Unlike state militiamen called up for a few weeks of emergency service, George Washington’s Continentals were regular soldiers who had to stick it out through years of fierce battles, nasty skirmishes, long marches, debilitating hunger, chronic disease and frigid exposure. They fought against superior numbers of better-supplied and -trained foes: a mix of British redcoats, Hessian mercenaries and loyalist volunteers. Rarely more than 10,000 men, the Continentals made up the hardy core of the patriot cause. By enduring through a prolonged ordeal, these full-time soldiers kept the Revolution alive while most of their countrymen served brief stints in a state militia — or stayed home.
Joseph Plumb Martin was one those Continental soldiers. Born in 1760 in western Massachusetts, he came from a rural family of declining fortunes. His Yale-educated father, Ebenezer, had squandered his high status as a Congregational minister by squabbling with town leaders, who discharged him. Unable to find another post, Ebenezer could not support his family, so he sent his 7-year-old son Joseph to live with the boy’s grandparents, who ran a small farm in Milford, Conn. Bored by farm chores and small-town life, Martin longed to get away once he reached adolescence. At age 15, he enlisted in a Connecticut regiment for a six-month term.
At first, military life seemed like a lark as Martin joined the untrained, rowdy horde of raw recruits assigned to defend New York City in July 1776, shortly after Congress declared American independence. One night, Martin and his fellow soldiers looted a warehouse, stole wine and got drunk. A month later, he discovered the harsher realities of a soldier’s life when British invaders landed in overwhelming numbers on nearby Long Island.
Experiencing his first combat, Martin saw scores of shattered men, “some with broken arms, some with broken legs, and some with broken heads.” Washington’s troops barely escaped and suffered several more demoralizing defeats during the next four months as they retreated from New York, across New Jersey and into Pennsylvania. Weary of a losing war, Martin hastened home when his enlistment expired at Christmas.
That winter, Washington lost most of his troops as their enlistments expired and had to rebuild the Continental Army. That proved difficult as word spread of the severe conditions and intense dangers of war. In early 1777, Washington persuaded Congress to require recruits to serve for at least three years — or as long as the war lasted. In the first two years of the war, patriots served only short stints, because they considered multiyear enlistments a form of slavery incompatible with their freedom as white Americans.
After 1776, the Continental Army consisted of marginal men: poor immigrants, transients, young apprentices, captured loyalists and former slaves. They enlisted from a combination of community coercion and the enticement of a cash bonus. In the spring of 1777, under pressure from his neighbors, Martin re-enlisted in Washington’s army: “I thought, as I must go, I might as well endeavor to get as much for my skin as I could.”
Those words appeared in “Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers, and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier,” Martin’s memoir first published in 1830. His account rejected the patriotic myth of a common cause that united Americans in a selfless struggle for freedom. Instead he depicted soldiers persevering despite callous officers and public neglect by civilians and political leaders. Martin highlighted the courage and endurance of enlisted men as essential to the founding of the United States. By celebrating the resilience and dedication of common troops, Martin corrected histories that glorified commanding generals.
Joseph Plumb Martin’s memoir from 1830 Museum of the American Revolution
As a minister’s son, Martin had received an unusually good education. But his family’s financial situation denied him the relative comfort of an officer’s life, consigning Martin instead to the hard knocks of a common soldier. Thanks to that combination, Martin could pen an often witty and insightful book, a preciously rare and lucid account of an enlisted man in the Continental Army.
Martin resented civilians who evaded the miseries of war, often while prospering by selling produce or livestock to the enemy or by cheating the patriot army. Martin recalled the anger of his fellow soldiers “venting our spleen at our country and government, then at our officers, and then at ourselves for our imbecility in staying there and starving in detail for an ungrateful people who did not care what became of us, so they could enjoy themselves, while we were keeping a cruel enemy from them.”
Some of those civilians were loyalists who supported the British forces. “There was no trusting the inhabitants,” Martin reported in New Jersey, “for many of them were friendly to the British, and we did not know who were or who were not and consequently were distrustful of them all.” Martin wanted readers to know that Americans were a divided rather than united people during the Revolution.
Martin wrote at length about the daily experiences of the Continental soldiers. Combat was shocking but sporadic, while arduous marching was almost constant. When night brought some respite, the soldiers slept “on the ground in the bushes, briars, thorns, or thistles,” for the army lacked enough tents and provided threadbare blankets that hosted lice. “How often have I envied the very swine their happiness … in their warm, dry sties, when I was wet to the skin and wished in vain for that indulgence,” Martin remembered. During the winter, troops holed up in encampments of small log huts, where sanitation was so wretched that many more died of camp diseases, especially dysentery, than of combat wounds. Frostbite ruined fingers and toes.
The new nation lacked the logistical infrastructure to adequately supply the Continental Army. Military contractors also cheated the soldiers with shoddy clothing and inedible food. In addition, congressmen and state legislators neglected an army increasingly composed of poor and marginal men without political influence. Finally, most citizens balked at paying the taxes needed to clothe, feed and pay troops, whom they thought of as disposable vagrants.
The troops frequently starved, especially during the winter. When they got food, it usually consisted of rancid horse meat, worm-infested biscuits and rock-hard old peas. Martin recalled, “Often, when I have picked the last grain from the bones of my scanty morsel, have I eaten the very bones. … ” Once, he went four days eating only some birch bark gnawed off a stick. The soldiers also received no pay after August 1777, when Congress suspended payments because hyperinflation had rendered paper currency almost worthless.
While dismayed with civilian indifference and the government’s neglect, Martin especially blamed the army’s officers, who came from a higher class and lorded it over the common soldiers while claiming the best food and housing for themselves. As gentlemen, officers cultivated a superior dignity and treated their troops as menial and vulgar. The officers “did not feel the hardships which we had to undergo,” Martin concluded, “and of course cared but little, if anything at all, about us.”
