James A. Henretta, professor of history at the University of Maryland in College Park and the author of America: A Concise History (1998), provides a number of illuminating answers to questions about the American Revolution (1775-1783) and life in colonial America. Why was George Washington such a great general despite his limited military experience, and what role did ideology play in France’s support of the colonists’ cause? Henretta paints a detailed picture of daily life among the colonists—for example, what they ate and how children played—while also describing the life of enslaved Africans and indentured servants.

Questions and Answers About Colonial America

Q: Who was the best general fighting for the colonists during the American Revolution and why?

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A: George Washington was the best general on the American side, for at least five reasons.

First, Washington was a master strategist who understood the character of the war and devised his plans accordingly. “On our Side the War should be defensive,” he told Congress. His strategy was to draw the British away from the seacoast, extend their lines of supply, and sap their morale while keeping the Continental Army intact as a symbol and instrument of American resistance.

Second, Washington was a decisive general who exploited tactical advantages to achieve crucial victories. On Christmas night in 1776, Washington crossed the Delaware River and staged a surprise attack on Trenton, New Jersey, forcing the surrender of a thousand Hessians (German mercenaries).

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Third, Washington was a courageous leader. He squelched potential military coups by disaffected officers and maintained the morale of enlisted men at Valley Forge as the disastrous winter of 1777-1778 took the lives of 3,000 soldiers.

Fourth, the American commander in chief was a good judge of character. Confident of his own abilities, he recruited outstanding military officers and appointed them to important commands.

Finally, Washington was an astute politician, deferring to Congress and the state governments while constantly pressuring civilian leaders to provide the army with much-needed men, arms, and supplies.

Q: Could the Revolution have succeeded if the French hadn’t been swept up by its ideals and lent support? I realize that the prospect of weakening Britain was probably most significant, but I‘m curious about just how major a role ideology played.

A: Your question is a good one, and the answer is somewhat complex. As you note, a desire to weaken Britain was a major motivation. Britain had defeated France in the French and Indian War (known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War, 1756-1763) and expelled the French from Canada. The French wanted revenge. Consequently, the French foreign minister, the comte de Vergennes, began to give secret aid to the Patriot Americans as early as 1776.

However, even at this point the ideas of the Enlightenment played an indirect role. Vergennes channeled aid to the Americans through a dummy company set up by the writer Beaumarchais. Beaumarchais was a philosophe—that is, one of the French thinkers who subjected existing institutions to critical examination. Most philosophes opposed the pretensions of the French kings to rule as absolute monarchs. They favored either a constitutional monarchy, such as that created in England by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, or a republic. Because of Beaumarchais’s republican sympathies, he was a good choice as a channel for French aid to the Patriot Americans who, in July 1776, had proclaimed their independence as a confederation of states with republican governments.

In 1778, following the patriots’ victory at Saratoga, Vergennes entered into formal military and commercial alliances with the government of the United States. As in 1776, this Franco-American connection was primarily a product of calculated diplomacy. Vergennes and the French king, Louis XVI, wanted to cut Britain’s power in North America and seize some of its valuable sugar-producing islands in the West Indies. At the same time they also realized the ideological and political dangers of an alliance with the Patriot Americans. The United States was a republic; France was a monarchy. The success of the American republicans might undermine the legitimacy of monarchical regimes throughout Europe.

French republicans, such as the Marquis de Lafayette, welcomed that possibility. Lafayette volunteered for military service in the Continental Army and strongly supported the dispatch of French troops to America. Then, in 1780, he used his personal influence with Louis XVI to persuade the king to support an aggressive military policy. Thanks to Lafayette’s intervention, the king ordered the French fleet to leave the West Indies, where it was trying to seize a sugar island. He instructed Admiral de Grasse to assist General Washington’s plan to capture the British army led by General Charles Cornwallis. When the Franco-American army led by Washington and Lafayette bottled up Cornwallis’s army on the Yorktown peninsula in Virginia, the French fleet prevented the British navy from rescuing Cornwallis and his troops.

So republican ideology as well as revenge diplomacy played an important role with respect to French support for the American cause. Without that French support, the American patriots might have won the independence of the United States, but that task would have been much more difficult. That, of course, is another story.

Q: What books provide the best general overview of the American Revolution?

