Fred W. Anderson

The Hinge of the Revolution
George Washington Confronts a People's Army, July 3, 1775

ON THE SOUTH EDGE of the Common in Cambridge, Massachusetts, three ancient cannons guard a granite monolith, which stands at the center of a circle of paving stones. Sight along the barrel of the right-hand gun and you will see that it points directly at Byerly Hall, home to the administrative offices of Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The precision of its aim was what first attracted me to the monument in the late 1970s, for then I was a graduate student and could take pleasure in such things. Eventually, I also noticed that the leftmost gun had been trained on the bell tower of Christ Church. However unintentional, the symbolism was completely consistent with the monument's meaning. Christ Church, arguably the handsomest building within cannon-shot, was constructed in 1761 as the spiritual home of the town's Anglican gentry: loyalists who had hightailed it out of town not long before July 3, 1775, the day that the monument, and its cannons, commemorates.

George Washington, oil on canvas by Joseph Wright, 1784, completed by John Trumbull, 1786, commissioned by Thomas Jefferson. Massachusetts Historical Society.

To one side stands a young tree, third or so in the line of descent from the one described on an adjoining tablet:

Under This Tree
WASHINGTON
First Took Command
OF THE
AMERICAN ARMY.
July 3d, 1775

Washington Taking Command of the Army. Engraving bound into extra-illustrated edition of Washington Irving's Life of Washington (New York, 1855–1859). Guild Library, Massachusetts Historical Society.

This, the oldest monument on the spot, was erected as part of the Centenary celebration of the Revolution, when it stood beneath the ancient, massive Washington Elm. That tree is long gone now, felled in the 1920s along with the tradition that Washington really did take command of the army where the tablet said he did. In 1925, a careful local historian, Samuel Batchelder, published a long, amusing article called "The Washington Elm Tradition: Is It True?" in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Historical Society, proving that no formal ceremony whatever accompanied Washington's assumption of command. Not so much as an honor guard turned out when the new general arrived on July 2—the scheduled reception having been canceled on account of rain. Also, the second was a Sunday, and the principal commanders would have been in church when Washington, "soaking wet and ... half sick," rode into the deserted-looking town.¹ That afternoon and the next day—when, as the tradition holds, he was standing under the tree reviewing the troops at a formal change-of-command ceremony—Washington was in fact riding the lines from Cambridge to Charlestown, getting his bearings and trying to catch sight of the enemy. So there was no parade to mark the change of command on July 3, as those who revered the Washington Elm had supposed. Washington merely took over the orderly book of the previous commander-in-chief, General Artemas Ward, and started issuing orders. That was all.

Regardless of Samuel Batchelder's efforts in setting the record straight, traditions are durable things—especially when the memorial tablets are already in place. Thus, when the monument was spruced up and expanded to commemorate the Bicentennial in 1976, a new stone was erected behind the cannons, bearing on its front a bas-relief bronze plaque.² The familiar figure of George Washington, depicted in profile on a magnificent horse, dominates the picture. He holds a sword in his right hand, its blade extended to salute the troops arrayed before him. Framing the scene are the branches of—yes—the Washington Elm.

In what may have been an attempt to appease Batchelder's potentially vengeful shade, the caption reads:

GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON
HAVING TAKEN COMMAND OF
THE ARMY OF THE UNITED COLONIES
AT CAMBRIDGE
INSPECTS THE TROOPS NEAR THIS SPOT
ON THE FOURTH DAY OF JULY 1775.

But that is as big a whopper as the older inscription. The diary of Ensign Noah Chapin of Somers, Connecticut, tells us that Washington was indeed in Cambridge on the fourth, but makes it clear that he had no interest in holding a review.

4. this Day near 2000 [Rhode Island] Troops musterd [from Roxbury] toward Cambrid[ge] to waight on the new Generals But was Rejected By the General Who said they did not want to have time spent in waiting on them.³

In other words, when the Rhode Islanders cameen masse to see their new commander-in-chief, he sent them packing back to Roxbury, where they presumably had trenches, or at least latrines, to dig.

Thus, July 3, a day on which nothing much happened, may seem an odd candidate for "The Hinge of Revolution," but this essay will contend that it was nevertheless. To see why, we will need to follow Washington forward a few months in time, noting what he observed in the New England camps and fortifications that circled Boston from Charlestown's Winter Hill to Dorchester Heights; trace the paths of Washington and the New Englanders back a couple of decades; and return to Cambridge on the day in question. But first we have one more plaque to read, on the back side of the monolith on the common. It has no hint of fantasy and simply reproduces Washington's general orders of July 4, 1775:

THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS having now taken all the Troops of the several Colonies, which have been raised or which may be hereafter raised for the support and defence of the Liberties of America, into their Pay and Service, They are now the Troops of the United Provinces of North America; and it is hoped that all Distinctions of Colonies will be laid aside, so that one and the same Spirit may animate the whole, and the only contest be who shall render, on this great and trying occasion, the most essential service to the Great and Common Cause in which we are all engaged.

This is our starting point because it indicates the direction the Revolution swung on the hinge of July 3. It did not swing easily, naturally, or inevitably toward nationhood. As George Washington concluded in the months that followed, he would have to overcome more than just the British enemy and the "Distinctions between Colonies" if he hoped to serve "the Great and Common Cause." It would be necessary, he believed, to reform a whole set of pernicious Yankee attitudes toward military service, and indeed a complex of beliefs about the nature of war itself. He intended to replace these with the professional ideals that, he knew, could alone enable the Americans to prevail against one of Europe's best-disciplined and best-equipped armies. In ways he was only beginning to grasp on July 3, defeating the British would require him to contend against the military culture of New England itself.

Washington was too good a diplomat to let anyone in Cambridge know what he thought of the army he had come to command. The Stoughton diarist Ezekiel Price, who recorded all the gossip he could get from the army, noted on July 5 that he had "heard ... that General Washington had visited the camps, and the soldiers were much pleased with him."⁴ They might have liked him less if they had known how little pleased he was with them.

