Warned Out

The freeborn son of an enslaved father and a free mother, Cuff Roberts’s life would be changed forever by the Revolutionary War. He served a five-year tour as part of the Continental Army, including at the Battle of Yorktown. As a veteran returning to Rhode Island, however, Roberts was not free to move around the country he helped make free. American poor laws, dating back to the seventeenth century, empowered Overseer of the Poor William Larned to repeatedly banish Roberts back to the town of Roberts’s birth. Roberts’s life would be shaped in powerful ways by American poor laws. Roberts helped local overseers by housing a needy neighbor, but came into conflict with other overseers over where he could live. After qualifying for a veterans’ pension, Roberts tried to make the life he wanted for his family in spite of the poor laws.

How Welfare Worked in the Early United States

What was American welfare like in George Washington’s day? It was expensive, extensive, and run by local governments. Known as “poor relief,” it included much of what we would now call welfare and social work. Unlike other aspects of government, poor relief remained the same, in structure, between the establishment of British colonies in the 1600s and the New Deal of the 1930s. How Welfare Worked in the Early United States: Five Microhistories tells the story of poor relief through the lives of five people: a long-serving overseer of the poor, a Continental Army veteran who was repeatedly banished from town, a nurse who was paid by the government to care for the poor, an unwed mother who cared for the elderly and struggled to remain with her daughter, and a young paralyzed man trying to be a Christian missionary inside a poorhouse. Of Native, African, and English descent, these five Rhode Islanders’ life stories show how poor relief actually worked. For them and for millions, all over the United States, poor relief was both generous and controlling, local and yet largely uniform around the nation. Two centuries ago, Americans paid for—and relied on—an astonishing government system that provided food, housing, and medical care to those in need, while also shaping American families and where they could live. Students of history and of today’s social provision have much to learn about how welfare worked in the early United States.

The Compleat Victory:

In the late summer and fall of 1777, after two years of indecisive fighting on both sides, the outcome of the American War of Independence hung in the balance. Having successfully expelled the Americans from Canada in 1776, the British were determined to end the rebellion the following year and devised what they believed a war-winning strategy, sending General John Burgoyne south to rout the Americans and take Albany. When British forces captured Fort Ticonderoga with unexpected ease in July of 1777, it looked as if it were a matter of time before they would break the rebellion in the North. Less than three and a half months later, however, a combination of the Continental Army and militia forces, commanded by Major General Horatio Gates and inspired by the heroics of Benedict Arnold, forced Burgoyne to surrender his entire army. The American victory stunned the world and changed the course of the war. In the end, British plans were undone by a combination of faulty strategy, distance, geography, logistics, and an underestimation of American leadership and fighting ability. Taking Ticonderoga had misled Burgoyne and his army into thinking victory was assured. The campaign’s outcome forced the British to rethink their strategy, inflamed public opinion in England against the war, boosted Patriot morale, and, perhaps most critical of all, led directly to the Franco-American alliance. Weddle unravels the web of contingencies and the play of personalities that ultimately led to what one American general called “the Compleat Victory.”

The Continental Army and ‘Military Europe’: Professionalism and Restraint in the American War of Independence

Most historians now agree that the United States won its independence not with citizen-soldiers but through the exertions of a small coterie of hardened military professionals. These men fought for eight years in George Washington’s Continental Army which, these historians maintain, was fundamentally different from contemporary European institutions. This article argues that this distinction is largely overstated. Continental officers and soldiers considered themselves as members of a military community which traversed national and institutional boundaries. Their adherence to a set of common norms, customs, and behaviours suggests that, far from unique, the Continental Army was an extension of ‘Military Europe’.

Vestiges of Black Internationalism

The siege led by the Continental Army to reclaim Savannah from British forces in the fall of 1779 is remembered as one of the most disastrous battles of the American Revolutionary War. However, greater carnage was circumvented by a legion of (largely) free Black Chasseurs Volontaires recruited from the colony of Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti). Their role proved strategically vital, and a monument erected in Savannah’s Franklin Square today pays homage to their contributions to the American project of independence. Indeed, the beguiling mythos of independence suffuses their historic legacy. Yet although their story is remembered in African American histories from the nineteenth century to the present, they are systematically occluded, marginalized, and overlooked by the colonialist archive. This article interrogates the violence of archival erasure and demands interdisciplinary, multimodal, and collaborative modes of recreating and rehabilitating lost African Atlantic histories.

1. Citizen soldier and sailor vs. standing armed forces

“Citizen soldier and sailor vs. standing armed forces” covers the establishment of the first militias in the colonies. Colonists inherited a British sense of military obligation but were opposed to standing armies. British wars drew in American forces, fostering Anglo-American discord. Stylized European warfare did not translate to the American landscape. Indigenous groups required, and indirectly taught, newer tactics. Americans under George Washington achieved independence through strategic alliances and contributions from the Continental Army, the militia, and partisans. The Navy also developed during the Revolutionary War. After the war, Republicans and Federalists disagreed on the best approach to the military.

The Academy Effect

This chapter traces how academies came to be seen as training grounds for political leaders. During the Seven Years’ War, academy teachers and trustees claimed their schools benefitted the British Empire. But when the Imperial Crisis hit, the political ambitions of academy students, which the British had stoked in the 1750s and early 1760s, became a liability. The academy generation became the revolutionary generation, and students and faculty streamed into the ranks of the Continental Army and state and national political offices. The American Revolution solidified the civic purposes of education, and academies in particular. But the war was also destructive to American education. As peace arrived in 1783, Americans, and especially academy alumni, began to think about how to rebuild American education.

Introduction

Prisoner exchange is as old as warfare itself. Along with ransom, it was one of the few hopes for prisoners of war until the advent of modern international law. By the beginning of the 17th century, prisoner exchange had become a recognized institute of rules and customs of war, with European states agreeing on exchange arrangements (so-called “cartels”) whenever they fought. The prime motive behind the exchange was the need to get one’s own trained soldiers back as soon as possible, but also to minimize the cost of keeping enemy prisoners. Only full-fledged “civilized” nations could form a cartel; native tribes and rebels were not seen as subjects of law. It is therefore not surprising that the British did their utmost to avoid entering a general cartel during the Revolutionary War (1775–83), for by doing so they would recognize the legitimacy of the nascent United States and their Continental Army. Approximately ninety years later, the Federal government in Washington faced the same problem and kept refusing an all-encompassing cartel with the Southern “rebels” for over a year after the beginning of hostilities in April of 1861. The deal was eventually reached in July of 1862 and would be in place until May of 1863. Although the official text read that the Union representatives signed the agreement with the people who had been “commissioned by the authorities they respectively represent,” the signing was a ...