Infantry, Part I: Regular Army / The Era of Revolution

by John K. Mahon and Romana Danysh

• The Era of Revolution

• When Congress, on 14 June 1775, moved to take over the New England Army then besieging Boston as a Continental establishment, it also authorized ten companies of riflemen to be raised in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia as part of the new Continental Army. The next day, Congress appointed George Washington its Commander in Chief. Before leaving their home state, the six rifle companies from Pennsylvania were combined to form William Thompson's Rifle Battalion. This battalion and the other new rifle units organized rapidly and marched quickly to Boston.

• The New England Army around Boston was composed of citizen soldiers. From the earliest times that type of soldier (male members of the community aged 18-45) had been required to associate in military organizations called "militia," and to train to defend his own locality. The militia system amounted to universal military training for men of active ages, but it was for local defense almost entirely. What is more, its enforcement rested altogether with the colonies. At the outbreak of the Revolution, all the colonies had military organizations operating, but their effectiveness was, in many cases, slight. It was the general ineffectiveness of the militia system, coupled with the need for centralized control, that brought about the creation of the Continental Army. Even so, on account of the militia, the colonies were able to utilize the experience of many veterans of England's colonial wars, familiar with the British Army and with the Indian modes of fighting it. These veterans were a very valuable asset.

• In addition to the rifle units and the besieging army, Congress later authorized the raising and maintaining of Continental infantry battalions in the southern states. By December 1775 there were forty-nine infantry battalions (or regiments, for the two terms were virtually synonymous) and several unattached companies in the establishment.

• The Continental Congress took the bulk of the army besieging Boston in 1775 as it found it. Since most of the units were enlisted only for the calendar year, General Washington had either to attempt to re-enlist the soldiers already in service or to assemble a new army. During the fall of 1775, he strove to retain the Continental troops for the duration .of the war, but was only successful in keeping part of them, and those for just one more year. A canvass of the officers of thirtynine regiments in November showed that 751 officers were willing to continue their service for one year while 406 were not.

• The legislators set the size of the army around Boston at 20,372 officers and men, to be organized into twenty-seven regiments and some separate companies. In this scheme New England, which had supplied forty-two in 1775, provided twenty-six Continental regiments in 1776. These twenty-six were numbered from the 2d through the 27th. They were designated Continental infantry in an attempt to transfer the men's loyalty from the states to the Congress.

• The 1st Continental did not come from New England, but was built around the nine companies of riflemen then in William Thompson's Pennsylvania Rifle Battalion. Six of those companies were among the original units of the Continental Army, while the other three joined up later. All lost their specialization as rifle companies and the "regiment" became a standard element of the line.

• Diverse units entered the Continental service, until by December 1776 there were eighty-two battalions of foot soldiers in all. During the year 1776 the following new units of battalion size were added to the establishment:

1. John Haslet's Delaware Regiment
2. James Livingston's Regiment, known as the 1st Canadian.
3. Moses Hazen's Regiment; known as the 2nd Canadian, also as Congress' Own. (The two Canadian regiments contained about equal numbers of Canadians and New Englanders, but in January 1781 all foreigners in the service were transferred to Hazen's.)
4. Seth Warner's Regiment, officered by men who had participated in the invasion of Canada in 1775 and filled in part by Green Mountain Boys.
5. Samuel Miles' Pennsylvania Rifle Regiment
6. 2nd-12th Pennsylvania
7. 1st-3rd Georgia
8. 1st-3rd New Jersey
9. 1st-9th Virginia
10. William Smallwood's Maryland Regiment
11. Charles Burrall's Connecticut Regiment
12. Samuel Elmore's Connecticut Regiment
13. Andrew Ward's Connecticut Regiment
14. The German Battalion

• Their officers were appointed by Congress upon the recommendation of the Commander in Chief.

