“Not Bull Breed but Mongrel Race”:

Ethnic Identity in the British Army during the Seven Years’ War

Paper Presented to

“Warfare and Society in Colonial North America and the

Caribbean”

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

October 7, 2006

Peter Way

University of Windsor

1

William Catton, a British common soldier, penned a poem, “The

Siege of Martinico,” celebrating the taking of that Caribbean

island during the Seven Years’ War, an expedition in which he

participated.

Light Infantry, their Bold attempts attain’d,For matchless Courage, reputation gain’d;Our Grenaders drove them [i.e. the French] from Place toPlace,Which shews the’re not Bull breed but Mongrel Race.1

This bit of doggerel hints at the ethno-nationalist thinking

imbricating the British imperial project. The French constituted

a “Mongrel Race” while the British, were by implication “Bull

breed.” The bellicosity of the bull proved a potent symbol for a

militarily aspiring nation. Catton’s bullishness proves

particularly interesting in that he soldiered in an Irish

regiment. While we know not his nativity, this reminds us that

British identity exhibited more complexity than often allowed.

1 William Catton, late a Soldier who served his late Majesty, in the Royal Regiment of Foot of Ireland, 15 Years, “The Siege of Martinico, A Poem,” printed sheet found in Monckton Papers, vol. 50, file 7, Northcliffe Collection, MG 18 M (microfilm reel C 367), National Archives of Canada, Ottawa [hereafter NAC].

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Greater Britain, embracing as it did Welsh, Scots, Irish, and

American colonials, as well as the English core, embodied as

“mongrel” a “race” certainly as the French. The mixed-bred nature

of the British more clearly evinced itself in the closed universe

of the military.2 Both “Bull breed” and “Mongrel Race” the British

deployed ethnic and regional identities to achieve their military

objectives, more deeply engraining these identities while giving

rise to new models of difference.

Ethnic or national identities are historically constructed,

arising from cultural interaction with other groups. Warfare

constitutes a key factor in ethnic differentiation. First,

2 A precise representation of the ethnic composition of the army in Americacan be achieved by collating the regimental reports taken in 1757. These documents (found in the Loudoun Papers, North American Series, Huntington Library, San Marino California) report the nativity of all non-commissioned officers and privates for virtually the entire army in America. The English born accounted for 30.3 % of the whole, while Scots amounted to 27.8%, Irish 27.2%, and continental Europeans for 4.4%. Colonials made up 4.9% of the army,while foreign-born residents of America equaled 5.4%. See: Return of the 2nd Battalion of 1st Regiment, 12 July 1757, LO 4011/no. 1/90; General Return of First Highland Battalion, 18 Sept. 1757, LO 6695/99; Return of 17th Regiment, 13 July 1757, LO 2533/no. 4/90; Return of 22nd Regiment, [July 1757], LO 2529/no. 1/90; Return of 27th Regiment, 13 July 1757, LO 4012/no. 1/90; Returnof 28th Regiment, 14 July 1757, LO 1944 no. 5/90; Return of 35th Regiment, 15 July 1757, LO 6616/88; Return of 40th Regiment, July 1757, LO 1683/no. 1/90; Return of 42nd Regiment, 13 June 1757, LO 5661/85; Return of 47th Regiment, LO1391/no. 1/90; Return of 48th Regiment, 3 July 1757, LO 1384/no. 2/90; Return of 55th Regiment, 13 July 1757, LO 3936/no. 1/90; Return of 1st Battalion 60thRegiment, 24 July 1757, LO 6639/89; Return of 2nd Battalion of 60th Regiment, 1 July 1757, LO 1345/no. 5/90; Return of 3rd Battalion of 60th Regiment, 15 July 1757, LO 6616/88; Return of 4th Battalion of 60th Regiment, 3 July 1757, LO 4068/no. 2/90, Loudoun Papers.

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military conflict typically pivots on borders, as defined in

ethno-national terms. A state and its “people” need the “other”

to wage war with psychological release from the taboo of murder.

Regional, cultural, linguistic, and religious particularities—the

baggage of ethnicity—have always functioned as means of such

differentiation. The French constituted England’s nemesis in the

18th century, an opposition resting on a long term historical

experience of frequent conflict that gave rise to congeries of

perceived dissimilarities that informed military conflict in the

era.3

Second, and the subject of this paper, in defining the other,

one necessarily defines oneself. Linda Colley maintained that the

idea of the “Briton” embodied a national chauvinism, largely

founded upon Protestantism and forged in a series of wars between

Britain and France from 1689 to 1815, that acted to integrate a

heterogeneous citizenry.4 While acknowledging that divisions

3 Edward Said defined Orientalism as “based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction” between the Orient and the Occident, a discourse constructed and disseminated by the West to both describe and rule the East. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 2-4. While the English-French opposition was not rooted so deeply in difference as that of West and East, given the greater proximity and intimate knowledge of one another’s culture, it proved equally visceral.

4 British contact with the rest of the world in the early modern and modernperiod, she asserted, “has regularly taken the form of aggressive military and

4

existed within Britain,5 Colley does purport that the Briton

constituted an overarching identity that knitted these

constituent parts together, with Protestantism providing the

sinews, anti-Gallicism the muscle, and warfare the blood.

Colley’s model has been criticized for its exaggeration of the

integrating powers of Protestantism, her timing of the real

unification of national interests within Great Britain, and, most

tellingly, its Anglocentrism,6 which, despite her protestations commercial enterprise.” Great Britain comprised “an invented nation superimposed, if only for a while, onto much older alignments and.” Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1737 (Orig. ed. Yale University Press, 1992; Paperback ed., London: Vintage, 1996), 3-5, 9.

5 The British defined themselves as a people in relation to an external Other not because of consensus and conformity within Great Britain, which embodied “a less than united Kingdom,” admitted Colley. Ibid., 5-6, 17. National divisions (English, Welsh and Scots) existed, as did regional (highland vs. lowland Scots, northern vs. southern Welsh, and even the regionalities of the English) and localistic. “Looked at in this way, Great Britain in 1707 was much less a trinity of self-contained and self-conscious nations than a patchwork in which uncertain areas of Welshness, Scottishness and Englishness were cut across by strong regional attachments, and scored over again to village, town, family and landscape.” Ibid., 8, 17. Colley excluded the Irish from her study because Britishness connected too intimatelyto Protestantism, the Irish being too complicit with Catholicism and the French. Britain treated Ireland as a colony and the Irish as a distinct and not wholly assimilable people. American colonials, who certainly aspired to beBritons on the whole, receive little consideration by Colley.

6 Murray Pittock contests the “fashionable” view that Protestantism acted as the integrating force of a unitary British identity. Too much religious factionalism existed for such a “simplistic view of British selfhood.” Murray G. H Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685-1789 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), 5-6, 45. Protestant sectarianism persisted throughout the eighteenth century, which suggests the need for another integrating force. Britain in 1760 remained far from homogenous, being internally differentiated but externally united. Pittock suggests that the Seven Years’ War and the French Revolution, not fear of Franco-Jacobitism, effected the union of “a Protestant Britain pursuing

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to the contrary, tends to read British history from an English

vantage point.7 The reality of a greater England hid within the

rhetoric of a Great Britain uniting the two kingdoms.8

However powerful as an abstract identity, dominant Britishness

purported an internal integrity to the Empire that did not in

fact exist. Hierarchies of ethnic types facilitated the assertion

imperial aims.” The “Empire was the key to British unity.” Ibid., 128-29, 133-34. Colley, herself, recognized this shift. “The Seven Years’ War was the mostdramatically successful war the British ever fought,” she observed. The scale of the victories changed the nature of the Empire from a simple commercial dominion to a territorial entity requiring unprecedented administration and military protection. Rather than seeing it as the point of creation for the Briton, however, her model leads her to treat the new empire as a problem hardto comprehend and justify in traditional British terms. Colley, Britons, 108.

7 Pittock terms it but “a codification and revision of a very traditional position,” a Whiggish history of economic and religious integration substituting England for Britain. Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain, 173. Yet, in the early eighteenth century, the combined populations of Wales, Scotland and Ireland almost equaled that of England, and up to 25 per cent spoke neither English nor Scots as their first language, making a study of minority peoples within the British Isles as valid as of the majority English.Great differences also existed in living standards, with wages for both skilled and unskilled labor being significantly lower outside southern England, leading to “deep poverty” for many and contributing to the perceptionof Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and even northern England as barbarous. Ibid., 1-2, 45, 119.

8 The idea of “Britain” certainly predated the Act of Union and at times had a distinctly non-English slant. Henry VII’s accession to the English throne yielded the modern understanding of a “British” history, and one with loud Welsh overtones. The accession of James I and VI, likewise, conjured fears of a Britain rooted in Scotland. The discourse of Union as partnership only acquired a semblance of truth with the suppression of the last Jacobite uprising and the contribution of thousands of Scottish soldiers to the imperial cause in the Seven Years’ War. Moreover, England’s hegemonic drive tocentralize power in London can be seen in the anti-Catholicism of the Treaty of Limerick and various Catholic penal acts, the Act of Union with Scotland and perpetual adjournment of the Scottish parliament, and the abolition of theCouncil of Wales with the goal of single kingdom monarchy with all resources dedicated to the Anglo-Hanoverian regime. Ibid., 54-57.

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of dominance over dependent peoples in the imperial setting.

England needed subordinate national identities, both to include

in the imperial project undeniably distinct peoples, but also to

remind colonized peoples that they remained apart from the

English, their cultural and political superiors. Such forces can

be seen at play in Scotland and the American colonies. The Scots

posed a thorny problem to the idea of the Briton, because of

their relatively recent union with the English and their

seemingly irrepressible Jacobite tendency. The Highlander, in

particular, was deemed warlike by nature, with his only use being

cannon fodder. Consequently, the English allowed soldiers alone

to retain a regional Highland identity symbolized by the wearing

of the plaid and the bearing of weapons, making recruitment a

process of identity formation. Conversely, American colonials,

buffered by distance and the protean state of their cultures,

evolved as other than Britons despite their aspirations. An

American identity began to crystallize during the Seven Years’

War in opposition to the Briton, arising from the British fiscal-

military state’s exercise of authority within the colonies.

7

The army, as the most palpable manifestation of central power

within the Empire and arguably the most successful integrating

institution in 18th century Britain,9 helped create and contain

these identities, allowing for differing forms of self-

identification and allegiance to the imperial project. This paper

examines how two constituent groups—Scots and Americans—operated

within the British world, and came to grips with the hegemonic

thrust of Britishness. 10

9 Steve Murdoch and A. Mackillop, eds., Fighting for Identity: Scottish Military Experience c. 1550-1900 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2002) xlii-xliii.

