between the army and its superiors in the Continental Congress. Always deferential to Congress and committed to civil control, the Virginian nonetheless remained candid with the lawmakers, even to voicing his disagreements with them. Since Washington could hardly direct all theaters of operations, Congress created various regional departments as needed: New England, the northern, the middle, the southern, and the western. Congressional experiments with administrative oversight proved less than successful. The Board of War, in fact, received attacks from some in the army and in Congress for allegedly being hostile to Washington and wishing to replace him with Gen. Horatio Gates, the victor at Saratoga in an overexaggerated episode known as the Conway Cabal.
Finally, in 1781, Congress created a war department, first headed by Gen. Benjamin Lincoln; but its powers were weak. Even so, it evolved into a substantial post late in the Confederation years. The second person to serve as war secretary, Gen. Henry Knox, continued in that office under the new constitutional government in 1789.
If the army over eight and a half years—the longest American conflict before the Vietnam War—displayed staying power, it scarcely hid its resentments toward Congress and American society, believing its sacrifices unappreciated. Lagging enlistments and desertion led authorities to accept British prisoners, white servants, and African Americans in the service. Restlessness in the ranks grew worse because of inadequate provisions, clothing, and pay. Several regiments mutinied during the last years of the war. American leaders voiced more serious concern over the officers' discontent about Congress's failure to provide back pay and to make firm assurances of postwar pensions or lump‐sum mustering‐out bonuses. The senior officers remained loyal to the Revolution—with the notable exception of Benedict Arnold—and this fact, along with Washington's shrewd response to the most vocal dissidents, explains the failure of the still somewhat mysterious Newburgh “Conspiracy” in early 1783; but the rumblings and threats, mostly among field‐grade officers, evaporated when Congress promised to move quickly on the officers' concerns.
With the end of the war in late 1783, the army disbanded peacefully. The principle of civil control of the military remained intact. That, unlike the results of so many revolutions, emerged as a great legacy of the American Revolution. And Washington, in this respect, proved a successful model for future American military officers.
[See also Citizen‐Soldier; Civil‐Military Relations: Civilian Control of the Military; Militia and National Guard; Weaponry, Army.]
Bibliography
- Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783, 1979.
- James Kirby Martin and Mark Edward Lender, A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763–1789, 1982.
- Robert K. Wright, Jr., The Continental Army, 1983.
- E. Wayne Carp, To Starve the Army at Pleasure: Continental Army Administration and American Political Culture, 1775–1783, 1984.
- Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Arms and Independence: The Military Character of the American Revolution, 1984.
- Don Higginbotham, George Washington and the American Military Tradition, 1985
