A curiously extravagant estimate of the extent of the continental forces engaged has been commonly set forth by adding these yearly figures, a process which takes no recognition of the fact that a man serving through three years, for instance, is counted in each year. The history of this confusion is traced in a paper by Justin Winsor in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., Jan., 1886.—Ed.
It is to be observed that the number of militia stated here is largely conjectural; and in no instance were the men called out in service for any considerable time. A comparison of these figures with figures quite as authentic, which give the number of men who were afloat year by year for purposes of offence, either in the national or state navies, or in larger numbers in privateers, will show that, in some of the later years of the war, this naval service enlisted a larger number of men than were serving in the army. Indeed, as has been shown, Great Britain appears to have often had more American enemies afloat on the Atlantic than she had seamen and officers of her own upon that ocean.
The earliest account of the Revolutionary navy was in Thomas Clark's Naval History of the United States from the Commencement of the Revolution (Philad., 1813; second ed., 1814), in two volumes.
Chas. W. Goldsborough's United States Naval Chronicle, bringing the story down to 1822, was printed in Washington in 1824.
In 1828 there appeared at Brooklyn, N. Y., a General View of the rise, etc., of the American Navy,—a book of little importance.
The most important of all the accounts is the Naval Hist. of the United States, by James Fenimore Cooper, first published in Philadelphia in 1839, and in a second edition in 1840. In some respects, relating to the war of 1812, Cooper's views have been called in question; but his story of the Revolutionary navy is the result of investigations that have not, on the whole, been improved upon.[1257] Cooper gives a list of the Continental cruisers, with the fate of each; and Lossing, in the summary of the Revolutionary naval history in his Field-Book, ii. 851, copies this list. An official and authentic record, with no attempt at a readable narrative, is found in G. F. Emmons's Navy of the United States, 1775-1853, with a brief history of each vessel's service, to which is added a list of private armed vessels, previous and subsequent to the Revolutionary War (Washington, 1853, published under authority of the Navy Department). The book contains a list of captures during the Revolution, both by public and private armed vessels.