America's First Band of Brothers: Friendship and Camaraderie within the Continental Army During the Revolutionary Era

@mastersthesis{engl2019,
  title = {America's First Band of Brothers: Friendship and Camaraderie within the Continental Army During the Revolutionary Era},
  author = {Engl, Rachel},
  year = {2019},
  keywords = {camaraderie, Continental Army, Emotions, Friendship, masculinity, sensibility},
  abstract = {This dissertation is a socio-cultural study that reimagines the social history of the Continental Army and incorporates an affective dimension to the traditional narrative of the Revolutionary War. Focusing on the lived experience of the American Revolution, it examines men who fought in the war and the relationships they forged. I argue that friendships and camaraderie among men in the Continental Army fundamentally shaped American military culture, ideas about manhood, and motivations for fighting, as well as helped to define the very nature and legacy of the Revolution. In establishing an army from the ground up, political and military leaders increasingly relied upon personal networks to not only fill positions of the new officer corps but also for promotions. This new group of officers developed a distinctly American military culture that borrowed elements from European armies, such as hierarchy based on a rank, but also incorporated novel practices that championed merit over hereditary claims. As the revolutionary movement gained momentum in North America, the ability to prove one’s manhood became even more pressing because the conflict with Britain was publicly defined in terms of a struggle over the trampling of colonists’ inherent rights as Englishmen. Upon entering the army, performances of an individual’s masculinity abounded, especially within the environment of military camps. Studying the experience of friendship and camaraderie among men in the army, it becomes clear that varying ideas about manhood emerged and evolved throughout the war. Moreover, as this project suggests, despite rhetoric supporting the idea that the American Revolution was a fight for liberty and breaking free of hierarchy, in actuality, the conflict also promoted impulses that bred inequality among men of different social ranks and helped establish an emerging hierarchy of American society that crystallized, in part, through the political leadership of the new republic.Exploring the horizontal sociability of officers and enlisted men in the Continental army during the Revolutionary War offers a starting point from which scholars of the Atlantic World can begin to understand how the participants on the ground of revolutionary movements become entangled in the process of the re-ordering of social hierarchies. Armies played a fundamental role in the revolutions that unfolded through the Atlantic World in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries, yet scholars often overlook how the environment of the army, itself, served as an important nexus in the process of creating and implementing revolutionary change, as well as masking the conservative impulses of social transformation. Overall, examining the communities of men developed among officers and enlisted men in the Continental Army unlocks the key to understanding a fundamental paradox that persisted in the age of revolutions: how social distinctions were created, re-justified, and proliferated throughout the Atlantic World in spite of political rhetoric promoting the liberty, equality, and fraternity of men.},
  language = {English},
}