Minutemen
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Minutemen is a name given to members of the militia of the American Colonies, who vowed to be ready for battle in a minute's notice.
The term minutemen has also been applied to various later United States' military units to recall the success and patriotism of the originals.
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[edit] History
As early as 1645 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, some men were selected from the general ranks of town-based "training bands" to be ready for rapid deployment. Men so selected were designated as Minutemen. They were usually drawn from settlers of each town, and so it was very common for them to be fighting alongside relatives and friends.
Some towns in Massachusetts had a long history of designating a portion of their militia as Minutemen, but others preferred to keep their entire militia in a single unit. After the Powder Alarm in the fall of 1774, Patriot leaders in the newly formed Massachusetts Provincial Congress recommended that all militias contain minute companies— special units within the militia system whose members underwent additional training and to hold themselves ready to turn out quickly ("at a minute's notice") for emergencies. Some towns followed this recommendation and altered their unit structures, but some took no action.
The Minutemen were usually 25 years old or younger, and they were chosen for their enthusiasm, reliability, and strength. They were the first armed militia to arrive or await a battle. Officers were elected by popular vote, and each unit drafted a formal written covenant to be signed upon enlistment. They typically assembled four times per year for training during peacetime. It was common, sometimes even in the middle of battle, for officers to make decisions through consultation with their men as opposed to giving orders to be followed without question.
[edit] Rationale
The Minutemen were created because the colonists in the New World had a constant threat of attack, and, to defend their people, they had to develop a fast response force. The colonies of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth were confronted with several problems. They were having a very hard time trying to make a living with the little resources they had, while trying to defend themselves against 10,000 Indians from the north. In resorted to a muster law. Every man was required to have a weapon (or if they could not afford one, they could buy one on credit), and all males aged 16 and over automatically became members of the militia. This was basically a miniature version of the old English muster law.
The original English muster law said that one had to be ready to train when called. However, the New Englanders had to modify the muster laws due to the constant threat the Indians were posing (attacks on towns, raids, and ambushes). All troops had to be armed and be ready to take their weapon, cartridges, and all the supplies they would need and be able to assemble at a moments notice to resist the Indian attacks. This was one early variation from the old muster laws. An eleven man committee was presided over by a governor (this was actually the first military staff in the New World), and when governors ordered a signal to be given in case of an Indian attack, the men of the threatened town were required to assemble immediately with their weapons.
[edit] Campaign against the Pequot Indians
The first offensive military attack by militias failed when Massachusetts sent Donald Endicott with four companies on an unsuccessful campaign against the Pequot Indians. According to one man's account the expedition only killed one Indian and burned some wigwams.
Weeks elaspsed between the incidents that caused the march and the arrival of Endicott’s men in the area. Once they got there they didn’t know which Indians to fight and why. This feeble response encouraged the Indians, and attacks on the settlers in the Connecticut valley increased.
In the following year Massachusetts again put a force on the field in collaboration with Plymouth and Connecticut. By the time Plymouth had gotten their force packed and ready to march the campaign had ended. Massachusetts Bay sent 150 militiamen, Plymouth sent 50 and Connecticut sent 90.
This necessitated a law beginning in 1630 that in certain places and at certain times, you should carry a firearm. Seven years later, in 1637, the law changed drastically to say that you were required to have firearms almost everywhere you went and at any gathering, or you would be fined for not doing so.
Around this time along with the gun laws changing, the Pequots were pushed out from their settlements. After several expeditions, the Peqouts were nearly exterminated.
[edit] New England confederation
In May 1643, a joint council was formed. They published the articles of the New England confederation. The real power of the confederation was that all four of the colonies promised to contribute soldiers to an alert force that would fight anywhere in the colonies.
In September 7, 1643 the towns were given more tactical control. A new rule allowed any general to call up his militia at any time. On August 12, 1645, 30% of all militia were made into short-notice groups (minutemen). Command and control decentralized to the extent that individual company commanders could put their troops into a defensive battle if necessary. A portion of the militia was well trained and well equipped, and set aside as a ready force.
In May 1653, the Council of Massachusetts said that an eighth of the militia should be ready to march within one day to anywhere in the colony. 80 militia marched on the Narragansett tribe in Massachusetts, though no fighting took place. Since the colonies were expanding, the Narragansetts got desperate and began raiding the colonists again. The militia chased the Indians around, caught up with their chief, and got him to sign an agreement for no more war.
In 1672, the Massachusetts Council formed a military committee to control the militia in each town. In 1675, the military committee raised an expedition to fight the raiding Wampanoag tribe. A muster call was sent out and four days later, after harsh skirmishes with the Wampanoags, three companies arrived to help the locals. The expedition took heavy losses: two towns were raided, and one 80-man company was killed entirely, including their commander. That winter, a thousand militia pushed out the Wampanoags.
In response to the success of the Wampanoags, in the Spring of 1676 an alarm system of riders and signals was formed in which each town was required to participate.
