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 openinghostilities, including lexington andconcord, and i showed how even with these opening hostilities,still we could see how long it took before independence wasactually declared.
basically, launching a civilwar was not an easy decision, or for a time at least,even a logical one. nor was organizing and fightinga civil war easy, particularly for thirteencolonies that were not used to acting in unison. and as we saw really early onin the course, the colonies tended to cometogether for purposes of self-defense when necessary,and then when no longer necessary they were definitelynot joined together in joint
cause past that point. so the colonies and then statesdid not naturally fall into a union of some kind unless therewas danger at hand-- and often only when danger wasat hand. well, today what we're going tobe looking at is some of the challenges facing these--well, now they're states, now that we've declaredindependence-- thirteen states when they cametogether in the opening phases of this civil war for theirmutual defense.
and as we're going to seeduring the lecture, on the one hand,given that togetherness was not really their natural state ofbeing, they did manage to accomplishquite a bit convened in the continental congress. but on the other hand,the process of organizing a war did not end up being a veryefficient business in many ways, and that's really going to bethe main subject of what i'm going to talk about today.
and the experience of trying toaccomplish things with only a weak continental congress actingas the central organizational body actually ended upconvincing some people down the road that a stronger governmentthan that one was going to be necessary when people weretrying to figure out a more permanent form of government forthese newly independent states. so one of the things i'll beshowing and talking about by the end of the lecture is the waysin which real life experiences were convincing some people orteaching some people--
even a better word--lessonsabout governance in these new states,and about what they thought worked and what they thoughtdidn't. there was never great uniformagreement, but you'll see why some peopleemerged from the revolutionary war effort thinking thatsomething stronger and more centralized was necessary. okay. so now let's turn to thecontinental congress and how
they organized a war. now the effort really began inearnest in may of 1775 when the second continental congress wasfirst sitting just after lexington and concord,because it was in may of 1775 that the continental congresstook direction of colonial military resistance to thebritish by creating the continental army. now, i ended thursday's lecturewith a quote by john adams from a letter that he wrote toabigail in which he was summing
up some of the challenges facingcongress. i'll repeat it here becauseit's going to outline some of the things that i'm--we will betalking about in today's lecture. and what adams wrote was:"when 50 or 60 men have a constitution to form for a greatempire, at the same time that they havea country of 1500 miles extent to fortify,millions to arm and train, a naval power to begin,an extensive commerce to
regulate, numerous tribes ofindians to negotiate with, a standing army of twenty seventhousand men to raise pay, victual, and officer,i shall really pity those 50 or 60 men." so that's adams writing toabigail 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 quotethe scope of the task that
really did lie before thecontinental congress: figuring out how to govern thethirteen states; worrying about issues having todo with commerce; negotiating with nativeamericans; and of course in war time--mostcentral of all given military hostilities that were right athand--creating and supplying an army. and it's that latter task thati'm going to focus on at the moment.
i'm going to be looking at howthe continental congress created and supplied the continentalarmy, because in a lot of ways,when you look at all of the complications and controversiessurrounding the creation of the continental army,you get a great case study of many of the problems that wereat the heart of any effort at unity between the colonies andthen the states. and not surprisingly,as we're going to see down the road in this course when we talkmore about the 1780s,
many of these problemscertainly did persist as problems not only through therevolution, 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 kindof case study in some of the problems involved with creatingan american union. now given what i've just saidabout problems inherent in
creating a union,it's not surprising that one of the first problems to presentitself, as far as the continental armyis concerned, was regionalism. i'm going to talk in a momentabout localism, but for now i'm going to talkabout regionalism. you might think that in amoment of crisis, regionalism might entirely fallby the wayside, and i suppose in some ways itdid, 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 ofwho's going to command the i remember when i was firstworking on my book, which is about politics in the1790s, and i thought --without lookinginto it very much-- that what i was going to findwhen i started looking at letters from the period was thatthere'd be this little honeymoon nationalism moment whereeveryone 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 littlewhile.' and that maybe there'd be thislittle honeymoon moment and then that might sort of wane and thenpeople would get more back into their entrenched sort ofregional 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 thenational 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 thesoutherners.' i remember finding a letterfrom one southerner to another
southerner from the first yearor 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 youngmen in clerkships in this new government as possible,because they're going to gradually be promoted intohigher offices, and sooner or later southernmen will be in control of most of the national offices,which is much better than being governed by a bunch of arrogantnortherners.'
