The Continental Army

A narrative analysis of the complex evolution of the Continental Army, with the lineages of the 177 individual units that comprised the Army, and fourteen charts depicting regimental organization.On 19 April 1775 local Massachusetts militiamen and regular British troops beganthe War of American Independence at Lexington and Concord. The New Englandcolonists reacted to this news by raising four separate armies. Each jurisdiction formedits force according to its particular experience in earlier wars and its individual interpretationof European military developments over the previous century. The speed ofthe American response stemmed from a decade of tension and from the tentative preparationsfor possible armed conflict that the colonists had made during the precedingmonths. The concentration of four separate armed forces at Boston under loose Massachusettshegemony as a de facto regional army paved the way for establishing a nationalContinental Army.The Continental Army was the product of European military science, but like allinstitutions developed by the American colonists, its European origins had been modifiedby the particular conditions of American experience. A proper appreciation ofthat Army in the context of its own times thus requires an understanding not only ofthe general developments in the military art of western civilization during the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries, but also of the particular martial traditions and experiencesof the English colonists in North America.In the seventeenth century Europeans developed a new range of weapons and graduallyintroduced them into their armies. At the same time a wave of dynastic wars inwestern Europe led to the creation of increasingly larger forces serving nation-states.Commanders and leading military theoreticians spent most of the eighteer:th centurydeveloping organizational structures and tactical doctrines to exploit the potential ofthe new weapons and armies. The full impact of these changes came at the end of thatcentury.Volume contains 18th century correspondence as it appeared at the time. Read more