The Barracks
Law & Order?
By 1778, British forces controlled large swaths of New Jersey, all of Staten and Long Islands, areas of upstate New York, slivers of Maryland, and parts of Delaware and southeastern Pennsylvania. They launched incursions into Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. By 1780, they controlled virtually all of Georgia and South Carolina, as well as outposts in North Carolina and Virginia. Yet the war continued, on the battlefield and on the homefront.
Unable to meet the problems of economic welfare, the British could not vanquish the danger of rebel violence either, both in the mainland country and in the farms surrounding the urban ports they controlled. That was also true, most devastatingly in New York, the only enduring British stronghold. Staten Islanders were “terrorized daily” by Patriots (and Loyalists), and the experience was similar in Westchester, eastern New Jersey, and Long Island. Parliament had vowed to restore the rule of law. But it only deteriorated. And now it sometimes included British and Hessian soldiers, who contributed to the plunder and black market corruption, which included kidnapping, rape, and murder. As one English official noted, “Britain’s armies made more rebels than they found.”
British Regulars
Britain’s soldiers fared poorly, too, however. Here at the upper Barracks, 300 to 500 regulars were housed, 20 apiece in rooms measuring 21 square feet — including wives and children, surviving on half and quarter rations. Most other regulars were put in bivouacs on the waterfront, earthen huts or “cantonments” in Lispenard’s Meadow (Tribeca) and upper Manhattan, as well as tents, homes, churches, or warehouses across the city. Hundreds, often thousands, were stationed at Bedford, Flushing, Newtown, Jamaica, Oyster Bay, Hempstead, and other villages in Long Island, as well as ferries, bridges, and wharves in the larger region, to control movement. New York was probably the most fortified area on the continent, and rarely did it contain less than 10,000 soldiers.
Officers praised the diligence and valor of their rank-and-file. But many soldiers were disillusioned, escaping into alcohol from the boredom and the brutality. Concern over the drunkenness, gambling, and violence found in dram and grog shops (now often run by soldiers’ wives) remained pervasive. But like officers, soldiers frequently dueled and brawled in the street while completely sober. Struggling on meager rations, they often stole food and wood from locals. Excluded from the higher corps’ regular dinners, teas, and galas, they sought out music and dancing with poor New Yorkers (White and Black), played cards in waterfront taverns, and frequented the Holy Ground, where the British shipped, by one account, over 3,000 women from Liverpool’s slums to serve as prostitutes. When sick or wounded, they were stuffed into “hospitals,” often staffed by amateur nurses. Their huts and tents were surrounded by contaminated waters and dried wells, contributing to high rates of disease. While aristocrats or merchants purchased their officer commissions at prices ranging from just under half to over $1 million (inflation-adjusted), ensigns made just under $20,000. And with the crunch on food and fuel, British officers frequently had to lower their rations, too. Over time, they began limiting the number of women and children allowed to encamp with the men as well. Many came only to die in unmarked graves, thousands of miles from home.
No image of the Upper Barracks exists, but the one in New Jersey above is close in design. Below you can gain a sense of its breadth.
John Ward Dunsmore, Hut Camp of the 17th Regiment of Foot, Inwood Hill, New York City (1915), New-York Historical Society.
Still, for all its hierarchy, violence, and squalor, military life was as good, sometimes better, than working life in Britain. The average man was thirty, with ten years of service: a “career soldier” by the standards of the day. Many enlisted from the trades (shoemakers and coopers, bakers and blacksmiths, barbers and bricklayers). And they were ethnically diverse: not just English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh, but Nova Scotian, Swedish, Danish, Austrian, Swiss, Dutch, Polish, even the odd American. The “Hessians,” soldiers recruited from Germanic states, made up a third of the “British” force by the end, 30,000.
The Irish were particularly noteworthy. This group made up a third of the Britain’s North American military during the Seven Years War, and that share only increased during the Revolution. The number included many Catholics, even though the Anglo-Irish, 10 percent of the population, controlled 90 percent of Ireland’s land. Generals Howe and Clinton repeatedly offered “free and unlimited” pardons to rebel deserters and European subjects, drawing many Irish “felons.”
With more than 300,000 Irish in North America, the group had a major impact on the war. Six of the rebel generals hailed from the British colony, including John Sullivan and Richard Montgomery. In many states, over half of Washington’s army were recent immigrants, but none more than the Irish. Leaders in both the English and Irish parliaments espoused the rebel cause — most famously Edmund Burke, who also represented the New York colony during the Imperial Crisis.
The Family that Fights Together, Stays Together
Because New York was the headquarters of the British military, hundreds if not thousands of these camp followers resided in the city during the war. Wives, most often relying on their husbands’ income, frequently lived in barracks and huts alongside other men. But soldiers’ families also required shelter, food, and fuel. To officials’ constant frustration, mothers sometimes commandeered private residences for themselves and their children. On occasion, British generals suggested banishing them altogether from the city. But they also performed vital military functions, like laundry or nursing. And expulsion risked angering the soldiers.
The King's Men: Understanding the British Generals
Although rebels spent most of the war running away from the Redcoats, British military leaders were also demoralized by the end. Officers lived in the former homes of elite revolutionaries, received private medical attention, and enjoyed good living. They indulged in a lavish party scene that included theater, parades, balls, and officers’ and gentlemen’s clubs, which ultimately may have squandered Britain’s soft power (the number of recruits and loyalty oaths steadily dwindled). But as veterans of many successful campaigns, they also expected swift victory in North America, like most in Europe. Yet victory was in doubt until the end.
