Shy

A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence. By John Shy (Revised ed., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990)

John Shy’s A People Numerous and Armed offers twelve essays on the American Revolution focusing on the intersection of military and social forces. Originally published in 1976, Shy’s work anthology represents a work in the vanguard of the New Military History, “preaching a new perspective on war” emphasizing that “war changes society, that strategy and military policy are aspects of politics, that the incidence of military service reflects and affects social structure, that the events and patterns of armed struggle help to shape the way people think about themselves and others, and so on…” (2).

A People Numerous and Armed reflects its Vietnam Era origins, a fact Shy readily admits in his new preface. Having witnessed the challenges America faced in combating a revolutionary movement in Southeast Asia, Shy in many of his essays considers the idea of the American Revolution as a revolutionary struggle and the different challenges incumbent on both Britain and the fledgling United States. In an essay on troublesome American general Charles Lee, Shy considers Patriot options for waging the war, fielding a conventional, professional army (favored by Washington) versus heavy reliance on militia and unconventional tactics (favored by Lee). Shy observes Lee’s alternative would certainly have confounded the British, but its inability to contest British incursions and provide dramatic victories would likely have frustrated the American populace. Similarly, Shy examines Britain’s conundrum over its policy toward that populace, whether to wage a limited war or employ a more “hard hand of war” approach. The Southern Campaign late in the war makes a number of appearances throughout the essays and takes center stage in “British Strategy for Pacifying the Southern Colonies, 1778-1781.” Shy details how British commanders targeted the South, hoping to find a soft underbelly of the rebellion which, once captured, could be garrisoned by Loyalist militia. Such a strategy was complicated by the readiness of Loyalists and hard-minded officers like Tarleton to visit “terrorism” on civilians and thus stir up anti-British sentiment.

Shy offers thoroughly researched, thought provoking essays which reflect well on military history’s contribution to and compatibility with political and social history. A People Numerous and Armed represents a significant example of the New Military History in action. Shy in his new preface admits his essays “are for the most part suggestive and impressionistic” (ix), and to this it might be added that they are generally not satisfactorily thesis-driven. Well-written narrative can make for good history, but Shy’s stand-alone essays, while book-ended by arguments, sometimes suffer for lack of strong argumentation throughout. Shy thoughtfully contributes to debates amongst historians of the Revolution, such as his counterpoint to scholars who claim the war was decided solely by French intervention. He allows that without the French “the Revolution could not possibly have ended when it did and in the way in did” but pointedly argues, “American society itself almost guaranteed the military outcome and powerfully affected the political outcome” (131). Shy also offers a counterbalance to those historians who prefer to harp on the inadequacies of the militia, correctly arguing that America’s armed citizenry represented a formidable obstacle to British pacification. In defending the militia, however, Shy errs on the side of slighting Continental soldiers, over generalizing when he claims the Continental army “never won a battle in the open field” (127). The role of the militia is a consistent theme throughout Shy’s essay, including what is perhaps the best of the twelve: “Hearts and Minds in the Revolution: The Case of ‘Long Bill’ Scott and Peterborough, New Hampshire.” Shy takes the example Scott, a wounded officer who told his British captors after Bunker Hill that he had enlisted not out of political differences with Britain but out of envy that neighbors no better than himself were receiving commissions. Shy discovers this apathetic soldier escaped British captivity twice to go on and become part of the core of Patriot soldiers who kept up the American cause alive. In relating his tale, Shy highlights how Britain managed to antagonize and thereby galvanize more Americans the longer the war dragged on and how Patriot militia managed to police their communities and thus keep American territory de facto Patriot when not actively occupied by Crown forces.

A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence. By John Shy. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1990.

A People Numerous and Armed provides a collection of John Shy’s essays pertaining to the American Revolution. The author poses a thesis rooted in “new” military history. According to Shy, “This book . . . [proposes] a new perspective . . . that war changes society, that strategy and military policy are aspects of politics, that the incidence of military service reflects and affects social structure, [and] that the events and patterns of armed struggle help to shape the way people think about themselves and others (p. x). In addition, Shy believes that the war was revolutionary because it heavily relied upon a popular and voluntary military service (p. xii).

Although the major thesis revolves around the war’s impact on society (and vise versa) several smaller themes connect the essays. The author believes that the legally armed colonial population had specific effects. According to Shy, “American politics was a politics of consent, and the distribution of weaponry had done more than anything else to produce that political situation” (p. xii). Furthermore, Shy emphasizes the impact of perception on historians’ decisions and actions (p. xii).

