Executive Times
		2005 Book Reviews
		Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence by Carol Berkin
		Rating: ••• (Recommended)
		Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com
	Partners Historian Carol Berkin reveals the stories about famous and ordinary women and what they did during the extraordinary time of the American Revolution in her new book, Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence. Readers will come away from this book with a new awareness of what women of all status, race and allegiance did during the war. Here’s an excerpt about camp followers, from the beginning of Chapter Four, “’Such a Sordid Set of Creatures in Human Figure: Women Who Followed the Army,’” pp. 50-57: In October 1777, American troops managed a minor miracle: the defeat of General John Burgoyne’s army at Saratoga, New York. The American victory stunned the British, delighted the French, and persuaded many Americans that independence just might be attainable. Under the terms of the surrender, over five thousand soldiers and officers were to be marched to Boston and shipped back to England, bound by a promise never to serve again in the war against America. As the defeated British and Hessian troops trudged through Boston, Hannah Winthrop watched the spectacle with sympathetic horror. Moving by her in great number were “poor, dirty emaciated men,” part of a once great and confident army that had found itself lost, near starvation, and badly beaten by an upstart force of volunteers and self-taught officers. But trailing behind these soldiers, Winthrop also saw “great numbers of women, who seemed to be the beasts of burthen, having a bushel basket on their back, by which they were bent double.” These baskets did not hold military supplies; instead they seemed to be filled with “Pots and Kettles, various sorts of Furniture, children peeping through.. . and other utensils,” and finally, “some very young infants who were born on the road.” The women Winthrop saw were barefoot and dressed in rags. As they passed, the stink of long hours of exertion and long abandoned hygiene produced an “effiuvia [that filled the air.” “I never had the least Idea,” Winthrop wrote, “that the Creation produced such a sordid set of creatures in human Figure.” Like Winthrop, militia private Daniel Granger had been struck by the sad circumstances of the almost two thousand women who brought up the rear of the march. Despite the chill in the October air, the women wore “short Petty coats” and were “bare footed & bare Leged.” As they walked, they were slowed by the huge packs they carried on their backs and by the children they carried in their arms. An air of resignation surrounded them, Granger added, and “they were silent, civil, and looked quite subdued.” If Winthrop and Granger were touched by the condition of these women, neither of them was surprised by females traveling with the army. American civilians called these women camp followers. The British called them “trulls” or “doxies.” Quartermasters and supply officers listed them in their records as living pieces of “baggage.” Generals called them necessary nuisances. Yet there was a grudging recognition on the part of everyone that these Women had a place in the British and American army camps and forts and even in the heat of battle: as cooks, washerwomen, seamstresses, nurses, scavengers for supplies, sexual partners, and Occasionally as soldiers and spies. No one knows how many “nuisances” there were—whether they numbered in the thousands or tens of thousands. The numbers rose and fell by the seasons, expanding during the winter months when the armies were stationary, decreasing when the fighting was renewed. In the American army, the female population varied widely from unit to unit; units formed in an area hard hit by the war or occupied by the enemy always attracted more women than units formed in safer regions. Not surprisingly, historians’ estimates of the number of women with the American army vary widely, from a claim that twenty thousand women marched with the American military to a more conservative estimate that women made up roughly 3 percent of the population in army camps. Perhaps five thousand women, and a remarkable twelve thousand children, experienced life in a British military camp before the war ended. The British transport ships arrived with some women aboard, usually the wives of noncommissioned officers, but the majority of the women who followed the British armies came from American cities and farms. Because the British were better equipped and supplied, they attracted more camp followers than the poorly provisioned Continental Army. Since five of every six British soldiers were single, they welcomed these women as temporary “camp wives.” Most of these camp marriages ended when the British returned home. But many of the five thousand Hessian mercenaries who deserted their regiments and settled in America began their new lives with the American women who had been their camp wives. What drove most of these thousands of women to join the armies was simple enough: loneliness, poverty, fear of starvation, the possibility of rape or death at the hands of hostile invading troops. The army was the court of last resort for wives, widows, runaway servants, and any woman who faced poverty because of the war. The military rations they received might be small and the conditions in the camps dismal, but meager meals and shared tents were preferable to no food or shelter at all. In an ironic sense, becoming a camp follower was an act of independent