The Honor of Ordinary Men

Editors’ note: This excerpt is adapted from  Freedom: The Enduring Importance of the American Revolution, by Jack D. Warren, Jr., available now from Lyons Press.

From its winter quarters in Morristown, New Jersey, George Washington’s army kept watch over the British army in New York City. The character of the war was changing, and with it the way Washington understood the men under his command. The martial enthusiasm that had led thousands of young men to enlist in the Continental Army and state regiments in the first year of the war was gone. Many of the men were gone, too—killed, grievously wounded, or captured.

The captured men had been herded into makeshift prisons in and around New York City. They had been crowded into sugar houses—large buildings where merchants had stored molasses and sugar shipped from the West Indies. The British fed them on rotten salt meat and ship’s biscuits infested with insects and ignored their suffering. British soldiers were not inclined to treat traitors to the king like prisoners of war. They resisted the temptation to hang them only because the rebels held British prisoners, and once the hanging began there might be no end to it. When the sugar houses were full the British shoved their prisoners into hulks—rotting, dismasted ships moored in a stagnant backwater in the East River. The prisoners packed into HMS Jersey and the other hulks listing off Brooklyn starved in a city where food was abundant, their miserable lives punctuated by the daily ritual, in summer’s heat and winter’s cold, of burying their dead comrades in shallow graves scooped from the stinking mud of Wallabout Bay.

In the winter quarters at Morristown, the ranks were thin. Many men whose enlistments had expired were gone. Some reenlisted in the late spring, after crops were planted, but others had had enough of war. Those who remained were housed in drafty cabins and poorly fed, not because food was scarce but because the army had not developed a reliable system for getting food to them. Men who had gone to war in the spring and summer of 1776 in bright new uniforms had worn them to rags. Yet they faced their task with grim determination.

George Washington’s view of them was changing. During the war’s first year and more, Washington had assumed that ordinary men enlisted in the army for pay and had to be subjected to stern discipline to keep them to their duty. Discipline, he was certain, was the essential characteristic of a successful army. But most his men were short-term recruits who would decline to reenlist if they were subjected to corporal punishment, and others might simply desert—their spirit of personal independence and love of liberty overwhelming their unselfish commitment to the cause.

A revolution predicated on the idea that all men are created equal and possess certain inalienable rights, including rights to life and liberty, was hard pressed to justify executing men for desertion or imposing savage punishments for infractions of military discipline, yet the pragmatic Washington needed men who would follow orders without question and who would sacrifice their lives at his command. The war, he was convinced, could not be won otherwise.

The mutually exclusive demands of personal liberty and military discipline were difficult to reconcile. Washington did so by appealing to the idea of honor. In the bleak winter of 1776, when the enlistments of most of his soldiers were about to expire, Washington addressed them in a way that revealed a Revolutionary shift in his thinking. “My brave fellows,” he began, “you have done all I asked you to do, and more than could be reasonably expected; but your country is at stake, your wives, your houses, and all that you hold dear. . . . If you will consent to stay one month longer, you will render that service to the cause of liberty, and to your country, which you can probably never do under any other circumstances.” When the men stepped forward to volunteer an officer asked Washington if they should be formally enrolled. “No,” Washington replied, “men who will volunteer in such a case as this, need no enrollment to keep them to their duty.”

The force Washington believed would “keep them to their duty” was honor—a personal commitment to moral and ethical conduct, even at the expense of selfish interests. Honor was traditionally regarded as an attribute of gentility, on the entirely practical grounds that ordinary people could not afford to set aside their selfish interests for the good of others. They had to struggle simply to survive or to provide for their families and could not be expected to sacrifice their interests for any larger community. By contrast, gentlemen—using that term in the pre-modern sense to refer to men of sufficient means that they could afford to set pecuniary interests aside and of sufficient education or understanding to distinguish the public good from private interests—could be motivated by honor. Officers were traditionally drawn from the aristocracy and the gentry because these groups were assumed to be motivated by honor. Commanding the Continental Army in his failed defense of New York and the retreat through New Jersey convinced Washington that the ordinary soldiers who reenlisted in that crisis were motivated by honor as surely as any officer.

