If the Continental Army was celebrated as a representation of the continent then, with soldiers from every state serving in the Continental Army at some point during the war, it seemingly stood to advance a strong sense of continental identity among its soldiers. Certainly, that is how the early historian David Ramsay saw it, with an army ‘composed of men from all the States, by freely mixing together’, who were ‘assimilated into one mass’. More recently, Holly Mayer has suggested that the army constituted a diverse ‘Continental Community’ of soldiers and camp followers, men and women, young and old, white and black. Mayer proposes that the army ‘served to reinforce appropriate existing beliefs and indoctrinate soldiers and followers alike in revolutionary political ideology’ while members of this ‘Continental Community’ were ‘profoundly “continentalised” or nationalised by the experience of living and fighting alongside men and women from the different states’.

If, as this Chapter will explore, there are some grounds for this theory, then the ‘continental’ aspects of the army also had severe limitations. Where ‘continental’ implies an army that was representative of people who identified as belonging to the continent, or whose members travelled widely over the continent, or that was well-supported by the rest of the continent, then the army hardly deserves the term. Those who had little contact with the army, like David Ramsay, may have preferred to imagine it as a continental community filled with citizen-soldiers, but this was not the case. The ordinary soldier who fought in the Continental Army bore little resemblance to Washington or Montgomery or the countless other heroes who would appear in paintings, sermons, essays, and newspaper accounts throughout the war. Far from a ‘nationalizing factor’, as one historian has described it, actual and extended military service had limited effect in expanding continental conceptions among soldiers.

The men who became the first soldiers of the Continental Army at the siege of Boston were members of a militia establishment that was more a social organisation than a military institution. Their participation in the militia was an emblem of social and economic involvement in the community. In most colonies, all able-bodied white men between the ages of 16 and 60 were required to serve. Officers were sometimes elected, and sometimes appointed, but were almost always drawn from the local elite.