A Study of Army Camp Life during American Revolution

by Mary Hazel Snuff

Chapter IV
RECREATION IN CAMP

If there must be a certain proportion of work and play in every one's life to make for efficiency, then the soldier of the Revolutionary War was far below normal in the scale of efficiency for recreation in any organized form is found to have been entirely lacking.

But before too severe a judgment is placed upon this lack of recreation the conditions the soldier left at home must be studied. Recreation as such had not been a part of his daily routine. It has been estimated that nine-tenths of the people lived in rural districts leaving only one-tenth for the cities,[¹¹⁴] an estimate which no doubt is true. The people had never thought of the problems of bad housing, congestion, or recreation. They had had the whole of nature for their home and the whole of the frontier to wrestle with.

Speaking of the people a generation or two later, Dr. F. L. Paxson says in The Rise of Sport, "The fathers of this generation had been sober lot unable to bend without breaking, living a life of rigid and puritanical decorum interspersed perhaps with disease and drunkedness, but unenlivened for most of them by spontaneous play."[¹¹⁵]

Thus in studying the life of the soldier at home before he went into the army camp, even the slightest traces of twentieth century recreation are found to have been lacking, but that does not mean that those people never forgot their work. It would be hard to find a more hospitable group. They were never too busy to entertain. There was the occasional jollification with rum or beer, the card party, the ball, the concert, the theater, and of a more rural type the picnic and the "corn husking".[¹¹⁶]

The conditions in camp were different than those at home. The problems of bad housing, congestion and recreation were then factors to be considered. There was the small unsanitary and poorly ventilated hut with twelve to sixteen men and sometimes even more crowded into it. When the troops first went into winter quarters there was plenty to do in the way of exercise for there were logs to cut and huts to build, but those were soon completed and the men were crowded together with nothing to do.

Something had to happen, the monotony of the dreary days had to be broken. This was brought about in several ways.

Often the punishments ordered by the court martial were administered publicly in camp just to enliven the common routine. When a man was sentenced to death, but had been pardoned by those in charge, the force of going through the punishment was carried out. The condemned man was brought to the side of his newly dug grave, he was bound and blind-folded, the firing party got in position, the fire lock even snapped, and as might have been expected, the culprit sometimes died of the shock.[¹¹⁷]

The hanging of a man was a gala day in camp and the place of hanging was almost as popular as an amusement park of today; "Five soldiers were conducted to the gallows according to their sentences. For the crimes of desertion and robbing the inhabitants, a detachment of troops and a concourse of people formed a circle around the gallows and the criminal were brought in on a cart sitting on their coffins and halters about their necks"[¹¹⁸]