1775 (31 page)

The American rebels of 1775, unlike most other popular revolutionaries before or since, enjoyed the rare benefit of beginning their war in control of the local armed forces, the colonial militias.
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To be sure, during the year or so before April 19, that achievement required foresight, purging, and strong-arming. “The colonial militia did not simply slide into the Revolution,”
according to military historian John Shy. “Military officers, even where they were elected, held royal commissions, and a significant number of them were not enthusiastic about rebellion. Purging and restructuring the militia was an important step toward revolution, one that deserves more attention than it has received.”
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The Massachusetts Provincial Congress had acted, even before the First Continental Congress announced its Association in October 1774, to specify that local committees be set up to enforce its provisions. “The Association,” argued Shy, was the vital link in transforming the colonial militia into a revolutionary organization…even where the Association encountered heavy opposition, it effectively dissolved the old military structure and created a new one based on consent, and whose chief purpose was to engineer consent, by force if necessary. The new Revolutionary militia might look very much like the old colonial militia, but it was, in its origins, less a draft board and a reserve training unit than a police force and an instrument of political surveillance.”
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The imprimatur of Congress made such organizations possible, and these multiple pressures forced Americans to commit themselves politically.

Shrewd Loyalists understood the significance of these early consolidations in areas they later sought to bring back under Crown control. After Britain’s partial reoccupation of South Carolina in 1780, James Simpson, the Loyalist-named attorney general, concluded that it was from “civil institutions”—the earlier restructuring of government—“that the rebels derive the whole of their strength.” Even many who had favored royal government were skeptical that it could be revived.
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To British military historian Piers Mackesy, “Behind this despair was the rebel militia…it was they who subverted royal government at the outset of the rebellion and secured control of the machinery of authority for the rebels; who stifled early threats of counter-revolution; who defended the civil institutions of the revolution throughout the war; and who restored Revolutionary control wherever the British and loyalists had temporarily overthrown it.”
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The internal police and surveillance function of the Revolutionary militia, visible from the Carolinas north to New England, is one that specialists have emphasized. In a related vein, the militia also fought in many small skirmishes and engagements—the so-called
petit-guerre
—too localized or minor for Continental armies. During the entire 1775–1783 period, for example, the militias participated on their own in 191 engagements in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, as opposed to the 485 times they
and the Continentals combined. However, specialists seem to agree that the internal security function was paramount.
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“One of the key contributions of the Whig militia,” said one, “was its successful suppression of the Tory element in the states. When the Tories threatened the control of the new Whig governments in the first three years of the war, the state governments turned to their militiamen to locate, apprehend or kill the Tories.”
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These few pages, more than others, will deliberately cite historians as the literary equivalent of expert witnesses. The pivotal long-term importance to the American Revolution of the civil and military committees, congresses, regiments, and associations set up in 1774–1775 is one of this book’s central arguments. So let military historians John Shy, Walter Millis, Piers Mackesy, and the others testify in their own words.

Mackesy, a recognized British military expert on the American Revolution, emphasizes that “the militia, in its role as an internal security force, enabled Washington to keep the Continental army together in the middle colonies and to detach as necessary to meet specific incursions.” American Walter Millis, in his classic
Arms and Men,
wrote that “repeatedly it was the militia which met the critical emergency or, in less formal operations, kept control of the country, cut off foragers, captured British agents, intimidated the war weary and disaffected or tarred and feathered the notorious Tories. The patriots’ success in infiltrating and capturing the old militia organizations by expelling and replacing officers of Tory sympathies, was perhaps as important to the outcome as any of their purely political achievements.”
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In short, purging, politicizing, and deploying a powerful internal security force was a critical 1774–1775 achievement with enormous consequences. John Shy’s summary is comprehensive: “Once established, the militia became the infrastructure of revolutionary government. It controlled its community, whether through indoctrination or intimidation; it provided on short notice large numbers of armed men for brief periods of emergency service; and it found and persuaded, drafted or bribed, the smaller number of men needed each year to keep the Continental army alive. After the first months of the war, popular enthusiasm and spontaneity could not have sustained the struggle; only a pervasive armed organization, in which almost everyone took some part, kept people constantly, year after year, at the hard task of revolution.”
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Luckily for the future United States, many British political leaders and generals began the war with a critical, even contemptuous view of the Americans, especially New England militiamen. Benjamin Franklin liked
to quote a General Clarke—assumed to be Thomas Clarke, King George’s military aide—boasting that with one thousand grenadiers he would cut through America “and geld all the Males, partly by force and partly by a little Coaxing.”
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Disdainful of the New England bounty seekers and draftees they saw in the Champlain-Hudson corridor during the 1757–1759 campaigns, few British generals comprehended the difference between those hired recruits and regular-serving Yankee militiamen. George Washington himself shared much of the skepticism, being appalled by some of the short-term enlistees he saw in June 1775 on taking command of the army besieging Boston. But despite his doubts about the reliability of militia in major battles—here his skepticism was appropriate—by late 1775 he was applauding Connecticut’s laws to restrain and punish Tories and others acting against the public interest. He specifically advised other provinces to follow Connecticut’s lead in assigning this responsibility to the militia. By the war’s end, he opined that “the Militia of this Country must be considered as the Palladium of our security, and the first effectual resort in case of hostility.”
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The militia was often harsh in its methods, more so than the regiments of the Continental Line. However, without that political and military backstop, the American Revolution would probably not have survived its many reverses.

