Women of the Army
Following its establishment of an army in 1775, the Continental Congress defined camp followers in the 1776 American Articles of War as “all suttlers and retainers to a camp, and all persons whatsoever serving with the armies of the United States.” Sutlers were vendors officially licensed to sell goods to soldiers within a camp or on campaign; retainers were family members, servants, and volunteers; and those “serving with the armies” included civilian employees such as nurses. Most female camp followers were retainers, generally the wives of soldiers, but some women were also employed by the army as paid nurses, and a small number worked as sutlers.
American commanders requested written records of the number of dependent women attached to each regiment throughout the war. Based on these records, historian John Rees estimates that over the course of the war, the average number of female camp followers attached to the Continental Army was one for every thirty men, or 2 to 3 percent of the army.
It’s not possible to know how many Virginia women served as women of the army throughout the war. Many records were lost or are incomplete, and the number of camp followers fluctuated, with more women joining camps in winter when troops were not actively campaigning. According to Rees, returns from Washington’s Middlebrook, New Jersey, winter camp in April and May of 1779 show that the number of women attached to General Peter Muhlenberg’s 8th Virginia Regiment, General William Woodford’s 2nd Virginia Regiment, and General Charles Scott’s 5th Virginia Regiment fluctuated from a low of 44 women with Muhlenberg’s brigade in April to a high of 104 women with Woodford’s brigade in May, for an average of about 72 camp followers attached to each of the three regiments. Overall, hundreds of Virginia women likely served as women of the army.
Although General Washington considered women to be a “clog” on the efficiency of the army, especially if they were pregnant or traveling with children, he also recognized that the presence of wives was necessary for morale. His wife, Martha Washington, joined him at most of his winter quarters. Moreover, many soldiers did not have the means to support their families, and Washington explained in 1783 that when faced with the hungry families of soldiers whose homes had been destroyed by the British he was “obliged to give Provisions to the extra Women … or loose by Desertion … some of the oldest and best Soldiers in the Service.” Frontier violence in the west or British raids in the east may have led some Virginia soldiers’ wives to become camp followers.
Finally, as historian Holly Mayer notes, “Camp followers were necessary to the survival of the military.” Female camp followers helped with the day-to-day tasks of maintaining the army. They cooked, cleaned, and mended clothes, and cared for the ill and injured. The Continental Army was perpetually low on supplies, making women’s labor as laundresses all the more important for keeping soldiers’ clothing clean, which helped to curb typhus, a common disease known as “camp fever,” and other diseases carried by pests such as fleas and lice.
Camp followers had a variety of effects on the Commonwealth and the Continental Army. For instance, noncombatants’ movements could cause consternation in communities. In 1777, “the great Resort of Soldiers to the City of Williamsburg & it’s environs” caused the vestrymen of Bruton Parish Church to petition the House of Burgesses to ensure that the parish would not be responsible for providing economic relief to the “necessary Attendants on the Camp, most of whom are the poorest Sort of our People.” Yet these “necessary Attendants” performed labor that was crucial to sustaining Virginia soldiers.
Life for Camp Followers
Dependent women attached to the Continental Army typically received one ration a day, and unless they were specifically employed by the Continental Army as laundresses, nurses, or cooks, camp followers did not earn money for their labor. Some enslaved Virginia women had no choice but to become camp followers. Free servant women, both white and Black, accompanied their employers on campaigns as well. Newspaper runaway advertisements attest to the fact that enslaved and indentured women also voluntarily “went to camp” to follow the army.
Women camp followers were subject to army regulations and threatened with being turned out of encampments if they misbehaved. Washington issued twenty-five orders during the war addressing women camp followers. When on campaign, women were expected to travel with the army’s baggage so that the troops could move in a quicker and more orderly fashion. Women riding in the wagons intended for baggage was a perpetual matter of concern for Washington and his commanders, who worried about exhausting the horses and encumbering the supply chain. Most women camp followers had to walk, although orders given by Washington in New York in 1779 indicate that a few women camp followers did have horses of their own and were allowing them to graze on private property contrary to orders.
Soldiers and unmarried female camp followers were also examined by army surgeons for venereal disease. Orderly books from the Virginia forces encamped around the Virginia Peninsula in the spring and summer of 1776 record concern over the “numbers of women follow[ing] the Camp suspected to have the Veneral Disorder.” Officers ordered surgeons to examine them. Returns from a military hospital in Pittsylvania County in 1781 show a total of seven women treated for various ailments, including at least two treated for venereal disease and one who was pregnant.
