The John Birch Society :: Truth Freedom Leadership

It was dishonest duty that could be dangerous: trudging without invitation onto farms and swiping a family’s food for your buddies in camp. Officers dignified this as "foraging," but little distinguished it from outright thievery beyond the receipts foragers scribbled: theoretically, the farmer could redeem these for money — someday. Yet things were so desperate for the Continental Army 230 years ago this month that Joseph Plumb Martin, a soldier-turned-forager, considered his assignment a blessing. Rather than starving in camp, he now had first crack at the food he confiscated: "We fared much better than I had ever done in the army before, or ever did afterwards. We had very good provisions all winter and generally enough of them." When those provisions became rations for the shivering soldiers at Valley Forge, however, there generally weren’t enough of them.

Valley Forge has come down as the apotheosis of patriotic suffering, but the misery worsened two years later when the Continentals wintered at Morristown. There the Army not only starved, it froze. A blizzard in January 1780 dumped snow "four to six feet deep, which so obstructs the roads as to prevent our receiving a supply of provisions," wrote Dr. James Thacher. He added, "No man could endure [the storm’s] violence many minutes without danger of his life. …some of the soldiers were actually covered while in their tents and buried like sheep under the snow." Those wretched recruits couldn’t count on uniforms to keep them warm, either. General Anthony Wayne had complained 3 weeks before the storm that the men "would make a better appearance had they a sufficiency of hats, but as Congress don’t seem to think that an essential…part of uniform, they mean to leave us uniformly bare-headed — as well as bare-footed — and if they find that we can bare it tolerably well in the two extremes, perhaps they may try it in the center." Spring ended this particular agony, but by May hunger was so rampant that the Connecticut line mutinied.

Desertion would seem the only sensible course, and it wasn’t that difficult, either. A man determined to exchange such privation for his family’s hearth and supper table would likely succeed. Yet, unless they died, most of the soldiers at Valley Forge and Morristown stayed and suffered.

Why? What inspired them? Modern Americans would answer, "Democracy." But the Founding generation took a dim view of democracy as mob rule, and they preferred even monarchy to mobs. "Most sensible people here...say that one master is better than a thousand,” a New Yorker wrote in 1774, "and that they would rather be oppressed by a King than by a rascally mob. 'Tis not only reducing everybody to a level, but it is entirely reversing the matter, and making the mob their masters."1 Democracy allows the majority to strip minorities of their freedom and property under a legal veneer. Alexander Hamilton called it "our real disease" and feared its "poison" could not be sufficiently diluted in a small country, while Edmund Randolph warned against its "fury" at the Constitutional Convention.

It’s unlikely, then, that democracy charmed American soldiers more than food, or that they nakedly endured blizzards for the privilege of electing rulers to tax them. But if democracy didn’t motivate their sacrifices, what did? We need not speculate because they frequently and clearly told us. They sprinkled their letters home and General Orders, their drinking songs and official documents, their camp doggerel and more formal poetry, with the word that emboldened them, that justified all deprivations and distresses: liberty. "Fair Liberty," they called it and urged themselves to respond to its "call": "No tyrannous acts, shall suppress your just claim,/Nor stain with dishonor America’s name./In freedom we’re born, and in freedom we’ll live…”

And what exactly was this "freedom?" Did the eighteenth century define it as we do, as a sort of nebulous, historical good that characterizes the American government simply because it’s the American government? Or was liberty something far more vital?

In fact, Revolutionary Americans would never have imputed liberty to government because they realized the two are opposites. Freedom flourishes only as government wanes; the more people have of one, the less they have of the other. The Founding Fathers sought a country as free from political power as possible, one in which men thrived without "swarms of officers" stealing their bread, dictating their beliefs and actions, compelling them to act against their own interests in favor of the State’s. Democracy curses a country with all these evils. John Adams's opinion was typical: "democracy...is...arbitrary, tyrannical, bloody, cruel, and intolerable a government."2

Nor did our ancestors conflate democracy with liberty, though contemporary Americans from politicians on up constantly make that mistake. At the celebration of Jamestown’s 400th anniversary last year, Pres. George Bush announced: "the work of American democracy is to constantly renew and to extend the blessings of liberty. … America is proud to promote the expansion of democracy, and we must continue to stand with all those struggling to claim their freedom." He isn’t alone in his error. Sen. John McCain told the Hoover Institution on May 1, 2007, "Democracy was born [here] and then spread across the globe … Today we stand, grateful, on this foundation of freedom. … Democracy and freedom continue to flourish around the world.”

Some eighteenth-century Americans did experiment with democracy — unhappily. A poet who survived Philadelphia’s flirtation with it recalled:

The mob tumultuous, instant Seize,
With venom’d rage, on whom they please –
The People cannot err.
Can it be wrong, in Freedom’s cause
To tread down Justice – Order – Laws
When all the Mob concur?

Democracy demands a huge, intrusive government to enforce the majority’s will. No wonder hungry soldiers sleeping under snowdrifts dreamed of living free, not democratically.

 

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1 Unattributed letter in Morning Chronicle and Daily Advertiser (England), Feb. 2, 1775.

 

2 John Adams to Mercy Warren in Massachusetts Historical Society Collections.