Minutemen

The Minute Man statue depicted on the Massachusetts state quarter

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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.[2] 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, "at a minute's notice" and 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 were elected by popular vote, as in the rest of the militia, 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.

The Massachusetts Provincial Congress found that the colony's militia resources were short just before the American Revolutionary War, on October 26, 1774, after observing the British military buildup. They found 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:[3]

The Massachusetts Provincial Congress 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.[3]

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 had returned to Boston.

This stamp was one of a set of three issued in 1925. The poem on the plaques is by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

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 that 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 4,000 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.

The British practiced formations with their weapons, focusing on marching formations on the battlefield. It is a myth that the British and other professional armies of the 1700s did not practice marksmanship with their muskets; the military ammunition of the time was made for fast reloading and more than a dozen consecutive shots without cleaning. Accuracy of the musket was sacrificed for speed and repetitive loading.[5]

The militia prepared 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 the militia would not interfere if they sent a sizable force to Concord to seize munitions and stores there (which they considered the King's property, since it was paid for to defend the colonies from the American Indian threat). The British officers were proven wrong. Shooting erupted at Lexington. There is still a debate as to whether it was a colonist or a British soldier who fired the first shot. The militia left the area, and the British moved on. The British then moved to Concord and faced a larger number of militia. The British were rapidly outnumbered at Concord, with the arrival of the slower moving militia; they had not counted on a long fight, and so had not brought additional ammunition beyond the standard issue in the soldiers' cartridge boxes. This then forced a strategic defeat on Colonel Smith, forcing him back to Boston.

A "running fight" began during the retreat. Militiamen knew the local countryside and were familiar with "skulking" or "Indian Warfare." They used trees and other obstacles to cover themselves from British gunfire and pursuit by British soldiers, while the militia were firing and moving. This kept the British under sporadic fire, and caused them to exhaust their limited ammunition. Only the timely arrival of a relief column under Lord Percy prevented the annihilation or surrender of the original road column.

Minutemen monument in Hollis, New Hampshire

Most Colonial militia units were provided neither arms nor uniforms and were required to equip themselves. Many simply wore their own farmers' or workmen's 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. They were better when used as irregulars rather than fighting formal battles in the traditional dense lines and columns, functioning 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 from the flanks of the Continental Army, while Continental soldiers held the center.

Their experience suited irregular warfare. Many were familiar with frontier hunting.[6] The Indian Wars, and especially the recent French and Indian War, had taught the colonials 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 (grooves inside the barrel) 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 behind other troops, before the British could get into range. The wilderness terrain that lay just beyond many colonial towns favored this style of combat and was very familiar to the local minuteman. In time, however, loyalists such as John Butler and Robert Rogers mustered equally capable irregular forces (Butler's Rangers and the Queen's Rangers, led by Englishman John Graves Simcoe). 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 augmenting 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 militia's strengths and weaknesses skillfully to attain the double-envelopment of Tarleton's forces.

Historian M. L. Brown states that some of these men mastered the difficult handling of a rifle, though few became expert. Brown quotes 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." [7]

There was a shortage of ammunition and supplies, and what they had 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.

The Minute Man by Daniel Chester French, erected in 1875 in Concord, Massachusetts, depicting a typical minuteman

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.[8]

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 (along with the Lincoln Memorial), The Minute Man. Inscribed on the pedestal is the opening stanza of Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1837 Concord Hymn with the words, "Shot heard 'round the world." 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 French used live models in the study of the anatomy and facial expression.[9] The Minute Man statue is still the symbol of the National Guard, featured prominently on its seals.

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.[10]

The 1925 Lexington-Concord Sesquicentennial half dollar features a sculptural portrayal.

The athletic teams of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst are nicknamed the Minutemen and Minutewomen. Until the 2003 rebranding featuring a modernized Sam the Minuteman, the logo featured the Concord Minute Man statue prominently.

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.

One of the factions in Bethesda's 2015 video game Fallout 4, which is set in Massachusetts, is called the "Commonwealth Minutemen". The inspiration for their namesake comes from the requirement to be ready "at a minute's notice" to defend any settlement in danger.[11]

Sinclair Lewis portrays Minute Men as paramilitary forces of Buzz Windrip's despotic government in his 1935 book It Can't Happen Here. In the book the fascist-like militia is called "Minnie Mouses" by the populace.

• Captain Robert K. Wright Jr. Massachusetts Militia Roots: A Bibliographic Study. (1986) 116th Military History Detachment Virginia Army National Guard. Available at the United States Army Center of Military History
• Who Were the Minutemen? (ushistory.org)
• Organization of the Minute-Men.
• Minute Man National Historical Park