The British and French, each with Indian allies, engaged in various fights beginning in 1689 and dragging on for almost a hundred years. In 1690, Colonel William Phips led 600 men to push back the French. Two years later he became governor of Massachusetts. when the French and Indians raided Massachusetts in 1702, Governor Phips created a bounty which paid 10 shillings each for the scalps of Indians. In 1703, snowshoes were issued to militiamen and bounty hunters to make winter raids on the Indians more effective. The minuteman concept was advanced by the snow shoe men.
In 1744, the militia took Louisburg from the French.
Picking up tactics from the French and Indians, the militiamen learned to fight tree to tree, using the terrain to protect them instead of marching and fighting in straight lines all the time.
The reason that the British underestimated the Minutemen and the colonial militia was mainly because their citizens, which they believed would be no different from the Colonials, were not primarily fighting a mortal enemy. Their fights were at the level of civil disorder: they would riot, and sometimes kill their neighbors; they didn’t have marauding French or hordes of Indians coming into their towns to kill them. The British believed that the militia’s stupidity and cowardice would most likely get them killed; that they would die running off or running into a tree rather than fighting in battle. The British officers also knew the general population in Britain was poor and had little or no education, so were more likely to riot. The Colonials didn’t want to perpetuate this. In America most people didn’t think or act the same way, and were more likely to work together than to just riot and then be put down.
The Minutemen always kept in touch with the political situation in Boston and their own towns. From 1629 to 1683, the towns had controlled themselves but in 1689, the King appointed governors. By 1772, James Otis and Samuel Adams used the Town Meetings to start a Committee of Correspondence. This instigated in 1774 a boycott of British goods. The Minutemen were aware of this as well.
With a rising number of Minutemen they faced another problem: they didn’t have enough gun powder to support an army for long enough to win freedom. They needed powder badly. The people of an island controlled by the Dutch, Saint Eustatius, decided they had had enough with the British being the major power and having its hand grasping over all the world. They were quite pleased with the idea of a large rebellion rising up against the British in the New World. As a token of support, they traded gunpowder to the Colonials for other goods needed in Europe. Not only did the Minutemen have political awareness of events in New England, but also of the feelings of other countries such as the Dutch and France. The Colonials knew that other powers in the world were against the British for the amount of power they wielded.
In 1774, General Thomas Gage, the new Governor of Massachusetts, tried to enforce the Intolerable Acts, which were designed to remove power from the towns. Samuel Adams pressed for County Conventions to strengthen the revolutionary resistance. Gage tried to seat his own court in Worcester, but the townspeople blocked the court from sitting. 2,000 militia marched to intimidate the judges and get them to leave. This was the first time the militia was used by the people to block the king from doing something they didn’t like. Gage responded by marching to collect gunpowder from the provincials; the people were really mad about this. For 50 miles around Boston, militiamen were marching in response. By noon the next day, almost 4000 people were on the common in Cambridge. The Provincials got the judges to resign and leave. Gage backed off from trying to seat a court in Worcester.
Worcester came up with a new militia plan in their County Convention. The Convention required that all militia officers resign. Officers were then elected by their regiments. In turn, the officers then appointed 1/3 of their militia regiment as Minutemen. Other counties followed Worcester’s lead, electing new militia officers and appointing Minutemen.
Gage marched out hundreds of regulars nearly every week, mainly because he wanted to show the provincials he was the more powerful among them. The Minutemen would respond by mustering to their town centers, standing there with guns and calling them “lobsterbacks.”
When it came to practicing formations with their weapons, the British mainly only practiced on formations and marching. Their men really never got a chance to shoot because they were crowded into Boston with no room to shoot without ruining buildings or hitting civilians. The British had worked it into their minds that no civilian force could stand against them, so they thought there would be no reason for them to practice shooting.
The New Englanders were facing a large imperial army, and they had the room and the insight to practice not only marching in formations but shooting from long distances and shooting for accuracy. In gathering and standing around their town centers, a sort of bonding between the Minutemen began. regular practice in musters increased their militia’s effectiveness, and the Minutemen got additional practice from responding to the British marches into their territory.
Having learned from spies about arms stockpiled in Concord, Gage decided on April 19, 1775 to send a 700-man force on a march to Concord to seize arms, gunpowder, cannons, and provisions from the provincials. The march was a spoiling attack. Gage underestimated the Minutemen, to say the least.
Preparations of longboats alerted the Minutemen to an impending attack, and alarm riders went out right away to warn all the towns close and far. The towns sent more and more groups of Minutemen. Gage decided not to tell his own men about the attack, so no stray words would affect the provincials knowing about the march.
The British marched from Boston to Lexington, getting wet and not resting. They marched in attack formation half the way there, causing them to feel worried and annoyed. Meanwhile the British generals received information that more and more militia were gathering in Lexington, with estimates up to 1000 men.
Captain John Parker of the Lexington Minutemen, thought the British were going to just march past Lexington. He decided to keep all his men on the green. The British, thinking a large militia would be there, marched out onto Lexington green in full battle formation. Parker did not want full conflict, and decided to back his men out of the way. The British marched forward on Parker’s men, and never got an order to stop. A shot was heard, and the British regulars went berserk, charging on the Minutemen and shooting them as they ran. When the smoke had cleared, the British suffered only one man wounded; however, the Minutemen had suffered 8 dead and 9 wounded; 6 of these men died.