The idea that ordinary men were motivated by honor was tested every day in the sugar houses and the prison hulks where the British offered prisoners the possibility of relief if they would join His Majesty’s navy or enlist in His Majesty’s army. Many agreed, if only to escape torment—how many will never be known—but many thousands more refused. They had nothing left but life and honor, and they refused to sacrifice their honor to save their lives. The honor of ordinary Americans—despite the suffering that continued as long as the war, despite the failures of their leaders, and despite the injustice and cruelty they endured—made victory possible. Without it, America would not be free.

Danbury

As spring came, Washington knew that the British would renew their efforts to defeat his army and win the war. Benjamin Franklin had arrived in Paris on his mission to persuade the French to join the war as an ally of the United States. A successful defense might be enough to draw the French into the war.

That defense depended on many things, not least keeping the army supplied, which was a constant challenge for George Washington and his officers as well as for the Continental Congress. Much of the food and other supplies Washington’s army used were purchased in Connecticut and adjacent areas of New England and stockpiled in Danbury, in the western part of the state, then brought by wagon across the Hudson and southwest to the army encampment at Morristown.

In April, Howe sent a force of some 1,900 men to destroy the supplies stored in Danbury. The Royal Navy landed the raiders on the Connecticut coast from which they marched north toward Danbury, twenty-five miles away. When the British reached Danbury they burned several thousand barrels of beef, pork, and flour, along with thousands of shoes, tents, and other supplies, as well as the wagons needed to haul them to Washington’s army. American troops entered Danbury just as the British and Hessians left, too late to save the supplies or the town. Joseph Plumb Martin, a Continental soldier, later remembered that “the town had been laid in ashes, a number of the inhabitants murdered and cast into their burning houses, because they had presumed to defend their persons and property . . . . I saw the inhabitants, after the fire was out, endeavoring to find the burnt bones of their relatives amongst the rubbish of their demolished houses.”

Scenes like this were repeated wherever the war went, and as the war stretched on for years it reached and scarred communities and families from Maine to the Florida frontier, leaving behind destruction and sadness and bitter anger. In Britain men might imagine that reconciliation was still possible, but that was already a fantasy, and every day the war continued, obstinate and bloody, the more a fantasy it became.

As the British and Hessians marched away, Continental troops and Connecticut militia converged on them, attacking their rear guard three miles south of Danbury and then engaging the enemy in a running battle all the way to the coast, with Americans led by Benedict Arnold firing on the marching column, retreating. Most of the British—many had not slept for three days, and some had fallen on the road from exhaustion—managed to escape to their transports. About 150 of them were wounded, killed, or captured. The British never attempted another inland raid of the kind.

Among the American dead was twenty-five-year-old Samuel Elmer, Jr. A lieutenant on furlough when the Danbury Alarm sounded, he rode south and volunteered for service. In the final moments of the battle he was killed rallying his men along a stone wall. He was buried where he fell. His grief-stricken father later moved Samuel’s body to a local burying ground, and placed a gravestone there with this inscription, expressing the hope that his son’s sacrifice would be remembered:

Lieutenant Samuel Elmer,

son of Col Samuel Elmer of Sharon,

was killed at Fairfield,

fighting for the liberties of his country,

April 28, 1777 in the 25th year of his Age.

Our youthful Hero bold in Arms

His Country’s cause his bosom warms

To have her right Fond to Engage

And Guard her from a Tyrant’s rage

Flies to ye Field of Blood & Death

And gloriously resigns his Breath 

America is free because Samuel Elmer, Jr., and many other young men like him gave their lives to make it free.

“Thus was I, a slave . . . fighting for liberty”

Among the soldiers in action that day was Jeffrey Brace, an enslaved man who had just enlisted in the Connecticut Continental Line. We know his story because in 1810 an idealistic young lawyer helped him write his memoirs—the story of a free African forced into slavery who fought in the Revolutionary War and lived the rest of his life as a free man. He had been born in what is now Mali in about 1742. Taken by slave traders when he was about sixteen, he survived the brutality, starvation, and violence of the Middle Passage and the cruelty of slave brokers in the British island colony of Barbados. After two months spent imprisoned in a filthy warehouse he later called a “house of subjection,” he was sold for service on a privateer—a privately owned ship fitted with cannons to attack enemy merchant ships during the French and Indian War.

