Army and Empire
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Army and Empire
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studies in war, society, and the military editors
Mark Grimsley Ohio State University Peter Maslowski University of Nebraska editorial board
D’Ann Campbell Austin Peay State University Mark A. Clodfelter National War War College Brooks D. Simpson Arizona State University Roger J. Spiller Combat Studies Institute U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Fort Leavenworth Timothy Timothy H. E. Travers Travers University of Calgary Arthur Waldron Waldron U.S. Naval War College
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Army and Empire
British Soldiers on the American Frontier Frontier, 1758–1775 Michael N. McConnell McConnell
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University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London
© 2004 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalogingin-Publication Data McConnell, Michael N. (Michael Norman) British soldiers on the American frontier, 1758–1775 / Michael N. McConnell. p. cm.—(Studies in war, society, and the military) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. isbn 0-8032-3233-0 (cl.: alk. paper)— isbn 0-8032-0479-5 (electronic) 1. Great Britain. Army—Military life. 2. Great Britain. Army—History—18th century. 3. Frontier and pioneer life—United States. 4. Great Britain— Colonies—America—Defenses. I. Title. II. Series. u767.m37 2004 973.2'7—dc22 2004008420 Set in Jansen by Kim Essman. Printed by Thomson-Shore Inc.
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For my mother and father Joan S. McConnell Fred N. McConnell and to the memory of Rose Ann Lee David Lee Elizabeth Thorpe
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Contents
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The British Occupation of the West 2. Frontier Fortresses 3. Military Society on the Frontier 4. The Material Lives of Frontier Soldiers 5. The World of Work 6. Diet and Foodways 7. Physical and Mental Health Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
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Illustrations
Figures 1. Cantonment of forces, 1766 2. Sir Jeffery Amherst, commander in chief, 1759–63 3. Gen. Thomas Gage, commander in chief, 1763–75 4. Draft of the Mississippi River, 1765 5. General Forbes’s Marching Journal to the Ohio 6. Fort Pitt, November 1759 7. Fort Ligonier, June 1762 8. Plan of Fort Niagara, 1764 9. View of Detroit, July 25 , 1794 10. Sketch of the fort at Michilimackinac 11. Plan of Mobile, 1770 12. Plan of Pensacola, 1765 13. Women’s, men’s, and children’s shoes 14. Whistle, harp, whizzer, and marbles 15. Snuff box, ring, thimbles, pins, combs 16. Pencils, padlock, key, coins 17. Cooking and dining utensils 18. Map of Niagara River 19. Niagara River gorge from the west 20. Iron shovel and axe heads 21. One of two stone redoubts at Fort Niagara 22. Bake house at Fort Niagara 23. Chamber pot, toothbrush, medicine bottles, pill tile 24. Plan of Croft-Town, 1770 25. View of Fort Erie, 1773
Maps 1. The Army and the West, end of 1760 2. The Army and the West, summer 1763 3. The Army and the West, end of 1766 4. The Army and the West, summer 1773
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Tables 1. Army manpower losses and gains in North America, 1766–67, 1770 2. Health of British forces overseas, 1768–75 3. Army rates of sickness and death in North America, 1766–67, 1770
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Acknowledgments
This book took longer to complete than I had originally planned and, as sometimes happens, it took a decidedly different turn from what I had originally intended. That it reached completion at all owes a great deal to the kindness and generosity of many institutions and individuals. Research trips to the William L. Clements Library and the David Library of the American Revolution were both profitable and enjoyable thanks to Professors John Dann and David Fowler and their capable staffs. I also owe thanks to the David Library for a research fellowship. The Alderman Library, University of Virginia; the British Library; the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania; the Oneida Country Historical Society in New York; the National Archives of Canada; the National Army Museum in London; and the Scottish Records Office all cheerfully supplied materials and answered queries about their collections. Brian Dunnigan, formerly executive director of the Old Fort Niagara Association, generously shared his own work and research files at an early stage of my research and has since been of particular help as the head of research and publications at the Clements Library. The Fort Ligonier Museum in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, has become somethingofasecondhomeoverthepastfewyears.NotonlyhaveIlearned much about British soldiers in America from the director, Martin West, and curators Penny West and Shirley Iscrupe, I have always enjoyed a warm welcome and generous hospitality. Marty shared his impressive knowledge of eighteenth-century fortification and military technology, while Shirley proved to be a most valuable guide through the museum’s archaeological collections. Fort Ligonier also provided venues for sharing ideas and research, as did the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, David Curtis Skaggs of Bowling Green University, Warren Hofstra of Shenandoah University, and the Organization of American Historians. James Merrell was generous enough to read the entire manuscript at a critical stage; his insights and editorial skills spared me any number of errors
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and fractured phrases. Martin West, Warren Hofstra, and Harold Selesky also read the manuscript at various stages and offered much sound advice, while Peter Way shared materials and insights from his own research on common British soldiers in America. I have also benefited greatly from the comments and critiques of several friends and colleagues here in Birmingham. Wendy Gunther-Canada, Carolyn Conley, Andrew Keitt, Daniel Lesnick, Raymond Mohl, and James Tent brought insights to bear from fields as diverse as medieval Italy and modern political theory as they listened patiently to half-formed ideas. Eddie Luster and Rebecca Naramore of the Sterne Library interlibrary loan department managed to fill every request, no matter how obscure. Alice and Michael continue to offer the kind of moral support that can be found nowhere else. So do my parents, whose own love of history and learning set me on a career path that has been rewarding in so many ways.