• Late in 1776 it was once again necessary to cope with the dissolution of the army, but this time Congress took a new tack. It attempted to create a force to serve "during the present war." The legislators, observing the size of the army in being, set the new establishment at eighty-eight battalions, and apportioned these among all the states, so that Massachusetts had to provide the greatest number, fifteen, and Delaware and Georgia the smallest, one apiece. The eighty-eight battalions thus authorized were raised, equipped, and officered by the states. They were no longer known by Continental numbers, but carried instead numbers in the several state organizations. These state organizations were called "lines," the term used then for the regular infantry or "foot" that made up the line of battle of an army. The state lines together comprised the Continental Line. These should not be confused with the occasional state regiments which were raised on a permanent basis for local service only.

• Although the regiments of the several states, arranged in the Continental Line, replaced the numbered regiments of 1776 (for example, the 9th Continental of 1776 became the 1st Regiment of the Rhode Island Line in 1777) , the change was mostly one of name. The relationship of regiments to states remained about as it had been, and the appointment of officers continued to be in practice a collaboration between Congress, the Commander in Chief, and the states. Some of the Continental regiments became units in the state lines, while the men and officers of others transferred to the new regiments of 1777 without carrying the lineages of their 1776 outfits with them. The reorganization of the winter of 1776 did not radically alter the way men came into the Continental service or the manner in which regiments were organized, but it did place responsibility for procurement, replacement, and supply more squarely upon the states. This stimulated an increased effort in some states: for example, Massachusetts and Connecticut (although later overruled by Congress) voted to supplement the Continental pay of their lines.

• In December 1776, while the reorganization of the American. Army was taking place, the British advanced into New. Jersey. Faced with this threat, Congress authorized Washington to add sixteen purely Continental battalions .to the foot establishment. This action resulted in part from the fact that the states had been unutterably slow in supplying their quotas for the eighty-eight line battalions. The term of service of the new sixteen was the same as that of the state lines, for three years or for the duration, but the similarity ended there. Washington raised them wherever he could, and appointed all their officers himself. The new Continental regiments were usually recruited within one state and, like all other units, had a hard struggle to reach full strength.

• The organization established late in 1776 and early in 1777-containing as it did the state lines coupled with the sixteen additional Continental battalions-was a compromise between two needs. The first need was to utilize the powerful authority of the states, without which the conflict could not be prosecuted; the second was to have at least some regiments subject only to the will of the Commander in Chief.

• All regiments sent out their own recruiting parties to prescribed areas, but to keep the fighting army up to strength was almost an impossible job. In consequence, during 1780, when the theater of war had moved south, Washington had not enough troops to act against the enemy with the part of the army that he commanded in person. Indeed, Congress found it necessary to consolidate the sixteen additional Continentals with the state lines, and, at the same time, to fuse the separate corps and the German Battalion into them too. More important, the infantry of the entire Continental establishment was reduced to fifty battalions by 1 January 1781. Such a reduction of the infantry was not dictated by strategy. On the contrary, it was the result of a grave failure, the failure to be able to maintain a larger number of regiments.

• As in previous years, new units appeared in the roster of the Continental Army during the four years beginning with 1777. They were often the result of the reorganization of earlier outfits. From various sources came the following units:

1. 1st-15th Massachusetts
2. 5th New York
3. 1st-6th Maryland
4. 4th New Jersey
5. 7th-10th North Carolina
6. 10th-15th Virginia
7. The Corps of Invalids

• These regiments and those in the preceding list made up the spine of the Army after 1776. They were not static; indeed some of the early ones provided elements of the others. Moreover, they supplied companies to special corps such as the legions of Henry Lee and Casimir Pulaski and the Corps of Light Infantry.

