Prof: So today,
as you can see on the syllabus,
the lecture is titled
"Organizing a War"--
and on this past Thursday,
I talked about the opening
phases of what basically--
as I described it--is a civil
war.
 
I talked about opening
hostilities,
including Lexington and
Concord, and I showed how even
with these opening hostilities,
still we could see how long it
took before independence was
actually declared.
Basically, launching a civil
war was not an easy decision,
or for a time at least,
even a logical one.
Nor was organizing and fighting
a civil war easy,
particularly for thirteen
colonies that were not used to
acting in unison.
 
And as we saw really early on
in the course,
the colonies tended to come
together for purposes of
self-defense when necessary,
and then when no longer
necessary they were definitely
not joined together in joint
cause past that point.
 
So the colonies and then states
did not naturally fall into a
union of some kind unless there
was danger at hand--
and often only when danger was
at hand.
Well, today what we're going to
be looking at is some of the
challenges facing these--
well, now they're states,
now that we've declared
independence--
thirteen states when they came
together in the opening phases
of this civil war for their
mutual defense.
And as we're going to see
during the lecture,
on the one hand,
given that togetherness was not
really their natural state of
being,
they did manage to accomplish
quite a bit convened in the
Continental Congress.
 
But on the other hand,
the process of organizing a war
did not end up being a very
efficient business in many ways,
and that's really going to be
the main subject of what I'm
going to talk about today.
 
And the experience of trying to
accomplish things with only a
weak Continental Congress acting
as the central organizational
body actually ended up
convincing some people down the
road that a stronger government
than that one was going to be
necessary when people were
trying to figure out a more
permanent form of government for
these newly independent states.
So one of the things I'll be
showing and talking about by the
end of the lecture is the ways
in which real life experiences
were convincing some people or
teaching some people--
even a better word--lessons
about governance in these new
states,
and about what they thought
worked and what they thought
didn't.
There was never great uniform
agreement,
but you'll see why some people
emerged from the Revolutionary
War effort thinking that
something stronger and more
centralized was necessary.
 
Okay.
 
So now let's turn to the
Continental Congress and how
they organized a war.
 
Now the effort really began in
earnest in May of 1775 when the
Second Continental Congress was
first sitting just after
Lexington and Concord,
because it was in May of 1775
that the Continental Congress
took direction of colonial
military resistance to the
British by creating the
Continental Army.
 
Now, I ended Thursday's lecture
with a quote by John Adams from
a letter that he wrote to
Abigail in which he was summing
up some of the challenges facing
Congress.
I'll repeat it here because
it's going to outline some of
the things that I'm--we will be
talking about in today's
lecture.
 
And what Adams wrote was:
"When 50 or 60 Men have a
Constitution to form for a great
Empire,
at the same Time that they have
a country of 1500 Miles extent
to fortify,
Millions to arm and train,
a Naval Power to begin,
an extensive Commerce to
regulate, numerous Tribes of
Indians to negotiate with,
a standing Army of Twenty seven
Thousand Men to raise pay,
victual, and officer,
I shall really pity those 50 or
60 men."
 
Okay.
 
So that's Adams writing to
Abigail basically saying,
'Oh, my God,
this is what we have in front
of us.
 
This will not be easy.'
 
And you can see in that quote
the scope of the task that
really did lie before the
Continental Congress:
figuring out how to govern the
thirteen states;
worrying about issues having to
do with commerce;
negotiating with Native
Americans;
and of course in war time--most
central of all given military
hostilities that were right at
hand--creating and supplying an
army.
 
And it's that latter task that
I'm going to focus on at the
moment.
 
I'm going to be looking at how
the Continental Congress created
and supplied the Continental
Army,
because in a lot of ways,
when you look at all of the
complications and controversies
surrounding the creation of the
Continental Army,
you get a great case study of
many of the problems that were
at the heart of any effort at
unity between the colonies and
then the states.
And not surprisingly,
as we're going to see down the
road in this course when we talk
more about the 1780s,
many of these problems
certainly did persist as
problems not only through the
Revolution,
but through the 1780s,
through the nation's first
decades,
and in some cases long
thereafter.
 
So in a sense,
you can look at the creation of
the Continental Army as a kind
of case study in some of the
problems involved with creating
an American union.
Now given what I've just said
about problems inherent in
creating a union,
it's not surprising that one of
the first problems to present
itself,
as far as the Continental Army
is concerned,
was regionalism.
 
I'm going to talk in a moment
about localism,
but for now I'm going to talk
about regionalism.
You might think that in a
moment of crisis,
regionalism might entirely fall
by the wayside,
and I suppose in some ways it
did, but definitely not
completely and,
as I'm going to talk about in a
moment,
you can see this particularly
when you talk about the issue of
who's going to command the
Continental Army.
 
I remember when I was first
working on my book,
which is about politics in the
1790s,
and I thought --without looking
into it very much--
that what I was going to find
when I started looking at
letters from the period was that
there'd be this little honeymoon
nationalism moment where
everyone thought:
'well,
we just created a Constitution
and we're not sure about it,
but let's hang in there and be
national together,
and let's not really focus on
regionalism for just a little
while.'
And that maybe there'd be this
little honeymoon moment and then
that might sort of wane and then
people would get more back into
their entrenched sort of
regional outlooks.
And what I found is that no,
there wasn't a honeymoon
nationalism moment.
 
