The Glorious Cause, page 67
After the war began, women’s energies were even more important to American resistance.13 Home-manufacturing became a national obsession, especially the spinning of yarn and the making of woolen clothing. A supply of wool was at hand in most places, and the wearing of homespun was emblematic of the glorious cause as it evoked the simplicity and virtue called for by the first Continental Congress. Women in the cities formed themselves into spinning societies and advertised themselves in the newspapers. At times they did more—in Philadelphia they made shirts for Washington’s army. In a number of towns women made themselves felt by enforcing the law, in particular by punishing hoarders and violators of boycott agreements. Abigail Adams reported one such instance in 1777, in which women in Boston took action to regulate the distribution of sugar and coffee, both scarce articles during the war. Her report described how some women set upon merchants who “have secreted a large quantity” of these commodities.
There has been much rout and noise in the town for several weeks. Some stores have been opened by a number of people and the coffee and sugar carried into the market and dealt out by pounds. It was rumored that an eminent, wealthy, stingy Merchant (who is a Batchelor) had a hogshead of coffee in his store which he refused to sell to the committee under 6 shillings per pound. A number of females[;] some say a hundred, some say more assembled with carts and trucks, marched down to the warehouse and demanded the keys, which he refused to deliver, upon which one of them seized him by his neck and tossed him into the cart. Upon his finding no Quarter he delivered the keys, when they tipped up the cart and discharged him, then opened the warehouse, hoisted out the coffee themselves, put it into the trucks and drove off.14
Most women did not find it necessary to act in such dramatic fashion, though they sometimes spoke with an equivalent force. Madame de Riedesel, a baroness married to a Hessian general, had to listen to an adolescent American girl cry out: “Oh, if I only had the king of England here, with what satisfaction I could cut his body in pieces, tear out his heart, dissect it, put it upon these coals, and consume it.”15 The Baroness was a captive at the time this astonishing outburst was made, having been captured with her husband and General Burgoyne’s army a short time before. That army was marched from New York to Virginia under the terms of its surrender. The Baroness had brought her three little girls along, never dreaming that defeat and humiliation awaited them all. On the march to Virginia, the captives received verbal abuse and not much to eat, and several women in Boston spat at her as she went by them. But the hardest treatment of all may have come south of Boston where on several occasions she attempted to buy food for her children, only to meet a flat refusal.
Madame Riedesel was technically a camp follower. Eighteenth-century armies seem always to have traveled with many women in attendance—wives of soldiers, friends, prostitutes. All of the women in some fashion provided a service, almost always more than sexual comfort. These women washed and mended clothing, sometimes procured and cooked meals, nursed the sick and wounded, and generally gave helpful aid. American forces often discouraged women from following the army—Washington disliked the practice and detested the blows morale could take from squabbling women. But the women persisted, and undoubtedly most soldiers were grateful that they did.
Charting the overall experience of women in the Revolution is a treacherous business. The range of that experience surpassed the few examples given here, and its meaning for women’s lives is not always clear. The generation that went through the Revolution, as participants in patriotism or loyalism, was changed by it, if only through getting a glimpse of what women’s lives might be when men were not always in full control. Middle- and upper-class women enjoyed a freedom unknown before the war, if their husbands and fathers were absent, serving in the army or some governmental body. But even when the men were present, the atmospheres were different in crisis and war. Politics was in the air, and claims to freedom and independence could incite the thought that American women, not just men, should enjoy their blessings. Only a small number of women insisted that such possibilities be explored. Abigail Adams’s advice to her husband, then in Congress, to “remember the ladies,” fell on deaf ears, as did less celebrated calls.
II
Civilians—men as well as women—often led lives seemingly untouched by the war. The enemy remained far enough away after Howe evacuated Boston in 1776 to permit most civilians in Massachusetts to lead fairly quiet lives. Quiet, and to some extent safety, disappeared wherever the armies marched or camped. Common rumor throughout the war had it that the Hessians, as all troops from German provinces were called, were to be feared the most. Howe’s pursuit of Washington across New Jersey in late 1776 aroused a deep hatred of German troops among civilians. These soldiers probably did not behave worse than their English allies, but because they were “foreign” and spoke a strange language they excited a deep revulsion.
Eighteenth-century armies did not ordinarily deal gently with the civilians they encountered, and Howe’s English and German soldiers behaved in conventional ways. They entered private houses unbidden and took what they wanted—food, clothing, and anything else they could lay their hands on. Keeping warm was difficult in winter, and, not surprisingly, troops pulled down fences and buildings for fuel.
Such actions were repeated throughout the war and not just by the enemy. Washington’s soldiers endured terrible hunger and cold at Valley Forge in 1778, and during the winter of 1779-80, strung out around Morristown, New Jersey, they suffered even more. In these times and in others, the temptation to plunder nearby civilians proved irresistible to some. There were many occasions when no excuse seemed necessary, around Monmouth Court House, for example, at the end of June 1778. In the aftermath of the battle the American soldiers entered houses which civilians had fled when the two armies came together. The Americans carried off whatever they could find, only to be pulled up short by an angry Washington who ordered that they be searched.