He proved to be a brave privateer—his shipmates named him Jeffrey, after British general Jeffrey Amherst—but when the war ended his enslaver had no further use for him and he was sold as a slave to a Connecticut man who forced him to work outside in winter with neither coat nor shoes and beat him mercilessly for imagined wrongs. A neighbor was so appalled that he took Jeffrey in and threatened to lodge a criminal complaint against his enslaver if he interfered. After a brief respite, Jeffrey was passed from one enslaver to another, enduring more brutality. Finally in 1768 he landed in the house of an elderly widow, Mary Stiles, where he did domestic chores. She taught him to read and introduced him to the Bible. He committed long sections of it to memory and could recite them for the rest of his life. When she died, Jeffrey—then called Jeffrey Stiles—passed to her son, Benjamin Stiles.

By 1775 he had been in New England for more than a decade, but his memoir makes no mention of colonial resistance to British regulation and taxation, the military occupation of Boston, nor any of the other events leading to the war for independence. Yet when the opportunity presented itself, Jeffrey enlisted in the Sixth Regiment of the Connecticut Continental Line. In his words, he “entered the banners of freedom . . . to liberate freemen, my tyrants.”

Why did he enlist? He did not say, but we can assume that Benjamin Stiles agreed to free him if he served in the Continental Army. Some New England enslavers agreed to free their slaves in exchange for all or part of their military wages—essentially permitting the enslaved to purchase their freedom. Others agreed to free slaves who entered the army as a contribution to the Revolutionary cause. Still others did so because they realized that slavery was inconsistent with the principles of the Revolution. Rachel Johnson of Wallingford freed Dolly in 1778, insisting that “I believe all mankind should be free.” Abijah Holbrook of Torrington explained that “all mankind by nature are entitled to equal liberty and freedom” when he freed Jacob and Ginne Prince.

Jeffrey had been with his regiment no more than a few weeks when they pursued the British and Hessians out of Danbury. “We beat them back,” Jeffrey said. “The fight was continued all day, and the victory was sometimes doubtful.” At thirty-five he was one of the oldest men in the regiment and one of the few who had experience in battle. After the fighting he was assigned to the regiment’s light infantry company, a select group of skilled soldiers distinguished for their courage, height (“I then wanted but a quarter of an inch of being six feet three inches,” he wrote) and athletic ability. The light infantry wore distinctive leather helmets and were sometimes referred to, as they are in Jeffrey’s memoir, as “leather caps.” He remained in the light infantry for the rest of the war. “Thus was I,” he concluded, “a slave, for five years fighting for liberty.”

Every soldier in the Continental Army had his own story—his own reasons for fighting and his own hopes for the future. America is free because of their sacrifices and their courage. Jeffrey said that his abusers had beaten him in order to make him docile and obedient, because they believed that “the thought of liberty must never be suffered to contaminate itself in a negro’s mind.” The thought of liberty had never left his mind. When the Continental Army disbanded in 1783, Jeffrey secured his freedom. He began calling himself Jeffrey Brace, adopting an Americanized version of his African name. For the first time in decades, he wrote, he “enjoyed the pleasures of a freeman; my food was sweet, my labor pleasure.” He settled in Vermont, where the new state constitution called for the gradual abolition of slavery, acquired land, and raised a family. His life was never easy. Even on the New England frontier, he could not escape bigotry and exploitation. But for him, as for many others, the American Revolution was a turning point between slavery and freedom. America is free because enslaved men like Jeffrey Brace fought, and many died, to make it so.

Jack D. Warren, Jr. is a native of Washington, DC, whose work focuses on the enduring achievements of the American Revolution. He served on the faculty of the University of Virginia, where he was an editor of The Papers of George Washington. He was subsequently executive director of The Society of the Cincinnati and the founding director of The American Revolution Institute. His books include The Presidency of George Washington and America’s First Veterans. He and his wife, Janet, live in Alexandria, Virginia.