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Analysis of the Continental Army, the Oneida People and Thomas Hutchinson

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Posterity chooses to view the American Revolution in a different light than many revolutionaries experienced it, for history is often mutable at the founding of a country. As revolutionary ideals blossomed, certain people were rejected from the pages of history. Many of them fought and bled for America, and one penned a history of his colony, but none were given historical shares of American independence. They were rejected from posterity’s heroic, romantic play of the American Revolution because their historical truths could not be cast—they created another play altogether. The following is an analysis of the Continental Army, the Oneida people and of Thomas Hutchinson— each was rejected from an idealist’s view of the American Revolution.…show more content…
From Valley Forge onward, there was a split between the soldiers and the larger public. Even as the public or civilians contributed little, “they believed [their contributions] not to be necessary” . The soldiers, banding together as one, “began to take pride in surviving as an army despite the heedlessness of the public” . Civilians would eat cows and pigs, but soldiers were forced to eat raw flour . And as the Continental Army lived in squalor, used moldy bedpans, and left Lord-only-knows-what detritus behind them, the people began to dislike the military even more. The Continental Army needed funding, and the people chose to ignore it. It was a mutually antagonistic relationship. This clear discrepancy between what the public deemed necessary for the “unfortunate soldiers” and, on the other hand, what the soldiers needed to survive, rankled revolutionaries and led to a splintering of the public from the military. As the soldiers wondered how a revolutionary war was to be undertaken with only voluntary contributions, the public wondered whether the revolutionary war would create a dictatorship. The result of George Washington’s plea with his officers in 1783 to stall rebellion in Newburgh represented a grand superseding of the public’s needs over those of the soldiers. He was Commander of the Continental Army and yet was “the central figure in overcoming the threat to defy congress” . In 1782 the nation stopped paying the soldiers, as it had promised, half-wages
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