10 Due to space considerations I have omitted the Welsh and Irish. The Welsh, though linguistically and socially distinct, had been part of a greaterEngland long enough to have been subsumed with the English, at least in the consciousness of their overlords. By the eighteenth century, the English and Anglophone Welsh perceived Wales as more British than Scotland or Ireland. England had incorporated Wales by the Act of Union in 1536, with the Council of Wales ruling the region until its abolition by the Williamite administration; thereafter London directly administered Wales. See Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain, 13-15. The fact that no new designation for the region emerged, such as West Britain to parallel that of Scotland’s re-denomination as North Britain, suggests how thoroughly Wales had been subsumedas an entity within the English consciousness. The Irish, sharing a complicated, brutal history with the English, divided into Gaelic, Old Englishand Anglo-Irish groups, and rivened by religious differences, occupied a middle ground between colonial subject and Britons. Unlike Scotland or Wales, Ireland was a colony, but one that possessed its own Parliament until the lateeighteenth century. More so than other British colonies, however, its history involved successive invasions and military conquest. First came the wave of Anglo-Norman invaders, followed by “New English” colonizers of Ireland in the period 1560-1660, who developed a group identity in opposition both to the Gaelic Irish and to the “Old English” Normans, both overwhelmingly Catholic byreligion. The English Revolution and the defeat of James II and VII by Williamof Orange’s Protestant armies handed control of provincial power and land to the Anglo-Irish, at the expense of both the Gaelic Irish and Anglo-Normans. The Anglo-Irish identified with England, seeing themselves as Englishmen. Their love for the old country was never fully requited, however, the English

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The Scots

Lord Barrington, Secretary at War, avowed to Parliament in 1751,

“I am for always having in our army as many Scottish soldiers as

possible, not that I think them more brave than those of any

other country we can recruit from, but because they are generally

more hardy and less mutinous; and of all Scottish soldiers I

should choose to have and keep in our army as many Highlanders as

possible.” Colley read this comment as a measure of a remarkable

about-face since the Jacobite uprising, Scotland having become

“the arsenal of the Empire.” Rather than an affirmation of

Highland military abilities, Andrew Mackillop believed Barrington

praised the martial abilities of Highlanders so as to use

enlistment as a means of keeping clansmen safely out of Britain

and at the front lines where they belonged.11 For whatever reason,treating them as “at least half foreign” and not real Englishmen. The Anglo-Irish, as “aliens” in both countries, developed an ethnic “ambivalence” that harbored some antagonism for the English. Hence Protestant sectarianism blurred the Catholic-Protestant divide. See: Francis James, Ireland in the Empire 1688-1770: A History of Ireland from the Williamite Wars to the Eve of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard, 1973), 289-91; Nicholas Canny. “Identity Formation in Ireland: The Emergence of the Anglo-Irish,” in NicholasCanny and Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 202-03.

11 Barrington cited in Colley, Britons, 125; Andrew Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’: Army, Empire and the Scottish Highlands, 1715-1815 (East Linton, Lothian, Scotland: Tuckwell Press, 2000), 57-58.

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from the Seven Years’ War Highlanders became strongly identified

with the British army.

Scotland clearly figured centrally to Colley’s case, its Union

with England providing the foundation of British identity.12 She

argued further that Scots profited greatly from the Empire after

the Seven Years’ War.13 While these observations may well be true,

Colley spoke only of a Scottish elite and however seamless their

integration into Britain, she left unanswered how painless and

welcomed the imposition of English authority on Scotland proved

for ordinary people. Furthermore, Colley’s offering of a common

Protestantism as the flux that soldered the British peoples

12 Yet, she recognized that first Jacobitism, then Scottish success on the imperial stage problematized the county’s transformation into North Britain. Despite the death knell of the Stuart cause and the well recognized contributions of the Scots to victory in the Seven Years’ War, Scottophobia remained strong with John Wilkes bemoaning the increasing influence of the Scots in British affairs and railing against the dangers to English liberties this presented, believing they desired authoritarian rule. Such a stance served Wilkes’s political interests, but also grew out of the reality of waxing Scottish influence in the Empire. Colley, Britons, 112-22. Interestingly, Wilkes was first pushed into opposition by losing the governorship of Quebec he so desire to Brigadier James Murray, the Scottish military officer. Ibid., 126.

13 Britain promoted Scottish economic development (Scotland’s economy expanded faster than England’s in second half of the eighteenth century), and opened up places to Scots in government and administration. The Scottish Enlightenment outpaced English intellectual developments, as did Scottish technical knowledge. Scots placed a disproportionate number in state sponsoredcommerce (such as the East India Company) and colonial administration, particularly in India, and the lesser Scottish gentry could rise in the army. Ibid., 122-40.

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together ignored the great differences in religious beliefs among

them. Scottish Presbyterianism stood at odds with Anglicanism,

and even within Scotland regions of Catholic and Episcopalian

majorities existed.14 Scottish experiences reveal a Briton with

more disturbed, multiple personalities.

Colin Kidd, moreover, questioned the coherence of the Scottish

or North Briton identity. North Britons possessed “concentric

loyalties which allowed Scots to capitalize on their self-

interested attachment to the expanding core of English commercial

opportunity, without compromising their emotional identification

with Scotland.”15 The fundamental obstacle to a coherent North

14 Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’, 207-08.15 In terms of commerce and politics, Kidd argued, Scots bought into the

idea of Great Britain, in that they profited in these areas through access to British markets and British freedoms. But Scottish chauvinism lay close to thesurface, and could erupt when native cultural traits, as in religion and language, seemed threatened, or desires for the rights of Britons became frustrated. Colin Kidd, “North Britishness and the Nature of Eighteenth-Century British Patriotisms,” The Historical Journal, Vol. 39/no. 2 (June 1996), 361-82; esp. 363, 378-79. Kidd rightly complicates Colley’s teleological vision, and is more conservative in dating Scotland’s embrace of Britain to until after the ‘45. But, in many ways, Kidd is looking through thesame telescope as Colley, only from the other end; in focusing on the Scottishelite he resolves a more coherent image of the North Briton than had he cast his gaze further north and farther down the socioeconomic scale. Dauvit Horsbroch also picks up on the theme of Scots having multiple identities. Soldiers could be Highlanders or Lowlanders, Scots and British depending on the situation. Horbroch, “’Tae See Oursels As Ithers See Us’: Scottish Military Identity from the Covenant to Victoria 1637-1837,” in Steve Murdoch and A. Mackillop, eds., Fighting for Identity: Scottish Military Experience c.1550-1900, 105-29.

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British identity it must be remembered lay in the historic divide

between Lowlands and Highlands, not only a topographical divide

but a cultural rift paralleled by economic, religious, and

language distinctions that made two peoples out of one.16 Andrew

Mackillop, while broadly accepting of the “concentric rings”

theory of Scottish identity, believed that historians too often

privilege the outer rings, the imperial and national, at the

expense of the regional and local; hence the privileged at the

cutting edge of Empire as opposed to common people, such as

16 T. M. Devine argues that the concept of the Highlands as a separate and distinct cultural region within Scotland did really emerge until the late 14th

century, when Lowlanders first described Highlanders as a wholly different people, uncivilized, savage with different dress and language. This differentiation coincided with the Anglicization of the south, particularly the spread of the English language, and a period of internal conflict when certain Highland chiefs were carrying out brutal attacks on parts of the Lowlands. The region increasingly was viewed as problematic for the consolidation of the Scottish state, and with the Stuarts ascension to the dual throne in the 17th century, measures were taken to tame the region. Eliminating the Gaelic language was perceived as key to the process. The Statutes of Iona required the first sons of Highland landlords to be sent to Lowland schools to be instructed in English, and in 1616 English language schools established. The persistence of the Catholic religion in parts of the Western highlands and the Hebrides, and Episcopalianism in the eastern Highlands—both viewed as sources of Jacobitism was also deemed a threat to theestablilshed Presbyterian Church. With the Act of Union the need for a unitaryculture became more acute, particularly as Highland culture was implicated with Jacobitism. The Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge formed in 1709 to convert dissenters and impose English language on the region. This organization, whose role was as much political as religious, did not have much success until later 18th century but was responsible for theestablishment of schools that instructed the true faith as well as English language. T. M. Devine, Clanship to Crofters’ War: The Social Transformation of the Scottish Highlands (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 1-5, 100-13.

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Highland soldiers. Once England extinguished the Jacobite heresy

in Scotland, it did not see the need for a singular British

military identity, and accepted “sub-national and regional

expressions of soldier consciousness.” The army incorporated

Highlanders as distinct entities, because the clan remained a

persuasive model for the British to understand the region while

clanship became a legitimating formula for the remilitarization

of the Highlands and its “colonisation” by the British fiscal-

military state.17 The military can be seen entrenching such models

of self-identification as concentric rings of fortification

defending its martial goals, most particularly with the

Highlander.

Mackillop maintained that England, valuing the Highlands less

than Lowland Scotland, “ghettoized” the region commercially and

set it aside as a “military reservation.” 18 Military service

could never provide Highlanders with full British status given

this subordination and constructed difference.19 Britain

17 Mackillop, “For King, Country and Regiment?: Motive and Identity Within Highland Soldiering, 1746-1815,” in Murdoch and Mackillop, eds., Fighting for Identity, 2002, 208-11; Murdoch and Mackillop, “Introduction,” ibid., xlii; Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’, 58-64.

18 Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’, 218.19 Ibid., 224.

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established the Board of Annexed Estates to manage confiscated

lands after the failed Jacobite uprising of 1745, and tasked it

with “improving” the Highland agricultural economy by converting

clan patterns of land management to more commercial bases, in the

process producing surplus farm labor that could be fed into

Britain’s war machine. Reflecting this underlying purpose, in

1760 the Board proposed, “the propagation of a hardy and

industrious race, fit for serving the public in war.”20 In the

aftermath of the ’45, Gaelic militarism was not totally repressed

or ignored, but harnessed to Britain’s overseas imperial interest

in what Mackillop terms Britain’s “cannon-fodder policy.”21

20 Ibid., 77-83; Hints cited on p. 89-90.21 Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’, 57-58. The movement of Highlanders into

British military service did not constitute a continuation of clan values, which had in fact been in decline since before the Act of Union, at least in terms of military obligation to the clan chief. Moreover, such a view misreadsthe nature of military function within the clan, which was rooted in agricultural concerns, the protection of cattle and lands, and driven in part by the harvest cycle. In this way clan warfare distinctly differed form the post-Culloden era, one of imperial not clannish conflict. Is wrong to see Highland soldiers as somehow naturally militaristic. Scottish and Welsh borderers, and the Anglo-Irish had strong military traditions but did not experience the same militarization as Highlanders, while the importance of Jacobite restitution and clan factors are overstated. Ibid., 6-9, 41-42.

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The first Highland regular units predated Culloden,22 but with

the outbreak of hostilities with France in 1754, Highland

recruitment picked up pace. In January 1757, the government

decided to raise two new battalions of Highland troops under

Archibald Montgomery and Simon Fraser. By war’s end, ten new

battalions of Highlanders were raised, making the Highlands much

more militarized than the Lowlands.23 Regular Highland regiments

did not constitute “clan regiments” in the way they are often

portrayed. The militarized clan’s purpose was to protect the

agricultural economy of the clan, whereas regular recruitment

22 After the Union the first independent Highland companies of soldiers formed in 1725. Numbering about 300 men per company, they were a small but significant indication of the beginning of the integration of Highland men into British military infrastructure and recognition of the martial resources to be had in that region. Although clan feuding was no longer a concern, the perceived need to control it with such military forces was perpetuated by clanchieftains who profited from the patronage and resources attached to the companies. This reinforced in the metropole a view of the Highlands as disorderly and martial in nature, and led to a dispersion of military resources to the Highlands at a time when the British military was centralizing. Highlanders, although remaining distinct, were integrated into British military structure (unlike in the American colonies where provincial regiments kept separate) and thus had greater access to military resources. Initially developed as a policing force, the Scottish independent companies developed into a core part of the army. The development of Highland companies in the period 1715-1746 “represented the most proactive and innovative area ofgovernment policy in the region.” The threat of Jacobitism had directed government policy into a military sphere, and insured the persistence of a cultural form, clanship, that it was meant to eradicate. In the process, England ghettoized the Highlands as “an imperial-military reservoir.” Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’, 13-20, 22, 29, 39-40.

23 Ibid. , 84-88

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comprised a commercial enterprise to be pursued without harming

that economy. Landlords discouraged enlistment of people on their

estates unless it directly benefited them in the form of

commissions or patronage. Also, instead of more important tenants

and tacksmen who had a stake in the estate economy and had served

as officers in clan raisings, regular recruitment targeted the

more marginal, i.e. non-tenants as opposed to rent-payers.

