Nearly every day now it was the same depressing routine. Among the voluminous papers that required his attention, General George Washington found the verdicts of courts-martial awaiting his approval. He read about yet another instance of his own troops callously plundering the local population—and not just the Loyalists but Patriots and the uncommitted, too. With grim determination, he sanctioned immediate punishment. Sometimes violence could be curbed only by violence.

Just the previous week, on September 6, 1776, Washington had issued orders warning his army that he was “resolved to put a stop to plundering,” whether of horses, or furniture, or merchandise of any kind. Any soldiers caught plundering, or found to be colluding with plunderers, would be brought before a court-martial and “broke with Infamy: For let it ever be remembered, that no plundering Army was ever a successful one.” It was now over a week since the nearly disastrous Battle of Long Island, when his troops had survived, barely, their first major encounter with the British Army. As his forces regrouped on Manhattan, Washington had to make some key tactical and strategic decisions: Should he abandon New York or defend it as long as possible? If he quit the city, should he burn it to deny the invaders a viable base? When and where would the British confront him next? And how could he persuade his men to reenlist when their term expired at year’s end? These were fundamental questions that could make or break the fall and winter campaign—and yet Washington was also concerned his troops’ behavior vis-à-vis civilians might threaten the entire enterprise.¹

Washington understood that plundering—a form of military violence against civilian property—undermined republican, Revolutionary ideals. He also knew that the line between the plundering of property and physical violence to civilian owners could be perilously thin, and that both types of transgression threatened to erode force discipline. And he appreciated that in order to win the war on the moral front, with both American and international audiences watching, he must out-civilize the enemy. This meant, for instance, granting quarter to surrendering enemy forces and treating prisoners of war according to established conventions. But first and foremost he must prevent his own troops from hurting the very people they were serving to protect. British and German soldiers had been plundering civilians from the start of the New York campaign. And as the imperial invaders continued to pillage their way through America, the Patriots’ cause benefited: here was an opportunity to indict British abuse as proof that America’s cause was legitimate, her Revolutionary insurgency necessary. But when Washington’s own troops harmed American civilians, they eroded trust in the new nation’s army, and with it the Revolutionaries’ chances in the contest for American hearts and minds. As such, Washington believed, plundering had to be curtailed—even if that meant using extreme violence against his own men. If words did not sway wayward soldiers, the whip just might.²

The Adjutant’s Daughter

September 12, 1776, promised to be another hot late-summer day. That morning, Washington’s troops knew what they were in for. A court-martial had found their comrade Daniel Donovel guilty of “plundering the House lately occupied by Lord Stirling,” the brave officer who had held out long enough during the recent Battle of Long Island to allow the main American force to retreat to safety. Perhaps Donovel’s spoils were discovered during a search of his knapsack or tent—or had a jealous comrade given him up? There appear to be no eyewitness reports of this particular flogging, but contemporary accounts of similar scenes allow us to reconstruct how it might have looked and felt.³

Donovel would likely have been stripped of his coat and shirt and tied to a tree or a post, known in the army as the “adjutant’s daughter” because the regimental adjutant supervised the administration of punishments ordered by courts-martial. Mustering on the Grand Parade to witness the punishment they called “putting on a new shirt,” the troops would have formed a hollow square around the post or, alternatively, parallel lines with the post at the head of the regiment. The public, demonstrative administration of military justice they were about to observe was designed to instill terror. Like all soldiers in the Continental Army, they would have signed a copy of the Articles of War, which included regulations for the protection of civilians. With the chaplain warning them against repeating the culprit’s crime, the company drummers would have readied themselves to execute the punishment, probably taking off their jackets for maximum freedom of movement and strength. One former British drummer, who later campaigned for the abolition of military flogging, experienced this preliminary “practice of stripping” as “so unnatural, inhuman, and butcher-like” that he “often felt most acutely [his] own degradation in being compelled to perform it.” One final time the first drummer might have checked his instrument of terror, the cat-o’-nine-tails. It consisted of nine thongs, or tails, of whipcord. Three hard knots were tied into each cord so as to maximize the damage and pain it inflicted when it lacerated human skin.