this is the like--thegovernment hasn't even been in existence yet for two years,and already people are like, 'i don't know about thatother-- those northerners.' so it doesn't--it waxes andwanes; it doesn't go away,and so it's not surprising, given that, that it pops upright at the outset of the whole revolutionary enterprise,particularly when people were thinking about acommander-in-chief of the
now obviously,in and of itself it's an important decision. you want the right man for thatjob, but it was complicated by regional concerns. basically, many new englandersfelt that since, during this early period of thewar, most of the military action washappening in new england-- basically all the hostilitieswe've been talking about much of it certainly is going on in newengland--
that a new englander would bethe logical choice to lead the army. and some people even had thesneaking suspicion that maybe new englanders wouldn't bewilling to fight under anybody else. people thought about the waythat the new england militia operated as units. one of the striking thingsabout the new england militia was that they actually electedtheir officers.
right? they--it wasn't like someonewas sort of enforced upon them as an officer. militia units elected their ownofficers-- so, given that,the thought was, given that kind of militaryculture, having a southerner thrust uponthem 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 thinka new englander made the most sense,but also john hancock and some of his friends actually thoughtthat he was the guy who should be commander-in-chief. they had pretty much alreadydecided: john hancock, he's the man,just a matter of time before he gets nominated and madecommander-in-chief of the army. so for a variety of reasonssome people thought maybe a southerner would not work ascommander-in-chief,
but on the other hand therewere other people who felt just the opposite,who actually thought that because a lot of what had beenhappening 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 byfinding someone who wasn't a new englander,by finding a southerner to be commander-in-chief and suggestthat this was a joint continental effort and not somenew england war.
and this kind of logic,this kind of wondering about how do you balance outpositions, officerships,cabinet offices, diplomatic posts--this goes on and on and on throughout this period. the people are always veryconcerned--whether you're talking about military positionsor whether you're talking about civil positions. even presidents had the sameproblem.
washington certainly has itthroughout the war as commander-in-chief--with this constant concern about trying to balance thingsout regionally, not just oh,because it would seem fair, but actually if you think aboutthe fact that a union-- whether you're talking aboutthe 1770s, the 1780s or the 1790s--if youthink about the fact that whatever kind of union you have,it's pretty weak, if you actually don't thinkabout things like balancing
between regions and differentpositions of responsibility and authority,the fear was that maybe parts of the union that didn't feelincluded and didn't feel represented might actually justpull out of the union. and throughout this period,actually later than one would think,that was a constant threat--that sections of theunion would threaten to pull out because they felt that theyweren't really being included as important members.
sort of again and again at keymoments, there's a little sort of threatof secession that raises its head and then is sort of shovedback down until finally it raises its head and is notshoved back down, but certainly that was alogical fear. and so wondering about balancewas a problem for anyone who was in any position of authority orcommand throughout this period, so in the case of the army,commander-in-chief, obviously this is a big andtypical kind of a decision.
so some favor hancock. others favored a virginiannamed george washington. we've already seen washingtondid have military experience as an officer fighting during thefrench and indian war. he made a few choices thatperhaps were not the best. however, he was someone who didhave extensive military experience fighting alongside oras part of the british army. he also was a person--he reallydid kind of have a commanding presence.
he was someone who seemed likehe 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 sortof museum education center at mount vernon which is actuallyreally big, really impressive--and one ofthe things that they did, was they created threelife-scale exact models of george washington at sort of keymoments.
so you have washington as asurveyor, washington during therevolution, washington taking the oath of office as president,and they literally measured his skull and did whatever they hadto 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 therevolution room and--okay. so however long i've beenstudying this period, you see a bazillion timespeople will say, "the man was an impressivefigure on a horse." everyone finds a way of sayingthat, "my,
he was an impressive figure ona horse, up on that white horse. what a man." one way or another,everyone's sort of, 'oh, oh, oh'--and i thoughtyeah, yeah, okay, i know this,impressive, impressive figure on a horse. so i walk into this room andthere'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 whoought to be in command. another useful thing aboutgeorge washington--you'll see it's a little complicated,but he didn't seem ambitious. one of the overridingassumptions 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 confederationor some kind of a form of government that's weak or shakyor new. the thought is you get apower-hungry person and you give that person power,they're very likely to become a tyrant or a despot and thenbasically seize control of the government and then"poof,"
everything is gone and now youjust have a despotism, so you don't want to giveambitious 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 whoseemed to be pulling for power. he wasn't the sort of guy whowas campaigning for himself. he wasn't the sort of guy whowas sort of pushing himself into situations.
