Book Review

Canada and the United States

For quite a number of years now, historians have been arguing over the question of what sort of person actually served in the Continental Army. For some, it was the yeoman farmer of legend who willingly left his plow to defend the rights of Americans against their tyrannical English masters. Others argued an opposing view and offered that most men who served an extended term of service in the Continental Army were of a lesser sort and not even all that well connected to the communities from which they had been recruited. Indeed, eminent revolutionary era scholars such as James Kirby Martin and John Shy have long thought that the soldiers who formed the Continental Army were a more eclectic group than has previously been supposed. What John Resch proposes to do is take another look at a discrete group of individuals who have been positively identified as having performed some sort of military service during the Revolution. Resch carries this mission even further by following the soldiers beyond their Revolutionary War years. Resch's main objective is to see if the image of the suffering soldier and the idea of the American Revolution as a popular war comport with fact or a mythologized sort of reality.	1
In order to answer this question, Resch decided to build on the pioneering work done originally by Shy and focused primarily on a sampling of soldiery from Peterborough, New Hampshire. While Resch's work is superbly researched, his survey is indeed founded on a rather shallow base for some of the broader assertions he eventually makes in his book. Moreover, throughout his work, Resch has the habit of extrapolating his findings from this one New England town to the rest of the Continental Army without much corroborative evidence.	2
As far as the study of Peterborough soldiers goes, Resch has developed some rather significant contributions to the postwar world of revolutionary-era veterans from this particular town and the country in general. Peterborough, unlike a wide variety of locations especially in the middle and southern colonies, has some remarkably extant sources on its citizens who fought and lived there following the war. As a result, Resch was able to conclude that a vast majority of adult males in Peterborough served in the military at some point in their lives during the first three years of the war. They did not avoid service and willingly served in some form. But what Resch does not do is to make a distinction about what sort of service these men actually performed. This is an extremely important difference. Recent work on the Continental Army soldiery has revealed that many white males who served actually did so for a period much shorter than the three years or more desired by George Washington and the Continental Congress. This is significant when one considers that the Continental Army remained in the field for nearly eight years. Moreover, enlistment terms of a longer duration were frequently characterized by resistance from the soldiery.	3
Was Peterborough representative of most New England towns or even towns of similar condition and size to those found in the middle and more southern colonies? Resch's research does not venture to answer this rather important question. Resch's argument that "claims made by modern historians, that the Continental Army was unrepresentative of society fails to materialize when all of Peterborough's soldiers are examined within the context of their households and community" (pp. 43–44) is also suspect. Resch rightly offers that "many townsmen served alternately in Militia companies, in state regiments, or in Continental units" (p. 44). This is a very broad distinction. Continental soldiers were offered only long-termed enlistment contracts after 1776, and most evidence from other historians has clearly demonstrated that this resulted in an annual manpower crisis for Washington's army and eventually caused a mutiny of the Pennsylvania and New Jersey lines. That the men of Peterborough served in militia companies or state provincial units is a fact that reinforces the idea that if they were in these particular units, they obviously were not serving in the Continental establishment at that particular moment.	. . .