Was it possible to supply an army operating 3, miles from home? Could Britain subdue a rebellion across 13 colonies in an area some six times the size of England?
Would a protracted war bankrupt Britain? Was Britain risking starting a broader war? To back down, the ministers believed, would be to lose the colonies. To be sure, the initial rally to arms was impressive. When the British Army marched out of Boston on April 19, , messengers on horseback, including Boston silversmith Paul Revere, fanned out across New England to raise the alarm. Summoned by the feverish pealing of church bells, militiamen from countless hamlets hurried toward Concord, Massachusetts, where the British regulars planned to destroy a rebel arsenal.
Thousands of militiamen arrived in time to fight; 89 men from 23 towns in Massachusetts were killed or wounded on that first day of war, April 19, By the next morning, Massachusetts had 12 regiments in the field. Connecticut soon mobilized a force of 6,, one-quarter of its military-age men. Within a week, 16, men from the four New England colonies formed a siege army outside British-occupied Boston. Thereafter, men throughout America took up arms.
It seemed to the British regulars that every able-bodied American male had become a soldier. But as the colonists discovered how difficult and dangerous military service could be, enthusiasm waned. Many men preferred to remain home, in the safety of what Gen. As progressed, many colonies were compelled to entice soldiers with offers of cash bounties, clothing, blankets and extended furloughs or enlistments shorter than the one-year term of service established by Congress.
The following year, when Congress mandated that men who enlisted must sign on for three years or the duration of the conflict, whichever came first, offers of cash and land bounties became an absolute necessity. The states and the army also turned to slick-tongued recruiters to round up volunteers. Moreover, beginning in , the New England states, and eventually all Northern states, enlisted African-Americans, a practice that Congress had initially forbidden.
Ultimately, some 5, blacks bore arms for the United States, approximately 5 percent of the total number of men who served in the Continental Army. Longer enlistments radically changed the composition of the Army. But few who owned farms were willing to serve for the duration, fearing loss of their property if years passed without producing revenue from which to pay taxes. After , the average Continental soldier was young, single, propertyless, poor and in many cases an outright pauper.
In some states, such as Pennsylvania, up to one in four soldiers was an impoverished recent immigrant. Patriotism aside, cash and land bounties offered an unprecedented chance for economic mobility for these men. Accounts of shoeless continental army soldiers leaving bloody footprints in the snow or going hungry in a land of abundance are all too accurate. Albigence Waldo, a Continental Army surgeon, later reported that many men survived largely on what were known as fire cakes flour and water baked over coals.
But that was not always the case. So much heavy clothing arrived from France at the beginning of the winter in that Washington was compelled to locate storage facilities for his surplus. In a long war during which American soldiers were posted from upper New York to lower Georgia, conditions faced by the troops varied widely. While one soldier in seven was dying from hunger and disease at Valley Forge, young Private Martin, stationed only a few miles away in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, was assigned to patrols that foraged daily for army provisions.
Some , men served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Probably twice that number soldiered as militiamen, for the most part defending the home front, functioning as a police force and occasionally engaging in enemy surveillance. If a militia company was summoned to active duty and sent to the front lines to augment the Continentals, it usually remained mobilized for no more than 90 days.
Some Americans emerged from the war convinced that the militia had been largely ineffective. Militiamen were older, on average, than the Continental soldiers and received only perfunctory training; few had experienced combat.
At Camden, South Carolina, in August , militiamen panicked in the face of advancing redcoats. Throwing down their weapons and running for safety, they were responsible for one of the worst defeats of the war. Yet in , militiamen had fought with surpassing bravery along the Concord Road and at Bunker Hill.
Nearly 40 percent of soldiers serving under Washington in his crucial Christmas night victory at Trenton in were militiamen. In New York state, half the American force in the vital Saratoga campaign of consisted of militiamen. In March , Gen. In much of this unrest had calmed down, especially in the southern colonies.
Most North Carolinians carried on their daily lives on farms raising crops and tending herds, and in cities shopkeeping, cooking, sewing, and performing dozens of other occupations and tasks. They did not often think about the king of England or his royal governor in North Carolina. But beneath this calm surface there were problems.
Just three years earlier at Great Alamance Creek, 2, Tar Heel farmers called Regulators had led an uprising, the largest armed rebellion in any English colony to that time. They wanted to "regulate" the governor's corrupt local officials, who were charging huge fees and seizing property.