he really had kind of a modestdemeanor in how he presented himself when up for some kind ofan office. and a great example of that iswhat 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 militaryuniform. he's the only guy in a militaryuniform. he shows up like:'hi, i'm george washington, guy in a uniform.
think george,think command, think--he'll--he's not sayinganything. 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 skillfulplay on his part to just sort of plant the subliminal message ineveryone's mind-- so surely he wanted to becommander-in-chief.
and it ends up being adams whonominates 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 betalking about him. so before adams sayswashington's name, sort of hancock's like:'ha, indeed that's me, i deserve this post.' and adams actually laterrecalls this.
he says he stood up to nominatewashington. 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 thelibrary-room." 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 reasonsas to why he thinks this particular unnamed person wouldbe good for the post of commander-in-chief. hancock thinks clearly thatadams is talking about him. adams says,"mr. hancock,--who was our president... "--he's presiding over thecontinental congress--
"heard me with visiblepleasure," until "i came to describewashington for the commander, i never remarked a more suddenand striking change of countenance. mortification and resentmentwere expressed as forcibly as his face could exhibitthem." that's a really sort of nicelittle moment there. hancock was not pleased. however, washington wasappointed commander--in-chief of
the continental army,june 15,1775. now he may have been a goodperson for this job. this is not to say he didn'thave regional prejudices of his own, and i think early in thecourse i quoted him about new englanders. did i do that? student: yeah.. prof: okay. i thought so.
that's--that quote actuallycomes from this moment in the course. that quote comes from whenwashington first goes up to new england to take his position ascommander-in-chief and meet this new england army that he's beenmade commander of, and his response to looking atthe army is what i quoted before: "new englanders arean exceeding dirty and nasty people." that's george washington,father of our country,
commander of the continentalarmy, on the army that he has just inherited. so he's not exactly thrilled. he doesn't--he hasn'tnecessarily commanded men like this before,and he's also a little--i don't even know what the right wordis-- 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 aplace, and they're electing their officers in their militaryunits. to washington,this--he just--this did not make sense, electing an officer? what kind of authority does anelected officer have? he didn't like the idea. it was pretty foreign as far asmilitary thinking goes to washington,and he wasn't entirely sure that he could actually tell theofficers apart from the common
soldiers,which is probably true if they're electing people fromtheir midst. so washington definitely sawnew englanders as unfamiliar, to say the least,when he took command of the army--again, regionalism. regionalism was also apparentin just the mere appearance of the soldiers. they came from ultimatelydifferent parts of the confederation.
some of them werestriking-looking people who came from the frontier,frontier riflemen from virginia and i think pennsylvania aswell. these were guys who weredressed in hunting shirts. they didn't have formaluniforms. they didn't carry muskets,but instead they carried rifles, which were--seemed to besharp shooting--sharper shooting, i guess,than a musket was. some of them carried tomahawksand they were very proud of
their shooting skills. they were kind of a wild bunch. there is a rather eccentricamerican 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 thesewild and crazy guys from out on the frontier armed with riflesso--
and lee i should note--i'llmention lee again later. lee--he's--everyone describeshim as eccentric. even lee describes himself aseccentric, but maybe one of the moreeccentric things about charles lee was that he had a pack ofdogs that he loved and that followed him everywhere he went,everywhere he went. if he went into a lady'sparlor, he had six dogs. if he went into a lady'sprivate chamber, apparently, he had sixdogs--[laughter]
so this was not particularlypopular with the female kind. he's an eccentric individualfor 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--ifcharles lee is calling people a damned riffraff [laughs],that actually says something. so anyway, the riflemen werekind of a wild crew. they saw themselves as theelite of the army because of they actually spent some timesort of taking potshots at
british officers on the lineuntil the british officers realized that there were thesekind of crazy riflemen taking shots at them,and it would be good not to be out in the open anymore. they also just liked shootingoff their guns for fun. ammunition supplies were verylow and this was not a good idea. i'll come back to this in aminute, but they were a little bit wild.
