A Proper Sense of Honor: Service and Sacrifice in George Washington's Army (review)

No other book provides so much thick description of the face of hierarchy, both ritual and concrete, in the Continental Army. (A Proper Sense of Honor does not examine the militia.) Indeed, no other book provides so thorough a treatment of discipline, health and medicine, burial, and the experience of prisoners of war in so short a space. While doing so, Caroline Cox strives for an interpretive "middle ground" (xviii) in the debate over the motives, social characteristics, and conditions of service of Continental Army soldiers. She succeeds, but one has to ask whether the sum totals more or less than the parts.

Cox's thesis can be summarized as "there was hierarchy in colonial America; it predisposed the Continental Army to hierarchy; and the army's soldiers normally accepted this hierarchy." If half the value of A Proper Sense of Honor lies in the detail of the individual chapters, the other half lies in Cox's argument that Continental Army hierarchy was founded on colonial social structure. Yet she takes no explicit stance on the significance of this conclusion for the study of revolutionary America. What were the social and political consequences of soldiers' acceptance of hierarchy during, and especially after, the Revolution? This, the question of outcomes, has to be the big question for a study of this topic, and Cox does not address it.

Indeed, Cox's middle ground is surprisingly bereft of explicit attention to two of the core issues in the debate between those historians (e.g., Robert Middlekauff, Charles Royster, and John Resch) who emphasize the political/ideological motivation of soldiers, with its implications of greater social equality and unity, and those who stress social or class dynamics (a much larger number, perhaps most notably Mark Lender and Edward Papenfuse), especially those of hierarchy and division. A Proper Sense of Honor is a work of cultural, not social, history, and Cox takes the social (or class) origins of enlisted soldiers for granted: "the level of treatment that soldiers accepted indicates that they came mostly from society's lowest ranks. Those men who accepted [such low] standards . . . were presumably those who did not see such conditions as a shameful" degradation (xvii).

Though essentially siding with Papenfuse and Lender on the origins of soldiers and the presence of hierarchy, Cox sidesteps the question of motivation. A couple of pages (240–41) suggest that it probably changed over time, with increasing unit pride and cohesion like that found in the professional European military forces of the day, but Cox does not explore the shifts in motivation any more than she does those in origin. Why soldiers joined the army is never resolved. Why did they stay? "Grumbling resignation was the order of the day" (116), she argues, but "Continental army soldiers did not question the conventions of the time" (117). If they didn't like the conditions of service, they deserted or refused to reenlist. In effect, actions explain motives, or make examining motives unnecessary.

Cox offers two possible answers to these conundrums. The first is socialization, both in colonial society and military institutions, which encouraged subordination to hierarchy. Accustomed to the demands of deference, "the men of the Continental army respected military hierarchy and accepted the different standard of living dictated by that arrangement. . . . Harmony reigned when everyone knew their rank and acted accordingly" (71). In this case, Cox's argument ultimately lends support to the political or military historian's emphasis on unity of effort in the army, and thus the national cause. Indeed, the cover illustration, in which Cox has turned soldier and officer away from one another (they originally faced the same direction), actually reverses the thrust of her interpretation: they should have faced toward each other, in de facto consensus supporting the existing social (and military) hierarchy.

Cox does begin to provide the "less polarized and more nuanced...