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213 Afterword The Military of Massachusetts Bay Transformed In the midst of King Philip’s War, although few in the colony perceived it at the time, a major shift occurred in the way that Massachusetts Bay conducted war. The change in the nature of offensive warfare was subtle, but significant. Amazingly, the exact day that the change transpired can be identified, a rare occurrence for such an important but almost imperceptible shift. The date was May 5, 1676. On that day, the Massachusetts General Court issued a series of orders to its commanders and militia committees. The first set of commands instructed military leaders to “arme & dispatch the Indian soldjers.”1 The second monumental instruction told the militia committees “to take subscriptions from persons willing and able to beare the charge of wages and provisions for the supply of . . . volunteers.”2 With the stroke of a pen, Massachusetts Bay changed the very nature of war making in New England—a change that lasted for over one hundred years. King Philip’s War was the most deadly and important military conflict in the history of colonial New England. Unlike the Pequot War, the conflict that began in 1675 was crucial to the survival of the colonies. The government of the Bay Colony responded to the crisis in the best way that it knew how—it fell back on its legally mandated, persistently local system of militia committees to impress men to fight the war. While a few men volunteered (and a minuscule number hired substitutes) to fight in the early days of the conflict, the war was predominantly fought by pressed men. The trouble was that these pressed men made bad soldiers. And it was not necessarily their fault. The fault should be laid at the feet of the colony’s thoughtful, long-established, perfectly logical institution: the committee of militia. The committees employed both civilian and military leaders to make decisions in a way that avoided any grand seizure of power by the central government, a fear that New Englanders carried from the days of 214 The Military of Massachusetts Bay Transformed Charles I in Stuart England. At the same time, the Massachusetts militia committees were local. This fit perfectly with New England society, as the colonists had come to cherish and demand local control of almost every aspect of their lives, from politics to religion and even to the military.3 The trouble was that militia committees, like Elizabethan lords lieutenant before them, had two masters. The committees were responsible to the governor, the General Court, and society in general to select good soldiers who would fight well. Yet, the committees of militia also had local masters—the towns that demanded that their best sons be spared the press. Why not send the “undesirables” in society instead? When it came time to choose which men to send into combat, the militia committees, manned by local elites, sided almost completely with their communities. They chose, as has been seen, men who had been in trouble with the law, had no connection to the town, were landless and searching for a place to fit in, or had defied authority. These traits were hardly the makings of first-rate soldiers. Not only were such men poor prospects to be good soldiers, but they often did not show up for service at all, especially those with a predisposition toward contempt of authority. Historian Jenny Hale Pulsipher has detailed high levels of evasion and resistance to the press during King Philip’s War.4 Men who hid or ran from the press just sent the committees scrambling to find more recruits, using the same criteria as before and often finding men just as bad or worse. In his account, Captain Benjamin Church often stressed the inferior martial abilities of pressed soldiers in the early days of King Philip’s War.5 His sentiments mirror those of Barnaby Rich and other English commanders, who complained loudly about the quality and fighting skills of recruits pressed out of taverns and jails for Elizabeth’s military adventures in the sixteenth century.6 The sheer number of ambushes and bungled operations during King Philip’s War, such as the surprise raid on the column at Bloody Brook, the unorganized , undisciplined rush to the Great Narragansett Fort, or the disastrous Sudbury rout, are evidence of the poor quality of the locally pressed troops. While bad soldiering was only one element in the inability of the colonists to best their...

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