Minutemen were members of well-prepared militia companies of select men from the American
colonial partisan militia during the American Revolutionary War. They provided a highly
mobile, rapidly deployed force that allowed the colonies to respond immediately to war
threats, hence the name. The minutemen were among the first people
to fight in the American Revolution. Their teams constituted about a quarter of the entire
militia. Generally younger and more mobile, they served as part of a network for early
response. Minuteman and Sons of Liberty member Paul Revere was among those who spread the
news that the British Regulars were coming out from Boston. Revere was captured before
completing his mission when the British marched toward the arsenal in Concord to confiscate
the weapons and ammunition that were stored there.
The term has also been applied to various later United States civilian-based paramilitary
forces to recall the success and patriotism of the originals.
History In the British colony of Massachusetts Bay,
all able-bodied men between the ages of 16 and 60 were required to participate in their
local militia. As early as 1645 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, some men were selected from the
general ranks of town-based "training bands" to be ready for rapid deployment. Men so selected
were designated as minutemen. They were usually drawn from settlers of each town, and so it
was very common for them to be fighting alongside relatives and friends.
Some towns in Massachusetts had a long history of designating a portion of their militia
as minutemen, with "minute companies" constituting special units within the militia system whose
members underwent additional training and held themselves ready to turn out rapidly
for emergencies, hence their name. Other towns, such as Lexington, preferred to keep their
entire militia in a single unit. Members of the minutemen, by contrast, were
no more than 30 years old, and were chosen for their enthusiasm, political reliability,
and strength. They were the first armed militia to arrive at or await a battle. Officers,
as in the rest of the militia, were elected by popular vote, and each unit drafted a formal
written covenant to be signed upon enlistment. The militia typically assembled as an entire
unit in each town two to four times a year for training during peacetime, but as the
inevitability of war became apparent, the militia trained three to four times a week.
In this organization, it was common for officers to make decisions through consultation and
consensus with their men as opposed to giving orders to be followed without question.
Just before the American Revolutionary War, on October 26, 1774, after observing the British
military buildup, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress found the colony's militia resources
short, and that "including the sick and absent, it amounted to about 17,000 men, far short
of the number wanted, that the council recommended an immediate application to the New England
governments to make up the deficiency," resolving to organize the militia better:
They recommended to the militia to form themselves into companies of minute-men, who should be
equipped and prepared to march at the shortest notice. These minute-men were to comprise
one-quarter of the whole militia, to be enlisted under the direction of the field-officers,
and divide into companies, consisting of at least 50 men each. The privates were to choose
their captains and subalterns, and these officers were to form the companies into battalions,
and chose the field-officers to command the same. Hence the minute-men became a body distinct
from the rest of the militia, and, by being more devoted to military exercises, they acquired
skill in the use of arms. More attention than formerly was likewise bestowed on the training
and drilling of militia.
The need for efficient minuteman companies was illustrated by the Powder Alarm of 1774.
Militia companies were called out to resist British troops, who were sent to capture ammunition
stores. By the time the militia was ready, the British regulars had already captured
the arms at Cambridge and Charlestown and returned to Boston.
Pequot War In August 1636, the first offensive military
attack by militias failed when Massachusetts dispatched John Endecott with four companies
on an unsuccessful campaign against the Pequot Indians. According to one man's account the
expedition succeeded only in killing one Indian and burning some wigwams.
Weeks elapsed between the incidents that caused the march, and the arrival of Endecott's men
in the area. Once they got there, they did not know which Indians to fight, or why. This
feeble response served to encourage the Indians, and attacks on the settlers in the Connecticut
Valley increased. In the following year Massachusetts again
put a force on the field in collaboration with Plymouth and Connecticut. By the time
Plymouth had gotten their force packed and ready to march the campaign had ended. Massachusetts
Bay sent 150 militiamen, Plymouth sent 50 and Connecticut sent 90.
New England confederation In May 1643, a joint council was formed. They
published the articles of the New England confederation. The real power of the confederation
was that all four of the colonies promised to contribute soldiers to an alert force that
would fight anywhere in the colonies. On September 7, 1643 the towns were given
more tactical control. A new rule allowed any general to call up his militia at any
time. On August 12, 1645, 30% of all militia were made into short-notice groups. Command
and control were decentralized to the extent that individual company commanders could put
their troops into a defensive battle if necessary. A portion of the militia was well trained
and well equipped, and set aside as a ready force.
In May 1653, the Council of Massachusetts said that an eighth of the militia should
be ready to march within one day to anywhere in the colony. Eighty militiamen marched on
the Narragansett tribe in Massachusetts, though no fighting took place. Since the colonies
were expanding, the Narragansetts got desperate and began raiding the colonists again. The
militia chased the Indians, caught their chief, and got him to sign an agreement to end fighting.