Benson Brorick’s Angel in the Whirlwind: The Triumph of the American Revolution (1997) presents the break with England as a grand epic stretching from the French and Indian War to George Washington’s inauguration.

A stimulating discussion of the prerevolutionary years, A. J. Langguth’s Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution (1988) is a suspense-ridden story of famous figures such as George Washington, John Adams, Samuel Adams, and Patrick Henry. Two fine studies of specific events are Edmund and Helen Morgan’s, The Stamp Act Crisis (1953) and Benjamin Labaree’s, The Boston Tea Party (1990). The rise of the Radical Patriots and the outbreak of the fighting in Massachusetts are captivatingly retold in David Hackett Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride (1994). For events in Virginia, see the exciting study by Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, & the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (1999).

For some vivid firsthand accounts of the military conflict see The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War for Independence, edited by John C. Dann (1980). Barbara Graymont’s The Iroquois in the American Revolution (1972) and Sylvia R. Frey’s Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (1991), trace the impact of the revolution on Native Americans and African Americans.

Q: Who was the best general fighting for the British during the American Revolution and why?

A: The truth is that Britain lacked a great military leader who might have suppressed the American rebellion. Some of the most capable British generals refused to accept a colonial command, while others were sympathetic to the colonial cause. More important, many generals were either old men or aristocrats with few military skills. Consequently, the king had to choose among men with ordinary talents.

When the war ended, angry members of Parliament demanded an explanation for the military defeat. How could mighty Britain, victorious in the great Seven Years’ War in Europe and America from 1754 to 1763, be defeated by a motley group of colonists? The ministry blamed the military leadership, pointing to a series of blunders. In 1776 General Sir William Howe had tried to negotiate a peaceful settlement with the rebels instead of ruthlessly pursuing Washington’s army. In 1777 Howe and General John Burgoyne had failed to coordinate the movement of their armies, which, along with Burgoyne’s poor tactics, led to the major British defeat at Saratoga. In 1781 headstrong Lord Cornwallis had defied the orders of Sir Henry Clinton, the British commander in chief in America, and had marched deep into Virginia, losing his army at Yorktown. Clinton himself was too cautious and did not command the respect of his fellow generals.

Q: Are there reenactors who portray British army forces from the American Revolution? What are some of their activities?

A: Crown Forces in America, 1775-1783, lists 44 groups that reenact the experiences of Loyalist, Hessian, Native American, and British military units during the American Revolution. They perform throughout the country at anniversary celebrations of important battles and portray many different types of units. For example, the 33rd Regiment of Foot, Light Infantry Company is based in Atlanta, Georgia, and recreates a British Light Infantry campaign in the South from 1779 to 1783. Colonel David Fanning’s North Carolina Loyalist Militia portrays the experience of local militia forces that supported the crown.

Other Loyalist reenactor groups underline the cultural diversity of those who opposed American independence. The Hesse-Kassel Jäger Korps brings to life the wartime experiences of soldiers from Hesse and other German states, many of whom stayed and became American citizens. The Woodland Confederacy is a reenactor organization dedicated to portraying Native Americans who fought for the British cause.

Related Web sites that provide insight into the life of the period include the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association, which focuses on 18th-century weaponry, and two merchant houses that offer 18th-century clothing and equipment: Jas. Townsend and Son, Inc. and G. Gedney Goodwin.

Q: How much schooling did most children in colonial America have?

A: In colonial America most children learned skills for the house and farm at home. They helped their fathers and mothers farm, make cloth, prepare food, and maintain the house. Or they served as apprentices to artisans, learning a craft, such as carpentry, by assisting a skilled worker. Attending an actual school supplemented these more basic forms of education.

School attendance varied widely by region. The Puritan colonies in New England made elementary education mandatory for all boys and girls because they wanted everyone to be able to read the Bible. They required each town to hire a schoolmaster and provided poor children with free tuition.

No other colonies in America made education mandatory or set up a system of public schools. Consequently, only a minority of children had formal schooling. In Pennsylvania, Quaker children attended privately supported Friends’ Schools. Other religious denominations, such as Lutherans, Moravians, and Dutch Reformed, also offered religious instruction in the Bible or in Sunday schools.

In the South, the children of white tenant farmers and enslaved blacks did not attend schools. Wealthy planters hired tutors to teach their children and to prepare them for further education in England or at the College of William and Mary, founded in 1693.