Washington's official reports to Congress maintained a tone of equable calm comparable to the air of dignity he projected in his personal relationships. But this self-control came at a price, and the letters he wrote to his family and friends could boil with emotions he otherwise suppressed. They did so most strikingly in times of stress, and never more than in the summer and fall of 1775. This, for example, is how he described the Yankees under his command to his cousin Lund Washington:

The People of this Government [Massachusetts] have obtaind a Character which they by no means deserved—their Officers generally speaking are the most indifferent kind of People I ever saw.... [T]hey are by no means such Troops, in any respect, as you are led to believe of them from the Acc[oun]ts which are published, but I need not make myself Enemies among them, by this declaration, although it is consistent with truth. I daresay the Men would fight very well (if properly Officered) although they are an exceedingly dirty & nasty people.⁵

If properly officered. Washington could never understand why the New England military leaders behaved as they did. Among his first duties had been to deliver the generals of the army their new congressional commissions: a simple matter but a critical one, because it established the chain of command. To his dismay, he discovered that the order of precedence Congress had fixed did not correspond to the seniority the generals had been observing among themselves—an order based an intricate and, to Washington, unfathomable calculus of age, experience, militia rank, social standing, political influence, and provincial allegiance. It took him weeks to sort out the disputes that racked the army's high command and which filtered down surprisingly far into the ranks, where even privates argued over whether General Putnam should outrank General Spencer, or whether General Thomas deserved to occupy the position that General Pomeroy had vacated. In the end, Washington settled these controversies through prolonged, patient negotiations conducted when he would have preferred to concentrate on strengthening the defenses of an army exquisitely vulnerable to attack. He summed up his delicate and anxious situation confidentially to Richard Henry Lee, a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress:

The abuses in this army, I fear, are considerable. and the new-modelling of it, in the Face of an Enemy, from whom we every hour expect an attack [is] exceedingly difficult, & dangerous—if things therefore should not turn out as the Congress would wish I hope they will make proper allowances—I can only promise & assure them, that, my whole time is devoted to their Service.⁶

And that, he surely wanted to add, was more than he could say for his touchy New England subordinates.

As it was, he could barely induce the Yankee officers to reveal how many men were under their command or to report how much ammunition lay in their stores. Their slowness in making the returns he needed was incomprehensible to him. "I arrivd here ... [a] week [ago]," he told Lee,

since which I have been labouring with as much assiduity by fair, and threatening means to obtain returns of our strength in this Camp and Roxbury, & their Dependencies, as a man could do, and never have been able to accomplish the matter till this day—now, I will not answer for the correctness of them, although I have sent several of the Regimental returns back more than once to have mistakes rectified.... [C]ould I have conceivd, that what ought [to be], and, in a regular Army would have been done in an hour, would employ eight days, I should have sent an Express off the 2d Morning after I arrivd with a gen[era]l acc[oun]t of things. but expecting in the Morning to receive the Returns in the Evening, and in the Evening surely to find them in the Morning (& at last getting them full of Imperfections) I have been drilled on from day to day, till I am ashamed to look back at the time which has elapsed since my arrival here.⁷

Drilled on, indeed! At Philadelphia, the delegates who had been so eager to have him take command of the army assured him that 20,000 sturdy Yankee troops awaited his arrival; the returns he finally bludgeoned out of the New England colonels showed fewer than 14,000 men fit for duty. The best estimates of the enemy's strength suggested that there were nearly as many British soldiers in Boston as there were Americans in the siege lines encircling the town. As many as 12,000 redcoats remained, he believed, even after the savage fighting on Breed's and Bunker hills. The conventional wisdom held that to carry a city by siege and storm, attackers had to outnumber defenders by two to one. The best Washington could do, therefore, was hold on and hope that the British would not attack again: for they could strike at will, under cover from field artillery, warships, and floating batteries, at American troops stretched along an eight-mile perimeter, in fortifications improvised without benefit of engineers' direction.

Washington did find a small degree of comfort in the report, when the returns he had ordered finally materialized on July 9, that the army had 308 barrels of gunpowder on hand. Knowing that, he breathed easier; easier, that is, until three weeks later, when he learned (by accident) that his subordinates had not troubled themselves to count the actual kegs in their stores but rather had reported their stocks as of early June, when they had made their last survey. Once the powder burned at Bunker Hill had been subtracted, Washington discovered, his army possessed exactly 90 barrels of powder—enough to make up nine cartridges per man, and far too little to fend off a determined assault.⁸

And then there was the even more disturbing matter of the soldiers who might have to fire those few rounds. He needed to raise at least 8,000 or 10,000 more men before he could take the offensive, but as he diplomatically put it to the president of Congress,

From the Number of Boys, Deserters, & Negroes which have been enlisted in the Troops of this Province [Massachusetts], I entertain some Doubts whether the Number required can be raised here; and the General Officers all agree, that no Dependance can be put on the Militia for a Continuance in Camp, or Regularity and Discipline during the short Time they may stay. This unhappy & devoted Province has been so long in a State of Anarchy, & the Yoke of ministerial Oppression has been laid so heavily on it that great Allowances are to be made for Troops raised under such Circumstances.... [Therefore,] I would humbly submit to the Consideration of the Congress the Propriety of making some farther Provision of Men from the other Colonies. If these Regiments could be completed to their Establishment, the Dismission of those unfit for Duty on Account of their Age & Character would occasion a considerable Reduction, and at all Events they have been inlisted upon such Terms, that they may be disbanded when other Troops arrive.⁹

With utmost delicacy Washington was hinting at what he really wanted: an army less overwhelmingly composed of Yankees. As he put it, bluntly, in a letter to his brother, "I [have] found a mixed multitude of People here, under very little discipline, order, or Government." What frustrated him most was how stubbornly this disorderly multitude resisted his efforts to turn it into a reliable fighting force.

Washington's public estimates of the defects of the New England army—too rich in boys and blacks, too poor in discipline, too unlikely to reenlist when their short terms of service had expired—can be set alongside his private description of Yankee troops as "an exceedingly dirty and nasty people" to bring us to what Washington believed was the heart of the problem. New Englanders were simply not the natural soldiers they had seemed when they inflicted such notable losses on the British at Lexington and Concord and again at Bunker Hill. The members of Congress, most of whom had little personal experience with military leadership, had assumed that a virtuous, armed citizenry would necessarily prevail over the ministry's hireling troops. They gave scarcely any thought, at the time they adopted the New England regiments as a Continental Army and appointed Washington as its commander-in-chief, to the practical difficulties of administration, logistics, and command. The exceedingly mild disciplinary regulations and short terms of enlistment they established reflected assumptions that discipline would arise naturally from the spirit and enthusiasm of a volunteer soldiery.¹⁰ Washington, however, knew immediately upon arrival that the New England troops were a sorry excuse for soldiers. He could see it merely by looking at the state of their camps.

