What happened
The two battalions were designed for a specific job. The Naval Committee's plan called for an expedition to Nova Scotia, and the Marines were to be drawn from Washington's army in Cambridge, organized in ten companies of 50 privates each, because "one of these Companies would compleatly man a small Vessell and two of them make a large Proportion of Marines for the largest." Every officer and man was to be "acquainted with maritime affairs so as to be able to serve 'to advantage by sea, when required.'"
Washington declined to supply them. On 27 November his reply to Congress said that men meeting that requirement "must be picked out of the whole army, one from this Corps, one from another," and he suggested raising the battalions in New York and Philadelphia instead, "where there must be now numbers of Sailors unemployed?" The next day he wrote again to say it would be impossible to get men to enlist for the duration of the war, and on 30 November Congress relieved him of the task and ordered the battalions raised independently of the army.
The Nova Scotia expedition was abandoned. Congress kept the Marines anyway, and on 28 November it commissioned Samuel Nicholas, a Philadelphia Quaker of thirty-one, as the first Marine officer. The chronology records that his commission was confirmed before that of any other officer of the Continental naval service.
The first use of the Marines was a raid, not an expedition. On the afternoon of 1 March 1776 Commodore Hopkins' squadron anchored in 12 fathoms off New Providence in the Bahamas, and on 2 March the Marines were issued muskets, ammunition, and broadswords and transferred to two captured sloops and the Providence, to be hidden below deck and land "Instantly" once close to the fort. At dawn on 3 March the plan failed before it began, because the whole fleet appeared off the bar instead of the three small vessels, and the town sounded its alarm.
Hopkins moved the landing to the eastern shore. Captain Nicholas' 234 Marines, with 50 sailors under a lieutenant who knew the island, went ashore at "the Creek," two miles east of Fort Montagu, in what the History Division calls "the first amphibious landing executed by Continental Marines." By two o'clock they had formed marching ranks.
The governor spiked the guns of Fort Montagu, fired three at the approaching column, and rode for Government House. Nicholas halted, sent an officer forward under a flag of truce, learned the fort was empty, and marched his men into it for the night. He reported that he "thought it necessary to stay all night, and refresh my men, who were fatigued, being on board the small vessels, not having a convenience either to sleep or cook in."
That night the powder left. The governor's council voted 14 to 10 that Fort Nassau could not be defended, and around midnight 162 barrels of gunpowder were loaded into two vessels that sailed for St. Augustine by two in the morning. The official history says the loss can be attributed directly to Hopkins' failure to close the harbor entrance, and that "with the loss of the powder went the primary objective of the expedition."
The Marines took the town anyway. At dawn on the 4th Nicholas marched the mile into Nassau, demanded and received the keys to Fort Nassau, and took possession without "firing a single shot," finding 40 loaded cannon waiting for a fight that did not happen. "The British colors were then hauled down and the Grand Flag of the United Colonies run up in their place."
Home from New Providence the fleet began to come apart. The Columbus lost all three of her Marine officers by resignation, and to fill one of the vacant lieutenancies her captain "elevated Sergeant Edward Burke." That autumn Nicholas, now a major, had a battalion in barracks in Philadelphia where "the desertion rate was high, and few deserters ever returned to duty," and one who did, Private Henry Hassan, was court-martialed on 24 November and sentenced to seventy-one lashes.
Then the Army borrowed them. Nicholas' Marines accompanied the militia in Cadwalader's division on the night Washington crossed the Delaware, and Cadwalader's crossing failed on the ice. At one in the morning on 2 January 1777 Cadwalader's troops marched for Trenton and took positions on the south bank of Assunpink Creek, and when Hessian grenadiers tried to force the bridge, the light troops, "Nicholas' Marines among them," were ordered "to fly to the support of that important post."