In 1672, the Massachusetts Council formed a military committee to control the militia
in each town. In 1675, the military committee raised an expedition to fight the raiding
Wampanoag tribe. A muster call was sent out and four days later, after harsh skirmishes
with the Wampanoags, three companies arrived to help the locals. The expedition took heavy
losses: two towns were raided, and one 80-man company was killed entirely, including their
commander. That winter, a thousand militiamen pushed out the Wampanoags.
In response to the success of the Wampanoags, in the Spring of 1676 an alarm system of riders
and signals was formed in which each town was required to participate.
The British and French, each with Indian allies, engaged in various fights beginning in 1689
and dragging on for almost a hundred years. In 1690, Colonel William Phips led 600 men
to push back the French. Two years later he became governor of Massachusetts. When the
French and Indians raided Massachusetts in 1702, Governor Phips created a bounty which
paid 10 shillings each for the scalps of Indians. In 1703, snowshoes were issued to militiamen
and bounty hunters to make winter raids on the Indians more effective. The minuteman
concept was advanced by the snow shoe men. The Minutemen always kept in touch with the
political situation in Boston and their own towns. From 1629 to 1683, the towns had controlled
themselves but in 1689, the King appointed governors. By 1772, James Otis and Samuel
Adams used the Town Meetings to start a Committee of Correspondence. This instigated in 1774
a boycott of British goods. The Minutemen were aware of this as well. With a rising
number of Minutemen they faced another problem: a lack of gunpowder to support an army for
long enough to win freedom. They needed powder badly. The people of an island controlled
by the Dutch, Sint Eustatius, decided they had had enough with the British being the
major power and having its hand grasping over the entire world. They were quite pleased
with the idea of a large rebellion rising up against the British in the New World. As
a token of support, they traded gunpowder to the Colonials for other goods needed in
Europe. Not only did the Minutemen have political awareness of events in New England, but also
of the feelings in other countries such as in Holland and France. The Colonials knew
that other powers in the world were against the British for the amount of power they wielded.
American Revolutionary War period
In 1774, General Thomas Gage, the new Governor of Massachusetts, tried to enforce the Intolerable
Acts, which were designed to remove power from the towns. Samuel Adams pressed for County
Conventions to strengthen the revolutionary resistance. Gage tried to seat his own court
in Worcester, but the townspeople blocked the court from sitting. Two thousand militiamen
marched to intimidate the judges and get them to leave. This was the first time the militia
was used by the people to block the king's representatives from acting on royal orders
and against popular opinion. Gage responded by preparing to march to collect munitions
from the provincials. For 50 miles around Boston, militiamen were marching in response.
By noon the next day, almost 4000 people were on the common in Cambridge. The provincials
got the judges to resign and leave. Gage backed off from trying to seat a court in Worcester.
The colonials in Worcester met and came up with a new militia mobilization plan in their
County Convention. The Convention required that all militia officers resign. Officers
were then elected by their regiments. In turn, the officers then appointed 1/3 of their militia
regiment as Minutemen. Other counties followed Worcester's lead, electing new militia officers
and appointing Minutemen. Gage conducted several "show the flag" power
demonstrations in Massachusetts which showed the local government officials that the "Minuteman"
mobilization scheme worked well. When it came to practicing formations with
their weapons, the British mainly only practiced on formations and marching. In addition to
having no area to practice live firing because they were crowded into Boston, the British
knew that in 18th century warfare the movement of the bodies of men and their formations
to maximize the line of fire was the more difficult and therefore, more important part
of military drill. The militia planned extensively with elaborate
plans to alarm and respond to movements by the king's forces out of Boston. The frequent
mustering of the minute companies also built unit cohesion and familiarity with live firing
which increased the minute companies effectiveness. The royal authorities inadvertently gave the
new Minuteman mobilization plans validation by several "show the flag" demonstrations
by General Gage through 1774. The royal authorities in Boston had seen these
increasing numbers of militia appearing and thought that if they sent a sizable force
to Concord to seize munitions and stores there, the militia would not interfere. The events
on April 19, 1775 proved them wrong when the mobilization fielded large numbers of minutemen
to confront them at Concord that, with the arrival of the slower moving militia, rapidly
outnumbered them and forced a strategic defeat on Colonel Smith forcing him back to Boston.
The mobilization plan worked so well that only the timely arrival of a relief column
under Lord Percy in Lexington prevented the annihilation or surrender of the original
road column.
Equipment, training, and tactics Most Colonial militia units were provided
neither arms nor uniforms, and were required to equip themselves. Many simply wore their
own farmers' or workmans' clothes, and in some cases they wore cloth hunting frocks.