With the troops lined up and Donovel bound to the post, the drummer would have separated the cords, perhaps swung the cat over his head as they did in the navy, and brought it down hard on Donovel’s naked back. With each lash the drummer’s whip would have drawn more blood, and after a few stripes he would have had to wipe the cords free of Donovel’s blood and tissue. The unit drum major’s job was to see to it that each of the thirty-nine lashes—the convention of forty less one derived from Mosaic law—was “well laid on”; the rotation among drummers ensured that each strike landed with maximum strength. Involuntary onlookers would have remembered their own painful experiences at the post. Some would now be flinching with each stroke of the whip; we know from other descriptions that some fainted. Such public displays of military discipline were routinely performed in front of a culprit’s own companies; the men who shared Donovel’s tent may have found the torturous display particularly hard to witness. Herman Melville’s novel White-Jacket, which contains a powerful scene of a naval flogging, imagines that others among such crowds, “either from constitutional hard-heartedness or the multiplied searings of habit,” would already “have been made proof against the sense of degradation, pity, and shame.”

Although Donovel would probably have been given a lead bullet to chew on, the physical pain was likely overwhelming. As Alexander Somerville, one of the few soldiers who ever wrote about his experience of being flogged, recalled, “I felt an astounding sensation between the shoulders, under my neck, which went to my toe nails in one direction, my finger nails in another, and stung me to the heart, as if a knife had gone through my body.” By the time that two dozen lashes had torn his flesh, Donovel’s lacerated back would have “resemble[d] roasted meat burnt nearly black before scorching fire; yet still the lashes fall.” Lash by lash, each hitting “as though the talons of a hawk were tearing the flesh off their bones,” as one British victim wrote, the army’s violence ensured that the culprit’s crime, punishment, and shame would be permanently inscribed on his flesh.

When they had finished with him, Donovel’s shoulders and back would have been grazed and rent, bruised and blistered, skin flaying off his back, and pieces of it torn off his bound wrists, too. As Melville writes, “stripped like a slave; scourged worse than a hound,” the publicly whipped man might feel the indignity and insult as much as the physical pain that would be with him for days or weeks, especially if this was his first whipping: “while his back bleeds” at the post, he “bleeds agonized drops of shame from his soul!” The drummers would have cleaned the cat of Donovel’s flesh to prepare for the next flogging later that day, or the next. Perhaps one of them would have been wondering whether his comrades saw him lay on the lashes all too well and might beat into him a lesson better to calibrate his future floggings. Their witnessing duty done, the troops were dismissed, retreating to the relative safety of Harlem Heights.

The brutality of the punishment reflected the seriousness of the crime. Few civilians would have attended the floggings of any of their plunderers. But having their homes plundered by one or several armies was a common and scary experience for Americans during the war. Most Patriots, unsurprisingly, laid the blame on the British, the Hessians, and the Loyalists. General Howe, whom Thomas Paine denounced as “the chief of plunderers,” had also promised the Hessians “plunder and destruction” for their service.⁴

Contemporaries often compared the impact of plundering enemy troops on a community to that of a natural disaster. Wherever the British Army marched, it was said, they left landscapes in their wake that resembled areas hit by tornadoes, earthquakes, or the plague. On June 27, 1777, the Patriot colonel Israel Shreve arrived at Westfield, nine miles west of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, just hours after a 13,000-strong British army had left the area. Bivouacked near the town, the redcoats had taken 2,365 fence rails to keep their fires going. In a looting spree fueled by cider, gin, port, rum, and whiskey, soldiers had entered over ninety houses, plundering 11,000 items. The soldiers had taken hundreds of pieces of clothing—not just men’s breeches and coats but also women’s apparel and children’s items. They pillaged miles of linen, lace, ribbon, and wool, as well as hundreds of items of bedding. They took 342 fowl, 665 sheep, and 106 hogs, as well as 28 beehives; carted away 11 tables, 18 chairs, and 26 mirrors; and stole 19 axes, a dozen hammers, and even a plough. It would take several pages to list the miscellaneous objects that were stolen, ranging from 105 pounds of candles to three barrels of soap. In the immediate aftermath, Shreve observed the “shocking havock” the British had left: “I saw many famalys who Declared they had Not one mouthful to Eat, [nor any] bed or beding Left, or [a] Stich of Wearing Apparel to put on, only what they happened to have on, and would not afoard Crying Children a mouthful of Bread Or Water Dureing their stay.” The community would claim a very sizable £8,700 worth of damages.⁵

At the same time, the British and Loyalists capitalized on any evidence of the rebels plundering American civilians. “The Ravages of the Rebel Army in and about the Jersies,” proclaimed the British-Loyalist New-York Gazette, “are shocking to Humanity.” The rebels, it was said, targeted not only Loyalists and their property, but all farmers, to the point where agriculture had virtually ground to a halt and famine threatened.⁶