decision making, a choice that carried many women hundreds of miles away from their homes and friends. Yet if life in the camps meant survival, it did not mean personal liberation. Military culture reinforced female dependency; it was intensely hierarchical and the chain of command was entirely male. Civilian women may have expected to serve as helpmates to their husbands or fathers, but camp followers could be called on to provide house-wifely services like cooking, sewing, and washing to literally hundreds of men. Camp followers did resist stringent rules and regulations and excessive workloads and meager pay, but these expressions of autonomy always carried the threat of punishment—or banishment. Women drummed out of the camp were sobering examples for those who remained. Not all the women in military camps were refugees from civilian life, of course. Sutlers and tradeswomen came to the army camps to ply their wares, and prostitutes came to ply theirs. The wives of generals and colonels came to lift the morale of their officer husbands, to organize as gala a social season of dances and dinners as was possible in the winter encampments, and then to return home when spring brought a new military campaign. But the majority of camp followers were women who came from the lower ranks of society, and the same class distinctions that separated the common soldiers from their officers carried over to the soldiers’ companions as well. While officers may have embraced the newer, more romantic notions of delicacy and refinement among women of their own class, their respect did not extend to the poorer camp followers, who seemed oblivious to every rule of feminine behavior. Camp followers cursed and drank like men, preferred to steal rather than to starve, and appeared in public when they were pregnant. To many officers, they had forfeited all claim to respect or chivalry. As one American officer put it, these women were “the ugliest in the world to be collected. . . the furies who inhabit the infernal Regions can never be painted half so hideous as these women.” Even unmarried enlisted men spoke disparagingly of the Women who traveled with their regiments. Watching the women bring up the rear on a march in 1780, Private Joseph Plumb Martin wrote, “It was truly amusing to see [their] number and habilments. . . of all specimens of human beings, this group capped the whole. A caravan of wild beasts could bear no comparison with it. There was ‘Tag, Rag and Bobtail’; ‘some in rags and some in jags,” he added, making sarcastic reference to the lines of a popular tune, “but none ‘in velvet gowns.’ Some with 2 eyes, some with one, and some I believe with none at all.” Martin’s obvious relish at the sight of these ragged and deformed women may have been little more than regional pride (or provinciality), for he was a proud New Englander and they were following regiments from the middle states. But his harsh judgment that they were “odd and disgusting” was not an uncommon one. No camp followers of Martin’s own Connecticut regiment wore “velvet gowns,” of course. Women who flocked to the armies, or came across the ocean with them, did so precisely because they were needy. A typical British soldier’s wife might arrive with little more than a gown or two, a cloak, a petticoat, a few aprons, a pair of shoes, and perhaps a blanket and some clothing for their children. After months of marching with the army, sleeping in fields or in crowded huts, carrying pots, pans, and children on their backs or in their arms, both the women and their clothing began to grow ragged. When their clothing wore thin, camp followers willingly donned the coats or shirts they removed from dead or dying soldiers, thus adding to their “odd and disgusting” appearance. They had few other choices, for neither military nor civilian governments considered clothing women and children to be their responsibility. When Governor Joseph Reed of Pennsylvania made the novel recommendation that the women of the Pennsylvania regiments be given “a new gown, silk handkerchief, and a pair of shoes,” the state legislature refused. Perhaps the sight of several women marching with Burgoyne’s army through a heavy snowstorm with little more to cover them than an “old oil-cloth” prompted Thomas Anburey to conclude that “the women who follow a camp are of such a masculine nature, they are able to bear all hardships.”But these women did not arrive in camp more masculine in nature than the women who remained at home. Military life had hardened them. Eager to provide food for their children and for themselves, women often plundered and looted as their army traveled through the countryside. A British soldier described them as a “swarm of beings—no better than harpies” and British officers worried that their plundering turned local citizens into bitter enemies of the king. During battle, women could be seen moving among the fallen bodies, “expos[ingj themselves,” as Connecticut soldier Ambrose Collins recorded, “where the shots were flying, to strip the dead.” It was not their bravery under fire that he remembered, however; watching them move from body to body he could only conclude that they were “doubtless the basest of their sex.” But if the brutality of warfare had made these women callous, or inured them to suffering and death, it had apparently done the same to him. “I saw one woman while thus employed,” he wrote with little sympathy, “struck by a cannon ball and literally dashed to pieces.” George Washington was especially perplexed and annoyed by the women who sought refuge