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In 1777, Congress fixed the number
of companies that each state had to recruit for the Continental
Army. Most state and local governments resorted in the end to
the draft. Free American citizens, because they would not fight
willingly, were told by their government that they had to place
a body on the line.
Some enlisted
again and again, taking one bounty after another (offered to
entice men into enlisting), but not reporting for service.
Recruiting officers, meanwhile, signed imaginary names and
pocketed the bounties while claiming that the
"recruits" had deserted. Entrepreneurs purchased the
services of boys and poor men, then hawked their merchandise for
a higher price to any individual, squad or town that needed to
produce a soldier. Local constables arrested poor men for
vagrancy and sold off their prisoners as substitutes sometimes
to more than one buyer. Once money had become a factor,
corruption followed suit.
In the July of
1780, Lieut-Colonel Huntington expressed the views of many a
soldier — "despise my countrymen, I wish I could say I
was not born in America."
Some 80,000
people, one in every 30 free Americans, belonged to pacifistic
communities that opposed the Revolutionary War on religious
grounds. There were as many Quakers, Shakers, Marvarians,
Mennonites Amish, Dunkers, and Sehwenkfelders on the total
number of soldiers in the Continental Army.
In 1774 the
colonial rebels, in defence of liberty and property, had refused
to submit to the arbitrary authority of British Parliament. Only
three years later the new state governments harassed,
intimidated, and imprisoned people who were highly unlikely to
stage the kind of revolt that they themselves had undertaken. It
did not take long for the oppressed to become the oppressors.
The intrusions on civil liberties of the pacifists revealed an
ironic twist: the rebels who professed to carry the torch of
freedom did their best to extinguish it, while those they
accused of demonstrating a "destructive tendency" to
subvert "freedom and independence" were the ones who
kept the torch ablaze.
The Revolution
constituted the most sweeping and devastating Indian war in
American history. All Native Americans east of Mississipi were
affected, and many lost their lands. After the war, when
American settlers no longer had to compete with the British,
encroachment on native lands proceeded with unprecedented speed.
When tens of
thousands of slaves sought their freedom by fleeing to the
British, a great number perished from disease. The final death
toll approximated that of revolutionary soldiers. In the North
some slaves gained their freedom by serving in the military for
their masters; in the South, slaves fled to the woods and swamps
to establish their own maroon (from the Spanish Cimarron —
wild and untamed) communities. Freedom was the name of the game
and the stakes were much higher for African Americans than for
patriots who were "slaves" to Parliament.
Much about the
event called the Revolutionary War had been very painful and was
unpleasant to remember; only the outcome was unqualifiedly
pleasant; so memory, as ever, began to play tricks with the
event. Almost before the blood had cooled, surviving patriots
turned the victims into heroes and created a whitewashed
mythology eulogising the so-called founding fathers—the
majestic ideas of Thomas Jefferson, the persuasive words of Sam
Adams and Tom Piane, the inspirational leadership of George
Washington.
A simple shift of
lens from George Washington to his slaves, to the soldiers he
commanded, to the Indians he displaced, reveals incidents and
events, facts and figures and personalities of great historical
significance.
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DESPITE
its constructed flamboyance, the American war of Independence
was a miserable affair: "The American calls for restraint
were unheeded, and the state legislature (South Carolina),
unable to provide support for the troops, soon gave legal
sanction to acts of plunder. Each side took its turn running
over the terrain, destroying or consuming everything in
sight."
