The British Army, “Military Europe,” and the American War of Independence

Author(s): Stephen Conway

Source: The William and Mary Quarterly , Vol. 67, No. 1 (January 2010), pp. 69-100
Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
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98248_001_144 1/6/10 9:53 PM Page 69

The British Army, “Military Europe,” and

the American War of Independence
Stephen Conway

I
F the eighteenth-century British and Irish looked west, into the
Atlantic, they also looked south and east, to the neighboring
Continent. They engaged widely and deeply with the rest of Europe,
as their historians are beginning to appreciate more fully. German mon-
archs; strategic interests, especially in the Low Countries and Germany,
but also in the Baltic and Portugal; extensive trade and investment; reli-
gious affiliations; a broadly shared high culture; intellectual engagement
through the republic of letters; the movement of peoples, as tourists,
merchants, retailers, technicians, and craftsmen in search of work and
opportunities—these were just some of the Continental connections of
Britain and Ireland. The closeness of the links could provoke a patriotic
or even nationalistic backlash. But they could just as easily lead to a
sense that the British and Irish were part of a larger Europe.1
Stephen Conway is a professor in the History Department at University
College London. He wishes to thank the owners and custodians of manuscript mate-
rials that he cites or quotes for permission to use material in their ownership or care.
He is grateful to the readers of an earlier version of this article for their helpful com-
ments and criticisms.
1 For recent scholarship on Britain, Ireland, and the rest of Europe, see for
example Nicholas Canny, “Writing Early Modern History: Ireland, Britain, and the
Wider World,” Historical Journal 46, no. 3 (September 2003): 723–47; Jeremy Black,
The Continental Commitment: Britain, Hanover and Interventionism, 1714–1793
(London, 2005); Stephen Conway, “Continental Connections: Britain and Europe
in the Eighteenth Century,” History 90, no. 3 (July 2005): 353–74; Hannah Smith,
Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, 2006); Andrew C.
Thompson, Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest, 1688–1756 (Woodbridge,
Eng., 2006); Tony Claydon, Europe and the Making of England, 1660–1760
(Cambridge, 2007); Nick Harding, Hanover and the British Empire, 1700–1837
(Woodbridge, Eng., 2007); Brendan Simms and Torsten Riotte, eds., The
Hanoverian Dimension in British History, 1714–1837 (Cambridge, 2007); Simms,
Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783
(London, 2007); Marie Peters, “Early Hanoverian Consciousness: Empire or
Europe?” English Historical Review 122, no. 497 (June 2007): 632–68; Conway,
“Scots, Britons, and Europeans: Scottish Military Service, c. 1739–1783,” Historical
Research 82, no. 215 (February 2009): 114–30. For the patriotic backlash against
Britain’s Continental connections, see Gerald Newman, The Rise of English
Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (New York, 1987); Linda Colley, Britons:

William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, Volume LXVII, Number 1, January 2010

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70 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

These connections and their consequences should interest those who

study colonial and revolutionary North America because they reveal much
about the ways in which the British and Irish operated in the British
Atlantic world that has been a framework for scholarship on eighteenth-
century America in the last few decades. In the late 1990s, T. H. Breen
urged historians of the American Revolution to accommodate Linda
Colley’s work on eighteenth-century Britishness; now they need to rec-
ognize the implications of recent writings on the Europeanness of the
British and Irish in that period.2
The British army that fought in America during the Revolutionary
War offers a striking example of this European consciousness. Britain’s
army shared with other European armies the international (or perhaps
transnational) tendencies of eighteenth-century military life that united
soldiers of many nations in an occupational fraternity. Based on the
transfer of personnel, technology, ideas, and institutions, and under-
pinned by the Eurocentric laws of war and a common commitment to
the dictates of military etiquette, this soldierly fraternity might usefully
be called “military Europe,” to borrow a term from one of the leading
historians of eighteenth-century European warfare. 3 Military Europe
incorporated not only members of the same army but also allies, auxil-
iaries, and even enemies. To be on opposing sides was not necessarily a
barrier to mutual respect and occupational solidarity.

Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992). I will be exploring the
connections and the extent to which there were European identities among the
British and Irish in a monograph titled Britain, Ireland, and Continental Europe in
the Eighteenth Century: Connections and Collective Identities (Oxford, forthcoming).
2 The literature on Atlantic and imperial approaches to British as well as colo-
nial and revolutionary history is too vast even to summarize. An important brief
introduction to Atlantic history as a subject, and its own history, is Bernard Bailyn,
Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). For four stimulat-
ing collections of essays, see David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The
British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, Eng., 2002); Kathleen Wilson, ed., A
New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire,
1660–1840 (Cambridge, 2004); Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Empire and
Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World (Baltimore, 2005); Toyin
Falola and Kevin D. Roberts, eds., The Atlantic World, 1450–2000 (Bloomington,
Ind., 2008). For Colley’s work, see esp. Britons. For T. H. Breen’s request to take
seriously its effect (and that of other British historians) on colonial and revolution-
ary history, see Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American
Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising,” Journal of American History
84, no. 1 (June 1997): 13–39.
3 Christopher Duffy, The Military Experience in the Age of Reason (London,
1987), chap. 1. Duffy uses “military Europe” as the title for chap. 1; he did not offer
a definition and might have meant the phrase to signify no more than his intention
to survey the armies of the main European powers.

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BRITISH ARMY AND AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 71

There were restrictions on entry into this fraternity, however, as the
Americans discovered. The Continental army undoubtedly exhibited
some of the features of military Europe, especially after it came under
the influence of German drillmaster Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben
from the winter of 1777–78. European officers, such as the French
Marquis de Lafayette, the Polish Kazimierz Pulaski, and the German
Nicholas Dietrich, Baron von Ottendorf, crossed the Atlantic to seize
the opportunities offered in the American forces. Some of the senior
officers of the Continental army had begun their military careers in
British ser vice; Horatio Lloyd Gates, Charles Lee, and Richard
Montgomery are well-known examples. No less importantly, the army’s
commander, Virginia gentleman George Washington, wanted to fight
the war in a European manner with a Europeanized American military.4
Washington won some respect from his opponents, and at times he was
treated by British officers as though he were almost a fellow profes-
sional. But not even his reputation was sufficient to overcome the
British view that the Americans did not qualify for full membership in
the club. The British perception that the Continental army was a glori-
fied militia, untutored in the ways of European warfare, persisted for a
remarkably long time, perhaps right to the end of the war. Despite shar-
ing a common language, culture, religion, and political history with
many Americans, British regular officers and soldiers often identified
more closely with their counterparts in the French army. On some occa-
sions, at least, consanguinity counted for less than a sense of profes-
sional identity, which British military men saw as essentially European.
Other historians have highlighted certain aspects of the European
character of the British army that served in America. General accounts
of the conflict written many years ago referred to the British military as
“hidebound” by its “European background” and “in most respects . . . a
conventional eighteenth-century European force.”5 But their considera-
tions of the army’s European features tend to be brief and undigested
and appear mainly to have been designed to set up a contrast to the
inexperienced and amateurish Americans. A few specialists have focused
on the transfer of military methods, particularly the looser formations
associated with light infantry tactics, between Europe and North
America. Yet, despite some scholarly contributions that address parts of
4 For George Washington’s preferences and the rejection of Charles Lee’s alter-
native approach, see John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the
Military Struggle for American Independence (New York, 1976), chap. 6.
5 Eric Robson, The American Revolution in Its Political and Military Aspects,
1763–1783 (New York, 1966), 99 (“hidebound”); Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious
Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 (New York, 1982), 297 (“in most
respects”).

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72 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

the subject as well as matters tangentially connected with it, the ways in
which the British army in the American War of Independence was an
integral part of military Europe need to be brought out more fully, not
least because they help to explain why British officers and even common
soldiers interacted so negatively with so many Americans in arms.6

T HE CASE FOR THE European nature of Britain’s military in America

does not rely on disproving its Britishness. The army was incontestably
an instrument of the British state. By the time of the American war, the
days had largely gone when it could be viewed not so much as a single
institution but rather as a loose assembly of largely autonomous military
units. Regiments had ceased to be known principally by the name of
their colonels, nor were they any longer effectively the property of their
commanders. A key moment in the creation of a more unified and state-
controlled army came with the issue of a 1751 royal warrant banning the
use of the colonel’s personal crests on regimental flags and allocating
each corps a distinctive number, symbolically emphasizing that it was
part of a bigger whole. Local and personal loyalties still mattered, not
least in securing recruits, yet identification with a particular locality or
officer was not necessarily incompatible with a sense of national alle-
giance. The one could even be a stepping-stone to the other. Local and
personal interests conduced to a national objective: manning the king’s
army. Its regular regiments were also British in the sense that almost all
their officers and men came from the countries that comprised George
III’s British and Irish kingdoms. There were specifically national or
6 For the transfer of military methods, see Eric Robson, “British Light Infantry
in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: The Effect of American Conditions,” Army
Quarterly 63, no. 2 (January 1952): 209–22; Peter Paret, “Colonial Experience and
European Military Reform at the End of the Eighteenth Century,” Bulletin of the
Institute of Historical Research 37, no. 95 (May 1964): 47–59; Paret, “The
Relationship between the American Revolutionary War and European Military
Thought and Practice in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century,” first pub-
lished in Don Higginbotham, ed., Reconsiderations on the Revolutionary War: Selected
Essays (Westport, Conn., 1978), 144–57, repr. Paret, Understanding War: Essays on
Clausewitz and the History of Military Power (Princeton, N.J., 1992), 26–38; Peter E.
Russell, “Redcoats in the Wilderness: British Officers and Irregular Warfare in
Europe and America, 1740 to 1760,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 35, no. 4
(October 1978): 629–52. See more generally Ira D. Gruber, “British Strategy: The
Theory and Practice of Eighteenth-Century Warfare,” in Higginbotham,
Reconsiderations on the Revolutionary War, 14–31. Gruber’s probing and thoughtful
essay concludes that the British army was influenced by European military theories
but by much else besides. For a wide-ranging study of the influence of military
Europe on the emerging American army, see Scott N. Hendrix, “The Spirit of the
Corps: The British Army and the Pre-National Pan-European Military World and
the Origins of American Martial Culture, 1754–1783” (Ph.D. diss., University of
Pittsburgh, 2005).