By measure of strength and experience, the British should have won, easily. Blamed until recently for losing the North American colonies (on both sides of the Atlantic), their military leaders have long been depicted as incompetent and corrupt aristocrats, purchasing their ranks, deploying weak strategy, and championing unbridled monarchy. But, as with the Loyalists, their politics were not greatly dissimilar from the rebels. General Howe echoed Edmund Burke, one of the most formidable advocates of colonial rights in Parliament, who forcefully rejected “involving the empire in all the horrors of civil war.” Under Howe’s command, the British continually acted with restraint in North America, hoping that leniency might win back hearts and minds. He and other leaders also shifted military tactics adroitly. They were, after all, veterans and students of the men who had built the largest empire since Genghis Kahn.
The real problem was less ideological or individual. British officers struggled with a fragmentary military bureaucracy, like the rebels. But they had far greater logistical challenges, stranded 3,000 miles away from their supply chain, with a 2-4 month voyage in either direction.
Nature made scheduling and coordination virtually impossible. Howe and his successors also faced tougher budgeting constraints than Washington, with 27 garrisons to supply in North America. Plus, there was mounting danger of revolution in other colonies, particularly Ireland, and invasion by naval-imperial rivals close to home, like France or Spain.
One War Among Many: The Revolution in Global Perspective
Britain had long relied on partners for its imperial expansion, and like the rebels they depended on foreign powers to win. New York thus remained extraordinarily diverse amid the Occupation. It was now common to find an even larger variety of people in the city, a multinational contingent of diplomats and servants, alongside the migrants and the diversity of Britain’s own army.
But England had alienated its main ally, Prussia, during the mid-1700s. And by the early 1780s, it was alone — more alone, historian Andrew O’Shaughnessy writes, than it would be until World War II. The Barracks is thus a fitting place to also note the geopolitical relevance of the North American rebellion for the British. In brief, once the French and Spanish and Dutch joined the rebels, the war expanded dramatically for London. They began fighting rivals to defend British colonies in the West Indies, the Mediterranean, west Africa, and India — where the last battle of the “American” Revolution was fought. The cost of the war doubled England’s already severe deficit, and Parliament now found itself stretched thin for money and manpower on several continents. Such challenges had bedeviled empires since ancient times: direct territorial control is risky, counterinsurgencies are draining, competitors always stand waiting. The British lost Minorca and several islands in the West Indies during the war, and King George III feared the US example would inspire other colonies to rebel and “annihilate the empire.” The loss of its greatest share of foreign territory prompted a darker, more illiberal set of policies, in line with the general backlash in Europe over this Age of Democratic Revolution.
Thomas Colley’s “The Belligerent Plenipo’s,” published in London circa 1782, depicts America (the Native on the right) celebrating its victory: half the British empire. Its allies, the French, Dutch, and Spanish empires, complain of not getting just compensation for their indispensable aid (represented by the missing body parts at the feet of King George III). Ireland, the angel floating in the clouds, now demands its own freedom.
-
For studies of British military strategy, see Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire (Yale University Press, 2013); David Smith, William Howe and the American War of Independence (Bloomsbury, 2016); Stanley Weintraub, Iron Tears: America’s Battle for Freedom, Britain’s Quagmire: 1775-1783 (Free Press, 2005); George Daughan, Revolution on the Hudson: New York City and the Hudson River Valley in the American War of Independence (W.W. Norton, 2016).
For more information about the German-speaking British military forces, see Friederike Baer, Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War (Oxford University Press, 2022).
For more about the makeup and experiences of members of the British military, see John Ferling, Almost A Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence (Oxford University Press, 2007); Don Hagist, Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution (Westholme Press, 2020); Christopher Hibbert, Redcoats and Rebels: The American Revolution Through British Eyes (W.W. Norton, 1990); Sylvia R. Frey, The British Soldier in America: A Social History of Military Life in the Revolutionary Period (University of Texas Press, 1981).
The topic of camp followers can reveal much about military logistics, day-to-day soldiering, and family life in wartime North America – all of which receive attention in Holly Mayer, Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community During the American Revolution (University of South Carolina Press, 1996).
For studies of struggles over land and indigenous rights, see Thomas Humphrey, Land and Liberty: Hudson Valley Riots in the Age of Revolution (Northern Illinois University Press, 2004); Oscar Handlin and Irving Mark, “Chief Daniel Nimham v. Roger Morris, Beverly Robinson, and Philip Philipse - An Indian Land Case in Colonial New York, 1765-1767,” Ethnohistory 11, no. 3 (1964);
For information about different indigenous peoples and the various of strategies and actions they pursued as the British colonial rebellion escalated into a revolutionary war for independence, Colin Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities, (Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 3; Bryan Rindfleisch, “The Stockbridge-Mohican Community, 1775-1783,” Journal of the American Revolution, February 3, 2016, https://allthingsliberty.com/2016/02/the-stockbridge-mohican-community-1775-1783/; Maeve Kane, “‘She Did Not Open Her Mouth Further’: Haudenosaunee Women as Military and Political Targets during and after the American Revolution,” in Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World, ed. Barbara B. Oberg (University of Virginia Press, 2019), 83–102.