It is perhaps not surprising that plundering was widespread throughout the war. An army, Frederick the Great of Prussia had written on the eve of the American Revolution, is a body whose foundation is the stomach. Yet most early modern armies experienced perpetual supply problems. As mobile armies often had to live off the land, continual foraging and impressment were essential for their survival. Foraging was defined as the taking of livestock, grain, and other foodstuffs by soldiers under the supervision of officers, with or without immediate payment or receipt or promissory notes for future compensation. Impressment was a forced sale of foodstuffs, often with insufficient compensation for the involuntary sellers. By the eighteenth century, uncontrolled pillaging and looting were supposedly on the wane. Still, the line between organized foraging and regular impressment on the one hand and unlicensed and arbitrary plundering on the other was thin.⁷

American historians like David Hackett Fischer distinguish between different kinds and degrees of plundering in the Revolutionary War. American troops committed mostly “petty theft and careless destruction,” writes Fischer; the British and their German auxiliaries were guilty of worse crimes. But the distinctions are perhaps not so clear-cut. Although precise assessments are hard to come by, the historical record affords us the occasional snapshot. After 1781, citizens of New Jersey could claim compensation for losses suffered since 1776 at the hands not only of British forces but also of the Continental Army and Patriot militias. British soldiers did seem to seize items much more indiscriminately: in addition to foraging for grain, crops, and livestock, they routinely took household goods and personal effects—for their own use or for sale on the black market outside army camps and in occupied cities.

Claims against Washington’s own troops were on average significantly lower than those against the British Army, covering mostly items of forage and men’s clothing. At the same time, claims against the Continental Army were more frequent. Continental soldiers seized oysters from oyster beds, plucked apples in orchards, uprooted turnips and cabbages, dug out potatoes, and stole corn and watermelons from the fields. Chicken, geese, turkeys, hogs, sheep, cattle, oxen, and horses were snatched at night or driven from pastures in the broad light of day. Continentals routinely turned horses and cattle loose in grain fields or meadows. Soldiers stole salt, beef, cheese, flour and sugar, tea and coffee, cider, rum, and wine from shops and cellars, both for immediate consumption and for sale or exchange with other articles. Officers occasionally abetted such for-profit plundering or even took their cut. In short, inhabitants living near American armies felt their plundering presence as much as the enemy’s.⁸

As in other war zones, it is the ordinariness of much of this plundering that is striking. But plundering troops didn’t just pose a risk to homes and goods. Whenever soldiers approached a homestead or farm to plunder, physical violence always threatened, especially if citizens tried to defend their property against often inebriated soldiers. In one such instance, a British foraging party entering the Frazer residence in Chester County, Pennsylvania, found only Mary Worrall Frazer, the wife of the Patriot major Persifor Frazer, and one female slave. In the nick of time, Mary had sent her four children, a servant, and two other slaves into hiding. The soldiers were getting drunk from the liquor they found while searching her house, when, “just as one of the men was going to strike me,” Mary later recorded, their commanding officer restored a degree of order. But the invaders continued to remove Mary’s possessions; when they left, she had insufficient supplies to feed her family.⁹

Whether physical violence was latent or threatened, as in Mary Frazer’s case, or overt—as it was for one Andrew Miller on Long Island, whom whaleboaters from Connecticut struck so severely with the breech of a musket that he suffered facial fractures and was left for dead—plundering brought the war right to people’s farms and into their homes. It stripped them of their belongings and destroyed their sense of safety. Plundering also challenged American citizens’ identity, rooted as it was in the sanctity of property—a notion (inherited from England) in defense of which the Revolutionary War was in part being fought. As a form of wartime violence, then, plundering was a serious material, political, and ethical problem.¹⁰

Precisely because plundering posed such an acute challenge for military-civilian relations, as well as for internal army discipline, army commanders on all sides meted out harsh punishment. Donovel, the culprit that September morning, as well as the men whipping him and the Continental troops ordered to witness his flogging, were well accustomed to the daily violence that ruled army life. Armies depend on the strict regulation of individuals, including the physical disciplining of their bodies. Officers in eighteenth-century armies routinely beat, caned, and clubbed soldiers in camps, in barracks, and on parade for even the smallest infractions, and sometimes just because they could. In addition to floggings for offenses trivial or severe, other painful forms of corporal punishment included riding the wooden horse (a wooden sawhorse structure, with weights or muskets attached to the offender’s legs) and running the gauntlet, when an officer might hold a sword’s tip to the culprit’s chest so as to slow down his progress through the beating ranks. American soldiers locked up in the whirligig, a cage that was turned at great speed, were said to go mad. Defenders of military flogging highlighted that it was prompt, cheap, and efficient; rarely did it deprive the army of a valuable fighting man. There is no clear evidence, though, that flogging actually reduced the incidence of military crimes.¹¹

