In Defense of Hearth and Home - Paul Hunt

In Defense of Hearth and Home (eBook)

The history of the Thirteen Colonial Militias from 1607-1775

Paul Hunt (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2020 | 1. Auflage
278 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-1877-2 (ISBN)

In Defense of Hearth and Home is an analytical history of the thirteen colonial militias from their inception up to the American Revolution. This work chronicles the experiences of each individual militia system, how it interacted with its opponents, how and when it gained war time experience or decayed from a lack of such experience during long periods of peace. Uses a combination of first person accounts, historical narrative, and combat analysis to weave together a comprehensive history of the thirteen colonial militias through the colonial period. A major theme of this work is that each colonial militia developed differing capabilities in response to the differing immediate threats each colony had to defend against. Each individual colony's war time experiences differed from that of its' neighbor, even when both participated in the same war. For instance, Queen Anne's War was a life and death struggle to Massachusetts and South Carolina, but barely merits a footnote in North Carolina's history. Through this process, chronicled herein, a patchwork of differing militias developed on the eve of the Revolution. Each individual militia system developed different levels of expertise, different capabilities, and became unique militia systems in response to differing histories. At the beginning of the American Revolution thirteen separate militia systems of varying quality opposed the English attempt to conquer the rebelling colonies. It was their experiences in the colonial period, or lack thereof, account for their differing quality in 1775. These differences explain many of the widely varying militia performances during the Revolution. Another major theme is that the first colonists brought European methods of warfare to the New World. Over the next one hundred and seventy years their experience fighting against the Indian nations, the French, the Dutch, and the Spanish forced the colonies to create a unique fusion of Indian and European warfare. The process of th

Preface: Methodology

Beyond Generals and Arrows on Maps

Why write on the militias? They don’t exactly have the best reputation do they? The militias were the primary defense force for the American colonies for two centuries, a period when those colonies experienced explosive growth and prosperity amidst a highly hostile environment. Yet the militias have such a poor reputation. Normally in such hostile conditions, a poorly defended society does not prosper. Yet clearly America prospered. This incongruity has always bothered me. I knew the militias, being amateurs, had panics, made mistakes, and failed at times. But these failures have come to unjustly define them. This work attempts to correct this. Quite simply, they deserve to be remembered accurately. So I will call particular attention to their successes, successes that have received far too little recognition. I will not ignore their failures, but you must excuse me if we do not dwell on them, all too many have done so. My only hope is that this work accords them the honor to which their service and sacrifices entitles them.

To understand how good or bad the militias were and why, we must look at their wars. Wars are complex creatures. They can be studied on many levels and often have been. One level concerns the interaction of the opposing generals’ decisions, Rommel and Patton, Grant and Lee, Washington and Howe. Another method involves the clash of armies, a chronological recounting of combat as each army seeks to dominate and crush the other. Ever read Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe or Von Manstein’s Lost Victories? Another way to study a conflict is from the soldiers’ eyes. Anderson’s A People’s Army or Forrest’s Soldiers of the French Revolution are great examples of this. Each level of historical study uncovers valid truth about the conflicts studied, but often not the same truths. Frequently, a truth is unclear at one level but quite prominent at another. Skilled, ambitious authors have penned multi-level studies. For example, Scheer and Rankin’s Rebels and Redcoats manages a fine synthesis of the personal level and the clash of armies. From this one book you can learn a lot about our Revolution and the men who fought it.

One of the finest works I have read is David Chandler’s The Campaigns of Napoleon. Chandler examines the French Revolution and Napoleon’s Wars on several different levels. One is the institutional level. He sees the Napoleonic Wars as a clash between a newly reorganized French Army and Napoleonic tactical system arrayed against other European powers that used military institutions and war fighting methods developed 50 years previously. Chandler’s thesis is that an improved and modernized institution translated into higher French Army combat effectiveness and was a major reason for their successes. It is this level or perspective we look at. We will examine how the exigencies of combat against, first Indians and then their French and Spanish allies, slowly transformed the Plymouth and Jamestown Trainbandsmen into the Revolutionary militias. We will see how militia combat experience, or lack thereof, influenced organizational adaptation and effectiveness over the colonial period. This level of study is somewhat under-examined. It is also a level at which certain truths are apparent that are not readily discernable at other levels.