and they did not necessarilylike to be disciplined, so for example in one instancethere was one virginia rifleman who was arrested for notlistening to orders and other riflemen stormed the jail andfreed him. this is not intense militarydiscipline taking place here at this time,and of course on the other hand you couldn't give all kinds ofprivileges to the riflemen because then all the othertroops would say, 'well, why are those guysgetting treated special,
like they're better than us?' so the army is kind of aconglomeration of different kinds of people,different places, even different uniforms,not just different behavior. so you can see just in thematter of managing an army, regionalism can addcomplications and problems. it's also a problem in aslightly different form, and i'm going to call itlocalism because i mean it in a slightly different way than imean regionalism.
and what i mean by localism is,people often tended to think of their own locality first andforemost rather necessarily than of the good of the entireamerican cause. so people thought aboutwherever they were from first and foremost--and along similar lines, they were distrustful aboutsurrendering local authority to any kind of a centralizedauthority. now in the continental army,obviously this is going to make it extremely complicated togather together one united armed
force. every state had its own militia. state legislatures wanted tostay in control of their own militias. some of these militias stayedseparate from the continental they certainly didn't want tosurrender control of their own military defense to some kind ofcentral organization that wouldn't necessarily put theirinterests first. so the very idea of combiningsome of these militias into one
big united one,in a sense--the continental army--was controversial. and at the start of the war inmany ways, the army was kind of acollection of separate little military delegations,just like the continental congress in some ways was acollection of separate little state delegations. this same fear aboutsurrendering local control and about protecting local interestsmade it extremely difficult for
the continental congress toorganize and orchestrate the war effort because as a body thecontinental congress had virtually no power ofenforcement. it could advise the states. it could ask them for things. it could make recommendations. it could not order a state todo something and then enforce that order. it had no real power ofenforcement.
and this came to be aparticularly big problem when it came to supplying the army. given that the states didn'trush forward to supply soldiers from other states,supplying the continental army in any kind of a reliable waysometimes was virtually impossible. so whatever the congress triedto do in the way of making requests or makingrecommendations about supplies-- like we recommend that eachstate provide x pounds of food
and x number of blankets for theuse of the continental army-- you just absolutely couldn'ttell, on the reality level, what would happen as a resultof that kind of an order. and this was a big problem,because there was an enormous supply shortage in thecontinental army as well as in the local militias. the scale of supplies requiredby this army was huge. so for example,during three months-- december of 1777 and januaryand 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 twomillion tons of hay. that's a lot of supplies,particularly if you have no really organized way to get it. and americans started the wardeficient in almost every necessity: guns,ammunition, flint, artillery, steel for bayonets,clothing, tents, blankets.
the solution obviously would befor the continental congress to organize some kind of a centralsupply 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'sfault. congress wasn't very good atthe implementation. the actual shortage ofsupplies, ironically enough, in part, was caused by the factthat 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 nowthat we're actually fighting the british.' so in time they--when thestates began to encourage other
countries to bring importedgoods, this became a little bit lessextreme, 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 apparentlythought 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 whobacked 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 thatit took him to load and fire his gun,so that maybe it's even a great idea to have the soldiersfighting with bows and arrows. that didn't necessarily go veryfar but he was thinking about
it. as long as the states were sowary about surrendering control to congress,supplies really were a seemingly insurmountableproblem, and there are actually storiesof washington's aides literally going farmhouse to farmhouse andknocking on doors to ask people for blankets and supplies andwagons and whatever they could get. literally, the army sometimeswas reduced to that level.
