if i were in Boston harbor on 12/16/73, i would have told them that real men drink coffee and that their symbolic gesture will get co-opted in the worst ways
All you ladies, you could have served your country in the Revolution. More than a few did. Molly Pitcher is the most famous…
But there were a number who marched with the Continental Army. In uniform. With rifle.
A few points in no order in response to things mentioned;
The Hessians (or Germans- they weren’t all Hessians) who fought weren’t military in the “soldier of fortune” connotation of the term and actually did fight as loyalty to their king or leader. (I won’t say love of because how many armies really fight for love of a monarch?) Several thousand of them came from what’s now Lower Saxony, an area directly ruled by King George III, whose German speaking (and to the irritation of his court non-English speaking great-grandfather George I was Elector of Hanover (no exact English equivalent to the title, but something like a duke over most of what’s now Lower Saxony with his capital in the city of Hanover; elector meant that whenever the Holy Roman Emperor died he was among those who elected a new one).
The Hessians were hired from the Landgrave (again, roughly, duke) of Hesse-Kassel, Friedrich II, who was George III’s uncle by marriage and had been leasing out his troops for years to earn money. It wasn’t the first time the British king had hired the Hessian army either: Friedrich had hired them to George II (his father-in-law, George III’s grandfather) during the Scottish uprising in 1745, which really pissed off a lot of Scots Irish in the colonies who remembered this well or had fathers who did. Prussia and the German lands and England were also allies during the Seven Years War and had many alliances still in effect by treaty during the Revolution.
Because of the British-Hanover connection and the British-Hanover-Hessian alliances most of the officer class at least did speak English (as well as French as well as whatever German dialects they spoke). Some spoke Russian as well since many had seen action in the Seven Years War or served time in Russia during the diplomacy thereafter) and even leased soldiers to the Tsarina for border patrol after the war, while some were in fact Russians or Auslanders who defected to German lands. Many of the German soldiers who fought for the Brits during teh Revolution returned after the war and settled, and some went AWOL and didn’t return to Germany in the first place, stunned at the land available in America and the number of people who spoke the language (or at least spoke a dialect they could communicate with). The American Revolution was an amazingly international affair and a bastard son of the Seven Years War.
A German officer who ironically did not speak English was the Baron General von Steuben (who as mentioned was not a Baron and here mentioned he wasn’t a general either). He did speak fluent French and communicated with his troops through interpreters, and he spoke Italian but used it mainly to communicate with his beloved greyhounds (who he shared his bed with [along with his teenaged aide-de-camp] and was never apart from).
The war split the Quaker church as many Quakers sought to remain members of the Society of Friends but also believed in the cause of the rebels and were particularly against the English intolerance of other religions. (The English crown wasn’t going around burning Catholic churches and synagogues or anything like, but they had bopped the head of the Quakers many times and still gave preferential treatment to Anglicanism of course.) This resulted in the Free Society of Friends, or “Fighting Quakers”, of which Betsy Ross and two of her husbands were members. (Betsy Ross had three husbands during the war- the one she was married to when the war began was killed in an explosion, the second was a sailor who died in a PoW camp, and the third was a friend of his she married in the final days of the war.)
Joining the armed forces during the Revolution was a lot different than joining for the Civil War generations later, when most men had enlistments of 3 years and many served for the duration. Most of the service in the Revolution was militia service rather than regular army, and many were given leave to return home and farm (which was necessary for army and civilians) and often only served a few weeks of what we’d call active duty.
As for New Englanders and Pennsylvanians, regardless of which side your relatives were fighting on it was the British that you hoped requisitioned your crops or livestock because they paid in gold or silver or in script that was backed by the English crown- you would get your money back- whereas the Continentals paid (as the Confederates did) in often worthless script or just took it. To be fair the Brits would loot farms as well, but usually when it was the farm of a known rebel (Monticello and Mt. Vernon both got raided), and there were many farmers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and the Carolinas more than willing to sell them food and supplies because it was frankly a boomtime.
Cities were often the most divided places politically: Savannah, Charleston, New York and Baltimore all had large loyalist factions and large rebel factions often in the same immediate families and sometimes as mentioned before in the same houses. Fairly common knowledge but I’ll mention anyway that Benjamin Franklin’s son was the Royal Governor of New Jersey (whose eventual arrest and imprisonment his father did not attempt to stop) and pretty much all of the important folk in the war had close friends and relatives on both sides.