Every war is a clash between two military institutions. Each is a complex product of its’ constituent peoples’ culture and government, its’ interaction and experience against opponents, and the parent civilization’s technological inheritance. These factors convey different strengths and weaknesses to the military institution. In wars between culturally similar nations, the institutional gulf is usually small. In clashes between civilizations, this gulf is often quite large. In such cases, their large dissimilarity prevents both from being fully effective against one another. Successes mix with failures, sometimes large failures. These failures stimulate adaptation as each army tries to gain an advantage and grapple with its’ foe. German philosopher Hegel’s thesis, antithesis, new synthesis accurately describes how these attempts to cope mutate into complex cycles of interactive adaptation. You see these cycles in short wars. In long wars, they often determine the victor and the vanquished. Unfortunately, these adaptive cycles often go unrecognized and are studied coherently even less often.

Wars are endeavours of crucial importance. To the fighting men the matter is literally life and death. They therefore operate at the height of innovative and adaptive ability. For example, in World War II what Americans did with the tank was astounding. Tanks that float; sounds like an oxymoron doesn’t it? Yet tanks swam ashore at Normandy, fighting until they were burned out hulks.a In Europe and the Pacific, dozens of variations emerged to solve individual problems. There were tanks that swam, tanks that swept mines, flamethrower tanks, tanks that tunneled through hedgerows, tank bulldozers, etc., literally dozens of varieties. Some were developed within days or weeks of the need arising. This was innovative adaptation at it fastest and finest. But this was adaptation at the micro level. There is also adaptation at the institutional level. The French Napoleonic Army of 1805 was a vastly different institution from the Ancien Regime Army of 1789, just 16 years prior. But here the changes were organizational. All major changes separating the Ancien Regime Army from the army Napoleon used to crush all Europe were organizational or tactical (granted, the artillery equipment was better). So too the German Army of 1940 was a completely different (and far more robust) creature than that of 1918, much to the chagrin of the French. It is these kinds of adaptations this work focuses on.

The first settlers in North America were militiamen, with all the institutional heritage England’s long, celebrated military traditions could impart. They came to the New World with a specific way of waging war, and met a completely different way of waging war in that of the indigenous tribes. We will examine the clash between these two different militaries. We will chronicle how the American, Spanish, French, and Indian ways of fighting interacted and changed over time. We will show how and why militia fighting effectiveness fluctuated over the 170 years from Jamestown to Lexington. During that time, Indian warfare and life in America evolved the Elizabethan Trainband into the colonial militias. When the American Revolution began, the English Army clashed with a very different group of militias than those transplanted to Jamestown and Plymouth.

In order to gain a firm understanding of each colonial militias’ strengths, weaknesses, and development in combat, we trace each individual colony’s militia over the colonial period to the Revolution. This is not intended as a comprehensive institutional study. We focus on each militias’ combat experiences or their lack, taking note of the institutional changes they adopted during and after each conflict. We then proceed to an overall assessment of each militia on the eve of the American Revolution. I apologize in advance for this approach’s repetitive nature. You will hear of King William’s and Queen Anne’s wars, and other conflicts on multiple occasions. We trace how each colony’s militia was affected by the differing stresses of these conflicts. What was to one colony a life or death struggle, to another merited a bare footnote. Only by tracing each colony’s militia history as a continuous progression can we understand their differing military capabilities in 1775. Only by understanding this can we understand why each separate militia performed well or poorly during the Revolution.

This work studies colonial militia combat effectiveness in their long struggle against first the initial Indian opponents, then the Spanish, French, and Indians encountered later. Historians often depict the militias as randomly unreliable and of little real worth. Much of the seeming randomness in militia combat effectiveness was not random when viewed through the lens of adaptive cycles. You must view the colonial militias as many separate, differentiated organizations each possessing different strengths, weaknesses and capabilities. An examination of militia combat effectiveness from these perspectives illuminates many of the reasons for their good and poor showings in the Revolution. To view the militias as a monolith is a serious error.

A brief comment about methods. In order to understand how a military institution evolves and adapts under the pressures of war, you need to ask certain questions. Specifically, exactly who fought who, how, and with what success? Patterns will emerge. Then you need to ask how these patterns changed over time as the opponents’ changing patterns of attack and defense interacted in a complex mosaic. At the macroscopic scale only the most general trends can be discerned. Not so at the microscopic, where answers are often readily apparent. This work uses a quantitative method to bring out these patterns and cycles of adaptation. Periodically during the colonial militias’ histories, we take primary source accounts of engagements and reduce them to a database that is scrutinized for these patterns. This is primarily a study of how the opposing institutions interacted with and upon one another. It is more than that though. At the microscopic level individual...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	10.8.2020
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
ISBN-10	1-0983-1877-3 / 1098318773
ISBN-13	978-1-0983-1877-2 / 9781098318772

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