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BRITISH ARMY AND AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 73

regional units, such as the Highland Scottish regiments, the Royal Welch
Fusiliers, and the Royal Irish and Enniskillen regiments, but many of the
infantry battalions brought together English, Welsh, Scots, and Irish sol-
diers in the same military formation. Celebration of the different saint’s
days of the component nations of the British Isles indicated the army’s
Britishness. On Saint David’s Day in 1779, a Scottish captain in the Forty-
Second Highlanders ate dinner with the officers of the Royal Welch
Fusiliers in New York, commemorating, as he put it, “St. Taffy with a
copious libation.” A dinner attended by Scottish officers on November 30,
1781, to celebrate Saint Andrew’s Day included toasts proposed to “our
Brother Saints”—Saint George, Saint David, and Saint Patrick—as well as
effusive expressions of loyalty to their common “Royal Master.”7
The British army that sought to suppress the colonial rebellion was
also in some senses American, most evidently in its reliance on local
manpower. In the Seven Years’ War, American provincial regiments
played an important part in fighting the French and, despite some fric-
tion, especially in the first part of the conflict, had served successfully
alongside British regular troops. Once the American War of Independence
began, the British quickly attempted to reinforce their military presence
in North America with similar provincial corps raised from among those
parts of the settler population that remained loyal to the British Crown.
Indeed British strategy proceeded from the assumption that thousands
of loyal Americans were just waiting for a British lead to come forward
and help put down the rebellion. At first the number of “friends to gov-
ernment” willing to serve in a military capacity disappointed the British
commanders. 8 According to a return drawn up for the British commis-
sariat in May 1777, only 713 of 4,417 nominally British soldiers in New
York City and its environs were loyalist provincials. 9 In January 1778 a
disillusioned General Sir William Howe, on the eve of his departure
from North America, argued that “an equivocal Neutrality” was the best
that could be expected of the inhabitants.10 Howe was unduly pessimistic.

7 Ira D. Gruber, ed., John Peebles’ American War: The Diary of a Scottish
Grenadier, 1776–1782 (Mechanicsburg, Pa., 1998), 251 (“St. Taffy”), 497–98 (“our
Brother Saints”). For changes making the army more of a state-controlled national
institution, see Alan J. Guy, “The Army of the Georges, 1714–1783,” in The Oxford
Illustrated History of the British Army, ed. David Chandler and Ian Beckett (Oxford,
1994), 92–111, esp. 98.
8 Paul H. Smith, Loyalists and Redcoats: A Study in British Revolutionary Policy
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1964), 78.
9 “Abstract of the Numbers victualled daily at New York,” May 17, 1777, in
Daniel Weir Letter-Book, Dreer Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia.
10 Sir William Howe to Lord George Germain, Jan. 16, 1778, in Colonial Office
Papers, 5/95, fol. 64, British National Archives, Kew, Eng.

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74 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

Loyalists formed military units to fill the gaps in the British forces cre-
ated by the redeployment occasioned by French intervention, when the
government in London decided to withdraw some British regular regi-
ments from North America and transfer them to the Caribbean and
bring others back to the British Isles to counter a threatened invasion.
Of the nearly ten thousand supposedly British troops victualed at New
York and its outposts in August 1781, more than one-third were
American loyalists, mainly organized in provincial regiments. The offi-
cers in such units were sometimes promoted from British regular regi-
ments, and the commander of one, Andreas Emmerich, was a German
soldier of fortune. But many officers were from the colonies, and the
rank and file were overwhelmingly American. By the close of the war,
according to one estimate, around nineteen thousand colonists had
served in loyalist military corps.11
The presence of “friends to government” in provincial units was not
the only feature of the composition of the British army that gave it an
American flavor. During the opening months of the war, embittered and
desperate British officers in besieged Boston urged the deployment of
other sources of local manpower, notably Native Americans and slaves,
as auxiliaries to regular troops. The inhibitions of British politicians and
senior military figures limited the use of such auxiliaries, yet native war-
riors and slaves contributed to the British war effort in America. About
four hundred Iroquois tribesmen accompanied General John Burgoyne’s
army when it began its march south from Canada in June 1777, and
many more natives fought alongside loyalist and regular troops in fron-
tier raids throughout the war. Most familiarly, John Murray, 4th Earl of
Dunmore, Virginia’s beleaguered royal governor, formed a unit of black
soldiers in 1775 to reinforce the tiny detachment of regular troops avail-
able to help him maintain his authority in the colony. For the most part,
refugee slaves were not armed but served in an ancillary capacity as
laborers, drivers, and even servants. Further black military formations
emerged, however, in the closing stages of the war in the South. At the
same time, the possibility of a larger-scale slave mobilization featured in
the deliberations of some British officers. In March 1782 John Moncrief,

11 For the use of American provincials in the previous war, see Fred Anderson,
Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North
America, 1754–1766 (New York, 2000), esp. 286–89, 370–72, 388–90, 412–14. For the
loyalist component in 1781, see “Return of the Number of Men, Women, and
Children . . . Victualled at New York, and the Out Posts,” Nov. 20, 1781, in British
Army Headquarters (or Dorchester) Papers, PRO 30/55/32, 3713(1), British National
Archives. For loyalist numbers, see Paul H. Smith, “The American Loyalists: Notes
on Their Organization and Numerical Strength,” WMQ 25, no. 2 (April 1968):
259–77, esp. 267.

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BRITISH ARMY AND AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 75

an engineer in the Charleston, South Carolina, garrison, recommended
“Embodying a Brigade of Negros of this Country.”12
White Americans, meanwhile, served not only in their own provin-
cial corps but also within the British army itself. Thomas Taylor Byrd,
from an old Virginia gentry family, was an officer in the Sixteenth
Regiment of Foot when the war began, and Leverett Saltonstall, the
scion of a no-less-famous Massachusetts dynasty, became a lieutenant in
the Royal Welch Fusiliers. George Inman, also of Massachusetts, joined
the Seventeenth Regiment of Foot as an ensign in 1776 and became a
lieutenant in another British regular regiment two years later. There
were Americans in the ranks as well, recruited before the war and still in
regular regiments when the fighting started; the British garrison sta-
tioned in North America after the Seven Years’ War enlisted local men.
Two whole units of loyalist provincials, furthermore, became regular
regiments late in the war: the Royal Highland Emigrants (the Eighty-
Fourth Regiment of Foot) and the Volunteers of Ireland (the 105th
Regiment of Foot). Though the last of these corps recruited in Ireland
itself at the end of the conflict, Scots-Irish settlers in America and
deserters from the Continental army dominated its ranks.13
12 John Moncrief to Sir Henry Clinton, Mar. 13, 1782, in Moncrief Letter-
Book, William L. Clements Library, Ann Arbor, Mich. (quotation). For British
advocacy of the use of natives and slaves, see for example James Robertson to
Clinton, Jan. 13, 1776, in Sir Henry Clinton Papers, Clements Library; “1775 & 1776
Decr & Jany. Conversations with Sir W[illiam] H[owe] relative to the Southern
Expedition,” ibid.; James Abercrombie to Lord Amherst, June 7, 1775, in Amherst
Papers, U 1350 080/2, Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, Eng.; Francis Bushill
Sill to John Spencer, Sept. 29, 1775, in Spencer Stanhope of Cannon Hall
Muniments, 60542/10, Sheffield Archives, Eng. For the use of Native Americans, see
Barbara Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution (Syracuse, N.Y., 1972).
For the native perspective, see Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in
Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge,
1995). For British qualms about their employment, see Troy O. Bickham, Savages
within the Empire: Representations of American Indians in Eighteenth-Century Britain
(Oxford, 2005), chap. 7. For slaves, see Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson
O’Shaughnessy, “Arming Slaves in the American Revolution,” in Arming Slaves:
From Classical Times to the Modern Age, ed. Christopher Leslie Brown and Morgan
(New Haven, Conn., 2006), 180–208.
13 “George Inman’s Narrative of the American Revolution,” Pennsylvania
Magazine of History and Biography 7, no. 3 (October 1883): 237–48, esp. 237–38;
Robert E. Moody, comp. and ed., The Saltonstall Papers, 1607–1815: Selected and
Edited and with Biographies of Ten Members of the Saltonstall Family in Six
Generations (Boston, 1974), 2: 477, 479, 490; William Byrd III to Thomas Willing,
Apr. 20, 1770, in Marion Tinling, ed., The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds
of Westover, Virginia, 1684–1776 (Charlottesville, Va., 1977), 2: 777–78; Byrd III to
Gen. Frederick Haldimand, Apr. 20, 1770, ibid., 2: 778; Thomas Taylor Byrd to
Byrd III, May 26, 1774, ibid., 2: 793–94; T. Byrd to Byrd III, June 9, 1774, ibid., 2:
794–95; T. Byrd to Byrd III, June 11, 1775, ibid., 2: 808–9; T. Byrd to Byrd III, Feb.
23, 1776, ibid., 2: 817–18. For the recruitment of Americans into the ranks, see John

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76 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

In addition the British army amassed to put down the rebellion in

the 1776 campaign contained a fair number of veterans with long
American experience. Some officers not only served in the theater in the
Seven Years’ War (including Howe, who had fought at Louisbourg and
Quebec) but also had been part of the American garrison for many years
during the subsequent peace. Francis Hutcheson, for example, a captain
in th e Royal Amer ic an Regime nt w hen t he Ame ric an War of
Independence began, had first joined the regiment as an ensign in
January 1756, served throughout the Seven Years’ War in North America,
then at Havana, against the Native Americans during Pontiac’s War, and
in garrison in Florida until 1773, when he went to New York. The
British army based in the mainland colonies between the Seven Years’
War and the outbreak of the Revolutionary War became, in many senses,
“Americanized.” 14 The practice of drafting rank-and-file soldiers from
regiments about to return home to others remaining in America meant
that many of the British- or Irish-born troops served in the colonies for
much longer than unit rotations suggested. Some regular officers sta-
tioned in America before the Revolutionary War owned land there, such
as John Montresor, an officer in the engineers, who acquired an estate in
New York in 1772. General Thomas Gage, commander in chief of the
British army in North America from 1763 to 1775, was among those offi-
cers who married American women, a connection criticized in the after-
math of the battle of Bunker Hill, when some of Gage’s subordinates
were looking for someone to blame.15
Even British soldiers who had not served in the colonies before the
Revolutionary War were to some extent Americanized by the experience
of that conflict. Not long into the struggle, the army appears to have
adapted its dress to suit American conditions, much as some of its units

Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American
Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 277–78. For the forming of the Volunteers of
Ireland, see Sir Henry Clinton to Lord George Germain, Oct. 23, 1778, in British
Army Headquarters (or Dorchester) Papers, PRO 30/55/13, 1469. For permission to
recruit in Ireland, see the Earl of Hillsborough to the Lord Lieutenant, Mar. 21,
1782, in Kilmainham Papers, MS 1001, National Library of Ireland, Dublin.
14 Shy, Toward Lexington, 278 (quotation), 354–58, 374.
15 For Francis Hutcheson, see his Narrative, June 8, 1775, in Haldimand Papers,
Add. MSS 21,680, fols. 7–8, British Library, London. For John Montresor, see G. D.
Scull, ed., The Montresor Journals (New York, 1882), 6–7. See also the letter of his
neighbor, Evert Byvanck to Lawrence Kortright, Feb. 21, 1777, in Byvanck Papers,
New York State Library and Archives, Albany. At least some of the land acquisitions
of British officers show up in claims for compensation after the war. See for example
Loyalist Claims Commission, Audit Office Papers, AO 12/20, fols. 141–42, AO
12/24, fols. 43–44, British National Archives. For criticism of Thomas Gage’s mar-
riage, see William Braco Gordon to Lady Fife, July 9, 1775, in Duff of Braco
Muniments, MS 2727/1/181, Aberdeen University Library, Scotland.

