(Old But Good) War and Wilderness: British Soldiers in Revolutionary America

In September 1781, Thomas Hughes, then 22, visited Brighton for what he hoped would be a restorative holiday. It was not his first trip: such sojourns were common for Hughes. But on this occasion something was different. As Hughes recorded in his journal, ‘launched into a sea of gaiety and dissipation’ he nevertheless felt ‘out of my element’. Though he admitted to being naturally of a somewhat ‘reserved disposition’, this had never previously stopped the young man from enjoying polite company. But as he wandered among Brighton’s gaming tables and ballrooms, he found ‘little pleasure in a concourse of people whose only amusement was the exhibition of their sweet persons and a laborious attendance on the toilette’.

What had happened to Hughes? Why did he feel alienated by pleasures and pastimes that he had once enjoyed? The answer was that he had spent the previous five years as a British soldier fighting in the American Revolutionary War, some 3,000 miles away in an environment which, it had seemed, was determined to destroy him. And, he reckoned, the American wilderness had accomplished its aim with gusto. Arriving in Brighton two months after returning from America, where he had endured bloody battles, months of captivity as a prisoner of war, bouts of disease, and lingering thoughts of suicide, Hughes realised that his ‘long stay’ had ‘quite rusticated’ him: ‘I have never enjoyed my health since my return from America.’ He spent much of his time in Brighton on ‘solitary morning walks on the side of the sea’, where he may well have looked west, towards the land across the Atlantic which, he felt, had irrevocably altered his constitution.

Hughes was one of around 80,000 British and Hessian soldiers who served in the American Revolutionary War between 1775 and 1783. British volunteer corps and their German Hessian conscript allies (hired as mercenaries by the British from the Principality of Hesse-Kassel) arrived in America shortly after the outbreak of war. Although their enemies were ostensibly the American rebels, over the following eight years many of the foreign troops would come to see their military foes as just one of the New World’s many hostile forces. The American environment – its physical terrain, flora, fauna, weather, climate, and diseases – proved hugely detrimental to their physical and mental health. They were not the first European soldiers to discover that a war in America was also a war against the natural world. As one British veteran of the French and Indian War (1754-63) had opined: ‘Those who have only experienced the severities and dangers of a campaign in Europe, can scarcely form an idea of what is to be done and endured in an American war.’ Over the course of the Revolutionary War, anxieties about what the soldiers would face in America would be steadily supplemented by the harsh realities on the ground. Hughes was able to reflect on his experiences in America after his return home; many of his comrades were not so lucky.