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141 5 The Pressed Men of Essex County The Social Identity of the Soldiers of King Philip’s War Many documents from the period of King Philip’s War and countless sources after—town histories, genealogies, community records, and other sources—claim to record the men who served in King Philip’s War. Yet, scores of the men so listed were never on the front lines; some received payment for services or provisions they supplied, while others were compensated for some now unknown reason. These men were not soldiers. Even leaving these noncombatants aside, from July 1675 to September 1676, well over a thousand men from Massachusetts Bay were soldiers . They served in active-duty militia companies, fighting in the most important and deadly conflict of colonial New England’s history. Of those men, 357 came from Essex County and served in infantry companies, cavalry troops, or garrisons.1 As we have seen, a uniquely New England military command structure, the committee of militia, had selected them from the pool of available men in their town. The committees were as important to the smooth operation of a town’s militia as selectmen were to town governments. This was especially true during wartime, when the militia committees took over most functions of town governance. The most important power of the militia committees was the right to choose which citizens of their towns would be sent to war. This was a matter for local communities, not the governor or the General Court in Boston or even the county’s own major general. For individuals, their families, and their towns, the town committees of militia held in their hands the power of life and death. Each town militia committee had different criteria for choosing soldiers , and the soldiers from each town could differ considerably from their fellows from other towns. As has been seen, Andover sent a specific subset of its leading sons to fight, while Rowley and Topsfield chose town 142 The Pressed Men of Essex County outsiders, Ipswich “undesirables,” and Marblehead strangers. Yet, despite the “persistent localism” of Massachusetts Bay’s impressment system and the diversity of the men whom it picked, certain common characteristics did exist among the soldiery. Most active-duty soldiers of King Philip’s War were in their mid-twenties when the war began, unmarried, and childless. These facts are not surprising. A fourth common characteristic is surprising, however, given the conventional wisdom in the history of colonial war and society. The soldiers of seventeenth-century New England were not a straightforward cross section of their communities. They were not simply “those inhabitants who at that moment had guns in their hands.”2 Instead, the men were chosen, and chosen for particular reasons. Age, Marriage, and Family as Factors in Impressment While the New England militia is perhaps best known for its inclusion of every male in the colony between the ages of sixteen to sixty, actual wartime service was understandably quite different. For instance, the men sent out during wartime did not represent this age range. Out of the 357 active-duty men from Essex County, the ages of 191 (54 percent) are known (see appendix 4).3 Of the men whose age is available, on average the committees chose men in their mid-twenties to fight the war (see table 8). The mean age was 26.6 years. More than 70 percent of the army was made up of men under thirty years old and 93 percent were under forty. The vast majority of the men who fought as enlisted men, 76 percent, were either in their twenties or thirties when enlisted. The next largest age group was men between sixteen and nineteen years old. Clearly, the active-duty forces of the county did not constitute a cross section of men from sixteen to sixty (the age range for men in the general militia). This is just one piece of evidence that proves that universal military obligation to serve in the militia was not the same thing as service in an active-duty, pressed expeditionary company. Understandably, the average ages of noncommissioned officers and officers were quite different. The twelve officers commissioned out of Essex County to lead wartime companies were forty-six years old on average, with an age range from thirty to sixty-five years old. Noncommissioned officers were younger, but on average still older than enlisted men; the average age of the twelve known sergeants and corporals was thirty, with an age...

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