The Revolutionary War did not go easy on the common soldier. Combat could beugly -- a far cry from the splendid and neat uniforms of caricature -- and everyday life harsh and miserable. Why did Americans, Continentals and militia, continue toserve? Did they believe in the higher cause? Did they fight, like modern soldiers, for their buddies? Did they hope for reward, in the Form of bounty money or land? Or were they, at times, just too scared to quit? Harry M. Ward, the William Binford Vest Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Richmond and a distinguished authority on the American Revolution, suggests that tough discipline played an important role in keeping George Washington's Continental Army in the field.

Very little scholarly work had been done on military discipline and enforcement in the American army during the Revolutionary War. The neglect is not for lack of source material. Thousands of orderly books, manuals of instruction, court martial, transcripts, and other primary sources exist in private collections and in local and national repositories, including the National Archives and the Library of Congress. Most of this material is readily available to researchers, and some of it, most notably in George Washington's papers, has appeared in print. Ward is the first historian to examine the primary sources in depth, however, and he has written a pioneering study of a Very important element in the military history of the Revolutionary War.

Washington was no touchy-Feely general. As Ward explains, he developed his understanding of military discipline from study and observation of British practices during the French and Indian War. Discipline during that war followed standard eighteenth-century practice. Penalties were cruel - from whipping and riding the wooden horse to public hanging - and intended to terrify rather than to correct. Washington was as enthusiastic as any other officer in applying this discipline, oftenmore so. And in the Revolutionary War, he made tough discipline a centerpiece of his military philosophy. The relatively democratic, easy-going methods common to the New England militia in early 1775 were not for him; and on taking command of the Continental Army later that year, he quickly instilled an authoritarian, hierarchic sys­tem that came down hard on everything from cowardice and desertion to foul lan­guage, gambling, and female camp followers.

Ward's focus is less on policy formulation than on the effect that Washington's dis­cipline-developed in consultation with Congress and the generals-had on the common soldiers. This emphasis on the average man helps to keep the book far more fresh and exciting than any purely administrative study. At all levels, from officers' guards, pickets, and police, to provost guards, executioners, and field musicians, Ward explores what it meant to live under Continental Army discipline, making use of numerous interesting anecdotes. At times, Ward's tendency to hop from one topic to another makes for haphazard reading, but the narrative, though at times awkwardly written, never loses interest. What is missing is a coherent overall sense of how military discipline evolved during the war, and particularly of how lessons learned during the course of the conflict influenced the development of U.S. Army discipline in suc­ceeding eras. The book lacks a concluding chapter to bring all of the loose ends together, instead ending rather abruptly with a discussion of military executions. Still, there is no question that Ward has written the definitive study of American military discipline during the Revolutionary War.

George Washington's promotion of military discipline in the Continental army and his approval of exemplary, although infrequent, executions to serve as deter­rents are well-known in the historiography of the American Revolution. Harry M. Ward's book provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of how the commander-in-chief and his officers maintained even partial control over soldiers, despite supply shortages, arrears in pay, and high desertion rates. This study examines the various roles, responsibilities, and methods of duty personnel, guardsmen, and other individuals who policed the Continental army. It conveys their wide range of activities and circumstances, from catching stragglers to monitoring camp cleanliness; from permanent units, such as the provost guard and the Maréchaussée Corps (mounted constabulary), to temporary police patrols; from elite guards like Washington's life guards to lowly drummers. Of the book's sixteen brief chapters, most focus on a particular position and its respon­sibilities; distinct chapters cover generals' guards, camp and quarter guards, picket men and safeguards, temporary police patrols, office of police, provost marshal, drummers and fifers, and executioners. Narrative accounts include richly detailed descriptions of the diurnal or nocturnal activities of the guards. Yet the reader may also be captivated by the intricate web of interactions between positions, that is, what lies conceptually between the chapters. Ward aptly demonstrates the multi­layered, component parts of this extensive guard system that, he asserts, involved more than one-quarter of the Continental army. Unfortunately, the book ends with the chapter on executioners and so misses the opportunity for a conclusion that could have better emphasized the integrated whole: how the positions not only overlapped but intertwined to promote discipline and regularity.

