America Goes to War: A Social History of the Continental Army

7. Running Through the Line Like Wildfire: Resistance, Punishment, Desertion, and Mutiny in the Continental Army

CHAPTER S EVE N Running Through the Line Like Wildfire: Resistance, Punishment, Desertion, and Mutiny in the Continental Army C annons boomed out a warning and signal rockets lit up the New Jersey sky. Suddenly, cheering soldiers poured forth from their huts with their muskets. The men of the Pennsylvania line had mutinied. With pent-up fury and indignation, the soldiers seized several artillery pieces, loaded them with grapeshot, and rushed toward the parade ground. Officers who attempted to quell the mutiny were shot, bayoneted, or roughed up by their own soldiers. I Lieutenant Enos Reeves watched as General Anthony Wayne and Colonel Richard Butler pleaded with their men to disperse and return to their huts; their pleas "had no effect." The soldiers answered that "they had been wronged and were determined to see themselves righted." 2 Led by a group of sergeants who jointly exercised command, the men filled the road and slowly marched toward Philadelphia and Congress. Their downcast officers followed ignominiously in the rear of their procession . The leaders of the mutiny took the title "generals colonel." This signaled to their deposed officers that they now outranked even Washington. Henry Marble, a New Englander who heard about the mutiny, stated that he would not "be surprised had the same disorder took place in every Line in the Army." 3 Why did Marble believe that all the enlisted men of the Continental army were ripe for mutiny? Why were the soldiers willing to undertake an act punishable by death? Why undertake an act considered so heinous 13° Running Through the Line Like Wildfire • 131 that special forms of punishment were reserved to deter it? Soldiers deserted, cursed their officers, and plundered civilians in practically all eighteenth-century armies. Yet mutiny was quite dramatically something else. This chapter will assess the frequency, causes, and meaning of mutiny as waged by Continental soldiers between 1776 and 1783. Resistance to officers, punishment, and official repression were all part of the process that led to the mutinous conduct prevalent throughout the army toward the end of the war. In discussing questions of discipline and resistance within the ranks, many historians have missed the crucial underlying issues.4 Resistance to discipline, however, may be rooted in a soldier's class experience. As we have seen in previous chapters, many of the soldiers of the Continental army were only a few steps beyond indentured servitude or slavery. To some, it may have been perhaps comforting to describe eighteenthcentury revolts as reactionary events triggered by "rebellions of the belly." Even contemporary observers downplayed the significance of mutinies . Washington, for one, informed his French counterpart Rochambeau that the revolt of the Pennsylvanians was caused by "foreigners and even some British deserters." Joseph Reed, president of the state of Pennsylvania, referred to Sergeant Williams, one of the leaders of the mutiny, as "a poor creature and very fond of liquor." 5 These accounts of resistance to spasmodic episodes struggled to deny the legitimacy of rebellions waged by soldiers. Had food and clothing been provided, went the conventional wisdom, the soldiers would never have had an occasion to revolt. Soldier rebellions, however, were more than what was described by Washington and Reed. They were "highly complex forms of direct popular action." In every eighteenth-century crowd action, the participants "were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights or customs; and in general, that they were supported by the wider consensus of the community."6 Indeed, the very words "mob" or "rabble "-used often by officers to describe Continental soldiers-suggest that the "crowd" possessed no honorable impulses of its own. This was comforting to officers who lost control over their men. Lacking definable motivation other than material need, the crowd was presented as the "passive" instrument of outside agitators, as Washington stated in a letter to French General Rochambeau following one particular mutiny.7 The men in the Continental army recognized that a "moral economy" existed between the soldier and the state. We know from earlier chapters 132 • Running Through the Line Like Wildfire that the average soldier in the Continental army was not a "yeoman farmer" nor was he always the "rabble" or "sweepings" of the street. Rather, citizens found themselves temporarily shouldering a musket for a great variety of reasons. They may have been willing to part with their civil liberties for a period of time, but not for too long...