To put military justice in context, we should remember that Anglo-American criminal law at that time imposed corporal punishment, including whippings, very regularly on civilians, both men and women, for crimes against persons as well as against property. And while it is true that the eighteenth century saw a transition away from exemplary punishment to modern penal codes, there were two very major exceptions: military discipline and slavery. The terror of the whip ruled on slave ships and colonial plantations. And while abolitionists were then starting to brandish the accusing image of the slave’s lash-scarred back, humanitarian reforms of military discipline still lay in the distant future. Those defending military flogging—including the new republic’s slaveholding commander in chief—remained adamant that it was indispensable for army discipline.¹²

We cannot be certain that Washington personally witnessed the corporal punishment of any of his soldiers. But even as a young colonel he had issued strict orders against plundering on marches and around campsites. Washington had studied select classical war writings, including Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War (in translation, always painfully aware of his lack of formal education), and modern military texts, some lent to him by older British officers like Lieutenant General Thomas Gage, who would later become his enemy. Practical army manuals such as the widely read Humphrey Bland’s Treatise of Military Discipline (Washington purchased his copy in the 1750s) suggested that destroying the countryside or laying it under contributions—that is, exacting goods, money, and labor—“only serve[d] to render the poor Inhabitants more miserable…without contributing anything to the service.”¹³

A scholar of military justice in the Continental Army, Harry M. Ward, notes that Washington “seems never to have been concerned…with the terrible suffering endured by soldiers being punished.” And Washington left no one in any doubt that he was a strict disciplinarian. An army, as he had proclaimed on New Year’s Day in 1776, “without Order, Regularity & Discipline” was “no better than a Commission’d Mob.” Even during his late teenage years, as Washington had been perfecting his skills as a surveyor, he was, writes the historian Richard N. Smith, “stamping order on chaos by fixing his name on previously uncharted territory.” By his twenties, Washington was learning British-style rigor when fighting alongside the redcoats on the frontier during the Seven Years’ War. “I have a Gallows near 40 feet high erected,” he boasted, “and I am determined…to hang two or three on it, as an example to others.”¹⁴

When Washington had taken charge of the Continental Army at Cambridge in the summer of 1775, he found the Massachusetts provincials in a sorry state, barely fit to fight the mighty British Empire—indeed, “an exceeding dirty & nasty people,” as he put it privately. Officers were using their civilian skills to shave their men or mend their shoes while allowing themselves to be addressed by their first names, which risked undermining the strict hierarchy of ranks. As on the frontier two decades earlier, discipline and order were, yet again, Washington’s first priority. He remembered the lessons from Bland’s military treatise and recommended officers in his new army read the book.¹⁵

Paradoxically, it seemed, the army defending the ideals of liberty would need to embrace authoritarian principles in order to survive. The Continental Army embodied the Revolution, and the relationship between the American people and the army was critical to the Revolution’s success. But just like other professional armies, the new republic’s fighting force needed to be “an absolute Tyranny,” as Washington’s top military justice official, William Tudor, put it, where “every Man who carries Arms, from the General Officer to the private Centinel, must be content to be a temporary Slave.” America’s struggle for freedom required them to win the moral war against the British invaders, and that necessitated the frequent use of the whip.¹⁶

And yet, Washington realized that the floggings were not working. Even if laid on with the appropriate severity to lacerate the backs of plundering miscreants like Donovel, 39 lashes were simply not enough. This punishment paled in comparison with the draconian lash counts for British soldiers convicted of the same offenses, and for whom 400, 600, 800, even 1,000 lashes or more, were not at all uncommon: not for nothing did Americans call British soldiers bloody backs. In part, the severity of British court-martial sentences for plunderers reflected the concern with protecting private property that the officer class shared with the country’s ruling elites more broadly. Even women who violated the sanctity of property were subject to harsh corporal punishment. Perhaps refugees or spies from Boston had told the story of Winifred McCowan, who was convicted of having stolen the town bull and having it killed. McCowan was sentenced “to be tied to a Carts Tail, and thereto receive 100 lashes on her bare back, in different portions in the most publick parts of the town and Camp,” the indecent exposure of her flesh compounding the humiliation. During the British occupation of Philadelphia, a mariner was to be sentenced to 1,000 lashes for stealing a black inhabitant’s cow. The invading army had already hanged some of its own men for plundering stores and private houses.¹⁷