in his camps. For although camp-following was a long-standing tradition within the British army, the American commanders had little experience with the presence of women among the military. Their colonies had relied on militias, locally based and called out—usually for brief service— only during crises. In August 1777, the general complained: “The multitude of women in particular, especially those who are pregnant, or have children are a clog upon every movement.”Perhaps even worse, the women refused to obey Washington’s instructions. Before the war was over, the general had issued eight armywide orders directing women to march with the baggage and prohibiting them from riding on the baggage wagons. Yet his officers had little success in ensuring that these directions were followed. Not even Washington himself could make the camp followers obey. When the Continental Army marched through Philadelphia after the British abandoned the city, Washington ordered the Women and children to travel on the side streets, or with the baggage in the rear, or, if possible, outside the city entirely. But, as one Philadelphia observer pointed out, the orders fell on deaf ears. The women were “spirited off into the quaint, dirty little alleyways and side streets. But they hated it. The army had barely passed through the main thoroughfares before these camp followers poured after their soldiers again, their hair flying, their brows beady with the heat, their belongings slung over one shoulder, chattering and yelling in sluttish shrills as they went and spitting in the gutters.”The contrast between Esther Reed’s genteel volunteers, moving through those same streets on their fund-raising mission, and these women, bred in poverty or sunk into it because of the war, was implicit. A frustrated Washington had recommended to his officers “to use every reasonable method. . . to get rid of all such as are not absolutely necessary.” Yet, as even Washington would have had to admit, most of the women were “absolutely necessary,” if for no other reason than to cut down on desertions. A harsh policy, the general conceded, would mean he would “lose by Desertion, perhaps to the Enemy, some of the oldest and best soldiers in the Service.” The men needed the comfort of their wives, or their mothers, especially when they were sick or wounded. “Will you not send for my mother?” pleaded one ailing soldier. “If she were here to nurse me I could get well.” But there were other reasons besides morale to keep women in the camps. One of them was hygiene. Dirty uniforms were a pressing problem in every regiment, yet men accustomed to their mothers, sisters, or wives doing the laundry balked at performing this traditionally female chore. To accommodate their troops, American and British armies required camp followers to serve as washerwomen for both officers and enlisted men. Regiments like New York’s 2nd and 3rd calculated the ratio of washerwomen to soldiers that was “absolutely necessary”: for 248 men, the 2nd regiment required two women; the 3rd, with 435 men, listed their needs at four women, or one washerwoman for every 109 men. Maryland camp followers escaped such remarkable work-loads, for their regiments set the ratio at one woman for every 24 men, or, more humanely, one for every 10. Both armies required the men to pay the women for their services, although wages were generally meager. British washer-women received three pence a week for shirts. At West Point, a June 1780 order by the American command addressed to “the Women, who draw provisions, with their respective Companies,” listed the following prices: “For a Shirt, two Shillings; Woolen Breeches, Vest and Overalls, two Shillings, each; Linen Vest & Breeches, one Shilling, each; Linen Overalls, one Shilling & Six Pence, each; Stockings & Handkerchief, Six Pence, each; The Women who wash for the Companies will observe these regulations.” Apparently some camp followers resented the low value placed on their skills. In 1778, the 2nd Pennsylvania Regiment felt it necessary to issue this directive: “Should any woman refuse to wash for a soldier at the above rate he must make complaint to the officers commanding the company to which he belongs... who [if they] find it proceeds from laziness or any other improper excuse” can dismiss the woman. Any guilty washerwoman who attempted to remain with her husband would be drummed out of the camp. Camp followers who did not resist their assignment did try to make their task easier whenever possible; a favorite shortcut was to do the laundry in the soldiers’ drinking water. The demand for washerwomen was usually greater than the supply and officers often turned to women in neighboring towns or on nearby farms to do their laundry. Yet even captains and colonels found the cost of cleanliness a drain on their pocketbooks. Writing home to his brother from his camp near Morristown in January 1780, Colonel Ebenezer Huntington complained about the impact of inflation: “Money is good for nothing. . . my Washing bill is beyond the limits of my Wages.” The solution, Huntington concluded, was to “hire some Woman to live in Camp to do the Washing for myself and some of the Officers.” His only hesitation was the gossip that might ensue about the nature of the woman’s duties. “I am aware that many Persons will tell the Story to my disadvantage.” Thanks to Berkin’s research and popular style of writing, the stories in Revolutionary Mothers can be read and remembered by a wide audience. Steve Hopkins, July 25, 2005
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