Recruitment thus entailed “an essentially modern activity” in

that “Highland tenantry were deployed by improving landlords,

essentially, as a cash or commercial crop.”24

The Press Act passed at the beginning of the Seven Years' War

also dragooned Highlanders into the British army, at least until

1758 when political pressure in England made Pitt abandoned it.

In April 1756, for example, justices of the peace local gentlemen

met at Inverness to draw up a list of "fitt and proper" men to be

apprehended and pressed into the North American service.25

24 Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’, 140-44.25Arthur N. Gilbert, "Charles Jenkinson and the Last Army Press, 1779,"

Military Affairs, vol. 42 (1978), 7; Arthur N. Gilbert, “An Analysis of Some Eighteenth Century Army Recruiting Records," Journal of the Society of Army Historical Register, vol. 54, no. 217 (Spring 1976), 39; Humphrey Bland to Loudoun, 1 April 1756, Edinburgh, LO999/22; Inverness County, Commissioners ofSupply and Justices of the Peace, Extract minutes ... of the Commissioners . ..pursuant to an Act of Parliament annent the speedy recruiting of His Majesty’s Land Forces, 5, 6 April 1756, LO1017/22; Francis Grant, List of the

16

Recruiting thus targeted those on the margins of the highland

economy—unmarried men, the landless, those least tied into the

estate’s tenurial system—either through incentive or force.

Mackillop, however, believes military service in the British

provided ordinary Highlanders access to the Empire’s resources.

Recruits could profit from the state through enlistment bounties

(in cash or land) and military wages, as well as pensions and

land grants to veterans.26 The need for recruits meant that those

at the bottom of Highland society wielded some control over the

terms of enlistment. Enlistment bounties stood at three to five

guineas in excess of the amount allowed by the government in late

1750s. Those with commissions without sufficient liquid capital

were forced to protect tenure and grant land as a substitute to

monetary bounties.27 In return for providing military recruits

men of the 42nd Regiment who have Inlisted for a Term of Years according to the Press Act, 16 April 1757, LO4214/74.

26 The Highlands operated within “the richest administration in western Europe,” and recruiting regiments constituted the main means of “colonizing” these resources for Highland elite, offering various source of patronage for re-distribution. Ibid., 107-08, 150-52, 183-90.

27 Simon Fraser promised that families of enlistees to his battalion would retain their landholdings, and that the soldiers, upon returning home from service, would be rewarded. After the war, 159 soldiers were resettled on the annexed estates, of which 81% formerly day laborers. This resettlement contributed to a scarcity of labor and higher wages after the war on Lovat lands and led to increase in multiple tenant farms. Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’, 107-108, 84-88

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subtenants demanded to hold land directly from the landlord, and

thus circumvented tacksmen. As well, re-settlement of soldiers

after the war could come under a new tenurial relationship

without expectation of labor dues. Thus to the subtenantry

recruitment proved a means of social advancement. Mackillop

concludes that “one of recruitment’s most important social

effects lay in the fact that it undermined the hierarchical

structure of Highland farms and expedited the emergence of

crofting.” 28 Provision of land for returned soldiers led to

existing tenants and subtenants being displaced, and small farm-

holdings (crofting) increasing.29 Recruitment and military service

also promoted migration from the Highlands, which stamped the

region as wasteland in the making and led to the creation of

Highland enclaves overseas in the colonies.30 Good in the short

28 Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’, 129, 157-60, 162-63, 166.29 According to Mackillop, “[T]he state and its military concerns” provided

a blueprint for the phenomena of “excessive subdivision” of land. Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’, 94-100. Mackillop cautions against exaggerating the long-term impact of soldier re-settlement. Rising population pressures in late18th century contributed significantly to socioeconomic dislocation, but soldiers played crucial catalytic role in initiating crofting. Ibid., 112.

30 The broadly expanded nature of “the imperial garrison” resulting from theTreaty of Paris offered Scots expanded opportunity to colonize the new imperial fiscal-military state. Already experienced in the complexities of therelationship between the imperial military and provincial considerations, Scots participated centrally in the British-American relationship. Military service in America had been linked to migration dating to the settlement of Highland soldier-settlers in Georgia in 1735, but the twinned process

18

term in that it expanded access to land by the lowest ranks of

highland society, in the long term it led directly to the

Highland Clearances.31

The military needs of the Empire in the Seven Years’ War

proved fundamental to the development of the modern Scottish

Highlands. Mackillop argues that Britain “ghettoized” the

Highlands commercially and treated the region as a “military

reservation,” a plantation of military labor so to speak,

accelerates with the Seven Years’ War. The possibility of obtaining land in the colonies factored into some Highlanders’ decision to enlist. They viewed enlistment as a means of social advancement, “a cheap, state-subsidised form of emigration.” Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’, 178-79, 185. About 3,000 Highlanders had migrated to the colonies by 1760, thus the movement of three Highland regiments changed the scale of immigration. At the end of the war theimperial state decided to continue to promote Highland emigration to the colonies as the best means of establishing quasi-military buffer settlements on its newly expanded frontiers. Only one in five Highland troops returned to Scotland in 1763, which Mackillop argues can not be fully explained by fatalities estimated at about 800, but may be explained by the settlement opportunities. A proclamation of 1763 promised officers who settled in the colonies 2,000-3,000 acres, and common soldiers 50 acres. Settlement patterns were both isolated (Lt. Henry Munro received 2,000 acres in Georgia) and concentrated planting of almost entire regiments; e.g. in 1763-64, north of Ticonderoga officers and noncommissioned officers of the 42nd and 77th HighlandRegiments were granted 27,600 acres. Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’, 18 ff.

31 Highland military recruitment comprised “a specific niche economy generated by imperial expansion” which had an enduring impact on the Highlands. Military wages were valued in a cash-strapped economy, and some of this money found its way back to the Highlands through remittances. Pensions from the Chelsea Hospital also came to play an important role in the Highland economy. The highest density of pensions within British Isles, and likely in the Empire as a whole, were paid in Scotland. Finally, land grants to veterans, both in the Highlands and the colonies, provided a means of social advancement for soldiers. Some also used the promise of land in the colonies to solicit better settlement conditions at home in terms of rent and length oflease. Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’, 76, 107-08, 150-52, 183-90

19

reflecting the region’s lower valuation than England and Lowland

Scotland.32

The ambivalence of the dual identity—both Highlander and

Briton—can be captured in the Highland Scots’ practical

understanding of military service. While offering the various

opportunities outlined above, enlisting by no means signified a

full embrace of British values or a blind patriotism for the

Empire. More so, they saw soldiering in contractual terms. And

the growing centrality of soldiering to the Highland economy made

it appear but another form of employment.33

Britain’s disproportionate reliance on the Highlands in the

Seven Years’ War and American Revolution in part derived from the

misperception of the region as still vibrantly clan-based and

warlike in nature, as lensed through the ’45, but clearly a

distortion of the rapidly changing social and economic reality.

32 Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’, 218. The army recruited about 12,000 menfor the Seven Years’ War, comparable to the largest Jacobite uprising in 1715 to put the effort in context. Ibid., 234-36

33 This does not mean that it was a popular career choice—in fact Scottish country people viewed soldiering as a demeaning occupation, and tried to avoidmilitary service wherever possible—but it could be viewed in terms of a job more so than in England. Like other forms of labor, Highlanders believed the terms of service were open to negotiation, and once agreed upon must be lived up to, or desertion from service was a consequence. Mackillop, “King, Country,and Regiment?,” 203-08; Horsbroch, “’Tae See Oursels,’” 119; Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’, 226.

20

Highland landlords exploited this inaccurate view to get greater

access to the resources of the state, making the military

identity of the Highlander as much an expression of provincial

desires as of centralizing state interests.34 Still, a military

identity could never provide Highlanders with full British status

given their subordinate constructed difference. Recruitment

rested upon a negative view of the region, and aimed at

protecting the core economy of the United Kingdom. This recipe of

imperial activity produced an “internal colonialism,” where the

Highlands were kept underdeveloped.35 And for the common

Highlander, the exchange was unequal: Highland identity came at

the price of military service abroad or crofting agriculture at

home.

Recruitment in the Seven Years’ War contributed fundamentally

to the creation of the “myth” of the Highlander. Military

service did not generate an exclusively British identity, more

imperial than Anglo-Scottish; even more so regional and

34 Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’, 236-40.35 Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’, 224, 240-41. Mackillop sees resources

being redirected from the metropolitan center to the Gaelic margin, making theHighlands a specialized economy not unlike Glasgow’s tobacco trade, though specializing in the trade of human beings.

21

localistic.36 The Highland regiments raised in the war set in

stone an idealized image of people from the north of Scotland as

clannish, preternaturally militaristic and, in reference to the

English and even Lowland Scots, exotic. The plaid kilt—denied

Scots outside of the military after Culloden and now for the

first time tied to specific clans by design—functioned as an

outward expression of this otherness. The Empire assigned

Highlanders a position in the hierarchy of imperial identities

below the English and Lowland Scots. As such, the Highlander

comprised an imperial identity constructed from the top down,

which was meant to enlist the perceived attributes of an

erstwhile enemy, fierceness and warrior culture, to the purposes

of the greater English imperial project. It served as a necessary

subaltern identity to the overarching personality of the Briton.

It both subordinated its subjects and offered them access to the

fruits of the Empire. Let us not forget that the myth rested on

real historical cultural differences, however naturalized, and

attributed to the Highland Scot characteristics, martial skill

and valor, that were deemed positively in English and Scottish

36 Mackillop, ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’, 205-07, 232-33.

22

society alike. The Highlander could embrace this character in a

way that was self-validating within the innermost concentric

circles of identity—the individual, the clan or regiment, and the

region. Performing the role of being Highlanders allowed these

peripheral people to be both outside of and within Britain,

giving them psychic space within which to negotiate their own

identity. Military service did not make them Britons; it made

them at once primarily Highlanders and secondarily British.

Americans

In August 1758, following the siege of Louisboug, James Wolfe

opined: “The Americans are in general the dirtiest most

contemptible cowardly dogs that you can conceive. There is no

depending on them in action. They fall down dead in their own

dirt and desert by battalions, officers and all. Such rascals as

those are rather an encumbrance than any real strength to an

army.”37 Just as the tide turned in the Seven Years’ War, it would

appear that an identity for the American soldier was

37 Wolfe to Lord George Sackville, 7 Aug. 1758 in Beckles Willson, The Life and Letters of James Wolfe (New York: Dodd Mead, and London: William Heinemann, 1909), 427, 392.