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BRITISH ARMY AND AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 77

had done in the Seven Years’ War. Descriptions of the uniforms of

Burgoyne’s army suggest that his regulars cut down their long-tailed
coats to facilitate movement and trimmed their cocked hats to turn
them into more serviceable caps. Though these changes may have been a
local response to the heavily wooded terrain through which Burgoyne’s
troops advanced, there is some evidence of a more widespread adapta-
tion. A near-contemporary painting of the battle of Germantown, near
Philadelphia (October 4, 1777), by Italian artist Xavier della Gatta,
probably composed with the advice of a British participant, shows
British troops wearing coats that also have the tails cut short, trousers
instead of breeches and gaiters, and round hats with the brims pinned
up on one side rather than the standard-issue cocked hats.16
More important than adaptations to regulation uniforms were new tac-
tical approaches. As the war went on, the tightly packed battlefield lines and
columns used at Bunker Hill gave way to much looser formations, quite dif-
ferent from the deployments common in contemporary Europe. Light
infantry methods were known in European warfare at this time, and light
troops were employed in European conflicts from the 1740s, making them
far from uniquely American. But the British regiments transferred from
North America to the Caribbean in late 1778 amazed their unseasoned
French opponents with the skirmishing skills acquired during recent fight-
ing against rebel colonists. As one British light infantry officer noted after
the opening action on Saint Lucia that December, their tactics “struck the
enemy with consternation.” 17 When Charles Cornwallis, 2d Earl
Cornwallis, visited the Prussian maneuvers in 1785 after having served in
America throughout the war, he was stunned to see “two lines coming up
within six yards of one another, and firing in one another’s faces till they
had no ammunition left: nothing could be more ridiculous.”18

YET IF THE BRITISH ARMY employed against the rebels was both undeni-
ably British and in some senses American, it should also be seen as
16 Cecil C. P. Lawson, A History of the Uniforms of the British Army (London,
1961), 3: 76–87; Stephen R. Gilbert, “An Analysis of the Xavier della Gatta Paintings
of the Battles of Paoli and Germantown, 1777,” Military Collector and Historian
46–47, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 1994–95): 98–108, 146–62. I am grateful to Justin B.
Clement for the Gilbert reference.
17 Colin Lindsay, “Narrative of the Occupation and Defence of the Island of St.
Lucie against the French, 1779,” in Alexander, Lord Lindsay, ed., Lives of the
Lindsays; Or, A Memoir of the Houses of Crawford and Balcarres, vol. 3, The Rise,
Progress, and Termination of the Maroon War, Illustrated by a Selection from the Public
Despatches and Private Correspondence of Alex. Earl of Balcarres, Governor and
Commander-in-Chief in Jamaica (Wigan, Eng., 1840), 3: 193–236 (quotation, 3: 220).
18 Charles Ross, ed., Correspondence of Charles, First Marquis Cornwallis, 2d ed.
(London, 1859), 1: 212 (quotation). For more on British tactical approaches, see the

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78 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

European. One of its most obvious and conspicuous European features

was the reliance on German auxiliary units. The hiring of troops from
the princes of the Holy Roman Empire comported with established
practice. The British state had paid for German auxiliaries, particularly
from Hessen-Kassel, in many of its earlier eighteenth-century conflicts,
most recently in the Seven Years’ War, where they had made up a signifi-
cant component of the British-funded allied army in Westphalia under
Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick. Troops from Hessen-Kassel also served in
Britain: in 1746, to help put down the Jacobite rebellion, and again in
1756, at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War as part of the preparations
to repel a feared French invasion. Even so the German option was not
the only European possibility when the British government began
preparing in the summer and autumn of 1775 to form a large field army
for America in the following year’s campaign. Discussions with various
German princes proceeded in parallel with talks with Catherine the
Great of Russia. Her well-disciplined and ferocious troops had per-
formed strongly in the Seven Years’ War, and some British observers
regarded them as ideally suited to the task of suppressing the American
rebellion. When Catherine decided not to help, British ministers, while
continuing to negotiate with the German rulers, approached the Dutch
States-General with a view to acquiring the use of its army’s Scots
brigade. After the Dutch proved as unwilling as the Russians, British
ministers pursued the German option more vigorously and concluded
treaties with the rulers of Hessen-Kassel, Hessen-Hanau, and Brunswick
in January and February 1776. These treaties enabled the British army to
use around eighteen thousand well-trained German troops serving in
their own regiments. The government of Lord North hired another three
thousand soldiers in 1777 from Anspach-Bayreuth and Anhalt Zerbst.
The withdrawal of British regiments from America in 1778 for service in
the Caribbean and to reinforce home defenses, besides making the loyal-
ists more important, increased dependence on the German auxiliaries. In
that year and the next, the Germans made up one-third of the total
British army strength in North America. In 1780 the proportion
increased to 34 percent; in 1781, to 37 percent.19

sources in footnote 6 and Matthew H. Spring, With Zeal and With Bayonets Only:
The British Army on Campaign in North America, 1775–1783 (Norman, Okla., 2008).
19 The literature on the Hessians is now considerable. See esp. Edward J.
Lowell, The Hessians and the Other German Auxiliaries of Great Britain in the
Revolutionary War (New York, 1884); Max von Eelking, The German Allied Troops in
the North American War of Independence, 1776–1783, trans. Joseph G. Rosengarten
(Albany, N.Y., 1893); Rosengarten, “A Defence of the Hessians,” Pennsylvania
Magazine of History and Biography 23, no. 2 (July 1899): 157–83; H. D. Schmidt,
“The Hessian Mercenaries: The Career of a Political Cliché,” History 43, no. 149

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BRITISH ARMY AND AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 79

Not so conspicuous, and certainly less noticed by historians, were
the continental Europeans who served in the British regiments. The
British Parliament gave special dispensation to the Royal American
Regiment, formed in 1756, to take in foreign Protestants as officers, an
option ordinarily ruled out by the 1701 Act of Settlement, which
expressly forbade foreigners from holding civil or military public offices.
French-speaking Swiss Protestants contributed notably to the Royal
Americans. The Prévost brothers, Augustine and Jacques Marc, joined
the regiment at the beginning; Augustine had already seen service in a
Swiss regiment in Dutch pay. Henri Bouquet, another Swiss officer,
established his reputation in and immediately after the Seven Years’ War.
He began his career by corresponding with British commander in chief
John Campbell, 4th Earl of Loudoun, in French. By the time of the
American conflict, some Swiss had reached prominent positions.
Frederick Haldimand, who had acted as General Thomas Gage’s deputy
in the years leading to the war, spent most of the conflict in Canada,
where he held a senior command. Augustine Prévost was based in
Florida with the Royal Americans when the war began and served as a
commander of British troops in the 1779 southern campaigns. Though
some of these Swiss officers had become partly Americanized by the out-
break of the Revolutionary War—Jacques Marc Prévost, for instance,
married a woman from New Jersey—their Swiss background remained an
important influence on their military careers, and (true to their origins)

(October 1958): 207–12; Ernst Kipping, The Hessian View of America, 1776–1783
(Monmouth Beach, N.J., 1971); Dietmar Kügler, Die deutschen Truppen im
amerikanischen Unabhängigkeitskrieg, 1775–1783 (Stuttgart, Germany, 1980); Jean-
Pierre Wilhelmy, Les mercenaires allemandes au Québec du XVIIIe siècle et leur apport
à la population (Beloeil, Quebec, 1984); Charles W. Ingrao, The Hessian Mercenary
State: Ideas, Institutions, and Reform under Frederick II, 1760–1785 (Cambridge, 1987);
Peter K. Taylor, Indentured to Liberty: Peasant Life and the Hessian Military State,
1688–1815 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994); Inge Auerbach, Die Hessen in Amerika, 1776–1783
(Darmstadt, Germany, 1996); Hagen Seehase, “Die Hessischen Truppen Im
Amerikanischen Unabhängigkeitskrieg,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für hessische Geschichte
und Landeskunde 103 (1998): 135–72; Christof Mauch, “Images of America—Political
M yt h s— H ist o ri og ra ph y : ‘ H e s s i a n s ’ i n t h e W a r o f I n d e p e n d e n c e , ”
Amerikastudien/American Studies: A Quarterly 48, no. 3 (Winter 2003): 411–23. For
the service of the Hessians before the American War of Independence, see esp.
Rodney Atwood, The Hessians: Mercenaries from Hessen-Kassel in the American
Revolution (Cambridge, 1980), 14–19. For support for the use of Russian troops, see
Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the American Manuscripts in the Royal
Institution of Great Britain (London, 1904), 1: 7. For the negotiations, see H. M.
Scott, British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution (Oxford, 1990),
216–20, 228–30; Peter D. G. Thomas, Tea Party to Independence: The Third Phase of
the American Revolution, 1773–1776 (Oxford, 1991), 238–39. For the proportions of
Hessian troops in the British army, see Atwood, Hessians, 257.

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80 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

they continued to write to each other in French long after they had
begun to correspond more generally in English.20
The Royal Americans also relied on men enlisted in continental
Europe to fill its ranks. Germans joined the regiment in large numbers
in 1756–57. The practice continued into the peace; Jacques Marc Prévost
contracted with the British Treasury in 1766 to raise three hundred men
for the Royal Americans in Germany. Once the American War of
Independence broke out, and the government decided to increase the
strength of the Royal Americans from its peacetime establishment of
two battalions to four, Germany again proved a fruitful recruiting
ground. In September 1775 John Savage, an officer who had served for
many years in Germany, offered to raise recruits in the Holy Roman
Empire. According to his own account, Savage supplied the Royal
Americans with German enlistees after having reached an agreement
with one of the regiment’s senior officers, Lieutenant Colonel Gabriel
Christie, and John Robinson, secretary to the Treasury. By October
Savage and his agents were busy advertising for recruits and running
into problems with the imperial authorities, which objected to his tak-
ing men out of Germany for foreign service and briefly imprisoned him
at Koblenz. How many soldiers Savage secured is unclear. He would
later claim not only great success but also that another German recruiter
effectively stole many of the men he had collected.21

20 See the Commissions of Augustine Prévost, 6106–48–1, 2, National Army

Museum, London. For Henri Bouquet, see Bouquet to [John Campbell, Earl of]
Loudoun, Oct. 11, 1756, in S. K. Stevens, Donald H. Kent, and Autumn L. Leonard,
eds., The Papers of Henry Bouquet (Harrisburg, Pa., 1972), 1: 11–12; Bouquet to
Loudoun, Nov. 4, 1756, ibid., 1: 14–17; Bouquet to Loudoun, Nov. 5, 1756, ibid., 1:
23–25; Bouquet to [Lt. Col. John] Young, ibid., 1: 30–34. For the Prévosts, see
Edward G. Williams, “The Prevosts of the Royal Americans,” Western Pennsylvania
Historical Magazine 56, no. 1 (January 1973): 1–38. For the Swiss continuing to corre-
spond with each other in French, see for example J. M. Prévost to Frederick
Haldimand, Dec. 26, 1775, in Haldimand Papers, Add. MSS 21,732, fols. 248–49;
Prévost to Haldimand, Mar. 31, 1777, ibid., fol. 308.
21 For German recruitment in the Seven Years’ War, see Anderson, Crucible of
War, 774; Peter Way, “Rebellion of the Regulars: Working Soldiers and the Mutiny
of 1763–1764,” WMQ 57, no. 4 (October 2000): 761–92, esp. 768–69. For Jacques
Marc Prévost’s contract, see Joseph Redington, ed., Calendar of Home Office Papers
of the Reign of George III, 1766–1769 (London, 1879), 54. John Savage offers incidental
information on his own recruiting activities, though it should be recognized that he
had a very large ax to grind. See Savage, The Case of Major John Savage (London,
1785). See also the letters of Sir Joseph Yorke, British minister at The Hague, in
Amherst Papers, U 1350 C41/62–7; Barrington to Capt. [Laurentius] O’Connell,
Oct. 3, 1775 (copy), in Barrington Papers, Add. MSS 73,587, fol. 3, British Library;
Sir John Fortescue, ed., The Correspondence of King George the Third from 1760 to
December 1783: Printed from the Original Papers in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle
(London, 1928), 3: 290; Atwood, Hessians, 10.

