Becoming Men of Some Consequence: Youth and Military Service in the Revolutionary War

By John A. Ruddiman

Young Continental soldiers carried a heavy burden in the American Revolution. Their experiences of coming of age during the upheavals of war provide a novel perspective on the Revolutionary era, eliciting questions of gender, family life, economic goals, and politics. "Going for a soldier" forced young men to confront profound uncertainty, and even coercion, but also offered them novel opportunities. Although the war imposed obligations on youths, military service promised young men in their teens and early twenties alternate paths forward in life. Continental soldiers’ own youthful expectations about respectable manhood and their goals of economic competence and marriage not only ordered their experience of military service; they also shaped the fighting capacities of George Washington’s army and the course of the war.

Becoming Men of Some Consequence examines how young soldiers and officers joined the army, their experiences in the ranks, their relationships with civilians, their choices about quitting long-term military service, and their attempts to rejoin the flow of civilian life after the war. The book recovers young soldiers’ perspectives and stories from military records, wartime letters and journals, and postwar memoirs and pension applications, revealing how revolutionary political ideology intertwined with rational calculations and youthful ambitions. Its focus on soldiers as young men offers a new understanding of the Revolutionary War, showing how these soldiers’ generational struggle for their own independence was a profound force within America’s struggle for its independence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780813936185

Book preview

Becoming Men of Some Consequence

JEFFERSONIAN AMERICA

Jan Ellen Lewis, Peter S. Onuf, and Andrew O’Shaughnessy, Editors

John A. Ruddiman

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS

CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON

University of Virginia Press

© 2014 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2014

ISBN 978-0-8139-3617-8

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

is available from the Library of Congress.

Contents

Acknowledgments

I can hardly begin to count my debts of obligation and gratitude accumulated during this project. All shortcomings and errors are mine alone, and without the support of key institutions and assistance from my mentors, colleagues, friends, and family, I could not have done this work.

This project has carried me to a great many institutions, and I am pleased to thank their librarians and staff. Kathy Ludwig at the David Library of the American Revolution provided crucial early guidance. Conrad Wright of the Massachusetts Historical Society offered key advice at several stages of this project. Stephen Nonack of the Boston Athenaeum kindly encouraged my work. Linda Showalter of the Marietta College Special Collections provided crucial assistance from afar. Ellen Clark at the Library of the Society of the Cincinnati generously welcomed me into that remarkable archive. I also would like to thank the librarians of the American Antiquarian Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, the New-York Historical Society, the Library of the New York State Historical Association, the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum, the Rhode Island Historical Society, the Virginia Historical Society, and Manuscripts and Archives at Yale University. It was marvelous to explore their collections, and I thank them for permission to cite materials under their care.

Numerous institutions have generously supported my work. I am grateful to have received funding from the David Library of the American Revolution, the Society of the Cincinnati Fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Mellon Fellowship at the Virginia Historical Society, the Washington College Research Fellowship at the Boston Athenaeum, a fellowship from the Library of the Society of the Cincinnati, the Salvatori Fellowship of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, as well as a grant from the William C. Archie Fund and a valuable research leave from Wake Forest University.

Early America is a field rich with brilliant historians. I count myself lucky to have learned from their scholarship, example, and advice. Joanne Freeman has guided and encouraged me across this project. After George Washington’s death, Alexander Hamilton grudgingly admitted that the old man was an aegis very essential to me. I am proud to note that Joanne remains a mentor very essential to me. Her enthusiasm for the wonders of the archive continues to inspire me. My work in this book has benefited immensely from the counsel of Jon Butler and John Demos, as well as the insights and advice of Adam Arenson, Benjamin Carp, Caroline Cox, Kathleen DuVal, Holly Mayer, John McCurdy, John Murrin, Lindsay O’Neill, and Wendy Warren. Thoughtful and challenging suggestions by Richard Holway of the University of Virginia Press and its anonymous readers also greatly improved this manuscript.

