This is the final installment.
We thank John for allowing his fine summaries to be placed on the website.
Note: Several officers and the Webmaster of our ARRT attended the Conference and all pronounced it to be "Excellent".
Rod Andrew -- Andrew
Pickens, Not the Swamp Fox
Militias became increasingly important in the South after a
large portion of the Continental Army was taken prisoner by the British in their successful siege of Charleston in 1780, Rod Andrew said in the
first session of the 8th Annual Conference on the American Revolution Sunday.
The reason was simple: "Charleston was the most
devastating surrender of American Forces until MacArthur in the
Philippines" in 1942.
What followed was "a bloody, messy civil war"
across the South, Andrew said March 24, that saw burnings, torture of prisoners
and killings, actions that harkened back to the Indian wars on the Georgia and
Carolina frontiers of a few years before.
The militias became effective over the months between the
collapse at Charleston of American forces and the surrender of the British at
Yorktown because their members' and leaders' were willing to "work well
with the Continental Army" as it regrouped in the Carolinas under
Nathaniel Greene, "Light Horse Harry" Lee and Daniel Morgan in
punishing raids and set-piece battles.
In that light, the militia showed "boldness,
determination and a willingness to act decisively in times of
connectivity."
For Andrew Pickens and many of his followers in South
Carolina, "religion is an important part of [his and theirs]
biography." He, like many others
there, were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians whose earliest roots in North American
were dug into Pennsylvania as the 18th century began.
In frontier Carolina, he was an elder of his church. Its beliefs, planted in John Calvin's
Reformation teachings" that "God was absolutely sovereign" and
mankind was "inherently corrupt" and "had to repent when they
strayed," were his beliefs. For all that, "what motivated him," Andrew said is
hard to say because "Pickens never wrote much ... never said much."
What is known that Presbyterians, as a definable group, overwhelmingly
supported the American cause during the Revolution. The British and Loyalists targeted their churches
for burnings during the war to keep them
in line. "George III considered it a Presbyterian rebellion." Whig
politician and aristocrat Horace
Walpole, assessing the surrender at Yorktown, said, "Cousin America has
run off with a Presbyterian minister."
For men like the king and politician and probably Pickens
himself, "it's hard to tell where
Calvinism left off and Republicanism picked up."
As for Pickens personally, Andrew said that he lived a life
defined by liberty, order and virtue.
Zeroing in on "order," Pickens was behind
"the wise enforcement of just laws" and determined to protect Up
Country settlers and communities in his "96 District" from Indians
and bandits.
"Orderly is a moral term." Andrew added, "it depends on virtue of
the people." As Pickens saw the
world, "corruption of the human
heart could send the world into anarchy."
-- John Grady
Eric Schnitzer -- The
Germans Are Also Coming.
At the time of the American Revolution, Germany was divided into approximately 100 independent states -- loosely defined and not always contiguous that were ruled by monarchies, princes, counts, et al., but Germans played a major role in the long war fought on the continent and around the world.
Speaking at the second Sunday session of the 8th Annual Conference on the American Revolution in Williamsburg, Virginia, Eric Schnitzer set out in detail the German contribution to the British effort in North America, as well as filling in to defend its holdings at Gibraltar, the Mediterranean and India what became a world-wide conflict.
All told, the states sent 30,000 troops. The reason: "The British army was a peacetime army at
the start of the war" and it "had no conscription."
The way the system worked through treaty or contract was
Britain paid the rulers, say in Hesse-Cassel or Hesse-Hanau for the use of the
soldiers, but "the Germans paid their own soldiers" for their
service. In answer to a question, Schnitzer added, "the Germans had to
provide their own equipment," but "but the British paid for
transport" to and from North America or where ever the soldiers were sent.
In many cases, there were familial connections among German
nobility to George III that facilitated the signing of the contracts for
service of the soldiers. For example, Hesse-Cassel's Landgraf was married to a
daughter of the British king, and he sent 17,000 soldiers to North America. Likewise
Braunschweig-Lueneburg's ruler was George's brother-in-law and was contracted
for 6,000 soldiers.
What may seem surprising is that many of the Germans sent to North America, some of whom became prisoners of war, especially after Yorktown, chose not to return to Europe.
For example, Schnitzer said that of the 6,000 sent from
Braunschweig only 2,700 went back; of the 17,000 from Hesse-Cassel, 11,000
returned' and of the 1,200 soldiers sent from Waldech, 500 returned.
The reasons for staying, he added, were numerous: land, better opportunity and a chance to start over.
Try as Washington might over more than six years in command of the Continental Army, he "was never able to create the Army he wanted to lead" - one with a top-down structure, Sean Sculley said at the concluding session of the 8th Annual Conference on the American Revolution on March 24.
In answering a question during the Williamsburg forum, the serving Army lieutenant colonel, added, "yet the New England militia model wasn't followed either." What he was referring to was the tradition of locally-serving soldiers, electing their own officers to serve under, and that during the colonial wars had achieved great unit cohesion.
Virginia's militia heritage was slightly different in what
it was expected to do, he said in the presentation. Sculley said that until the French and Indian
War it "was more worried about slave insurrections" than attacks from
the French.
What Washington came to see during the war was a recognition
that "power [including military leadership] came from the people."
But his experience during the French and Indian War left him with grave
reservations about how well militiamen would perform in combat, so he still
favored soldiers in continental service as being more reliable under fire.
In today's military, Sculley, who teaches history at the
Military Academy, said, "leadership in the Army comes through negotiation"
and shared risk.
By contrast, Washington believed "you need to have
officers who can lead" in times of great risk, but at first, not committed
to explaining why. As for the enlisted
ranks, he wanted them to serve for the duration, not for short periods of time
-- eight months in the case of Virginia, and be sent where needed, not confined
to a state's boundaries for home defense.
To maintain
discipline, the British Articles of War were modified to American conditions,
he said, and bending to republican impulses pay was adjusted and made uniform
from colony to colony as their soldiers passed into the Continental Army.
By 1777, Congress, not the ranks, were choosing officers to
allow Washington more leeway in command.
Despite that change, regiments were aligned by state, a bow to local
cohesion. As the war dragged on, the ranks were filled by a mix of true
volunteers to the cause, men serving because of social pressure and, in some
instances, conscripted for specific months of service to meet an immediate
threat of British invasion or Tory activity.
For the officers, this selection by Congress meant they
could "rise in rank but not necessarily in social standing" as was
the case in the British army nor were they necessarily coming from the enlisted
force as they had when chosen by their peers. In the dreariness of the winter
camps, the officers also came to appreciate their soldiers' concern of not
being paid for months, their other grievances over treatment and were
increasingly reluctant to carry out the harshest of discipline -- shooting for
desertion.
Particularly after the defeat at Germantown, Washington saw
in the need for uniform training of all units, the need for literate
noncommissioned officers to mentor the junior soldiers in what they were
expected to do as a unit and larger force and an insistence, by him, that
officers "share all suffering" with their men.
In short, "lead by example."
In short, "lead by example."
Despite the hardships, the army endured, Sculley, citing 1779-1780 estimates, put the desertion rate at between 4 and 7 percent. In the 1840s, the rate was 40 percent.
-- John Grady