Camp followers were sometimes drafted to work as nurses. In the orderly book of the 3rd Virginia Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel William Heth recorded in June 1777 that “a proportionate Number of Women to the Sick of Each regim’t [were] to be Sent to the Hospital … to attend the Sick as Nurses” while the army was encamped at Middlebrook, New Jersey. These women were usually not paid for their labor, though they received rations. Paid female nurses, on the other hand, were usually recruited from neighboring areas and did not necessarily follow the army or depend on it for rations.
Encampments often had separate tents or huts for women, but sometimes women slept in the same tents as their husbands and their messmates. Women attempted to recreate some semblance of family life in camp, and children were born and raised in encampments.
Martha Washington and the Role of the Officer’s Wife
While life in the camps was hard for many women, the wives of officers had a very different experience of camp life than did women of lower social rank and lesser means. Officers’ wives tended to make seasonal visits to their husbands when the army was not actively campaigning, and they usually lived in more comfortable lodgings outside of the main encampment. Unlike ordinary soldiers’ wives, these women did not typically wash, cook, or nurse wounded soldiers. Instead, they attempted to boost the army’s morale by hosting social events such as balls and dinners for officers and visiting dignitaries. This allowed their husbands more time to focus on military planning and administration rather than receiving visitors and repaying social obligations.
Martha Washington began traveling from the Washingtons’ family estate at Mount Vernon to be with General Washington at his winter headquarters in the winter of 1775-1776. Once with her husband at headquarters, Martha Washington hosted social events, received visitors, and provided moral support to her “pore General.” Washington found his wife’s presence so important that he asked her to join him at winter headquarters for the next six years. He also asked the Continental Congress to reimburse her travel expenses for the long, often difficult journey from Mount Vernon. As she made her way north, Martha Washington was often greeted by public ceremonies, escorts, and celebrations as a symbol of the Revolutionary War effort.
Another socially prominent Virginia-born camp follower was Alice Lee Shippen, wife of Dr. William Shippen, the chief physician of the Continental Army. She followed Dr. Shippen to army encampments, where their teenage daughter Nancy was sometimes able to visit them. Like Martha Washington, Alice Shippen found the separation from her children and extended family difficult. An army officer’s wife may have enjoyed a higher standard of living than the wife of a soldier, but she also made sacrifices in terms of comfort and proximity to family to follow her husband to camp.
Women Close to Combat
Continental commanders wanted to keep women far away from combat, although they were not always successful in doing so. Despite constant orders to stay with the baggage train so as not to encumber the army on active campaign, instances of women cooking for soldiers on the battlefield, bringing soldiers water during battle, and on very rare occasions, serving in combat themselves occurred throughout the war.
Anna Maria Lane, the wife of a Connecticut soldier, disguised herself as a man and served alongside her husband, John Lane, in the Battle of Germantown in 1777, where she was injured but refused treatment for fear of being discovered. She stayed by John Lane’s side when he reenlisted in the Virginia Light Dragoons a few years later (whether or not she did so in male guise cannot be determined from the existing documents). The Lanes spent the remainder of their lives in Virginia, and in 1808, Anna Maria Lane applied for and received a pension from the Virginia Assembly for her service “in the garb, and with the courage of a soldier.”
Most female camp followers’ experience of combat, however, was as a witness rather than a combatant. As the Continental Army moved south in the summer of 1781 to besiege the British at Yorktown, Washington wanted the army to be unencumbered by women. Out of concern for civilian safety as well as military efficacy, some soldiers’ wives were escorted out of Virginia before the Battle of Yorktown. Nevertheless, historian Rees estimates that around fifty tenacious female camp followers accompanied the Continental Army on its arduous trek south from the Hudson River.