Compared with the justice meted out by the British military—his model of discipline and now his formidable enemy—the maximum punishment at Washington’s disposal was no credible deterrent for a hungry soldier, a private eager for adventure or profit, or an enlisted man who simply took what he considered his. For Washington knew that his troops, much like British soldiers, had a contractual understanding of what the army owed them in return for their service. When pay was in arrears or supplies were short, when they saw embezzlement was ripe or perceived that their officers and civilian authorities were treating them poorly, soldiers were more easily prepared to supplement their provisions by irregular means. “The devil would now and then tell us,” wrote Private Daniel Barber, that “it was no harm to pull a few potatoes and cabbages, and pluck, once in a while, an ear of corn, when we stood in need.” Some drew the line at pumpkins and potatoes, others at poultry or pigs, and still others only at the robbing of homes. By the time resources became very scarce during the first difficult winter at Valley Forge, even officers admitted to feeling the urge: “I am ashamed to say it,” confessed the army surgeon Dr. Albigence Waldo, “but I am tempted to steal Fowls if I could find them, or even a whole Hog, for I feel as if I could eat one.” Washington, then, faced a formidable task balancing his soldiers’ immediate needs with the ideals of the American cause.¹⁸

Consider for a moment the food requirements of the Continental Army. Washington estimated that 15,000 men consumed 20 million pounds of meat and 100,000 barrels of flour annually. Until the evacuation of Manhattan in fall 1776, the American forces were reasonably well provisioned with pork and beef, bread, rice, and cornmeal, as well as fresh produce. But for the remainder of the war, supplies of meat, flour, and bread fluctuated widely; vegetables were often scarce, with the most severe shortages experienced in winter camps at Valley Forge and Morristown in 1778 and 1779. (Prices in Pennsylvania rose by 700 percent during 1779.) In February 1778, soldiers had only three ounces of meat and three pounds of bread each to last them for an entire week. Washington acknowledged a paradox: “With respect to Food, considering we are in such an extensive and abundant Country, no Army was ever worse supplied than ours.”¹⁹

The new American state was ill-equipped to feed its defenders. Yet Washington had to balance his army’s urgent need for provisions with the equally important priority of maintaining good army-civilian relations. Thus, when he was forced to obtain food directly from the citizenry, Washington paid if he could, or at least issued bills of credit in compliance with civilian oversight rules imposed by Congress and the states. Commissary agents, accompanied by armed guards, would buy foodstuffs in the countryside and forward them via supply depots to the army.²⁰

However, this system was often hampered. Inadequate roads and waterways created transport problems, which were compounded by insufficient wagons, horses, and oxen, as well as a shortage of skilled workers, such as teamsters, hostlers, and blacksmiths. Lack of salt limited the ability to preserve meat. American farmers and merchants, irrespective of their political loyalties, often ferried their livestock and produce across considerable distances to sell them to the British, who tended to pay better. Embezzlement and theft were widespread in the army, as goods were sold to inhabitants in exchange for liquor and other desired articles. Some quartermasters and commissary generals of the stores, whose pay was low, turned to profiteering, although it appears the Continental Army may have prosecuted fraud more rigorously than the British did. When other methods yielded insufficient supplies, Washington had no choice but to resort to foraging and, from the winter of 1777–78 onward, to impressment.²¹

Washington’s army competed with the British for limited resources, especially of fresh foods, hay, oats, horses, and wagons. From 1775 to 1781, the British Army experienced more or less continuous and occasionally acute food shortages. In order to feed between 60,000 and 90,000 troops each year, it had to source the vast majority of its supplies from Britain. The quantities passing through the commissary general’s office from spring 1777 to autumn 1781 included nearly 80 million pounds of bread, flour, and rice; 11 million pounds of salt beef and over 38 million pounds of salt pork; 3 million pounds of fresh meat; nearly 4 million pounds of butter; some 427,000 bushels of peas; 177,000 gallons of molasses; 134,000 gallons of vinegar; and 2.8 million gallons of rum.²²