At Princeton the next day the Marines held the right of Cadwalader's line. Their first volley was fired at such a distance that it had no effect, the British answered from 50 yards with volleys that drove Cadwalader back 40 yards and cost him a gun, and Washington himself could not rally the line. Reinforcements from Sullivan's division did, and the British line gave way.
What is less known
The founding resolution was written for an operation nobody carried out. The Nova Scotia expedition, with its rendezvous at Newburyport or Portsmouth on 1 December and three months' provisions, was the reason for the two battalions, and it was dropped within weeks of Washington's letter. The Marines outlived the plan that justified them by almost a decade.
The forts they took were not weak on paper. Fort Montagu mounted seventeen 12- and 18-pounders and Fort Nassau forty-six, but the governor had reported in May 1775 that Fort Nassau was indefensible because firing its guns might bring down its walls, and the fort sat under high ground to the south from which musket fire could keep its gunners off the guns.
The raid the Corps remembers as its first landing lost its objective the same night. Hopkins held his four largest ships in Hanover Sound while the governor loaded the powder a few miles away, and John Paul Jones wrote afterward that the removal "was foreseen, and might have been prevented, by sending the two brigantines to be off the Bar." The Marines executed their part and the fleet did not execute its own.
The enlisted record of the year is two men. Sergeant Edward Burke was made a lieutenant because three officers quit, and Private Henry Hassan came back from desertion, took seventy-one lashes "at the head of his Company," was returned to duty, and deserted again a little over a month later. The same history that records the first landing records that few deserters ever came back at all.
The through-line
Seven days, one argument. Day 1, the resolution of 10 November, created two battalions on paper for a job that was cancelled. Day 2, Nicholas' commission on 28 November, gave the paper one officer, confirmed before any other in the naval service.
Day 3, the landing at New Providence on 3 March 1776, was the Marines doing exactly what they were raised to do, for a fleet that lost the powder anyway. Day 4, Sergeant Burke's elevation to lieutenant, is what a ship's company does when its officers resign and it still has to sail. Day 5, Private Hassan's court-martial on 24 November, is the discipline of a battalion that was losing men faster than it could try them.
Day 6, the bridge at Assunpink Creek on 2 January 1777, and Day 7, the line at Princeton on 3 January, are the Marines under the Army's orders, in the Army's battles, holding a post and then a flank because Cadwalader needed light troops and they were there. Nothing in the resolution of 10 November anticipated either day.
The line that runs through the seven is borrowing. Congress tried to borrow the men from Washington and was refused. The fleet borrowed them for a raid and did not finish the raid, and the Army borrowed them for a winter and used them hard.
Read in order, the days also show how little of the fourteen months the Marines spent doing the thing the resolution described. The phrase "to serve to advantage by sea when required" covers the landing at New Providence and little else in the record of these seven days. The rest of the year is resignations, recruiting, a court-martial, and a winter under the Army.
Each time they were borrowed the Marines did the job they were handed, with whatever they had, under whoever was commanding that week. That is the thesis: the Corps did not survive its first fourteen months because of what the resolution said it was for. It survived because a small body of armed men who could be moved by water and would fight on land was useful to everyone, and the evidence for that is that everyone used them.
The counterargument
The thesis fails on its own record, and the failures are in the same sources. Being useful did not keep the Corps in existence. In 1785 Congress authorized the sale of the Alliance, the last vessel of the Continental Navy, and the chronology's own conclusion is that "the Navy of the Revolution, and, consequently, the Marines, was allowed to dwindle away after the fighting was over."
The usefulness was also thinner than the through-line makes it sound. At New Providence the Marines took two forts that had been abandoned, from a militia of which "fewer than 30 men had reported" and a governor who spiked his own guns, and one Bahamian merchant wrote that the Americans "came more like Sheep to the Slaughter than men to fight" and that several of them "declared afterwards that if they had met with a warm reception in the Wood, they would have surrendered." The landing was unopposed because the defense collapsed, not because the Marines overcame it.