The most vivid description of how the Cambridge and Roxbury encampments looked in July 1775 comes from a letter that a Massachusetts chaplain, the Reverend William Emerson of Concord, wrote to his wife. The shelters of the troops, he wrote,

are as different in their form as the Owners are in their Dress, and every tent is a Portraiture of the Temper and Taste of the Person that incamps in it. Some are made of Boards, some of Sailcloth, and some partly of one and partly of the other. Others are made of Stone and Turf, and others again of Brick and others Brush. Some are thrown up in a hurry & look as if they could not help it—meer necessity—others are curiously wrought with doors & windows, done with Wreaths and Withes in manner of a Basket. Some are the proper Tents and Markees that look as the regular Camp of the Enemy.
These are the Roadislanders, who are furnished with Tent Equipage ... in the most exact english Taste. However I think that the great Variety of the American Camp is upon the Whole rather a Beauty than a Blemish to the Army.¹¹

The commander-in-chief, however, found little to admire in the huts and hovels that Emerson found so picturesque. Washington cared enormously about regularity: an orderly encampment manifested the necessary discipline and hierarchy of an army. In a well-ordered camp, everything—from the healthful positioning of latrines to the precise spacing of identical tents along company streets to the daily routines of roll-call, police call, drill, and guard duty—reminded soldiers that they were cogs in an organization that had a mission to accomplish and unquestionably possessed the power to punish any man who failed to perform his duty. In the New Englanders' squalid camps, more shantytowns than cantonments, Washington saw the symbol of a mixed multitude in peril of becoming a mob.

"Dirty and nasty" as they were, Washington believed that the Yankees had the potential to become respectable troops. The British army was famous for its ability to transmute scum into fighting men, and he himself had whipped into shape the unpromising lot of vagrants and ex-servants who had first made up the Virginia Regiment during the French and Indian War. To accomplish the same feat with New Englanders, however, would require a wholesale restructuring of attitudes and habits. The problem, again, lay in the officers who represented their region entirely too well. "It is among the most difficult tasks I ever undertook in my life," Washington wrote,

to induce these people to believe there is, or can be, danger till the Bayonet is pushed at their Breasts; not that it proceeds from any uncommon prowess [i.e., courage], but rather from an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people which believe me prevails but too generally among the Officers of the Massachusetts part of the Army, who are nearly of the same Kidney with the Privates; and adds not a little to my difficulties; as there is no such thing as getting Officers of this stamp to exert themselves in carrying orders into execution—to curry favor with the men (by whom they were chosen, & on whose Smiles possibly they think they may again rely) seems to be one of the principal objects of their attention.¹²

As colonel of the Virginia Regiment two decades before, Washington had disciplined and trained men he regarded as poor material because he had had gentlemen to help him do it. The Virginia officers instinctively understood the nature of command and willingly shouldered its burdens. Nothing could have been more unlike their behavior, or further from Washington's approach to military leadership, than the intimacy between officers and men that was everywhere evident among the Yankees. Although Washington agreed that it was useful, even salutary, for senior officers to deal with their juniors in an "easy and condescending manner," he abhorred any familiarity between officers and men that might "subject [a leader] to that want of respect which is necessary to support a proper command." He had been aghast, not long after arriving in New England, to see a Yankee captain shaving one of his own men. Since then, he even had found it necessary to court-martial officers who had shown so little self-control as to swear at their troops, and even trade blows with them.¹³ The duty of an officer to his men, after all, was to

be strict in ... discipline; that is, to require nothing unreasonable ... but see that whatever is required be punctually complied with. Reward and punish every man according to his merit, without partiality or prejudice; hear his complaints; if well founded, redress them; if otherwise, discourage them in order to prevent frivolous ones. Discourage vice in every shape, and impress upon the mind of every man, from the first to the lowest, the importance of the cause, and what it is they are contending for.

Engraving bound into extra-illustrated edition of Washington Irving's Life of Washington (New York, 1855–1859). Guild Library, Massachusetts Historical Society.

That Yankee officers did not automatically understand these things arose largely from the way their colonies enlisted troops for the army. Washington saw two interconnected problems here: the mode of recruitment and the tour of duty. In the first place, New England officers "raised for rank": that is, their provincial Congresses or governments issued warrants ("beating orders") that designated colonels to raise regiments of volunteers and authorized them to appoint their own subordinate officers. Practically speaking, this meant that junior officers received the rank appropriate to the numbers of men they succeeded in signing up—an ensign ten or fifteen, a lieutenant twenty or thirty, a captain fifty, and so forth. Yankee privates preferred enlisting under men they knew, respected, trusted, or to whom they were related; few were willing to serve under strangers. The very act of enlisting men fostered close connections between officers and soldiers. An officer who raised volunteers for his rank had no choice but (in the eighteenth-century phrase) "to make interest" with his men, just as a politician standing for election "made interest" with the electors.

Washington soon found that he had no tool strong enough to pry apart the officers and men of an army raised in this way. He tried court-martialing officers guilty of conduct unbecoming to their rank to such an extent by late August that he could report having made "a pretty good Slam among such kind of officers as the Massachusetts Government abound in." And yet, he continued, even though "I spare none, ... [I] fear it will not do, as these Peeple seem to be ... inattentive to every thing but their Interest."¹⁴

The second problem compounded the first: the terms of enlistment stipulated service for the campaign only. Depending on the province, every soldier in Washington's army would have his enlistment expire between December 1, 1775, and January 15, 1776. With no legal means of detaining soldiers who refused to reenlist, Washington stood to watch his entire army dissolve before his eyes. It almost did. The Connecticut soldiers' tours ended on December 1, and few showed a disposition to remain until Massachusetts and New Hampshire could mobilize 5,000 militiamen to take their places in the line. Disregarding a technicality that would have extended their enlistments (without extra pay) to December 10, and ignoring their officers' pleas that they remain until the replacement militia arrived, all but one of the Connecticut regiments marched for home on December 1. Washington sent armed detachments to retrieve them, then found it necessary to post extra sentries to keep them from marching off again. It was said that half of General Israel Putnam's own regiment was under guard from December 2 onward.¹⁵ And the Connecticut troops were only the first to have their enlistments expire. Despite feverish efforts to reenlist men, by mid December only 8,500 veterans had agreed to extend their tours of duty through the end of 1776.

Thus as 1775 drew to its cold and gloomy end, nearly half the places in the Continental lines were filled by short-term militia drafts. Washington confessed to being "much pleased, with the Alacrity which the good people of [Massachusetts], as well [as] those of New Hampshire, have Shewn up on this occasion," and he was most pleasantly surprised when the militia "behave[d] much better than I expected under our wants of Wood—Barracks (for they are not yet done)—Blankets &ca."¹⁶ Yet nothing could convince him that the militia could be disciplined, and he expected no good to come from its units being intermixed with those of the army. The militia, he confided to his former secretary, Joseph Reed, "being under no kind of Government themselves, will destroy the little subordination I have been labouring to establish, and run me into one evil whilst I am endeavouring to avoid another." He was, he confessed, sick to death of the whole Yankee tribe, and their miserable recalcitrant army: "could I have foreseen what I have, & am like to experience, no consideration upon Earth should have induced me to accept this Command. A Regiment ... would be accompanied with ten times the satisfaction—[and] perhaps the honour."¹⁷