The royal governor, William Tryon , and his militia crushed the rebellion at the Battle of Alamance. Another problem beneath the surface calm lay with the large African and American Indian populations.
Many in these two groups hated their low positions in a society dominated by powerful whites. Some white colonists believed that if a war with England broke out, these other Tar Heels would support the king in hopes of gaining more control over their own lives. Finally, Tar Heels knew that other colonies were continuing to resist English control. In , colonists in Boston, Massachusetts, had thrown shipments of tea into the harbor rather than pay Parliament's taxes on the tea.
The Boston Tea Party aroused all the colonies against Parliament, which was continuing to show its scorn for the colonists' welfare. In June , the Massachusetts legislature issued a call for all of the colonies to meet at Philadelphia to consider these problems. But Royal Governor Josiah Martin refused to call a meeting of North Carolina's legislature in time to select delegates to go to Philadelphia. So the colony's Whigs those who favored independence formed a provincial congress that sent representatives to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in September.
The movement against English rule spread rapidly. In April British soldiers, called lobsterbacks because of their red coats, and minutemen—the colonists' militia—exchanged gunfire at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts.
Described as "the shot heard round the world," it signaled the start of the American Revolution and led to the creation of a new nation. North Carolina joined the war the following month. Eight days later, Governor Martin became the first royal governor in the colonies to flee office. In July he had to leave the fort and fled to the safety of a British ship anchored offshore. For eight years the Old North State was the scene of suffering caused by the war for independence.
There were deaths and injuries, terrible shortages of food and warm clothing, destruction and loss of property, and constant fear. While soldiers fought the war on the field, North Carolina's public leaders fought for independence, too.
In April North Carolina's provincial congress met at Halifax and decided to send a message to the Continental Congress. The group called for all the colonies to proclaim their independence from Great Britain. These Halifax Resolves were the first official action by any colony calling for a united drive for independence.
Now there was no turning back. Once the members of the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence, only the spilling of much blood would settle the matter. But North Carolinians were greatly divided. There was bitter combat between the Whigs and Tories those loyal to England , each trying to force the other to their views or at least to stop them from helping the other side.
John Adams, who became the second president of the United States, said that in the Revolution one third of the people were Whigs, one third Tories, and one third did not take either side. This was not exactly true for all colonies, of course, and perhaps North Carolina had more Whigs than Tories.
In the midst of war, and with a divided population, North Carolina began trying to create a new government. The king's governor had fled. If the king were no longer the sovereign, the center of authority and order, then who would be? Where would the government come from?
All the colonies faced this problem. They knew about English law and understood about governors, legislators, and judges. The new "twist" in was the practice of placing the power of government in the people rather than in a monarch. The questions of how this popular sovereignty would be expressed through elections, and how often, and who would be eligible to vote, would become areas of considerable debate. In response to the Boston Tea Party, the British government decided that it had to tame the rebellious colonists in Massachusetts.
Yet another provision protected British colonial officials who were charged with capital offenses from being tried in Massachusetts, instead requiring that they be sent to another colony or back to Great Britain for trial. But perhaps the most provocative provision was the Quartering Act , which allowed British military officials to demand accommodations for their troops in unoccupied houses and buildings in towns, rather than having to stay out in the countryside.
The quartering of troops eventually became one of the grievances cited in the Declaration of Independence. The Battle of Lexington broke out on April 19, British General Thomas Gage led a force of British soldiers from Boston to Lexington, where he planned to capture colonial radical leaders Sam Adams and John Hancock , and then head to Concord and seize their gunpowder.
But American spies got wind of the plan, and with the help of riders such as Paul Revere , word spread to be ready for the British. On the Lexington Common, the British force was confronted by 77 American militiamen , and they began shooting at each other. Seven Americans died, but other militiamen managed to stop the British at Concord, and continued to harass them on their retreat back to Boston.
The British lost 73 dead, with another wounded and 26 missing in action. The bloody encounter proved to the British that the colonists were fearsome foes who had to be taken seriously. But that was before the brutal British naval bombardments and burning of the coastal towns of Falmouth, Massachusetts and Norfolk, Virginia helped to unify the colonies.
Leaders of the rebellion seized the burnings of the two ports to make the argument that the colonists needed to band together for survival against a ruthless enemy and embrace the need for independence—a spirit that ultimately would lead to their victory. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
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