This army was a dangerous thing—a budding democracy of young men with firearms

From Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick. In doing some genealogical research on a first cousin six times removed (the Amos Farnsworth mentioned below), I came across this passage providing a wonderful description of the first army of the Republic, the volunteers answering the call of the Lexington Alarm. What an army!

That these primarily young men from the country were not accustomed to taking orders from anyone made the enforcement of discipline difficult. Not only did the members of a typical company all know each other (indeed, many were related by blood), they were accustomed to making decisions by consensus at town meetings. This meant that the soldiers, not their officers, decided any issues that might have a direct impact on their welfare. On May 10, Private James Stevens complained in his diary that Captain Thomas Poor “spoke very rash concerning our choosing a sergeant and said that we had no right.” Taking umbrage, the soldiers decided to “do no duty that day.” Captain Poor had no choice but to apologize to his men, and after his “recantation,” Stevens and the others returned to duty. This army was a dangerous thing—a budding democracy of young men with firearms.

Inevitably adding to the surliness of the recruits was the availability of large quantities of rum. Muskets kept going off—sometimes accidentally, sometimes for the fun of it, injuring and, in at least one instance, killing American soldiers. “Four guns were discharged in camp and endangered men’s lives,” David Avery recorded in his diary on May 8. “One out of our window, one at the picket guard. Two others hurt. An awful day!” The New Englanders could be raucous, but they also tended to be exceedingly religious, attending prayers on an almost daily basis and listening to one, sometimes two sermons each Sunday. The diary kept by Private Amos Farnsworth is as much a record of his spiritual life as it is an account of his experiences in the provincial army. “I was filled with love to God. . . . ,” he wrote at one point, “and lifted up my soul to God in ejaculation, prayers, and praise.” These men were fighting for liberty, but they also believed that the Lord was, in his own inscrutable way, working through each and every one of them.

Spiritual, ornery, and clannish, the New Englanders defined their struggle in profoundly local terms. They refused to serve under an officer they did not know or like. They also seemed intent on having a good time. Ezekiel Price of Stoughton visited Roxbury in early June and found the soldiers “in high spirits and healthy; being mostly young men and many of them persons of wealth and reputable yeomen.” That was not the impression of a surgeon from a man-of-war who had been given permission to cross the provincial lines to attend to wounded British prisoners. He found the streets of Cambridge “crowded with carts and carriages, bringing them rum, cider, etc., from the neighboring towns, for without New England rum, a New England army could not be kept together. . . . They drink at least a bottle of it a man a day.” The surgeon had his obvious biases, but there was more than a little truth in his description of an army that was barely under anyone’s control: “nothing but a drunken, canting, lying, praying, hypocritical rabble, without order, subjection, discipline, or cleanliness; and must fall to pieces of itself in the course of three months. They are . . . the descendants of Oliver Cromwell’s army, who truly inherit the spirit which was the occasion of so much bloodshed in [England]."

To the point about so many being related - Of about 25 family members I have traced from the Groton area, 20 of them grabbed their muskets when the call went out on April 19th, assembled in town and marched together off to war to make a future none had conceived before. An army "drunken, canting, lying, praying, hypocritical rabble, without order, subjection, discipline, or cleanliness." And, it is worth noting, An army victorious. Within ten months of the British surgeon's visit, that rum drinking, hard-praying rabble sent the British packing from Boston. Within six years they and their brethren across the states ejected Britain from American shores.

Whatever they were doing wrong, it somehow worked out right.