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 Historical Overview of: Roles of the Militia
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   The New England colonies maintained a politically stable militia system during the pre-Revolutionary War years. There was virtually no standing army but all the provincial governments were able to provide large numbers of militiamen when and where they were needed simply by drafting them out of the town militias. The New England colonies lost some territory and many men during the last quarter of the seventeenth century, but the political authorities never lost administrative control.
 
   Each town effectively became an advanced military base from which the provincials could maintain a defensive posture or launch an attack on the enemy aborigine. New England towns had a military organization that was sustained and implemented locally with a minimum of outside interference. One authority argued that the relatively loose and decentralized control that the provincial officers maintained in New England towns was a principal cause of the maintenance of political cohesion by the legislature and governors. Most towns had sufficient supplies in the community store houses to support the local militia and quite a few other militiamen for at least a short time. Other towns could draw on similar supplies to sustain the war effort. In King Philip's War the aborigine were defeated more by shortages of supplies than by acts of war.
 
   New England militia often supplemented the ordinarily and common civil authorities, such as the sheriffs, police and town patrol or watch units. During the British occupation of Boston with the king's troops a series of clashes occurred between militia and civil authorities on the one side and the British forces operating as military conservators of the peace, on the other side. The Boston Evening Post editorialized that so great were the offenses of the military conservators that in Boston there had been "a late vote of council of this town calling upon the inhabitants to provide themselves with arms for their defence." It thought that this was "a measure as prudent as it was legal" because "it is a natural right which the people have reserved to themselves, conformed by the [English] Bill of Rights, to keep arms for their own defence."
 
   New England militia seldom went into actual battle as whole units, although they engaged in skirmishes and pursued marauding Indian war parties as whole units. Men were selected for their particular skills in tracking, sensing danger, marksmanship, and other useful military skills and then especially trained to become frontier rangers. The general political authority raised and paid for special combat forces in times of trouble, using the general militia as a reservoir of supply for these volunteers. These select militiamen were the voluntary and democratic counterpart of the Anglo-Saxon select fyrd. The latter usually had no choice but to accept the additional training that separated them from the general (or great) fyrd, the militia comprised of all able-bodied males. Whether for principle or pay, the long term and mobile New England militia volunteered to serve in these select militia forces. The volunteer element also removed from concern one potential problem, that being the question of whether the general militia could be deployed outside their home counties or colony.
 
   Serving in a regiment did not excuse a man from guard duty, for within a regiment, there were five distinct types of guard duty on which a man might have to serve. In a quarter guard a regiment provided its own police, usually with a subaltern, drummer and as many as forty men. They patrolled the perimeter at night and held prisoners awaiting courts-martial or punishment. The provost guard provided additional police functions via detachment of forty-five men under a subaltern. It carried out punishment, including executions. The piquet guard was composed of a captain, two subalterns and as many as 50 men. It was designed to hold a line upon attack until the whole regiment could form. The main guard was the company-size force which provided external security for the whole camp and consisted of a company drawn from the entire body of men on a rotational basis. Officers of the rank of general were entitled to a personal guard, which varied by rank. A lieutenant-general had thirty-three guards; a major-general, twenty-three; and a brigadier-general, fifteen. Typically, as many as a quarter of the men assigned to a regiment or camp might be assigned to guard duty; or, a man might expect to serve on guard duty every fourth day.
 
   There was a fundamental difference between the British regulars and the American militiamen regarding camp life. The American militia viewed the camp as a temporary aberration, a place to stay away from home, having no permanence. They did only the bare minimum required to stay for a brief period. There was no question that, no matter how fine military quarters might be, the men would gladly trade them at any point for their own homes. English soldiers, from both personal desire and because they were driven by brutal discipline, made the camp as perfect as possible. They cleared stumps, set drainage and permanent latrines, levelled the land if at all possible, and then set their camps according to a pre-arranged plan, and with a define sense of order. To those men, the army was a way of life and the camp was as close to a permanent home as they were likely to come, for most had been impressed or enlisted for life. To the British troops, the militiamen were a disorderly group possessed of no pride of accomplishment. To the Americans, the English fetish for camp orderliness was the result of the officers' insistence on discipline for its own sake and decision to make the men work to keep them from mischief.
 
   Illness and malnutrition were the two great enemies of all in the field on military assignments. The standard diet of the enlisted men was adequate to maintain health and normal activity. The diet, by standards of the time, were reasonably well balanced. Problems occurred when food was not supplied as the manual required or when men were assigned to especially arduous tasks, such as felling trees, building roads, forts or bridges and carrying supplies or boats. Massachusetts Governor Francis Bernard reported to the board of Trade in 1763 that, "I was surprised to see what havoc disease made alone among the provincial soldiers." We need not dwell here on the woeful state of medicine, the inferior training of physicians and surgeons, poor sanitation, lack of real hospitals and drugs, presence of lice and rats and other disease carriers, inability to diagnose diseases and ailments correctly, lack of sterile instruments or the lack of understanding of how diseases were caused and spread. Dysentery, typhus, typhoid fever, pneumonia, smallpox, diphtheria, malaria, measles, mumps, and other virulent disorders frequently caused more deaths than engagements with the enemy. A man injured in an accident or wounded in combat could count on virtually no medical help. Amputation was standard treatment for shattered limbs. Bodily wounds or internal injuries were generally untreated because of the lack of skill and hospitals. Professor Anderson found that, during the French and Indian War, New England militia and volunteers suffered a mortality rate of between 40 and 66.7 per thousand and a total casualty rate of 283.5 per 1000, for a period of about three months.
 
