ABSTRACT
The British army’s treatment of American non-combatants during the War of Independence has attracted the attention of many historians. Most modern scholars content themselves with describing various British outrages, particularly at certain critical junctures during the war, such as in New Jersey in December 1776 and South Carolina in the summer of 1780. Some try to apportion blame, with the conduct of the army’s German auxiliaries a particularly favourite topic for debate. A few more adventurous souls seek to explain why the British army behaved as it did. Historians rarely comment explicitly on the impact of British depredations on American attitudes, probably for the simple reason that it seems so obvious: the destruction and loss experienced by colonists of all types must surely have made the British army’s task more difficult, and even driven large numbers of Americans into the revolutionary camp. But does this tell us all we need to know about American reactions? What emerges from a wide range of sources is the very varied nature of the American response to British indiscipline. Some Americans certainly appear to have been estranged by the behavior of the British army, but others benefited from their compatriots’ suffering. Still others, rather than becoming outwardly antagonistic towards the British cause, appear to have been cowed by their misfortunes. Many more examples can be found of Americans who were politically unmoved; they seem not to have identified more strongly with the revolutionary side as a result of experiencing British depredations, whether directly or vicariously. Perhaps the most common hostile response was not the taking up of arms against the British forces, but low-level non-cooperation, which in the end may have caused the army more problems than enraged colonists who took pot-shots at British soldiers. Some aspects of this story were no doubt peculiar to the circumstances of the time and place; but the varied response of Americans to treatment that one would expect to produce only one reaction suggests that we should not make assumptions about the behavior of civilians at other times and in other places who found themselves in similar situations.