23

crystallizing. Though Wolfe had been in the colonies but a few

months, his opinion of the American had hardened into a non-

complementary cast, preconceived notions setting to certitude in

war. British army officers widely shared such views and extended

the criticism to colonial politicians and the general population,

deemed unsupportive and obstructionist at worse and ineffectual

at best in their support of the war effort. Colonial soldiers,

for their part, found regular army officers officious and

condescending, and their application of discipline cruel and

unusual. Colonists, more generally, deemed the British army to be

demanding of resources, unmindful of how colonial politics

worked, uncaring of matters of private property and individual

liberties, and neglectful of the subordination of military to

civil power within British constitutionalism; seeming at times

more an occupying than a protective force. From this juncture of

allied peoples flowed much conflict producing as often a sense of

difference as a shared identity as Britons.38

38 Historians have long been as interested in pinpointing the emergence of American identity, whether the American preceded the Revolution or vice versa.David Hackett Fisher wrote of four regional folkways from Britain transplantedto the New World in a series of migrations dating to initial colonization, taking root in specific regions of the colonies. While these folkways shared anumber of characteristics, such as the Protestant religion, they were distinctone from the other in specific ways. Add to the mix a number of other regional

24

Having, for the most part, benefited from the benign neglect

of the metropole during much of the preceding 150 years, a new,

assertive and intrusive imperial state invaded the colonial

periphery during the Seven Years’ War in the form of the British

army. The fiscal and military demands made by Britain upon its cultures that formed, and the colonies produced a patchwork of cultures ratherthan a singular identity on the eve of the Revolution. Likewise, Michael Zuckerman maintained that, although “the colonists of British American always strove to be Britons,” they had different experiences than Britons and peculiar cultural traits that were formative of later American national identity but not directly determinative. By the Revolution, there existed at most a colony-based identity, evident only in the more densely settled regions, and still fragmented by ethnic, religious and other divisions. A common identity only began to form in the Revolution, he affirmed. Jack P. Greene also noted that, as the power and pull of metropolitan culture grew in the mid eighteenth century “there was a self-conscious effort to anglicize colonial life through the deliberate imitation of metropolitan institutions, values and culture.” Rather than playing up the differences of colonial cultures, colonists emphasized characteristics they shared as Britons. Demographic and economic growth, increasing urbanization, general prosperity, and political maturation fostered cultural convergence. “Out of this steady process of convergence emerged the beginnings of an American cultural order that was waiting to be defined during and immediately after the era of the American Revolution.” See: David Hackett Fisher, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford, 1989), Conclusion; Michael Zuckerman, “Identity in British America: Unease in Eden,” in Canny and Pagden, Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 115, 156-57; Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Pressfor the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1988), chapter 8; quots. on 175, 171. All these historians, to a greater or lesser extent, look to the Revolution as the central event and to the colonists themselves as the key actors in the formation of American identity. Conversely, Timothy Breen argued that the assertion of an aggressive Britishness by England in the mid-eighteenth century had the effect of marginalizing the colonial periphery. Colonists partook of this patriotism into the 1760s when British actions such as the Stamp Act prompted a backlash to their perceived exclusion from the status of Britons. It was the British who, through their imperial agenda, constructed the idea of the American as something lesser than the Briton. Growing American proto-nationalism flowed from this differentiation. T. H. Breen, “Ideology And Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution:

25

colonies, although long the norm at home and essential to the

assertion of the nation’s military power, struck the colonies

with blunt force. In fact, the colonial experience of warmaking

in the Seven Years War differed from that at home at least until

1758 in a fundamental way—in the separation of civil and military

power. The British fiscal-military state, according to John

Brewer, arose as a result of the political crisis experienced by

the state after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In order to

protect the Protestant Succession, Parliament enabled the

expansion of the military through the extension of fiscal

institutions and state taxation, but on the condition that the

Commons exerted public accountability over state war-making. With

this guarantee in place, the essential operation of the fiscal-

Revisions Once More in Need of Revising,” Journal of American History, 84:1 (June 1997), 13-39.

Fred Anderson closely examined the military sphere and traced the formationof an American identity (at least as experienced by soldiers of Massachusetts)to the Seven Years’ War. Being thrown into close contact with regular troops, really for the first time on such an extensive scale, the provincials noted a number of key cultural differences with their British compatriots that contributed to the formation of a separate identity. Two key consequences arose from the regular army’s failure to make provincials abide by their rules: the British had little regard for their military capability; and war militarized colonials, making them aware of the cultural differences with the British. “The war was an education for both sides,” Anderson wrote, “and the lessons that New England soldiers learned reinforced their cultural heritage and their sense of themselves as a distinct people.” Fred Anderson, A People’sArmy: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 195.

26

military state could proceed covertly, visible in the form of

customs and excise taxes, and long-term government borrowing, but

its full grasp on society obscured by the ostensible absence of a

standing army on English soil (with the exception of a number of

strategically placed garrisons). 39 The imperial military state

manifested itself more palpably in America during the Seven

Years’ War. In 1754, Whitehall decided that military authority

would supercede colonial civil power in key functions of

mobilization, such as the provisioning of the army and the

quartering of its troops. When an army ultimately numbering in

the tens of thousands landed on American shores, and the military

command issued direct orders to civil authorities for funding the

war effort, mobilizing troops, providing support infrastructure

and supplies, and curtailing certain commercial activities,

colonial leaders quickly decried the militarization of their

society, pleading the rights of Englishmen to be free of a

standing army.40 In reality, their status can be seen more as

39 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (London: Routledge, 1989), xvii-xx, 47-49, 137-39, 250.

40 Alan Rogers, Empire and Liberty: American Resistance to British Authority1755-1763 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 52.

27

analogous to that other British colony, Ireland, which had long

functioned as an island transport ship for the British army.

A recognition of different interests quickly emerged and

conflict ensued. Briton and colonial mutually hammered out “the

American” on the anvil of military needs—the processes of

recruitment, supply, trade embargo and quartering—needs with

profound consequences for the colonies. The disputes between

colonials and the army over these issues were primarily economic

in nature—hinging on restriction of trade, compulsory marketing

of provisions, requisition of wagons and livestock central to the

agricultural economy, recruiting of scarce (free and bonded)

labor, and the forced quartering of troops on civilian homes and

businesses. More so than in the recognition of cultural

difference, the seeds of American identity lay in the collision

of Britain’s fiscal-military state and the American colonies’

pretensions to equal status. The clash of interests materialized

early, with General Braddock, complaining in the spring of 1755

of the colonists’ “Supineness and Neglect of their Duty.”41

41 Braddock to Sir Thomas Robinson, 18 March 1755, LO 560, box12; Council held at the Camp at Alexandria in Virginia, 14 April 1755, LO 564/12; Braddockto Robinson, 19 April 1755, LO 572/12; Braddock to Robinson, 5 June 1755, LO 581/13; Rogers, Empire and Liberty, 52-53.

28

Benjamin Franklin, by comparison, provided the “American”

perspective on Braddock’s British invasion. “In their first

march, too, from their landing till they got beyond the

settlements, they had plundered and stripped the inhabitants,

totally ruining some poor families, besides insulting, abusing,

and confining the people if they remonstrated.”42 Colonials found

representatives of the British army to be officious, demanding,

and condescending. None proved more so than Braddock’s successor,

James Campbell, Fourth Earl of Loudoun, who took command of the

army in 1756. Loudoun arrived in July, 1756, and shortly

thereafter wrote that colonials “have assumed to themselves what

they Call Rights and Priviledges, Tottaly [sic] unknown in the

Mother Country and are made use of, for no purpose, but to screen

them, from giveing any aid, of any sort, for carrying on the

42 Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, pp. 225-26 [check] cited in Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 206.

29

Service, and refusing us Quarters.”43 These negative impressions

informed Loudoun’s actions.

Recruitment of both the provincial troops raised by the

colonies and regular soldiers provided a flash point for

internecine conflict. Every year the commander-in-chief informed

the colonial governors of the number of provincial troops he

expected the colonies to raise for the campaign. Provincial

Governors confronted colonial assemblies with the request for

authorization of the expenditure attendant upon the mobilizing of

these forces. As a result of the often strained relations between

the executive and legislative branches of colonial governments,

the assemblies’ control of the purse strings, and in certain

instances the prevalence of internal sectarian politics, the

number of provincial troops actually fielded often fell well

short of those requested. It must be remembered as well that the

43 In early October he expostulated: “The backwardness of the People in thisCountry, to give any assistance to the Service, is incredible.” From castigating the people, Loudoun late in the year escalated to an indictment ofthe politicians. “Governors here, are Cyphers.” In the past they had sold the King’s prerogative to get their salaries, he maintained, ”and till You find a fund, Independent of the Provinces, to Pay the Governors, and new model the Governments, You can do nothing with the Provinces. . . . if You delay it tilla Peace, You will not have force to exert any British Act of Parliament here” [Loudoun] to Cumberland, 29 Aug. 1756, LO1626/52; Loudoun to Cumberland, 3 Oct. 1756, LO1968/44; Loudoun to Cumberland, 22 Nov.-26 Dec. 1756, LO2262/52.

30

scale of mobilization demanded by the British eclipsed past war

efforts and the economic wherewithal of the colonies, so

resistance was natural.44

In addition to raising troops, the army expected colonies to

supply these men with provisions, an expectation that often was 44 The army requested 9,000 provincial troops for the 1756 campaign against

Fort Crown Point. In the end, the force totaled 6434 privates and noncommissioned officers. See: James Abercromby, Return of Provincial Forces of the Several Colonies raised for the reduction of Crown Point, 26 June, 1756, LO1254/28; W[illiam] Shirley to Sir Thomas Robinson, 11 Aug. 1755, LO622. Box 13; Massachusetts General Court. Resolutions regarding Crown Point.14 Jan. 1756, LO759, box17; Connecticut. General Assembly. Resolution on the raising of men and money for operations in 1756, 21 Jan. 1756, LO763/17.

For the 1757 campaign, Loudoun, determining to be as “moderate” in his demands as possible, requested only 4,000 men from the northern colonies. He also mandated that Pennsylvania produce 1400 men, Maryland 500, Virginia 1000,North Carolina 400, and South Carolina 500 for the defense of the southern frontiers. See: [Loudoun] To Sir Charles Hardy, 31 Jan. 1757, LO2742/61; Loudoun to Mr. Fox, 8 Feb. 1757, LO2802/63; Minutes taken at a meeting of the Governors of North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Pensilvania [sic] with the Earl of Loudoun, 15 March 1757, LO3060/68. In June, however, Loudoun complained to Pitt that neither Pennsylvania nor Virginia had raised the men promised, nor sent the troops to South Carolina they were supposed to, and Maryland, while raising the men, placed such extraordinary restrictions on their use as to nullify their effectiveness. [Loudoun] to Gov. Denny, 21 March1757, LO3128/69; [Loudoun] to Wm. Pitt, 17 June 1757, LO3845/85. Where colonies responded promptly to army directives, officers expressed their appreciation, as did Colonel Henry Bouquet to the Governor of South Carolina, “who takes all possible means to forward the Service” by prevailing on the Assembly to raise troops and provide monies for the construction and repair offortifications. See: Bouquet to Governor Dinnwiddie, 23 June 1757, ADD 21631, SCH 51915, The Military Papers of Henry Bouquet: Brigadier General in America, Lieutenant-Colonel of the Royal American Brigade 1754-64. Microfilm from British Library Additional Manuscripts 21631-21660. (London: World Microfilms, 1978), Reel 1, p. 23 [hereafter BP1/23]; Bouquet to General Napier, July 13, 1757, ADD 21631, SCH 51915, BP1/33.

In preparation for the 1758 campaign, Lord Loudoun indicated to the governors of the northern colonies that upwards of 7,000 provincials would be required. The New England legislatures, primarily at the instigation of Governor Pownall of Massachusetts, had already sent commissioners to a conference to discuss the establishment of a common military policy

31

not met. Loudoun encountered such a problem in New York in 1756.

Charles Hardy, the governor of the colony, had instructed the

Assembly to set an upper limit on what could be charged for

wagons, horses and wages, but that august body ignored his

instructions. Hardy issued warrants allowing officers to impress

wagons and prevented workers for the army from leaving that

employment if their demands for higher wages were not met, but

some of the local officials refused to implement these orders.