Several ironies and inequities are explored. Revised regulations of the Continental army more closely approximated the British Articles of War. Enlisted men faced harsher penalties than officers, and the incessant fear of brutal punish­ments was "the most objectionable aspect of service" (ix). Soldiers relinquishing their civilian rights upon entering the army found that "the military code of an army fighting for American liberty was grounded in the denying of liberty in military society" (30). For common soldiers, military justice could be swift and unfair, because it was concerned more with deterrence than with ensuring a fair legal process. Ward notes the increased military professionalism of the Continental army over time, but he does not attribute that phenomenon to the army's success at policing and regulating disorderliness. Instead he contends that corporal punish­ment was "counterproductive" because it did not lower rates of desertion (164). Yet the efforts at policing the army and the use of severe punishments (floggings and executions), even if generally acknowledged to be less draconian than British practice, suggest a good deal about the nature of Revolutionary society. Capital punishment "underscored the low regard in which enlisted men were held by their officers and indeed by their countrymen" (197). These are all intriguing, suggestive arguments, even if the book's chief significance still lies with its nuanced descrip­tions of the activities and responsibilities of guardsmen and other duty personnel.

Harry Ward is an esteemed historian of the Revolutionary War. He has written exceptionally good biographies of four Continental army gener­als, a book on the banditti in the no-man's-land between the rival armies, and a general history of the American Revolution. Now Ward, a professor emeritus at the University of Richmond, has turned his attention to a ne­glected subject. Though he focuses on how the American army was policedin the Revolutionary War, in reality;George Washington's Enforcers is aboutfar more than policing the Continental army. It offers valuable insights into the lives of those soldiered.

In the fall of 1777, just before the army marched into Valley Forge, the Continental Congress sent a committee to meet with General Wash­ington in Whitemarsh, Pennsylvania. Congress had many things on its mind, but it was especially interested in improving discipline within the army. Allegations were flying inside and outside of Congress that autumn that Washington's army behaved like a mob. In contrast, some also alleged, the army in the Northern Department, commanded by General Horatio Gates, was the very model of what an army should be. Indeed, Gates's army had just defeated and captured an entire British army at Saratoga, while Washington had unsuccessfully defended Philadelphia against another British army. Congress put Washington on notice to make changes in his

,
 army. Washington got the message, and the army that emerged from Valley Forge six months later was strikingly different.

Keeping discipline in the army was essential for numerous reasons, including protecting health and safeguarding nearby civilians. It was crucial as well that the soldiers learn to follow orders, so that in the heat of battle they would do as they were told. Ward explains the military justice system in detail, showing how it grew more draconian as the war progressed. Under the initial Articles of War there were only two capital crimes, but fourteen others had been added by the end of 1776. Ward estimates that up to one hundred Continental soldiers were sent to the gallows or before firing squads. At the outset of the war, the military code permitted courts-martial to or­der up to thirty-nine lashes for certain acts; after one year, punishments of one hundred lashes were authorized, and for a wider range of infractions. Corporal punishment occurred almost daily in the Continental army and included many gruesome practices that today would be seen as cruel and unusual.

Ward chronicles the various types of guard duty that existed, includ­ing protecting officers, securing the camp, and patrolling detached areas toprevent spying, hunting down deserters, and overseeing commerce between civilians and soldiers. The number of guard officers grew to scandalous proportions. At times, more than 5 percent of the soldiery were assigned to the personal guard units that protected battalion and regimental com­manders. Ward devotes a chapter to the Maréchaussée Corps, a mounted police unit that was responsible, among other things, for guarding prisoners and carrying out executions.

Soldiering and warfare is often scorned in academic circles. It should not be, and particularly in regard to the War of Independence. At least a quarter of the free adult males of military age soldiered in that war, severaltimes the percentage that served in the American armed forces in World WarII. What Ward has done in his exceptionally well-written book is to open awindow onto the world of those men who served in the Continental army, by showing how they lived, what they experienced, and the discipline and hardships they endured. This is at once an excellent history of the Conti­nental army and wonderful social history.