I am beyond fortunate that Wake Forest University has become my academic home. My students are enthusiastic and my colleagues wise and encouraging. In particular, I would like to thank Lisa Blee, Michele Gillespie, Michael Hughes, and Monique O’Connell for reading drafts and offering advice, and Simone Caron, Robert Hellyer, Jeff Lerner, and Tony Parent for their counsel.

If I may spread my gratitude farther afield, allow me to offer thanks to Ben Waterhouse and Catherine Keyser, old friends, fellow teachers, and comrades-in-arms through many campaigns.

Finally, I thank my family. My sisters, Jillian and Jayne, have listened patiently to history stories their whole lives. My endlessly encouraging parents, John and Joan, have always supported our education and endeavors. At last, let me offer my gratitude to my wife Kate for her persistent questions, patience, and love.

Becoming Men of Some Consequence

Towns and battles in Revolutionary America.

Introduction

They sought out the old fortune-telling woman in the war’s fifth summer. Twenty-three-year-old Dr. Zuriel Waterman, his older brother George, and their younger friend Jonathan Rice had already seen their Rhode Island home become the seat of war, first with the British occupation of Newport in 1776, then in the ill-fated attempt to dislodge the king’s forces in 1778. War had brought new opportunity and demands: after two months of medical instruction in 1777, Zuriel had entered the service of the armies of the United States, working for a brief spell as a surgeon in a New Hampshire regiment, then turning out again with the local militia in 1778. Yet life went on despite war’s disruptions, and these young friends thought it would be a lark to get a sense of how their lives could unfold.

The fortune teller spoke about wives and war. Zuriel described her as an old fat woman, about fifty or sixty years old, and naturally very sagacious, [and] enquiring about people. He painstakingly recorded her predictions in his journal, revealing both the gist of their questions and the fortune teller’s intuition about the expectations of these young men. George, she said, was to have 2 Wifes & 6 Children, to be married in 3 years, to have very good fortune in the latter part of his days. She also sensed he had many private enemys, and she describ’d one to him very right. She told young Jonathan Rice he would have very good luck as he enter’d his 21st year, enjoy very good luck upon the water, marry in three years, and share his life with 1 Wife & 6 children. As for Zuriel, he was to have 2 Wifes if not 3; [with] 4 or 5 children. Not only did he have but few enemies, Zuriel recorded, he would have very good luck in a little time [and] to have every thing to my wish & be settled down when I am 27 years old. Zuriel also noted the old woman’s assurance that I have seen the girl I am to have—a tall lass, slender and fair, merry and sociable—& will see her again ’fore long. She further told me that I should have good luck upon the water in a little Voyage, or a privateering but not to go on long voyages or continue going to sea. She anticipated that Zuriel Waterman would be as good as his name and have an offer to go a privateering in 3 weeks, or 3 days; or in 2 weeks or 2 days. Indeed, the following month Zuriel sailed on the privateer sloop Industry out of Pawtuxet.

These predictions—and Zuriel Waterman’s detailed record of them—suggest the path of these young men’s thoughts and the expectations society held for them. First, the men looked to their domestic futures for glimpses of a respectable manhood fulfilled by marriage and children. Predictions about merry and sociable mates were certainly welcome, but more importantly, these fortunes offered the young men tactical advice on how to advance in life. They craved secret information about their standing in the community and sought any tips about hidden enemies who could undermine their reputations or block their advancement. Most importantly, no matter however lightheartedly they asked, they sought guidance about whether military service might lead them safely to prosperity and respectability. As young men in their early twenties, Zuriel, George, and Jonathan sought the resources and relationships that marked the transition to the next stage of their lives. To achieve those goals they were ready to balance the opportunities and dangers of war with delicacy and some nerve.¹

* * *

The American Revolution required decisions about allegiance and action. At the heart of this generation-long upheaval lay the War of American Independence—a crucible in which the struggle over liberties burned down to the essence of sovereignty and power.2 For eight years of war, mobilization and fighting seared politics, society, and culture. Though the Revolutionary experience was immensely diverse—the war was long, its campaigns widely scattered, the forms of military service varied, and the rebelling states mismatched—the youth of its soldiers provides a connecting thread and offers insight into the communities that sent them to fight. Like Zuriel Waterman and his friends, the majority who took up arms for intense or prolonged military service were youths coming of age. Going for a soldier forced young men to confront profound uncertainty, and even coercion. Heavy obligations mixed with novel opportunities, however. Their expectations about manhood and their path forward in life shaped not only how young men experienced military service, but also the martial culture and fighting capabilities of American armies, the course of the war, and ultimately the new American republic. Young soldiers’ generational struggle for their own independence was a profound force within America’s struggle for independence.