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BRITISH ARMY AND AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 81

Nor was the Royal Americans the only British army unit to have
Germans in its ranks. Recruitment of Germans had been a feature of
earlier conflicts; in the Seven Years’ War, in particular, the German pres-
ence in the British regiments had been far from negligible. Returns of
the British army at home admittedly convey the opposite impression:
the infantry regiments inspected in 1756 contained a trifling 0.35 percent
of men described as “foreign.” But the army abroad was a different mat-
ter. The British force that served under Ferdinand of Brunswick in the
1758–62 German campaigns recruited locally to help compensate for
losses through death, injury, and desertion. In North America, mean-
while, German soldiers served in a number of British regiments other
than the Royal Americans. In 1757 foreigners who had been enlisted in
Europe, probably all or nearly all German, made up 6 percent of the
Fortieth Regiment of Foot.22
When the American war necessitated a rapid expansion of the British
army, ministers in London looked once more to Germany for assistance.
Lord North’s government paid contractors to raise soldiers in the Holy
Roman Empire for the army generally, not just for the Royal Americans.
One of the regiments that benefited was the Sixteenth Regiment of Foot.
In March 1776 Essex magistrates detained Johannes Kuler, described as a
native of “Hessen,” for desertion from the regiment. Kuler had been
recruited in Germany by Heinrich Lutterloh, a major in the Brunswick
army, another example of a German military entrepreneur who acted (like
Savage) as a contractor for the British government to realize the business
possibilities of soldiering. The following month six more Germans in the
Sixteenth Regiment of Foot, recruited by a different German officer,
deserted from the farm on which they were billeted, apparently due to lack
of food. The Essex Quarter Sessions records reveal that these prisoners were
part of a group of more than thirty German recruits who landed at
Harwich. Later musters of the regiment in America contain a noticeable
sprinkling of German names among the rank and file.23
22 Figures for 1756 calculated from WO 27/4, WO 27/6, British National
Archives. For recruitment in Germany, see for example Leeds Papers, Egerton MSS
3443, fols. 110–11, British Library. For the proportion of foreigners in British regi-
ments in North America, see Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and
War in the Americas, 1755–1763 (Cambridge, 2002), 318.
23 Heinrich Lutterloh went on to offer his services to the Americans. See
William L. Stone, trans., Letters of Brunswick and Hessian Officers during the
American Revolution (Albany, N.Y., 1891), 160; Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds., The
Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, 1983), 23: 110–12. For German military
entrepreneurs, see Fritz Redlich, The German Military Enterpriser and His Work
Force: A Study in European Economic and Social History (Wiesbaden, Germany,
1964–65). Military entrepreneurship was not uniquely German. For the commercial
motives of Highland chiefs who raised regiments for the British army, see Andrew
Mackillop, “More Fruitful than the Soil”: Army, Empire and the Scottish Highlands,

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82 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

Of all the Germans contracted to raise troops for the British army in
the early stages of the American War of Independence, Georg Heinrich
Albrecht von Scheither was by far the most important. A Hanoverian
officer, he had commanded a corps of light troops during the
Westphalian campaigns of the Seven Years’ War. He acquired a reputa-
tion during the course of the conflict as a bold and daring commander.
Military prowess, in Scheither’s case, seems to have gone hand in hand
with financial impropriety: shortly after the war, he was accused of trying
to defraud the British Treasury with his expenses. Nonetheless some ten
years later, in the summer and autumn of 1775, he came to terms with the
British government for supplying German recruits for the army. Initially,
Scheither wanted to raise a corps of men that he would command him-
self. In part, perhaps, he was seeking to relive his glory days of the Seven
Years’ War. Probably more importantly, he recognized that as colonel of
his own corps he would have many opportunities for profit through his
handling of the pay, clothing, and equipping of the troops. Eventually,
however, he accepted that the British government wanted men to fill the
ranks of existing regiments designated for American service.24
Scheither had found nearly two thousand German recruits by
February 1776. A return of three hundred men who embarked at Stade,
near Hamburg, for England on December 18, 1775, suggests that most of
Scheither’s recruits were Protestants of one description or another,
though there were some Catholics. Most appear to have had no previous
military experience, but the British colonel who inspected them
described the noncommissioned officers as “All Men that have already
serv’d,” and veterans of many different armies were present in small
numbers among the privates.25 They came from all across Germany. The
most notable contributions were from states neighboring Scheither’s
Hanoverian base: Hessen-Kassel supplied the largest contingent by far,
followed by Prussia, Brunswick, and Hildesheim. Next in order of
numerical importance were Saxony and Eichsfeld, then part of the terri-
tories of the archbishop of Mainz, now in Thuringia in central Germany
(Figure I). A small number came from beyond the Holy Roman Empire:
Poland, Hungary, Denmark, the Dutch Republic, and even, in one case,

1715–1815 (East Linton, Scotland, 2000). For the Sixteenth Foot’s Germans, see
Entry of Apr. 16, 1776, in Quarter Sessions Book, Q/SMg 22, Essex Record Office,
Chelmsford, Eng., and the muster rolls of the Sixteenth Regiment of Foot at Saint
Augustine, Jan. 29, 1778, and Newtown, Long Island, Sept. 3, 1781, WO 12/3320,
fols. 47–48, 50–51, British National Archives.
24 For Georg Heinrich Albrecht von Scheither’s career in the Seven Years’ War,
see State Papers Germany, SP 87/28, fols. 11, 67, British National Archives. For his
expenses, see Treasury Papers, T 1/450, fol. 370, ibid.
25 Col. William Faucitt to Lord Barrington, Nov. 30, 1775, WO 43/405, ibid.

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BRITISH ARMY AND AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 83

FIGURE I
The Holy Roman Empire in ca. 1775. Adapted from David Hancock,
Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British
Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (New York, 1995), 22; Jeremy Black, George II:
Puppet of the Politicians? (Exeter, Eng., 2007), xiv–xv; Brendan Simms, Three
Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783
(New York, 2007), xx–xxi. Drawn by Rebecca Wrenn. A color version is
available on http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/wm/67.1/
conway.html.

Ireland. The real surprise in the list of geographic origins is the tiny
Hanoverian contribution. Scheither, keen to secure the support and
assistance of Hanoverian authorities and mindful that they might fear
his competing with the electoral army, committed himself not to recruit
in Hanover itself. Apart from a few convicts turned over by the electoral
regency, there appear not to have been more than a handful of
Hanoverians among his enlistees.26

26 “Liste de Recruies Embarqui à Stade pour l’Angleterre le 18m Decembr 1775,”

WO 43/405, ibid.; William Faucitt to William Barrington, Nov. 10, 1775, ibid.;
Faucitt to Barrington, Jan. 1, 1776, ibid.

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84 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

The Hanoverian connections of Scheither were more important

than his meager haul of Hanoverian recruits suggests. He was able to
recruit across Germany because George III was not only king of Great
Britain and Ireland but also elector of Hanover. As Colonel William
Faucitt, the officer who negotiated with Scheither, explained to the
Secretary at War, William Barrington, 2d Viscount Barrington, and as
Savage discovered to his cost, it was “contrary to the establish’d Laws of
the Empire [i.e., the Holy Roman Empire] for any Foreign Powers to raise
Recruits in it.” To avoid a prohibition from the emperor or trouble from
the Austrians and Prussians, whose recruiting officers ranged across
Germany in search of men, Faucitt recommended that the king “avail
Himself of His Electoral Powers, by virtue of which, His Majesty will be
at full liberty to raise Recruits in any part of Germany, in the same man-
ner as the King of Prussia does under the title of Elector of Brandenburg,
& the King of Denmark, under that of the Duke of Holstein.”27 Only
under electoral aegis, in other words, was Scheither able to raise the nearly
two thousand men that he supplied to the British army.28
A letter of March 3, 1777, from Barrington to Robinson, effectively
drawing the line under Scheither’s scheme, summarized the distribution
of the German recruits. Of 1,957 men, the vast bulk—some 1,522—were
described as “distributed amongst the Regts serving in America.” Other
sources suggest a broadly even split between the main British army serving
at New York and the corps based in Canada. A further 101 of the men
Barrington described as “Sent to Canada, & not yet known to what Corps
they are allotted,” while 244 were “incorporated in the Rl American Regt.”
The remainder were “rejected, & Sent back to Stade” (82), or “dead,
deserted, & discharged” (8).29 Some British units received only a handful,
but other regiments took in significant numbers. The seventy-five
Germans given to the Forty-Seventh and the Eighth Regiments of Foot in
July 1776 constituted 9 percent of their establishment strength. The
Twenty-Ninth Regiment of Foot, which received even more Germans sev-
eral months earlier, still had a “foreign” contingent that comprised one-
eighth of its mustered strength at the end of the war.30

27 Faucitt to Barrington, Nov. 10, 1775, ibid.

28 For Prussian and Austrian recruiting throughout the Holy Roman Empire,
see Peter H. Wilson, “The Politics of Military Recruitment in Eighteenth-Century
Germany,” English Historical Review 117, no. 472 (June 2002): 536–68.
29 Lord Barrington to John Robinson, Mar. 3, 1777, WO 4/99, p. 198, British
National Archives.
30 Sylvia R. Frey, The British Soldier in America: A Social History of Military Life
in the Revolutionary Period (Austin, Tex., 1981), 23 (table 2, quotation). For the
Germans sent to the Forty-Seventh, Eighth, and Twenty-Ninth regiments, see WO
4/96, p. 257, WO 4/97, p. 463, British National Archives. For establishment
strengths, see WO 24/484, ibid.