Q: What did children in colonial America primarily study in school?

A: In Puritan New England schooling had a religious goal. Because it was a “chief project of the old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures,” Puritan children were taught how to read and given daily instruction in Bible reading.

Elementary schools in New England and elsewhere also taught boys how to write. Boys were also taught the basic principles of arithmetic, so that they would be able to keep accounts for themselves or as clerks for merchants. Girls were sometimes taught arithmetic as well.

Young girls were often taught to sew, quilt, and embroider, while older girls were given training in music, art, and dancing. But young women—even those from privileged backgrounds—were discouraged from intellectual pursuits. When Eliza Custis, Martha Washington’s granddaughter, observed that she “thought it hard [wrong] that they would not teach me Greek and Latin because I was a girl—they laughed and said women ought not to know such things, and mending, writing, Arithmetic, and Music was all I could be permitted to acquire.”

The small percentage (about 10 percent) of young men who were educated beyond the age of 12 often received training in the classical languages (Greek and Latin), geography, surveying and navigating, simple legal principles, and elementary physics. But education for most people in colonial America was confined to learning the alphabet and learning how to read.

Q: How did the American colonies recruit soldiers during the American Revolution?

A: The Patriot leaders of the American Revolution did not favor conscription because they believed that standing armies of conscripted soldiers could be used to oppress the people. Patriot leaders also knew that Americans preferred to serve in the local militia that was commanded by local officers, mobilized only for short periods of time, and usually fought battles close to home.

In 1775 and 1776 the Continental Army led by George Washington was composed of local militia units and short-term volunteer enlistees. When these forces faded away, Continental Congress found it necessary to create a more permanent army, offering men who enlisted for three years a bounty of $20, a yearly clothing allowance, and a promise of 100 acres of land.

By 1777 most soldiers in the Continental Army were poor men who hoped to use their bounties to get a start in the world. To provide the troops requested by the Continental Congress, states offered even higher bounties or resorted to conscription. To avoid conscription, propertied men often hired substitutes, either poor whites, free blacks, or indentured servants. Virginia and Maryland allowed slaves to serve as substitutes for their white owners.

Q: Where are some places to go to find information about a relative who fought in the American Revolution?

A: Tracking down a relative who lived more than two centuries ago can be difficult. However, if you know a few things about your ancestor, such as his state, town, or military unit, then the task becomes a little easier. Still, you may have to travel to a research library or a regional center of the National Archives and Records Administration. Start your research on the World Wide Web.

One place to begin is the military records section of the National Archives. It provides a list of microfilmed “Records of Revolutionary War Soldiers (Record Group 93).” Within that record group there are 58 rolls of microfilm (M860) that contain a comprehensive name index to soldiers, sailors, and some civilian employees. There are also microfilm rolls containing the records of particular states, regiments, and companies.

A second place to start your search is at the Historical Resources Branch of the U.S. Army Center of Military History. It contains extensive bibliographies of printed sources, arranged by states and other headings.

Q: How did food differ regionally in colonial America?

A: The environment and the settlers’ cultural preferences determined what people ate in the various regions of colonial America.

In New England, the English settlers initially ate the traditional foods of their homeland: wheat bread, milk, beef, and green vegetables. But wheat grew poorly in the rocky soils, so many families planted rye (for rye bread) or corn (for corn meal and porridge). After 1750 they also ate large quantities of potatoes.

In the mid-Atlantic colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and in the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia, wheat grew well. As a result, many German and English settlers there maintained a European-style diet. They ate wheat bread and kept large numbers of cows, which supplied them with meat, milk, cheese, and butter. The Scots-Irish settlers who moved to the backcountry of Pennsylvania and down the Shenandoah Valley into western Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas developed an agricultural system based on corn and hogs. They ate plenty of cornbread and pork.

Enslaved Africans in the Chesapeake region had to eat the food provided by their owners. Corn—a peck (8 quarts) a week—was the basic ration, bolstered by a pound of bacon or salt pork. Slaves kept chickens as an additional source of protein. Blacks in South Carolina had a more varied diet of corn, rice, and yams, which they supplemented by fishing and by hunting rabbits and raccoons. Carolina slaves also ate African foodstuffs, such as okra, sorghum, and sesame.

