New York 1776

American forces

The army that built up in and around New York City was not the one that had performed so well around Boston, and if Britain experienced problems in amassing an army to fight the war, they seem almost trivial compared to those that Washington had to deal with. The American commander-in-chief had to watch his army melt away as terms of enlistment expired at the end of 1775 and he was justifiably concerned that Howe’s beleaguered regulars might break out and scatter the remains of his command. Less than 4,000 of the troops around Boston were willing to re-enlist and Washington was forced to call on emergency militia reinforcements. Even so, he had barely 10,000 men as 1776 opened.

The ragged men around Boston had become the Main Army, part of the Continental Army, following a vote in Congress on July 25. Congress was now attempting to raise a new army, but the term of enlistment would again be for a single year, which would put Washington in exactly the same situation in 12 months. It was entirely possible that the point would be moot by then and Washington lashed out angrily at what he saw as the “dirty, mercenary spirit” of the men who had left him at Boston.

Numbers were not the only problem. There was an almost total lack of military training to contend with as well. The painful fact was that Americans would have to learn their soldiering “on the job,” and the lessons would be harsh. A key obstacle to overcome was the sense of rivalry between the colonies. One of the war’s most celebrated diarists, Joseph Plumb Martin, wrote that he would rather serve alongside Indians than with men from Pennsylvania, whom he dismissed as “mostly foreigners.” It was true that the fledgling Continental Army consisted of a broad spectrum of nationalities, and differences in social standing were no less dramatic. Freed slaves, gentlemen, farmers, paid substitutes, young glory seekers and a sprinkling of veterans would rub shoulders in the ranks.

There would be no effective training before Valley Forge, in the winter of 1777, and the Continentals would for now have to settle for lessons offered by the British regulars on the field of battle. Nor was there any uniformity of dress. Congress had declared the uniform of the new army would consist of brown coats and all enlistees were entitled to one, but even the units who received brown coats soon wore them out and by late August Washington’s Army had a distinctly motley appearance. Notable exceptions were units including the 1st Delaware Regiment and Maryland’s ‘Dandy Fifth’, who would go into battle properly uniformed—for most it was a case of civilian clothes, or, at best, hunting shirts.

Equipment was similarly lacking in standardization, with a wide variety of weapons, including a few blunderbusses, joining British, Dutch, French and German muskets. Large numbers of French muskets, superior in some ways to the famed “Brown Bess” the British regulars carried, had started to arrive in 1776, but the problem was exacerbated by the tendency of fleeing soldiers to drop their weapons. An estimated 8,000 muskets were discarded in this way in 1776.