The Historian's Perspective
"The Heroine of Monmouth, Molly Pitcher, June 28, 1778," print by Currier and Ives, c. 1876. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Women and Wagoners: Camp Followers in the American War for Independence
by Holly A. Mayer
An old tune called “The Girl I Left Behind Me” tells of a
lovelorn soldier yearning to return home to his waiting fair maid. Although
there is a good chance that this song was fifed during the war, the earliest
transcripts only date to the 1790s. Even if redcoats and rebels did not
whistle it in 1776, it echoes what people of the Revolutionary Era believed
about men honor-bound to cause, country, and home-bound consorts. The
reality, however, was that not all men left to serve in the military and
not all women stayed home. Over the course of the war, thousands of women,
many with children, and throngs of civilian men trailed after the combating
armies. Known collectively as camp followers, these men, among whom many
were wagoners, and women made up a people’s army encompassing civilians
as well as soldiers. The majority of these civilians were hard-working,
though not necessarily heroic, contributors to military life and operations.
Acknowledging their presence expands our image of the Continental Army
and our understanding of civilian contributions to waging the Revolution’s
war.
Followers, especially the female followers, have seldom rated much mention
in histories of the War for American Independence, perhaps because most
women and girls did stay behind tending to farms and businesses or sheltering
with friends and relatives. Society tended to applaud those who stayed
behind as fitting feminine heroes—heroines —who sustained
the home front. Such applause helped build and identify girls’ and
women’s proper activities and social sphere. That was certainly
the case in America as later generations used the Founding Era to determine
standards by which to judge what was appropriate for American women. Although
the representations are not fully aligned with the reality of women’s
wartime challenges and roles, especially those defined by race, the Revolution
produced at least two iconic female stereotypes: the first, what today
may be called the “American Girl,” was usually young, ‘free’
and engaged in adventure; the second, the “Republican Mother,”
was married or maternal and showed her brave spirit by serving others.
While later generations created the popular image of the camp follower
as the free-spirited “American Girl,” in reality more “Republican
Mothers” may have filled that role.
A sample of recent children’s histories about female fortitude in
the Revolution reflects both of the above images as well as changes and
continuities in the depictions of women and girls. Such examples of history
for children, especially when read one right after the other, reveal a
ritual recitation of the female models of revolutionary spirit. Modern
works include Native American and African American role models, such as
Nancy Ward and Phillis Wheatley, but the focus remains on white women,
though notably diverse by age, rank, and marital status. There are the
“patriots in petticoats,” such as Esther DeBardt Reed, governor’s
wife and fundraiser; Lydia Darragh, Quaker informant; Nancy Hart, frontier
sharpshooter; and Sybil Ludington, the teenaged female Paul Revere. Margaret
Corbin and Mary Ludwig Hays, both followers called “Molly,”
also figure prominently. In an interesting switch from earlier nineteenth
and twentieth-century accounts, however, the cross-dressing Deborah Sampson,
who enlisted as the soldier Robert Shurtliff, now appears to receive greater
accolades as society accepts women in trousers and celebrates those serving
in uniform.
The legend of Molly Pitcher is one example of a later popular image
eclipsing historical reality. Pitcher manifested the “American
Girl” stereotype—the camp follower wife of a soldier who
took up her husband’s gun when he was wounded in battle. But the
apocryphal “Molly Pitcher” aside, female camp followers
were rarely extolled in song or story. They were more likely to be ridiculed
for not being decorous, self-denying wives, sisters, daughters, just
as popular songs and verse were likely to deride men who chose not to
become self-sacrificing soldiers. Camp followers were a problem for
they muddied the image of the orderly, virtuous society that the revolutionaries
were trying to create.
Revolutionary America declared that women were to stay at home, for
the home was exalted during wartime as the embodiment of peace. When
women made their homes with the army they undermined idealized images
of femininity and domestic life. Senior officers’ wives were the
exception. Thus Martha Washington, Catharine Greene, and Lucy Knox appeared
in stories as models of rectitude, noble republican womanhood, visiting
camps during the winter, bringing cheer, clothes, and foods for their
husbands. These “ladies” then got out of the way by going
home at the opening of the campaign season. What is rarely mentioned
is that their presence in the army camp strained the military’s
ability to house and provision them just as the presence of ordinary
camp followers did.
Among the “ordinary” women with the army were a few “American
girl” types who disguised themselves as soldiers or, still in
skirts, fought at critical times. Most adult female followers, however,
provided a rough representation of republican motherhood, as they helped
spouses and other family members during wartime and, in the peace years
that followed, nurtured virtue in the new republic and public-spiritedness
in its male citizens.
Although the followers took up some measure of the army’s time,
space, and supplies, most of the women gave back by cooking, cleaning,
and caring for the troops. Some followers served officers and their
visiting wives. General George Washington, for example relied heavily
on Elizabeth Thompson, an Irish woman who accepted employment as his
housekeeper and followed him to various encampments until 1779-1780.
Benedict Arnold employed a sergeant major’s wife as a housekeeper
at West Point before he deserted. Numerous orders and regulations, however,
indicate that doing laundry was the primary paying job for women.