Loudoun complained of the lack of progress and asserted that “the

evil lies in the Disposition of the People, who will have no

Consideration for the Necessity of the times.” Loudoun, with

Hardy’ support, took matters into his own hands, sending parties

independent of the commander-in-chief, which naturally infuriated him. Before Loudoun could impose his will, however, he received notice of his recall to England. See: Anderson, Crucible of War, 223-26. His replacement, James Abercromby, called for 20,000 provincial troops in total for the 1758 campaign, backed up as Loudoun never was by Pitt’s promise to the colonial governments to reimburse their expenditures. Nonetheless, in April he reportedthat less than 18,000 had mobilized. See: [Abercromby] Circular Letter to the Governorsof Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia, 15 March 1758, AB45, box 1, Abercromby Papers, ManuscriptDepartment, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California [hereafter in form AB45/1]; [Abercromby] to Wm. Pitt, 28 April 1758, AB215/5; Pownall to Abercromby, 19 June1758, AB366/8; William Henry Lyttelton to Abercromby, 16 May 1758, AB258/6. Forbes to William Pitt, Philadelphia, May 1, 1758, in Writings of General JohnForbes Relating to his Service in North America, ed. Alfred Proctor James for the Allegheny County Committee of the Pennsylvania Historical Society of the Colonial Dames of America (Menasha, Wisconsin: The Collegiate Press, 1938), 76-77.

32

into the lands around Albany seizing wagons and dray animals, and

arresting those who did not cooperate.45

The colonies took advantage of their control over the raising

of provincial troops, however the army exercised authority in the

recruiting of colonials to the regular forces, and this subject

proved more contentious in the British-American relationship.46

45 Rogers, Empire and Liberty, 54; Loudoun cited in ibid., 54. Likewise, In March 1758, as more troops than expected had to be raised that year, commander-in-chief James Abercromby ordered governors to impress provisions from the people and deliver these to the military contractors at a “reasonableprice” to be determined by “proper Persons” so as to cause no grounds for complaint. Likewise, as not enough arms were available to furnish provincials,he ordered assemblies to supply weapons or have men bring their own arms. JohnForbes, the commanding officer in the expedition against Fort Duquesne in 1758, and his subordinate, Henry Bouquet, found that Pennsylvanians proved very reluctant in doing either. Their actions in securing the requisite wagonsand horses aroused grounds for complaint. The local people near York, Pennsylvania, claimed in the late spring to be “willing to do every thing theycan, but that they are afraid of being ill treated; by what I can learn amongst them, this Jealousy arises from some Unfair Usage, which they alledge Some of ‘em have formerly rec’ed from Officers in the Army.” Forbes, frustrated by what he saw as recalcitrance and taking a page from Loudoun’s book, in early fall threatened that, if sufficient wagons were not forthcoming, he would “call in the whole troops from the Eastern frontier and sweep the Country indiscriminately of every Waggon, Cart, or Horse, that he could find.” See: [Abercromby] Circular Letter to the Governors, 22 March 1758, AB63, box 2, Abercromby Papers. Manuscript Department, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California [hereafter in form AB63/2]; [Abercromby] to William Pitt, 28 April 1758, AB215/5; George Stevenson to Bouquet, 31 May 1758, ADD 21643, BP6/96b; Forbes cited in Rogers, Empire and Liberty, 55; [Abercromby] to Gov. Delancey, 10 Oct. 1758, AB739/14.

46 Colonial resistance to British recruitment to the armed services, in particular impressments to the royal navy, had a long tradition. Most notably,in November 1747, when Commodore Charles Knowles sent a press gang into Boston, an angry crowd numbering in the thousands took control of the city streets for several days, seized some naval officers and destroyed British property, and confronted Governor William Shirley in the Province House. When the militia Shirley called out refused to mobilize, he armed the provincial lawmakers and faced down the crowd, but not before it became clear that the

33

The recruitment of indentured servants prompted provincial

authorities to protest to the military. Masters, “having a great

part of their Property vested in Servants,” also frequently took

the law into their own hands to resist British recruiting

parties. Horatio Sharpe, Governor of Maryland, warned “an

Insurrection of the People is likely to ensue.”47 Major Rutherford

reported in 1756 that Royal American officers had many disputes

with masters of servants, a few of which were going to court.

Colonial lawyers, revealingly, argued that servants, as property,

had no free will, and thus could not be taken against the

masters' wishes.48 Masters also had enlisted servants jailed on

some specious charge to keep them from the army's clutches.49

imposition of imperial authority on the colonial populace would not go unchallenged. Rogers, Empire and Liberty, 38-40.

47 Horatio Sharpe to William Shirley, 2 Feb. 1756, LO793/18. Corbin Lee, whomanaged an iron forge worked by indentured servants, complained to Sharp when recruiters took two of his servants. “It is not unusual with many of these recruiting Gentlemen when they meet with a person that will not be bullied outof his Property and tamely give up his Servant without any sort of Recompense immediately to deem him an Enemy to his Majesty’s Service.” Corbin Lee to Sharp, 30 April 1757, LO3506/76.

48 Rutherfurd [sic] [to Loudoun], 23 Aug. 1756, LO1549/35; Charles Hardy to Lord Halifax, 7 May 1756, in Military Affairs in North America, 1748-1765: Selected Documents from the Cumberland Papers in Windsor Castle, ed. Stanley Pargellis (orig. ed. 1936; Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1969), 174-75.

49 The taking of Servants was such "a very unpopular thing" in Pennsylvania that many "now lye under a severe confinement in our Gaols for no other crime but that of voluntarily inlisting themselves . . . Such an Influence has popular Opinions upon the Courts and Lawyers in this Province.” One sergeant found a way around this decoy, by allowing himself to be jailed upon a complaint, but first filling his pockets "with good dollers [sic]" and that

34

Army recruiters did not escape the wrath of masters, however, as

William Shirley reported. “The officers have been arrested for

entertaining these Servants, Violences used by the Populace” in

Pennsylvania and Maryland “for recovering them from the Officers,

and the Servants imprison’d for inlisting.” A mob reportedly

killed a recruiting sergeant in Philadelphia early in 1756.50

Masters also petitioned formally against the enlistment of

their servants. The Pennsylvania House of Representatives

advised the governor that many masters had complained that “a

great Number of Bought Servants are lately inlisted by the

reportedly recruiting 70 servants, who were "so desirous of Serving." Robert Morris [to Loudoun], 5 July 1756, LO1287/29; Daniel Webb to Loudoun, 10 April 1756, LO1034/23.

50 William Shirley [to Henry Fox], 8 March 1756, LO890/20; Shirley to RobertHunter Morris, 20 Feb. 1756, in Charles Henry Lincoln, ed., Correspondence of William Shirley Governor of Massachusetts and Military Commander in America 1731-1760 (New York: MacMillan, 1912), vol. 2, 391-92, n. 1; Pargellis, Lord Loudoun, 107. In another incident, Pieter Van Ingen, a recruiter for the Royal Americans, enlisted a servant of Samuel Henry at Trenton in August 1756.Henry later confronted him in a tavern demanding his servant or money in recompense, and struck him on the head with a iron-tipped stick when he refused. Van Ingen chased him off with his sword. Henry returned with friends in an attempt to capture the servant, but Van Ingen drove them off again. When he tried to leave, though, Henry attacked him with a pitchfork, which he parried with his sword. He retreated inside and had his men fasten knives to poles, with which they routed Henry’s party, which surrendered the field and the servant. But when mob rule failed, Henry turned to the law, andhad a justice send a constable to Van Ingen demanding he give up the man or the money, or go to jail. Van Ingen refused and a writ was served upon him, and he was jailed in a "Stinking" cell without a bed, chair or fire, despite the protest of his colonel as to the illegality of his imprisonment. Pieter Van Ingen, Affidavit, 18 April 1757, LO3376/74; James Prevost [to Loudoun], 5 April 1757, LO3294/72; John Smyth, certificate, 6 April 1757, LO3300/73.

35

Recruiting Officers now in this Province, and clandestinely or by

open Force conveyed away” to the great oppression of the masters

and the province. Under the law masters had “as true & as just a

Property in the Servant bought as they had before in the Money

with which he was purchas’d.”51 The backlash to recruiting

prompted an official response.52 The British Parliament ultimately

made it lawful to recruit indentured servants who volunteered,

but provided for either the compensation or return of servants to

aggrieved masters.53

51 Pennsylvania, General Assembly, House of Representatives, Address to Robert Hunter Morris, 11 Feb. 1756, LO819/18.

52 Initially, Lord Loudoun instructed his recruiting officers to inspect thearticles of indentured servants to see how much time they had left, and to take only those that could be had “at a reasonable price”; i.e. those with thefewest years remaining. Loudoun, Heads of Instruction for Col. Webb, 23 Feb. 1756, LO848/19.

53 Great Britain, Parliament [An act for the better recruiting of His Majesty’s Forces on the Continent of America; and for the Regulation of the Army . . .]. 25 March 1756, LO2583/21. The Act stipulated that, if the owner protested within six months, the recruiting officer must either give up the servant upon being repaid the enlisting money, or pay the master a sum to be determined by two justices of the peace in the province of residence or of enlistment based on the original purchase price and the amount of time left tobe served. This act also attempted to quell any complaints that free men had been duped into enlisting. A recruit had to be taken to a justice of the peace or magistrate within four days but not before 24 hours of his listing toswear his willingness or unwillingness. If the latter, he had to return the levy money and pay 20s. sterling for expenses within 24 hours; failing this hewas considered enlisted. In response to the act, Benjamin Franklin, that paragon of the crafts, filed a petition on behalf of fellow Pennsylvania masters claiming £3,652 and a half pence Pennsylvania currency for 612 servants listed. Loudoun felt that Franklin had misunderstood Parliament’s wishes, and said that none of these claims were substantiated other than by the word of the owners. [Benjamin Franklin], List of Servants Belonging to the inhabitants of Pennsylvania and taken into His Majesty’s Service, 21 April

36

The recruitment of free individuals to the regular army also

sparked official opposition and popular conflict. Some recruiting

officers were subjected to “Vexatious Suits” in the courts of law

for performing their duties.54 Recruiting parties met with

collective violence.55 For example, Samuel Mackay reported from

Portsmouth, Maine in December 1757: “I have had my party out in

the Country but they generally get Mob’d; one of them was beat in

the Streets the other Evening by five Sailors, as yet I can make

no discovery of the Authors, but I have a warrant out against one

who has taken the liberty to threaten.”56 Colonial officials often1757, LO3415/74.

54 A soldier and drummer in the Royal Americans were jailed in Boston in 1758 for alleged irregularities in their taking up a deserter. Debts owed by putative recruits were invented or inflated and the men incarcerated to prevent them joining the army, and keep their persons and labor in the local setting. Loudoun confided that he would detain no military prisoners in any jail in America if committed for a military crime, as they had been continually released and he had never been able to get any redress. The sheriff and jailer of New York were particularly guilty of such actions. JohnDuncan, 44th Regiment of Foot on Account of Recruiting &c for the Year 1757, 24 June 1757, LO6600/86. William Smith to Loudoun, 6 March 1758, LO5715/122. The brothers Thomas Alley, 31, and Daniel Alley, 20, both laborers, enlisted with the 40th regiment, but were sequestered in jail at Portmouth, where they were being held for a debt owed to the son of Col. Warner, a Justice and localmagnate. Warner was “one of the principal Men in the Town & as no one hardly cares to oppose him, he generally does what he pleases.” Weekly Returns of theRecruiting Parties of Capt. Mackay, Lt. Cottnam and Ens. Archbold for the 40thRegiment, Jan. 1758, LO6919/118; Samuel Mackay to Col. Forbes, 6 Feb. 1758, LO5549/119. 6 May, 1757, Loudoun Memorandum Books, vol. 2.

55 Three riots took place in Wilmington, Delaware in the fall of 1757, in which Independent Company recruiters had been beaten. The mob leaders were known but the recruiting officer did not trust local authorities to prosecute.See: Capt. Charles Cruickshank to Loudoun, 14 Dec. 1757, LO5012/111.