The British military even tried to ship fresh foodstuffs across the Atlantic. It encouraged the development of methods to avoid the bruising of onions and potatoes in transit. Casks with spring-loaded pressure relief valves allowed sauerkraut to complete the fermentation process belowdecks. Those managing to deliver animals alive received premiums. But the high incidence of livestock fatalities en route, inadequate preservation techniques, and mistakes in warehousing—not to mention the ravenous rats—curbed the transatlantic delivery of edible foods. Often the quality of rations was so poor that hungry soldiers refused to eat the “mouldy bread, weevily biscuit, rancid butter, sour flour, wormeaten pease, [and] maggoty beef.” As one observer remarked, “[O]ur army moulders away amazingly: many die by the sword, many by sickness” caused by foul provisions. In the end, therefore, the British Army had to rely very heavily on local (American) supplies of fresh meat and greens, flour, grain, and rice, as well as forage of hay and oats.²³

But procuring fresh food in America posed considerable challenges for the invaders. James Murray, a veteran Scots officer, wrote a letter home in June 1776—even before the main troop contingents arrived—complaining of his meager rations. Officers, Murray lamented, were allotted no more than the soldiers, “nor have I tasted 4 morsels of fresh provisions for 4 months. Broiled salt porc for breakfast, boiled salt porc for dinner, cold salt porc for supper.” With the move of army headquarters to New York and the occupation or domination of large parts of New Jersey and Rhode Island in late 1776, provisioning the army from America temporarily became easier for the British. For Washington, it would mean he had to find supplies elsewhere, or claw them from the invaders’ greedy hands.²⁴

Indeed, the opposing armies’ immense appetite for food and fuel led to regular foraging wars between them—“fighting for our daily bread,” as one British officer called it. British foraging parties scoured the countryside near their base camps for fresh provisions, horses, hay, and fuel. Seeking to deny them supplies, Americans harassed the foragers. The latter therefore required large covering parties of 500 to more than 2,000 men, making foraging extremely expensive. It also was dangerous. By the end of the 1776–77 winter, Howe’s army had been reduced to half its size, with most of the casualties due to skirmishes and minor raids, often in the context of such foraging expeditions.²⁵

Given that their supply situation was frequently dire, British and American troops were all too easily tempted to supplement their rations and clothing by plundering civilians. Both sides thus risked alienating populations whose support they needed in order to win the war. For Washington, it was the very values underlying the American cause that were at stake—not to mention his army’s credibility in defending that cause.

The Terror of Example

Since Washington was forced, all too often, to resort to foraging and impressment, it was imperative that he control his troops’ conduct towards civilians. To that end, he put practical measures in place to curtail the soldiers’ opportunities for misbehavior. Washington set up posts near mansions along army routes in order to prevent straggling soldiers from peeling off. He ordered guards and patrols around campsites to be enhanced. Commanders limited the numbers of passes from camp and the distance enlisted men could travel even if they did have a pass. Roll calls were ordered two or three times per day, often unannounced, while officers checked soldiers’ tents and knapsacks for illegally obtained goods. Soldiers were banned from leaving camp after the nightly roll call and from taking weapons out of camp. A barrage of orders warned against pilfering and burning houses and barns; damaging mowing grounds, gardens, and orchards; and burning rails, fences, shrubs, and trees as firewood. Washington’s appeals that the troops treat civilians with decency were sometimes posted in public places and published in the papers in an attempt to reassure the wider population.²⁶

Even though such preventive measures were necessary, they were not sufficient. If Washington and his officers were to stem the spread of plundering that threatened to corrode army discipline and undermine civilian trust, and if they wished to assert America’s moral superiority over the invading forces, courts-martial needed to be able to impose much tougher sentences than thirty-nine lashes. Throughout the summer of 1776, the Congress had been revising the Articles of War, with Thomas Jefferson and especially John Adams taking leading roles on the Committee on Spies. As far as Washington was concerned, they could not finish their work soon enough.

One week after Donovel’s flogging, Washington took the unusual step of shaming his army by comparing it unfavorably with that of the British. The king’s forces, Washington wrote in orders that were read out at every army post, were “exceeding careful to restrain every kind of abuse of private Property.” By contrast, “the abandoned and profligate part of our own Army, countenanced by a few officers, who are lost to every Sense of Honor and Virtue, as well as their Country’s Good, are by Rapine and Plunder, spreading Ruin and Terror wherever they go.” When soldiers caused destruction and inspired fear instead of upholding notions of republican virtue, honor, and patriotism, the Revolutionary cause suffered. Washington reiterated his previous orders that he would “punish without exception, every person who shall be found guilty of this most abominable practice, which if continued, must prove the destruction of any Army on earth.”²⁷