The essays address topics such as: the colonial militia, Thomas Gage, American strategy, and Loyalists. For the purpose of this review, select essays will be commented upon. Shy’s best essay is, “American Strategy: Charles Lee and the Radical Alternative.” The author examines the political and military radicalism of General Charles Lee using the general’s private papers that have been published by the New York Historical Society.

The article culminates in Washington and Lee’s conflicting ideas with regards to appropriate American strategy (p.150). Washington advocated warfare rooted in traditional British linear tactics, however, Lee disagreed. According to Shy, “the need to maintain popular support by protecting people and property, and the need to keep a Continental army intact and united, had become conflicting demands on American strategy. It was obvious to Washington that, however painful the choice, the army was more important than the people . . . To Lee, it was not all that obvious. . . [Lee] stressed the . . . need for American warfare to fit the American genius . . . In short, Lee was proposing to a war waged along guerilla lines” (pp. 150-155).

Shy concludes that although Lee’s continuous undermining of Washington effectively ended his career; Lee still contributed to the revolution. Lee saw the Revolution as, “a fight by free men for their natural rights . . . [he] envisioned a popular war of mass resistance, a war based on military service as an obligation to citizenship” (p. 161). In addition, Lee believed that a guerilla war was more in keeping with American concepts of individuality. Washington, however, stressed that a war of bushwhacking would tear colonial society apart. Subsequent to this line of reasoning, he favored a militarily conservative war that utilized conventional strategy. This policy would spare American society and politics from the inevitable hardships of unconventional warfare. In sum, this essay is exemplar because it is well reasoned, well supported, and promotes Shy’s thesis – military events/institutions and society impact each other.

Essays such as, “Hearts and Minds in the American Revolution” are of mixed value. Shy’s essay examines the motivation behind colonial armed struggle (163). The author uses “Long Bill” Scott and the residents of Peterborough, New Hampshire as the case study for his investigation. While Shy’s essay supports his overall thesis, the details of the article are problematic. His thesis is that, “the revolutionary role of the men from Peterborough . . . is easily misunderstood and underestimated if we look at it only in terms of traditional military strategy and set-piece battles”(p.174). Unfortunately, the author fails to draw on overall conclusion. Although the reader learns that Scott initially fought for the Continentals in order to advance his social status, Shy neglects to isolate a general reason that prompted the majority of Americans to fight.

The Vietnam War influenced some of the author’s essays. This does not pose an immediate problem because Shy acknowledges his own political context, “We dare not argue that the American Revolutionary War was basically like modern revolutionary wars in Indochina and elsewhere” (p. 196). Yet, there are circumstances in which the author is overburdened by his contemporary world. For example, his final essay, “The American Military Experience,” seeks to establish a pattern that explains, “the American military experience with war, carrying the story down to the present, in order to explain . . . the terrible troubles of 1967” (p. 225). Thus, Shy uses hindsight when discussing nearly two hundred years of American military history.

Overall, Shy’s book is laudable. His war and society thesis is useful for those interested in the historiography of military history. In addition, historians who are interested in the military aspects of the American Revolution should consult Shy’s work.

A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence. By John Shy. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1990.

John Shy’s revised edition of A People Numerous and Armed is a change from the original book in the addition of three new essays and the removal of one original essay. Although he has made a few changes, his overall goal in this book remains the same in expressing that “war changes society, that strategy and military service reflects and affects social structure, that the events and patterns of armed struggle help to shape the way people think about themselves and others, and so on through a catalogue of specific ways in which the impact of armed force may be felt.” (p. 3)

The book consists of twelve chapters, or essays, written by Shy and published in various journals and books. In these essays he looks at such topics as the American Revolution today, the colonial militia, Henry Ellis and Thomas Pownall, Thomas Gage, American society, strategy, the legacy of the revolution and more. In his first essay he argues that the colonists did not win the war, but rather they managed to not lose it.

He moves on to look at the colonial militia in which he suggests that the early militia was complicated, it varied from province to province, and it changed through time because of military demands. The social differences between clustered population and scattered settlements, developed seaboard areas and the economically marginal frontier, and slave and non-slave societies were all reflected in military response.