Most used fowling pieces, though rifles were sometimes used where available. Neither fowling
pieces nor rifles had bayonets. Some colonies purchased muskets, cartridge boxes, and bayonets
from England, and maintained armories within the colony.
The Continental Army regulars received European-style military training later in the American Revolutionary
War, but the militias did not get much of this. Rather than fight formal battles in
the traditional dense lines and columns, they were better when used as irregulars, primarily
as skirmishers and sharpshooters. When used in conjunction with continental regulars,
the militia would frequently fire ragged irregular volleys from a forward skirmish line or the
flanks of the Continental Army, while Continental soldiers held the center.
Their experience suited irregular warfare. Most were familiar with frontier hunting.
The Indian Wars, and especially the recent French and Indian War, had taught both the
men and officers the value of irregular warfare, while many English troops fresh from Europe
were less familiar with this. The long rifle was also well suited to this role. The rifling
gave it a much greater range than the smoothbore musket, although it took much longer to load.
Because of the lower rate of fire, rifles were not used by regular infantry, but were
preferred for hunting. When performing as skirmishers, the militia could fire and fall
back behind cover, or other troops, before the British could get into range. The wilderness
terrain that lay just beyond many colonial towns, very familiar to the local minuteman,
favored this style of combat. In time, however, loyalists like John Butler and Robert Rogers
mustered equally capable irregular forces. In addition, many British commanders learned
from experience and effectively modified their light infantry tactics and battle dress to
suit conditions in North America. Through the remainder of the revolution, militias
moved to adopting the minuteman model for rapid mobilization. With this rapid mustering
of forces, the militia proved its value by serving as augmentees to the continental army
on a temporary basis occasionally leading to instances of numerical superiority. This
was seen at the Battles of Hubbardton and Bennington in the north and at Camden and
Cowpens in the south. Cowpens is notable in that Daniel Morgan used the militias strengths
and weaknesses skillfully to attain the double-envelopment of Tarleton's forces.
The historian M. L. Brown states that while some of these men mastered the difficult handling
of a rifle, few became expert. Brown quotes the Continental Army soldier Benjamin Thompson,
who expressed the 'common sentiment' at the time which was that minutemen were notoriously
poor marksmen with rifles:
Instead of being the best marksmen in the world and picking off every Regular that was
to be seen...the continual firing which they kept up by the week and the month has had
no other effect than to waste their ammunition and convince the King's troops that they are
really not really so formidable.
Ammunition and supplies were in short supply and were constantly being seized by British
patrols. As a precaution, these items were often hidden or left behind by minutemen in
fields or wooded areas. Other popular concealment methods were to hide items underneath floorboards
in houses and barns. Criticism
The success of minutemen at Lexington and Concord is offset by the long history of failures
of the colonial militia. Even Samuel Adams, who was at Lexington on the day of the famous
clash, later said: "Would any man in his sense, who wishes war may be carried on with vigor,
prefer the temporary and expensive drafts of militia and minutemen to a permanent and
well-appointed army?" General Charles Lee, who had desired to lead militia forces, complained:
"As to the minutemen, no account ought to be made of them." George Washington is also
well known for a long series of scathing opinion of the shortcomings of militia forces.
However, the minuteman model for militia mobilization married with a very professional, small standing
army was the primary model for the United States' land forces up until 1916 with the
establishment of the National Guard. Legacy
In commemoration of the centenary of the first successful armed resistance to British forces,
Daniel Chester French, in his first major commission, produced one of his best-known
statues, the Concord Minute Man of 1775. Inscribed on the pedestal is the opening stanza of Ralph
Waldo Emerson's 1837 Concord Hymn with the immortal words, "Shot heard 'round the world."
According to the sculptor, the statue's likeness is not based on Isaac Davis as is widely claimed,
the captain of the Acton militia and first to be killed in Concord during the Battles
of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, but rather on the typical minuteman of the
day. Minutemen are portrayed in Paul Revere's Ride,
a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Although historians criticize the work as being historically
inaccurate, Longfellow understood the history and manipulated it for poetic effect.
The athletic teams of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst are nicknamed the Minutemen and Minutewomen.
The US Air Force named the LGM-30 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile the "Minuteman", which was
designed for rapid deployment in the event of a nuclear attack. The "Minuteman III" LGM-30G
remains in service today. References
Footnotes
External links Captain Robert K. Wright, Jr.. Massachusetts
Militia Roots: A Bibliographic Study. 116th Military History Detachment Virginia Army
National Guard. Available at the United States Army Center of Military History
Who Were the Minutemen? Organization of the Minute-Men.
Minute Man National Historical Park