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BRITISH ARMY AND AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 85

The European character of the British army in America also owed
something to the previous service of several of its officers in the mili-
taries of other states. Particularly noteworthy in this regard was the Scots
brigade of the Dutch army, which British ministers in 1775 regarded as a
possible way of reinforcing the army in America. The brigade’s origins
lay back in the sixteenth century. It had served alongside British troops
in earlier eighteenth-century wars, notably the War of the Spanish
Succession (1701–14) and the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48).
By the time of the American conflict, the Scottishness of the brigade had
been significantly diluted. Until the Seven Years’ War, it enlisted its rank
and file almost exclusively in Scotland. British governments, aware that
the brigade strengthened the Dutch Republic, its principal European ally,
readily gave permission for such nominally foreign recruitment in its ter-
ritories. But when the Dutch opted for neutrality in the Seven Years’ War
and the British state began for the first time to try extensively to tap
Highland manpower, the brigade was obliged to stop sending its recruit-
ing parties to Scotland. At first the ban was temporary, but after the war
it became permanent, despite Dutch complaints that it would be tragic
“to see an Establishment of such consequence, and of such an ancient
date, go to ruin.”31 By the time an English visitor to the Dutch Republic
saw them in 1767, the Dutch-Scots’ character had completely changed.
The rank and file, he noted, was “chiefly composed of Swiss and
Germans.”32 Other sources suggest that Dutch, Flemish, and Walloon
recruits filled the gaps created by the ending of Scottish enlistments.33
The brigade’s national character persisted, however, in the officer
ranks. Though Protestant Scottish gentlemen were eligible to join the
British army as officers, they continued to opt for a military career in
Dutch service. To a large degree this commitment to the brigade was
professional. The “Ambition of rising in the Service,” as one Scots
brigade officer put it, probably motivated many. 34 Intake of new Scottish
officers into the brigade swelled at the end of Britain’s own wars. In
1762–64, for instance, when the British army diminished considerably in

31 Count William Bentinck to the Earl of Sandwich, Nov. 1, 1763, in Sandwich

Papers, SAN/V/69/26, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, Eng.
32 Edmund Bott’s Journal, Add. MSS 30,949, fol. 21, British Library.
33 For the brigade generally, see James Ferguson, ed., Papers Illustrating the
History of the Scots Brigade in the Service of the United Netherlands, 1572–1782, 3 vols.
(Edinburgh, 1899–1901). For its increasingly diverse recruitment, ibid., 2: 287. For
its final years, see Joachim Miggelbrink, “The End of the Scots-Dutch Brigade,” in
Fighting for Identity: Scottish Military Experience, c. 1550–1900, ed. Steve Murdoch and
A. Mackillop (Leiden, Netherlands, 2002), 83–103.
34 Henry Seton to Count William Maurice of Nassau, Dec. 25, 1750, in Nassau
d’Auverquerque Papers, D/ENa F 65, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies,
Hertford, Eng.

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86 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

size at the close of the Seven Years’ War, a crop of new ensigns and lieu-
tenants acquired commissions in the Scots brigade’s regiments.35 A few
of these young men might have been former British officers in search of
a new military home. More were probably embarking for the first time
on an army career but realized that openings in the British service were
likely to be much more limited than in the Dutch.
By the time of the American conflict, the British army contained a
fair number of former Scots brigade officers. From seventy to eighty
transferred during the early stages of the Seven Years’ War, when Dutch
neutrality meant that the brigade was likely to remain inactive. Many of
these Scots brigade officers obtained commissions in the newly raised
Highland regiments. A notable example was Simon Fraser, who joined a
Highland corps in 1757 (after a brief spell in the Royal Americans) and
went on to rise steadily to become colonel of the Twenty-Fourth
Regiment of Foot. As a general officer serving under John Burgoyne,
Fraser was killed in the fighting near Saratoga in 1777. Fraser’s career,
and those of many other officers like him, suggests that the brigade
enjoyed a special relationship to the British military. In 1765 one of the
Dutch-Scots officers called it “a seminary for educating many good offi-
cers that afterwards made a considerable figure in the British army.”36
Officers of the brigade appear to have been disappointed when the
North government failed to secure its services at the beginning of the
American War of Independence, a disappointment that probably owed
much to their recognition that active campaigning usually produced the
casualties that accelerated promotion for those who survived. As in the
Seven Years’ War, Scots brigade officers transferred into the British army,
including Charles Gordon and George Stewart, who became officers in
the Seventy-First Highlanders in 1776; Charles Halkett, who joined the
new Highland corps of Kenneth Mackenzie, 1st Earl of Seaforth, in
1778; and William Nicholson, who received a commission in the
Edinburgh Regiment, or Eightieth Regiment of Foot, at about the same
time. Others tried to cross over into the British army, but Barrington
discouraged them on the grounds that “We have Officers in great
Abundance.” 37 Some who remained in the brigade had doubts about
their decision; though they expressed themselves in terms of patriotism
(“It would be more the duty of a born Briton just now to act his part in
35 Ferguson, History of the Scots Brigade, 2: 429–32.
36 “Annual Committee to Consider the Petition of Coll. Stewart,” July 10, 1765,
in Thomas Hunter, ed., Extracts from the Records of the Convention of the Royal Burghs
of Scotland, 1759–79 (Edinburgh, 1918), 186–87, esp. 186.
37 Lord Barrington to Ensign G. F. Turnbull of General Stuart’s Regiment in
Dutch service, Mar. 21, 1776, WO 4/96, p. 360, British National Archives.

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BRITISH ARMY AND AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 87

quieting the American troubles”), they probably sensed a missed oppor-
tunity for professional advancement.38
One particularly peripatetic Scots brigade officer’s career illustrates
the European background and orientation of some of those who served
in the British army in America during the Revolutionary War. Brigadier
General Francis McLean was the commander of the British garrison at
Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1778. At the end of that year, after only a few
months in North America, he was agitating for a more active role.
McLean urged Sir Henry Clinton, the commander in chief at New York,
to allow him to use part of the force in Nova Scotia under his command
to raid the New England coast. Such a move, McLean explained, would
“oblige them [the rebels] to Keep Bodies of Troops in different Quarters
& consequently diminish the Number of their Grand Army next
Campaign.” 39 He must have been pleased to lead the expedition that
established a base at Penobscot, in modern-day Maine, in the early sum-
mer of 1779. McLean proved remarkably adept at combining military
operations and political judgments. On landing at Penobscot, he issued
a proclamation assuring the local inhabitants that they had nothing to
fear and enforced a rigid discipline among his soldiers to prevent their
undermining his good intentions. When local people who took oaths of
allegiance reverted to the rebel side on the appearance of an American
force that had come to dislodge the British, McLean’s reaction was char-
acteristically measured. Once the American troops retreated, he accepted
the difficult situation that the local people had faced and offered them
clemency rather than retribution.40
McLean had joined the Scots brigade as a young man and distin-
guished himself as a lieutenant when the French stormed the Dutch

38 Maxtone Graham Muniments, GD 155/856/8, National Archives of Scotland,

Edinburgh (quotation). For transferring officers in the Seven Years’ War, see James
Hayes, “Scottish Officers in the British Army, 1714–63,” Scottish Historical Review
37, no. 1 (April 1958): 22–33, esp. 26 n. 2. For Simon Fraser, see Ferguson, History of
the Scots Brigade, 2: 389n, 420, 423. For brigade officers’ disappointment when their
corps was not taken into British service, see for example Kenneth Mackenzie to Lord
Barrington, Dec. 27, 1775, in Barrington Papers, Add. MSS 73,588, fols. 84–85,
British Library. For transfers in the American war, see Ferguson, History of the Scots
Brigade, 2: 400n; Hamilton and Greville Papers, Add. MSS 42,071, fol. 205, British
Library.
39 Francis McLean to Sir Henry Clinton, Dec. 28, 1778, in British Army
Headquarters (or Dorchester) Papers, PRO 30/55/14, 1634(6).
40 This account of Francis McLean’s career is heavily indebted to Conway,
Historical Research 82: 126–28. For McLean and Penobscot, see Sir Henry Clinton to
McLean, Feb. 11, 1779, in British Army Headquarters (or Dorchester) Papers, PRO
30/55/15, 1740; McLean to Clinton, May 16, 28, 1779, ibid., PRO 30/55/16, 2005,
2024; McLean to Clinton, June 20, 1779, ibid., PRO 30/55/17, 2088; McLean to
Lord George Germain, Aug. 26, 1779, CO 5/182, fol. 130, British National Archives.

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88 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

fortress of Bergen op Zoom in 1747. Progress in the brigade, however,

was far from rapid. By 1750 McLean was merely an acting captain. The
Seven Years’ War gave him the opportunity to advance, though not in
the Dutch service. In 1758 he transferred to the British army, becoming a
captain in the Forty-Second Regiment of Foot, or Black Watch. After
campaigning in the Caribbean and North America, he became a major
in the newly raised Ninety-Seventh Regiment of Foot in 1761 and
secured promotion to lieutenant colonel the following year. At this point
McLean must have realized that the war was near its end, and, as an offi-
cer in a new regiment almost certain to be disbanded, the future that
awaited him was as a retired officer on half pay. To avoid this fate, he,
along with a number of other British officers, requested to serve in the
Portuguese army. The British government approved such transfers
because Portugal was under attack from the Spanish and their French
allies, and British ministers assumed a leavening of their own officers
would bolster the depleted Portuguese army.41
A Portuguese commission was a passport to a new lease of military
life, though McLean could not have predicted that he would remain in
Portuguese service for sixteen years, reaching the rank of general. As a
result of the patronage of a leading Portuguese politician, the 1st
Marquis of Pombal, McLean not only rose in the army but also became
governor of the province of Extramadura in 1773. After having attained
such heights, McLean might have decided to live out his remaining days
in Portugal. The American Revolution, however, brought another phase
in his career. Early in 1778 he rejoined the British army after being
offered the colonelcy of the newly raised Eighty-Second Regiment of
Foot by Douglas Hamilton, 8th Duke of Hamilton, the Scottish noble
who had formed the regiment. Perhaps McLean, at about sixty years old,
reckoned that his Portuguese position was less secure than it had been;
Pombal, his patron, had fallen from grace in 1777. McLean may also
have calculated that it was now, at his more advanced age, worth taking
up a senior rank in a new British regiment because he could return
home with some financial security if he survived the war.42
McLean, it should be stressed, was far from typical. The breadth of
his transnational experience was surely unsurpassed, at least among the
Britons who fought in America during the Revolutionary War. But he
was far from alone in having served in another European military. The
41 Ferguson, History of the Scots Brigade, 2: 227, 281, 369, 420, 512. For Francis
McLean’s transfer to Portuguese service, see Loudoun Papers, Add. MSS 44,069,
fols. 20, 144, British Library.
42 See State Papers Portugal, SP 89/75, fol. 15, British National Archives.
George III was clearly impressed by Francis McLean and endorsed his appointment.
See Fortescue, Correspondence of King George the Third, 3: 531.

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BRITISH ARMY AND AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 89

Scots brigade, in particular, supplied a steady stream of recruits for the
officer ranks of George III’s British regiments. And, even if the number
of such officers was a small proportion of the whole, the essentially
European character of the British army was based on much more than
the exchange of personnel between different militaries.