Washington had to give such orders more than once during the war. His British opposites, Howe and Clinton and their staffs, took similar actions. Both armies indeed punished marauders, in or out of uniform, severely. James Thacher, a medical officer who kept a thorough journal, reported that soldiers near Albany in 1778 who had robbed and murdered inhabitants were hanged. Thacher called these creatures “villains,” and his hatred of them seems to have been widely shared in both armies.16 Still, soldiers robbed and killed civilians throughout the war.
Civilians learned to fear not only the army of each side but also those who traveled with them or who lived in their shadows. The camp followers of both armies, for the most part mature women—wives and a number who were not wives—committed a variety of offenses against civilians. These women normally provided useful services for officers and men. They washed clothing, cooked, nursed the sick and wounded, and gave other sorts of comfort. They did not always confine their attentions to solders, however. When the opportunity to steal presented itself, some took advantage of it. Several with Nathanael Greene’s army in April 1781 may have joined soldiers in burning houses near Camp Gum Swamp, South Carolina. Greene threatened to execute any that were caught. Women “belonging” to regiments in Washington’s army in July 1778, when it was near Newark, New Jersey, may have taken two cloaks, handkerchiefs, shirts, pillow cases, and a large “Diaper Blankett” from civilian houses. Regimental officers searched them for these items after the civilians complained of their losses.17
Civilians feared another group—the outlaws who lurked on the fringes of the armies. Near New York City for much of the war, around Philadelphia from September 1777 until July 1778, and throughout the Carolinas and Georgia from 1780 on, such bands roamed—often disguised as partisans serving one army or the other—plundering and killing. In reality they were jackals, possessing neither decency nor principles and seeking only their own advantage. The real partisans despised them. Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox of South Carolina, found that bandits trailed his irregulars and passed themselves off as soldiers under his command. In this guise they plundered luckless Carolinians. Marion gave his men permission to put these outlaws to death without a trial or court-martial.18
The Americans living in or near towns and cities occupied by the armies experienced the worst that the war could bring. Boston was the first of the cities to be occupied, but its trial ended early in the war. If the city had not ever really grown accustomed to having the army in its midst, it managed at least to hold together until fighting began at Lexington. In the month that followed this first great battle, about half its civilian population left. With their departure and with the city under siege, life in Boston assumed a bleak cast. And in June after the heavy casualties the British army suffered at Bunker Hill, almost everyone must have felt depressed and anxious.
Surely almost no one lived really well, soldiers and civilians alike, until the navy carried the troops away in March 1776. Food became scarce almost immediately. Fruits, vegetables, and fresh meat disappeared as the besieging Americans cut off access to the farms and stores of the interior. Salted meat, dried beans and peas, and a few other items continued to come in from Britain. But supply from across the sea was irregular and could not provide much variety. For civilians, as John Andrews, a merchant who remained within the city to protect his property explained, it was “pork and beans one day, and beans and pork another, and fish when we can catch it.” Andrews did not starve but he lived in dread that despite his austerity he could not protect what he had. The soldiers, he said, “think they have a license to plunder every one’s house and store who leaves the town, of which they have given convincing proofs already.”19
The British soldiers, for their own reasons, must have shared some of Andrews’s gloom. They had fought in two bloody battles, to no good purpose as far as they could see. And here they were confined to a virtually deserted city by an army of rebels. The winter made things worse for these troops and for the civilians as well. As the river and the bay began to freeze over, the chance of an attack increased. By itself the cold would have been bad enough.
Not surprisingly, in the winter of 1775–76 the British army did not show a nice regard for civilians’ rights or for civilians’ property. Officers took over a number of private houses for themselves—General Henry Clinton lived in John Hancock’s and Burgoyne lived in James Bowdoin’s. Other lower-ranking officers spread themselves out in lesser houses. Their soldiers also seem to have lived in houses.20
Public buildings were also put to the army’s purposes. Dragoons used the Old South Meeting House as a riding school, tearing out the pews to make it serviceable. West Church and Hollis Street Church became barracks; the Federal Street Meeting House was made into a barn for the storage of hay, and the Old North was pulled down for firewood. At least one hundred privately owned houses went the way of Old North—into the fires of shivering soldiers. Besides the damaged and demolished houses and churches, Bostonians found out-buildings missing, fences destroyed, trees cut down, gardens trampled, and a general filth when they reclaimed their city in March.
The year after the British evacuated Boston they captured Philadelphia, which they held for almost nine months. In several respects the occupation of Philadelphia resembled that of Boston. The civilians who remained after the city fell had to contend with soldiers who sometimes plundered and abused and even killed them. They also had to house officers and men whether they wanted to or not.
On the whole, however, civilian life was much better than it had been in occupied Boston. No army surrounded Philadelphia, and travel to and from nearby farms and villages—and to New York—continued. To be sure, the Delaware River could not be used until late November 1777, when Howe finally succeeded in capturing the American forts which dominated its waters. But Washington’s army, weak and miserable at Valley Forge, offered no threat at least until the spring of 1778. There were partisan bands, however, which attempted to stop farmers from carrying their produce into the city, and there were outlaws who robbed anyone on the road weaker than themselves.