Nursing was also service with pay, and it too generally meant caring
for the troops by cleaning. These nurses were not professionals trained
to dispense medicines and bandage wounds, although some probably added
those duties, but followers and hired employees drawn from camp and
neighboring communities. They washed patients, swept floors, and emptied
chamber pots. Without the help of these women both the American and
British armies would have had to hire or assign men to these chores—and
that meant diminishing the ranks of soldiers. Nursing was hard and even
dangerous work. Germs rather than enemy fire brought the danger, and
women, like men, wound up in the military hospitals suffering from the
sicknesses, such as smallpox, that swept through the camps.
Military commanders worried that followers might spread instead of limit
disease and disorder. Officers fretted about prostitution and the spread
of sexually transmitted diseases. They also worried that followers might
undermine security and increase crime. A few women did enter camp lines
to spy for the enemy, and a few did prod men to challenge their officers
or to desert. Some did take things that belonged to the army or steal
from soldiers or civilians. Most female followers, however, were not
prostitutes, provocateurs, spies, or thieves, and the army constantly
worked to ensure that by checking that they were legitimately related
to the men in the army and by regulating what they did.
Because commanders recorded followers on company ration rosters and
recorded orders relating to the conduct of the followers, historians
can estimate their number in the thousands. Unfortunately, because the
records are not complete, the exact numbers of women followers (or other
family members) has not been determined. We do know that the numbers
changed over time and differed according to where regiments recruited
and served. It appears that there was an average of one woman to every
thirty or thirty-five soldiers in the Continental Army (not the militias)
during the war, and that suggests that anywhere from 3,000 to 7,000
women may have followed the army at some time or other over the eight
years of the conflict.
The numbers of other followers are as difficult, if not more so, to
gauge because those followers did not always show up on ration lists
or regimental roles. On the other hand, we know that these children,
servants, slaves, and male civilians were there because they figured
in military law, organizational plans, commands, and personal letters.
Like most of the women, the children, personal servants, and slaves
in camp came under the heading of retainers to the camp. They were attached
to and served individual officers and soldiers. Israel Trask was an
officer’s son who joined the army as a waiter, drawing rations
and wages as an officer’s servant. Many other boys and men worked
as private servants, some of them for wages and others as slaves. The
most famous slave was Washington’s Bill or Billy Lee. More African-American
laborers appear to have worked for the British forces (which offered
freedom to slaves who ran away from rebel masters rebelling against
the crown). Yet American and allied French officers readily employed
them as personal servants as well as laborers. A few of these retainers
to the camp became soldiers, and others, like the nurses already mentioned,
ended up serving with the army when they accepted employment in the
Hospital Department.
Many men chose to work for the Hospital or other staff departments,
among which the big ones were the Commissary and Quartermaster, rather
than enlisting into the ranks. In putting their personal preferences
for certain kinds of work, higher wages, and limited terms over low-paid,
long-term, line-of-fire soldiering, they did not exactly fulfill the
image of the worthy man putting aside his own desires for the common
good. Some of these male followers then, like the female followers,
also disturbed the image of the orderly, virtuous society that the revolutionaries
idealized. So, as with the female followers, history books both for
adults and children reflect that both in what and whom they put in and
leave out of the story.
They were part of the reality of the Revolutionary War however. Many,
though not all, of the contractors, clerks, animal handlers, and dispatch
riders that the staff departments employed were civilians. The same
can be said about the wagoners, some of whom were African Americans,
found in those departments and with every regiment. In 1780 the Wagon
Department alone had over a hundred enlisted and a few civilian wagon
masters, over 300 enlisted wagoners, and almost another 300 civilian
wagoners. Some of the wagoners had enlisted directly into that job whereas
others were drawn from the ranks. These drivers, moving their teams
and wagons loaded with provisions and equipment, were essential to army
operations, but it may be that because they were so important their
offenses and failures became magnified. As a group, they had the reputation
of being untrustworthy and unreliable, of stealing supplies and stealing
away. Unfortunately group infamy meant that the good individuals were
not always recognized. Yet, whether good or not so good, wagoners were
necessary, and the army could never find enough of them to hire or enlist
and it could never keep enough of them.
Knowledge of the camp followers is important for it generates an awareness
of who was ignored, merely mentioned, or celebrated in the past--- and
when and why that happened. Were some people ignored in contemporary
accounts and in later histories because they did not “fit”
the picture being constructed or because they were just doing what was
considered normal rather than noteworthy? Why, at various times, have
researchers dug the unheralded people out of the records and presented
them for notice? Perhaps it is because so many of us want to know, to
quote the radio commentator Paul Harvey, “the rest of the story.”
It may also be that we need to recognize not only those who did what
was extraordinary but also those who simply continued to do their duty
under the most challenging of circumstances. Thousands of camp followers
did exactly that, and in doing so helped the Continental Army survive
and win the War for American Independence.
Holly A. Mayer is an associate professor
of history at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is
the author of Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community
during the American Revolution.
HOME
