Rebellion in the Ranks: Mutinies of the American Revolution (review)

As John Nagy makes clear in his exhaustively researched new book, exactly what constitutes a mutiny is hard to pin down. During the Revolutionary War, the word was used freely by individuals and courts martial panels to refer to everything from “simple individual disobedience to actual armed insurrection” (p. xv). However, despite contemporary confusion, Nagy is clear that he is looking to explore and explain the latter, whether those incidents were planned and aborted or carried out. To that end, he has combed the archives for details of mutinies including those best known to scholars, those of the Pennsylvania and New Jersey lines in 1781, and many others. In a useful appendix, he lays out a schedule of the ones he has discovered, making clear the sheer number and demonstrating that mutinies were more numerous as the war progressed. Nagy emphasizes, as others have done, that unrest was rarely due to disloyalty to the cause. Rather, disturbances occurred when soldiers had been pushed beyond endurance over lack of pay and clothing and when living conditions generally were wretched. Much of the extensive detail of the smaller mutinies is new and Nagy has integrated Patriot experiences on land and sea and those of the British Army during the war to broaden out his study.

Despite the rich material on lesser known mutinies, Nagy’s book is especially thorough on the recounting of the mutiny of the Pennsylvania line, which occupies about a third of the book. For this, he has uncovered a dazzling array of evidence and is able to recreate both the events and people’s perceptions of them at the time, thanks to material he has found from the spy networks of both the Patriots and the British. He has unearthed a reservoir of sources that will be of use to scholars and students for a long time to come.

Unfortunately, the immense detail the book contains gets in the way of its readability. It is dense going as the reader is not able to distinguish between the critical pieces of information and the incidental ones. One suspects that the author cherished each tidbit too much. It is a challenge that many historians face as they write to distill the years of labor in the archives and eliminate cherished quotes or nuggets of knowledge that took months or more to uncover. Alas, it must be done to move the account and the analysis along. Here, reader and author get bogged down. The use of lengthy quotations slows the pace down yet more.

Still, the scholarship is sound and the writing is free of jargon. Nagy is sympathetic to the soldiers. He convinces readers of their ultimate loyalty to the cause as they tried to cope with what he called “a perfect storm” (p. 65) of distress over food, supplies, and unclear enlistment contracts. Those interested in the military details of the Revolution will find the blow by blow recreation of these incidents helpful.