F
or all that British policy makers of the early 1760s had hoped to keep colonial Americans dependent and confined east of the Appalachian crest, they could not. Ironically, British strategists failed to recognize the extent to which the newly populated frontiers and hinterlands also posed dilemmas for would-be rebel governments. Many new settlers were as hostile—or even more so—to their provinces’ coastal planters, Hudson Valley aristocrats, or staid Puritan Congregational church dignitaries as to any royal governor or far-off Parliament. Neither the hugeness nor the sentiment of the backcountry was well understood as war broke out.

By the late twentieth century, though, technology had enabled maps of America circa 1775 to present extraordinary detail on population distribution that, had it been possible to assemble and circulate at the time, would
have better informed Patriot leaders and London officialdom alike. The Crown had strategic opportunities that went uncomprehended. Indeed, the details of frontier settlement still surprise even the expert.

What
map 6
displays is straightforward. The light gray coloring shows the part of New England and New York already populated by 1760. Alongside, marked in dark gray, stretches the great expanse first settled during the 1760–1776 period. The upper swath of dark gray—the northern backcountry, along an arc from Maine to New York—added half again as much territory to the adjacent longer-settled regions. That affected, but did not hugely change, those provinces’ politics.

The larger southern backcountry, shown in
map 7
, was not much smaller than the sections of the four colonies already settled in 1760. As
map 7
shows, Virginia’s older core still dominated, but the sprawling new population in the fast-changing Carolinas and Georgia gave each royal governor some ground for hope. This is the more famous backcountry—the canebrakes, river bottomland, and baptismal creeks thronged in the aftermath of the French and Indian War by families and opportunity seekers alike. Over the same period, it also changed by a significant in-migration of a different nature: runaways, former convicts, ex-servants, and ne’er-do-wells from London stews, Bridewell cells, Philadelphia servants’ attics, debtors’ courts, and Irish bogs. Tens of thousands poured south along the Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia to Augusta, Georgia, shaping a 1775 backcountry soon to be further inflamed by rebellion and war.

The Great Expansion: 1760–1775

Watchers had been awed. On the first day in 1769 when it opened for business, the land office at Fort Pitt on the Forks of the Ohio had 2,790 applicants. Three hundred miles to the south, in Salisbury, North Carolina, one observer reported that during the autumn and winter months of 1766, a thousand wagons had passed through heading west. Many more people crossed the Atlantic. From Irish ports alone, between March 1773 and June 1774, some 20,450 emigrants sailed to America.
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Many of those reaching the backcountry did so within months of arriving in America.

To Frederick Jackson Turner, theorist of how the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century frontier remolded America, the upland South was the “new Pennsylvania,” an extension of that state and its early hybrid population. As early as the 1730s and 1740s, rising costs of land in the Quaker colony pushed new arrivals and younger sons toward more affordable stretches of Virginia and the Carolinas—pressures that only intensified during the 1760s and 1770s. A later chronicler, though, more accurately described the backcountry South as “Greater Pennsylvania.”
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Certainly many of the ethnic and religious migrants to the Carolinas looked back northward for kinship, not eastward to an unfamiliar southern tidewater.

Geographers and historians alike have drawn maps of the southward routes taken by the principal English, German, and Scotch-Irish migrant groups. Millions of amateur genealogists have since retraced those movements. Even twenty-first-century visitors to a trio of contiguous counties in northern South Carolina—Chester, York, and Lancaster, each named for a familiar county back in southeastern Pennsylvania—will spot county seats with a few old streets and buildings more akin to those 500 miles north.

The thesis of Pennsylvania extended can be overdone. A century later, during the siege of Fort Sumter, Yankee sympathy was scarce in upcountry South Carolina. Besides, the pre-Revolutionary routes became a southward and westward funnel for more than Pennsylvanians. These others included convicts from the shiploads Britain sent annually to America, runaway servants, burned-out frontier families fleeing tomahawks (and instantly hostile to southern Indians), former Regulators abandoning North Carolina after their 1771 defeat, rowdy “boys” (Steelboys, Whiteboys, Oakboys, etc.) from gangs in rural Ireland, and the incipient Cracker types that many Georgians, Carolinians, and even the Cherokee initially referred to as “Virginians.”
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Violence was a backcountry staple. The major preoccupation of British mapmakers in drawing the contours of the southern backcountry was to update the ever-changing “Indian Boundary” from Virginia south. This was more to protect and placate the Indians than to favor settlers or land speculators, not a Crown priority. The controversial Proclamation Line of 1763, more or less following the Appalachian peaks, provided only a rough demarcation. Subsequent boundary adjustment came through an ongoing colony-by-colony process under the aegis of royal governors and John Stuart, Britain’s Indian superintendent for the Southern Department. Officials in London had a veto, but for the most part they wanted to uphold the Proclamation Line.