A bunch of my ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War, so I’d have to be a patriot and make them sammiches and keep the homefires burning. I might even have made a sammich for George Washington when he stayed at our house. Something soft for the filling.
Patriot.
In the time machine where I go back as me, I likely would have been giving a hand to the revolutionaries behind the scenes in ways that a woman past prime childbearing years could.
This would include feeding, nursing and sewing for them, perhaps taking over a family business so that my menfolk could join the active fighting and joining community endeavors to provide for the American army.
Not all of the patriots fought on the front lines.
True. Many were prostitutes.
I never said I was enthusiastic.
The British soldiers were paid fighters, so many of them chose a career of fighting, but Americans, in general, were not military minded, and we didnt want war.
Besides Sam Adams, I dont think anybody else(on our side) was enthusiastic either.
Dont forget, it took us over a year from April 1775 to July 1776 for us to finally decide to make a war out of it and delcare our independence.
Besides, “THEY” started it.
We did not ask General Gage to come to Lexington with a bunch of armed troops.
General Gage should not have declared martial law. General Gage should not have tried to take away our arms.
The Hanover regiments never came to America. They took up garrison positions in Gibraltar and freed up British regiments to come to America. They fought in the Gibraltar siege but that was it.
I wonder what happened to her last husband? She was one strong woman. Just carrying the water all day on the battlefield had to be exhausting.
There’s something to be said for boosting morale. 
Not long before the war broke out, the ancestors on my father’s side whose history we know best were in eastern NC (having recently relocated from SE VA), running a mill by the Tar River. They were staunch Tories until they were, uh, persuaded to provision the Revolutionaries at gunpoint. After that they never looked back, apparently aware of which side their bread was buttered on, so to speak.
But then again, at that time I also had ancestors in upstate NY as well as Suffolk, England and Germany, so who really knows? But if we restrict my existence to NC, then I’m quite sure I would have been at least raised a Loyalist.
This is how I am. From what I know of my ancestry, there were relatives on both sides of the ocean and the conflict at the time, so it’d probably depend on which branch I was living with.
If I had been involved, I would have been on the British side.
Seeking my fortune as a German soldier seems like a better career path than waiting for the next pogrom to rape the shtetls of Eastern Europe.
So there I am, freezing my arse off on sentry duty, while the bulk of the unit is warm in quarters celebrating Christmas Eve. I volunteered for this shitjob to cover the fact that their winter holiday is not MY winter holiday, this war is a clusterfuck, and damn I hope those rebels are desperate enough to come over the river tonight, at least I’ll be warm from this musket, maybe I’ll just get wounded, that nurse in the medical section volunteered for duty tonight also, aw fuck did I miss Chanukah? Hey! Something’s moving out there!
HALT WHO GO–
I keep thinking of a Rodney Dangerfield line: “I’m from a family of losers I tell ya, a whole family of losers. During the Civil War my grandfathers fought for the West! During the American Revolution they fought for Mexico! Losers I tell ya!”
My people were here in 1775 – they had been in Pennsylvania for some 90 years at that point. Despite being Mennonites and Quakers at least one of them served in the Pennsylvania militia and saw action at Brandywine.
Being a small town lawyer with republican (small R) and liberal instincts (making me a Wig), probable ambitions to remove to the Ohio Country as my people did (an immigration prohibited by the Crown), not a Church of England type and not particularly dependent on the largesse and patronage of the royal colonial administration, I’d probably have been at least a half-hearted rebel.
More likely I would have lit out for the Ohio just as soon as the ability of the British Government to stop me and the Iroquois/Shawnee threat were ended. Of course that did not happen until Mad Anthony Wayne cleaned up Little Turtle and the Miami and Maumee at Fallen Timbers in 1794 and Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames in 1813. I could have been hanging around Fort Pitt or Marietta for a fair long time.
I could not be on either side unless I was not directly involved in killing anyone. I probably would’ve been the coward who stayed behind, maybe even here in the Ozark mountains.
I’d be really old by now.
I’m pretty sure I’d be swayed by the Patriot rhetoric and I’d like to think I would fight bravely but who knows?