The experiences of fighting New England inertia and of watching the army dissolve lay behind a pair of remarkable letters in which Washington analyzed the army's problems and proposed the measures to which he would cling for the rest of the war. On February 1, 1776, with the enlistment crisis barely over and the British still holding out in Boston, he detailed the effects of short tours of duty to Joseph Reed. Soon he would have to attack—he could not sustain the siege indefinitely—but he was still so short on powder that the siege guns Henry Knox had lately brought from Ticonderoga would have too little ammunition for a proper artillery preparation. To attack enemy fortifications that had not been subjected to bombardment was supremely difficult for the best-trained soldiers; his men, regardless of their personal courage, were by no means so well drilled as to be trustworthy under fire. "Place them behind a Parapet—a Breast Work—Stone Wall—or anything that will afford them Shelter," he wrote, "and from their knowledge of a Firelock, they will give good Acct of their Enemy, but I am as well convinced as if I had seen it, that they will not March boldly up to a Work—or stand exposed in a plain.... The Men must be brought to face danger—they cannot allways have an Intrenchment, or a Stone Wall as a safe guard or Shield." Indifference to death was no easy quality to create under the best of circumstances and all but impossible to induce in men who could look forward to honorable discharges, if only they stayed alive.

It takes you two or three Months to bring New men in any tolerable degree acquainted with their duty—it takes a longer time to bring a People of the temper, and genius of these [New Englanders] into such a subordinate way of thinking as is necessary for a Soldier—Before this is accomplished, the time approaches for their dismission, and your beginning to make Interest for their continuance for another limitted period; in the doing of which you are oblig'd to relax your discipline, in order as it were to curry favour with them, by which means the latter part of your time is employd in undoing what the first was accomplishing and instead of having Men always ready to take advantage of Circumstances, you must govern your Movements by the circumstances of your Inlistment.¹⁸

In short, annual terms of service and the incessant demands of recruiting were forcing Washington to "make interest" with his men, to "curry favour" as shamelessly as—a Yankee. Only defeat at the hands of the British could have given the proud Virginian a more bitter cup to drink.

Washington completed his analysis in the letter to John Hancock, president of the Congress, from Manhattan, half a year after the British had evacuated Boston. Fortune had favored the Americans almost outrageously when General Howe and Admiral Molyneux Shuldham, deciding that the guns looming on Dorchester Heights made Boston indefensible, had withdrawn without forcing Washington to make the assault he dreaded. Now, "upon the eve of another dissolution of our Army," Washington sat on Harlem Heights, waiting for Howe to attack.¹⁹ Congress, fearing that only the "meanest, idlest, most intemperate and worthless" men would enlist for more than a year, had refused to let him recruit soldiers for the duration of the conflict, and he wanted desperately to make Hancock see that without a permanent military establishment, "our cause will be lost."²⁰ He recognized the ideological difficulty of his request, for he knew that Hancock and the rest of the Congress understood standing armies as necessarily threatening to liberty and for that reason saw short enlistments—a distinguishing feature of the New England army he had taken over in 1775—as a crucial safeguard. But Washington also knew from experience, as Hancock and most of his fellow delegates did not, that only a standing army could solve the problems of poor discipline and poor leadership. Therefore, beginning with the fundamentals, he argued his case in the most patient, persuasive way he could.

Officers needed good pay, Washington explained, since "this will induce Gentlemen, and Men of Character to engage; and till the bulk of your Officers are composed of Such persons as are actuated by Principles of honour, and a spirit of enterprize, you have little to expect from them." The enlisted men must be offered bounties large enough to make them willing to sign up for long tours of duty—preferably for the duration. Without these two features, the Continental Army would never be more than the image of the force he had taken command of at Cambridge:

while the only merit an Officer possesses is his ability to raise Men—while those Men consider, and treat him as an equal; & (in the Character of an Officer) regard him no more than a broomstick, being mixed together as one common herd, no order; nor no discipline, can prevail—nor will the Officer ever meet with that respect which is essentially necessary to due subordination.²¹

Only these measures could create a Continental Army capable of meeting the British on British terms of military professionalism: an army with gentlemen officers, sustained by their corporate sense of honor and composed of disciplined troops for whom campaigns and battles were less to be feared than taken in stride. The best of the Continentals would then be motivated by their love of liberty, as the best already were. The indifferent ones, and even the worst, would perform their duties rather than shirk them, if only to avoid the punishments that gentleman officers would not hesitate to inflict.

To achieve this goal Congress had to "make interest" with the officers by giving them both enough income to keep their families from want, and enough distinction of rank to satisfy their personal need for honor. In this and only this way could Congress attach the loyalties of the officers to itself, as the loyalties of British officers attached to the king. In this and only this way would the army become an organization capable of serving the United States and defending its people's liberties. But if Congress failed to make interest with its officers, if Congress persisted in allowing the states to commission officers merely because they could raise men, then the case for the professionalization of the army would be lost, and with it the hope of the Revolution. Continental officers would never be more than curriers of favor, whose devotion to the United States and its independence would never transcend their personal loyalty to the men who followed them. The fate of the Revolution therefore depended on establishing the army as a national institution, an instrument of policies determined by a Congress wise and virtuous enough to define a common good greater than the self-interest of any group or state.

That all this had been present in embryo on July 3, 1775, can be seen in the general order that Washington wrote on that day and promulgated the next, in which he expressed the earnest hope that "all Distinctions of Colonies will be laid aside, so that one and the same Spirit may animate the whole, and the only contest be who shall render, on this great and trying occasion, the most essential service to the Great and Common Cause in which we are all engaged."²² Where Washington's understanding had grown, in the fifteen months that intervened between this general order and his letter to Hancock, was in the realization that the Revolution could be threatened not only by the distinctions of colonies but also by the distinctive military culture of the New England colonies. For the region that had made itself the center of resistance to British "tyranny" after 1765 was in fact the only part of colonial America with a military tradition strong enough to embolden its people to take up arms in defense of their liberties. More than any other obstacle—in some senses, more than the British army itself—Washington struggled against the implications of the New England military tradition from July 3, 1775, onward.

I have pursued Washington's complaints about the New England army at such length, and reported his analysis of what he understood as its pathology in such detail, because in them he painted the most detailed portrait we have of New England military culture in the late colonial period. It was not a portrait original with him. Virtually every high-ranking British officer to serve in North America during the French and Indian War had made identical complaints about the character and conduct of the New England provincial troops. The Yankee soldiers, they maintained, were resistant to discipline, averse to hardship, prone to desertion and mutiny, and so faint of heart as to be incapable of fighting on an open field in the approved, manly, European style. Some of these deficiencies, they thought, stemmed from the poor quality of the provincials as men; most derived from the fact that the Yankee officers were for the most part tradesmen, farmers, and laborers who were incapable of responding to the call of honor or duty because they were incapable of recognizing it. Provincial officers, the British complained, so feared the disapproval of their men that they would actually conspire to protect them from court-martial punishments. Under no circumstances could such officers and soldiers be relied upon in battle. As a consequence, British commanders employed them whenever possible as laborers, not as combat troops.²³

Because they judged the provincials by British social values and professional standards of military conduct, regular officers of the French and Indian War never understood that the behavior they deplored proceeded from the covenantal principles that structured both civil and religious life in New England. For more than a half-century before the French and Indian War began, the four New England provinces had raised thousands of troops to undertake expeditions against French Canada, campaigns planned and executed by colonial officers. The men who organized and commanded these provincial forces were for the most part lawyers, merchants, and farmers—military amateurs who took for granted the contractual principles of their region and, in so doing, accommodated themselves to the values and assumptions of the men who made up the rank and file.

