The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (108 page)

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The British held the field, but they had lost the Carolinas and Georgia. Stewart retired to Charleston; to the south a small British force remained in Savannah. But these units were too weak to do much more than sit and wait for the end of the war. The countryside belonged to the Americans.

Shifting the war to the South had seemed especially promising to British commanders after Charleston fell in the spring of 1780. In reality they faced enormous problems even after that victory. For they had erred in their estimates of loyalist support. If they had ever had a chance of holding a population loyal to the king, they squandered it by neglecting the southern colonies after the defeats at Moore's Creek Bridge and Charleston in 1776. And until Archibald Campbell captured Savannah in January 1779, they had remained inactive.

During the years before the British turned southward again, patriot militia proved that they could maintain order in the Carolinas and Georgia. They defined this mission as one which required the suppression of loyalism. And for the most part they succeeded in putting down, or at least discouraging, loyalist attempts to organize. They continued in this work after British regulars arrived.

Cornwallis confessed to feeling disappointment at the absence of loyalist support -- the Carolinians neither joined his army nor fed it willingly. Worse, they did not give him, or his successors, information about his enemy's movements. Instead Carolinians ambushed his dispatch riders, attacked his supply trains, and wiped out the Tory forces that dared to show themselves.

The South, like New England and the middle colonies, was enemy country. Southern militia may have been no more reliable in set-piece battles than most irregulars to the north, but they were brutally effective in fighting loyalist militia. They fought well in these irregular engagements for at least two reasons: they shared the faith in the glorious cause, and they had the support of most of the ordinary people of the South.

Nathanael Greene may not have recognized these realities in the dreadful days following Camden. Yet he fought his war with skill and imagination -- and gradually came to understand that when he ran from the enemy he would be succored by the people of the Carolinas. The support was not lavish -- the countryside's resources were lean and decimated by the war -- but it was enough to enable him to make the struggle he called the "fugitive war" the means to victory in the lower South.

In the battle of Eutaw Springs, South Carolina, the last major action of the Revolutionary War before Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, over 500 Americans were killed and wounded. Nathanael Greene had led some 2200 men into the Springs; his casualties thus represented almost one-fourth of his army. More men would die in battles in the next two years, and others would suffer terrible wounds. The statistics, although notoriously unreliable, show that the Revolution killed a higher percentage of those who served on the American side than any war in our history, always excepting the Civil War.
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Why did these men -- those who survived and those who died -- fight? Why did they hold their ground, endure the strain of battle, with men dying about them and danger to themselves so obvious? Undoubtedly the reasons varied from battle to battle, but just as surely there was some experience common to all these battles -- and fairly uniform reasons for the actions of the men who fought despite their deepest impulses, which must have been to run from the field in order to escape the danger.

Some men did run, throwing down their muskets and packs in order to speed their flight. American units broke in large actions and small, at Brooklyn, Kip's Bay, White Plains, Brandywine, Germantown, Camden, and Hobkirk's Hill, to cite the most important instances. Yet many men did not break and run even in the disasters to American arms. They held their ground until they were killed, and they fought tenaciously while pulling back.

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In most actions the Continentals, the regulars, fought more bravely than the militia. We need to know why these men fought and why the American regulars performed better than the militia. The answers surely will help us to understand the Revolution, especially if we can discover whether what made men fight reflected what they believed -and felt -- about the Revolution.

Several explanations of the willingness to fight and die, if necessary, may be dismissed at once. One is that soldiers on both sides fought out of fear of their officers, fearing them more than they did battle. Frederick the Great had described this condition as ideal, but it did not exist in ideal or practice in either the American or the British army. The British soldier usually possessed a more professional spirit than the American, an attitude compounded from confidence in his skill and pride in belonging to an old established institution. British regiments carried proud names -- the Royal Welch Fusiliers, the Black Watch, the King's Own -- whose officers usually behaved extraordinarily bravely in battle and expected their men to follow their examples. British officers disciplined their men more harshly than American officers did and generally trained them more effectively in the movements of battle. But neither they nor American officers instilled the fear that Frederick found so desirable. Spirit, bravery, a reliance on the bayonet, were all expected of professional soldiers, but professionals acted out of pride -- not out of fear of their officers.

