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American logistics

Below is a copy-paste of narrative with its HarvRef footnotes and references for your use here. It is removed completely from American Revolutionary War as too detailed for the survey account of military campaigns there. The effort is part of a trimming project in coordination with the Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Requests, to promote the ARW article to B-class status.

Generally throughout the Revolution, inadequate provisioning of the Continental Army led to serious difficulty in maintaining a force in the field. From July 1779 to July 1780, the Army shrunk from twenty-six thousand men to less than fifteen thousand. Only the most committed of revolutionaries persisted throughout the conflict, although some numbers reentered service after leaving at end-of-enlistment, desertion, or mutiny amnesty. Several factors contributed: lack of food regularly distributed in ration quantity, inadequate or no pay, and in 1780-81 the harshest winter of the war.[1]

Overall, the problem was fundamentally a financial one. The Continental currency depreciated, inflation accelerated.[2] The British government maintained a financial campaign counterfeiting a flood of paper currency in Continental dollars to sabotage the war effort.[3] Continental currency became worthless, state treasuries were empty, towns went bankrupt, and the marketplace was paralyzed by Quartermaster and Commissary certificates[4].[a] Both Congress and states shared in the failure of the “specific supplies” system that Congress undertook by committee. From the standpoint of legislation, states did not tell Congressional Boards nor their delegates in Congress what they had, and Congress requisitioned the states for food in resolves that were only published in Philadelphia newspapers. Congressional requisitions to each state were proportionately based on wealth and population, but those formulas did not match the ability to respond in each state.[5][b]

a ship's landing with a ship in the background; in the middle ground barrels and boxes staged for awaiting Conestoga wagons, adjacent artillery pieces lined up; in the foreground military, civilian and laborer figures consulting and at their tasks
Continental Army provisioning suffered from inadequate finances, markets and transportation

Even during the emergency of war with national survival at issue, American colonial traditions of local self-government thwarted efforts to supply a national "standing army".[c] States interfered with shipments of army provisions, Continental Army and Navy supply officials were drafted into state militias, and local magistrates would not enforce impressment when farmers withheld food from the military for speculators.[6] States either could not or refused to cooperate with Congress, civilians everywhere resisted and then refused to participate in markets to supply and provision the army. When Continental, state or local officials were given authority to impress goods for army use without compensation, it was either actively resisted or only half-heartedly attempted.[7] State provincialism also played a part.[8][d]

As a matter of administration and logistics, the most serious aspect limiting military supply was the immense difficulty in acquiring provisions and transportation. Middlemen and speculators bought up food before it reached market, adding their margins to state expense. French regiments in Maryland and Connecticut paid in gold and silver, preempting state purchase of army requisitions in Continental dollars or worse, by certificates.[9] Even when states gathered supply, there was no administrative means provided to take it to the Continental Army. Unaccessed food rotted in state depositories.[10] The most serious related event was the mutiny of the Continental Pennsylvania Line in January 1781, followed by that of the New Jersey Line later the same month. The two mutinies followed one years' service without pay of any kind, along with a sporadic supply of inadequate food and clothing.[11]

Congressional delegates feared for the future of their revolution and the nation's independence. Among the correspondents of George Washington pleading in his daily correspondence for Continental Army support, a Nationalist movement developed within every state. State commissioners met in a Hartford Convention from 11 to 22 November 1780, recommending an end to the administrative Boards of mixed Congressional and civilian advisors. Nationalist majorities in state legislatures increased their Congressional delegations with numbers of former Continental Army officers.[12][e] The Nationalist caucus in Congress replaced the Boards with independent executive Secretaries of Foreign Affairs, Finance, War, and Marine (Oceans). Unfortunately these were likewise mostly secretarial posts accumulating reports to submit to Congress for action.[13]

Late in the war, Congress hoped that shifting direct responsibility onto the state legislatures for each state militia Line regiment in Continental service would result in better provisioning. It asked individual state legislatures to equip their own troops and pay upkeep for their own citizen soldiers in the Continental Army. When the war ended, the United States had spent $37 million at the national level and $114 million at the state level. The United States finally solved its debt problems in the 1790s when Congress assumed all state war debt to attach the states to the Constitution of the United States' central government, and it founded the First Bank of the United States to establish the good faith and credit of the United States.[14]

Notes
  1. ^ For instance, cattle-feeders could not use Congressional certificates to buy yearlings to fatten, nor would grain sellers honor them for feed. States netted as little as 10% their annual revenues in inflated Continental dollars, the rest in certificates that could not be used to pay their state requisitions to Congress to fund the Army.
  2. ^ Requisitions for wheat to Connecticut had no effect because there was little wheat production there. Pennsylvania had to import its requisitions of bacon and salt from other states with inflated currency. Congressional orders for salted beef and pork were placed after marketing season, so states had to obtain the supplies through hording speculators. The previous year’s drought in Rhode Island had killed all the state’s cattle. The 1780 harvest was poor in New York. Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay was effectively blockaded.
  3. ^ Congress tried to motivate the Quartermaster and Commissary Departments in the Continental Army independently from local politics by compensating them on commission. That led to local charges of corruption by local profiteers and others on Puritanical principles.
  4. ^ State requisition laws were designed to minimize the pain of local citizenry and to maximize delay to the Continental Army. In the worst case by law, a requisition passed in October 1780 was to begin county implementation February 1781, with fifty days for individual farmers to comply, and another 30 days of appeal time. Regardless of legislated schedules, in many cases local officials refused to pressure their voting neighbors. They accepted their salaries, “without ever supposing it incumbent on them to discharge the duties thereof” according to Deputy Quartermaster Edward Carrington, April 1781.
  5. ^ These included Generals John Sullivan (NH), Ezekiel Cornell and James Mitchell Varnum (RI), and other staunch nationalists were returned such as clergyman John Witherspoon (NJ).
Citations
  1. ^ Carp 1990, p 178
  2. ^ Carp 1990, p 186
  3. ^ Baack, “Economics of American Revolutionary War”
  4. ^ Carp 1990, p 186
  5. ^ Carp 1990, p 182-3
  6. ^ Carp 1990, p 220
  7. ^ Carp 1990, p 186-7
  8. ^ Carp 1990, p 185
  9. ^ Carp 1990, p 186
  10. ^ Carp 1990, p 181
  11. ^ Carp 1990, p 179
  12. ^ Carp 1990, p 203
  13. ^ Carp 1990, p 187,203
  14. ^ Jensen 2004, p 379
Bibliography
  • Carp, E. Wayne (1990). To Starve the Army at Pleasure: Continental Army Administration and American Political Culture, 1775–1783. UNC Press Books. ISBN 978-0-8078-4269-0.
  • Baack, Ben. "The Economics of the American Revolutionary War". EH.net. Economic History Association. Retrieved July 27, 2020.
  • Jensen, Merrill (2004). The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution 1763–1776. Hackett Publishing. ISBN 978-0-87220-705-9.

Sincerely - TheVirginiaHistorian (talk) 20:30, 12 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

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