[laughs]
It just--It never happened--
that even as soon as the
national government is launched
in the 1790s,
even when people have decided
to commit,
at least for the present,
to this new Constitution,
they were still thinking about:
Southerners,
'I don't know if we trust the
Northerners'--
Northerners,
'I don't know if I trust the
Southerners.'
I remember finding a letter
from one Southerner to another
Southerner from the first year
or two that the government was
in existence,
and the one Southerner says to
the other,
'I think we should try as hard
as we can to get as many young
men in clerkships in this new
government as possible,
because they're going to
gradually be promoted into
higher offices,
and sooner or later Southern
men will be in control of most
of the national offices,
which is much better than being
governed by a bunch of arrogant
Northerners.'
Okay.
 
This is the like--the
government hasn't even been in
existence yet for two years,
and already people are like,
'I don't know about that
other--
those Northerners.'
 
So it doesn't--it waxes and
wanes;
it doesn't go away,
and so it's not surprising,
given that, that it pops up
right at the outset of the whole
revolutionary enterprise,
particularly when people were
thinking about a
commander-in-chief of the
Continental Army.
 
Now obviously,
in and of itself it's an
important decision.
 
You want the right man for that
job, but it was complicated by
regional concerns.
 
Basically, many New Englanders
felt that since,
during this early period of the
war,
most of the military action was
happening in New England--
basically all the hostilities
we've been talking about much of
it certainly is going on in New
England--
that a New Englander would be
the logical choice to lead the
Army.
 
And some people even had the
sneaking suspicion that maybe
New Englanders wouldn't be
willing to fight under anybody
else.
 
People thought about the way
that the New England militia
operated as units.
 
One of the striking things
about the New England militia
was that they actually elected
their officers.
Right?
 
They--It wasn't like someone
was sort of enforced upon them
as an officer.
 
Militia units elected their own
officers--
so, given that,
the thought was,
given that kind of military
culture,
having a Southerner thrust upon
them might not be welcomed with
open arms by New England troops.
 
On a much more minor note,
complicating matters was that--
not only did some people think
a New Englander made the most
sense,
but also John Hancock and some
of his friends actually thought
that he was the guy who should
be commander-in-chief.
 
They had pretty much already
decided: John Hancock,
he's the man,
just a matter of time before he
gets nominated and made
commander-in-chief of the army.
So for a variety of reasons
some people thought maybe a
Southerner would not work as
commander-in-chief,
but on the other hand there
were other people who felt just
the opposite,
who actually thought that
because a lot of what had been
happening so far had been going
on in New England,
that New Englanders had been
doing a lot of the fighting,
all the more reason to promote
unity among the colonies by
finding someone who wasn't a New
Englander,
by finding a Southerner to be
commander-in-chief and suggest
that this was a joint
continental effort and not some
New England war.
And this kind of logic,
this kind of wondering about
how do you balance out
positions,
officerships,
cabinet offices,
diplomatic posts--
this goes on and on and on
throughout this period.
 
The people are always very
concerned--whether you're
talking about military positions
or whether you're talking about
civil positions.
 
Even Presidents had the same
problem.
Washington certainly has it
throughout the war as
commander-in-chief--
with this constant concern
about trying to balance things
out regionally,
not just oh,
because it would seem fair,
but actually if you think about
the fact that a union--
whether you're talking about
the 1770s,
the 1780s or the 1790s--if you
think about the fact that
whatever kind of union you have,
it's pretty weak,
if you actually don't think
about things like balancing
between regions and different
positions of responsibility and
authority,
the fear was that maybe parts
of the union that didn't feel
included and didn't feel
represented might actually just
pull out of the union.
And throughout this period,
actually later than one would
think,
that was a constant
threat--that sections of the
union would threaten to pull out
because they felt that they
weren't really being included as
important members.
 
Sort of again and again at key
moments,
there's a little sort of threat
of secession that raises its
head and then is sort of shoved
back down until finally it
raises its head and is not
shoved back down,
but certainly that was a
logical fear.
And so wondering about balance
was a problem for anyone who was
in any position of authority or
command throughout this period,
so in the case of the army,
commander-in-chief,
obviously this is a big and
typical kind of a decision.
So some favor Hancock.
 
Others favored a Virginian
named George Washington.
We've already seen Washington
did have military experience as
an officer fighting during the
French and Indian War.
He made a few choices that
perhaps were not the best.
However, he was someone who did
have extensive military
experience fighting alongside or
as part of the British army.
He also was a person--He really
did kind of have a commanding
presence.
 
He was someone who seemed like
he ought to be a military
leader.
 
A couple--Gosh.
 
Probably a couple years ago,
I was giving a talk at Mount
Vernon and they have a new sort
of museum education center at
Mount Vernon which is actually
really big,
really impressive--and one of
the things that they did,
was they created three
life-scale exact models of
George Washington at sort of key
moments.
So you have Washington as a
surveyor,
Washington during the
Revolution, Washington taking
the oath of office as President,
and they literally measured his
skull and did whatever they had
to do to make it like,
exact George Washington.
 