56 Samuel Mackay to Col. Forbes, 16 Dec. 1757, LO5023/111.

37

took the side of recruits and mobs in these conflicts.57 It was

reported from Boston in February 1758 that a “Broil . . . between

a Mob, & some of the Recruiting Parties” took place and that mobs

were forming against recruiting parties for perpetrating

unscrupulous acts. "To see a Drunken Man lugg’d thro’ ye Streets

on a Souldiers back guarded by others wither [sic] it was or was

not to carry him before a Justice to swear must certainly give a

Strong impression of ye method of enlisting & certainly have an

ill effect on an inflam’d Mobb, ” warned Thomas Pownall.58 A

57 Captain Robert Mackinen informed his superiors from New London, Connecticut in December 1757, that, not only were they refused billets by the local justices, but one of the recruits had been rescued and discharged by a town selectman. Mackinen recovered the recruit, yet a local justice issued a warrant his release. The constable assembled a large “Posse” at the door of the tavern where he was being held and resolved to take the man by force. Mackinen ordered his men to resist, albeit without violence, and to accompany the man to jail, but once there the justice used sailors from a privateer armed with cutlasses to separate the man from the party. For their part, the locals claimed that the “recruit”, Jonas Woodward, had been selling turkeys tolocals but, not having the correct change at hand, allowed a soldier to make change for him, who then claimed he was enlisted. Woodward threw the money down, but it was allegedly secreted on his person without his knowledge and fell out when he was searched. When the constable went to rescue him from troops at the tavern, he and Woodward were roughly handled, forcing him to take several troops under arrest with Woodward, but an angry crowd would not let them pass, so he had to free Woodward and troops to prevent bloodshed. Governor Fitch complained to Loudoun about Mackinen’s actions, but promised toprevent such popular actions against recruiters in the future. Mackinen [to Col. John Forbes], 21, 23 Dec. 1757, LO5058/112, LO5077/112; John Hempstead etal., Depositions relative to violences committed by a Recruiting Party, 4 Jan.1758, LO5332/115; [Loudoun] to Gov. Fitch, 30 Jan. 1758, LO5498/115; Rogers, Empire and Liberty, 46.

58 T. Pownall to Loudoun, 6, 13 Feb. 1758, LO5547/119, LO5569/120. See also Boston Justices to Thomas Pownall, 7 Feb. 1758, LO5550/119.

38

tavernkeeper from Chester County, Pennsylvania, voiced the tenor

of American discontent, when, confronting a recruiting sergeant,

he "Swore by God that he would beat the brains of any Scoundrell

[sic] Soldier" recruiting in his inn. Moreover, he said "God Dam

[sic] Lord Loudoun and his Army too, they are all Scoundrells and

a burden upon the Country," and asked "What had he or his Army

done Since their comeing but deprived the people of their

hands"?59 59 Information of James Jobb, 14 Dec. 1757, box?. See also: Horatio Sharpe

to Loudoun, 18 May 1757, LO6353/80. Attempts to recapture men who had desertedHis Majesty’s service also inflamed colonial passions. A crowd of people in Boston in January 1757, beat a sergeant who had captured up a deserter from the 50th Regiment, rescued the absconder, and warned that any officers that came would be treated likewise. See: 31 Jan. 1757, Vol. 2, Earl Loudoun, Memorandum Books, HM 1717, Manuscript Department. Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Soldiers and sailors deserted in the city of New York to join privateers operating out of the harbor in hopes of getting a share of the booty these freelancers regularly captured, and this led to confrontations when the military sought to reclaim its men. In April 1757, a sergeant and party sent to retake a deserter from the 44th regiment hiding outprivateers met resistance from the sailors. One soldier had his wrist slashed with a hanger and another man received a bayonet wound in the belly. The privateers rioted in the street all night and the local magistrates did nothing but complain of the soldiers’ actions. Loudoun threatened to send troops into the streets to quell disturbances, but the mayor asked him not to.Instead, Loudoun demanded that the landlord of the public house where the deserter was harbored be punished, that all deserters be given up, and that a magistrate be available when needed to issue writs. The following month, the ongoing desertion of sailors from the men of war and transports in New York harbor to join the privateers led Loudoun to surround New York with three battalions to prevent their escape, then during the night used sailors to takeup the alleged deserters (800-1,100 men, or about a quarter of the city’s malepopulation) without disturbance. Such extreme measures did not extinguish the problem. In October, a deserter was spotted on board a privateer ship, but theship’s master refused to allow the corporal and his party sent to secure him on board, enabling the man to make his escape. Loudoun complained to the mayor, who did nothing, and to a magistrate and the recorder, who took the

39

The American colonies for a variety of reasons, then, did not

produce as many regular soldiers as the army wished, yet yielded

a surplus of obstruction and outright opposition. “We shall have

a great deal of difficulty to recruit of our Regiment," confessed

an officer, "the People of this Country having no great affection

for a red Coat, nor do they stay long with us after they list

when they find an opportunity to take their leave."60 Such

reluctance to serve in the regulars played a role in Pitt’s

decision to send more regular regiments to the North American

theater, which in turn lessened the conflict over recruiting in

the colonies, although crowds attacks on British soldiers

occurred.61 British demands for support vied with American

recalcitrance and outright resistance in the effort to mobilize

information and queried the ship’s master by did not prosecute him. He complained further to Lt. Governor Delancey. Privateers and merchantmen, Loudoun asserted, frequently inveigled soldiers away from the service, and such deserters are often found in sailors clothes having engaged to go to sea.See: 15-16 April 1757, Loudoun Memorandum Books, vol. 2; [Loudoun] to William Pitt, 30 May 1757, LO3741/82; Rogers, Empire and Liberty, 41; 1, 2, 3 Oct. 1757, Loudoun Memorandum Books, vol. 2.

60William Eyre to Col. Napier, 23 Jan. 1756, LO 766/17. Another recruiting officer concurred: “the Generallity of the People Instead of Encouraging the Regular Service they Discourage men from Enlisting.” Another observed that “there is a general backwardness in the people of this province to the Kings service, which is but too much encouraged by all sorts of people, as they seem to consider every man, we enlist, as a real loss to the Province.” See: Henry Wendell [to ?], 15 Feb. 1757, LO 2840/63; John Cosnan to Col. Forbes, 9 Jan. 1758, LO 5377/116; Charles Lawrence to Loudoun, 19 Oct. 1756, LO 2042/46.

61 Rogers, Empire and Liberty, 47-48.

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manpower in the great war for empire. In the process of a massive

mutual enterprise, feelings of difference sharpened, acquiring an

edge that the infusion of funds from the British fiscal-military

state and the shared military success of the later war years

blunted, but the blade had been tempered and needed but another

imperial crisis to whet the distinction between Briton and

American.62 62 Trade embargoes also proved a source of conflict, which, for time

considerations cannot be covered in the presentation. The fact that colonial merchants traded with the enemy not unsurprisingly infuriated Loudoun. New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania acting on the orders of the Board of Trade had imposed temporary embargoes to prevent this trade in 1755-56. Such measures were not unusual in wartime, but these had crumbled in the face of merchant opposition and the supposed impossibility of enforcing them. Secretary at War Henry Fox instructed the governors in March 1756, that they should use all their powers to prevent trade with the French and their colonies. Loudoun’s solution to the problem of enforcement was to order a complete prohibition of all exportation, meaning that only those vessels cleared by the high command would be allowed to leave port. This was implemented in the colonies from New Jersey southward in August 1756, and fromVirginia northwards in March 1757. Some exceptions were allowed, as in the exportation of rice from South Carolina to Britain when shipmasters posted bonds of at least £1,000 sterling, but elsewhere the restrictions were enforced. For example, an armed vessel sailed the Delaware River enforcing theembargo. Colonial assemblies implemented the embargo and merchants cooperated at first, but when it dragged on longer than the temporary measures they had experienced before, and their goods stockpiled in their warehouses angry crieswere heard for the injunctions repeal. Merchant marines would also have suffered from the lack of work, while fishermen were barred from going out forthe spring code fishing season. See: Fox to the Governors in North America 13 March 1756, LO 924/20; Loudoun, Circular letter to the Governors of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, 20 Aug.1756, LO1524/35; [Loudoun] Circular to the Governors of new York, Jerseys, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts Bay, 2 March 1757, LO2959/66; Lyttleton to Loudoun, 5 Nov. 1756, LO2162/49; Abercromby to Loudoun, 21 March 1757, LO3131/69; Anderson, Crucible of War, 182-83. Colonial support disintegrated, first in Virginia, where Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie unilaterally broke the embargo in May. Dinwiddie defended

41

The issue of quartering troops even more acutely threw into

relief the developing perceived differences between the

authoritarian British and the unpatriotic, grasping colonists.

Operating on the constitutional principle that the military

should be subordinate to the civil power, colonists opposed

quartering as a threat to British liberties. The annual mutiny

acts passed in Britain stipulated that quartering could not be

forced upon citizens, but the mutiny acts applied to the colonies

in 1723, 1754 and 1756 excised this prohibition against

quartering, and left the matter in the hands of the commander-in-

chief in North America.63 Beneath the discourse of constitutional

his action, pleading that Burgesses were not going to vote supplies unless theembargo was lifted, and that Lord Holdernesse had ordered him to allow ships loaded with grain for Britain, Ireland or the British Plantations to leave once they posted bonds. Virginia’s competitor in the tobacco trade soon followed suit. Loudoun wished to maintain the embargo, but relented in the face of the obvious and opened trade again on June 26, as “the Truth is, no Rule, no Law, has any force in this Country.” See: [Loudoun] to Pitt, 17 June 1757, LO3845/86; Anderson, Crucible of War, 183; Dinwiddie to Loudoun, 15 July1757, LO3947/88; [Loudoun] to HRH [Duke of Cumberland], 22 June 1757, LO3869/86. However, James Abercromby, the acting commander-in-chief after Loudoun’s recall, imposed another temporary embargo on all North American ports in March 1758, with orders given to detain ships attempting to evade therestriction. He lifted this embargo in early May once the fleet had sailed forHalifax and the Louisbourg expedition. See: [Abercromby] Circular Letter to the Northern Governors, 15 March 1758, AB44/1; [Abercromby] to Commodore Durell, 15 March 1758, AB43/1; [Abercromby] Circular Letter to the Governors Lyttleton and Dobbs, 16 March 1758, AB49/2; Abercromby, Circular Letter to theGovernors, 8 May 1758, AB239/5.

63 J. Alan Rogers argued that “[n]early a century and a half of resistance to arbitrary military power was ignored when the Crown left the quartering of troops in America to the British army during the French and Indian War.” Pitt

42

principles that proved more audible among colonial politicians

and community leaders then in the private homes quartering

soldiers, there lurked a more primary concern. Liberty at root

connected to property, and the people who were to house and

provide for the soldiers deemed quartering an inadequately

recompensed theft of property orchestrated by the military rather

than a representative government. Such material considerations

fused with higher ideals of defending British liberties to

provoke widespread opposition to quartering in the first few

years of the war, which military power nonetheless overturned

repeatedly through the threat of force, in the process confirming

the fears of the military and contributing to the negative image

of the British. In the end, however, Britain’s fiscal-military

state would resolve the controversy in typical fashion—by

restoring the separation of civil and military authority, and by

borrowing money and subsidizing the building of barracks in

America, thus taking the onus off of colonial officials and, for

the most part, sparing individual citizens the need to

considered drafting a quartering act specific to the colonies, but never achieved this objective. J. Alan Rogers, “Colonial Opposition to the Quartering of Troops During the French and Indian War,” Military Affairs, vol.34, issue 1 (Feb. 1970), 7; Anderson, Crucible of War, 769, n. 5.

