Why write on the militias? They don’t exactly have the best reputation do they? The militias were the primary defense force for the American colonies for two centuries, a period when those colonies experienced explosive growth and prosperity amidst a highly hostile environment. Yet the militias have such a poor reputation. Normally in such hostile conditions, a poorly defended society does not prosper. Yet clearly America prospered. This incongruity has always bothered me. I knew the militias, being amateurs, had panics, made mistakes, and failed at times. But these failures have come to unjustly define them. This work attempts to correct this. Quite simply, they deserve to be remembered accurately. So I will call particular attention to their successes, successes that have received far too little recognition. I will not ignore their failures, but you must excuse me if we do not dwell on them, all too many have done so. My only hope is that this work accords them the honor to which their service and sacrifices entitles them.

To understand how good or bad the militias were and why, we must look at their wars. Wars are complex creatures. They can be studied on many levels and often have been. One level concerns the interaction of the opposing generals’ decisions, Rommel and Patton, Grant and Lee, Washington and Howe. Another method involves the clash of armies, a chronological recounting of combat as each army seeks to dominate and crush the other. Ever read Eisenhower’sCrusade in Europe or Von Manstein’sLost Victories? Another way to study a conflict is from the soldiers’ eyes. Anderson’sA People’s Army or Forrest’sSoldiers of the French Revolution are great examples of this. Each level of historical study uncovers valid truth about the conflicts studied, but often not the same truths. Frequently, a truth is unclear at one level but quite prominent at another. Skilled, ambitious authors have penned multi-level studies. For example, Scheer and Rankin’sRebels and Redcoats manages a fine synthesis of the personal level and the clash of armies. From this one book you can learn a lot about our Revolution and the men who fought it.

One of the finest works I have read is David Chandler’sThe Campaigns of Napoleon. Chandler examines the French Revolution and Napoleon’s Wars on several different levels. One is the institutional level. He sees the Napoleonic Wars as a clash between a newly reorganized French Army and Napoleonic tactical system arrayed against other European powers that used military institutions and war fighting methods developed 50 years previously. Chandler’s thesis is that an improved and modernized institution translated into higher French Army combat effectiveness and was a major reason for their successes. It is this level or perspective we look at. We will examine how the exigencies of combat against, first Indians and then their French and Spanish allies, slowly transformed the Plymouth and Jamestown Trainbandsmen into the Revolutionary militias. We will see how militia combat experience, or lack thereof, influenced organizational adaptation and effectiveness over the colonial period. This level of study is somewhat under-examined. It is also a level at which certain truths are apparent that are not readily discernable at other levels.

Every war is a clash between two military institutions. Each is a complex product of its’ constituent peoples’ culture and government, its’ interaction and experience against opponents, and the parent civilization’s technological inheritance. These factors convey different strengths and weaknesses to the military institution. In wars between culturally similar nations, the institutional gulf is usually small. In clashes between civilizations, this gulf is often quite large. In such cases, their large dissimilarity prevents both from being fully effective against one another. Successes mix with failures, sometimes large failures. These failures s