Provincial Soldiers and Popular Religion in the Seven Years' War

Crossposted from American Creation. And I promise I'll stop blogging about this book after this, at least for a while.

The talented historians on this blog have made it abundantly clear that religion played an active role in the intellectual life of our “Founding Fathers.” I’m not particularly interested in the individual faith of particular men, but I am fascinated by the ways in which religion contributed to the development of imagined communities within the new nation.

Recently, I read Fred Anderson’s A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (more here), in which Anderson argues that Massachusetts soldiers’ piety and providential thinking encouraged them to think of themselves as a distinct group. By the 1750s, most Massachusetts men (other than those who worked in shipping industries) had very little contact with ordinary non-American Britons. When volunteers from Massachusetts came into contact with hard-drinking, hard-fighting, foul-mouthed British regulars, they were horrified. For their part, British officers and men found the Americans undisciplined, sanctimonious, disrespectful, and old-fashioned. Many factors, including recruiting practices and military discipline, contributed to these misunderstandings, but religion was a major element.

The average 18th-century British regular soldier was not a particularly observant Christian. Like all Britons, most were baptized and attended occasional Anglican services, but the army was not overly concerned with the spiritual life of its men. In 1758, the British army camped near Lake George had 15 chaplains: 14 served the 6,000 Massachusetts provincial troops while one served the 6,000+ regulars (210). While New England soldiers participated in daily prayer services and attended two sessions of preaching on Sundays, regular soldiers were seldom seen participating in organized religious services.

Disparity in religious observance between the two groups was not just a matter of formal worship. Massachusetts men were deeply troubled by the regulars’ conduct, complaining that British soldiers ignored the Sabbath, fornicated with female camp followers, and regularly took the Lord’s name in vain. Caleb Rea, a Massachusetts soldier, said of swearing, “as a moral cause I can’t but charge our defeat on this sin, which so much prevails, even among the chief commanders” (117).

Their mundane interactions with British soldiers in camp convinced many Massachusetts soldiers that, “they were the moral superiors of the redcoats, and this conviction colors most of their perceptions of the British” (117).

Anderson argues that the young men who fought in the Seven Years’ War were profoundly influenced by their interactions with regulars. During the war, they began to think of themselves as culturally separate from the ordinary Britons (admittedly, not a fair sampling of British society in general) whose behavior so offended them, which made it easier for them to contemplate political separation 15 years later.

Another factor setting provincial soldiers apart from the regulars was their “old fashioned” providential thinking. New England soldiers believed that every occurrence — victories, defeats, bad weather, etc. — had “not just an immediate cause, but an underlying moral cause” and that the army would never prosper while the regular soldiers continued to defy God (203). The redcoats tended to dismiss this view, but it allowed the provincial soldiers to credit victories to their own prayers and clean living (even though their military contributions were dubious). In this way, Massachusetts soldiers came to believe that they were primarily responsible for winning the war and that the regulars were, if anything, a hindrance to final victory. The regulars might be tactically competent, courageous, well-supplied, and numerically superior, but the New Englanders believed that these considerations could never lead to victory if they were not right with God.

The implication (not made explicit by Anderson) is that this belief in the efficacy of Providence may have enabled New Englanders to face down British regulars in the 1770s, despite the army’s overwhelming advantages.

Too often, historians explain Revolutionary-era ideology as exclusively rational, legalistic, and inspired by the Enlightenment without taking the colonists’ providential worldview seriously. If, as Anderson argues, young provincial soldiers were “accustomed to casting events into [a] providential framework,” it is unlikely that they would have abandoned this habit of mind twenty years later (199). Without further investigation, it is impossible to say definitively whether soldiers from other colonies would have shared Massachusetts’ fondness for interpreting events as signs from God. In addition, it is hard to imagine that Virginians or western Pennsylvanians drew such a stark distinction between themselves and their redcoated comrades based on religious communitarianism. Still, Anderson makes a crucial point by casting popular religion as a political, as well as a cultural, phenomenon. For Massachusetts soldiers, religion was both a spiritual matter and a badge of inclusion in an imagined community — one that was beginning to conceive of itself as distinct from the rest of the British Empire politically as well as culturally.