He moves on to show British feelings in two essays. One essay on Henry Ellis and Thomas Pownwell, both of whom had governed in the colonies, compares Ellis’s belief in the military weakness of the colonists and the ludicrousness of their grievances to Pownwell’s belief that the revolution could be prevented with economic interdependency. He also looks at commander in chief of the British Army Thomas Gage and how he gave shape to the beginning of the Revolution. In the years that followed British policy was never able to overcome this bad beginning.

He looks at the defining characteristics of American society on the eve of the Revolution and the impact that this society had on the war. He moves on to take a look at Charles Lee and his life and views as a military radical, he does so with no attempt to pass judgment. The loyalists are looked at in New York as well as the strategy of the British to use them in the southern colonies. It explores the British desire to arm those loyalists in the south.

Readers seeking a narrative on the Revolutionary War should look elsewhere. Rather this book looks at several particular different aspects of the war. The absence of a thesis in this book proves its only weakness, if it can be called that. Each chapter is a separate essay, the subject of one does not carry into the next, making it a little more difficult to follow. This said, it is an excellent book examining many different facets of the American Revolution in which the author succeeds in creating a better understanding of “what caused it to what it produced.”

A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence. By Shy, John. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

John Shy, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, organized this book from a collection of papers he has written over a fifteen-year span. Though this book is a series of loosely related essays about the American War for Independence, “the message is that war changes society, that strategy and military policy are aspects of politics, that the incidence of military service reflects and affects social structure, that the events and patterns of armed struggle help to shape the way people think about themselves and others, and so on through a catalogue of specific ways in which the impact of armed force maybe felt (p. x).” In other words, Shy is trying to make a point that social historians should not ignore military history. Each group of historians can utilize aspects of the other’s research to enrich its works.

The author looks at very specific issues about the American Revolution. Some of the different topics include the American Revolution today, colonial militia, British imperial possibilities, Thomas Gage, the historian Lawrence Gipson, Charles Lee, the hearts and minds of the colonials, Loyalists, the question of whether the war was revolutionary, and the American military experience for all the wars in which the United States has participated. Being an expert on the colonial militia, many of these chapters explore some aspects of the military organization. In the second chapter, Shy provides a new look at the militia. He examines the differences between militia organizations regionally and through time. Regionally, militia units differed based on the size of the border to the frontier of their state. Those, like New York, with smaller boundaries had units that were more effective because they had less to defend compared to Virginia, which had a large border to protect. In addition, he discovered that initially every male of military age served in the militia, regardless of social status. As time passed the ranks became composed mainly of the lower classes and vagabonds.

Some of the chapters provide a British point of view of the period before the war. One chapter looks at how two completely different English governors, Henry Ellis and Thomas Pownall, viewed the coming of the war and how they should deal with the social unrest to prevent a rebellion. Ellis believed that military control would produce harmony while Pownall wanted to implement economic interdependency to prevent conflict. Another chapter that presents the British point of view is about Thomas Gage, the British military commander of the colonies. Gage shaped the early part of the American Revolution through his mismanagement of the army, his detachment from the population, and his personal demeanor.

Shy does not focus exclusively on the British point of view, and devotes several chapters to the American standpoint. The author provides a chapter devoted to understanding the life of, and not judging, Charles Lee. This chapter proved very interesting because it showed how close Washington came to losing command of the Continental Army to Lee. Another excellent chapter explored the hearts and minds of the Americans in the war. Shy compares the devotion to the cause and the reasons why men fought between the hardcore soldiers who served for most of the duration of the war to those who participated only a fraction of the time. These chapters from the American viewpoint help to counter those presented from the British standpoint.

Overall, Shy provides a well-balanced book detailing specific subjects of the American Revolution. He presents both the British and the American point of view. He also includes throughout the book examples of how the times in which historians write influence the works that they produced. Before each chapter he offers a short paragraph describing the circumstance and the point of time when each of the chapters was written. A good example from the book is chapter nine. When Shy wrote this paper during Vietnam he attempted to answer one question: Was the American War for Independence truly revolutionary? Thus, he was comparing the North Vietnamese fight for revolution to the American fight for independence.

If there are weaknesses in the book, they are the absence of one truly unifying thesis of the book and that the author asks more questions than he answers. The first criticism, lack of a true thesis, makes the book difficult to read because the reader does not know which subject will appear next, and the book does not answer one unifying question. The latter of the criticisms is both bad and good. It is bad because it leaves the reader wondering about the questions that are not answered and it is good because it provides numerous ideas for areas and subjects that need to be studied and researched. Ending on a positive note, the author does bring the American Revolution into the larger picture of history. Overall, I would recommend specific chapters to undergraduates to read, the best one being chapter nine.