given that kind of problem,it makes sense that the experience of fighting the warconvinced many people that there did need to be somethingstronger, something more centralized atthe center of whatever kind of confederation was forming. and particularly people whowere at military headquarters with washington,which includes alexander hamilton, since they were theguys who were seeing problems with supplies and how congresscouldn't seem to do anything
forcefully and efficiently--it's not surprising that many of those people ended up beingreally strong nationalists who really wanted a strongercentralized government. hamilton, frustrated atheadquarters, just seeing what he saw as thissort of amazing, potentially deadly inefficiencyof 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 isreally thinking about what kind of government comes later. hamilton's sort of already outthere pounding away, and it's partly based on hisreal life experience of what it's like to try and be governedby the continental army while being in the army during a timeof war. so this is basically aninteresting and important point. it'll come up again towards theend of the course, but basically there were reallife experiences behind people's
theoretical ideas about whatkind of government would be desirable for the new americannation. when we get to the part of thecourse where we're talking about the constitution and differentideas and sort of what led up to it and why people thought onething or thought another thing, some of those ideas are notsort of highfalutin', sort of detached 'thoughtsabout federalism,' but they're actually based on real lifeexperiences and real lessons and people looking at what has beenhappening and then drawing
conclusions and coming todifferent conclusions-- but still, drawing conclusions,based on what they've just experienced,about what should be happening next. so basically centralizedcoordination, scary thing for the states--notgood news for organizing a continental army;neither was the complete lack of a precedent for what thecongress was doing in organizing this war--if you think about great
britain, think about all of thesophisticated administrative machinery that they would havehad there for conducting a war, and then think about theamerican states that have really nothing in place. they're really starting fromscratch, and the people in congress whowere responsible for organizing the army were not men with vastmilitary experience. of the roughly sixty-fivecongressmen that were in attendance in 1775 and 1776,only five had served with the
british during the french andindian war; only one of these five had realexperience in supplies and that experience dated back to 1759;none really had experience with medical matters in a time ofwar; only two had any medicaltraining 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 graincommittee.'
well, i don't know. so basically,you have a bunch of people here who are trying to figure outfrom scratch how to create a coordinated army effort. by 1778, congress began to tryto improve its administrative structure and it did begin tocreate boards of war and boards of admiralty,but even once they started to have an organized administrativeforce, habits of individualcongressmen were unpredictable.
there wasn't even a way toenforce attendance to the continental congress--and again, sometimes continental congressmen thoughtthat what was happening at home demanded their attention morethan 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 wastitled "engagement of members to meetpunctually." they actually published alittle reminder saying:
'we really need you guys tocome [laughs] to the congress. we're kind of having a war andbad things are happening. we really--we'd like you to behere so you can actually do things.' even just attendance sometimescould be a problem, and that really didn'taccomplish very much. as one historian wrote,congress was "too inefficient to correct its owninefficiency."
that's not good. so obviously things aresomewhat unpredictable, occasionally random,and this made congressional control and organization aproblem throughout the war-- and it wasn't just congressmenwho were inexperienced with this kind of issue and were havingproblems with the whole question of supplies. supply issues were complicatedby the behavior of soldiers, many of whom for the most parthad not ever been soldiers
before,so they're also not following any precedent. it's not like they're a trainedmilitary force-- and many of them were often farmore interested in protecting their locality than in anythingelse, and their behavior in battlewhen far from home was sometimes not ideal. also, because they were notalways sure of what they were doing they were not very carefulwith the supplies that they were
given. like the riflemen.,they fired off their guns for fun. they sold sometimes theirclothes and ammunition if they needed cash. when they were beating a hastyretreat, they tended to just throw anything that was heavyand getting in their way on the ground as they ran. one soldier who returned to aplace where the army--
the continental army had justretreated said "the ground was literally covered with arms,knapsacks, staves, coats, hats,and old oil flasks." these people--they just droppedthings and ran, and left them on the field. so there's no precedent on somany levels for what we're talking about here. there was no precedent for anorganized continental army, there was no precedent for anorganized continental army
administration,so troops had to learn how to behave like an army whilealready fighting a war-- which leads to another problemat the start of the war, and that is the problem of whatcertainly one or two european visitors saw as the attitude ofthe american troops. in part, as i just suggested,many soldiers were just ignorant about militaryoperations, about how an army was supposed to be organized. they hadn't been soldiers.
they didn't know how an armywas supposed to work. they had to be trained fromscratch. now baron von steuben was aforeign volunteer that arrived in the states in 1777. specifically,he was given the task of training the continental army. he was someone who hadexperience with european armies. he was given the task oftraining the american troops. steuben didn't speak a lot ofenglish when he first came here.
he actually was much better infrench and german, and so according to people atthe time, when he was training thetroops, he cursed in three different languages at the sametime, [laughs]english, french and german, and i guess he cursed a lot. i think he was probably alittle surprised by what the troops could not do. supposedly, steuben and otherswho were trying to train the
troops discovered among otherthings that it was very hard to teach the people to marchbecause they didn't always consistently know left foot andright foot. if that's something you hadn'tthought about before, i suppose you're not thinkingabout it as you're walking. so--and i'm such a city slickerhere that i don't know the difference, and i always--everyyear when i say this, i count on someone in theclass. maybe one of you will know andcan sort of interpret this for
me. supposedly, or at leastanecdotally, one of the things that they didto train these troops was they tied hay on one foot and strawon the other foot and said, 'hay foot, straw foot,hay foot, straw foot,' and that was the way that people wereinitially 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 tomarch in the continental army because i wouldn't know whichwas my hay foot. does anyone here know thedifference between hay and straw? oh, yes. student: i'm a farm kid. straw is just--it's pretty muchjust like the stem of the wheat. it's all pretty much throwawaystuff used for bedding.