Q: What were the most popular foods in colonial America?

A: Native Americans relied on corn (maize) and beans (of many varieties) as their traditional dietary staples. These items also became the basic foodstuffs of many European settlers. As physician William Douglass observed in the 1720s, 'The general subsistence of the poor people is salt pork and Indian beans, with bread of Indian corn meal and pottage of this meal with milk for breakfast and supper.' Moreover, corn provided food for the farm animals that produced meat and milk: Chickens ate its kernels, and cows munched its stalks and leaves.

Yeomen farm families grew wheat, which they ground into flour for bread. They also harvested crops of barley, which they made into beer. They planted orchards of apples, which were pressed into cider, and other fruits, such as peaches and pears. Beginning around 1750 many settlers planted potatoes, which were not only nutritious but also had high yields per acre.

For protein-rich foods, Native Americans ate deer and fish. European settlers also relied on fish, which were abundant in lakes and rivers, and on the meat of domesticated animals: chicken, cattle, sheep, and especially hogs. For fresh vegetables, colonial Americans harvested turnips, beets, onions, carrots, squash, and peas; they also dried peas for use during the winter months. Finally, they ate strawberries from their gardens and wild berries, such as blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries.

Q: Why did the framers of the Constitution of the United States create the electoral college?

A: When the framers of the Constitution met in Philadelphia in 1787, the electoral college was not a central part of the constitutional system. But once the delegates had created the office of president, they had to decide how to fill it. Because they wanted the chief executive to be independent of Congress, they ruled out appointment by the legislature. And, because the framers did not foresee political parties that would nominate presidential candidates, the framers did not see how ordinary voters could decide among the hundreds of potential candidates.

The electoral college offered a solution. The framers decided that each state would appoint electors, with each state legislature deciding how to choose the electors. The electors would meet in their own states, and each would vote by ballots for the two most qualified candidates. Many framers doubted that any individual would receive a majority of the votes, and so they spent three days discussing how to decide the election. Finally they agreed that the House of Representatives would choose the president from those receiving the five highest numbers of electoral votes, with each state having a single vote in the House.

The advantage of the electoral college was that it meshed with the crucial political compromise made previously between large and small states. The most populous states got most of the electoral votes, because one vote was given for each member of Congress from each state. However, the small states retained considerable power: If the House of Representatives decided the election, then each state would have a single vote.

Q: Can you provide more background on George Washington’s military career both in and before the Revolutionary War?

A: When the Continental Congress chose George Washington as the commander in chief of its army in 1775, the Virginia planter had very little military experience. In 1754, at the age of 22, Washington had commanded a few companies of Virginia militia. His troops overpowered a small French force in one wilderness battle but were defeated and forced to surrender in another. Washington fought courageously in 1755 when French and Indian forces routed the British general Edward Braddock’s army, but he saw very little military action during the French and Indian War (1756-1763).

Despite his limited experience, Washington turned out be an inspired commanding general. By demonstrating respect for political leaders in Congress and the states, he won support for the army and his military strategy.

Early in the war Washington’s strategy was defensive. His goal was to draw the British away from the seacoast and extend its lines of supply while keeping the Continental Army intact as an instrument of American resistance.

Later, bolstered by the military alliance with France, Washington acted boldly. In 1781 he feinted an assault on the British army in New York City and secretly marched French general Rochambeau’s army from Rhode Island to Virginia. There it joined his Continental Army and, aided by the French fleet, forced the surrender of the 9,500-man British force commanded by General Cornwallis, essentially ending the war.

Thus, by organizing a disciplined Continental Army and using it strategically, Washington led the Patriot forces to victory against an adversary that had greater military and economic resources.

Q: What kind of games did children play in colonial America?

A: From an early age children in colonial America were expected to work hard on the farm. Consequently, their time for games was limited. Some children amused themselves by hunting or fishing, activities that also provided the family with food. Or they took exercise by swimming, running, or riding horses. For older boys and men horseracing was very popular, especially in the Southern colonies.

More formal games for boys included foot ball (played barefoot and similar to soccer), wicket (similar to cricket), and backsword (fencing). Young girls played house, imitating the tasks of grownup women. Older girls learned the skills of shuffleboard and outdoor bowling, won by the player who rolled a large round wooden ball closest to a small white ball. Young people of both sexes were taught how to dance, either formal ballroom minuets or folk dances, depending on their race and social class. They picked up the rules of various card games: whist (similar to bridge), piquet (rummy), put (poker), and cribbage. Other popular board games included chess, dominoes, and dice.