A People's Army Redux

Here is my full review of Fred Anderson's A People's Army (see unscholarly review here). Comments, suggestions, and criticisms are more than welcome, but please don't tell me about any typos, as I already handed it in.

Modern Americans seldom give much thought to the Seven Years’ War, and when they do, they generally remember it as a distant imperial struggle made up of dates and names that vanished back into oblivion immediately after the AP US History test. In A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War, Fred Anderson attempts to bring the Seven Years’ War back into our national narrative as a pivotal moment in the formation of an American identity. By examining the experiences of Massachusetts’ provincial soldiers as they endured deprivation, argued for their contractual rights, and interacted with the might of the British Empire through contact with its military system, Anderson argues that “the war gave the provincials a sense, at a crucial point in their lives, of their identity as a distinct people” (223). This common experience enabled Massachusetts’ soldiers to conceive of themselves as Americans rather than as Englishmen, and opened mental space for them to consider separation from the empire in the 1760s and 1770s.

In its most basic argument, A People’s Army closely resembles T.H. Breen’s work in “Baubles of Britain: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century” and The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. Both Anderson and Breen believe that common experiences translated into a shared language that united colonists and made it possible for them to communicate their outrage over the perceived excesses of imperial domination during the Stamp Act, Boston blockade, and Nonimportation crises. Yet, Anderson’s argument differs substantially from Breen’s in that he argues for a distinctive provincial identity that was based on outdated English principles that had incubated in an isolated American environment for over a century, while Breen emphasizes the Anglicization and interconnectedness of American culture after mid-century. These contrasting portraits of American identity offer radically different interpretations of the roots of American independence: the latter imagines a British people who feared becoming too dependent on the metropolis that was so important to them, while the former supposes a colonial population that awakens to realize that they have been their own nation all along.

Because he focuses so specifically on the observations and beliefs of ordinary soldiers, Anderson is more convincing in translating experience into action than is Breen. Whereas Breen’s central argument requires an alchemical transformation of shared material culture into shared political ideals, Anderson draws a concrete line between wartime experiences and later events. The most vivid of these examples is his discussion of provincial soldiers’ interactions with the purposefully cruel and arbitrary system of British military justice. After seeing imperious officers maim, kill, and dispense seemingly capricious mercy to common soldiers during the war, Massachusetts men were horrified to find Boston occupied by regulars in the 1760s. Without accounting for their experiences in the Seven Years’ War, colonial reaction to occupation might seem hysterical and unfounded, but when we consider their frame of reference, fear of what regulars might do to a civilian population seems entirely reasonable.

The crux of Anderson’s argument is that when provincial citizen-soldiers interacted with regulars, they recognized themselves as a distinct and morally superior people. The regulars, particularly the officers, responded in kind by imagining themselves to be professional and civilized in contrast to the dirty, disorganized, traitorous peasants who made up the provincial army. Since, in Anderson’s telling, the provincials had had little contact with native-born Englishmen for over a hundred years, they understood the regulars as representatives of Britain in general, and they did not like what they saw. Anderson highlights several aspects of British military life that were especially repugnant to provincials, including the class-based deference due to officers, vulgar behavior such as gambling and whoring, and the shocking impiety of officers and men who swore, ignored the Sabbath, and were generally irreligious. From these attributes, provincial soldiers constructed an unflattering portrait of what it meant to be British. Anderson argues that this perception overturned an older generation’s fond and largely illusory affinity with the realm and allowed the younger generation to see themselves as a separate people.

Anderson’s careful attention to the specifics of local conditions, customs, and beliefs contributes to both the strengths and the principal weaknesses of his argument. By confining his attention largely to the writings of common soldiers, Anderson fails to place Massachusetts’ pre-war history within an imperial context. His Massachusetts is a place of agricultural villages, neighborliness, and the ties of kinship, not a bustling Atlantic community with a shipping industry that tied it to the far-flung reaches of the empire and an ongoing relationship with metropolitan politicians. While Anderson is careful to stipulate that colonists did not inhabit “bucolic utopias,” his intense focus on local considerations implies a strict isolationism in the century before the Seven Years’ War (30). There can be little doubt that American colonists experienced a more intense imperial integration in the years after 1750, but it is important not to overstate their seclusion before that time.