BRITISH MILITARY MEN who never served in other armies might still see
themselves as part of a European occupational fraternity that tran-
scended national distinctions. Many British officers came from the same
social background as their continental European counterparts. By no
means were all of them, admittedly, members of the traditional elite;
there were even some who had been promoted from the ranks. But in all
European armies, including the British army, the landed upper classes
dominated. On the Continent the higher reaches of the officer corps
were almost a noble preserve: all 181 general officers of the French army
in western Germany in 1758 were aristocrats. Nobles occupied many
posts lower down the officer scale too. In 1767 some 75 percent of all the
infantry officers of the Piedmont-Sardinia army were aristocrats, as were
93 percent of cavalry officers. Nearly twenty years later, the Prussian
army had a mere 22 commoners out of 689 officers holding ranks from
major to field marshal. At first glance the British army seems to have
been much less aristocratic: in 1780 only 30 percent of its officers held
titles. Yet appearances can be deceptive. Though Continental aristocratic
families bestowed titles liberally on all their sons, in the British aristoc-
racy only the male head of the family and his eldest son had titles, and
gentry families, often titled in many Continental countries, frequently
enjoyed no such distinction in Britain and Ireland. More importantly,
an aristocratic ethos set the tone for the British army as much as for any
other in Europe. Aristocracy was itself originally a military institution,
and the chivalric ideals of the medieval knights—bravery, generosity,
and honor—continued to exert a hold on the minds of eighteenth-
century army officers.43
43 For the British army and comparisons with other European armies, see Lee
Kennett, The French Armies in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Military Organization
and Administration (Durham, N.C., 1967), 57; Christopher Storrs and H. M. Scott,
“The Military Revolution and the European Nobility, c. 1600–1800,” War in History
3, no. 2 (January 1996): 1–41, esp. 15–17; Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the
War of American Independence (Oxford, 2000), 31–32. For the difficulties in compar-
ing British and Continental aristocracies, see for example M. L. Bush, The English
Aristocracy: A Comparative Synthesis (Manchester, Eng., 1984), 1–2; John Cannon,
Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1984),
vii; Cannon, “The British Nobility, 1660–1800,” in The European Nobilities in the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. H. M. Scott (London, 1995), 1: 53–81, esp.
1: 54–55. For the European officer class, see Duffy, Military Experience in Age of
Reason, chap. 2.

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90 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

The educational experiences of many members of the British and Irish

elite, including those who ended up in the army in America, no doubt
reinforced a sense of class solidarity. The Grand Tour, a leisurely and
lengthy excursion to the Continent’s principal cultural centers, formed part
of an elite male’s education. In the course of several months or even years
traveling abroad, young upper-class Britons and Irishmen visited famous
European fortifications and battlefields and often witnessed parades and
maneuvers by Continental armies. Moreover officers, like other members
of the British and Irish elite, went to the Continent for prolonged periods
for health reasons. Major William Saxton of the Forty-Fifth Regiment of
Foot, who took the waters in France while his regiment was serving in
America, proved remarkably difficult to persuade to leave. Those who trav-
eled to the Continent, either on tour or for other reasons, often spoke
French, the international language of the age, or learned it while abroad if
they were not already proficient. Knowledge of French not only allowed
members of the upper classes to converse with their social equals in the rest
of Europe but also furnished access to French-language publications, a vital
consideration for young officers or would-be officers. As John Burgoyne, of
Saratoga fame, pointed out, “The best modern books upon our profession
are written in that language.”44
Though reading of any kind was far from universal among military
men, some engaged avidly with professional literature. Less bookish col-
leagues sometimes derided officers who showed an interest in military
treatises: George Evelyn Boscawen, a junior officer in the Boston garrison
on the eve of the American war, was mercilessly mocked for his theoretical
pretensions. But at least a few British military figures were not afraid to
display their learning. Robert Donkin, a regular army major, wrote a
military treatise published at New York in the spring of 1777, which
44 Edward Barrington De Fonblanque, Political and Military Episodes in the Latter
Half of the Eighteenth Century. Derived from the Life and Correspondence of the Right
Hon. John Burgoyne, General, Statesman, Dramatist (London, 1876), 19 (quotation). See
also [James Cunninghame], Strictures on Military Discipline, in a Series of Letters with a
Military Discourse: in which is Interspersed Some Account of the Scotch Brigade in the
Dutch Service (London, 1774), 2; and, for a modern assessment, Azar Gat, The Origins of
Military Thought from the Enlightenment to Clausewitz (Oxford, 1991), chap. 2. For
William Saxton, see for example Barrington to Saxton, Feb. 27, 1777, in WO 4/99, p.
185, British National Archives; Dec. 9, 1777, in WO 4/101, p. 96, ibid. For the Grand
Tour generally, see esp. Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the
Eighteenth Century (Stroud, Eng., 2003). For visits to battlefields, see for example Lord
Pembroke’s instructions to his soldier son, telling him to visit Italian battlefields of the
Wars of Polish and Austrian Succession during his tour: Lord Herbert, ed., The
Pembroke Papers (1734–80): Letters and Diaries of Henry, Tenth Earl of Pembroke and His
Circle (London, 1942), 196. The importance of learning French is emphasized in Lee of
Hartwell Papers, D/FE/D/6/22, Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, Aylesbury; Lord
Fitzwilliam to his mother, Nov. 13, 1764, uncataloged correspondence, draw 24, in
Fitzwilliam (Milton) Papers, Northamptonshire Record Office, Northampton.

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BRITISH ARMY AND AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 91

reveals much about his own reading. Though Donkin drew most heavily on
classical sources, he frequently mentioned French military giants, especially
the great seventeenth-century commander Marshal Turenne, and referred
specifically to military authors, notably Maurice de Saxe, the most success-
ful French commander of the War of the Austrian Succession (“worth read-
ing on the subject of cavalry”), and Jacques-François de Chastenet, Marquis
de Puységur, whose military experience stretched over nearly sixty years
(“Mr. Puysegur recommends reading to all warriours”).45 Donkin dedicated
his work to Hugh, Earl Percy, commander of the British troops at Newport,
Rhode Island. The choice was singularly appropriate because Percy was
himself a serious reader of military literature. In 1774, when young
Boscawen was an object of mirth, Percy, then a senior officer in the same
Boston garrison, asked for a copy of the memoirs of French general Antoine
de Pas, Marquis de Feuquières, to read in the long winter nights.46
In some cases elite education involved a period at a foreign academy
or university. As France was the military colossus of Europe until at least
the middle of the eighteenth century, French academies attracted British
and Irish students who aspired to military careers or who had already
joined the army. One of those who spent time in Caen academy in
Normandy before embarking on his army life was Robert Carr, who in
1776 was killed while a lieutenant colonel in America. Another was
Henry Pelham, who attended Caen in 1775 before beginning a military
career in the Guards: “I do flatter myself I shall be something the better
for coming here,” Pelham wrote to his brother Thomas. 47 William
Evans, already a lieutenant in the Forty-Fifth Regiment of Foot, asked
permission at the start of 1775 to extend his leave of absence until the
spring of 1776 for the sake of his education in France. Richard Augustus
Wyvill studied at Strasbourg prior to entering the Thirty-Eighth
Regiment of Foot and serving in America in 1780. German military
academies and universities also attracted serving or aspiring British offi-
cers, especially after the Seven Years’ War, when Frederick the Great’s
victories over the French as well as the Austrians gave Germany a reputa-
tion as the wellspring of military expertise. In the 1770s a visitor identi-
fied Brunswick academy as a magnet for young British males seeking a
military career. Other evidence suggests that he was right: Thomas
Hawkins’s diary reveals that he went there in 1777 prior to becoming a
45 [Robert] Donkin, Military Collections and Remarks (New York, 1777), 33
(“worth reading”), 39 (“Mr. Puysegur”).
46 For George Evelyn Boscawen, see G. D. Scull, ed., Memoir and Letters of
Captain W. Glanville Evelyn, of the 4th Regiment, (“King’s Own”), from North
America, 1774–1776 (Oxford, 1879), 30. For Hugh, Earl Percy, see Percy to Dr.
Thomas Percy, Nov. 25, 1774, in Letters of Hugh, Earl Percy, MS G 31.39.4, Boston
Public Library.
47 Henry Pelham to Thomas Pelham, Feb. 1, 1775, in Pelham Papers, Add. MSS
33,126, fol. 299, British Library.

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92 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

cornet in the Tenth Dragoons. Meanwhile a number of British and Irish

men in or destined for the army studied at Göttingen, the king’s “German
university.” 48 Among alumni who served in the American War of
Independence, Sir Francis Carr Clerke, 7th Baronet, remembered his
Göttingen days when he fought alongside German auxiliaries on the ill-
fated Burgoyne expedition in 1777. Another Göttingen student later to
serve in America attached to the Hessian Jägers, George Hanger, explained
in his memoirs that “As I had resolved on being a soldier, a German edu-
cation was the best suited to the profession I had chosen.”49
Transfer of military personnel and education at foreign academies
made sense because many broad structural similarities existed among the
armies of Europe. All used the same kinds of weapons: muskets, bayonets,
and artillery pieces that were remarkably similar in design and quality.
Common weaponry helped to determine similar battlefield approaches;
the linear formations resulted from the desire to maximize the firepower
of not very accurate muskets. American conditions might have modified
the British army’s linear dispositions but did not lead to their abandon-
ment. Even less did fighting in America alter other basic similarities
between the British and other European armies. The different militaries
organized themselves in the same ways, with regiments, battalions, and
companies for the infantry and regiments and squadrons for the cavalry.
Officer ranks from the lowest to the highest corresponded closely to those
in other armies. French terminology—such as “la petite guerre” (today
called guerrilla warfare), “chevaux de frises” (wooden stakes designed to
obstruct enemy cavalry), and “cartouche” (a cartridge), as in cartouche
box, the leather ammunition container carried by infantrymen—heavily
influenced the language of fortification, sieges, and warfare generally.50
48 John Pringle to Albrecht von Haller, June 11, 1763, in Otto Sonntag, ed.,
John Pringle’s Correspondence with Albrecht von Haller (Basel, Switzerland, 1999),
54–56 (quotation, 56). For Göttingen, see Gordon M. Stewart, “British Students at
the University of Göttingen in the Eighteenth Century,” German Life and Letters 33,
no. 1 (1979): 24–41, esp. 33–34.
49 George Hanger, The Life, Adventures, and Opinions of Col. George Hanger
(London, 1801), 1: 14 (quotation). For Robert Carr, see J. W. Hayes, “The Social
and Professional Background of the Officers of the British Army, 1714–1763” (mas-
ter’s thesis, University of London, 1956), 210. For William Evans, see Earl Harcourt
to the Earl of Rochford, Jan. 7, 1775, in State Papers Ireland, SP 63/445, fol. 7,
British National Archives. For Richard Augustus Wyvill, see Journal of Richard
Augustus Wyvill, Peter Force Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
For Brunswick, see Diary of Thomas Hawkins, DD J 2245, Cornwall Record Office,
Truro, Eng.; [John Moore], A View of Society and Manners in France, Switzerland,
and Germany: With Anecdotes relating to Some Eminent Characters (London, 1779), 2:
74. For Sir Francis Carr Clerke at Göttingen, see Lucas of Wrest Park Papers, L
30/12/17/12, Bedfordshire Record Office, Bedford, Eng.
50 Duffy, Military Experience in Age of Reason, 56 (“la petite guerre”); John
Childs, Armies and Warfare in Europe, 1648–1789 (Manchester, Eng., 1982), 74,
105–11, 115–16, 123–24, 208–11 (“chevaux de frises,” 209, “cartouche,” 208).