Thus, every New England provincial army in the colonial wars was raised for a year or less and made up almost entirely of volunteers—young, typically unmarried farmers, laborers, and artisans who earned the equivalent of farm laborers' wages and who often received substantial recruitment bounties. Because these men usually did not have families and farms or businesses of their own, they were free to serve in a way that household heads were not. They were also willing to serve because military pay was high enough to allow them to save money toward setting up their own households. In this way a beneficial distinction grew up between the region's militia—a universal, compulsory organization that included virtually all property-holders and which was accordingly difficult to mobilize for active service—and its provincial forces, which were composed of young, hardy, not-yet-established men.

When the number of recruits for any provincial force fell short of its target strength, the colony government had the power to draft men from the militia for service, but seldom exercised it: any attempt to "press" militiamen was so likely to produce resistance that every colony allowed draftees to hire substitutes to take their places. As provincial forces became responsible for all expeditions against the enemy, the militia therefore evolved into a kind of defense infrastructure, responsible for procuring volunteers, storing and occasionally transporting supplies, and providing the rudiments of military training for the male population above the age of sixteen. Militia units retained enough organizational integrity to operate as a home defense force and on occasion actually took the field. But because militia units comprised the entire male population of towns or districts it was risky as well as expensive to call them up, and instances of mobilization remained rare.

In response to the demands of the colonial wars, then, New England had developed military institutions suited to its economy, society, and culture. Provincial forces superficially resembled European formations—they had the same ranks and organizational tables—but in spirit and function departed strikingly from professional norms. Provincial soldiers interpreted their obligation to fight not directly in terms of obedience to the king whom they ultimately served, but rather as a matter of contractual relationship with their provinces. Recruiting officers executed enlistment contracts as the agents of their provinces. Because they almost always "raised for rank," the men whom they enlisted understood military service not as a general obligation but as a specific agreement to serve under the officer who had enrolled them. Provincial soldiers kept careful account of the promises made to them at enlistment and their fulfillment (or the lack of it) during campaigns. They regarded as equally binding both formal elements, such as the duration of enlistment and the provision of pay and supplies, and informal promises made by their recruiting officers. Given their perspective on the relationship between the provinces and themselves, it is not particularly surprising to see provincials treating failures of supply or the efforts of commanders to retain them beyond the ends of their enlistment terms as breaches of contract. As in common law where a broken contract absolves the aggrieved party from the obligation to perform further duties, provincial soldiers saw their government's failure to fulfill its end of the enlistment bargain as justifying their immediate reversion to civilian life.

Thus, New England soldiers during the French and Indian War often went on strike or left the army en masse when they believed the province had broken its contract. The fact that British officers saw soldiers' strikes as mutinies and called the unauthorized leaving of camp desertion did not particularly concern the provincials—although it was sheer torture for their colonels, who tried to explain to uncomprehending redcoats that their men were behaving rationally (if not perhaps reasonably). The provincials believed that if they acquiesced in violations of their rights, they would expose themselves to further abuse and perhaps even to indefinite terms of service—a condition they associated not with enlistment but with slavery. Regular commanders-in-chief, such as the Earl of Loudoun or General Jeffery Amherst, thus came to loathe New Englanders, whom they regarded as stubborn, unreliable, and despicably self-interested.

As a result, from 1757 through the end of the French and Indian War a rough accommodation emerged between the British regular officers who commanded in America and the colonists who enlisted in the provincial armies. Redcoats fought the French, often heroically, and took the credit for victory. Provincials worked, ingloriously, as road- and fort-builders, artificers, garrison troops, and transporters of supplies. As one regular officer put it with more than a hint of contempt, the provincials "do the works that in inhabited countries are performed by peasants."²⁴

The British concluded that their efforts had won the war and that the provincials had been little better than an encumbrance; the provincials concluded that although the redcoats might be brave and their officers might be skillful, they were on balance a poor excuse for men. The New Englanders indeed concluded that the war had not been won by British heroism, or even by a combination of British heroism and colonial labor, but rather by God's providential intervention on the side of His Protestant people. Since the regulars were not only notorious blasphemers and violators of the Sabbath but allowed Irish papists to serve in their ranks, New Englanders found it impossible to suppose that God had looked favorably on Britain's cause because He was pleased with the British army. Instead, it seemed clear, the saving remnant in Zion had been entirely of Yankee provenance. The British might have been capable soldiers, but it was God who had used them to fulfill His design, and that design was to bless His New England Israel.

This providential worldview, so quaint by contemporary English standards, was the final element in New England's military culture. It was the hardest feature for professional military observers to grasp because it took divine participation in war as an immediate, and even in a sense predictable, factor. Of course, British officers in the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary era were, in at least general terms, Christian believers, and George Washington firmly believed that "Providence, which has been more bountiful to me than I deserve,"²⁵ had guided his decision to accept the command of the Continental Army. But neither British officers nor Washington would ever have assumed that God would intervene to protect ill-disciplined, poorly led soldiers from a superior adversary. Yet that was precisely what New Englanders like the Reverend William Emerson, who commented so favorably on the irregularity of the Cambridge and Roxbury encampments, really did believe. The chaplain could delight in the same camps that horrified Washington because he, unlike Washington, looked on them with the eye of faith. The only thing that worried Emerson about the army was the profanity he heard in the camps, but (after duly considering its dangers) he still felt justified in concluding that,

though there are many things amiss in the Camp, yet ... God is in the midst of us, ... [for] there are many here that know his Name & put their Trust in him that others are aware the remarkable Restraints of his Grace, and are kept back from presumptuous Sins.²⁶

Lest it be thought that such faith was solely the property of chaplains, the diaries of officers and common soldiers alike bear ample witness to the New Englanders' ability to understand that Jehovah was their ultimate commander-in-chief. Amos Farnsworth, to take but one example, was a corporal from Groton who fought bravely at Bunker Hill, remaining in the redoubt until the redcoats climbed over the parapet. The most detailed entries in his diary record not military events per se but occurrences that he interpreted as common and remarkable providences. He took notes on sermons (such as the homily in which the Reverend Doctor Samuel Langdon used Hebrews 2:10 to "encorridge us to Enlist under the Great General of our Salvation"), saw divine protection in a skirmish when "the Bauls Sung like Bees Round our heds" but "thare was not A Man of us kild," and rejoiced less in his exploits at Bunker Hill than at meeting a comrade with whom "I could Freely convers ... on Speritual things." Such occurrences enabled him to write that "I find God has a Remnant in this Depraved, and Degenerated, and gloomy time."²⁷ That saving Remnant, of course, was what really mattered. Without it, God would never have permitted the poorly equipped New Englanders to wreak havoc on their better-armed enemies, any more than He would have allowed Gideon and three hundred men, carrying nothing but trumpets, jars, and torches, to put to flight the Midianite host.