43

accommodate soldiers. Lord Loudoun again occupied the center of

the controversy.

Shortly after his arrival in North America in 1756, Loudoun

spluttered from Albany that colonials had “assumed to themselves

what they Call Rights and Priviledges, Tottaly unknown in the

Mother Country and are made use of, for no purpose, but to screen

them, from giveing any aid, of any sort, for carrying on the

Service, and refusing us Quarters.” Loudoun tried “by Gentle

means, to get the better of this Obstinacy,” but the mayor

informed him that he knew the law and did not have to give

quarters. Loudoun had his own quartermaster pick the quarters.

Later in the fall, when the mayor and people of Albany delayed in

providing winter quarters for about 300 troops, Loudoun

threatened to march in more battalions and to force them all on

the city. The opposition crumbled and city officials decided to

create a fund to pay citizens for quartering expenses.64 Loudoun

64 [Loudoun] to the Duke of Cumberland, 29 Aug. 1756, LO1626/37; [Loudoun] to Cumberland, 22 Nov.-26 Dec. 1756, LO2262/52; James Abercromby to Loudoun, 20 Dec. 1756, LO2373/55. While Albany was the only town that had given any quarters for the troops, when a detachment left, they would give no quarters to them when they returned. Loudoun ordered a survey of the homes in Albany, which he put at 329, and calculated could quarter 190 officers and 2.082 men, or five soldiers per house. See Rogers, “Colonial Opposition to the Quarteringof Troops,” 11, n. 13.

44

again would play the card of armed force in New York, 65

Philadelphia, 66 and Charleston, 67 but met his match in Boston.

65 The city of New York initially failed to provide quarters for soldiers, other than in barracks and blockhouses. Loudoun asserted the right to quartersand in the fall of 1756 threatened to seize them by force if necessary. The Mayor, and town council finally buckled, and the colonial assembly voted to build barracks for the Royal American battalion to be stationed there. [Loudoun] To Henry Fox, 22 Nov.-26 Dec. 1756, LO2263/52; [Loudoun] to Cumberland, 22 Nov.-26 Dec. 1756, LO2262/52; Anderson, Crucible of War, 181.

66 General Edward Braddock had set the tone on quartering early when in 1755, frustrated by what he saw as obstructionist colonial officials, he informed the Pennsylvania Assembly that he would exercise his power to quartertroops where he would and “take due care to burthern those colonies the most, that show the least loyalty to his Majesty.” His successor, Lord Loudoun, proved equally adamant. “As to quarters in Philadelphia and every other place . . . where I find it necessary to have Troops, I have a Right to them, and must have them.” He informed Col. John Stanwix to “go gently with the People at First,” but to insist upon the required quarters. See: Braddock’s words paraphrased by Edward Shippen, cited in Rogers, “Colonial Opposition to the Quartering of Troops,” 7; Loudoun cited in ibid., 7. Loudoun requested quarters in Philadelphia from Governor William Denny in September 1756, and a month later gave notice that a battalion of the Royal Americans and an Independent company would winter there. The Pennsylvania Assembly responded inNovember, despite Denny’s best efforts, with quartering legislation that only provided for troops to be accommodated in public houses and not private homes as required by the military. Henry Bouquet, commander of the Royal American detachment, arrived in the town where essentially no quarters had been prepared. A new hospital able to hold 500 troops plus officers lay unused, butthe Assembly refused to let him take possession. “During these Transactions, avery deep Snow fell, succeeded by a sharp Frost,” wrote Denny. “In this severeWeather the Troops marched into Town, the Small pox raging in every Part, and were crouded [sic] into public Houses, where they suffered extreme Hardships and caught the Infection. The Surgeons declared every House would be an Hospital, unless the sick were removed into one Place, and those who were lesscrouded and better accommodated.” Still 124 men “lay upon Straw” and 62 beds were wanted, but the House “suffered the Men to lye in this miserable Condition,” while recruits continued to arrive. Fear of a smallpox epidemic inthe city as much as concerns for British liberties prompted opposition to

45

The quartering controversy developed later in Boston because

William Shirley had convinced the Massachusetts legislature to

build barracks on Castle William Island in Boston harbor in 1755.

When in August 1757, Loudoun informed Governor Pownall, his

former secretary, that a regiment of soldiers would need to be quartering. Denny wrestled mightily with the Assembly maintaining the line that the commander-in-chief was empowered to request quarters as needed, from private as well as public houses, while the Assembly’s champion, Benjamin Franklin, heroically fought the “contest for political liberty.” As officials in Philadelphia had not adequately quartered troops and provided none for officers, Loudoun, pro forma, threatened to march troops into Philadelphia to take quarters by force if necessary, as he claimed had happened in Britain in the campaigns of 1745-46. With that threat over their heads, the Assembly finally relented, renting additional housing for the troops and freeing hospital space for the sick. See: Rogers, “Colonial Opposition to the Quartering of Troops,” 7-8; Denny to the Proprietaries, 9 April 1757, Pennsylvania Archives, ed. Samuel Hazard., series 1, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: Joseph Severns & Co., 1853), 110-12; [Loudoun] to William Denny, 22 Dec. 1756,2382/55; [Loudoun] to Cumberland, 22 Nov.-26 Dec. 1756, LO2262/52; Anderson, Crucible of War, 166-67.

67 Henry Bouquet, dispatched from Philadelphia to South Carolina, arrived atCharleston in June 1757, with five companies of Royal Americans, and encamped outside town as some men had contracted small pox in the passage from Philadelphia. Officers applied for quarters on July 26 “as the Troops were illsupplied with Straw, the Camp full of Water, and the Number of the Sick encreasing every Day,” he reported. “Four bad empty houses were given to them,where the Men were obliged to ly upon the Floor” until September 21, when 160 men were given quarters in public houses, but the rest remained where they were. Officers were not quartered until August 2. The Highland Battalion arrived September 3, having lost seven men in the Atlantic passage, but with only 16 sick men. They were only given quarters in “a half finishd Church without Windows, in damp Store houses upon the Quay, and in empty houses, where most of the Men were obliged to ly upon the Ground without Straw or any Sort of Covering. Immediate Sickness was the Consequence of such a Reception after so long a Voyage.” By end of September, 500 Highlanders were sick, and 60 died within three months. The Commander of the Highlanders noted “this Climate Do’s not agree with our Northern Constitutions.” Some local inhabitants took pity on them and admitted 200 men into their homes. Securing quarters in town, Bouquet complained to Loudoun, proved “the eternal Struggle in America.” Despite his repeated pleas he had achieved no results by mid-October. Bouquet alleged that the local inhabitants grossly overcharged

46

quartered in the city, the legislature decided to pay for

additional barracks to be built at Castle William to prevent

quartering in private homes.68 Loudoun remained unconvinced of

Massachusetts’ commitment to the war effort, and began to voice

recruiting parties for provisions and accommodations, and asked Governor Littleton to stop such “Robbery, by a Law fixing the rate to be pay’d by the Troops for diet.” “Private Interest is always the first point here, and PublicSpirit is no more the Second,” he confided to Loudoun, and “too great a tenderness for the People, and too Strict an adherence to Forms in Such Circumstances, might be of great prejudice to the Troops.” As it stood, the soldiers were spread among unsatisfactory public and private houses and uncompleted barracks with neither furniture nor even straw for the men. In October the Colonial Assembly resolved to build barracks for 1,000 men but initially made no provision for furniture or bedding, and issued insufficient firewood. Bouquet complained to the governor, who took the matter to the Assembly, which agreed to provide one cord of wood for every 100 soldiers, andone blanket per man, but no further provisions was made for the hospitals, guard rooms and officer quarters. See: Henry Bouquet and others, Resolution sent to the Governor of South Carolina, 2 Dec. 1757, LO 4937/109; Archibald Montgomery [to Loudoun], Oct. 1757, LO 4727/104; Bouquet to Loudoun, 16 Oct. 1757, 4649/102; Petition from Bouquet and officers under his command, 2 Dec 1757, ADD 21643, BP6/48. Loudoun instructed Bouquet that if South Carolina didnot provide sufficient quarters, he should use troops to quarter themselves oncitizens, but in the end decided to deploy the Royal Americans to New York so as to ease the crush on Carolinian resources. See: [Loudoun] to Bouquet, 25 Dec. 1757, LO5099/112. The decision to remove the Royal Americans resulted from a complaint from Governor William Henry Lyttleton, who complained he had been close to securing all the army wanted from the assembly when Bouquet interfered, and told it that if province could not support all troops, should appeal to Loudoun to have part of the forces withdrawn. Lyttleton to Loudoun, 10 Dec. 1757, LO4987/110; [Loudoun] to Gov. Lyttleton, 13 Feb. 1758 LO5570/120. Lyttleton put the cost of quartering the regular forces in South Carolina from June through November 1757 at £20,210 10s. 5d. [Wm. Lyttleton] Account of the Charges for accommodating the King’s Forces in the Province of South Carolina, 1 Dec. 1757, AB4/1. Yet, as late as March 1758, not all regular officers had been provided with quarters or barracks. See: Bouquet to Lyttleton, 28 Feb. 1758, AB25/1; Lyttelton, Message to the Assembly of the Province of South Carolina, [15 March 1758, AB42/1.

68 Rogers, “Colonial Opposition to the Quartering of Troops,” 9.

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doubts about the governor’s trustworthiness as a servant to the

Crown. Pownall was:

the greatest Man I have yet met and from whom I forsee

more trouble to whoever commands in this Country than

from all the People on the Continent . . . . As to his

Notions of what is necessary for an Army and the Powers

that must be in the Person that commands them at the

time that war is actually in the Country, he has formed

them from a superficial Reading of Law at School

without any Practice. Every act of a general is an

Infringement on the Liberty of the People, and if the

Civil Magistrate, does not furnish Carriages, every

thing must stand still, and, if he does not give

Quarters, the Troops must perish in the Streets, but

where his own power is concerned, there he has no

Bounds.69

Pownall proved to be a thorn in the side of the general.

69 Loudoun to Cumberland, 15 Oct. 1757, LO4642/102.

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All remained quiet until early November when recruiting

parties were denied quarters in Boston.70 The Massachusetts

General Court drew up An Act for Regulating the Militia, which

stated: “No officer, Military or Civil, or other Person, shall

quarter or billet any Soldier or Seamen upon any Inhabitant

within this Province without his Consent . . . notwithstanding

any Order whatsoever,” excepting public houses. An £100 penalty

would be assessed for an infraction, to be split between

government and offended party. Pownall explained to Loudoun that

the law was meant to protect “an Essential right of the Subject

that no one could be quartered upon, unless by Law and there was

no Law.” If Massachusetts did not immediately settle the

quartering issue, however warned Loudoun, three battalions would

march into Boston. Pownall conveyed the threat to the assembly,

which passed legislation empowering magistrates to provide

70 The officers had reported to Pownall who gave them a list of justices of the peace to whom to make their request for accommodation, but these men told the officers that, as no law relating to quartering extended to the colonies, they could not be accommodated and would only quarter the soldiers at Castle William, which the officers deemed too inconvenient at three miles from town. Nicholas Cox to Col. John Forbes, 4 Nov. 1757, LO4760/105; Robert Mackinen, 4 Nov. 1757, LO4763/105. See also: Thomas Pownall to Loudoun, 4 Nov. 1757, LO4757/105; John Cosnan to Col. Forbes, 7 Nov. 1757, LO4783/106; Abstracts of the Letters of the Recruiting Officers from Halifax now at Boston, with remarks from Col. Forbes, 13 Nov. 1757, 4815/106.