   The English regarded the American militiamen as substitute manual laborers who were especially well suited, if for nothing else, for building and maintaining roads and bridges, driving wagons, building boats and then carrying these across portages, cutting firewood, building and maintaining latrines, and in general performing such distasteful physical tasks as fell on the British soldiers when there were no militia available. As Colonel John Robertson explained, the provincials were suited only "to work our boats, drive our wagons, and fell our trees, and do the work that, in inhabited counties, are performed by peasants." Perhaps most odious of all duties was that of cutting trees and doing other attendant work to build roads. This work required enormous physical stamina, for first growth trees of the virgin forests provided a significant obstacle and among the many considerations of British civil engineers, the amount of physical toil required was the least. Next in line as a physically demanding task was the building of fortifications. Forts required the digging of large holes, felling and cleaning large trees and dragging these to the proper place and setting the posts in the holes; and locating, extracting, shaping and setting large stones. Many period records show that the British officers enlisted, drafted, recruited, and, if all else failed, hired, provincial tradesmen to serve as masons, sawyers, carpenters, millwrights, wheelwrights, or (that all-purpose term), "artificers." Provincials also hunted game to supplement the standard fare of salt beef, pork, cod, or mutton.
 
   There was no socio-economic discrimination practiced in New England militia as had been the case with the English militia. Regular British officers who served in North America and who knew little, if anything, of prevailing social conditions, and often cared to know even less about the national customs, misunderstood the colonial way of fighting and preparing for war. They did not care to understand the fraternity and socializing that marked militia training days. To them, the American provincials were woefully disorganized, completely inefficient and hopelessly democratic. Officers socializing with the enlisted men and militiamen electing their own officers necessarily precluded discipline, organization and efficiency. In an army where officers made it a practice to refuse to learn, let alone address men by, their first names, the fraternization they saw among provincials was disgusting. Surely, mutiny and desertion would follow from such lax discipline. Here, poor citizens and indentured servants joined with their commercial and propertied brethren. The New England militia certainly represented a far greater cross-section of society than did the contemporary English militia.
 
   A prominent Tory compared the militia to Falstaff's army; it was "poor and bare." Another Tory said that many of the militia had entered battle wearing "breeches that put decency to blush." The Earl of Loudoun complained to Lord Cumberland about his militia. "[A]s to the complaints of the ill usage of the Militia, it rather appears to me that the Militia came rather slow up, and when they arrived to the number of 2000, the desertion from that time on was equal to their Acquisition by the arrival of new reinforcements."
 
   As we have seen, at least Englishmen did show respect for the colonial militia and their unique ability to wage war effectively in the hinterland of America. After the catastrophic defeat of General Edward Braddock's army at the Battle of the Wilderness, the London-based Public Advertiser caustically observed that "300 New England Militia men would have routed this Party of Indians." One British officer commended the New England militia to the exclusion of the others.
 
   In all military Affairs it seems to belong to the New England Provinces to set a proper Example. All agree that they are better able to plan and execute than any of the [other] British Colonies. We put no Confidence in any troops other than theirs; and it is generally lamented that the British Veterans were not out in Garrisons and New England Irregulars [Militia] sent to the Ohio. Their men fight from Principle and always succeed. . . . Instead of the Devastations committed by the Troops in 1746, not a Farmer has lost a chicken . . .
 
   Americans were only too willingly to support this kind of endorsement. The Public Advertiser's American correspondent, writing on 18 August 1755, related an account of an ambush that had occurred "150 miles off . . . a few days ago" in which an Amerindian war party numbering three hundred had attacked a party of eighty New England militia. "The Indians fired first and killed one Man; the New England Men took to the swamps and woods after them and killed 40 of them." A private letter written by a Boston correspondent in August 1755 in the same newspaper recounted the success of the New England militia in "the late fight at Nova Scotia." An "Old England Officer, Colonel Monckton" had ordered the militiamen to march in European-style close "Army Order" which they did, but only so long as they were not under attack. "When the Indians fired on them out of the Woods they broke their Ranks and ran into the Woods after them." Monckton was outraged and accused them of misconduct, saying "the Devil was in them." But the militiamen had the last laugh. "They soon returned and shewed him several Indian heads and scalps, [saying] 'This is our Country Fighting.'" This lesson had been lost on British commanders and because Braddock had insisted on fighting as Monckton had, he "fell sacrifice to his Onstancy." After the British surrender at Yorktown, Sir Henry Clinton referred to the New England militiamen as "warlike, numerous and formidable."
 
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