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The soldiers even looked much the same. Notwithstanding the distinctive
colors for the uniforms (the famous red coats for the British and
Hanoverians, off-white for the Austrians, French, and Spanish, dark blue
for the Dutch and Prussians, and green for the Russians) and the unusual
dress of distinctly national or regional units (such as the Scottish
Highlanders, the Cossacks in the Russian army, and the Croatian
Pandours in Habsburg service), the standard line infantryman looked
much like his counterpart in almost every other army, with his long-tailed
coat with turnbacks and cuffs, breeches and gaiters, and ubiquitous
cocked hats. As with tactics American conditions encouraged adaptation
but certainly not abandonment of European norms. The changes made to
European-style dress were relatively modest and not very different from
the practical adaptations introduced in Europe, as contemporary pictures
of the Minorca garrison and even troops on maneuvers at home testify.51
More important than structure, language, and appearance were ways
of thinking. A common military mentality was a product not simply of
shared social, cultural, and professional experience but of the laws of war, a
subset of today’s international law, which in the eighteenth century was
known as the law of nations. The laws of war derived from written treaties,
recorded practice, and the pronouncements of leading public lawyers such
as Swiss jurist Emerich de Vattel, who believed that the principles of
restraint and proportionality, so characteristic of the Enlightenment, were
essential guides to military conduct. Though European armies frequently
deviated in practice from the ideals prescribed by the legal writers, they
nevertheless regarded the laws of war as establishing a moral framework for
their relationships with one another. It seems to have been in such a spirit
that General William Howe, at the opening of the New York campaign of
1776, wrote to George Washington about how the warring parties might
conduct the forthcoming military operations. “I beg Leave generally to
observe,” Howe announced, “that it is not only my Duty as a Soldier, but
my Disposition as a Man . . . to discourage and punish all Acts of Cruelty,
Rapine or Oppression.” He went on to hope that Washington would “exert
your Endeavours to cultivate the most liberal Sentiments, among all who
place themselves under your Command.”52 American accusations about
British ill conduct inspired Howe to write, and his response may have
51 Peter Wilson, “Warfare in the Old Regime, 1648–1789,” in European Warfare,
1453–1815, ed. Jeremy Black (Basingstoke, Eng., 1999), 69–95, esp. 88–92. For uni-
form adaptation, see Lawson, History of Uniforms of British Army, vol. 3, esp. 3:
57–72. Adapting uniforms was a way of making them last longer. It may well be that
uniform changes in America (as in Europe) owed at least as much to regimental
financial pressures as to local geographic conditions.
52 Major General William Howe to General George Washington, July 16, 1776,
in W. W. Abbot and Dorothy Twohig et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington:
Revolutionary War Series (Charlottesville, Va., 1993), 5: 341–42.

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94 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

intimated politely that the British would not tolerate transgression of

the code by the Americans. Howe, in other words, seems to have
regarded Washington as an exceptional American, almost as an honorary
member of the European military club; there would be little point in
communicating with him in this way if he were not. The Virginian
might be a rebel, and he might lead an army almost totally lacking the
virtues of a professional military force, but at least he was a gentleman
with military experience acquired serving alongside regular British
troops, who therefore had some idea of what was required.53
These niceties point not only to a desire to adhere to the limitations
imposed by the laws of war but also to a military etiquette, a generally
understood set of norms and values common to the different European
armies. In all European militaries, members of regular formations
regarded the flags, or colors, of their unit as embodying its honor; hence
the seemingly extreme lengths that officers, and even common soldiers,
went to preserve them from capture. The British and German regiments
that surrendered at Saratoga, to give an example, hid their colors in a
variety of ingenious ways to prevent their falling into the hands of the
victorious Americans. Though historians primarily view such episodes as
demonstrating the strength of regimental identity, the same determina-
tion to save the colors in soldiers from different nations suggests the
existence of a set of common European military values. Equally, officers
of every European military knew what military etiquette prescribed for
both sides in a siege. The participants carefully choreographed the whole
event, and its ending was a finely judged matter. Etiquette required the
defenders to resist for as long as was honorable, but not beyond the point
when resistance was useless and would result only in unnecessary loss of
life. The besiegers, for their part, should offer terms calibrated to reflect
the immediate military circumstances and the valor, or otherwise, of the
enemy. When the British garrison of Fort Saint Philip, on Minorca, sur-
rendered in February 1782 to French and Spanish troops, the Bourbon
besiegers admired the British and Hanoverian defenders, who had held
out bravely for more than five months. In recognition of this steadfast-
ness, the French and Spanish permitted the garrison to march out of the
fort with full military honors, with its regimental flags flying and its musi-
cians playing the fifes and drums. “As they lay down their arms and
unbuttoned their cartridge belts,” a Spanish soldier noted, “there was no
53 Emerich de Vattel’s work was translated into English as Vattel, The Law of
Nations; Or, Principles of the Law of Nature: Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of
Nations and Sovereigns, 2 vols. (London, 1759–60). For his reputation, see Geoffrey
Best, Humanity in Warfare: The Modern History of the International Law of Armed
Conflicts (London, 1983), 36 (where he is described as “the most influential of the
publicists”). For the laws of war more generally, see Stephen C. Neff, War and the
Law of Nations: A General History (Cambridge, 2005), pt. 2.

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BRITISH ARMY AND AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 95

one present but felt a lump in his throat.”54 The same etiquette, and the
apparent failure of colonial soldiers to understand it, lies behind the exas-
perated comment of Sir Henry Clinton, a veteran of the German cam-
paigns of the Seven Years’ War, when the garrison of Charleston, South
Carolina, appeared reluctant to surrender to his army in May 1780: “I
begin to think these People will be Blockheads enough to wait the
Assault—Je m’en lave les Mains.”55
The sense that many British officers did not regard the Americans as a
worthy enemy, implicit in Clinton’s words, comes across in a number of
different wartime accounts. The many disparaging comments about fight-
ing in America were in part a response to the difficult conditions in which
the British army operated. In the words of Sir James Murray, a British
captain, the war in America was “a barbarous business and in a barbarous
country.”56 British officers who fought alongside the army’s native allies
often felt decidedly uncomfortable, as Lieutenant Colonel Mason Bolton
explained in February 1779: “as to their scalping women Children and
Prisoners I find it’s not possible to prevent them, such Cruelties must
make an Expedition very disagreeable to the King’s troops when order’d
on Service with them.”57 Yet it was not just natives whom British officers
accused of using barbaric methods. Officers commonly criticized rebel
tactics viewed as unfair or ungentlemanly, especially in the first years of
the war. Typical was Captain William Dansey’s language in a letter sent
home from South Carolina during the ill-fated attack on Charleston in
July 1776: “such cowardly Scoundrels have we to deal with,” he wrote after
one of his sentries was killed by rebel soldiers “who came upon their
Hands and Knees to get a Shot at him as one wou’d at a Duck.”58
54 W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley, ed. and trans., Spain under the Bourbons,
1700–1833: A Collection of Documents (London, 1973), 161–62 (quotation, 162).
55 Sir Henry Clinton to Lord Cornwallis, May 6, 1780, in Cornwallis Papers,
PRO 30/11/2, fol. 28 (quotation). For the hiding of the colors, see James Phinney
Baxter, ed., The British Invasion from the North: The Campaigns of Generals Carleton
and Burgoyne from Canada, 1776–1777, with the Journal of Lieut. William Digby of the
53d, or Shropshire Regiment of Foot (Albany, N.Y., 1887), 54–56. Joachim Miggelbrink
views the saving of the brigade’s colors at Bergen op Zoom in 1747 as an instance of
the strength of corporate feeling. See Miggelbrink, “End of the Scots-Dutch
Brigade,” 86. For Clinton’s military background, which began in America in the
1740s but in the Seven Years’ War was shaped by his fighting in Germany, see
William B. Willcox, Portrait of a General: Sir Henry Clinton in the War of
Independence (New York, 1964), 9–18.
56 Eric Robson, ed., Letters from America, 1773 to 1780: Being the Letters of a Scots
Officer, Sir James Murray, to His Home during the War of American Independence
(Manchester, Eng., 1951), 48.
57 Mason Bolton to Frederick Haldimand, Feb. 8, 1779, in Haldimand Papers,
Add. MSS 21,760, fols. 81–82 (quotation, fol. 82).
58 William Dansey to his mother, July 6, 1776, in Dansey Papers, Historical
Society of Delaware, Wilmington.

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96 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

British troops regarded the American rebels not simply as fighting in

an underhand manner but as decidedly inferior to a European enemy.
Francis Rawdon Hastings, Lord Rawdon, writing in January 1776 while a
captain in the Sixty-Third Regiment of Foot, could hardly wait for the
conflict in America to stop because the rebels in his estimation hardly com-
pared with a proper European opponent: “one only dirties one’s fingers”
dealing with them, he commented dismissively.59 Baldwin Leighton, a cap-
tain in the Forty-Sixth Regiment of Foot, was equally contemptuous when
he related the experience of fighting in New Jersey in the spring of 1777:
“they are the most paltry Enemy, that ever Soldiers, had to deal with.”60
Leighton’s use of the term soldiers is surely significant; he clearly imagined
the British troops as professional military men and their opponents as
beyond the pale of military Europe. Perhaps the most telling moment,
however, occurred when Cornwallis’s little army capitulated at Yorktown,
in October 1781. Cornwallis, rather than face the humiliation of surrender-
ing in person, declared himself unwell and delegated this awkward duty to
his second-in-command, Brigadier General Charles O’Hara of the Guards.
O’Hara revealingly offered his sword not to Washington but to French
commander Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau.
Surrendering to the Americans was too much for O’Hara; infinitely prefer-
able was to acknowledge defeat by a fellow European professional.61
American loyalists were usually no less excluded from military
Europe. Those friends to government who took up arms for the king
were, for the most part, simply too unsoldierly to be considered as mem-
bers of the club. James Gray, a former regular who became major of the
Second Battalion of the King’s Royal Regiment of New York, confessed
that most of his colleagues in the corps were “ignorant of Military disci-
pline, never having been in the service nor as yet had time to learn their
duty.”62 British army majors and lieutenant colonels protested vigorously
59 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Late
Reginald Rawdon Hastings, Esq., of the Manor House, Ashby de la Zouche, ed. Francis
Bickley (London, 1934), 3: 167.
60 Baldwin Leighton to William Congreve, Apr. 20, 1777, in Congreve Papers,
D 1057/M/1/32/2, Staffordshire Record Office, Stafford, Eng. (quotation). Leighton
not long after conceded that “the Rebel Generals are daily gaining experience, &
time, will make their men, good Soldiers.” See Leighton to Congreve, July 6, 1777,
in Congreve Papers, S. MS. 48/7, William Salt Library, Stafford, Eng.
61 Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau, famously
refused to accept, pointing out that he was only an auxiliary; Charles O’Hara was
obliged to surrender to Benjamin Lincoln, George Washington’s second-in-
command. See John D. Grainger, The Battle of Yorktown, 1781: A Reassessment
(Woodbridge, Eng., 2005), 149. Even the British rank and file, according to a
German officer in the French forces, “showed the greatest scorn” for the Americans
at the surrender ceremony. See Evelyn M. Acomb, ed. and trans., The Revolutionary
Journal of Baron Ludwig von Closen, 1780–1783 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1958), 153.
62 James Gray to Francis Le Maistre, June 24, 1779, WO 28/5, fol. 14, British
National Archives.