• An understanding of the internal organization of the Continental infantry regiments and their components requires a short explanation of infantry tactics in the eighteenth century. To begin with, the heart of a battle as fought in western Europe was the line of infantry. It was this line which had to be broken if victory were to be won; hence the heavy fire of the artillery and the maneuvers of the cavalry were chiefly directed against it. It was common in Europe for the battle line to be formed on an open plain just outside of effective artillery range of the enemy. This meant that the two lines took their positions within 500 yards of each other, a distance at which, with modern firearms, few men would be left standing. This is the fact which makes it hardest for moderns to visualize early warfare. The effective range of the musket of the period was not over 100 yards and was often nearer 50. Fighting at such ranges, infantry organization was founded upon the need to form the line, control it in battle, renew it when decimated, and maneuver it so as to place the enemy at a disadvantage. But this was not the beginning and the end of infantry tactics, particularly in the rough, wooded terrain of North America.

• In the colonial wars of the eighteenth century, the need had grown for infantrymen to precede the battle line. Their purpose was to screen the advance or retreat of their own main body, to break up the power of the volley from the enemy's line, and otherwise to soften that line for an assault with bayonets. Such an assault commonly began at a distance of fifty yards or less from the foe. As a result, one of two things took place: either a savage hand-to-hand encounter, or a collapse and retreat by one of the lines, In any case, the infantrymen who moved out ahead of the line were trained to aim at individuals, to protect themselves by using cover, and to operate with an interval of several yards between them. They came to be called "light infantry." In contrast to their action, the line fired by volley without taking individual aim, remained standing unless ordered to do otherwise, and advanced with the men in it actually elbow to elbow up to the moment of the assault.

• In the American service, as in the British, battalions and regiments were usually one and the same. An English regiment had ten companies in it, eight of them (the "battalion companies") for the line, the other two for special uses. These were the elite or "flank companies." One called the "grenadier company" was composed of men picked for their strength acrd courage. As often as not (for instance, at Bunker Hill) the grenadier companies were detached from their regiments and used together in provisional grenadier battalions. These were given the most difficult assignments, and the posts of honor (that is, of greatest danger) if used in the battle line.

• The tenth company in a British battalion was called the "light company." Light companies were also detached and consolidated into provisional battalions, but as often they were assigned a truly light mission, that is, to advance ahead of the line, screen it, and demoralize the enemy. This mission of light infantry in the American service was usually performed by rifle units, which fanned out in front of the army and, with their accurate fire, galled the enemy severely.

• At first there was no counterpart to flank companies in the Continental infantry. Beginning in August 1777, however, General Washington directed that 108 men and 9 officers be drawn from each brigade and formed into a temporary Corps of Light Infantry. When winter came this corps was disbanded, but. it had proved so useful that Washington urged Congress to authorize one light company for each battalion to be formed into a separate corps during every campaign thereafter. It was with the Light Corps, which resulted, that Anthony Wayne stormed Stony Point on 16 July 1779 in the most celebrated night attack made by Americans during the Revolution.

• Like the British Grenadiers, the American Corps of Light Infantry became the elite body of the Army. Command was eagerly sought in it by the most enterprising officers and places in the ranks by the men. Although the Corps as a whole continued to be disbanded each winter and raised afresh for every campaign, one light company became permanent in each Continental battalion after mid-1780. Prior to that time American battalions had contained only eight companies, those of the line, so that the addition brought the total up to nine, still one short of the British. The Corps of Light Infantry received special training in the use of the bayonet. During July 1780 it was put under the command of Lafayette, and made the chief American assaults the following year upon the enemy's works at Yorktown.

• One of the distinctive features about the Revolutionary War was the use of rifles and rifle units in it. The rifle was virtually unknown in the New England Army that opened the war. Indeed, throughout the conflict, muskets were the armament of the troops of the line. At 100 yards, the best musketeers could hit a man-sized target only four shots out of every ten. In contrast, expert riflemen could kill a man with every shot at 100 yards and do good execution at twice that range. The chief limitations on the use of riflemen were the scarcity of expert shots and the fact that the rifle could not carry a bayonet. Although the latter deficiency was somewhat overcome through the use of tomahawks and knives, riflemen remained vulnerable to a determined bayonet attack. Accordingly, riflemen were not useful in the line, but both sides made extensive use of them as sharpshooters ahead of and around the main fighting force.