So I'm the historian.
 
I'm giving the talk.
 
I'm like, 'oh,
I have a little bit of time
before the talk,
I'll go wander around the
visitor center'--
and I see--you know--there's
Washington surveyor,
huh, well, who would have
thought I would have seen--
there he is,
it's kind of realistic looking.
 
And then I wander into the
revolution room and--Okay.
So however long I've been
studying this period,
you see a bazillion times
people will say,
"The man was an impressive
figure on a horse."
Everyone finds a way of saying
that, "My,
he was an impressive figure on
a horse, up on that white horse.
What a man."
 
One way or another,
everyone's sort of,
'oh, oh, oh'--and I thought
yeah, yeah, okay,
I know this,
impressive, impressive figure
on a horse.
 
So I walk into this room and
there's [laughs]
Washington on the horse,
and without even thinking I
said, "Wow,
he's an impressive figure."
[laughter]
I was like okay,
it must be true.
 
[laughter]
I couldn't help myself.
He was--like, really impressive.
 
So he looked like someone who
ought to be in command.
Another useful thing about
George Washington--You'll see
it's a little complicated,
but he didn't seem ambitious.
Right?
 
One of the overriding
assumptions of politics at this
time is,
if you really are openly power
hungry,
if you really are very openly
ambitious,
you're the exact person who
should not be given power,
particularly if you're looking
at a republic or a confederation
or some kind of a form of
government that's weak or shaky
or new.
The thought is you get a
power-hungry person and you give
that person power,
they're very likely to become a
tyrant or a despot and then
basically seize control of the
government and then
"poof,"
everything is gone and now you
just have a despotism,
so you don't want to give
ambitious people power.
And George Washington,
though he did have any number
of talents and skills,
and though he was certainly
ambitious,
as you'll see in a moment,
he wasn't the kind of guy who
seemed to be pulling for power.
He wasn't the sort of guy who
was campaigning for himself.
He wasn't the sort of guy who
was sort of pushing himself into
situations.
 
He really had kind of a modest
demeanor in how he presented
himself when up for some kind of
an office.
And a great example of that is
what happens when he shows up to
the Continental Congress--
and he's named a delegate to
the Continental Congress,
and he shows up,
and he shows up in his military
uniform.
Okay.
 
He's the only guy in a military
uniform.
Right?
 
He shows up like:
'hi, I'm George Washington,
guy in a uniform.
 
Think George,
think command,
think--He'll--He's not saying
anything.
He's not campaigning,
but he's definitely putting the
idea out there like:
'I'm a military guy and you're
looking for one right now,
and here I am in my uniform
waiting [laughter]
for you to notice me.'
So it was a sort of skillful
play on his part to just sort of
plant the subliminal message in
everyone's mind--
so surely he wanted to be
commander-in-chief.
And it ends up being Adams who
nominates Washington for the
position of commander-in-chief,
which really,
really irked John Hancock,
who thought that,
as a Massachusetts man,
when Adams starts talking,
that obviously Adams must be
talking about him.
So before Adams says
Washington's name,
sort of Hancock's like:
'ha, indeed that's me,
I deserve this post.'
 
And Adams actually later
recalls this.
He says he stood up to nominate
Washington.
He says that Washington,
who was sitting near the door
of the room,
quote, "As soon as he
heard me allude to him,
from his usual modesty,
darted into the
library-room."
Okay.
 
So Adams stands up and says,
'I want to talk about commander
in chief' and Washington goes
"boom,"
out of the room,
[laughs]
not that anyone will notice.
 
It's like, 'no,
no, no, I don't want to be in
the room.'
 
So Adams presents his reasons
as to why he thinks this
particular unnamed person would
be good for the post of
commander-in-chief.
 
Hancock thinks clearly that
Adams is talking about him.
Adams says,
"Mr. Hancock,--who was
our President...
 
"--he's presiding over the
Continental Congress--
"heard me with visible
pleasure,"
until "I came to describe
Washington for the commander,
I never remarked a more sudden
and striking change of
countenance.
 
Mortification and resentment
were expressed as forcibly as
his face could exhibit
them."
Okay.
 
That's a really sort of nice
little moment there.
Hancock was not pleased.
 
However, Washington was
appointed commander--in-chief of
the Continental Army,
June 15,1775.
Now he may have been a good
person for this job.
This is not to say he didn't
have regional prejudices of his
own, and I think early in the
course I quoted him about New
Englanders.
 
Did I do that?
 
Student: Yeah..
 
Prof: Okay.
 
I thought so.
 
That's--That quote actually
comes from this moment in the
course.
 
That quote comes from when
Washington first goes up to New
England to take his position as
commander-in-chief and meet this
New England army that he's been
made commander of,
and his response to looking at
the army is what I quoted
before: "New Englanders are
an exceeding dirty and nasty
people."
 
Okay.
 
That's George Washington,
father of our country,
commander of the Continental
Army, on the army that he has
just inherited.
 
So he's not exactly thrilled.
 
