Quotes from Ray Raphael

The Scottish immigrants must have hated the English, who had persecuted them in their homeland. But they feared their new neighbors, the American rebels, even more.

What galled soldiers the most was the apparent well-being of those who chose not to fight. Although many civilians, like their counterparts in the army, suffered from shortages and high prices, the men who endured hunger, cold, and enemy fire on behalf of their country could not abide by those farmers and merchants who appeared to prosper

Whether tenant farmers seeking their own land or cultural minorities fearful of persecution, many groups of Americans, upon surveying the political landscape of the Revolution, sided with the British for reasons that had little or nothing to do with political philosophy. Articulate and vociferous Tories might preach on the moral virtues of loyalty and the corresponding evils of revolution, but many rank-and-file loyalists operated from concrete principles of survival and self-interest.

Americans in the 1770s were sharply divided according to religion, national origin, location, and even language. Scots Irish Presbyterians in North Carolina, English American Anglicans in Virginia, Dutch and German Mennonites in Pennsylvania, Scottish Highlander Catholics in New York, native-born Congregationalists in Massachusetts—each group had its own culture, its own beliefs, its own set of interests.

General Montgomery noted that the soldiers in his charge "carry the spirit of freedom into the field, and think for themselves," and that they even "felt it necessary to call a sort of town meeting" to plan any maneuvers. They demonstrated such a "leveling spirit, such an equality among them, that the officers have no authority," Montgomery reported. "The privates are all generals.

Since militia units in most cases elected their noncommissioned officers, the men who served in these positions could not be too harsh or arbitrary. Democracy in the army? A new and strange concept, indeed.

The rich and powerful often tried to discredit crowd action by calling attention to the lowerclass status of rioters, but they could not always suppress the will of the people so forcefully expressed. Riots, with their direct objectives and moral urgency, effectively offset the arbitrary power or inattention of harsh rulers.

In 1768, at Fort Stanwix in New York's Mohawk Valley, British Americans negotiated a treaty with the Six Nations which placed most of the Iroquois land off-limits to white settlement. In return, the Iroquois ceded all rights to the land south and east of the Ohio River—land which was inhabited by other groups of Native Americans, not themselves.

With the murder of Cornstalk, who had tried so hard to avoid war, most of the Shawnee joined the British and the western tribes to fight against white Americans.

The voices of moderation on both sides had been silenced. With no more opposition from within, American war hawks were free to do as they pleased.

When slave owners claimed they could not join the minutemen because they had to stay home to prevent insurrections, small farmers objected that service in the military was "calculated to exempt the gentlemen and throw the whole burthern on the poor" and that "the Rich wanted the Poor to fight for them, to defend there property, whilst they refused to fight for themselves."32

Military recruiters took who they could get. In those days, with roughly 50 percent of the population under sixteen and most of the men over twenty already supporting families, teenagers constituted a disproportionate share of the available males.

as draftees of any substance searched for substitutes to fill their slots, boys and men of little property who were willing to sell their time and bodies found no shortage of takers.

With the exception of officers, most of the long-term soldiers were boys and men of little wealth. Most could not even vote, whether because of their age or their lack of property.

Most men of means, whether their holdings were modest or substantial, felt they could not afford the time, nor did they wish to give up the assistance of their own sons or apprentices.

For the Cherokees, on the other hand, the 1776 raids by Dragging Canoe and other militants ended in disaster. The Cherokee people—old men, women, and children included—paid a heavy price because their young warriors were the first Native Americans to wage war against the fledgling United States.

When their patriotic neighbors came to the reservation to sign them up for the army, proud Catawbas seized on the opportunity to shine once again.

According to official records, exactly 3,000 free African Americans departed from New York to Canada in 1783—1,336 men, 914 women, and 750 children.

On one level, the Catawbas' participation in the Revolutionary War worked to their advantage. While most Native American nations had to face retribution for choosing the wrong side, the Catawbas fared somewhat better.

Unlike the tens of thousands of emigrants who were still enslaved and the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who remained in bondage in the new United States, a handful of free black émigrés left written accounts of their personal adventures.

The Indians, of course, had no recourse in the courts, where they were forbidden to testify; "[we are] not heard when we speak the truth," they protested.149 By 1826 scarcely 100 Catawbas remained in two small villages, and in 1840 the remaining Catawbas signed away what little was left of their land in return for a tract in North Carolina which they never received.

Although the American Revolution did not lead directly to the decline of the Catawbas, it did establish the domination of the United States from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, thereby creating the conditions under which all Native Americans—even those deemed "friendly"—would be overwhelmed in the end.

153 In return for their allegiance, the Crown kept the Chickasaws well supplied with guns and ammunition, which they used to hunt game and ward off enemies. This alliance continued during the American Revolution; throughout the war, British agents boasted of the "friendly disposition" of their faithful allies, the Chickasaws.154

To hunt, trap, and trade—or to fight the king's war: these were the choices open to Chickasaw males during the Revolution. Whereas many Native Americans were tugged in opposite directions by emissaries of the British and the patriots, the Chickasaws were pulled on the one hand by official agents of the king who urged them to take up the hatchet, and on the other by traders who preferred they venture into the woods in search of furs and pelts.