The aim of this historical essay is more modest. It tells the stories of selected conflicts that are examples of the changing relationship between the British settlers, the Indians, the professional British army, and the French. It will begin with a glance of the seventeenth-century conflicts between settlers and Indians, particularly the Great Swamp Fight in King Philip’s War. These wars were fought by the colonials alone, without men or funding from the mother country. At that time the main problem for the Americans was to invent a strategy that would beat the Indians at their own game of lightning raids against defenseless settlements and of ambushing columns of men marching in European formations.

The eighteenth-century wars, in which the Americans played a vital but subordinate role, pitted professional European armies against each other. The British suffered occasional defeats in these campaigns when they violated the rules of wilderness warfare, but the final decisive battles were won by European armies in direct confrontation with each other. Here the focus is on the American colonial soldier as part of the great British military establishment. Were the Americans simply inept, argumentative, unreliable, pale shadows of the Redcoat ideal, or did they “march to a different drummer” and act in an honorable and reasonable way according to their own lights?

It is generally conceded that the British colonies of North America were founded for religious or commercial, not military purposes. Captain John Smith of Virginia and Captain Myles Standish of Plymouth Colony, professional soldiers, were exceptions among the farmers and traders. Yet the colonies were founded in areas with indigenous populations that quite naturally objected to being forced off their lands. How should they protect the farms with their houses full of food and manufactured goods, and their outbuildings and pastures full of cattle and horses? What was the most efficient method of defense on a moving frontier? In the earliest years of Virginia, the settlers huddled in fortified centers, and every settler was put under Draconian military discipline, but this promptly broke down and the militia system was substituted.

Every able-bodied male between the ages of sixteen and sixty served in the militia without pay. Training was minimal, but every soldier had to bring his own firearm to the annual training day, and to demonstrate that he was an accurate shot. The militia in its regular form was a purely defensive force, never asked to move outside the neighborhood of the members’ homes. In areas of particular danger the colonists developed a garrison system of fortified dwellings where inhabitants of a village might huddle until the threat of an Indian raid was past, but normally members of the militia guarded their own homes. The main use of the militia on the frontier was as a pool of men from which paid “rangers” were chosen to patrol the frontier line just in front of the settlements, and to go on occasional offensive raids against Indian villages. In the seventeenth century rangers were neither permanent nor professional soldiers.