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e f ) r . , a h t s o b o y r t : s h e i c r f o t n e t i e t e s y W s f o m t s e l m e r e v A n ’ y t n A . r u C i n A n m r e m N C o L . U n , m y , a a e n o i n ( ” g t s . a r a i h n a e c 6 i h l r i c T . C r o 6 7 i b i 1 “ F 1 W L M
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Introduction
Few men had greater firsthand knowledge of Britain’s army in America than its mustering agents. James Pitcher, “Commissary of the Musters,” and his two assistants were responsible for verifying the number of soldiers in each regiment. Theirs was important work; the musters, held twice a year, provided an independent account of the army’s strength, serving as a check of the monthly reports submitted by the regiments. Since pay and allowances were based on these returns, no part of the army could expect its allotment until Pitcher had verified the returns based on his department’s own inspections. 1 During the interlude between the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution, Pitcher and his men once again prepared for long, dangerous journeys from army headquarters in New York City; their travels would take them to every corner of Britain’s North American possessions as well as to the island garrisons located on Bermuda and the Bahamas. Pitcher headed for the Ohio Country, following Forbes’s Road west, to sprawling Fort Pitt. One of his assistants headed up the Hudson River on the first leg of a trek that eventually took him through the Great Lakes to distant Fort Michilimackinac at the confluence of Lakes Huron and Michigan. The other man traveled south by ship and cross-country, ending his trip in the new and sultry province of West Florida, where redcoats stood guard at the former Spanish and French forts of Pensacola and Mobile. 2 Altogether, 1765 these agents covered some 9,800 miles, much of it through the western periphery of British America, lands only recently attached to the empire. Indeed, their travels followed the course taken by British expansion during and immediately after the Seven Years’ War: over the Alleghenies to the upper Ohio valley, up the Mohawk valley to Lake Ontario, and around the Niagara portage to the upper Great Lakes—the pays d’en haut of New France and the heart of the French-Indian trading and alliance network. Much farther south, British troops clung to decayed outposts in West Florida, having arrived only two years earlier. This new imperial frontier, however, was by no means fixed. In addition
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to the string of forts guarding portages and rivers, Pitcher and his agents would have seen the ruins of posts abandoned during the recent war with trans-Appalachian Indians, and not until the end of 1765 did the redcoats finally take possession of Fort Chartres and the Illinois Country.3 The journeys of Pitcher and his men revealed many features of the evolving network of British garrisons and of military life in the West. First, and perhaps most compelling for travelers, were the distances that defined the new imperial frontier, which stretched in a broad “z” shape from the Great Lakes to Pensacola Bay (see map 1 )—the region’s expanse was better measured in weeks or months than in miles. Moreover, the West held a widely varied landscape, from the upper Great Lakes with their numbing winters to the tropical coast of the Gulf of Mexico, frequently invaded by violent hurricanes. The West occupied by redcoats was also a network of fortifications: some impressive works of earth and stone, others mere stockades. Though British soldiers were used to serving in widely scattered detachments in Britain or Ireland, at home this generally meant duty in garrison towns or known havens of smugglers. In contrast, British forts in western America were not only widely separated from each other but from the civilian world within the settled colonies as well. Nevertheless, as Pitcher and his assistants visited one post after another, they would have seen unmistakable signs of “society,” however small or crude by the standards of colonial or British civilians. At nearly every fort lived at least a few wives and children, dependents whose poverty left them little choice but to follow the regiments. Englishmen—and women—found themselves serving alongside Irishmen, Scots, Germans, Frenchmen, and African Americans; these redcoats in the West served in an army whose manpower came from virtually every corner of the British Atlantic. In their barrack rooms, as well as on their persons, these people could display at least some elements—be it fancy cloth or fine china—of the dynamic world of commerce that helped define Britain’s relations with its far-flung colonies. The mustering agents would also have understood that what defined the daily activities of these military communities, which ranged in size from a few dozen inhabitants to 200 or 300, was less the relentless routine of close-order drill and musketry than the heavy labor and drudgery involved in keeping themselves fed, clothed, and housed. The impermanent nature of fortifications built of wood and earth meant that redcoats also spent long hours wielding picks, shovels, and broadaxes in an endless cycle of building and rebuilding. In their off-duty time, common soldiers and officers alike
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could be found nurturing garden plots, tending livestock, hunting, and fishing, all in an effort to supplement the filling but seldom nutritious rations of salt pork, peas, and bread. The mustering agents would also have found unmistakable signs of ill health among the troops and dependents as well as notes in regimental books recording deaths. Added to the sprains, lacerations, and broken bones commonly associated with military and civilian labor, soldiers faced dangers from the climate—from tropical diseases to frostbite. The need to move men and supplies throughout the West exposed redcoats to the risk of drowning, dying of exposure, or crippling injury on breakneck mountain roads. Moreover, all of these dangers beset an army whose manpower continued to age because of life enlistments and a shortage of recruits. From the autumn of 1758, when British and provincial soldiers first entered the lands west