A company made up of planters’ sons had been assembled in Georgetown, Maryland, about forty miles away, and once a week Wilkinson rode down the Potomac Valley to drill with them. This was his first taste of soldiering, and the patriotic excitement of preparing for war swept away his thin ambition to be a doctor. Less than three months after setting up his practice, he had enlisted in the army. For Wilkinson, the obvious unit to join was the Maryland militia, but no company existed in Monocacy, and to be commissioned into the Georgetown company, he would, as an outsider, have to put his name forward to the local committee of safety. Intoxicated by the news of the battle of Bunker Hill and by his own dreams of glory, however, he decided “not to await the tardy procedings of committees and conventions” and in July 1775 rode straight toward the sound of gunfire in Boston.
2
CITIZENS AND SOLDIERS
THE YOUNG SUBALTERN’S TIMING could not have been better. The Continental Army, created by Congress in June 1775 with General George Washington as its commander, had just begun to send its first units to Boston to reinforce the New England militia besieging General Thomas Gage’s army of redcoats. Wilkinson immediately attached himself as a volunteer to a Pennsylvania rifle company, but the new army needed officers. That September, on the basis of his short training at Georgetown, Wilkinson was appointed a captain in the recently raised Second Continental Regiment, commanded by Colonel James Reed. Put in command of a troop made up largely of frontiersmen, the banditti who so infuriated the planters, Wilkinson immediately encountered a problem that would dog him throughout his military career—how to reconcile the requirements of a disciplined army with the expectations of individual liberty.
The young captain was appalled by “the familiarity which prevailed among the soldiers and officers of all ranks; from the colonel to the private, I observed but little distinction, and I could not refrain from remarking to the young gentlemen with whom I had made acquaintance that the military discipline of their troops was not so conspicuous as the civil subordination of the community in which I had lived.” His reaction might have been expected, given the sharp contrast between his Maryland-bred, aristocratic outlook and the democratic habits of riflemen drawn largely from New Hampshire, but it was part of a larger clash that divided both the army and Congress itself.
Within weeks of taking command of the New England militia outside Boston, George Washington came to a similar conclusion about the civilian soldiers from the north. Like his newest lieutenant, he was shocked by the “irregularities” of their behavior toward officers, their lack of discipline, and their tendency to leave camp whenever they felt they could be more useful at home. “All the General Officers agree,” he reported to Congress, “that no Dependence can be put on the Militia for a continuance in Camp, or Regularity and Discipline during the short time they may stay.” Washington never doubted that the Continental Army had to be made up of full- time, or at least long- serving, professional soldiers if they were to defeat the disciplined ranks and firepower of British troops. The conviction was etched into him by long years in command of the Virginia militia and experience of action with trained British forces during the French and Indian War.
Nevertheless, the New England militia had inflicted such heavy losses on their attackers in the battle of Bunker Hill that the British never again attempted to break out of Boston. “When I look to the consequences of it in the loss of so many brave Officers, I do it with horror,” General William Howe reported to London after his hard-won victory. “The Success is too dearly bought.” Nor did every American general agree with the commander in chief’s assessment. Washington’s adjutant general, Horatio Gates, who had been trained as a professional soldier in the British army, declared that he “never desired to see better soldiers than the New England men made.” And Congress remained hostile to the threat of political intimidation posed by professional soldiers. “A Standing Army, however necessary it may be at some times, is always dangerous to the Liberties of the People,” Samuel Adams declared. “Soldiers are apt to consider themselves as a Body distinct from the rest of the Citizens.”
Thus from the start of his military career, Wilkinson was caught up in the struggle between supporters of the regulars and the militia. In military terms, the argument turned on matters of discipline, pay, and length of enlistment, but the implications of creating a professional soldiery reached beyond the army. In the minds of most independent-minded Americans, the militia represented the true spirit of the Revolution, men who took up arms, not for pay or promotion, but for sheer patriotic commitment to their country and to the ideals it reperesented.
“Our troops are animated with the Love of Freedom,” New England delegates to Congress declared in February 1776. “We confess that they have not the Advantages arising from Experience and Discipline. But Facts have shewn that native Courage warmed with Patriotism is sufficient to counterbalance these Advantages.”
That belief lay at the heart of the battle for liberty. Just as independent citizens were superior to obedient subjects, so soldiers fighting for democracy and freedom must prevail over those serving the dictates of a distant monarch. “We must succeed in a Cause so manifestly just,” Samuel Adams insisted, “if we are Virtuous.”
Washington, by contrast, held that Americans, like everyone else, fought better and for longer when they had “a prospect of Interest or some reward.” With grim realism he wrote, “Men may speculate as they will, they may talk of patriotism; they may draw a few examples from ancient story, of great atchievements [sic] performed by its influence; but whoever builds upon it, as a sufficient Basis for conducting a long and [bloody] War, will find themselves deceived in the end.” To win their liberty, Americans needed something more than idealism; they needed to create a more efficient fighting machine than the enemy’s.
Wilkinson’s rapid promotion in this new force would owe much to his enthusiastic support for the changes that Washington and his senior officers introduced. The Continental Army’s soldiers were enlisted for a minimum of twelve months as opposed to the militia’s variable terms of three to nine months. A uniform line of command was created that led up from the platoon lieutenant and company captain through the lieutenant colonel at the head of a regiment and the brigadier general commanding a brigade of several regiments to the dizzy heights of a major general in charge of a division of infantry, artillery, and cavalry units.
A revised and more severe disciplinary code, the Articles of War, was introduced, and a provost marshal was appointed to jail and, if necessary, flog offenders up to a maximum of thirty- nine lashes. The list of offenses for which soldiers could be executed was extended to include desertion and, for the first time, treason. “An Army without Order, Regularity and Discipline,”
Washington announced on January 1, 1776, when these changes came into effect, “is no better than a Commission’d Mob.” With new powers at their back, junior officers were ordered to exert greater control over their men, a command that Wilkinson obeyed in his own fashion when he met his company for the first time in March 1776.
“The regiment was ordered for muster the day I entered on duty,” he recalled, “the company was paraded, and I presented myself to take the command; but when I gave the order to shoulder firelocks the men remained motionless, and the lieutenant, stepping up to me, inquired where I was going to march the men. I answered that he should presently see but in the meantime he must consider himself in arrest for mutiny and ‘March to his room,’ which he did without hesitation. I then addressed myself to the company, pointed out to them my right of command and the necessity for their obedience; I informed them that I should repeat the order, and if it was not instantly obeyed, I should run the man nearest to me through the body, and would proceed on right to left, so long as they continued refractory and my strength would support me. I had no further trouble, but joined the regiment and marched to the parade of general muster.”