New Yorker Sarah Osborn marched with her husband, Aaron Osborn, and his company from Philadelphia to Virginia during the Yorktown campaign. Sometimes on foot and sometimes allowed the privilege of traveling by horse or wagon, she baked bread and washed clothing for her husband and other soldiers during the campaign. Osborn recalled in her 1837 application for a widow’s pension that her husband declared he “could not do leave her behind” when local Quakers urged her to stay in Philadelphia for her safety. According to Osborn, just three other women were attached to her husband’s company: two officers’ wives and an enslaved or free Black woman named Letta. Once at Yorktown, the four women stayed “just back of the American tents” and cooked and brought food to the soldiers in the redoubts. On one such occasion, Osborn recalled meeting General Washington, who asked if she “was not afraid of the cannonballs?” Osborn said she was not. She joked that British “bullets would not cheat the gallows”—a reference to the executions the Patriots might face if unsuccessful in their revolution—and that “it would not do for the men to fight and starve too.” Osborn cooked for soldiers on the day of British General Charles Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown and was an eyewitness to the event: “The British officers rode right on before the army, who marched out beating and playing a melancholy tune, their drums covered with black handkerchiefs and their fifes with black ribbands tied around them, into an old field and there grounded their arms and then returned into town again to await their destiny.”
Loyalist and Foreign Camp Followers in Virginia
Enslaved women escaped to follow the British armed forces after royal governor John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, promised freedom to enslaved men owned by rebels in 1775. Of the more than 1,000 enslaved Virginians who escaped to British lines, historian Joan R. Gundersen notes that 70 percent, largely women and children, were employed in civilian, rather than military, labor. Just as in the Continental Army, the presence of women and families was essential to the morale of the formerly enslaved men who fought for the British.
White Loyalist families in Virginia were uprooted multiple times throughout the war and sometimes also sought refuge with the British Army. In 1781, for instance, the entire Parker family of Williamsburg fled to British lines. Virginia Loyalist women who became camp followers joined their British counterparts in doing much the same washing and nursing duties as women following the Continental Army.
Following the British surrender at Saratoga in 1777, the Americans took thousands of British and German troops prisoner. The prisoners’ wives—who had already followed their soldier husbands across the Atlantic and to America from Canada—followed them into captivity on a long march from New York to Massachusetts and finally to an encampment in Albemarle County in 1779. Along the way, German camp followers were tasked with patching soldiers’ clothes and knitting them cold-weather accessories. Upon their arrival, common soldiers’ wives lived in small barracks with their husbands and struggled to supplement their rations by hiring themselves out as laborers; German and British officers rented more elegant homes and were able to join local high society. German general Baron von Riedesel and his wife even befriended Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson and his family.
Camp Followers in Trouble
Washington and other Continental commanders were often frustrated by the logistical difficulties that female camp followers presented. In addition to making it more difficult to move and provision the army, female camp followers presented other, more subtle dangers. Women camp followers increased the opportunities for anti-American espionage. Continental Army commanders attempted to keep “[persons] not belonging to the Army” out of their camps, but women posing as peddlers and laundresses overheard American battle plans, observed the army, and were able to report back to their British masters. Conversely, women could also serve as spies in a way that was helpful to the American cause. Records show that female camp followers reported brewing mutinies and conspiracies to army commanders.
Some women following the army sought to take advantage of the opportunity to make money through illicit trade or even theft. Connecticut soldier Ambrose Collins recalled that some American women at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777 “even exposed themselves where the shot [was] flying, to strip the dead” of valuables while the battle raged around them. Soldiers’ wives annoyed commanders by illegally selling rum to soldiers throughout the war, up to and including when in camp at Yorktown.
Historian Holly Mayer finds little evidence that prostitution was widespread among American camp followers. Instead, most prostitutes who catered to soldiers did so in cities where their clientele would visit them from camp. Although prostitution existed in camps, women in camp were frequently scrutinized by officers to determine their legitimate connection to soldiers and eligibility for rations.
Because of their important work cleaning the clothes of the Continental Army, women were most likely to run into trouble with authorities over their laundering practices. Laundresses charging high prices for their labor to cash-strapped soldiers was a consistent matter of contention within the army, and sometimes commanders set laundry prices to prevent overcharging. Women were also punished for washing laundry in unsanitary water or, as in Fredericksburg in October 1778, threatened with a stint in the guardhouse if they contaminated the stream that was the camp’s source of drinking water by washing laundry in it.
Virginia’s camp followers played a crucial role supporting the Continental Army during the American Revolution: they washed clothes, nursed the sick and wounded, provided essential sustenance by cooking for soldiers (even under fire), and organized other forms of entertainment and support for soldiers according to their resources. Most importantly, their presence helped ensured that the men they followed stayed with the army.