Anderson’s local focus also reinforces two pillars of the standard narrative of the Revolution: the central importance of Massachusetts and the middle-class origins of appeals to universal rights. Although it is unreasonable to fault Anderson for focusing on a single colony, his argument is so firmly grounded in local conditions that it cannot be applied to other colonial populations. If resistance to empire was partially the result of the Massachusetts militia’s recruiting practices and the economies of independent farms, how can we explain Virginia’s or South Carolina’s participation? Anderson’s argument is convincing for Massachusetts, but it does not extrapolate well. Similarly, Anderson’s focus on the experiences of the sons of middle-class yeoman may obscure the Revolutionary contributions of laborers, sailors, and servants as explored in Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s “The Many Headed Hydra:Sailors, Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century.” While Anderson finds several examples of middle-class men talking about their “rights” long before Linebaugh and Rediker would have predicted, he does not consider the possibility that “seamen in particular and wage workers in general were foremost among the most radical parts of the colonial population” (Linebaugh and Rediker, 235). A People’s Army tells an important story about the coming of the Revolution, but it is not the whole story.

One aspect of Anderson’s argument that might prove useful to historians of the later eighteenth century is his discussion of popular religious belief among provincial soldiers. Too often, historians explain Revolutionary-era ideology as exclusively rational, legalistic, and inspired by the Enlightenment without taking the colonists’ providential worldview seriously. If, as Anderson argues, young provincial soldiers were “accustomed to casting events into [a] providential framework,” it is unlikely that they would have abandoned this habit of mind twenty years later (199). Without further investigation, it is impossible to say definitively whether soldiers from other colonies would have shared Massachusetts’ fondness for interpreting events as signs from God. Still, Anderson makes a crucial point by casting popular religion as a political, as well as a cultural, phenomenon. Although any exploration of the faith of the “Founding Fathers’” generation is a political minefield for modern historians, Anderson’s work provides a reputable model for others who wish to explore the politics of popular religious belief.

A People’s Army makes a compelling argument and goes a long way toward restoring the Seven Years’ War to a place of prominence in early American history. Despite its limited scope, this book supplies important information about the relationship between Britain and her colonies on the eve of the imperial crisis. Anderson argues that the contest between pan-British and distinctly American identities was predicated on interpersonal contact and differing standards of personal and professional conduct, not just on official policies, taxes, or political ideals. By examining the defining event of their young lives, Anderson reintroduces us to the Revolutionary generation.

A People's Army

I'm taking a quick break from reading Fred Anderson's A People's Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years' War (1984) to jot down some first impressions.

I've only read the first of three parts, but I am very impressed so far. Anderson writes clearly and insightfully, and his topic is of the utmost importance for the history of 18th-century America: How did provincial soldiers experience the Seven Years' War and how did that experience inform their actions during the Imperial Crisis of the 1760s and 1770s?

Anderson argues that the provincial army and its soldiers did not conform to British regulars' expectations of military order and professionalism because it was a manifestly different type of organization. Rather than the class divide that separated regular officers from enlisted men, the provincial troops were recruited in a way that guaranteed that officers and men were drawn from the same communities, occupations, and families. An officer might deserve the respect of his men, but that respect derived from his position as an older, more established member of the community (often an older brother or uncle of his soldiers), rather than from his hereditary privilege.

The British found this system incomprehensible and concluded that provincial troops were hopelessly undisciplined and degraded. In return, the Massachusetts men thought that the British were arrogant, controlling, and unjust. Their experiences during the war led the young provincials to distrust the regulars. In the 1760s and 1770s, these experiences would color their understanding of imperial policies and make it possible for them to break with Britain, which is something their fathers never would have done.

Beyond this book's fascinating topic and excellent research, it is engaging and accessible. A recipient of the VPI Grad Student Seal of Approval, A People's Army is written in a plain style that opens its scholarly arguments to a wide audience. Anderson is a solid writer, making good use of topic sentences and spicing up his prose with colorful turns of phrase.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in 18th-century America. It is not merely a narrow history of one colony's troops, but an enlightening exploration of the interactions between provincials and metropolitans that made the Revolution possible.