With no updates from the politicians in Philadelphia, and in the face of incessant civilian complaints, Washington and his staff were feeling increasingly desperate for alternative measures. By September 25, a sleepless Washington—“[F]rom the hours allotted to Sleep, I will borrow a few moments”—wrote a very long letter to John Hancock, the president of the Congress. The general urged his civilian superiors once more to allow for harsher discipline to curb the alarming spread of plundering. His soldiers were using any excuse to steal from civilians. They threatened to commit arson to make inhabitants flee their houses and then rob them with impunity; afterward, they often did burn homes to conceal their actions. Washington reassured Hancock that he had tried his utmost, including instituting summary corporal punishment, “to stop this horrid practice, but under the present lust after plunder, and want of Laws to punish Offenders, I might almost as well attempt to remove Mount Atlas.”²⁸

To underscore his frustration with the lenient punishments for plunderers, that same day Washington forwarded to the Congress the records of one recent court-martial that had particularly outraged him. Ensign Matthew Macumber, of Taunton, Massachusetts, had been caught red-handed by Brigade Major Daniel Box as Macumber was leading twenty of his men in plundering a house just outside American lines. Box had demanded that Macumber put down his loot or return it to its rightful owners. Instead, Macumber ordered his men to prepare to fire on Box. The latter beat a tactical retreat, later to return with a larger party to disarm and arrest Macumber, who was brought before a court-martial. At the trial, presided over by the delightfully named Colonel Comfort Sage, Box testified that he found Macumber’s troop “loaded with plunder, such as House furniture, table Linen and Kitchen Utensils, China & Delph Ware.” Box’s men supported his story, adding women’s clothing to the items of plunder and confirming that the offenders would have fired on them had they tried to seize the stolen goods. Two of Macumber’s men testified in their superior’s defense, saying that he had ordered them specifically not to plunder. The court acquitted Macumber of plundering and robbery, requiring only that he ask Box’s pardon and be reprimanded for insubordination and threatening a superior officer.

In disbelief, Washington refused to confirm the verdict and, as was his privilege as commander in chief, asked the court to reconsider, tersely annotating the copy of the trial minutes that he forwarded to the Congress: “[T]he Men who were to Share the Plunder, became the evidence for the Prisoner.” At the retrial, another officer corroborated that he, too, had challenged Macumber, from whose overflowing knapsack some wax toys were protruding, while his men were carrying off chairs, kettles, and other items; their pistols cocked, the men were ready to fire on Box. The court now ordered Macumber cashiered, or dismissed in disgrace. Washington saw to it that the revised verdict was implemented immediately.²⁹

Macumber may have narrowly escaped a much harsher sentence. For, as yet unknown to Washington, on September 20, Congress had finally passed revised Articles of War. Drafted largely by John Adams and modeled on the British articles, these tightened the regulations for protecting civilians from the plundering and destruction of their property. The death sentence could now be imposed for a total of sixteen offenses ranging from mutiny, sedition, and desertion to plundering. The maximum corporal punishment was raised from thirty-nine lashes to one hundred, a significant increase, if still massively lower than the average lash sentence in the British Army.³⁰

Repeatedly during the war, Washington requested that Congress either permit a maximum lash count of five hundred or remove any cap at all. A broader spectrum of corporal punishments, his thinking went, would also help reduce excessive and arbitrary beatings of soldiers by their officers, who often resorted to such spontaneous punishment instead of going to the trouble of a court-martial and its limited set of sanctions. Congress, however, rejected Washington’s urgent recommendation. Washington would mostly adhere to the hundred-lash limit, although occasionally he also approved up to five hundred. Lacking the legal option of much more severe lash sentences, he periodically authorized the execution of plunderers, both as a result of courts-martial and even in the form of summary executions without trial. But, in the fall of 1776, Washington was still relying mostly on the whip rather than the rope as he sought to rein in his plundering troops. The extent to which he was successful would shape the battle for American popular support.³¹

The Politics of Plunder

By mid-November 1776, as the British were completing their sweep of New York, the imperial high command had already decided to extend its reach. A major British army led by the thirty-seven-year-old aristocrat and career officer Major General Charles Cornwallis would drive the American forces out of eastern New Jersey, making it the third colony (after New York and Rhode Island) restored to British rule and, crucially, turning it into a supply base for the army. Washington learned of this objective and moved his forces into New Jersey in anticipation of a British invasion, which Cornwallis launched on November 18 with some 10,000 men. Cornwallis’s army moved relatively slowly—it daily consumed seventeen tons of food; it needed to stop early each day to collect wood for fuel and to bake bread; the 1,000 horses drawing the massive baggage train required hay and water. But liberated Loyalists were flocking to the British standard: more than one-tenth of New Jersey households swore an oath of allegiance once Howe promised to pardon them. The strategy of regaining territory and loyal subjects for the Crown appeared to be working.³²

