America Goes to War: A Social History of the Continental Army.

Perhaps no episode in American history has been subjected to myth and iconography as often as the American revolution. In America Goes to War Charles Neimeyer succeeds in "deconstruct[ing] the myths of Lexington and Concord." These myths

long held that British aggressively attacked America's peace-loving colonists who in turn had little choice but to abandon the plows in the fields and defend themselves, their families and their national honor. All freedom-loving Americans willingly and self-sacrificingly abandoned their civil pursuits until the glorious fight was won. (p. 160)

Among the myths that Neimeyer destroys are what I will call the "Paul Revere myth" and the "Crispus Attucks myth." The Paul Revere myth suggests that the Continental Army was composed of artisans, yeoman farmers, and other native-born Americans willing to risk everything rather than live any longer under British oppression. But this social group, Neimeyer argues, had little interest in abandoning their livelihoods for the base and ignoble world of the eighteenth-century soldier. As a result, the Continental army became "a true pell-mell of human souls," with disproportionately high numbers of immigrants, African Americans, and propertyless "free men on the move." (p. xiv) These men fought not for abstract concepts of liberty or individual rights, but as rational actors for land, money, or other tangible goods.

The Crispus Attucks myth (so named after a free African American man killed by the British during the Boston Massacre) suggests that African Americans were able to see through the racism and intolerance of Colonial society to the transcendent virtues in revolutionary America. This myth implies that slaves, too, could see the oppression and unfairness of the British system as well as the evident improvements that an American victory promised. With such convictions, African Americans willingly fought for the colonists, helping to assure independence for the colonies and a better world for the African American community. Conversely, Neimeyer argues that African Americans saw service in the Continental Army as "trading one master for another." Furthermore, "[m]any African Americans must have hoped for the success of the British" given the British promises to emancipate slaves throughout the colonies. (p. 81) Many African Americans exploited the war to achieve freedom from slavery either by fleeing to British lines or by joining the American forces, then deserting at the first opportunity. Few served because they shared the values of American society and fewer still believed that a victory by the American Army (led, after all, by slaveholders like George Washington) would lead to the end of slavery or to a glorious new period of harmonious race relations.

Once in service, the men held to a version of a Thompsonian moral economy. They understood that in return for their military service they were due food, shelter, pay, and clothing. On occasions when these items were not forthcoming, or when the men believed that enlistment periods had expired (always a contentious issue because of the vague wording of enlistment agreements), they displayed a class consciousness and protested, often to the point of mutiny. In short, Neimeyer argues that these men were rational actors who viewed the military as a labor market, carefully shopping and guarding their value as laborers.

To be sure, this myth-dispelling approach has been established by others, most notably John Shy, F. W. Anderson, James Kirby Martin, and Mark Lender.(1) The greatest virtue in this book, therefore, is not in the new ground that Neimeyer breaks, but in his weaving of a concise and convincing criticism of the conventional wisdom concerning the American Revolutionary soldier. Indeed, he fully recognizes the debt he owes to historians who have already worked in this field by relying heavily on their research. To these studies, he adds diaries and manuscript collections from both American and British sources. Neimeyer uses the papers of well-known men like Washington, Adams, and Gates as well as those from journalists and previously inarticulate men in the ranks. His quantitative data, gathered from various unit musters and rolls, are less convincing. The book's charts do not move his arguments along, often providing numbers when ratios are needed.

America Goes to War thus places another nail in the Minuteman's coffin. The Revolution followed the dominant pattern of subsequent American wars by filling the ranks disproportionately with men at the bottom or the fringes of American society (except Indians, whom the colonists preferred to kill rather than recruit). As such, Neimeyer shows, the fledgling American military was less an enlightened example of egalitarian and principled self-sacrifice than a product of the social structure of the equally fledgling nation that it defended.

Michael Neiberg Carnegie Mellon University 

ENDNOTE 

1. See for example John Ferling, "Oh That I Was a Soldier: John Adams and the Anguish of War," American Quarterly (Summer 1984): 258-75; John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (Ann Arbor, 1990) and essays by all of these authors in Peter Karsten, ed., The Military in America from Colonial Times to the Present (New York, 1986).