Merry, Manly Militias

As a euphoric martial spirit swept the colonies after Lexington and Concord, many Americans showed surprising faith in their militias, especially given that they were about to wage war against the most formidable military power of the day. One Philadelphian, not yet sure how he felt about American independence, wrote a friend days after news of Lexington and Concord arrived: “The parliament seem determined to force us into an acknowledgment of their supremacy, I dread the worst, for I am sure they never can do it, from the number of inhabitants, and the very situation of this country; besides our rifle men, who are used to shooting in the woods, will never come to an open engagement; they are very expert at the Indian manner of fighting.” 

In America, the militia was the center of a military tradition that deviated markedly from European warfare and was largely modeled after settlers’ (often skewed) conceptions of Native American warfare. Although settler militias inflicted real deadly violence on the British during the Revolutionary War, they developed and usually reserved this form of brutal and irregular warfare when making war on Indians. Outside the period of outright hostilities, both white militias and mobs applied limited violence that usually stopped short of death when engaging the “enemies of liberty.” In contrast, most of the fighting in America had developed and would continue to occur as part of the endemic wars between settlers and Native peoples or mixed forces of both. “For the first 200 years of [U.S.] military heritage,” the military historian John Grenier wrote, “Americans depended on arts of war that contemporary professional soldiers supposedly abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders.” Ironically, although Europeans in America became convinced that guerrilla warfare, which they called the “skulking way of war,” was innate to Indians’ supposedly savage condition, they sought to enlist Native peoples in their wars and developed a militia tradition of ranger companies that specialized in skulking, supposedly as well as any Indian.

American settlers, convinced of their mastery of the Indian way of bushfighting, embraced this new way of war as their own and as a marker of their virility, but there were important distinctions. Whereas Native forces usually sought to inflict violence over a relatively short campaign, as part of their logistical calculations and goals, European settlers in America introduced the settler colonial logic of elimination: extended, scorched-earth campaigns that sought to extirpate their foes. Native warfare employed caution and the element of surprise, to inflict damage while suffering as few casualties as possible to great effect — often translated into what today is called guerrilla warfare. Europeans mimicked such tactics, but also combined them with their logistical capacity to support longer campaigns and extirpative goals. As the theorist Patrick Wolfe famously asserted, since British settlers came “to stay” and displace the Native population in North America, they ultimately waged a genocidal campaign of extermination. The “logic of elimination” behind the goals of the British and later American settlers made genocidal violence an ongoing feature of North American settler colonialism.

American militias, part of the infrastructure that carried out one of the most extensive ethnic-cleansing projects known, were also bands of “merry men” who came together to drink and frolic, away from their wives and children. One common refrain was that militiamen did little more than drink and boast; in fact, one of the most time-honored traditions associated with militia musters was to retire to the tavern as soon as possible. Timothy Pickering, who attempted to reform Massachusetts militia traditions, found the militiamen’s habit of firing in good fun at whomever they pleased particularly appalling. “It had been the custom in Salem,” Pickering wrote, “from my earliest remembrance, and of fifty or perhaps a hundred years before to fire at the officers, under the senseless notion of doing them honor … and it gave them a singular satisfaction to make women the objects of their dangerous diversion. Nor did strangers escape the hazard and inconvenience of their inhuman inhospitable sport.” For many participants, the militia was much of the time a largely social affair, where much mirth was to be had. Levity and play — eerily combined with anxiety, terror, and deadly violence — would also infuse the identity and practices of some of the same militiamen when they wore buckskins and painted their faces to carry out ruthless warfare against Native peoples. 

During the first half of the 18th century, almost all North American British colonies, save Quaker-influenced Pennsylvania, experimented with and came to rely to some degree on Native forms of warfare, employing Native allies, ranger units, or both. By midcentury, the term rangers had become familiar to most Americans given the decades of ongoing wars against various French, Spanish, and Native alliances. During these years, the success and celebrity of Gorham’s Rangers during King George’s War (1745–48) and Father La Loutre’s War (1749–55), and, even more so, Rogers’ Rangers during the Seven Years’ War, firmly established this tradition as a point of pride for Americans.

