United States
Despite these cavils, Jennings has written a worthwhile book. Buy it. Read it. Profit from most of it.
C. B. CURREY
University of South Florida
HOLLY A. MA YER. Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community during the American Revolution.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 1996.
Pp. xiv, 307. $39.95.
Military historians have tended to neglect all about
warfare that does not concern strategy, operations, and
battles, and consequently have ignored the many other
ways that people are drawn into war and affected by it.
Holly A. Mayer sets out to redress this imbalance of
attention for the American Revolutionary War. She
began with an interest in camp followers, but research
soon turned her toward the broader concept of community. The term "camp followers" immediately suggests women, young and not so young, like Bertolt
Brecht's Mother Courage, making their wares available to soldiers needing sustenance. Some, not all, are
prostitutes. But Mayer gave up this narrow, conventional understanding of camp follower once she realized how many kinds of civilians, "men as well as
women, black and white" (p. ix), were part of the
Continental Army. "Community" thus became her
label for an enlarged and refined conception of her
book's subject.
Sutlers, teamsters, farriers, coopers, wheelwrights,
and a host of other artisanal and mercantile skills were
vital to any premodern army, and how best to recruit
and manage the people who performed those functions
never ceased to be a military puzzle. In the history of
warfare, privatization is not a new idea but a very old
one. Supply and maintenance functions, like nursing,
that are fully militarized today were often performed
little more than a century ago by private persons or
groups who served under military law. Families might
even follow their menfolk to war, cooking, cleaning,
and nursing in exchange for food, shelter, and protection; what armies lost in leanness they gained in
logistical support at low cost. Mayer notes how often
American officers brought their sons, boys of ten or
twelve, into the army, nominally as solders, but actually to serve as "waiters" or orderlies to their fathers.
Less often, American wives followed their husbands.
But it is the much larger group of civilians beyond
actual families that made up most of the Continental
Army community. If we take the term "community" to
mean a number of people in one place, linked by their
involvement in a common enterprise, then the word
fairly describes all the people of the Continental Army.
But a stricter definition, as in "dense networks of social
interaction," raises an important question. Characteristic of the Continental Army, including its civilian
members, was a looseness of affiliation and a transience of personnel. Mayer herself notes that it was a
"chaotic" community (p. 236). Unlike British regiments at the time and American regiments of the Civil
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
583
War, personal records of the Continental Army rarely
reveal any sense of strong communal or organizational
identity. Charles Royster's A Revolutionary People at
War (1979) argues that, after 1776, the Continental
Army became increasingly isolated, even alienated
from American society. The army itself may have
become more communal in its shared sense of grievances, but little in the evidence presented by Mayer
suggests that even this negative sense of "community"
could be applied to the army's "camp followers."
Perhaps she intended nothing so rigorous and has used
the concept of community simply as a convenient way
of describing the broader membership in the army
while avoiding the traditional connotation of disreputable women, but the question remains.
An endless effort by George Washington and Congress to integrate this great variety of civilians, performing military functions that ranged from essential
to dispensable (if inevitable), into the military system
never yielded a satisfactory result but led instead to
"civil-military conflict and confusion" (p. 194). Reliance on civilians raised costs and weakened lines of
military control, but using officers and soldiers to
perform "civilian" functions, like transportation and
supply, diverted precious combat strength and often
lowered the quality of performance. Soldiers scorned
teamsters and supply clerks, sergeants regarded wagon
masters as their inferiors, and troop unit commanders
refused to accept commissaries and other civilian staff
officers as equals. Resentment was mutual in this
undemocratic army. Women, many of whom nursed,
washed, and cooked for the army, ranked just above
African-American laborers at the bottom of the military status ladder (except, of course, Martha Washington and the visiting wives of other senior officers).
Following her broadened definition of camp followers, Mayer draws on existing studies of Continental
Army logistics and administration by Wayne Carp,
Erna Risch, and Louis Hatch. But the consequent
attention given to these structures comes at the expense of the social analysis we are led to expect from
her emphasis on community. This said, her book is
broadly researched in both published and manuscript
evidence and sensibly argued. It serves a continuing
need to know more about those "who also served" in
the Revolutionary War.
JOHN SHY
University of Michigan
JEAN EOWARO SMITH. John Marsh all: Definer of a
Nation. (A Marian Wood Book.) New York: Henry
Holt. 1996. Pp. xi, 736. $35.00.
The charm of Jean Edward Smith's new biography
almost overcomes a reviewer's need to look at it with
a critical eye. Eminently readable, the book paints a
personal portrait of the fourth chief justice that utterly
captivates. "Marshall was a man of simple tastes and
uncomplicated outlook," Smith writes. "Careless of
dress, indolent of manner, and a friend to all who
APRIL
1998