[…] the next large leap towards an American revolution may have begun with small steps by Luke Knowlton and others who became part of the troop mutinees of late 1759. Private Knowlton, a twenty-one-year-old from Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, had enlisted with others from his area to serve until November 1, 1759. They meant to fulfill their contract but were angered on October 28 when their regiment was read orders from General Amherst keeping them in service past the agreed upon date. Knowlton’s journal reads as follows:
November the 1st, 1759… this morning there was a petition drawed up by the men and signed by near two hundred of our men, and sent to our colonel for a dismission. And he immediately sent it to the general [Amherst].
November 2. This morning fair weather. We was drawed up by about six o’clock and our colonel read to us the letter which the general sent as a return to our petition; which is not to have us presume to go home before we have a regular discharge, though he confesses our time is expired. But the men went off from the parade in great haste and in less than an hour there was two hundred of us on the parade with our packs swung in order to march… before we had got half a mile our officers came after us with orders to fire upon us if we would not return, but did not, though we refused to obey them and still kept on our march.
They did keep on their march, sometimes evading British patrols, and reached home after about two weeks. The mutineers were not deserters who tried to slip away, but resisters who met publicly as at a town meeting, arrived at a consensus, gave notice, and then openly walked away. The mutineers did not try to kill their commanders: the troops simply decided to leave and then left, as a group. This contractual emphasis and consensual decision-making struck regular British soldiers as both curious and cowardly.
Source:
Olasky, Marvin. “The War to End All Wars.” Fighting for Liberty and Virtue: Political and Cultural Wars in Eighteenth-Century America. Crossway Books, 1995. 106-7. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Anderson, A People’s Army, 191.
Further Reading:
Field Marshal Jeffery Amherst, 1st Baron Amherst, KB
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