Overview
The Continental Army is discussed in the excerpts chiefly through the problems of paying, staffing and motivating it. In the 2011 episode on George Washington, Thomas Fleming describes the army as an organization whose survival turned on money and on Washington’s willingness to bargain with a reluctant Congress. In the 2021 episode on Thomas Paine, Harlow Unger describes it as an army that did not really exist as a unified force until Washington assembled it from separate state militias. Skipper Young, in the 2016 episode, mentions the army only in passing, as the body to which a figure gave money before July 4. The excerpts name no founding date, no commander other than Washington, and no battle beyond those listed below.
Pensions and the officer resignations
Fleming’s account of the army centers on the winter at Valley Forge and on a pension demand. He states that Washington asked for pensions during that winter after 300 officers resigned in front of him. According to Fleming, the officers were gentlemen and could resign, while the enlisted men could not go anywhere; if they tried to leave, they would be hanged. Fleming reports Washington’s conclusion that unless pensions were granted for the officers, there would be no army at the end of the affair. He says Sam Adams and John Adams objected loudly in Congress, that the uproar lasted a couple of months, and that the vote finally carried by one vote. In Fleming’s telling, Washington got his way, the pensions were granted, and the resignations stopped. Fleming adds that Washington never forgot this episode George Washington Was Our Guest (2011).
The same episode places the army within a broader argument about money in politics. Bob Zadek frames the discussion around the McCain-Feingold Act and the Citizens United case, and Fleming says the Founders were divided on such questions. Fleming attributes to Washington the motto that men must be taken as they are, not as we wish them to be, and says Washington would have been appalled by current finance laws. Fleming also says the idealists in the Continental Congress clashed with Washington repeatedly during the Revolution George Washington Was Our Guest (2011).
Militias, landowners and short enlistments
Unger’s account, in the Paine episode, describes the army as an assemblage rather than a standing institution. He says there was really no such thing as a Continental Army at the outset, and that Washington pulled different militias from the different states together. Each state had to raise its own army, and within each state the governor would turn to landowners who had indentured workers. Those workers had to be paid to serve, and Unger says they gladly served because they would make more money doing so without losing their money as indentured servants. They usually served only three months at a time because they had to return to the farms Thomas Paine: Apostle of Liberty (2021).
Unger ties the army’s manpower to the broader question of popular support. He cites rough statistics that only about a third of those living in the colonies firmly backed the revolution at the beginning, a third were neutral and favored whoever seemed to be winning, and a third were Tories who supported remaining subject to English rule. He says a battle had to be waged for the hearts and minds of the common residents, and that Thomas Paine’s writing supplied the missing piece. He notes that only about five percent of the population was literate, and that Common Sense was distributed by printers pasting broadsheets inside their windows while a literate person read aloud to the crowd Thomas Paine: Apostle of Liberty (2021).
The crisis of 1776 and American Crisis
Unger’s narrative of the army’s near-collapse begins with the British landing in New York. He says the British massacred Washington’s army in Brooklyn, then crossed into Manhattan, called New York Island at the time, and sent the troops racing in retreat, with British buglers playing the hunting call to mock the fleeing soldiers. Unger describes Washington as beyond belief in anger that these were the troops the different states had sent him. He lists the subsequent retreat: out of New York Island into Westchester County, a defeat at White Plains, across the Hudson River into New Jersey, another defeat, and finally across the Delaware River to the Pennsylvania shore, where it looked like the end of the war Thomas Paine: Apostle of Liberty (2021).
Unger credits Washington with the foresight to have his retreating troops take every rowboat they could find along the bank over to the west bank, so the pursuing British and their Hessian mercenaries would have no way to cross. He says Washington was preparing an attack on Trenton but morale was so low he did not know how he would do it. Then Paine appeared with a rough draft of an essay he called American Crisis and showed it to Washington, who loved it, as did his adjutant. Paine galloped to Philadelphia to the printer, had it printed, and galloped back to the Delaware River encampment, where it was distributed among the troops and officers were told to read it to all of them Thomas Paine: Apostle of Liberty (2021).
Unger says the essay encouraged and inspired the troops so that they crossed the Delaware River on Christmas night, through ice floes, snow and bitter cold, and won the battle of Trenton, which turned American morale around by showing that the farmers could fight and defeat a trained army from Britain and Germany. He quotes the essay’s opening words, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” and says it became the first of 31 essays Paine wrote during the Revolutionary War, each numbered and each signed “Common Sense,” written whenever morale began to fall Thomas Paine: Apostle of Liberty (2021).
Across episodes
Two episodes carry the substance of the topic. Fleming, in 2011, treats the army as an employer whose officers could resign and whose survival depended on pensions voted by Congress; Unger, in 2021, treats it as a coalition of state militias whose endurance depended on Paine’s pamphlets and on a single victory at Trenton. The two accounts do not contradict each other, but neither episode refers to the other’s material, and the excerpts show no development of a shared argument between them. Young’s 2016 episode mentions the army only in a single clause, and the Paine episode’s discussion of Common Sense touches the army only through the question of who would serve and who would supply it.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when the Continental Army was founded, who commanded it besides Washington, how it was organized or supplied, or how it ended. They name no statute, no treaty and no congressional resolution beyond the pension vote Fleming describes. They give no dates for Valley Forge, Trenton or the retreat across New Jersey, and no figures for the army’s size at any point. The 2011 excerpt breaks off mid-sentence in its first section, and the 2016 excerpt is a single fragment, so neither can be used for anything beyond what is quoted above.