of the Appalachians, until 1774, when mounting colonial resistance to parliamentary acts drew most of the army in America to Boston, the protection and management of the West and its peoples was a principal concern of the army and its leaders in Whitehall. Much of the permanent force kept in the American colonies after 1763 saw service in the West; between 1758 and 1774 fully one-fifth of Britain’s infantry regiments spent time standing guard over the Great Lakes, the Gulf Coast, and the Ohio and Mississippi valleys in between. The military landscape that Pitcher and his men encountered on their travels into the West represented an altogether unprecedented experience for Britain’s regular army. Nothing in the army’s past could fully prepare redcoats for the challenges of duty on the far western periphery of British America. The duty of occupying territory and giving weight to governmental authority was not in itself new to the British army: redcoats had maintained a long-standing occupation of Ireland, campaigned against Jacobites in the Highlands of Scotland, and chased smugglers along England’s coasts, and they had provided security in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland as well as in the slave-based sugar islands in the West Indies. What was different about the British army’s experience in the American West was not merely the physical magnitude of the territory but the distinctive social and cultural complexity of the world within which redcoats lived and worked. Elsewhere they found themselves in a recognizable “British” world (in Ireland or Scotland) or in places where the natives, whether African or Acadian French, were essentially separate—either enslaved or bent on living their own lives undisturbed by empire. But the region beyond the Ap-
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palachians was alive with what must have seemed to redcoats a bewildering array of peoples and interests. Natives who were once the allies of the French now found themselves facing a British regime that had long been the enemy. Indians’ control over their own lands and economies became increasingly problematic with the presence of British traders on the Great Lakes and colonial settlers in the Ohio Country. As the army attempted to introduce what has been called “garrison government” into the West, it was inevitably drawn into the wider world around it. 4 More than just military posts existing as enclaves in others’ lands, British garrisons were yet one more type of community in a complex matrix of peoples and cultures. The chapters that follow are an exploration of redcoats’ lives in the West, emphasizing themes that are fundamental to any larger exploration of the army’s role as an agent of empire on Britain’s frontier in America. Chapter 1 examines the army’s occupation of the West beginning in the waning days of the Seven Years’ War, and chapter 2 takes a close look at the paramount feature of that occupation: the fortified garrisons that defined the army’s West and shaped the lives of those who lived within their walls. Those people are the subject of the remaining chapters. Chapter 3 examines the makeup of frontier garrisons, emphasizing the social and ethnic complexities of what on the surface appears to be a uniform military force. Chapter 4 expands the picture of garrison communities by looking into the material lives of soldiers and military dependents. The next three chapters take as their topics the related themes of work, diet, and health—issues that dominated the lives of all ranks of redcoats in the West. The conclusion looks back on the West over a decade and a half of military occupation, examining both changes and continuities in the army’s experience. This book follows a path charted and developed by a new generation of scholarship on the British army and its experiences in the colonies. These studies, in turn, have built upon the emphasis of the “new military history” on armies as social as well as military organizations and their relationships to the states and societies that spawned and sustained them. Current scholarship on the British army in America covers a wide range of topics: encounters between regulars and provincials, common soldiers’ emerging identity as a labor force and their encounters with wholly new concepts of war making, and the redcoats’ experience in waging a war for empire between 1755 and 1763. 5 In one important respect, however, this study departs from the literature on redcoats in America. Instead of following the army through its war
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against the French, it explores the postwar, peacetime army in the West. The difference is an important one. The army during the Seven Years’ War was bigger and better financed than the peacetime force that followed. Redcoats during the war also engaged in campaigns that placed a premium on the army’s fighting skills; garrisons on the postwar frontier, in contrast, seldom engaged in tactical exercises or the large-scale operations that typified the battalions of Amherst and Wolfe. And whereas these generals led armies that numbered in the thousands, western military forces rarely counted more than a couple of hundred soldiers at any given place; regiments, even companies within regiments, were widely dispersed across a highly variable physical and cultural landscape. The questions that inform the following chapters, then, have less to do with war than with peace, less to do with the details of tactics and military [-19], (19 organization than with what might be called the “housekeeping” associated with occupying and maintaining strong points on the outer limits of empire. Lines: 50 Housekeeping seems to be a useful way of conceptualizing much of what ——— shaped military life in the West. Indeed, a theme that runs through the story is how domestic and unmilitary these scattered garrisons were, and how mil- * 231.38 ——— itary expectations and routines had to give way before the unique demands Normal P of life beyond the settlements. Over time, in fact, forts and garrisons in the * PgEnds: West took on aspects similar to those rural civilian communities back east. [-19], (19
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William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.)