49

quarters in public houses, while recruiting officers were to pay

for quartering and provisions at rates set by Parliament. This

measure could not satisfy Loudoun, precluding as it did the right

to quarter in private homes. By this act the members of the

assembly were attempting “to take away the King’s undoubted

Prerogative, and the Rights of the Mother Country; they attempt

to take away an Act of the Brittish [sic] Parliament: they

attempt to make it impossible for the King either to keep Troops

in North America, or if he had them in his Forts to make it

impossible for him to march them thro’ his own Dominions either

for the Defence of those Dominions, or for the Protection of the

Lives and Properties of his Subjects.” 71 For its part, the

Assembly reaffirmed that adequate quarters had been provided in 71 [Mass. General Court.] An Act for Regulating the Militia, Section 25, [4

Nov. 1757], LO4761/105; Pownall cited in Rogers, “Colonial Opposition to the Quartering of Troops,” 9; [Loudoun] to Pownall, 15 Nov. 1757, LO4838/106; Pownall to Loudoun, 28 Nov. 1757, LO4908/108; Pownall to Loudoun, 28 Nov. 1757, LO 4910/108; Massachusetts. General Court. An Act making provision forthe Quartering and Billeting Recruiting Officers and Recruits, [1 Dec. 1757], LO4931/109. If he were to acquiesce, Loudoun maintained, every other colony would follow Massachusetts’s lead. Loudoun to Pownall, 6 Dec. 1757, LO4955/110. Recruiting officers in Boston and Marblehead reported after the adoption of the legislation that they had no problems getting billets. When recruiters requested quarters in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, however, they wereinformed that these could not be provided until a law was drafted similar to that of Massachusetts, and they were forced to pay for billets until a bill was put to the assembly in a week. William Cox to Col. Forbes, 11 Dec. 1757, LO4996/110; Nicholas Cox to Col. Forbes, 11 Dec. 1757, LO4995/110; Samuel Mackay to Col. John Forbes, 9 Dec. 1757, LO4977/110; Richard Nicleson [to Forbes], 9 Dec., 1757, LO4976/110.

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the barracks on Castle Island, and that provision of additional

quarters elsewhere must first be voted for by the government,

which act they were willing to produce, but reminded the governor

“the inhabitants of this Province are intitled [sic] to the

Natural Rights of English born Subjects.”72 Pownall was not

unsympathetic with this position. At this juncture, he wrote

Loudoun: “in a Free Government where there is a Public

Legislature and people Act by their Representatives, a Governor

must endeavor to lead those people for he cannot drive them . . .

Your Lordships Situation is very different--Your Lordships [sic]

has not only Power, but the uncontrouled means of executing it,

whenever you shall think it prudent to exert such.” Loudoun’s

threat of settling the quartering dispute with troops if

implemented would alienate the people from the military, Pownall

maintained. For whatever reason, Loudoun wrote on December 26

that he had decided to countermand his orders to march troops

into Massachusetts.73

72 Mass. Bay, General Court, Message from the two Houses to Pownall, 16 Dec.1757, LO5021/111; Assembly cited in Rogers, “Colonial Opposition to the Quartering of Troops,” 10.

73 Pownall to Loudoun, 15 Dec. 1757, LO5014/111; [Loudoun] to Pownall, 26 Dec. 1757, LO5114/113.

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For the first time in the quartering wars Loudoun retreated

and allowed the Massachusetts law to stand. Although he claimed

victory for asserting the army’s prerogative, he in fact yielded

the presumed right of the military to quarter soldiers in private

homes. The defeat no doubt further entrenched his negative view

of colonials, while his authoritarian approach, however much

grounded in imperial policy, made the British-American

relationship ever more bilious, as did the actions of certain

individual soldiers quartered in private homes.

While typically dealt with in constitutional terms at the

level of colonial governance, on the ground the quartering issue

involved property rights and the matter of personal safety. At

best, quartering purloined provisions and control of personal

space from citizens with the promise of reimbursement; at its

worse, it was as if ones home had been invaded by members of a

looting army. Theft, damage, disturbance, threats of violence and

actual physical violence could come with quartered troops.74 While74 Officers hardly set a good example. An official in Elizabeth Town, New

Jersey warned Loudoun in January 1757, that people in the colonies were unusedto “War and martial Discipline,” and thus “to prevent Tumults and Disturbancesbetween Your Officers and the Inhabitants where the Troops are quarter’d I hope You Lordship will give the strictest Orders for Moderation and Lenity to be exercised at all Times.” This request went for naught. In March, various citizens of Elizabeth Town made complaints against Captain Porter of the Royal

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such incidents were not the norm, they proved notorious enough to

personalize the opposition to quartering, even finding voice in

religious sermons.75

The quartering controversy powered a cultural clash in the

British-American relationship. British funding of the war effort American Grenadiers and his conduct towards local residence. He bought three barrels of cider but would not pay the agreed price when delivered, argued with a local citizen and struck him with fist and sword. Also, a landlord complained a foreign captain of the 3rd Battalion of the same regiment (presumably not Porter) threatened to cut his head off and beat his wife because she would not roast a sheep for him. See: J. Belcher to Loudoun, 3 Jan. 1757, LO2630/59; Deposition of Edward Thomas, 29 March 1757, LO3203/71; Samuell Woodruff to Loudoun, 29 March 1757, LO3208/71; Deposition of CorneliusHetfield, 30 March 1757, LO3215/71; 29 March, 1757, vol. 2, Loudoun MemorandumBooks.

It is not any wonder then, that private soldiers sometimes took advantage of their strength in numbers while quartered on the public. In the fall of 1756, a company of Royal Americans was ordered into quarters in George Town, Maryland. A group of these soldiers moved into a house owned by William Wethered in November and on January 17, through their carelessness he alleged,the house burnt down, together with a storehouse, stables, fencing, a garden adjoining house, and two small houses that were pulled down to prevent the fire spreading. Wethered sought reimbursement, and Governor Horatio Sharpe, asdesired by Loudoun, persuaded the Assembly to pay him £300 for his house. Shortly thereafter in Charlestown, Maryland, two companies of soldiers took over John Kirkpatrick’s house and outbuilding for barracks. They totally wrecked the premises, burning floors and doors and ruining brickwork. He complained several times to their captains, who treated him derisively. The worth of the house he put at £500 and the outbuilding at £70. See: John Kirkpatrick to Loudoun, 2 April 1757, LO3261/72. In November 1757, Jannetie Ten Eyck petitioned Loudoun that since the beginning of the war her house in Albany has been full with stores, officers and soldiers. At that time a sergeant and three men quartered there, “who use her with insufferable Inssolence, threat’ning, to take the Bed whereon She lays, or come to Bed to her, tho’ she hath already . . . given them the Straw bed from under her.” They also threatened to cut the doors and windows if she did not find them firewood, for which she was obliged to the kindness of her neighbors, being upwards of 50 years old, weak and sickly, and with no man to assist her. She begged relief from the commander-in-chief. See: Jannetie Ten Eyck, Petition toLoudoun, 17 Nov. 1757, LO4851/107. Governor Fitch of Connecticut complained that in March 1758, some of Simon Fraser’s Highlanders grievously wounded

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would paper over the issue, but left the root problems

unresolved. When Parliament finally legislated a quartering act

for the colonies in 1765, that allowed for quartering in private

homes if barracks and taverns provided insufficient space, the

controversy erupted again with more enduring consequences.

British commanders grew exasperated as a result of their

dealings with the colonists, giving voice to negative

characterizations of “Americans.” Acting on his orders and

willing to exercise the vice regal powers granted him, Lord

Loudoun sought to impose a unified military order on the Caleb Mead, and Captain John McDonald refused to give up the culprits when legally summoned. Fitch asked for an investigation, and if the facts support this version of events, the men to be handed over to civil authorities for trial. The army needed to make an example of soldiers who do such things, he maintained, otherwise it would only give ammunition to the cries against quartering. See: [Abercromby] to Simon Fraser, 19 July 1758, AB457/10.

75 The clergy referenced the conflict in their preaching. In one published sermon preached to regular officers and soldiers in 1759 at Elizabeth Town, the site of quartering conflict with the army the year before, the reverend offered a biblical rebuke to the congregation. Although King David was a bravesoldier, he was not violent in disposition and “was not inclined to take away the property of his countrymen by force of arms, without asking their consent,and contrary to reason and law.” In Philadelphia, another hotbed of the quartering controversy, William Smith sermonized the Royal American forces on the evil of committing violence against their fellow subjects or terrifying them so as to take their money on penalty of forfeiting their salvation. The troops had arrived in the city as “a raw unform’d corps,” and no violence had yet occurred, but Smith felt the need for a preemptive threat of damnation. See: Military Character of King David, Display’d and Enforced, in a Sermon, Preached March 8, 1759, to the Regular Officers and Soldiers in Elizabeth-Town(New York: H. Gaine, 1759), 9; William Smith, The Christian Soldier’s Duty . . . A Sermon Preached April 5, 1757. In Christ-Church, Philadelphia, tothe first Battalion of his Majesty’s Royal American Regiment; at the Request of their Colonel and Officers (Philadelphia: James Chattin, 1757), 8-10.

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colonies.76 Colonial leaders refused to yield the powers they

believed civil authorities wielded and chafed at the military’s

air of superiority. From such friction, there congealed a nascent

colonial identity—Americans as unsupportive of the war effort and

hence unpatriotic Britons, or Americans as defenders of British

liberties from military tyranny, depending upon the perspective

of the commentator.

The rupture between British military power, embodied by John

Campbell, Fourth Earl of Loudoun, and American colonial civil

authority, most clearly rendered by Thomas Pownall, Governor of

Massachusetts, distracted the army from war-making and threatened

defeat for the empire. Recognizing this danger, William Pitt

resolved the standoff largely in favor of the colonial

governments. By December 1757, he decided no longer to treat the

colonies as wholly subordinate political entities subject to

forced contributions to a common war fund, but rather in a manner

analogous to allies whose contributions to the war effort would

be subsidized by Whitehall. Moreover, Loudoun’s successor as

76 Fred Anderson notes that Loudoun’s ideal approximated the military union proposed at the Albany Conference of 1754 and rejected outright by the colonies. Anderson, Crucible of War, 183.

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commander-in-chief would not wield direct control over colonial

governments, which once again fell under the control of the

secretary of state for the Southern Department.77 With these

decisions, Pitt eased both the economic and constitutional

sources of military-colonial tensions, and enlisted more

wholehearted American support of the war. Coupled with the

turning of the tide of the war in 1758, many of the conflicted

identity issues of Britons and Americans were effaced for the

time being.

Conclusion

Mobilizing the army to fight the Seven Years’ War entailed

drawing people together from different countries or regions with

varying social and religious norms into a polyglot, culturally

heterogeneous whole. The War also marked a “turning point” in the

sociocultural construction of the Empire, in that the vast

territories acquired meant that Britain had to deal with the

ethnic, religious and cultural particularities of a vastly

expanded domain. The people involved both adopted and contested

77 Anderson, Crucible of War, 214.

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the mantle of Britishness to suit their own needs. Participation

in the British military legitimated the identity of the Scottish

Highlander, for example, bringing with it the possibility of both

financial benefit and physical harm, and leading to a

reorganization of economic and social practices in the region.

The engagement of the British fiscal-military state with American

colonials proved more conflicted, as the needs of the army for

men and supplies drove a wedge between the imperial partners and

forged models of difference that later contributed to the

development of the American revolt against the motherland.78

Soldiers participated in each process, enforcing ethnic

distinction through warfare and having their identities carved

out for them by a greater England. More than this, they actively

engaged in the formation of ethnic identities that did not always

align with the models prescribed by the imperial state, and

formed alliances across national boundaries that belied their

essential difference and blurred the legitimating discourses of

military conflict and imperial authority.

78 Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain, 145.

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