The burden of military service chiefly falls on the poor…
We know that the members of the Continental Congress were some of the wealthiest men in America. Not all the wealthiest men… forty percent of the wealthy were loyal to King George III. Others were just looking out for Number One. Long after the Revolution, myths developed of “the Continental soldier as American yeoman — the small farmer/landowner who grabbed his rifle from above his fireplace and marched willingly to war.” Not so. Tom Schactman took a page in his book about The Founding Fortunes to to quote social historian Charles Neimeyer: most of the 200,000 men who served at some point during 6-8 years of war were “young, landless, and unskilled.”
A quarter of the rank and file soldiers were Irish, an eighth were German. In modern terms, they might be considered undesirable aliens. In fact, Benjamin Franklin complained about “the Palatine boors” (German immigrants) who lived in caves in Pennsylvania because they couldn’t afford houses. Many Irish, German, and not a few Anglos, had been shipped to America as indentured servants. Most indentured servants did not sign a voluntary contract. A court suspended a sentence of death by hanging, in favor of transportation to America and sale into servitude. Homeless young men and women were also kidnapped off the streets of Europe for shipment.
Neimeyer surveyed 396 men in several Massachusetts regiments from enlistment and other records. Less than ten percent owned any property. Another historian, Gregory H. Nobles, concluded that “Yeoman successfully pressured members of the gentry to keep the buren of military service on the poor and landless men who constituted the lowest stratum of whites.” Anthony Wayne, a future brigadier general, reported to the Pennsylvania Assembly, “The burthen falls chiefly on the poor and the middling sort of the inhabitants, whilst the more opulent are, for the most part, exempt.”
But the soldiers of the Continental Army found something to believe in, and fought hard to win it. When William Howe was sent by King George to take command of British forces in Boston, he thought he could break the revolutionary forces encircling the city. He assumed that the rebels lacked the discipline to face up to a coordinated assault by seasoned veteran soldiers. On 17 June 1775, he sent redcoats charging up Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill. They suffered twice as many casualties as the defenders, losing a third of the entire force in wounded alone.
Even before the battle, General Gage sent two British officers to spy on the land surrounding Boston. He wanted knowledge of the landscape, and a sense of the temper of the people. In the vicinity of Worcester in February 1775 they “went into a tavern, a Mr. Brewer's, a whig, we called for dinner, which was brought in by a black woman, at first she was very civil, but afterwards began to eye us very attentively... we observed to her that it was a very fine country, upon which she answered so it is, and we have got brave fellows to defend it, and if you go up any higher you will find it is so... we resolved not to sleep there that night...”