He doesn't--He hasn't
necessarily commanded men like
this before,
and he's also a little--I don't
even know what the right word
is--
befuddled, struck,
by the mood or the way in which
these troops conduct themselves.
 
As I mentioned before,
New England is like a town
meeting government kind of a
place, and they're electing
their officers in their military
units.
To Washington,
this--he just--this did not
make sense, electing an officer?
 
What kind of authority does an
elected officer have?
He didn't like the idea.
 
It was pretty foreign as far as
military thinking goes to
Washington,
and he wasn't entirely sure
that he could actually tell the
officers apart from the common
soldiers,
which is probably true if
they're electing people from
their midst.
So Washington definitely saw
New Englanders as unfamiliar,
to say the least,
when he took command of the
Army--again, regionalism.
 
Regionalism was also apparent
in just the mere appearance of
the soldiers.
 
They came from ultimately
different parts of the
confederation.
 
Some of them were
striking-looking people who came
from the frontier,
frontier riflemen from Virginia
and I think Pennsylvania as
well.
These were guys who were
dressed in hunting shirts.
They didn't have formal
uniforms.
They didn't carry muskets,
but instead they carried
rifles, which were--seemed to be
sharp shooting--sharper
shooting, I guess,
than a musket was.
Some of them carried tomahawks
and they were very proud of
their shooting skills.
 
They were kind of a wild bunch.
 
There is a rather eccentric
American general who will come
up again in the course.
 
His name is Charles Lee,
and he always referred to the
riflemen, quote,
as "that damned
riffraff."
 
He just thought they were these
wild and crazy guys from out on
the frontier armed with rifles
so--
and Lee I should note--I'll
mention Lee again later.
Lee--He's--Everyone describes
him as eccentric.
Even Lee describes himself as
eccentric,
but maybe one of the more
eccentric things about Charles
Lee was that he had a pack of
dogs that he loved and that
followed him everywhere he went,
everywhere he went.
If he went into a lady's
parlor, he had six dogs.
If he went into a lady's
private chamber,
apparently, he had six
dogs--[laughter]
so this was not particularly
popular with the female kind.
He's an eccentric individual
for a variety of reasons--and he
ends up having a bad,
bad moment during the
Revolution, which we'll come to.
 
But anyway, so Charles--if
Charles Lee is calling people a
damned riffraff [laughs],
that actually says something.
So anyway, the riflemen were
kind of a wild crew.
They saw themselves as the
elite of the army because of
their shooting skills.
 
They actually spent some time
sort of taking potshots at
British officers on the line
until the British officers
realized that there were these
kind of crazy riflemen taking
shots at them,
and it would be good not to be
out in the open anymore.
 
They also just liked shooting
off their guns for fun.
Ammunition supplies were very
low and this was not a good
idea.
 
I'll come back to this in a
minute, but they were a little
bit wild.
 
And they did not necessarily
like to be disciplined,
so for example in one instance
there was one Virginia rifleman
who was arrested for not
listening to orders and other
riflemen stormed the jail and
freed him.
Okay.
 
This is not intense military
discipline taking place here at
this time,
and of course on the other hand
you couldn't give all kinds of
privileges to the riflemen
because then all the other
troops would say,
'Well, why are those guys
getting treated special,
like they're better than us?'
 
So the army is kind of a
conglomeration of different
kinds of people,
different places,
even different uniforms,
not just different behavior.
So you can see just in the
matter of managing an army,
regionalism can add
complications and problems.
It's also a problem in a
slightly different form,
and I'm going to call it
localism because I mean it in a
slightly different way than I
mean regionalism.
And what I mean by localism is,
people often tended to think of
their own locality first and
foremost rather necessarily than
of the good of the entire
American cause.
So people thought about
wherever they were from first
and foremost--
and along similar lines,
they were distrustful about
surrendering local authority to
any kind of a centralized
authority.
Now in the Continental Army,
obviously this is going to make
it extremely complicated to
gather together one united armed
force.
 
Every state had its own militia.
 
State legislatures wanted to
stay in control of their own
militias.
 
Some of these militias stayed
separate from the Continental
Army.
 
They certainly didn't want to
surrender control of their own
military defense to some kind of
central organization that
wouldn't necessarily put their
interests first.
So the very idea of combining
some of these militias into one
big united one,
in a sense--the Continental
Army--was controversial.
 
And at the start of the war in
many ways,
the army was kind of a
collection of separate little
military delegations,
just like the Continental
Congress in some ways was a
collection of separate little
state delegations.
 
This same fear about
surrendering local control and
about protecting local interests
made it extremely difficult for
the Continental Congress to
organize and orchestrate the war
effort because as a body the
Continental Congress had
virtually no power of
enforcement.
It could advise the states.
 
It could ask them for things.
 
It could make recommendations.
 
It could not order a state to
do something and then enforce
that order.
 
It had no real power of
enforcement.
And this came to be a
particularly big problem when it
came to supplying the army.
 
Given that the states didn't
rush forward to supply soldiers
from other states,
supplying the Continental Army
in any kind of a reliable way
sometimes was virtually
impossible.
 
