Militia Movements

Prerevolutionary Militia

In Arms and Armor in Colonial America, Peterson documented the continual shipments of arms which London sent out to the militia companies, set up as quickly as the new colonies or plantations were established. The Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock, who settled Massachusetts in 1620, as Peterson recorded, had only “small guns of the minion and saker class” to defend against Indians and possible attacks from the French north in New France, modern-day Canada. The militia movement grew in sophistication as the colonies developed. Douglas Edward Leach noted, “as early as 1639, the colony of Massachusetts had been able to hold a training session for two regiments lasting the whole day.” With the beginning of the wars with France, King William's War in 1689, the colonial militias faced another direct threat as the French from New France sought to eradicate the English colonies with the aid of the Iroquois tribe and the tribes from the Great Lakes. During the same time, the Spanish in the south did the same with their allies among the southern tribes. James Oglethorpe settled Georgia with districts and towns in 1732 to provide a buffer for the more prosperous Carolina colonies. The nexus of Spanish power in the south at this time was Castillo de San Marcos at St. Augustine in Florida, dating from 1565 as the oldest permanent European city in the present United States.

As the long struggle with the French continued, the colonial regiments, with so little manpower coming from England, began to evolve into professional regiments. Indeed, as American historian Francis Parkman wrote in Montcalm and Wolfe, it was the Virginia troops under Colonel George Washington who began the last of the French wars, the French and Indian War (1756–63). In May 1754, in what is now western Pennsylvania, Washington fought a skirmish with the French and Native Americans under Ensign Coulon de Jumonville, who was killed. As Parkman commented, “this obscure skirmish began the war that would set the world on fire.” In July of the following year, Washington and his colonial Virginia troops helped cover the retreat of the regular British battalions under General Edward Braddock, formerly of King George II's Second Regiment of Foot Guards, the Coldstream Guards. Another famous figure in the history of the American militia movement, Daniel Boone, made his first appearance in the Braddock campaign in Pennsylvania. (Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin organized the transportation for the campaign.)

It is from the French and Indian War that the rift between the regular soldiers from Great Britain and the colonial, or provincial, troops can be dated. However, throughout the war, the British regulars were desperately dependent on the troops that the colonies could furnish in the struggle with the French. The colonial troops proved themselves at the Battle of Lake George (New York) in September 1755 when New York troops under Sir William Johnson, the superintendent for Indian Affairs (with his Native American allies), decimated regular French troops under Major General Ludwig Augustus, Baron von Dieskau, and French Canadian militia, and allied natives. The fact that, two months after Braddock's defeat, a force made up entirely of American militia had turned back a major French invasion was not lost on the English colonists. At the same time, it established the belief that militia, well trained and led, could stand against any regulars.

...