The Minutemen and Their World

Chapter Six examines life in wartime Concord. While many were expecting a short, easy war, the opposite was true, and the war effort weighed heavy on the citizens of Concord. Just one way in which the war forced Concordians to change their way of life was the order by the Provincial Congress to take in and support nearly a hundred poor refugees from Boston, and then from Charlestown. Concord also served as the wartime location for Harvard College when its Cambridge facilities were being used as barracks. These developments and others changed the character of the town significantly: “By mid-March of 1776, some nineteen hundred persons were concentrated in Concord, representing an increase of over 25 percent in little more than a year” (134).

The economic cost of the war is difficult to overstate. Revolutionary-era America was a monetary mess: Continental Congress had been issuing paper money since the beginning of the war, as were the governments of each colony, and many transactions were conducted on credit. By 1777, prices were rising rapidly as paper money lost value. During this period, more and more Americans began to wear textiles produced on their side of the Atlantic, and other trades developed to fill the gap that English goods had left. Nevertheless, multiple years of economic hardship led to a (mostly unsuccessful) search for scapegoats. In 1781, the Massachusetts General Court imposed high taxes in hard currency to address the state’s debt, a move that was opposed by all but the richest of towns, including Concord.

The population increase, demands for provisions, and the need to prioritize military service over agricultural labor all took their toll on the town. The men of Concord were initially enthusiastic about joining the war effort, and those who remained in Concord also contributed to provisioning the troops and guarding strategic points. However, the constant demand for fresh recruits became harder and harder to fill as the war went on: “In all, Concord was obliged to provide some 875 men for terms of two months or more—a figure more than two and a half times the eligible male population on the eve of the war” (146).

The draft did not exclude men who were too old to fight, and in some cases women; however, this often meant in practice that these draftees were expected to pay a fine or find a replacement. This was just one way that the economic burden of the war was shared: the selectmen would calculate and split the costs of the war among the townspeople, and those who had served received credit. As the war wore on, Concordians began to pay for replacement soldiers as a matter of course, and this, combined with a demand for longer terms of service from George Washington, meant that, by 1778, the war was fought “principally by landless younger sons, by the permanent poor, and by blacks. In Massachusetts, as in every other state, necessity ultimately overcame prejudice” (150). Many slaves and free black men who joined the war effort did so in the hope of gaining their freedom, and in many cases, they succeeded. Attitudes toward slavery as an institution were shifting, at least in the north: “[...]the Revolution against British-imposed ‘slavery’ had dramatically undermined the notion that any man was, by right, a slave” (151).

By 1783, Concord was exhausted, as was the rest of America, and the townspeople suspected that they had contributed more than most to the war effort. Determined to see that the political ideals that ostensibly lay behind their participation in the war would be enshrined in the form of the new government, they were “the first anywhere in America to suggest that a constitutional convention was necessary to establish government of the people” (154). Concordians, and later others, insisted on this as an alternative to having the General Court write a new constitution. However, Concord remained politically moderate, and the pre-Revolutionary elites for the most part retained power. But a sustained attitude of suspicion, and a determination to get their fair share, led Concord to keep a close eye on its representatives in the state organs of government, and they were equally suspicious of the process of a confederation of states. In contrast, in the immediate post-war period, long-standing religious and sectional divisions in the town began finally to heal.