The young men of Revolutionary America stood at a peculiar point in their lives—clearly they were not children, but nor were they proper adults in the eyes of society. After about 1740, for example, census-takers acknowledged an essential difference between children who were dependent and youths sixteen and older who were productive members of a household.³ The gap between a youth’s first obligation for militia service at sixteen and his eligibility for the title of freeman at twenty-one similarly illustrates colonial society’s sense of the liminality of adolescent males. Though eighteenth-century colonials would not recognize the modern concepts of adolescence or teenaged rebellion, they expressed an awareness of this group and held expectations for their paths to full maturity.⁴ In a 1720 sermon, Benjamin Colman described this period of life as a chusing time or fixing time for young people. Choosing occupations and marriage partners, he insisted, was indeed the work of your Youth.⁵ The path toward full adulthood was clear for boys: in their teens through mid-twenties, they labored for their families, hired themselves out for wages, or undertook apprenticeships. An elite handful attended college or sought professional training. In this time of life, young men were to obtain the tools and resources necessary to acquire a farm, trade, or profession—the competency to marry, support a family, and stand as a full adult member of the community.⁶ As Zuriel Waterman’s fortune teller suggested, their communities defined full adulthood through social roles and relationships, rather than by simply noting biological maturity or by counting chronological age.

These defining qualities for male adulthood in colonial America also intertwined with the ideal markers of manliness. Though different communities produced regional variations on these norms to suit their social order, they shared the underlying imperatives of obtaining economic competence, demonstrating social utility, and earning respect from other men.⁷ Marriage marked the achievement of both mature adulthood and respectable manhood. Benjamin Franklin, distributor of the common wisdom of the age, reiterated the relationship between marriage and full manhood in his Poor Richard’s Almanac. He insisted in 1744 that He that has not got a wife is not yet a compleat Man, repeating the idea a decade later: A Man without a Wife, is but half a Man. The key, Poor Richard wryly advised, was to Ne’er take a wife till thou hast a house (& a fire) to put her in.⁸ A proper man had to be able to provide for as well as punish his dependents. With gender, as with race and class in early America, an individual’s superiority and independence was premised on and contrasted with others’ subordination and dependence. Colonial society not only contrasted respectable men with women, but also with boys, apprentices, servants, black slaves, and savage Indian men.⁹ At base, a proper man’s economic resources enabled his authority over others and earned him the respect of his fellow men. Combined, these qualities and relationships marked a man’s personal independence—not an escape from freedom from care or concern, but attainment of a meaningful sense of control or agency in his life.¹⁰

Examining the young men of the Revolution provides an opportunity to untangle the intertwined relationships between military service, youth, and gender. Young men—marginal, unmarried, and without property—faced a double deficit: their adulthood was pending and their masculinity incomplete. Ideally, they would leave these shortcomings behind in the normal course of their lives. War, however, could offer them a faster path to respect and competence. There is an intuitive expectation that becoming a soldier, a profoundly male role in the eighteenth century, must have had a relationship with the construction of manhood and masculine identity.¹¹ After all, the demands of military mobilization targeted young men at a particular moment in their lives as they faced specific social deficits and aspirations. Soldiering promised novel opportunities, advancing youths toward adulthood with promises of economic compensation that would lay the foundation of future independence while offering immediate rewards of social utility and fraternal respect—together, the qualities of ideal masculinity.