It was also quite clear to American colonists that Native allies, and enemies, were a force to be reckoned with. After the Seven Years’ War, even leading British officers who often denounced American troops at times conceded that hardy American frontiersmen were necessary for their campaigns. Likewise, as much as elites living on the Eastern Seaboard enjoyed ridiculing backcountry bumpkins, they at times also drew inspiration and faith, tinged with a sense of virility, from their mastery of arms. 

Such latent dispositions to favorably view provincialism meant that following the early successes in Massachusetts in the spring and summer of 1775, American faith in their virility and military prowess was at an all-time high. Once organized into militias for the Revolutionary War effort, they often adopted some form of Indian garb as their official uniforms, as one observer noted in delight: “Every man has a hunting shirt, which is the uniform of each company — almost all have a cockade & buckskin tale in their hats, to represent that they are hardy resolute, & invincible Natives of the woods of America.” Another report painted a particularly attractive scene of a company of Virginian veterans of Dunmore’s War on the way to join the forces organizing under General Washington at Cambridge, Massachusetts: “They bear in their bodies visible marks of their prowess, and show scars and wounds which would do honor to Homer’s Iliad … These men have been bred in the woods to hardship and dangers from their infancy. They appear as if they were entirely unacquainted with, had never felt the passion of fear. With their rifles in their hands, they assume a kind of omnipotence over their enemies.” “At night,” after demonstrating uncanny shooting skills, they enacted a tantalizing Indian masquerade: 

A great fire was kindled around a pole painted in the court house square, where the company, with the captain at their head, all naked to the waist, and painted like savages … indulged a vast concourse of people with a perfect exhibition of a war-dance, and all the maneuvers of Indians, holding council, going to war, circumventing their enemies by defiles, ambuscades, attacking, scalping, &c. It is said by those who are judges, that no representation could possibly come nearer to the original.

Virginians seemed to take to such dress and revolutionary fervor with more verve then most. “The people all over America are determined to die or be free,” explained one Virginian, who also depicted how the local militia expressed such pathos in their uniquely American garb: “The general uniforms are made of brown Osnaburghs, something like a shirt, double caped over the shoulder, in imitation of the Indian, and on the breast, in capital letters, is the motto, Liberty or Death.”

Yet, such euphoria was also a contrivance, long nurtured by Americans to alleviate deep-seated anxieties. During the revolutionary period, American settlers internalized poignant apprehensions over their situation as Euro-Americans about to sever their cultural lifeline to their mother country in Europe, all the while continuing to engage an indigenous enemy in the “new world.” Americans performed fantastic intellectual acrobatics to negotiate the triangular, settler colonial crucible that on the one hand pitted them against their cultural metropolis, which claimed vast superiority and cast them as little better than savages, and on the other the original inhabitants of the land, who could outperform them in the North American woods, to which they had a truer claim. In a further ironic twist, the two peoples they were most anxious about and wished to outdo — the British and most Native nations in the region — became allies, joining forces to curb American settlers. For them there was no other way, but to insist that they were more qualified than their British kin to form a just and civilized republican, even democratic, society, and at the same time to declare themselves better than Indians in their own way of war. In doing so, American settlers pioneered a host of practices, along with conflicting convictions and talking points, and forced them to abide together under the same cognitive canopy, contradictions be damned. Such strained ideological and cultural production proved all the more urgent for male settlers, given that for many it involved an ongoing struggle to maintain their hold on a particularly valuable form of cultural cache — their manhood. 

Excerpted from American Laughter, American Fury: Humor and the Making of a White Man’s Democracy, 1750–1850, by Eran A. Zelnik. Copyright 2025 © by Johns Hopkins University Press. Published with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

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