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BRITISH ARMY AND AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 97

in 1779 when a change in regulations, designed to boost recruitment into
the loyalist corps, allowed provincial officers to take precedence over them.
Clinton, then commander in chief in America, had much sympathy with
his aggrieved regular colleagues. Frederick Mackenzie, the British deputy
adjutant general, was relatively restrained in his criticism of the over-
promotion of prominent loyalists. Even so his sense of injured professional
pride was clear in his remarks on Cortland Skinner: “The Brigadier is a
very good man, and a loyal Subject, but has no Idea of moving even . . . [a]
small . . . body of troops, and is therefore a very unfit person to be
entrusted with the Command of a thousand men.” 63 British regulars
regarded the loyalist militia with considerably more contempt. Even com-
mon soldiers in the British regiments looked down on the loyal militiamen.
In June 1780 Cornwallis felt it necessary to order both “Officers and
Soldiers of the Army” in South Carolina to “treat them [the newly raised
militia] with proper attention and Civility.”64 Offended loyalists seem to
have believed that regulars’ contempt toward them was a symptom of the
disdain metropolitan Britons customarily heaped on colonial Americans
and consequently railed against British “pride.”65 The supercilious attitude
of British officers, and even ordinary soldiers, appears to have owed more
to their keen sense of occupational solidarity. Professional European sol-
diers might be viewed as their equals, but the amateurish Americans—
whether fighting with or against them—could not be regarded as part of
this European military fraternity.66
Professional solidarity, admittedly, was not always evident in the
interactions between the British army and its German auxiliaries. There
appears to have been a thinly disguised mutual enmity between the
British and German branches of the army. The Hessian reputation for
looting seems to have caused much friction. A disgruntled British major,
returning home with Howe’s dispatches, complained that the German
officers were “only desirous of making money, plundering &c.”67 Just
after the 1776 campaign in New York and New Jersey, which had ended
63 Frederick Mackenzie, Diary of Frederick Mackenzie: Giving a Daily Narrative
of His Military Service as an Officer of the Regiment of Royal Welch Fusiliers during the
Years 1775–1781 in Massachusetts Rhode Island and New York (Cambridge, Mass.,
1930), 2: 550.
64 Entry of June 28, 1780, Order-book, 1780–81, in George Wray Papers,
Clements Library.
65 See for example the comments of John Chalmers, in “Letter of John
Chalmers, Lieutenant Colonel Commandant of the Maryland Loyalists,” Aug. 20,
1780, in “The Aspinwall Papers,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society,
4th ser., 9–10 (1871): 793–811, esp. 796.
66 For the memorial of the field officers, see CO 5/98, fol. 101, British National
Archives. For Sir Henry Clinton’s view, see Auckland Papers, Add. MSS 34,416, fol.
348, British Library.
67 Memo. of conversation with Major Nesbit Balfour, Jan. 13, 1777, in Lucas of
Wrest Park Papers, L 29/214.

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98 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

with Washington’s successful counterattacks at Trenton and Princeton,

British military men were particularly vociferous in their condemnation of
the Germans, whom they blamed for the disaster at Trenton. An officer in
the Royal American Regiment, for instance, argued that the Hessians “set the
Example” in pillaging that some of the British troops had unfortunately fol-
lowed, and Lieutenant John Shuttleworth of the Royal Fusiliers attacked the
“irregularities the Hessians are guilty of in plundering.”68 But if there were
special circumstances that explain British irritation at that time, criticism of
the Germans continued into the next campaign and beyond. Charles
Cochrane, a British grenadier officer, lamented “the Plundering Mercenary
Irregular behaviour of the German soldiery” in Pennsylvania during the
autumn of 1777; the following year, O’Hara wrote of the Hessian troops that
“their Marauding, & Plunder is beyond belief—Cruel & Savage.”69
It might be tempting to attribute such criticism to British hostility
to the Germans as a people, and certainly some German commentators
believed as much. A Hessian Jäger officer, echoing the hurt feelings of
some loyalists, pointed to the “confounded pride and arrogant bearing
of the English, who treat everyone that was not born upon their raga-
muffin Island with contempt.”70 Yet, examined more closely, the British
criticisms appear as essentially professional: they support, rather than
contradict, the point about European military solidarity. British officers
condemned their German colleagues not because they were Germans but
because they did not behave as professional soldiers should. Sir George
Osborn, a British lieutenant colonel who acted as muster-master for the
Hessian auxiliaries, commented in October 1776 that “The Circumstance
of Plunder is the only Thing I believe gives Trouble or Uneasiness to
General Howe with respect to the foreign Troops.”71 When the auxil-
iaries displayed the required martial qualities, British officers praised
them fulsomely, as Howe’s reports on their performance at the battle of
Long Island reveal: he commented favorably on the bravery of the
British and the German troops under his command. 72 Major Henry
68 Francis Hutcheson to Frederick Haldimand, Feb. 16, 1777, in Haldimand
Papers, Add. MSS 21,680, fols. 175–76 (“set the Example,” fol. 175); John
Shuttleworth to [Walter Spencer Stanhope], Jan. 29, 1777, in Spencer Stanhope
Collection, Bradford City Archives, Eng. (“irregularities”).
69 Charles Cochrane to Andrew Stuart, Oct. 19, 1777, in Stuart-Stevenson Papers,
NS 5375, fol. 38, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh (“Plundering Mercenary
Irregular behaviour”); Charles O’Hara to Sir Charles Thompson, Sept. 20, 1778, in
Hotham Papers, DD HO 4/19, Hull University Library, Eng. (“Marauding, &
Plunder”).
70 “Extracts from the Letter-Book of Captain Johann Heinrichs of the Hessian
Jäger Corps, 1778–1780,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 22, no. 2
(July 1898): 137–70 (quotation, 146).
71 Sir George Osborn to Lord George Germain, Oct. 29, 1776, CO 5/93, fol.
501, British National Archives (my emphasis).
72 General William Howe to Lord George Germain, Sept. 3, 1776, CO 5/93, fol.
259, ibid.

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BRITISH ARMY AND AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 99

Rooke similarly lauded the “great steadiness and intrepidity” of the
Hessian troops involved in the capture of Fort Washington later in the
1776 campaign. 73 The following year a British lieutenant expressed
admiration for Wilhelm von Knyphausen, the Hessian commander in
the attack on Fort Washington, excitedly noting that he was “said to be
one of the best Generals in Germany, bred up under Marshal Keith [a
Scots-born Prussian general, killed in the Seven Years’ War] to whom he
was Aide de Camp.”74 British observers particularly praised Knyphausen
for restoring discipline to the Hessian troops and checking their propen-
sity to plunder. In July 1780 General James Robertson, British commander
in New York, reported favorably on the conduct of the German part of
the army that advanced into New Jersey, which he attributed to the “rev-
erence” that its soldiers had for Knyphausen: “The domestic animals
strayed about unhurt among them; no plunder or rudeness took
place.” 75 More than a year later, in September 1781, Mackenzie also
admired the Hessian auxiliaries’ professionalism. He pointed out how
much better the German senior officers were than their British counter-
parts at accompanying their men to prevent indiscipline. He noted dis-
approvingly that “no British General” went aboard ship with their men
in the force designated to rescue Cornwallis, commenting that “Major
Generals Kospoth & Wurmb embarked with the Hessian troops, and
have continued with them the whole time. What a contrast!”76
THE BRITISH ARMY deployed in America during the Revolutionary War
was essentially European in character. It undeniably possessed American
features, and the Britishness of its British component manifested itself
in many ways. But even British-born members of the army were able to
see themselves as part of a wider military fraternity, incorporating mili-
tary men from other European countries. It was possible, very occasion-
ally, for British soldiers to allow a particularly well-respected American
to enter this fraternity as an honorary member. General William Howe
seems to have regarded George Washington as eligible, at least at the
beginning of the 1776 campaign. Yet from the British perspective, this
club was European. The transfer of personnel from one army to another
and the broad similarity in weaponry, tactics, terminology, ranks, military
organization, and dress all contributed to building a sense of a military
Europe to which British soldiers belonged. So too did the laws of war,
73 Henry Rooke to Charles Rooke, Nov. 23, 1776, in Rooke Papers, D 1833 F2,
Gloucestershire Record Office, Gloucester, Eng.
74 W. H. Wilkin, Some British Soldiers in America (London, 1914), 246.
75 James Robertson to Lord George Germain, July 1, 1780, in Letter-Book
1780–83, Henderson of Fordell Muniments, GD 172/vol. Rv, p. 70, National
Archives of Scotland.
76 Mackenzie, Diary of Frederick Mackenzie, 2: 641.
77 See esp. Daniel A. Baugh, “Withdrawing from Europe: Anglo-French
Maritime Geopolitics, 1750–1800,” International History Review 20, no. 1 (March

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100 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

which regulated relationships among the different armies, and a shared

military etiquette, a generally understood code of conduct—strange and
bewildering to outsiders—followed with the utmost punctiliousness by
those who were part of this European military international. When loyalist
and rebel Americans in arms found themselves treated with disdain by
British officers and even common soldiers, they were suffering not so much
from British arrogance (though there was no doubt some of that) as from
the contempt of European professionals for American amateurs.
Many historians in the last few decades have envisaged eighteenth-
century Britain and Ireland as on the eastern edge of the British Atlantic
world, rather than as an integral part of Europe. Atlantic historians, to
be fair, often regard continental Europe as part of their field of study,
but their Atlantic perspective inevitably leads them to focus on the ways
in which Europe interacted with the Americas (and to a lesser extent
with West Africa) and to examine much less closely the ways in which
Britain and Ireland interacted with the Continent. Some Atlantic and
imperial historians who have looked at that relationship suggest that
British governments and the wider public turned away from the rest of
Europe in the mid-eighteenth century and concentrated instead on
imperial matters, especially in the British Atlantic, returning to a
European focus only with the loss of the American colonies.77 Such a
periodization of disengagement and subsequent reengagement with
Europe is in many ways attractive, yet examination of the British army
that fought in the American War of Independence suggests that, in the
military sphere at least, a European identification persisted through the
years of imperial infatuation from the 1750s to the early 1780s. At the
very time when the British army was trying to assert itself within the
North Atlantic world and unsuccessfully playing out an imperial role, it
was revealing its fundamentally European character.

1998): 1–32; Baugh, “Maritime Strength and Atlantic Commerce: The Uses of ‘a
grand marine empire,’” in An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815, ed.
Lawrence Stone (London, 1994), 185–223. Jeremy Black, a leading British historian
of the period, similarly identifies a shift away from Europe in the middle of the eigh-
teenth century followed by a return in the aftermath of the American conflict. For
an early statement of his position, see Black, Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-
French Relations in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1986), esp. 122–23. And for its
development, see Black, America or Europe? British Foreign Policy, 1739–63 (London,
1998). Eliga H. Gould presents a somewhat different argument, closer to the one
advanced here. He sees the British, though committed more to the Atlantic and
imperial theaters from the 1750s, remaining focused on European objectives. The
American war, in his view, brought Britain’s European persona to the fore. See
Gould, “American Independence and Britain’s Counter-Revolution,” Past and
Present, no. 154 (February 1997): 107–41; Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British
Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000).

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