In 16  largely stand-alone chapters, Ward (emer., Univ. of Richmond) argues that while the often-brutal punishments (ranging from hundreds of lashes to executions) inflicted under Washington proved inadequate as a deterrent, his efforts nonetheless fostered professionalism among the Continental Army's ranks. Further, Ward argues, the disciplining and controlling of the army reflected the norms of early American society itself, in that the enlisted/lower ranks invariably received higher rates of conviction and severer punishments for transgressions than the genteel officers, and they were generally treated similarly to the enslaved Americans of the era. Perhaps the greatest contribution of the work is its clear, concise, detailed description of the various--and occasionally overlapping layers of enforcement that Washington (ironically) adopted and adapted, primarily from the British Army. Washington emerges as a pragmatic disciplinarian who, while trying to fight a war, had his hands full in trying to professionalize and retain the oft transient and easily distracted troops. Rooted in primary sources and comprehensive in nature, Ward's work will certainly be a boon to anyone interested in the intricacies of the Continental Army--although the absence of the Newburgh Conspiracy in such a work is curious.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic levels/libraries.

     Professor Emeritus Harry M. Ward of the University of Richmond has spent much of his career explaining the American War of Independence with a particular empathy for the common soldier. In his most recent book, George Washington’s Enforcers: Policing the Continental Army, Ward “probes the efforts of the army command to coerce men, many of whom were unaccustomed to any strict discipline or direction in their lives, to become competent warriors” (p. x). Unfortunately, the book lacks a unifying thesis to draw together the interesting results of Ward’s research. There are many different arguments he might have made from his plumbing of orderly books and correspondence, but Ward’s major failing in George Washington’s Enforcers is that no such effort was made. Ward notes how the “Continental army adopted almost totally the table of organization and military code of justice of the British army” (p. x), while making light of key differences in the execution of military justice in the American corps. The result is a frustrating series of chapters that only describe the role and purpose of the various elements of the Continental Army’s administrative apparatus— Washington’s “enforcers”—with little analysis of the contradiction inherent in the American experience of forging a purportedly republican army committed to overturning tyranny. Despite his introduction of the tools commanders used to enforce discipline and regulations, Ward makes little progress toward explaining how Washington and his subordinates learned how to lead America’s first citizen-soldiery.

     The trend in recent historiography has been to investigate the nature of America’s first Army. Fred Anderson clarified how tumultuous the relationship was between America’s first commander in chief and his New England soldiery in “The Hinge of the Revolution: George Washington Confronts a Peoples Army,” MassachusettsHistorical Review 1 (1999). David Hackett Fischer highlighted the differences between Washington’s “army of liberty” and the King’s “army of order” in Washington’s Crossing (New York, 2004). Caroline Cox explained the attitudes and expectations that the colonists brought to militarylife in A Proper Sense of Honor (ChapelHill, N.C., 2004). Ward’s lack of analysis fails to continue this trend with George Washington’s Enforcers. Ward’s first three chapters—“Preconditions,” “The Common Soldier,” and “Military Justice”—led this reader to expect a comparison and contrast of the American Army with contemporary European forces and methods of enforcing discipline. Ward concludes, however, that “although they showed greater tactical adaptability and improvisation than the British army, the American forces subscribed to the principles and practices of organization and discipline learned from their British counterparts” (p. 12). This oversimplification glosses over the complexities and birth pangs of the Continental Army outside Boston in 1775 and the actual practice of discipline (or the failure thereof) during the course of the Revolutionary War’s several campaigns. Ward confines himself for the remainder of the book to an examination of the bits and pieces of the Continental Army’s administrative apparatus. Chapters on “Washington’s Life Guard,” “General’s Guards,” “Camp and Quarter Guards,” “Picket Men and Safeguards,” “Temporary Police Patrols,” “Provost Marshal,” “TheMaréchaussée Corps,” “Drummers and Fifers,” and “The Executioners” are filled with detailed research and interesting anecdotes that give one a sense of the monotony and repetitious nature of Army life. The book trails off without any summary or making any grand statements about the specific employment or even the nature of the tools of discipline employed by commanders in the Continental Army. The best part of the book is its rich footnotes, which future scholars will mine to go beyond Ward’s narrative to continue to analyze the similarities and differences between the American experience and the European armies from which they drew their basic organization.