Still, coercion and force were never absent from the life of either army. There were, however, limits on their use and their effectiveness. Fear of flogging might prevent a soldier from deserting camp, but it could not guarantee that he would remain steady under fire. Fear of ridicule may have aided in keeping some troops in place, however. Eighteenth-century infantry went into combat in fairly close lines and officers could keep an eye on many of their men. If the formation was tight enough officers might strike laggards and even order "skulkers," Washington's term for those who turned tail, shot down.
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Just before the move to Dorchester Heights in March 1776, the word went out that any American who ran from the action would be "fired down upon the spot."
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The troops themselves approved of this threat, according to one of the chaplains.

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Washington repeated the threat just before the Battle of Brooklyn later that year, though he seems not to have posted men behind the lines to carry it out. Daniel Morgan urged Nathanael Greene to place sharp-shooters behind the militia, and Greene may have done so at Guilford Court House. No one thought that an entire army could be held in place against its will, and these commands to shoot soldiers who retired without orders were never widely issued.
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A tactic that surely would have appealed to many soldiers would have been to send them into battle drunk. Undoubtedly some -- on both sides -- did enter combat with their senses deadened by rum. Both armies commonly issued an additional ration of rum on the eve of some extraordinary action -- a long, difficult march, for example, or a battle, were two of the usual reasons. A common order on such occasions ran: "The troops should have an extraordinary allowance of rum," usually a gill, four ounces of unknown alcoholic content, which if taken down at the propitious moment might dull fears and summon courage. At Camden no supply of rum existed; Gates or his staff substituted molasses, to no good effect, according to Otho Williams. The British fought brilliantly at Guilford Court House unaided by anything stronger than their own large spirits. In most actions soldiers went into battle with very little more than themselves and their comrades to lean upon.
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Belief in the Holy Spirit surely sustained some in the American army, perhaps more than in the enemy's. There are a good many references to the Divine or to Providence in the letters and diaries of ordinary soldiers. Often, however, these expressions are in the form of thanks to the Lord for permitting these soldiers to survive. There is little that suggests soldiers believed that faith rendered them invulnerable to the enemy's bullets. Many did consider the glorious cause to be sacred; their war, as the ministers who sent them off to kill never tired of reminding them, was just and providential.
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Others clearly saw more immediate advantages in the fight: the plunder of the enemy's dead.
At Monmouth Court House, where Clinton with-

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drew after dark, leaving the field strewn with British corpses, the plundering carried American soldiers into the houses of civilians who had fled to save themselves. The soldiers' actions were so blatant and so unrestrained that Washington ordered their packs searched. And at Eutaw Springs, the Americans virtually gave up victory to the opportunity of ransacking British tents. Some died in their greed, shot down by an enemy given time to regroup while his camp was torn apart by men looking for something to carry off. But even these men probably fought for something besides plunder. When it beckoned they responded, but it had not drawn them to the field; nor had it kept them there in a savage struggle.
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Inspired leadership helped soldiers face death, but they sometimes fought bravely even when their leaders let them down. Yet officers' courage and the example of officers throwing off wounds to remain in the fight undoubtedly helped their men stick. Charles Stedman, the British general, remarked on Captain Maitland who, at Guilford Court House, was hit, dropped behind for a few minutes to get his wound dressed, then returned to the battle.
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Cornwallis obviously filled Sergeant Lamb with pride, struggling forward to press into the struggle after his horse was killed.
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Washington's presence meant much at Princeton though his exposure to enemy fire may also have made his troops uneasy. His quiet exhortation as he passed among the men who were about to assault Trenton -- "Soldiers, keep by your officers" remained in the mind of a Connecticut soldier until his death fifty years later.
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There was only one Washington, one Cornwallis, and their influence on men in battle, few of whom could have seen them, was of course slight. Junior and noncommissioned officers carried the burden of tactical direction; they had to show their troops what must be done and somehow persuade, cajole, or force them to do it. The praise ordinary soldiers lavished on sergeants and junior officers suggests that these leaders played important parts in their troops' willingness. to fight. Still, important as it was, their part does not really explain why men fought.