The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (66 page)

but neither was it one of convenience. They seem to have been genuinely fond of one another, and their marriage was a happy one.

The fifteen years from 1759 until 1774 were quiet, but important nonetheless. When they began, Washington was a disappointed officer, an ambitious man, jealous of his honor and reputation, inclined to selfpity, sensitive to slights, selfish and self-seeking -- in short, still immature. He grew in these fifteen years: his military ambition cooled, he became less concerned with himself and more concerned with others -- family, friends, and neighbors. Serenity largely replaced the sensitivity to slights, and generosity, the selfishness. We can only speculate about the process by which these changes were accomplished. We do know that Washington's responsibilities increased and, perhaps more important, that they were of a new sort, unrelated to military ambition and dreams of glory. The problems of plantation management had to be faced daily; friends came for advice, money, and comfort. And there were problems of governing. Washington's public activities extended from the courtroom, where he was a justice of the peace, to the vestry, and finally to the House of Burgesses.

All these obligations he fulfilled thoroughly and, as far as is known, generously. He was not a brilliant leader in the Burgesses -- not really a leader at all, although his opinion on important questions came to be valued. In these years he met the requirements of patrician leadership: concern for the community informed by balance and judgment in making decisions. Those qualities had been identified by the second Continental Congress in Philadelphia.

And now in 1775 standing with the army outside Boston, Washington's hard-won mastery of himself faced a cruel test. He was called upon to lead forces of doubtful quality, supported by colonies of still unknown resolve, against the greatest power in Europe. Those strong inner resources of mind and character which had developed so slowly in Washington sustained him in the eight years of war that followed. So also did at least two profound convictions. The first was that he was the instrument of Providence in the struggle. He characteristically put this belief more modestly than this bald statement allows: "But as it has been a kind of destiny that has thrown me upon this service, I shall hope that my undertaking it is designed to answer some good purpose."
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The other belief approached passion -- a love of what Washington called the "glorious cause," the defense of the liberties of Americans.

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When Washington arrived in Cambridge on July 2 to take command, the British army locked up in Boston still bled from Bunker Hill. Yet it was a dangerous enemy, well trained and on the whole well officered and equipped. In July it numbered 5000; when Howe, who replaced Gage in October, evacuated Boston the following March it had increased to 10,000.
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In most respects the British army was a conventional eighteenth-century European force trained to fight in the accepted style of the century., In the eighteenth century, before the French Revolution brought its immense changes, war was the preserve of the dynastic state, fought on a small scale for limited purposes. Ordinarily, two groups in society did the fighting -- the aristocracy who provided the officers, and an under class, peasants, vagrants, the dregs who filled the ranks. Frederick the Great of Prussia once said that a war was not a success if most people knew that it was going on, and he, like rulers all over Europe, took pains to shield the middle classes, the solid producers and the artisans, from the bloodshed and destruction of battle.
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Armies composed of dregs were difficult to recruit, difficult to train, and expensive to maintain. They were also necessarily small -- "necessarily" because of their expense and because of the character of the dynastic state, chronically limited in its revenues and limited too by its inability to call upon an indifferent people to support its wars. Hence wars had to be fought only for dynastic purposes-not national ones as became the rule in the nineteenth century. The eighteenth-century dynasts feared an armed people, with good reason -- as the French Revolution was to show.

The composition of the army required that it be highly trained and harshly disciplined. Vagrants, ignorant peasants, and in many cases foreigners who were dragooned or hired felt neither moral commitment to their rulers nor loyalty to their nation which, in a modern sense,

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did not exist. The aristocracy, however, felt such loyalties and provided the officers to drill and lead the scum who made up the rank and file. Frederick, who set the standards of organization and the direction of much military doctrine, warned against reliance on any but aristocrats; bourgeois officers he despised as deficient of any motive other than a wish to fatten their purses. But neither Frederick nor any other eighteenth-century ruler could avoid reliance on foreign-born rank and file. Press gangs swept the scum into the army and recruiters hired foreign mercenaries; and officers of noble birth subjected both to exacting and sometimes savage discipline. Still the rate of desertion proved appallingly high. A French traveler once observed that the main duty of the native half of the Prussian army was to prevent the foreign half from deserting.