The winter campaign is not a clean story of Marines holding lines either. Cadwalader's division, the Marines with it, never crossed the Delaware on the night of the Trenton attack, and at Princeton the Marines were in the part of the line that fired too early, was driven back, lost a gun, and could not be rallied by Washington in person. The battle was won when Sullivan's division arrived, not when the Marines held.
Nor was the Assunpink bridge a Marine post; the light troops were sent to it after Hitchcock's brigade broke and ran back across it, and the record credits American artillery with driving off the British infantry below the bridge before the grenadiers came on.
There is also the question of who did the work at New Providence. Fifty of the 284 who landed were sailors, and the man who found the fleet its anchorage was a naval lieutenant, John Paul Jones, who took a pilot to the fore-topmast-head and guided the ships in. The first Marine landing was a naval operation with Marines in it, and the thesis has to hold that too.
And the borrowing was not free. A unit that can be lent to anyone is a unit nobody owns, and the Columbus resigning all three of her Marine officers, the Philadelphia battalion bleeding deserters, and a Corps whose last recorded Marine, in 1784, was a single private on a single ship are what that looks like from the inside. The honest version of the thesis is that usefulness kept the Marines alive while there was a war, and that nothing kept them alive when there was not.
The reading
A unit survives its founding by being useful to people who did not found it. The cost is that the people borrowing you set the terms, and they seldom bring you back the way they found you. Congress wrote the resolution, Washington refused it, Hopkins wasted the landing, and Cadwalader spent the Marines on a bridge and a flank, and the Marines survived all four because they did the work each one handed them.
I serve in a Reserve unit, and a Reserve unit is the borrowed unit of the modern Corps. It exists on paper for a mission it may never execute, it is lent to whoever has a requirement and a funding line, and it is judged by people who did not raise it and will not keep it. The seven days of this week are the oldest version of that arrangement in the Corps's record.
What the record supports is narrow. It does not say that being borrowed is good, and the counterargument above is that being borrowed nearly ended the Corps once the borrowing stopped. It says that the units which got used were the ones that could be used on short notice, by water or by land, under someone else's officer, and that the founding document had almost nothing to do with which those were.
For a First Sergeant that is a statement about readiness rather than about heritage. The question the Army asked of Nicholas' battalion on 2 January was whether it could march at one in the morning and hold a bridge by noon, and the resolution of 10 November was not consulted. The answer came from whatever the battalion had done about its muster, its equipment, and its deserters in the weeks before anyone asked.
The week also contains the warning. Burke was promoted because the officers above him quit, Hassan was flogged and deserted anyway, and the fleet that landed the Marines let the powder go. A unit that is useful to everyone is exposed to everyone's failures, and the only part of that it controls is its own.
The drill
For the next seven days, keep one page. Each day write down the one thing your section was asked to do that day by someone outside it, who asked, and whether you could do it with what you had on hand at the moment you were asked. A Lance Corporal can do this from a pocket notebook and nobody has to see it.
If nobody outside your section asked anything of it all week, write that down too, because it is the most important line on the page.
On the seventh day read the page and mark each line with one word: could, could not, or could with help. Count the lines. If the "could not" lines share a cause, a missing qualification, a piece of gear, or a person who was not there, write that cause at the bottom of the page and bring it, in one sentence, to the next person above you.
The question
Write the one-sentence rule you would want your relief to inherit about what your section must be able to do for a unit that did not raise it and will not keep it. Which of the seven days this week came closest to testing it, and where will you put the rule so that you see it Monday?
Sources
- Smith, Charles R. Marines in the Revolution: A History of the Continental Marines in the American Revolution, 1775-1783. History and Museums Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1975. Chapters I, III, IV, and V. Read at archive.org
- A Chronology of the United States Marine Corps, 1775-1934, Volume I. Historical Branch, G-3 Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1965. Entries for 1775, 1776, 1777, and 1785, and the Part I conclusion. Read at archive.org
Corrections
None.