hay actually has grass andalfalfa--food for animals in it. so straw is the--just the stemof the wheat and hay -- student: straw is allthrowaway stuff. hay has actual food mixed inwith it. prof: hay has actualfood mixed in. thank you very much. i knew there had to be [laughs]someone who knows something about a farm. i greatly appreciate that.
i'm writing it down for nexttime i talk about this. i have it written down now. i have my fact for the day thati learned. now von steuben is one of thepeople who looked at the continental soldiers andcommented on what he took to be a particularly americanattitude. supposedly, what steuben saidwas, in the prussian army,officers said to a soldier "'do this,' and he doethit: but i am obliged to say...
'this is the reason why youought to do that;' and then he does it." the americans are operating ina slightly different way from what he considers a traditionaleuropean army's behavior. basically, americans didn'talways respond well to orders. they wanted to take part indecisions. they wanted their opinions tobe represented. obviously, this kind ofpolitical sensibility could present problems if you'retrying to command men in an
it also created problems withterms of enlistment. soldiers tended to sign on forone year at a time and when the year was over,they just often went home. they were in the army bychoice, and they felt that they basically had no need to listento any kind of higher command telling them to stay. we'll see a little bit later ina 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 bitlonger.' so for example,at the end of 1775, a big chunk of the army justpacked up and went home-- so america essentially changedarmies 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 samething would happen again. it took a while before congressagreed to try and regulate and
lengthen terms of enlistment. there was a similar probleminvolved with social rank and military rank. i've already mentioned veryearly in the course that social rank,hierarchy in the colonies, was a little bit more slipperythan in england, so that while there certainlywas an elite in the colonies and the states,there wasn't a sort of entrenched to-the-manor-bornaristocratic class,
as there would have been inengland, and the difference between agentleman and a more common man could sometimes be hard to tell. well, washington wantedgentlemen to serve as commanding officers. basically, he wanted to usesocial rank to enforce military rank,thinking that if you respected someone as your social superioryou'd probably respect him as your military superior.
as washington put it,"the true criterion" of judgment about who should bean officer "when past services do not enter into thecompetition, is, whether the candidate foroffice has a just pretension to the character of a gentleman,a proper sense of honor, and some reputation tolose." if he has some reputation tolose, he's going to worry about losing it, so there's a logicfor having an officer. now this may sound logical byeighteenth-century terms--
this kind of logic--but itoften presented a problem, because sometimes there reallywasn't all that much separating socially--as far as rank is concerned--officers fromnon-officers. and again, think about the newenglanders promoting people from within their own. sometimes there wasn't reallymuch of a social rank differentiating officers at all. there's one historian whoargues that one of the reasons
why there was dueling prevalentamong some of the younger officers in the continental armywas because they were actually dueling to prove that they couldduel, which meant that they wereactually gentlemen, or of the gentleman class,which meant they were actually better than some of the men theywere commanding who were pretty much their equals. so dueling was a way for theseyoung officers to sort of prove that they deserved to be elite.
so we're talking about kind ofa fuzzy line here that was not helpful for washington in tryingto figure out how to get discipline and order in thearmy. this is certainly not somethingthat you would have found in the british or french army wheresocial rank and military rank was much more defined andestablished, and it's one of the reasons whyeuropeans came to america to fight during the americanrevolution. some of them came because theywere inspired by the cause.
some of them came because theywould not have been able to promote themselves in thebritish 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 thecontinental army, say that they would fight forthe cause if they were given a commission as an officer,and they'd be given one. and this was enormouslydemoralizing for some of the
continental army officers whowere not being promoted. they watched these people comein from other countries and be promoted above them. alexander hamilton said it gavehim "pygmy feelings," this idea that these foreignerscould come in because they were supposedly better than us andthen get promoted over us, and we were just a bunch ofrustic boobs and we didn't get promoted as quickly as they did. so some people from foreigncountries were actually taking
advantage of the sort ofambiguity in the states at the time. so looking at the process oforganizing a war, we've seen regionalism andlocalism in action working against centralized control andorganization; we've seen complications ofsocial 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'thave that much power,
really struggling to exert somekind of centralized control over a continental war effort. so in essence,the things that were complicating unity between thecolonies and then the states are the same things logically thatare going to complicate and confuse efforts to create somekind of continental war effort. we'll see this continuing in adifferent way in the 1780s. now we've been looking at--iwant to just take a few minutes here.