What Washington found in Cambridge was a provincial army that might have been transported in time directly from the French and Indian War, if not from King William's. In almost every detail except its less pronounced tendency toward mutiny, the New Englanders of 1775 behaved like, prayed like, and fought like the New Englanders of 1755. Indeed, both the Lexington Alarm and the Battle of Bunker Hill bore striking resemblances to events of the previous war, episodes of which Washington knew nothing, but which New Englanders remembered as defining moments. As on the day of Lexington and Concord, thousands of militiamen turned out in 1757 when the news spread that Fort William Henry had fallen. Connecticut sent 5,000 militiamen (a quarter of the colony's whole complement) and Massachusetts mobilized more than 7,000 within hours of receiving an urgent appeal for support from the commander of Fort Edward. Before the countermanding orders came out on August 12, as many as 15,000 men had marched for the New York frontier. By then, at least 4,000 men had already arrived at Fort Edward, more than seventy miles from the nearest Massachusetts settlements and more than a hundred from Connecticut's closest towns. It was a feat of mobilization that no contemporary European militia, except perhaps the Swiss, could have matched.²⁸

At the Battle of Bunker Hill, New Englanders fought on the strategic defensive just as they had at the Battle of Lake George twenty years earlier, when they had tempted French regulars to make a disastrous frontal attack on fortified lines. The British, in an almost uncanny tactical parallel to the Battle of Ticonderoga in 1758, sent troops in line against the New England entrenchments—with the same costly results. Artemas Ward, the Bay Colony general who gave the order to fortify Bunker Hill, thus precipitating the British attack, had witnessed the bloody fiasco of Ticonderoga at first hand, as a provincial lieutenant colonel. That he hoped to lure the redcoats into making the same kind of attack they had launched on the French lines in 1758 cannot be proven, but it cannot be doubted that this, the only battle Ward had ever witnessed, constituted his most vivid impression of combat.²⁹

Rightly understood, what Washington encountered in Cambridge and Roxbury was not so much a deficient army as an army that worked exactly as the governments that organized it, the officers who led it, and the men who filled its ranks expected it to work. Washington's decision to remodel these forces in the image of a regular army was as immediate, and probably as instinctive, as the New Englanders' re-creation of a provincial force on the example of previous conflicts. But as the Yankees worked within a fully developed military tradition, Washington emerged from a colony that had no experience of war on its borders between the 1680s and 1753. At the time that Washington took command of the Virginia Regiment in 1754, the Old Dominion had scarcely any seasoned military leaders; nor had the province supported a viable militia for a half-century. At the outset of his military career, George Washington had had to learn what he needed to know of military institutions from books, and the books he read instructed him on how to create a regiment in the image of a British army battalion.³⁰ More important, however, Washington's first experience of battle burned into his mind the importance of all the things his books had preached: unified command, subordination, strict discipline, thorough training, and adequate supply. He struggled to give the army in Massachusetts these things after he took command on July 3, 1775. Not one of those desiderata had been present at the defining moment of Washington's early military career: the Battle of Fort Necessity, July 3, 1754.³¹

The Night Council at Fort Necessity, engraving bound into extra-illustrated edition of Washington Irving's Life of Washington (New York, 1855–1859). Guild Library, Massachusetts Historical Society.

At Fort Necessity, Washington had commanded a poorly equipped, virtually untrained, terribly understrength Virginia Regiment in an unequal fight against a battle-tested French and Indian force. Washington's authority had recently been challenged, and his command divided, by a regular officer, Capt. James MacKay. MacKay, who as commander of an Independent Company held a king's commission, refused to take orders from Washington, whose rank as a colonel derived from a commission issued by Virginia's governor. MacKay had kept his supplies and his company's camp separate from those of the provincials, declined to make his men available for fatigue duty, refused even to recognize the Virginian's parole and countersign. Only the onset of the French attack brought MacKay's company inside the Virginia lines. Even if he had known how to do it, Washington had no time to train his men. His regiment was critically short on supplies and even shorter on discipline; its ranks included only about one-third of its authorized strength. Finally, Washington had built a fort so small that only about 70 of his 300 men could take shelter within its palisade. The rest had to protect themselves as best they could in a shallow trench surrounding the stockade. When the French attacked, Washington discovered that he had sited the fort within musket range of a forested hillside, from which the enemy could pick off his men in perfect safety, as they crouched in the ditch, unable to return fire. And as if all these were not misfortunes enough, it rained—a circumstance that not only rendered the defenders' muskets useless but suddenly revealed that among the supplies the Virginians lacked were screws, the implements they needed to extract the bullets and wet charges from their weapons' bores.

From late morning till nightfall, French and Indian marksmen fired from cover at anyone who dared show his head above the lip of a three-foot-deep sodden trench. By dusk, a third of Fort Necessity's defenders were dead or wounded. Then, when the firing slackened as it became too dark to aim, the survivors rushed the storehouse, broke into the rum, and made themselves reeling drunk. Only the decision of the French commander, Capt. Louis Coulon de Villiers, to spare the defenders saved Washington and his men from annihilation. Villiers permitted the survivors to march off the next day with their weapons and colors in return for Washington's signature on articles of capitulation, which declared (in French, which Washington did not understand) that Washington had "assassinated" Villiers's brother, Ensign Jumonville, five weeks earlier. Washington, at the price of his honor, saved what was left of his command. The bloody, miserable, humiliating mess that had been the Battle of Fort Necessity left Washington determined never to make the same mistakes again. Discipline, training, rigor, and strict subordination would become his watchwords ever after.