The logic of the male life course in Revolutionary America highlights these connections between youth, manliness, and soldiering. Life course analysis considers an individual’s transitions through the stages of life, each with definitional social roles and experiences: to begin work, leave home, marry, bear children, and retire. Following decisions and actions, it offers striking insight into the expectations and assumptions of individuals, families, and communities while also revealing how an individual’s path or strategy might diverge from the norm. Because young men experienced military service as part of a transition between life stages, the perspective of the life course is particularly valuable for framing young soldiers’ experiences and decisions, societal expectations, and their own aspirations for the future.¹² Coming of age in Revolutionary America demanded that youths obtain necessary resources, form key relationships, and receive acknowledgement from the community. The rising generation of youths in their late teens and early twenties would have to accomplish this transition in the midst of a revolutionary war—seeking their own independence at the same time that their communities struggled to establish an independent republic, to preserve the imperiled empire, or to simply survive and be left alone.¹³

As a result of pressure from their elders and their own aspirations for progress in their life course, young men—neither beardless boys nor established family men—bore the heaviest burden in the fight against Britain for American liberties. Demographic studies of the Continental Army’s state-based regiments suggest communities’ assumptions about soldiering. Though males aged sixteen to sixty were eligible for military service, the majority of Continentals were youths in their late teens through early twenties.¹⁴ Despite significant diversity across the rebelling provinces, the age range of the men they sent as long-term soldiers proved remarkably consistent. For Massachusetts soldiers, four in ten joined the army before they turned twenty-one, and almost seven in ten joined before age twenty-six. In one New York regiment, 72 percent of soldiers enlisted in their teens or early twenties.¹⁵ Foreign-born recruits were older, often enlisting after or to escape indentured servitude, which raised the average age of Continentals in mid-Atlantic provinces. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania’s colony-born soldiers averaged twenty-one years old, and slightly more than half the New Jersey enlistees were no older than twenty-two.¹⁶ Soldiers in a Maryland regiment at the end of the war averaged only twenty-one years old at enlistment, despite a significant contribution of manpower by older immigrants.¹⁷ Virginia’s Continentals appeared to be the youngest of all, averaging about twenty years old when they joined the army.¹⁸ That perhaps fewer than one in five Continental soldiers were married also offered a telling a sign of their collective youth and social position as their chronological ages.¹⁹ Equally important, the average age of Continentals remained fairly steady across eight years of war, showing a steady turnover of troops, with young recruits filling the places of the discharged, deserted, and dead.²⁰ From north to south and from 1775 through 1783, the war at the heart of the American Revolution was a young man’s fight.

Youths and their families faced the transitions of the life course with some trepidation even in the best of times. A prescriptive piece in a colonial newspaper highlighted the emotional tension in this transition from youth to adulthood: a father advised his son, now free at the end of an apprenticeship, that this moment represented the crisis of your fate; and as you now manage fortune, succeeding life will be marked with happiness or misery; a few years perseverance in prudence, which at your age is but another name for virtue, will ensure comfort, pleasure, tranquility and esteem.²¹ On the path to full adulthood some boys progressed quicker than others, while the poorest or least lucky never emerged into comfortable competence or gained society’s esteem. War and the prospect of military service added another variable for young men to consider as they tried to make their way forward. The connection between military service and advancement in life—the connection that Zuriel Waterman and his friends investigated with their fortune teller—was also the connection between soldiering and aspirations of manliness.

* * *

To understand the American Revolution we must investigate the interaction between individual experiences and the operation of power.²² Examining revolutionary soldiers’ youth and their life course offers a novel approach to this question, building on studies in the new military history and incorporating findings about gender in early America. Attending to individuals’ decisions and experiences also disrupts the familiar narrative of the war, counters an unhistorical assumption about the timeless universality of soldiers’ experiences, and draws new connections between the War of Independence and the broader social and political upheavals of the Revolution.