In order to maintain popular American support, however, British commanders knew that their troops needed to be seen as liberators, not conquerors. If they were students of history, they might remember that excessive plundering during the previous century’s English Civil War had alienated civilian populations there. General Howe opposed plundering with more or less explicit reference to the ongoing battle for American sympathies. Charles Stedman, who served under Howe as a British Army commissary, later nonetheless confirmed that the British Army in New Jersey had indulged in the politically indiscriminate “business (we say business, for it was a perfect trade) of plunder….The friend and the foe, from the hand of rapine, shared alike.” Until now, the people of the Jerseys had generally been sympathetic to Britain, many enlisting to fight for the Empire. Yet, when they realized that they enjoyed little or no protection, that the British frequently seized their property, and that, in many instances, “their families were insulted, stripped of their beds, with other furniture—nay, even of their very wearing apparel,” more than a few switched sides. Perhaps the American army would at least compensate them for losses. Another officer reflected on the effect of British troops tearing clothing and property from locals: “[W]e went on persuading to enmity those minds already undecided, and inducing our very Friends to fly to the opposite party for protection.”³³

As Lexington, Falmouth, and Norfolk had shown, the application of violence that could be portrayed as excessive consistently backfired on the British. After those early public relations disasters, any evidence or rumors that the British were continuing their war of depredation aided the Revolutionaries in their polemical and moral war. Some suggested that, in the face of widespread American plundering, the British could have ended the rebellion quickly. But “unfortunately the indiscriminate Plunder of the British Army” neutralized any potential political and moral advantage. With both armies causing destruction, the population kept changing sides according to the fluctuating fortunes and the more or less destructive behavior of the opposing armies.³⁴

Meanwhile, Washington’s army was at real risk of simply “melting away,” to use David Hackett Fischer’s phrase, as the terms of soldiers’ enlistments expired. When they moved through Princeton and Trenton by the start of December, barely 2,500 men were left. But supplying even that rump with blankets, clothes, and shoes increasingly posed a problem, and “the ground was literally marked with the blood of the soldiers’ feet.” Still, Washington did not waver from his principles—even if that meant protecting the treacherous Loyalists from Continental plunderers.³⁵

Washington looked at the politics of plunder with great moral clarity. While many Continental soldiers considered Loyalist property fair game, their commander in chief insisted they not indulge in politically motivated looting. The prosecution of internal enemies should instead be left to civilian authorities. For Washington, discipline and principle trumped any disdain that his troops or officers might feel towards the Loyalists. In limited circumstances, Washington did sometimes permit his soldiers to appropriate Loyalist assets. He did not condone, however, when soldiers turned carefully delimited appropriation orders “into a mere plundering scheme” against anyone they chose to label as Tories.³⁶

The extent to which Washington’s consistent disciplinarian efforts succeeded in curtailing plundering is impossible to ascertain, as it is asking for a counterfactual: How much more devastating to civilians—and damaging to the American cause—might plundering have been without Washington’s strict approach? What perhaps mattered more was the unambiguous message he sent to his army, to the civilian population, and to the enemy in his attempt to project a positive image of America’s armed forces. Washington tackled the formidable challenge of plundering with all the tools of command, communication, and chastisement at his disposal. The steady stream of agonizing orders issuing forth from headquarters testify to his continuous frustration.³⁷

Since starting their retreat from New York City, Washington’s troops had marched some one hundred miles. By the time General Cornwallis reached the Delaware River, Washington had moved his troops to the Pennsylvania side, avoiding a direct confrontation. As Anglo-German forces entered Trenton, New Jersey, on December 8, General William Howe—much to the vexation of his subordinates—ordered the army to move to winter quarters. If the American troops had not starved by spring, Howe would resume the pursuit. But Washington, whom the Congress on December 12 vested with “full power to order and direct all things relative…to the operation of the war” for six months, had a surprise in store for the invaders. His next move wouldn’t just expel the enemy from much of New Jersey and deprive them of that crucial granary; it would also gain Washington a vital foothold for congressional investigators to collect evidence of enemy plundering as well as some of the war’s more abhorrent developments: atrocities on the battlefield and the rape of American women. If Britain’s success depended on winning American popular support, their troops’ abusive behavior already threatened to undermine the Empire’s mission.³⁸

William Faden, Bernard Ratzer, and Gerard Bancker, The Province of New Jersey, Divided into East and West, commonly called the Jerseys ([London], 1777). Credit 25