The first book I ever read about the American Revolution was a children’s book called George the Drummer Boy, by Nathaniel Benchley, with illustrations by Don Bolognese. It tells the story of a drummer in the British Army who is stationed in Boston in 1775. His unit is chosen to march out of Boston to seize some military supplies held by local rebellious militias, and he finds himself in the middle of the battles of Concord and Lexington. 

Written in simple language, the book accurately relates the history of the battles, while giving readers a clear and authentic view of how ordinary foot soldiers could have experienced them. In a note at the end, the author explains, “Just as it takes two sides to make a war, so there must be two stories for every battle. Sometimes they are alike. Other times they are wildly different. This is a guess at how the British soldiers felt before and during the battles at Lexington and Concord. As guesses go, it should not be too far wrong.” The story is not concerned with big historical events. Instead, we see the perspective of a lowly infantry soldier in the middle of a mission that he doesn’t fully understand and that goes wrong from the start. 

One day, George’s company is picked for “special training.” He asks his friend, Fred, what that means. Fred doesn’t know, but reminds George that “in the Army, you don’t ask questions…You do as they tell you.” Later, when the army readies a number of boats, George wonders, “maybe this means we go to sea.” “I hope not,” Fred replies, “Unless, of course, they take us home.”

Finally, George’s unit is sent out of Boston and across the Charles River, when they stand for hours, wet and shivering. When they finally begin their march through the countryside, they hear church bells ringing and see “dim shapes of running men in the dark,” minutemen assembling to oppose the British. “This may turn out to be a long day,’ says Fred.”

After the first battle, at Lexington, the British soldiers arrive at Concord:

“George began to wonder what he was doing there. ‘I wish I was back in Boston,’ he told Fred. ‘Me too,’ said Fred. ‘I don’t like this place one bit.’ All the guns and powder had been taken out of Concord and hidden some place else.”

Some soldiers begin to burn buildings in town. “They have to do something,” Fred explains, “They can’t come all this way for nothing.” George replies, “It seems pretty silly to me.”

Soon the minutemen in Concord attack the British and drive them out of town, and continue to chase them back towards Boston, firing at them the whole way. The British finally reach safety and begin to head home. “It was dark and raining by the time they got back to Charlestown. Nobody knew or cared that this was the start of the Revolution. When it was over, American would be a country of its own. All George and the others wanted was to get back safely to Boston. It had been, as Fred said, a long day.”

The point of the story isn’t to portray the British army as unmotivated or misguided, to excuse their actions, nor to argue that they were in the right. Rather, it is to humanize the ordinary soldiers who stood in the rain and marched through the night because a general had devised a plan that required them to. It is a view of war which must have resonated when the book was published in 1977, with memories of Vietnam still strong, to say nothing of World War II and the Korean War,

Wittingly or not, Benchley’s approach was very much in line with new ways of understanding the American Revolution which emerged around when he was writing. No longer were historians content to describe Continental soldiers broadly in heroic terms, celebrating them only as gallant and selfless defenders of American liberty. Instead, they began to explore the experiences of enlisted soldiers in the Revolution, allowing us to truly understand who made up the Continental Army and study them as individuals.

One notable example of this approach is Mud & Guts: A Look at the Common Soldier of the American Revolution (1978), by Bill Mauldin, best known for his sardonic and jaundice-eyed cartoons about World War II soldiers. The lead image sums up the book’s theme, depicting two weary soldiers slogging through mud, one scraping mud off his shoe (or foot?) with a bayonet while the other asks, “I forget…are we advancing or retreating?”

The image rings true in several ways. American soldiers were often dirty, tired, and bedraggled, and had long since lost track of the war’s progress. Indeed, at times the army’s strategy was such that the difference between advancing and retreating was hard to discern.

In another illustration, a soldier emerges from the paymaster’s hut holding a pay certificate (I.O.U.) saying, “Well, no one can accuse us of being mercenaries.”

Contemporary accounts from soldiers bear out the truth of both cartoons. Connecticut soldier, Joseph Plum Martin, for example, remembered being paid in hard currency instead of pay certificates only once after 1776, in the summer of 1781, when he received a month’s pay, courtesy of the just-arrived French army.

My only quibble with Mauldin is his criticism of Fredrich von Steuben, who reorganized the Continental Army and lead efforts to instill proper training and discipline. Mauldin describes von Steuben as an imperious taskmaster. In reality, most accounts show that the soldiers admired and respected him, both for his enthusiastic, multilingual profanity and the care he showed to the enlisted men.

The goal at the heart of Finding the Maryland 400 is to elevate the lives of ordinary soldiers in the Revolutionary War and their families without mythologizing them. It seeks to accomplish what these two books have, allowing us to see the Continental Army, and life in the Revolutionary era, through the eyes of soldiers from the Maryland Line.

I wholeheartedly recommend Mud & Guts and George the Drummer Boy. Frankly, the only book about Lexington and Concord that I like more is Paul Revere’s Ride, by David Hackett Fischer.

Are there books about the American Revolution that you’ve enjoyed? Anything that you read as a child that inspired a love of the subject? Please list them in the comments!

 

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