we've been looking at some ofthe realities of the continental i brought in a handout partlybecause i'm very low tech so i didn't bring a computer--but partly because i actually really wanted you to hold thisin your hands, and while it's being passed outi'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 thanit would have been but not tremendously smaller than itwould 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 getspassed out here. this particular one is theconnecticut courant. it was printed in hartfordand as i mentioned the date: so as you're getting ityou--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 anddomestic." okay. news, fresh news. and one of the first thingsthat you'll see on the front page in the left-hand column is"persons that are being held up to public view asenemies to their country"-- right off the cuff.
these are probably people whomaybe were treating with loyalists or supplying the enemyarmy or denouncing the local congress. who knows what they were doing,but whatever they were doing it was bad and they're beingpublicly 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 andapologize and pay a dollar--
sort of, 'okay,i won't do it again.' i can't say i've seen anyconfession, but certainly many,many issues of this paper when i was looking through themcontained that column with more people being publicly shamed. so if you look at the paper,you could see right off the cuff you have something beingreprinted from a pennsylvania newspaper. it actually is a declaration.
someone's ranting about thebritish and then goes on to say, 'why doesn't the continentalcongress reward any british officer who deserts the britisharmy by giving him land here?' what a great idea. we'll get them to desert bypromising them land and then they'll come over to our side--and you can see they have different amounts of acres thatthey're proposing, so it's like a little plan. i can't say it goes anywherebut it is an interesting little
plan. you can see next that there'snews from london dated march 21. we're july 8,so there are several things in this paper that are a reminderof how slow news traveled particularly from overseas backto the states and the colonies. this is actually a debate inparliament about the death of an american general,general montgomery, which moves in to being adebate about the rebels, and you can see capitalletters, "rebel,"
"rebel,""rebellion," sort of throughout that column. then we've got news fromwilliamsburg. on the bottom there on thethird column, we've got a couple littleadvertisements for a political pamphlet and cash needed for oldcloths-- basically, so the printingpress folk can clean off the presses. one of the things you'll noticeis that it's sort of random news
often printed from othernewspapers. there on the top of the secondpage from north carolina, you actually could see thatnorth carolina is instructing its delegates in the continentalcongress that they would be able to declare independence. there's kind of a majorstatement, "boom," right there,sort of by itself, no commentary. you can see one thingactually--we're running out of
time, but one of the things youwill not see--july 8,1776--is the declaration of independence. it has not gotten here yet intime to be printed, and it's actually not until thenext edition, on the 15^(th) of july that yousee the declaration of independence actually getprinted 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 manyin that it would start out having typically,i suppose--this one has it mixed, but sometimes you haveinternational news and then national news and then localnews 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 anythingelse i want to point out. you'll see on the third pagewe've got news from hartford,
so it's become local by thethird page. you'll see on the third columnthere "deserted from colonel john ward'sregiment," one tillson mills it lookslike-- miller--i'm sorry--a drummer. he is about 30 years old,5 foot 6 inches high, has a peaked chin "andsomething of a guilty look." [laughter]i love that description.
you'll see that throughout thiscolumn and the last page there are a couple listings aboutdeserters, people looking for deserters. you'll see someone--where is he? well, maybe he's on the thirdpage. roger--on the third column onthe third page, roger march of litchfieldopposed and spoke against the measures of congress. he's probably going to be enemyto our country in the first
column of the first page in thenext edition of this newspaper. so basically i--i'm--i'vehanded this to you just so that you could get a sense of what atypical 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 wasat 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 goesback to march. but this is how people arelearning about whatever is happening in that entire wareffort. it's haphazard,it's kind of random, it's slow, and it's oftenunreliable-- so again it's kind of adramatic reminder about some of the realities of engaging in awar in a period when even communication is complicated anddifficult. i will stop there because weare out of time.
on thursday will be the midtermhere. blue books will be here andready for you, and all will be okay. i'm saying calming midtermthings. it will all be good.
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