Native American youth played lacrosse, a game that Europeans later learned. Slaves in South Carolina enjoyed a variety of African games, including papaw (a dice game), fighting sticks, and sports activities that, one observer explained, consisted of “running, jumping, and climbing trees.”

Q: Who were the Hessians, and why did they fight in the American Revolution?

A: The armies of most 18th-century European states were relatively small and were composed primarily of professional soldiers who fought for pay rather than for patriotism. The princes who ruled small states in what is now Germany recruited soldiers such as these, created armies, and sold their services to major military powers. The principality of Hesse, near Frankfurt in west central Germany, was a leading supplier of these troops. Because of population growth, many Hessian peasants could not provide land for all of their sons and sent some of them to join the prince’s army.

Because Britain was an island nation and not easily invaded, it maintained only a small standing army. When it went to war in Europe—or North America—it raised a professional army at home and hired additional troops from various German princes. Because many of the German troops who fought for the British during the American Revolution came from Hesse, Americans called all of them “Hessians.”

German soldiers greatly assisted the British war effort. In 1776 a British officer remarked that Hesse in particular provided “riflemen ... as much superior to those of the rebels as it is possible to imagine.” However, a significant number of Hessians and other German soldiers deserted from the British army and became citizens of the American states. Many joined existing German settlements in the mid-Atlantic States of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York.

Q: Is there any evidence that Powhatan killed the colonists at Roanoke?

A: The fate of the settlers at Roanoke is shrouded in mystery. As yet there is no direct evidence that Powhatan, the chief of the Powhatan confederacy of Algonquian tribes, had a hand in their disappearance or death. But given the ongoing conflict between the native peoples and Europeans in the region, it is quite possible that he was involved.

The Spanish were key actors. In 1561 Spaniard Antonio Valázquez sailed into the Chesapeake Bay and carried away a leading chief’s son, who may have been a relative of Powhatan’s. Nine years later this young man returned from Spain in the company of eight Jesuit priests, who set up a mission at Ajacán, very near the later English settlement of Jamestown. The local people killed the missionaries, and in 1572 a Spanish expedition retaliated, killing 20 natives in combat and hanging 14 others.

Thus, when the English arrived at Roanoke a few years later, the Native American peoples of present-day coastal Virginia and North Carolina must have seen them as dangerous intruders. There is evidence that the Roanoke settlers visited the Chesapeake tribe, an Algonquian people who lived near Cape Henry and were semi-independent of Powhatan.

It is possible that when the settlers left Roanoke, some of the survivors were absorbed into the Chesapeake tribe. If so, they were killed by Powhatan and his allies, who completely destroyed the Chesapeake tribe shortly before a new group of English traders and adventurers arrived at Jamestown in 1607.

Q: I recently went to Daniel Boone’s home in Missouri. The tour guide at the home told our tour group that Daniel Boone died from eating too many sweet potatoes. Is this true? What was his life like?

A: Daniel Boone was born in Pennsylvania in 1735 and died in Missouri in 1820, at the ripe old age of 85. His last meal may have been sweet potatoes but it is unlikely they caused his death. According to some sources Daniel had seen death coming and had made his own coffin, keeping it handy under his bed.

Even before he died, Daniel Boone was the subject of conflicting myths. Some accounts portrayed him as an empire-builder, leading colonists westward to bring lands under the plow. And in fact Boone was involved in the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals (March 1775), in which some Cherokee leaders relinquished Indian claims to a large part of Kentucky. The treaty led (a few months later) to the first Anglo-American settlement at Boonesborough.

Other sources portray Boone as a fugitive from civilization, moving constantly westward to pursue the life of a hunter. They point out that Boone moved his family to Missouri in 1799, saying he wanted “more elbow room.”

Which was the real Boone—the explorer-farmer or the backwoods hunter? The answer is that he was both. Boone originally moved to Kentucky looking for cheap farmland for himself and his many children. Despite his efforts as a land speculator and surveyor, Boone failed to become a substantial landowner. His talents lay elsewhere. Boone was at heart a hunter, happiest when he was tracking game and living off the land.

