The colonies had their own small, underarmed, and unprofessional militias, along with a few ad hoc groups of patriots.
It wasn’t until June 1775 that the Second Continental Congress created the Continental Army. The diversity of the under-organized ad hoc armed forces from April and earlier carried over into the new officially-organized army. Included were Native American Indians, people of African heritage, and people whose ancestry included every part of Europe. A number of significant leaders were either German immigrants or children of German immigrants, as historian Thomas Sowell writes:
A number of other military officers came from the German states to America to fight in the Revolutionary War. One of these was Baron de Kalb, who died fighting while others fled at the Battle of Camden in South Carolina.
The actions of at least one of these German fighters have been preserved in American folklore:
One of the most dramatic fighters was a German-American woman named Maria Ludwig, who traveled with her husband, a gunner in the American army, and carried pitchers of water to soldiers in battle. She was nicknamed Molly Pitcher, and won fame by taking her husband’s place at a cannon after he had been wounded. The inspiring example of her bravery was recognized by George Washington after the battle.
On the other hand, some of the Germans in North America served in the war on the side of the English. In a happy turn of events, many of these soldiers eventually switched sides and fought for the independence of the United States, as Thomas Sowell explains:
The British army brought nearly 30,000 German mercenary soldiers to the colonies to try to put down the American rebellion. These were not individual volunteers but soldiers sold or rented to the British by the rulers of various German principalities. More than half came from the little state of Hesse-Cassell, so all German mercenaries in the Revolutionary War were lumped together by Americans as “Hessians.” Some of these soldiers deserted to the American side during the war, and some remained in the United States after the war, settling in existing German communities. Just over half of the “Hessians” returned home. Somewhere between 5,000 and 12,000 eventually became American citizens. One of these soldiers, named Kuester, was an ancestor of General George Custer, the Indian fighter.
The diversity of the Continental Army, the Minute Men, the militias, and finally the United States Army was not only a diversity of languages, religions, and ethnicities, but also a diversity of social classes. In this way it was similar to the British Army, as historians Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski write:
In terms of social composition the rank and file approximated the British army. The ranks contained some farmers, tradesmen, and mechanics, but they included many more recent immigrants, enemy deserters and prisoners of war, Loyalists and criminals (both of whom sometimes had the option of joining or hanging), vagrants, indentured servants, apprentices, free black men, and slaves. The soldiers thus overwhelmingly came from the bottom strata of society. Although the social origins of many Continentals resembles those of British regulars, the similarity fades when one asks why men served. Obviously, some Continentals, like their British counterparts, had little choice. But most American recruits served willingly. The methods of avoiding service were so numerous that few people became regulars against their will. Poor and propertyless men may have found substitute payments, bounties, and Army pay attractive, but less dangerous ways to make money and acquire land abounded in American society. Financial benefits simply reinforced the primary motivation to serve, which was probably ideological. Appeals to freedom and liberty — and the vision of a better future these abstractions conveyed — could strike an especially intense chord in men of humble means and origins.
While the enlisted men were largely from the lower social classes, the officers in the American army came from a mixture of classes. In contrast to the British army, in which officers were exclusively from the upper classes, the Americans embraced some notion of meritocracy, and so their officers represented a diversity of social classes.
The enlisted men who fought for independence were, in terms of social rank, similar to the soldiers fighting for Britain. But in terms of language, religion, and ethnicity, they were far more diverse. The Americans were united by the concept of freedom, and served willingly and with motivation.