Historians have long been aware of the demographics of Revolutionary soldiers, but they have left the import of their collective youth unexamined. In arguments about the military nature of the Revolution, soldiers’ place in the life course has essentially been hidden in plain sight. For generations, scholarship on the Revolutionary War has investigated soldiers’ motivations, debating the tangle of patriotic idealism, self-interested economics, and impulses of voluntarism versus coercive pressures. Scholars have tried to move the motivation debate forward by contrasting military mobilization within specific communities and states, examining the institutional and political evolution of the Continental Army and local militias, weighing Revolutionary ideology versus soldiers’ social origins, and excavating culture and hierarchy within the army.²³ Historians of the War of Independence have reconstructed a detailed social picture of the Revolution’s soldiers. Complicating the patriotic myth of a revolutionary nation eagerly in arms, historians have shown that the men who carried the heaviest military burden—the Continentals—increasingly stepped out from the margins of colonial society.²⁴ Whether poor, foreign born, in servitude, deracinated, or young, the men who enlisted as Continentals as the war dragged on were something less than average.²⁵ The youth of these soldiers is a crucial and under-examined component of their marginalization, however. Examining soldiers’ youth reveals the war as these soldiers and their communities saw, experienced, and explained it. Rather than simply asserting that Revolutionary soldiers were young, this study interrogates how age and position in the life course interacted with family, emotion, expectations for advancing in life, and gendered aspirations and prescriptions.²⁶

Examining soldiers’ youth also addresses a gap in the growing scholarship on masculinity in early America. In general, these studies either address the colonial period and end in 1775 or open their analysis with the postwar early republic.²⁷ This study of young men in the Revolutionary War stands in that opening, contributing also to a scholarship on masculinity and war in early America.²⁸ The life course of young men provides crucial connections for explaining the experience of war for the Revolutionary generation. Just as the war was fought by a particular demographic slice of society, it also unfolded within a particular matrix of gendered and generational expectations. Consideration of gender alone, however, can too easily focus on prescriptive definitions—what a social elite expected men to be rather than how would-be soldiers performed their own identities. Age and gender intertwined in Revolutionary America as mutually constitutive forces. Attention to youth and the life course braids these strands of inquiry together, mimicking the cords of experience and culture that young men followed as they made their way forward in life.

Considering the war’s events in the context of young soldiers’ expectations and experiences also productively destabilizes the familiar narrative of the Revolution. Instead of a story that begins with the midnight ride of Paul Revere in 1775, progresses through virtuous suffering endured at Valley Forge in the middle of the war, and concludes triumphantly at Yorktown in 1781, the decisions and experiences of individual young men drive the narrative. Youths could enlist for a few months, for a campaign, or for a range of years. Many who served cobbled together multiple engagements, joining and (hopefully) leaving military service in trajectories that had little relation to an arc of the war visible only in hindsight. The contingency of soldiers’ actions in turn shaped the nature of the army, the progress of the war, and the larger contours of the Revolution.²⁹

By examining this young cadre of Revolutionary soldiers, this book also confronts a persistent, unhistorical assumption that all soldiers across time and place are essentially alike—that whether before the walls of Troy, on the muddy field at Agincourt, or in the mountains of Afghanistan, the experience and meaning of war boils down to something shared and universal. Though comparisons are valuable, the particulars of time, place, and culture matter immensely. The import of taking up arms, going to battle, and (ideally) returning to a civilian life are heavily contingent, defined by circumstance as well as the particular values and structures of society.³⁰ The War of Independence was the conclusive act by which a portion of American colonials seized political control of their communities and rejected the British Empire. That war also provided the context in which they created new republican governments and a continental confederation. Hundreds of thousands of young men made decisions about military service in this political storm. For young men coming of age during the American Revolution, their political, economic, and familial considerations about soldiering were intimately connected with their constructions of self, pursuits of personal independence, and progress to the next stage of the life course.