So whatever the Congress tried
to do in the way of making
requests or making
recommendations about supplies--
like we recommend that each
state provide X pounds of food
and X number of blankets for the
use of the Continental Army--
you just absolutely couldn't
tell, on the reality level,
what would happen as a result
of that kind of an order.
And this was a big problem,
because there was an enormous
supply shortage in the
Continental Army as well as in
the local militias.
 
The scale of supplies required
by this army was huge.
So for example,
during three months--
December of 1777 and January
and February of 1778--
so during a three-month period,
the army ate more than two
million pounds of beef,
two million pounds of flour,
and their horses ate two
million tons of hay.
Okay.
 
That's a lot of supplies,
particularly if you have no
really organized way to get it.
 
And Americans started the war
deficient in almost every
necessity: guns,
ammunition, flint,
artillery, steel for bayonets,
clothing, tents,
blankets.
 
The solution obviously would be
for the Continental Congress to
organize some kind of a central
supply system,
which they tried to do,
but again, without being able
to enforce things,
that was not a very effective
way to proceed.
 
This wasn't all Congress's
fault.
Congress wasn't very good at
the implementation.
The actual shortage of
supplies, ironically enough,
in part, was caused by the fact
that British imports were no
longer being taken--
right?--in the colonies and the
states so that we--
the states had been so busy
saying,
'No, we do not want those evil
British imported goods.'
 
Now they're like.
 
'uh oh, [laughs],
we kind of might have been able
to use some of that stuff now
that we're actually fighting the
British.'
 
So in time they--when the
states began to encourage other
countries to bring imported
goods,
this became a little bit less
extreme,
but that is sort of a weird,
ironic problem that arose when
the war broke out.
 
In the meantime,
there were some American
soldiers fighting with spears,
fighting with tomahawks.
Benjamin Franklin apparently
thought that bows and arrows
might be a really good idea,
and he was serious--and he
calculated.
 
Okay. He's a calculating guy.
 
You remember he's the guy who
backed away from George
Whitefield to see how far--Okay.
 
So he's calculating again,
and he calculated this time
that you could--
a single soldier could shoot
off four arrows in the time that
it took him to load and fire his
gun,
so that maybe it's even a great
idea to have the soldiers
fighting with bows and arrows.
That didn't necessarily go very
far but he was thinking about
it.
 
As long as the states were so
wary about surrendering control
to Congress,
supplies really were a
seemingly insurmountable
problem,
and there are actually stories
of Washington's aides literally
going farmhouse to farmhouse and
knocking on doors to ask people
for blankets and supplies and
wagons and whatever they could
get.
 
Literally, the army sometimes
was reduced to that level.
Given that kind of problem,
it makes sense that the
experience of fighting the war
convinced many people that there
did need to be something
stronger,
something more centralized at
the center of whatever kind of
confederation was forming.
 
And particularly people who
were at military headquarters
with Washington,
which includes Alexander
Hamilton, since they were the
guys who were seeing problems
with supplies and how Congress
couldn't seem to do anything
forcefully and efficiently--
it's not surprising that many
of those people ended up being
really strong nationalists who
really wanted a stronger
centralized government.
Hamilton, frustrated at
headquarters,
just seeing what he saw as this
sort of amazing,
potentially deadly inefficiency
of the Continental Congress,
really early in the war,
he is already coming forward
and saying,
'We need a stronger centralized
power;
we need a stronger centralized
power,' even before anyone is
really thinking about what kind
of government comes later.
 
Hamilton's sort of already out
there pounding away,
and it's partly based on his
real life experience of what
it's like to try and be governed
by the Continental Army while
being in the army during a time
of war.
So this is basically an
interesting and important point.
It'll come up again towards the
end of the course,
but basically there were real
life experiences behind people's
theoretical ideas about what
kind of government would be
desirable for the new American
nation.
When we get to the part of the
course where we're talking about
the Constitution and different
ideas and sort of what led up to
it and why people thought one
thing or thought another thing,
some of those ideas are not
sort of highfalutin',
sort of detached 'thoughts
about federalism,' but they're
actually based on real life
experiences and real lessons and
people looking at what has been
happening and then drawing
conclusions and coming to
different conclusions--
but still, drawing conclusions,
based on what they've just
experienced,
about what should be happening
next.
 
Okay.
 
So basically centralized
coordination,
scary thing for the states--not
good news for organizing a
continental army;
neither was the complete lack
of a precedent for what the
Congress was doing in organizing
this war--
if you think about Great
Britain, think about all of the
sophisticated administrative
machinery that they would have
had there for conducting a war,
and then think about the
American states that have really
nothing in place.
 
They're really starting from
scratch,
and the people in Congress who
were responsible for organizing
the army were not men with vast
military experience.
Of the roughly sixty-five
congressmen that were in
attendance in 1775 and 1776,
only five had served with the
British during the French and
Indian War;
only one of these five had real
experience in supplies and that
experience dated back to 1759;
none really had experience with
medical matters in a time of
war;
only two had any medical
training and they were not on
the medical committee,
so bureaucracy even at an early
point.
 
[laughs]
'Let's take the two medical
guys and put them on the grain
committee.'
Well, I don't know.
 
So basically,
you have a bunch of people here
who are trying to figure out
from scratch how to create a
coordinated army effort.
 
