“I Mus Pagk Your Parton”: Letters, Petitions, Pension Applications, and Recovering the Experiences of Early American Enlisted Men

There are few resources to recover to the lives of early American enlisted men that were produced during their time of service. Their voices do not shout from the archives like those of officers and politicians. Only a small amount of their letters survives, and those which do often remain in collections of officers’ letters. Sometimes, families preserved private collections of letters, later donated to museums, archives, or other depositories. Most surviving enlisted men’s letters from the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution come from New England, the most literate region of British North America, but some survive from elsewhere. What letters do remain express more concern with personal and spiritual matters, rather than their daily lives in a military setting. A better resource for soldiers’ views of their service takes the form of petitions, usually formatted as letters, showing discontent with their conditions, and asking for their commanders or governments to redress their grievances. As collective documents, they are more anonymous than personal correspondence, but provide a good view of living conditions, and relationships men had with their commanders. Beyond letters, there are still resources available to explore enlisted men’s lives. The most important body of sources for exploring enlisted men’s experiences are the pension applications for Revolutionary War service now in the National Archives. As part of the process for applying for a pension, each man had to provide an account of his service, often with corroborating affidavits from former officers, neighbors, or fellow soldiers. These three kinds of documents – letters, petitions, and pension applications can reveal how enlisted men experienced conflict, their attitudes on military service, and what most concerned them before, during, and after their service.