The Continental Army: the Force That Was Not Supposed to Exist (EVM0016)

An army with no country to raise it

In June 1775 there was no United States. There was a Congress with no power to tax, thirteen colonies with their own militias and their own jealousies, and an armed crowd outside Boston. The Continental Army was voted into being before the country it served existed, and for eight years it was kept alive by a body that could ask the states for money but never compel them to send it.

The uniforms tell you that immediately

Look at the line in this plate. There are proper regimentals — blue coat with buff facings, the combination that became the army’s identity — and standing beside them men in linen hunting shirts, the fringed frontier garment that was cheap, quick to make and available when cloth was not. Washington himself recommended the hunting shirt in 1776, not as a matter of style but because it could be produced in America while blue broadcloth had to be imported, largely from France.

Non-uniform uniforms were the normal condition

A regiment might be clothed one year and in rags the next, and the colour of its facings depended on which state had paid for the cloth. The 1779 regulation tried to impose order — blue coats for all, facings by region — and could never be fully applied for want of material. What an illustrator has to paint here is not a regulation but a supply situation: a line where two men standing shoulder to shoulder are dressed by two different economies.

Two black soldiers in the line, and they are not a decoration

Among the figures are two black soldiers, and they belong there historically. Around five thousand men of African descent served in the Continental Army, free and enslaved, in integrated units — the 1st Rhode Island being the best known but far from the only case. It was the last time an American army fought racially integrated until 1948, a fact that says more about the century and a half in between than about 1778.

What kept it together was not victories

The Continental Army lost more battles than it won. Its achievement was different: it survived, and by surviving it denied the British the decisive engagement they needed. Enlistments expired in the middle of campaigns, pay arrived months late or in worthless paper, and at Valley Forge and Morristown men deserted in numbers that would have destroyed a European army. It did not dissolve — and the war was decided by the fact that it did not.

The training that arrived from outside

The turn came at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777–78, when Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben imposed a single simplified drill on an army that until then had been fighting with as many systems as it had colonies. He wrote the manual, had it translated because he did not speak English, and trained a model company himself. What emerged in the spring could manoeuvre and could use the bayonet — which is what the plate shows. The other side of this war is in EVM0014; the Europeans who came to fight in it are in EVM0015.