George Washington, Namesake of our Round Table

8th AmRev Conf (Part III)

The 8th Annual Conference of the American Revolution, presented by America's History LLC http://americashistoryllc.com and hosted by Bruce and Lynne Venter, was held in Williamsburg, VA from March 22 - 24, 2019.  John Grady of our Round Table attended and made the following summaries of some of the lectures presented at the conference. 

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.

 -- John Grady




Sean Sculley -- Military Leadership

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."

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