By 1778, Congress began to try
to improve its administrative
structure and it did begin to
create boards of war and boards
of admiralty,
but even once they started to
have an organized administrative
force,
habits of individual
congressmen were unpredictable.
There wasn't even a way to
enforce attendance to the
Continental Congress--
and again, sometimes
Continental Congressmen thought
that what was happening at home
demanded their attention more
than whatever was going on with
the Continental Congress,
so they just didn't show up--to
the point that in April of 1778,
Congress actually circulated a
written statement that was
titled "Engagement of
Members to Meet
Punctually."
Okay.
 
They actually published a
little reminder saying:
'we really need you guys to
come [laughs]
to the Congress.
 
We're kind of having a war and
bad things are happening.
We really--We'd like you to be
here so you can actually do
things.'
 
Even just attendance sometimes
could be a problem,
and that really didn't
accomplish very much.
As one historian wrote,
Congress was "too
inefficient to correct its own
inefficiency."
That's not good.
 
Okay.
 
So obviously things are
somewhat unpredictable,
occasionally random,
and this made congressional
control and organization a
problem throughout the war--
and it wasn't just congressmen
who were inexperienced with this
kind of issue and were having
problems with the whole question
of supplies.
 
Supply issues were complicated
by the behavior of soldiers,
many of whom for the most part
had not ever been soldiers
before,
so they're also not following
any precedent.
 
It's not like they're a trained
military force--
and many of them were often far
more interested in protecting
their locality than in anything
else,
and their behavior in battle
when far from home was sometimes
not ideal.
 
Also, because they were not
always sure of what they were
doing they were not very careful
with the supplies that they were
given.
 
Like the riflemen.,
they fired off their guns for
fun.
 
They sold sometimes their
clothes and ammunition if they
needed cash.
 
When they were beating a hasty
retreat, they tended to just
throw anything that was heavy
and getting in their way on the
ground as they ran.
 
One soldier who returned to a
place where the army--
the Continental Army had just
retreated said "the ground
was literally covered with arms,
knapsacks, staves,
coats, hats,
and old oil flasks."
These people--They just dropped
things and ran,
and left them on the field.
 
So there's no precedent on so
many levels for what we're
talking about here.
 
There was no precedent for an
organized Continental Army,
there was no precedent for an
organized Continental Army
administration,
so troops had to learn how to
behave like an army while
already fighting a war--
which leads to another problem
at the start of the war,
and that is the problem of what
certainly one or two European
visitors saw as the attitude of
the American troops.
In part, as I just suggested,
many soldiers were just
ignorant about military
operations, about how an army
was supposed to be organized.
 
They hadn't been soldiers.
 
They didn't know how an army
was supposed to work.
They had to be trained from
scratch.
Now Baron von Steuben was a
foreign volunteer that arrived
in the states in 1777.
 
Specifically,
he was given the task of
training the Continental Army.
 
He was someone who had
experience with European armies.
He was given the task of
training the American troops.
Steuben didn't speak a lot of
English when he first came here.
He actually was much better in
French and German,
and so according to people at
the time,
when he was training the
troops, he cursed in three
different languages at the same
time,
[laughs]
English, French and German,
and I guess he cursed a lot.
 
I think he was probably a
little surprised by what the
troops could not do.
 
Supposedly, Steuben and others
who were trying to train the
troops discovered among other
things that it was very hard to
teach the people to march
because they didn't always
consistently know left foot and
right foot.
Right?
 
If that's something you hadn't
thought about before,
I suppose you're not thinking
about it as you're walking.
So--And I'm such a city slicker
here that I don't know the
difference, and I always--every
year when I say this,
I count on someone in the
class.
Maybe one of you will know and
can sort of interpret this for
me.
 
Supposedly, or at least
anecdotally,
one of the things that they did
to train these troops was they
tied hay on one foot and straw
on the other foot and said,
'hay foot, straw foot,
hay foot, straw foot,' and that
was the way that people were
initially taught to march.
Now of course city slicker me:
What is the difference between
hay and straw?
 
[laughter] I would be bad.
 
I would be even worse.
 
I would be not knowing how to
march in the Continental Army
because I wouldn't know which
was my hay foot.
Does anyone here know the
difference between hay and
straw?
 
Oh, yes.
 
Student: I'm a farm kid.
 
Straw is just--It's pretty much
just like the stem of the wheat.
It's all pretty much throwaway
stuff used for bedding.
Hay actually has grass and
alfalfa--food for animals in it.
Prof: Okay.
 
So straw is the--just the stem
of the wheat and hay --
Student: Straw is all
throwaway stuff.
Hay has actual food mixed in
with it.
Prof: Hay has actual
food mixed in.
Thank you very much.
 
I knew there had to be [laughs]
someone who knows something
about a farm.
 
Thank you very much.
 
I greatly appreciate that.
 
Okay.
 
I'm writing it down for next
time I talk about this.
Okay.
 
I have it written down now.
 
I have my fact for the day that
I learned.
Thank you very much.
 