In all his subsequent commands, Washington seemed determined to become more British than the British. He made efforts to meet, question, and learn from senior redcoat officers. Eventually, he would serve under four of them—Edward Braddock, John Stanwix, John Forbes, and Henry Bouquet—and travel as far as New York to meet a fifth, Lord Loudoun. From all of them he grasped the importance of self-control, consistency, distance from subordinates, and strictness in dealing with enlisted men. He applied military punishments freely in the Virginia Regiment, hoping to create a standard of obedience comparable to that in the most rigorous regular units. Between May and June 1757, for example, he approved floggings that averaged over 600 lashes each, a severity comparable to that of contemporary British regiments. During those same months, he presided at general courts-martial that imposed no less than fourteen capital sentences, a rate that substantially exceeded the pace at which the regulars hanged and shot their own miscreants pour encourager les autres.³²

Washington could nurture these martial values, so unlike those of the New Englanders, because Virginia lacked an indigenous military tradition that could compete with them; because he always had been determinedly Anglophile in his tastes, behaving and dressing just as he believed English gentlemen did; and because as a slave owner in an intensely hierarchical society, he unquestioningly accepted his role as a governor of men, having exercised authority over social inferiors almost since childhood. What was undoubtedly most important, however, was that, harsh as they were, the methods of discipline and training he adopted worked. By mid 1760, even so unsparing a critic of American troops as Brig. Gen. Robert Monckton acknowledged that the Virginia provincials "doo their Duty as well as any Old Regiment [i.e., British regiment]." Not many months later, another witness noted, without much exaggeration, that the "Blues" were "vying with the King's Troops, in uniformity, in appearance, exactitude, regularity, firmness, and Intrepidity."³³ By 1760, of course, Washington was no longer commanding them; at the end of 1758 he had resigned his commission, married, and taken up the role of a great planter. But every officer who had served under him agreed that the improved performance of the Virginia Regiment rested on foundations of professionalism he established while its commander.

Washington sought to impose the military values he had cultivated during his French and Indian War apprenticeship on the New England army because he assumed they were correct—he never questioned them, never doubted them—and because they had produced the results he wanted. Most of all, however, he sought to impose those values on the army because he longed to meet an enemy he respected, and for years had sought to emulate, on equal terms. The army that the New Englanders had created, and which Congress had entrusted to his care, had proven itself capable of killing redcoats; indeed, it had shown that under the right circumstances it could kill them in great numbers. But it was not sufficient merely to destroy enemy troops. The principal task of the soldier, as Washington understood it, was not to kill but to be obedient unto death. Similarly, the task of the general who headed an army was to accomplish the mission assigned by the legitimate civil authority. Control, discipline, regularity—Washington's watchwords since 1754—were everything, for without them there was no controlling the violence of war, no way to keep armed men from becoming thugs and thieves, rapists and murderers.

Washington understood that the patriotic enthusiasm and contractual understandings holding the New England army together were sufficient to assemble several thousand armed men with enough "knowledge of a firelock" to "give a good account of [themselves to] the enemy" from "behind a parapet." But the enthusiasm that held New Englanders together could never create the discipline, cohesion, self-sacrifice, and obedience necessary to make them willing to engage an enemy on an open field; nor could contractual bonds hold an army together in the face of privation and defeat. Washington wanted so desperately to regularize the army because he knew that men who reasoned about soldiering as if it were just another kind of employment would not hesitate to go home when their enlistments expired. And above all, Washington knew that the New England army was not only an ephemeral force but a regional one.³⁴

Perhaps no one in North America realized so clearly (and so early) as Washington that for the Revolution to succeed the army needed to be a force drawn from all the colonies, made up of men loyal not to localities but to the Congress and the common cause it sought to represent. Congress had sent Washington to Massachusetts to fight a civil war, and he understood how easily local sympathies could tear an army to shreds. If he hoped to build an organization capable of sustaining a revolutionary struggle while remaining subordinate to Congress—a force that would neither dissolve in the face of adversity nor unleash unpredictable violence against civilians—he had no choice but to overturn the very military traditions that had summoned the army into existence.

Thus, on the afternoon of July 2, 1775, two very different understandings of the relationship between soldiers and society, war and revolution, existed side-by-side at army headquarters in Cambridge. The military culture of New England had created a people's army—one that represented the region's society and values—just as it had during the colonial wars. Such an army, drawing its strength directly from the localities, had to be renewed annually in order to survive and would last only so long as a substantial majority of the populace continued to believe that the war was worth fighting. The New England provincial tradition was, in this sense, both more implicitly radical—in its potential for mass mobilization and its actualization of popular consent—and more fragile than the professional military tradition that Washington prized. Given the intimate connections between New England's army and society, a protracted war would be almost certain to produce revolutionary social change, if only because a lengthening struggle would require increasing coercion to sustain the necessarily high levels of military participation.

Few potential outcomes would have alarmed George Washington more. The control, not the propagation, of violence was for him the core of military service. If, as he believed, it had become necessary to defend the liberties and property of Americans by force of arms, then every effort had to be made to limit revolutionary changes to a purely political level. To do more—to allow war to become the engine of revolution—would be to imperil the social order, together with all the laws, rights, and liberties that he hoped to preserve. Both to defend the liberties of Americans and to diminish the terrible revolutionary potential of the war, Washington knew that he had to replace a popular force with a respectable army. Such an army had to be strictly loyal to the Congress, as the sole agency through which the colonies could express their common political goals. Such an army had to become the symbol and embodiment of American virtue and values, the obedient (and if necessary, suffering) servant of the colonies' common cause.

Washington's conception of the Continental Army, therefore, derived at a conscious level from European and professional military ideals and at an emotional level from his personal experiences of war's disorders. It did not grow, as the New England military tradition did, from roots sunk deep in the soil of an American region and its culture. Yet Washington's conception of a Continental Army contained the germ of a truly revolutionary idea, American nationhood. July 3, 1775, was, therefore, the hinge of revolution because on that day perhaps the only American who was fully, absolutely, and unquestioningly dedicated to military professionalism took control of the Continental Army. In that revolutionary moment was crystallized the only conception of the Continental Army that ultimately could have produced something scarcely imaginable before: an American army representing an American nation. The vision was as yet partial, inchoate, blurred; but it cannot be missed in the general order that Washington wrote on July3, to be read on the following morning throughout the army. It is this order that brings us back to where we started, at the center of the stone circle, behind the cannons, on Cambridge Common:

THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS having now taken all the Troops of the several Colonies, which have been raised or which may be hereafter raised for the support and defence of the Liberties of America, into their Pay and Service, They are now the Troops of the United Provinces of North America; and it is hoped that all Distinctions of Colonies will be laid aside, so that one and the same Spirit may animate the whole, and the only contest be who shall render, on this great and trying occasion, the most essential service to the Great and Common Cause in which we are all engaged.

FRED W. ANDERSON, associate professor of history, University of Colorado at Boulder, is the author of A People's Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years' War (1984) and the forthcoming The Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (2000).

NOTES

^1. Samuel F. Batchelder, The Washington Elm Tradition: Is It True? (Cambridge, Mass., 1925), 34. This version of the piece is a bound offprint of the original article.