Partisans, the occasional patrols sent from Valley Forge, even the outlaws were nothing more than a nuisance to the British army. It lived much better than it had in Boston under siege.
The civilians, however, were never completely free from harassment by soldiers. At its best a soldier’s life was rarely comfortable, and soldiers in close quarters with civilians often took, or tried to take, goods civilians preferred not to give up. In the first few days of the occupation, before officers could dampen free spirits, soldiers stole from houses, tore down fences for their campfires, and took hay, vegetables, and other goods without giving receipts. Such actions never completely stopped in the next nine months, but unauthorized seizures may have fallen off. As winter came on the troops seemed to act on orders from their officers and protests from civilians.21
The poor suffered the most during the occupation. They may not have been robbed so frequently as those with more of the world’s goods, but they felt the bite of inflated prices most keenly. Food and fuel were almost always available in Philadelphia, but the prices one paid for them increased rapidly while the British were present.22
Inhabitants at every social level felt anxiety and fear during the occupation. Even those loyal to the king’s cause had reason to fear, for soldiers looking for plunder did not care where they got it. Robert Morton, a young Tory, at first welcomed the arrival of the British and scoffed at the speed with which Congress fled the city in September. Within a day or two of the beginning of the occupation he began to record its “dreadful consequences”—the looting of houses, the seizure of his mother’s hay with no pretense of payment or even a receipt, and the “ravages and wanton destruction of the soldiery.”23
Young Morton greeted the occupation well disposed toward the British. Elizabeth Drinker, the wife of a Quaker merchant, does not seem to have cared much for either side. And like almost all Quakers, she disapproved of the violence of the war.
Several weeks before Philadelphia’s capture, the Pennsylvania council seized Henry Drinker, husband of Elizabeth, on suspicion of disloyalty to the American cause. Henry Drinker and other Quakers under suspicion were sent to outlying towns and confined. Elizabeth naturally worried about her husband. The occupation added to the strain she felt.
The Drinkers had money and did not go hungry or cold. Nor did they have to give up their house, although after prolonged negotiations they had to take in a British officer, a Major Crammond, who came with three servants (one boarded at the Drinkers’), three horses, three cows, two sheep, plus assorted turkeys and chickens. All this baggage may have surprised Elizabeth Drinker, who never quite adjusted to having the major in the house. His presence, however, may have brought a benefit she did not fully recognize. Before Major Crammond took up residence the family feared that soldiers might break into the house. One did in late November, an intoxicated trooper who had taken up with their young servant Ann. Elizabeth Drinker was badly frightened by this occurrence and was made even more fearful by stories of troops who plundered Philadelphia houses. In December, after seeing men loitering in the neighborhood after dark, she confided to her journal that “I often feel afraid to go to Bed.” Major Crammond may have been something of a bother—he kept late hours and entertained his friends in the Drinkers’ parlor—but his presence must have discouraged soldiers who might otherwise have entered the house.24
Elizabeth Drinker occasionally appealed to Joseph Galloway for assistance. Galloway was a loyalist, once a powerful Pennsylvania politician, and a man of ability. From December 4, 1777, until the army pulled out of the city, he served as “Superintendent General of the Police in the City and its Environs and Superintendent of Imports and Exports to and from Philadelphia.” The grand title simply meant that he was responsible for the regulation of trade in and out of Philadelphia. The only coercive power he had was whatever the army chose to lend him.25
The regulation of trade during the occupation was no light matter. Business flourished during these nine months. The army ordered that regular entry of ships and cargoes should be made, and goods which were likely to be smuggled to rebels outside the city—rum, spirits, molasses, and salt—were carefully stored and sold only by permit.
Loyalist merchants made money during this period and so apparently did the British officials and naval officers who engaged in smuggling. Galloway did his best to see that the law was observed, once going so far as to break into a warehouse owned by Tench Coxe, another Tory merchant, in search of contraband arms.
Coxe had returned to Philadelphia with the army in September 1777. He found it half deserted, but exiles like himself who had fled the year before soon made their way back. Trade revived with New York and the West Indies once the American forts on the Delaware were cleared in late November. Even before the opening of the river, Coxe advertised in a local paper that he had cotton goods, satins, silk knee garters, pearl necklaces, and Keyser’s pills for sale. Keyser’s pills must have been highly valued, for they supposedly cured venereal disease, rheumatism, asthma, dropsy, and apoplexy.26
For those with money, merchants like Coxe, royal officials, and some army officers, there was a social season with balls held weekly, and occasional plays, concerts, and parties. The high point of these celebrations occurred on May 18, 1778, when General Howe’s officers, directed by Captain John André, gave their commander, who was soon to give way to Henry Clinton, the Mischianza, a grand party with a mock tournament featuring knights of the Blended Roses and the Burning Mountain, a ball, a banquet, and decorated barges on the river which hailed their commander with gun salutes. André enlisted the local gentry, and beautiful Tory girls were much in evidence. Altogether it was a memorable occasion for the general, though not everyone approved. Elizabeth Drinker sniffed that the day was to be remembered for its “scenes of Folly and Vanity.”27.