A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence. By John Shy. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Pp. xv, 304.)

The book consists of ten essays and lectures written by John Shy over a period of fifteen years highlighting his beliefs that war changes society, that strategy and military policy are aspects of politics, that the incidence of military service reflects and affects social structure, and that events and patterns of armed struggle help to shape the way people think about themselves and others. In the struggle for American independence he was concerned with how the Revolutionary War linked what caused it to what it produced. He argued that, as a protracted conflict that relied on popular support, the war was in itself a revolution and that military factors permeated both the origins and outcome of the revolution. Lesser themes included the effects of a legally armed population in ensuring that government could not rule by force alone, thereby making eighteenth century America politics more consent-based than it is now. Other concerns were the importance of perception to decision and action and discussions of patterns in British strategy, American military response, and the general military experience of the nation and individuals.

Within the limits of a review it is impossible to discuss ten chapters, especially when the narratives are not tightly connected. Therefore, I shall mention a few of the more salient points. Shy stated that after the war the colonies faced the real possibility of civil war and argued that conflict was avoided due to our relative affluence and to the character of the war experience in that its bitter fighting encouraged Americans to avoid further conflict by compromise. Although the traditional view held that colonial militias were rather static, Shy found that they differed considerably and that the differences favored the northern colonies. Clusters of towns in New England fostered a sense of community absent in the more rural areas of the south while the more prosperous seaboard also provided better equipped forces than the economically marginal frontier. In addition, non-slave areas were freer to commit their men to militias than plantation-based economies with a large population of slaves and, therefore, a corresponding insecurity that made it difficult for the planters to absent themselves from home.

Turning to the British military, Shy found that General Thomas Gage gave the war its beginning and its particular shape in that Gage was incompetent but had considerable influence with policy makers in England. Gage’s lack of understanding led Britain to the false premise that force was practical, while his lack of strength meant he could not tell the king anything he did not want to hear, therefore it lead him to support the erroneous proposition that Boston was the center of the revolt and could be isolated. Shy also studied loyalists in the lower Hudson Valley where one-fifth of the region remained supportive of the crown. He noted that Clinton refused to use loyalists as instruments of terror because of his ethics as a gentleman and because he knew that to do so would so damage the standing of the loyal colonists that they could never be a force in the community after the war. That decision paid large dividends because it contributed to the lack of widespread retaliation after the war, avoiding the bloodbath that would follow the French revolution. Shy found three stages to the British war effort, beginning with what was essentially a police action based on the judicial system to control Boston as the center of insurgency, then becoming a conventional war after 1775, before switching in 1778 to a comprehensive plan of pacification following the entry of France.

Shy really hit his stride when he discussed the military conflict as revolution. He agreed that the physical impact of the war was considerable, arguing that it increased the gap between rich and poor while also establishing that recovery from the physical effects of the conflict was rapid. He saw the real struggle as the battle for the support of citizens in that the ability of the colonies to obtain sufficient public support and form a conventional army made the cause more legitimate at home and in Europe. The commitment to traditional military maneuvers meant the colonies could avoid the negative perceptions that would have come with guerrilla tactics and made the war a conservative instrument that helped to establish a conservative nation. Shy found that local politics, especially public expressions, were often governed by which side was in control at the time but argued that militias were a large force in politicizing the people, thereby broadening the base of support for the rebellion. Shy claimed that militias had a “hot house effect” that sped the development of a national conscience and identity. Although never capable of committing large maneuvers, militias sapped the strength and resolve of the British by being a constant threat and by representing a seemingly endless supply of potential manpower. In the final chapter Shy argued that the Revolutionary War became the paradigm of how America saved itself from being like Europe and, along with nineteenth century wars, formed peculiar American ideas of warfare. Those ideas included a dual concept of security, an optimistic belief in our abilities, and an ambivalent attitude about the military. Shy saw continuity in twentieth century military thought that preserved much of the older response to military problems.

That which made Shy’s book exceptional also was its greatest weakness. The study represented a good introduction to the impact of the war on colonial society and that of society on the war. It presented a lot of ideas, concepts, and arguments in a short few pages, making the study a good primer or reference for background. Although Shy established some general themes that run throughout, the very nature of the essays as individual studies made it quite difficult to maintain a continuous line of thought. If you approached the study as an introduction to provide background for further reading, it succeeded admirably. The trick was not to look for that which was not there.