As a result, young soldiers’ particular experiences emphasize the connection between the War for Independence and the broader Revolution. The youth of Revolutionary America shared a different perspective from their elders on the tremendous upheavals and disruptions caused by the war. Considering that half the colonial population was no older than sixteen in the late eighteenth century, the experiences of the rising generation warrant serious attention. For youths of the revolutionary generation, the war that began in 1775 dominated their progress towards adulthood. A Massachusetts boy born in 1755 at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War would have spent his formative years hearing news of the Stamp Act, Townshend Duties, destruction of tea, the Intolerable Acts destroying self-government in his province, and the Continental Association boycotting English goods. As patriot committees mobilized militarily in 1775, he would have been approaching the age of majority, twenty-one. A Virginian girl born in 1763 at the end of Britain’s Great War for Empire would have heard news of the British surrender at Yorktown before her eighteenth birthday and could have watched a younger brother march off as a hired substitute before the final cease fire in the spring of 1783. Across their adolescence, the war and the Revolution would have been inextricable. The young men who bore the military demands of the struggle for Independence may not have been political leaders or theorists, but they were central actors in the Revolutionary experience. The Revolution was a matter of mobilization and battle as well as political transformation and constitutional debate. Studies of the American Revolution, however, too often focus on one aspect at the expense of the other, perhaps because it is difficult to fit the destruction and chaos of the war into a positive narrative of the Revolution as an act of national creation.³¹ The young men of the American armies connect the broader Revolution, the war, and the decisions and experiences of families and individuals. Their aspirations and experiences mirrored the intertwined hopes for creation and the inescapable pain of destruction.

* * *

Military experience within the American Revolution varied widely according to time and place, making it tricky to generalize and necessitating a focusing lens. Perhaps as many as 200,000 men fought against British rule, but individuals could enlist more than once or serve in several different military capacities during the war.³² For some, their time in arms was brief—perhaps a few weeks mustered with the militia. Others undertook multiple engagements that added up to years of service. The demographic and political makeup of American society shows the significance of this mobilization. The colonial population numbered approximately 2.5 million people at the beginning of the war, growing to 3 million by its end. Of this population, half a million were enslaved Africans and African Americans (officially) barred from service, while another half million remained loyal to Britain. Excluding the female half of the population and the white male revolutionaries too old or young for service left approximately 500,000 men in the potential pool of military manpower to fight against Britain. Roughly 40 percent of these eligible men fought in the American cause—a substantial accomplishment of mobilization by the Congress and its rebelling states, especially in light of complicated loyalties and a rising tide of disaffection across the long conflict.³³

As a result of the churning among these substantial and diverse military experiences, the Continental Army offers a useful and necessary lens to focus this inquiry into youth and soldiering. Continental service exemplified intense military service and drew its strength from the young men of colonial society. It provides an excellent laboratory in which to examine how decisions, behaviors, and relationships worked with youth, manhood, and soldiering. As an organization, the Continental Army presents productive contradictions. It was a national institution before there was a fully articulated American nation. Each regiment, however, originated in a specific state and often drew soldiers from specific regions or communities within a province, allowing consideration of the local contours of political leadership, economics, and masculine expectations. The army also saw the collision of a radically politicized discourse of liberty and a profoundly inegalitarian military hierarchy. Also, while the concentration of so many young men in one place was unusual for colonial America, and military culture set itself in contrast with civilian mores, these young Continentals were never far removed from civilian communities. As young men enlisted, took commissions as junior officers, marched, fought, waited, and returned home, their actions and experiences in the Continental Army offer insight into the personal experience of the war within the broader Revolutionary movement.

Though there is great value in using the Continental Army as a lens to examine youth, soldiering, and the life course during the Revolution, this focus necessarily imposes limits. First, I could not simultaneously present a comprehensive account of the entire War of Independence and an analysis of youth and military service. As a result, I have focused my attention on the forces commanded by George Washington, favoring as a result the northern campaigns and the more densely populated eastern areas near the coast.³⁴ Most of the soldiers examined came from New England, the mid-Atlantic states, and Virginia. This does reflect the composition of the Continental Army, however. New England states contributed half of the enlistments to the Continental Army, with the mid-Atlantic states and Virginia providing roughly an additional forty percent of Washington’s manpower. Though there were major Continental Army campaigns in the Carolinas, short-term militia provided the local contribution of military manpower in that escalating and bloody irregular war.³⁵ Following Washington’s young Continentals also suggests comparisons with military service in militia and state units or on privateers—some men served as Continentals and in these units, while others purposefully avoided long-term service.