Now von Steuben is one of the
people who looked at the
Continental soldiers and
commented on what he took to be
a particularly American
attitude.
Supposedly, what Steuben said
was,
in the Prussian army,
officers said to a soldier
"'Do this,' and he doeth
it: but I am obliged to say...
'This is the reason why you
ought to do that;'
and then he does it."
 
The Americans are operating in
a slightly different way from
what he considers a traditional
European army's behavior.
Basically, Americans didn't
always respond well to orders.
They wanted to take part in
decisions.
They wanted their opinions to
be represented.
Obviously, this kind of
political sensibility could
present problems if you're
trying to command men in an
army.
 
It also created problems with
terms of enlistment.
Soldiers tended to sign on for
one year at a time and when the
year was over,
they just often went home.
They were in the army by
choice, and they felt that they
basically had no need to listen
to any kind of higher command
telling them to stay.
 
We'll see a little bit later in
a future lecture Washington
literally pleading with the men:
'Please don't go home.
I know you can go home.
 
Please don't go home.
 
Please stay just a little bit
longer.'
So for example,
at the end of 1775,
a big chunk of the army just
packed up and went home--
so America essentially changed
armies at the beginning of 1776,
found new men,
enlisted them for another
one-year term,
and it was assumed that at the
end of another year the same
thing would happen again.
It took a while before Congress
agreed to try and regulate and
lengthen terms of enlistment.
 
There was a similar problem
involved with social rank and
military rank.
 
I've already mentioned very
early in the course that social
rank,
hierarchy in the colonies,
was a little bit more slippery
than in England,
so that while there certainly
was an elite in the colonies and
the states,
there wasn't a sort of
entrenched to-the-manor-born
aristocratic class,
as there would have been in
England,
and the difference between a
gentleman and a more common man
could sometimes be hard to tell.
 
Well, Washington wanted
gentlemen to serve as commanding
officers.
 
Basically, he wanted to use
social rank to enforce military
rank,
thinking that if you respected
someone as your social superior
you'd probably respect him as
your military superior.
 
As Washington put it,
"the true criterion"
of judgment about who should be
an officer "when past
services do not enter into the
competition,
is, whether the candidate for
office has a just pretension to
the character of a gentleman,
a proper sense of honor,
and some reputation to
lose."
Right?
 
If he has some reputation to
lose, he's going to worry about
losing it, so there's a logic
for having an officer.
Now this may sound logical by
eighteenth-century terms--
this kind of logic--but it
often presented a problem,
because sometimes there really
wasn't all that much separating
socially--
as far as rank is
concerned--officers from
non-officers.
And again, think about the New
Englanders promoting people from
within their own.
 
Sometimes there wasn't really
much of a social rank
differentiating officers at all.
 
There's one historian who
argues that one of the reasons
why there was dueling prevalent
among some of the younger
officers in the Continental Army
was because they were actually
dueling to prove that they could
duel,
which meant that they were
actually gentlemen,
or of the gentleman class,
which meant they were actually
better than some of the men they
were commanding who were pretty
much their equals.
 
So dueling was a way for these
young officers to sort of prove
that they deserved to be elite.
 
So we're talking about kind of
a fuzzy line here that was not
helpful for Washington in trying
to figure out how to get
discipline and order in the
army.
This is certainly not something
that you would have found in the
British or French army where
social rank and military rank
was much more defined and
established,
and it's one of the reasons why
Europeans came to America to
fight during the American
Revolution.
Some of them came because they
were inspired by the cause.
Some of them came because they
would not have been able to
promote themselves in the
British or French Army or some
other army,
but in the Continental Army
they were Europeans;
they seemed sophisticated;
they seemed to have experience.
 
They could go to the
Continental Army,
say that they would fight for
the cause if they were given a
commission as an officer,
and they'd be given one.
And this was enormously
demoralizing for some of the
Continental Army officers who
were not being promoted.
They watched these people come
in from other countries and be
promoted above them.
 
Alexander Hamilton said it gave
him "pygmy feelings,"
this idea that these foreigners
could come in because they were
supposedly better than us and
then get promoted over us,
and we were just a bunch of
rustic boobs and we didn't get
promoted as quickly as they did.
 
So some people from foreign
countries were actually taking
advantage of the sort of
ambiguity in the states at the
time.
 
Okay.
 
So looking at the process of
organizing a war,
we've seen regionalism and
localism in action working
against centralized control and
organization;
we've seen complications of
social rank and the sort of
individualism of the troops,
making it hard again to
organize and command;
and overall we've seen a
Congress that all in all doesn't
have that much power,
really struggling to exert some
kind of centralized control over
a continental war effort.
 
So in essence,
the things that were
complicating unity between the
colonies and then the states are
the same things logically that
are going to complicate and
confuse efforts to create some
kind of continental war effort.
We'll see this continuing in a
different way in the 1780s.
Now we've been looking at--I
want to just take a few minutes
here.
 
We've been looking at some of
the realities of the Continental
Army.
 
I brought in a handout partly
because I'm very low tech so I
didn't bring a computer--
but partly because I actually
really wanted you to hold this
in your hands,
and while it's being passed out
I'll talk about what it is
before you get your hands on it.
 
It's actually a newspaper,
a Connecticut newspaper from
July 8,1776.
 