In 1780 and early 1781, the soldiers were fed up with their terrible conditions. The war had become a bloody stalemate that neither side seemed able to break. In the Continental Army, prolonged hardships led to a wave of mutinies by disgusted soldiers, who suddenly refused to take orders or perform duties.
Although alarming to Washington and other generals, the mutinies were sporadic and short, because each involved a few regiments from a single state rather than the whole army at one time. Far from a consolidated national force, the Continental Army consisted of distinct sets of state-organized regiments. Identifying with a home state, the soldiers had only a weak sense of American identity. Indeed, commanders could suppress mutinies by calling in troops belonging to a different state to enforce order on the dissidents.
In May 1780, Martin and other Connecticut troops were encamped at Basking Ridge, N.J., where they reached a boiling point. Martin recalled:
“The men were now exasperated beyond endurance; they could not stand it any longer; they saw no other alternative but to starve to death, or break up the army, give all up and go home. This was a hard matter for the soldiers to think upon. They were truly patriotic; they loved their country, and they had already suffered everything short of death in its cause; and now, after such extreme hardships, to give up all was too much, but to starve to death was too much also.”
Staging a mutiny, they defied orders, while “growling like sore-headed dogs” at their officers. Those officers tried to seize a ringleader “like wolves on a sheep and dragged him out of the ranks, intending to make an example of him for being a ‘mutinous rascal.’” But the bayonets of the men “pointing at their breasts as thick as hatchel teeth, compelled them quickly to relinquish their hold of him.”
That night, the Connecticut soldiers abandoned their mutiny and returned to their huts and their obedience. Officers wisely avoided punishing any soldiers and, for a few weeks, secured more food for these regiments.
Ultimately the Connecticut troops would neither desert to the enemy nor head home to civilian life. Having suffered so much together, the soldiers balked at dissolving their bonds by walking away. “We had lived together as a family of brothers for several years,” Martin wrote, and “had shared with each other the hardships, dangers and sufferings incident to a soldier’s life.” The solidarity of fellow suffering held the army together despite the soldiers’ anger at officers, civilians and state and federal leaders.
For Martin, the abortive mutiny of May 1780 loomed larger than any one battle in accounting for the ultimate patriot victory. By choosing solidarity over anger, the common soldiers kept the army alive. In the end, Martin credited them for winning the war by persisting through years of difficulty and danger. That persistence permitted a victory virtually completed in October 1781 when Washington’s troops and their French allies captured a British army at Yorktown, Va. The French military intervention ultimately helped to win the war — but the common patriot soldiers had sustained the cause long enough for that intervention to prevail.
The war ended in early 1783, when the British accepted a peace treaty that recognized American independence. To cut costs, Congress hastily dissolved the Continental Army, sending the troops home without six years of arrears in their pay — save for some certificates pledging future payment at no specified date.
Most of the ragged soldiers despaired of ever receiving their due from a bankrupt government. Instead they sold their certificates for pennies on the dollar to speculators. Martin recalled that the paltry amount allowed the demobilized soldiers to buy some clothing “to enable them to pass with decency through the country and to appear something like themselves when they arrived among their friends.” While the common soldiers had won the war, they reaped few benefits from independence.
During the 1790s, after a new constitution strengthened the federal government, the administration of George Washington did fund the certificates. But that funding provided windfall profits to the speculators who had preyed on the soldiers’ desperation in 1783. Big investors had more political clout than did the poor soldiers who had done so much to win the war. Martin lamented, “When the country had drained the last drop of service it could screw out of the poor soldiers, they were turned adrift like old worn-out horses.”
In 1784, Martin settled in the new town of Prospect on the central coast of Maine (then part of Massachusetts). He married Lucy Clewley, and they had five surviving children. Respected by his neighbors, Martin became a town selectman. But he never prospered.
During that decade, many former soldiers settled in and around Prospect because they expected to receive free land from the state government, which had confiscated the region from wealthy loyalists. The settlers believed that free farms on the frontier should compensate them for their wartime service and suffering. But a canny patriot general, Henry Knox, had married Lucy Flucker, a member of a loyalist family that had claimed a vast tract of land that included Prospect. Exploiting his marital and political connections, Knox gained ownership of the Flucker lands that the state confiscated during the war. He then threatened to evict any settlers who refused to buy their farms from him. Most did pay, but Martin could not afford it. In 1801, he wrote a letter that survives in Henry Knox’s papers:
“I throw myself and family wholly at the feet of Your Honor’s mercy, earnestly Hoping that Your Honor will think of some way, in your wisdom, that may be beneficial to Your Honor and save a poor family from distress.”
Because Knox did not relent, Martin lost his farm. Dispossession by Knox informed Martin’s bitter memories of officers as selfish parasites who grabbed more than their fair share, during and after the war. While common soldiers won the Revolution, officers reaped the postwar fruits by speculating in frontier lands and pay certificates.
In 1818, Martin applied for a war pension reserved for the destitute. “I have no real nor personal estate, nor any income whatever,” he testified in applying for a war pension. “I am a laborer, but by reason of age and infirmity I am unable to work. My wife is sickly and rheumatic.” Martin received $8 a month: barely enough for a family to live on.
Martin died in 1850 at nearly 90 years old. In his singular memoir, he shows how the new country was built on the exploitation of the common soldier, recounting hard truths about a revolution so often sugarcoated and distorted in our own time. He reveals a dangerous, difficult and divisive struggle, one that won independence while preserving inequality in the distribution of wealth and power. Debunking the hero worship of generals, Martin declared, “Great men get great praise; little men, nothing.”