^2. A nearby stone explains that the present arrangement was "Erected 1976 in honor of our Bicentennial year and in respect to the signers of the Declaration of Independence by the Italian-American Historical Society of Cambridge." Since then two more tablets have been added by representatives of another group not to be outdone in its claims to patriotism: one erected in 1984 "To the memory of Gen. Thaddeus Kosciusko" by "Cambridge Citizens of Polish extraction"; the other placed in 1985 "To the memory of Gen. Casimir Pulaski," by the "Polish American Veterans and Auxiliary, Cambridge Post." Other memorials will, most likely, follow.

^3. Noah Chapin, quoted in Batchelder, Washington Elm Tradition, 23, emphasis in original.

^4. Ezekial Price, quoted in Batchelder, Washington Elm Tradition, 22. A transcription of the full diary appears in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1st ser., vol.7 (1863):185–262.

^5. George Washington to Lund Washington, Aug. 20, 1775, in The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, ed. W. W. Abbot et al. (Charlottesville, Vir., 1985- ), 1:335–336. Cited hereafter as Papers GW.

^6. George Washington to Richard Henry Lee, July 10, 1775, in Papers GW, 1:99–100.

^7. George Washington to Richard Henry Lee, July 10, 1775, in Papers GW, 1:98.

^8. Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography (New York, 1951), 3:484, 509.

^9. George Washington to John Hancock, July 10, 1775, in Papers GW, 1:90, 183.

^10. Many works have touched on Congress's expectations concerning the Continental Army and understandings of military professionalism in light of republican fears of a standing army. Among these the most important are Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1782 (Chapel Hill, 1979), 10–12, 25–30, 44–53; James Kirby Martin and Mark Edward Lender, A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763–1789 (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1982), 40–48; Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (New York, 1979), 196–204 passim; Robert K. Wright, Jr., The Continental Army (Washington, D.C., 1983), 21–44; and Lawrence Delbert Cress, Citizens in Arms: The Army and Militia in American Society to the War of 1812 (Chapel Hill, 1982), 15–66 passim. Cress provides the most accessible summary of the ideological issues at stake in creating an American standing army. The best guide to the secondary literature on war, society, and culture in 18th-century America is Don Higginbotham, "The Early American Way of War: Reconnaissance and Appraisal," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., vol. 44 (1987):230–273.

^11. William Emerson to Phebe Emerson, July 7, 1775, in Diary and Letters of William Emerson, 1743–1776, ed. Amelia Forbes Emerson (Boston, 1972), 80.

^12. George Washington to Richard Henry Lee, Aug. 29, 1775, in Papers GW, 1:372.

^13. Lynn Montross, Rag, Tag, and Bobtail (New York, 1952), 40; Freeman, Planter and Patriot, 520n; George Washington to Col. William Woodford, Nov. 10, 1775, in Papers GW, 2:346

^14. George Washington to Richard Henry Lee, Aug. 29, 1775, in Papers GW, 1:373.

^15. Freeman recounts the crisis in detail in Planter and Patriot, 569–574; see also John Ferling, The First of Men: A Life of George Washington (Knoxville, Tenn., 1988), 136–138.

^16. George Washington to John Hancock, Dec. 11, 1775, George Washington to Joseph Reed, Dec. 25, 1775, in Papers GW, 2:533, 607.

^17. George Washington to Joseph Reed, Nov. 28, 1775, in Papers GW, 2:449.

^18. George Washington to Joseph Reed, Feb. 1, 1776, in Papers GW, 3:237, 238.

^19. George Washington to John Hancock, Sept. 25, 1776, in Papers GW, 6: 394.

^20. John Adams, quoted in Don Higginbotham, The War of American Independence (New York, 1971), 390; George Washington to John Hancock, Sept. 25, 1776, in Papers GW, 6:394.

^21. George Washington to John Hancock, Sept. 25, 1776, in Papers GW, 6:395, 396.

^22. General Orders, July 4, 1775, in Papers GW, 1:54

^23. Fred Anderson, A People's Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years' War (Chapel Hill, 1984), passim, esp. ch. 6; Douglas Edward Leach, Roots of Conflict: British Armed Forces and Colonial Americans, 1677–1763 (Chapel Hill, 1986), 130–132.

^24. Col. James Robertson to John Calcraft, June 22, 1760, quoted in Alan Rogers, Empire and Liberty (Berkeley, 1974), 67.

^25. George Washington to Martha Washington, June 23, 1775, in Papers GW, 1:27.

^26. William Emerson to Phebe Emerson, July 7, 1775, in Diary and Letters of William Emerson, 81.

^27. Amos Farnsworth diary, quoted in Montross, Rag, Tag, and Bobtail, 43.

^28. The Fort William Henry alarm has never been adequately studied. For telling evidence, however, see Harold Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven, 1990), 110 and passim; Gertrude S. Kimball, ed., The Correspondence of William Pitt (New York, 1906), 1:94–97; Ian K. Steele, Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the "Massacre" (New York, 1990), 127; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. 7: The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758–1760 (New York, 1967), 88.

^29. On Ward's experience in the Seven Years' War and characteristics as a commander in 1775, see James F. Smith, "The Rise of Artemas Ward" (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado at Boulder, 1990). On the Battles of Lake George and Ticonderoga and their meanings for the provincials, see Anderson, A People's Army, chs. 5 and 7.

^30. John M. Dederer, War in America to 1775: Before Yankee Doodle (New York, 1990), 109–110 and passim. Washington's starting point was Col. Humphrey Bland's Treatise of Military Discipline (1727 and after), the standard manual for most British professionals of the day. He continued to read widely and ultimately came to value Caesar and other classical writers as highly as the Maréchal de Saxe and other modern authorities.

^31. That Washington had his early experiences much in mind at the beginning of the Revolutionary War can be inferred from his mention of it in a letter to Adam Stephen, written from New York, July 20, 1776: "I did not let the Anniversary of the 3d ... of this Inst[an]t pass of[f] without a grateful remembrance of the escape we had at the Meadows." Papers GW, 5:408–409.

^32. James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (Columbia, S.C., 1991), 68, computes the average flogging in the Virginia Regiment during these months at 613 lashes, as opposed to a British average (evidently army-wide) of 731. Executions in British units at Fort Edward between June and November 1757 averaged just under one per regiment per month. From May to September 1759 General Jeffery Amherst approved 7 capital sentences in his expeditionary force; it numbered approximately 10,000 men. See Anderson, A People's Army, 137n.

^33. Robert Monckton to Jeffery Amherst, July 9, 1760; Robert Stewart to George Washington, Mar. 12, 1761; both quoted in Titus, Old Dominion at War, 133.

^34. Titus, Old Dominion at War, 133.

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The Hinge of the RevolutionGeorge Washington Confronts a People's Army, July 3, 1775

FRED W. ANDERSON

The Hinge of the Revolution
George Washington Confronts a People's Army, July 3, 1775