It's the entire newspaper,
as you will see.
It's a little bit smaller than
it would have been but not
tremendously smaller than it
would have been.
But as you'll see,
it's called The Weekly
so it came out once a week.
 
It is four pages long.
 
I'll wait as it sort of gets
passed out here.
This particular one is The
Connecticut Courant.
It was printed in Hartford
and as I mentioned the date:
July 8,1776.
 
So as you're getting it
you--you'll notice--you look at
the front page.
 
Let me get my copy here.
 
You can see that it contains
"the freshest advices,
both foreign and
domestic."
Okay. News, fresh news.
 
And one of the first things
that you'll see on the front
page in the left-hand column is
"persons that are being
held up to public view as
enemies to their country"--
right off the cuff.
 
These are probably people who
maybe were treating with
Loyalists or supplying the enemy
army or denouncing the local
congress.
 
Who knows what they were doing,
but whatever they were doing it
was bad and they're being
publicly shamed on the front
page of this newspaper.
 
And it suggests--It says
"confession one
dollar,"
which suggests that you could
step forward and confess and
apologize and pay a dollar--
sort of, 'okay,
I won't do it again.'
I can't say I've seen any
confession,
but certainly many,
many issues of this paper when
I was looking through them
contained that column with more
people being publicly shamed.
 
Okay.
 
So if you look at the paper,
you could see right off the
cuff you have something being
reprinted from a Pennsylvania
newspaper.
 
It actually is a declaration.
 
Someone's ranting about the
British and then goes on to say,
'Why doesn't the Continental
Congress reward any British
officer who deserts the British
army by giving him land here?'
What a great idea.
 
We'll get them to desert by
promising them land and then
they'll come over to our side--
and you can see they have
different amounts of acres that
they're proposing,
so it's like a little plan.
 
I can't say it goes anywhere
but it is an interesting little
plan.
 
You can see next that there's
news from London dated March 21.
Okay.
 
We're July 8,
so there are several things in
this paper that are a reminder
of how slow news traveled
particularly from overseas back
to the states and the colonies.
This is actually a debate in
Parliament about the death of an
American general,
General Montgomery,
which moves in to being a
debate about the rebels,
and you can see capital
letters, "rebel,"
"rebel,"
"rebellion,"
sort of throughout that column.
 
Then we've got news from
Williamsburg.
On the bottom there on the
third column,
we've got a couple little
advertisements for a political
pamphlet and cash needed for old
cloths--
basically, so the printing
press folk can clean off the
presses.
 
One of the things you'll notice
is that it's sort of random news
often printed from other
newspapers.
There on the top of the second
page from North Carolina,
you actually could see that
North Carolina is instructing
its delegates in the Continental
Congress that they would be able
to declare independence.
 
There's kind of a major
statement, "boom,"
right there,
sort of by itself,
no commentary.
 
You can see one thing
actually--We're running out of
time, but one of the things you
will not see--July 8,1776--is
the Declaration of Independence.
 
It has not gotten here yet in
time to be printed,
and it's actually not until the
next edition,
on the 15^(th) of July that you
see the Declaration of
Independence actually get
printed in this newspaper.
No commentary,
just sort of like that little
North Carolina declaration,
just "boom,"
they just sort of print it.
 
It takes up about two columns,
and that's it.
This paper is typical of many
in that it would start out
having typically,
I suppose--This one has it
mixed, but sometimes you have
international news and then
national news and then local
news and then on the back you'd
have advertisements,
and in a general way this paper
is kind of following that trend.
 
Let's see if there's anything
else I want to point out.
You'll see on the third page
we've got news from Hartford,
so it's become local by the
third page.
You'll see on the third column
there "deserted from
Colonel John Ward's
regiment,"
one Tillson Mills it looks
like--
Miller--I'm sorry--a drummer.
 
He is about 30 years old,
5 foot 6 inches high,
has a peaked chin "and
something of a guilty
look."
 
[laughter]
I love that description.
You'll see that throughout this
column and the last page there
are a couple listings about
deserters, people looking for
deserters.
 
You'll see someone--Where is he?
 
Well, maybe he's on the third
page.
Roger--On the third column on
the third page,
Roger March of Litchfield
opposed and spoke against the
measures of Congress.
 
He's probably going to be enemy
to our country in the first
column of the first page in the
next edition of this newspaper.
So basically I--I'm--I've
handed this to you just so that
you could get a sense of what a
typical newspaper would have
looked like--
what you would have seen if you
were in Hartford,
Connecticut, on July 8,1776.
This would have been what was
at your disposal for whatever
was happening in Connecticut,
for whatever was happening
throughout the states,
for whatever was happening
overseas.
 
Some of that overseas news goes
back to March.
But this is how people are
learning about whatever is
happening in that entire war
effort.
It's haphazard,
it's kind of random,
it's slow, and it's often
unreliable--
so again it's kind of a
dramatic reminder about some of
the realities of engaging in a
war in a period when even
communication is complicated and
difficult.
I will stop there because we
are out of time.
On Thursday will be the midterm
here.
Blue books will be here and
ready for you,
and all will be okay.
 
I'm saying calming midterm
things.
It will all be good.
 
 
 