Q: Are there American Revolution reenactors like Civil War reenactors? If so, what are the major organizations that portray Patriot units?

The Patriot side of the American Revolution lives on in the activities of hundreds of reenactors. These living history groups are organized into military companies and regiments and are found in many parts of the country. For example, the 24th Connecticut Militia Regiment is a Patriot unit located in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (an area claimed in the mid-18th century by Connecticut and Pennsylvania). In Virginia, the 5th Troop, Virginia Light Horse, commemorates the force raised in 1776 by Light Horse Harry Lee.

Information on these and many other reenactor groups is available from the Brigade of the American Revolution, a non-profit living history association dedicated to recreating the life and times of the common soldier of the American Revolution. Members represent elements of all the armies involved in the fighting: Continental, Militia, British, Loyalist, German, French, Spanish, and Native American.

These organizations include women and children as well as men. The women enact roles as officers’ ladies, wives of soldiers, and camp followers, and they undertake many of the crafts and daily chores that women would have done in the military camps during the American Revolution. The children learn and practice games and chores of 18th-century youngsters. Reenactors outfit themselves with clothes, guns, and equipment that are copies of the original items.

Q: How did indentured servitude differ from slavery in colonial America?

A: From 1607 to 1700 English planters in Virginia and Maryland brought about 100,000 English indentured servants to work on their plantations. Most of these bound laborers were under 25 years of age, and one-quarter were women. Hoping eventually to prosper in the American colonies, they signed labor contracts, called indentures. The contract required a merchant to provide passage across the Atlantic; it legally bound the servant to work four or five years for the person to whom the merchant sold the indenture.

Unlike indentured servants, enslaved Africans did not choose to come to America; they were forced to do so. Once in the colonies, some Africans were treated like indentured servants and eventually received their freedom. But most slaves served for life, and their children inherited slave status. Thus, the crucial differences between the two systems of bound labor were threefold: slavery was involuntary, perpetual, and racially defined, whereas indentured servitude was voluntary, limited to a term of service, and had no racial component.

Q: Who signed the Declaration of Independence?

A: Most of the 56 delegates who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, were merchants, slaveowning planters, or well-to-do landlords. Twenty-five of the signers had been trained in the law. John Hancock, the president of the Congress, signed the declaration first. The other delegates who supported the declaration are listed by state:

Q: Which colonies of colonial America had slavery?

A: Slavery existed in every British colony in North America. The division into free states and slave states occurred only after the American Revolution (1775-1783), when some Northern states ended slavery and other Northern states passed laws providing for gradual emancipation.

Most enslaved people in colonial America were of African descent, but during the first century of settlement (1607-1720), Europeans also enslaved thousands of Native Americans. Tens of thousands of European men and women worked as indentured servants, a milder form of human bondage.

Although all colonies permitted slavery, some colonies had many slaves and others had very few. In the New England colonies, only about 1 percent of the population consisted of enslaved blacks. The Mid-Atlantic colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania had greater numbers of slaves—about 5 percent of the population—in part because the Dutch settlers often used slave labor.

Most slaves on the mainland of North America lived in the Southern tobacco- and rice-growing colonies. In 1770 slaves accounted for 35 percent of the population in Virginia and about 60 percent in South Carolina’s population. A number of colonial port cities—New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston—also had large communities of enslaved African American workers.

Q: What jobs did slaves do in colonial America?

A: Most enslaved Africans in the Western Hemisphere worked on sugar plantations in Portuguese Brazil and in the British and French West Indies. Sugar was not produced in the British colonies on the mainland of North America. There, the main plantation crops were tobacco, rice, and indigo (a blue dye).

Most slaves in Maryland and Virginia grew tobacco for export to European markets. They planted the young seedlings in the spring and hoed and weeded the crop throughout the summer. In the fall they picked and hung up the leaves to cure over the winter. They also grew corn and wheat, both for export and their own consumption. Some enslaved men worked proficiently as artisans: Coopers made barrels for the tobacco and corn, wheelwrights repaired wagons, and masons and carpenters built houses, sheds, and barns. Slave women worked in the fields and also as manufacturers, spinning wool and cotton into yarn and weaving it into cloth.