The British march to Concord kept on going. They marched all the way to Concord without any disturbance, but they saw more Minutemen arriving in the woods, and there were some snipers taking a few pot shots.
In Concord the light infantry and grenadiers split up to secure the bridges and search the town, though they were hungry and tired from marching for a day. The British could see the Minutemen gathering into a large group on a hill above Concord, and they proceeded with their duties of burning powder and weapons that they found. The Minutemen mistook the smoke rising from town and thought they were burning down the town, so they decided to move on the British regulars on North Bridge. The surprised British retreated. The Minutemen advanced. The scared British fired, but due to fright and a lack of firing practice, they fired too high: there were only three casualties among the Minutemen. The Minutemen were not only firing accurately, but they had three times as many men firing on the British. Two officers and many of their men died. Surprised by this, the British immediately broke ranks and ran as fast as they could. The Minutemen chased after them and retook the bridge, as the British began their long march back to Boston.
By the end of the march there was about a 20% casualty rate for the 1,500 British troops. At the end of their march back to Boston, there was just over a 2% casualty rate for the 4,000 Minutemen. By the next night 20,000 Minutemen and militia were surrounding Gage at Boston. “By the end of the day, British casualties numbered 273, while the colonials suffered only 94, 18 of which fell during the initial clash at Lexington. The American Revolutionary War had begun.”*
[edit] Motivation
The New England town meeting style of local decision-making in combination with the colonial legislature meant that, for nearly all functions of government, these men had already experienced generations of self-rule. Even though most of them could not express lofty sentiments about the rights of man and the purposes of government, they knew that the same British Army of professional soldiers who had once fought with them against a common enemy was now in their land to take something important away from them. One Massachusetts man used the phrase "An Englishman's home is his castle" when he explained to his friends why he had barricaded himself behind his front door to fight the British Army as it passed by during the final phase of the Battle of Lexington and Concord. The typical individual American Patriot in Massachusetts fought for a political idea even at this first stage of the war when independence from Great Britain was not yet a common sentiment.
[edit] Equipment, training, and tactics
Most Colonial militia units were provided neither arms nor uniforms and had to equip themselves. Many simply wore their own farmers' or workmans' clothes, while others had buckskin hunting outfits. Some added Indian-style touches to intimidate the enemy, even including war-paint. Most used hunting rifles, which did not have bayonets but were accurate at long range. The Continental Army regulars received European-style military training later in the American Revolutionary War, but the militias did not get much of this. Rather than fight formal battles in the traditional dense lines and columns, they were better when used as irregulars, primarily as skirmishers and sharpshooters.
Their experience suited irregular warfare. Most were familiar with frontier hunting. The Indian Wars, and especially the recent French and Indian War, had taught both the men and officers the value of irregular warfare, while many British troops fresh from Europe were less familiar with this. The wilderness terrain that lay just beyond many colonial towns, very familiar to the local minuteman, favored this style of combat.
The rifled musket used by most minutemen was also well suited to this role. The rifling (grooves inside the barrel) gave it a much greater range than the smoothbore musket, although it took much longer to load. Because of the lower rate of fire, rifles were not used by regular infantry but were preferred for hunting. When performing as skirmishers, the minutemen could fire and fall back behind cover or other troops before the British could get into range. The increased range and accuracy of the rifle, along with a lifetime of hunting to develop marksmanship, earned minutemen sharpshooters a deadly reputation.
Ammunition and supplies were in short supply and were constantly being seized by British patrols. As a precaution, these items were often hidden or left behind by minutemen in fields or wooded areas. Other popular concealment methods were to hide items underneath floorboards in houses and barns.
[edit] Legacy
In commemoration of the centenary of the first successful armed resistance to British forces, Daniel Chester French, in his first major commission, produced one of his best-known statues (along with the Lincoln Memorial), the Concord Minuteman. Inscribed on the pediment is the opening stanza of Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1837 Concord Hymn with the immortal words, "Shot heard 'round the world." The statue's likeness is based on Isaac Davis, the Captain of the Acton Militia and first to be killed in Concord during the Battle of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775.
[edit] References
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
- Paul Revere's Ride by David Hackett Fischer ISBN 0-19-508847-6
- The Encyclopedia of Military History, from 3500 B.C. to the Present by R. Erniest Dupuy and Trevor N. Dupuy ISBN 0-06-270056-1
- The Minutemen, by John Galvin. Hawthorne Books, 1967; reprinted by Brassey’s Inc, 1989.
- The Early Settlements, by Vernon Johns. Excerpted from New England Settlements web paper at http://www.vernonjohns.com/nonracists/nesettlm.html 2004.
- Gun Control In Colonial New England, by Clayton E. Cramer. Undated, post-1995. First published in Golden Gate National Rifle Association Newsletter. Available at http://www.ggnra.org/cramer and at http://www.claytoncramer.com/GunControlColonialNewEngland.PDF and http://www.claytoncramer.com/GunControlColonialNewEngland2.PDF
- The First Salute, by Barbara W. Tuchman. Random House, 1988.
- The battles of Lexington and Concord, by Roger Lee, “the history guy” web page, 1998-2002.