• As already mentioned, the rifle companies from Pennsylvania in William Thompson's Battalion soon lost their specialization and became an element of the line, armed with muskets. Nearly as short-lived as a rifle unit was the Maryland and Virginia Rifle Regiment, composed of the original Continental rifle companies from Maryland and Virginia plus some later ones from the same states. This unit was captured at Fort Washington on 16 November 1776 and was never re-formed. Just at the time of its capture, Daniel Morgan received a commission as Colonel of the 11th Virginia. He recruited 118 riflemen and joined the Continental Army with them at Morristown, New Jersey, early in April 1777. Very soon Washington drew 500 picked riflemen from the regiments of his Army and put them under Morgan's command. Thus began the most famous of the rifle corps which persisted intermittently throughout the Revolution.

• Sometimes Washington referred to Morgan's unit as a rifle corps, sometimes as "rangers." The latter term requires a little elaboration. Rangers were a species of infantry that the British had developed to cope with the methods of the French and Indians in North America. They were scouts who ranged the forests spying upon the enemy, gathering intelligence on his strength and intentions, and harassing him when they could. Units of rangers had to be made up of men who understood woodcraft and who could match the Indians in stealth. Also, they had to be trained shots. Actually, corps like Daniel Morgan's were rangers a good deal of the time. In addition, there were certain units, such as Thomas Knowlton's Connecticut Rangers, which regularly bore the title.

• From time to time the size of Continental units was fixed by resolve of the Congress. Thus during the reorganization which took place at the end of 1775, regiments were authorized to contain 728 officers and men, companies 78 enlisted men. These strengths were much larger than the British counterparts which were 477 and 38, respectively. Although Continental units always exceeded equivalent British units in strength, they varied widely from authorized size. For example, nine months after the first directive appeared, some companies had 67 men in them, others 88. This was, of course, the result of the unequal fall of casualties upon different outfits and the variation in the effectiveness of the recruiting systems of the several states. The Delaware Regiment illustrates a typical case of shrinkage. It was so decimated after the battle of Camden in 1780 that it had to be combined with Maryland companies to form a regiment. Later still, with the Maryland remnants, it was reorganized as a light company, commanded by Robert Kirkwood.

• In closing this section on the organization of Continental infantry during the Revolutionary War, nothing should be stressed more heavily than the confusion which chronically prevailed in it. At all times Washington and his staff were obliged to improvise new organizations from the remnants. of those that had been cut up in battle or had served out their short terms and gone home. Moreover, at all times it was also necessary to assimilate thousands of citizen soldiers for brief periods into some sort of working team with the Continentals. This had to be repeated over and over again with new increments because militia terms of service were very short. The attempt to utilize the militia, and put it into good enough order to be effective for at least one campaign, was perhaps the hardest of the Commander in Chief's almost insupportable duties.

• In spite of its burdensomeness the effort was well placed. Indeed, John W. Fortescue, historian of the British Army, declared that the militia was the decisive factor. Be that as it may, the militia formed around the Continental Army as a nucleus, and would not have turned out had that often ragtag force not been in the field. Most of the estimated 164,000 militiamen who took up arms for terms from a day up to three months were infantry. In addition to them were other infantrymen, raised and maintained on a relatively permanent basis by the several states, who, with the militia, rallied on the Continentals and abetted the cause.

• When the British surrendered at Yorktown on 19 October 1781, there were sixty battalions of infantry in the Continental establishment. Afterwards, as time passed and it appeared that the British intended no new attack, that number was steadily reduced. Finally, in November 1783, after a peace had been formally ratified, only one foot regiment remained, commanded by Henry Jackson. Then, on 2 June 1784, the end came even for that unit, leaving as the only authorized vestige of the Continental Army still in service fewer than a hundred men to guard military stores at West Point and at Fort Pitt.