In South Carolina enslaved blacks worked primarily on rice plantations, planting, harvesting, and milling millions of tons of rice for export to Europe. Because rice cultivation took place in hot, mosquito-filled, swampy lowlands, epidemic diseases took the lives of thousands of these workers. In the port city of Charleston, many slaves worked as artisans, dock laborers, and sailors.

In the Northern colonies, most slaves served as laborers on rural farms or in port cities, but a few worked as skilled artisans.

Q: Who was Francis Marion, and why was he called the “Swamp Fox?”

When the American Revolution began, Francis Marion was a prosperous, 43-year-old, slave-owning rice planter on the Santee River in South Carolina. As a loyal Patriot, he raised a company of volunteers. When the British invaded South Carolina in 1779 and captured the American army defending Charleston, Marion mobilized a small force of Scots-Irish militia in the back country and attacked British troops and supply barges. To escape a sizeable army dispatched by the British commander Lord Cornwallis, Marion’s guerrilla band retreated into the Great White Marsh, a swampy region just below Wilmington, North Carolina.

Using another swamp in South Carolina as a base of operations, Marion and his men launched a series of attacks in 1780 against encampments of the Loyalist Americans who supported the British and played a major role in the British war effort in the South. He eluded capture by Colonel Banastre Tarleton, the infamous commander of a brutal Tory legion. Even the devil could not catch “this dammed old fox,” Tarleton exclaimed, giving Marion his nickname the “Swamp Fox.”

Throughout 1781 Marion harassed British forces in South Carolina, winning some battles and, when losses came, retreating into the swamplands. When Cornwallis gave up the fight in the Carolinas and led his army into Virginia, Marion joined with Light Horse Harry Lee and General Nathanael Greene to attack British forts in the back country. By 1782 only Charleston remained in British hands, thanks in considerable measure to the military exploits of the Swamp Fox and his bands of guerrillas.

Q: What were the primary weapons used by both sides during the American Revolution?

A: The basic weapon used by British and American soldiers during the American Revolution was the smoothbore musket. This musket had a long barrel, usually 100 cm (40 in) in length. It fired a single shot and was loaded through the muzzle by a cumbersome process. Before aiming and firing, a soldier had to grasp a small container holding gunpowder, pour the powder and a round lead ball down the barrel, jam them tight with a ramrod, place a bit of gunpowder in the pan where it could be ignited by a flint, and then—finally—cock the hammer. Some soldiers could do all this lying on their backs. However, in order to fire two times a minute, most men had to load from a kneeling or standing position, exposed to enemy fire.

The hunting rifle used by some American militiamen employed a different and more accurate technology. It had a tapered barrel that was rifled (lined with spiral grooves), which gave the balls greater speed and accuracy. Hunting rifles, which later gave Daniel Boone his reputation as a Kentucky sharpshooter, were not issued to soldiers because the grooved barrel quickly accumulated gunpowder and required frequent cleaning.

Because muskets were inaccurate and slow to load, attacking armies during the Revolutionary War often reached defensive lines with relatively few casualties and engaged the defenders in hand-to-hand combat. Consequently, many men died of bayonet wounds.

Q: How were women involved in the war effort of the American Revolution? What were some of the activities with which they were involved?

A: The American Revolution changed the lives of many American families and caused women to take on new responsibilities and tasks. In some towns and villages, women who were distressed by the high prices for bread, tea, and sugar formed mobs and seized the goods they needed to feed their families. In Boston, a mob of women accused merchant Thomas Boyleston of hoarding goods, “seazd him by his Neck,” and forced him to sell at the traditional prices. In rural Ulster County, New York, women surrounded the Patriot Committee of Safety, demanding steps to end the food shortages; otherwise, they said, “their husbands and sons shall fight no more.”

With their husbands and sons away at war, some women went into the fields, plowing, harvesting, and loading grain, while others took on the role of supervising hired laborers or slaves. “We have sow’d our oats as you desired,” one women wrote to her absent husband, “had I been master I should have planted it to Corn.” Other women contributed to the war effort by increasing their production of homespun textiles, spinning wool and flax fibers into yarn and weaving them into a coarse but serviceable cloth. One Massachusetts town produced 30,000 yards of homespun, while women in Elizabeth, New Jersey, promised “100,000 yards of linnen and woolen cloth.”

Appears in

Colonial America, Life in; American Revolution