Second, looking at youth within the Continental Army largely excludes soldiers who were foreign-born immigrants; these recruits were significantly older than their colony-born comrades. Though I have left these men at the edge of this project, other studies have demonstrated their contribution to the culture and capacity of the army.³⁶ Similarly, I have left aside the Native Americans who fought against or allied with the Revolutionary cause, because youth, manhood, and war in their communities operated along different cultural vectors.³⁷ While I have sought to integrate the military actions of young black and African Yankees within the Continental Army with the experiences of their white comrades, examining Washington’s army excludes the larger number of African Americans who lent their support to the British cause in pursuit of their own liberty.³⁸ Finally, using the Continental Army as a focusing lens neglects the 19,000 Americans who bore arms in British-organized units—a loyalist mobilization roughly proportional to the efforts of their Revolutionary neighbors.³⁹ Because of their particular political and social circumstances, however, these loyalist soldiers require a comprehensive study of their own. Though the pressures of the male life course similarly played on young loyalists, they faced different political questions as rebel persecution severely disrupted their social worlds.⁴⁰ Despite these limits and exclusions, focusing on young Continentals is valuable. These soldiers comprised the main strength of the revolutionaries’ war effort and of Washington’s army. The General assured Congress in 1776 that these long-serving soldiers were necessary—relying on militia meant resting on a broken staff.⁴¹ Whether he could rely on the motivations and resolve of those young men would prove a pressing question across eight years of war.

The archives of the American Revolution have preserved a raucous chorus of voices from the war, and in the course of my research I have encountered thousands of these young men. Drawing on the arc of the male life course for the Revolutionary generation, I focus my analysis on a cadre of would-be soldiers in their late teens and early twenties—depending on their appearance in the war, boys born between 1750 and the mid-1760s. The archives are rich with letters, diaries, and memoirs, though these sources were more likely to originate from officers, New Englanders, or from earlier in the war when soldiers’ literacy rates were higher. As a result, I have especially prized voices from the mid-Atlantic and southern regiments. Additionally, young soldiers’ actions and emotions appear in military documents such as court marital records, the official commands of generals, and the illicit songs, poems, sketches, and perfect nonsense soldiers jotted on the blank pages of orderly books.⁴² Size rolls from companies and regiments record names, physical descriptions, home towns, and prewar occupations, all of which can help reconstruct individual experience and motivation.

Veterans’ memoirs and pension applications in the early nineteenth century also record and contextualize military service. The pension applications created at oral depositions prove invaluable for recovering details of Revolutionary service from illiterate men or those too poor to create their own written records.⁴³ Both pension applications and veterans’ memoirs, however, require sensitivity to the inevitable reconstructions of memory.⁴⁴ A memoirist’s politics, emotions, and agenda at the moment of composition can dramatically differ from the distant period being remembered. War memories cannot be accepted uncritically. With the American Revolution especially, the gravity of patriotic and nationalist narratives warped memory. However, it is still possible to chip away the coral-like accretions of time to uncover suggestive or revealing information. Explicitly patriotic language or self-serving explanations certainly must be taken with a grain of salt. But the landscape of family relations, strong emotions, striking or traumatic events, or details that at first glance appear trivial can be tremendously informative—provided they match the context and spirit of evidence contemporary to the war.⁴⁵ The ordinary individuals who emerge from this archive are remarkable for the amount of information about them that survives. It is telling, however, that their stories ring more of the personal and the familial than of the straightforwardly military. The words, actions, and trajectories of young soldiers’ lives reveal shared assumptions, experiences, and pressures in a time of war.

This study of young soldiers in the Revolution explores specific experiences, decisions, and relationships that unfolded across the course of the war. The first chapter, ‘The Eyes of All Our Countrymen Are Now Upon Us,’ considers the ambitions of young men—junior officers and enlisted soldiers—in joining the army for self-advancement, for money, or to escape domestic oppression. It also shows the coercion that pushed young men toward the war and the choices youths made to avoid the Continental Army. Young men’s choices about military service profoundly limited the military capabilities of the revolutionaries. Chapter 2, ‘We Were Young Men with Warm Hearts,’ turns to experiences within the army. The youth of enlisted soldiers and junior officers proved