With troops enlisted almost entirely from the impoverished classes, incapable of honor, difficult to train, and expensive to maintain, military commanders' understandably conceived of warfare as the art of preserving the army as much as winning victories. Their preoccupation with the problems of recruitment and training led them to strive to make military practice as rational as possible. Operations ordinarily were conducted only in seasons of good weather, and winter campaigns were rare. Winter quarters were carefully selected to permit a reasonably comfortable existence and opportunities for the renewal of men and weapons. And in good weather, victories were not usually exploited for fear that defeat might follow or intolerable expense be incurred. Commanders did not seek combat with eagerness; the German officer who characterized battle as the remedy of the desperate spoke for most. The concept of total war and its corollary, total victory, remained for the future to invent.

Tactics reflected the assumptions that underlay the general rules of campaigning. Skillful tactics consisted of maneuvering troops so as to begin battle under circumstances that would prohibit heavy losses. This consideration sometimes outweighed the results of battle -- with defeat and light losses tolerable, and victory with heavy losses intolerable. Skill in marching, Marshal Saxe the French military authority contended, was more important than proficiency in the manual of arms -- the handling and use of weapons, including their firing at the enemy. Hence the enormous energy lavished on close-order drill, drill on the parade ground, with intricate movements precisely accomplished. These movemerits in formations were rigidly controlled -- the intervals between men, ranks, and files exactly determined -- and the troops were taught, drilled, and practiced until they could carry them out without thinking, as if they were parts in a machine animated only by the sounds of their

officers' voices. Several generations of military commanders sought to create armies that were virtually machines, their soldiers mechanical pieces, moving only on order. The drill instilled more than discipline; it taught movements on the parade ground which men used on the battlefield -- it was not simply for "show," as a number of American observers charged during the Revolution.

Thus the steps that the troops used in marching were calculated to hold them in precise formation. Frederick's officers insisted that their soldiers move by the "Prussian step," with the knee rigid and the entire leg swung forward. The British favored high knee-action, with the foot lifted well off the ground and stamped down hard. Troops ordinarily moved in columns, places in the column corresponding to places in the lines from which fire was delivered. The British, along with most European armies, fought with their infantry deployed in lines three deep, the front rank kneeling, the center with each soldier standing with his left foot inside the right of the man kneeling in front, and the rear rank with each soldier placed with his left foot inside the right of the man ahead in the center. "Locking," the term British regulars used to describe this alignment, reveals much about its purposes: to hold tightly a mass of men so as to permit the concentrated, and controlled, fire of their muskets. In this formation, as in most others, the troops fired on order by volley.
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The firing of muskets in fact involved another set of intricate procedures, each initiated and completed on command. The standard guide for British foot soldiers, Humphrey Bland
An Abstract of Military Discipline
, called for seventeen separate commands to be given to soldiers loading their muskets.
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Infantrymen could not fire until six more Orders were relayed, seven if the command "Take Care" (which initiated the process), is counted. This elaborate set of orders seems absurd, and is customarily treated as such by modern historians, but in reality it suited the way everything was done and contributed to the rational control of the irrational process that constitutes warfare.
Had troops been permit-

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ted to load their weapons at their own speed, they probably would have got in one another's way, for the Brown Bess, as the British musket was affectionately called, was long, heavy, and difficult to handle and load. And the fire of troops loading it without careful supervision would undoubtedly have been difficult to control. Free-lancing was not encouraged; the heavy volleys of massed men were much more lethal.

There was another use for the foot soldier after he fired his weapon which also required unyielding discipline. Since muskets could not deliver more than three rounds per minute and had an effective range of only one hundred yards, the bayonet was usually relied upon to break up a massed, or an entrenched, enemy. And the bayonet charge returned results only when it was performed by massed men -- here was still another reason for the three ranks of infantry. Marshal Saxe recommended four lines of infantry, the last line (or fourth) to be armed with pikes. British commanders relied on three, however, sometimes eschewing firing altogether in favor of the heavy shock of the bayonet charge. Howe had depended upon the bayonet at Breed's Hill with disastrous results to his troops until he delayed placing them in line until after they had come close to the redoubt. Then their charge proved effective.
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