Abstract
A wide variety of eighteenth-century authors made comparisons to soldiering and slavery in newspapers, pamphlets and books. The analogy tended to be applied to highlight the lack of personal autonomy and inadequate wages of army service, as well as its harsh punishment and lifetime enlistment periods. While some commentators championed soldiers’ rights to better treatment, many had other agendas in mind. It was particularly prominent in anti-abolitionist propaganda, for example. Regardless of their intentions, civilians’ soldier-as-slave rhetoric took a toll on the actual men in uniform. The few rank-and-file writers to acknowledge it suggest that the metaphor shamed and humiliated them.
Keywords: enslavement as metaphor, eighteenth-century soldiers, anti-abolitionists, constraints of army service, radical attitudes to army
This investigation follows in the footsteps of Matthew McCormack and Kevin Linch’s attempt to more fully ‘define’ Britain’s eighteenth-century servicemen by exploring how contemporaries saw them and how they saw themselves away from the battlefield.1 It looks at a very specific aspect of that definition process: the tendency to cast soldiers as slaves. A few historians have acknowledged this in passing, but never in any depth.2 This paper draws upon published accounts of the rank and file roughly encompassing the period from the War of Austrian Succession to the aftermath of Waterloo.
This era saw a ‘sea change’ where Enlightenment rationalists and humanitarian thinkers increasingly questioned the legitimacy of enslavement.3 Their logic was then applied more broadly to cast doubt on other institutions. In this period authors deployed slave metaphors as weapons, one of the strongest in the arsenal of those campaigning for change. Traditional attitudes to everything from marriage to animal husbandry were revaluated and characterized as forms of slavery. Early feminists compared wives to slaves to argue for the granting of suffrage and property rights to women; reformers labelled agricultural workers and factory children as slaves to advocate for better wages and working conditions for them; and opponents to animal cruelty ‘consciously created parallels between human and animal slavery’ to demonstrate the need for animal protection.4 One survey catalogues the term being applied to everything from ‘backbreaking labour’, ‘control of labour’, ‘colonial servitude’, and ‘subsistence labour’, to ‘political imposition’, and ‘passive obedience’.5 Metaphors of enslavement had become a powerful rhetorical tool in the long eighteenth century.
The following paragraphs will show that authors applied the term ‘slave’ to Britain’s rank and file to advance a wide variety of agendas. While some championed soldiers’ rights to better treatment, many had other agendas in mind. For anti-abolitionist propagandists and advocates for American slaveholders, the comparison served as a form of ‘whataboutism’, a way to deflect criticism by pointing out their critics’ own flaws. In other words, proslavery advocates suggested that Britons were hypocrites in condemning plantation slavery when they themselves had such an oppressive military institution. Abolitionists, in turn, tended to ignore any similarities.
Instead of lamenting that those who ‘delivered the black underdog from his oppression cared nothing about hard bargains driven with white underdogs’, as one previous historian has argued, this paper starts with the premise that the soldier-as-slave was always a false equivalence.6 No matter how hard servicemen had it, they were never fully comparable to enslaved people on colonial plantations. The popularity of the enslavement metaphor in civilian representations of armed service is more worthy of study for what it reveals about perceptions than about the realities of eighteenth-century soldiering.
The investigation has unearthed several key features of British army service that most readily lent themselves to enslavement metaphors. Though certain features surface more frequently than others, the rhetoric took on the flavour of the political context within which it circulated. Despite their changing contexts, these features can be loosely grouped into two separate sections. The first section concentrates on the aspects of armed service that approached enslavement by removing men’s freedom of conscience and inadequately paying them for their work. The second section highlights areas where soldiering emulated slavery in its use of the lash and the all-encompassing nature of its control over men’s lives.
The third and final section contends that the enslavement analogy took a toll on the actual men in uniform. Being defined in such a way constituted its own oppression. In a discussion of ‘the eighteenth-century resonances of the word “slave”’, John Richardson finds that it ‘nearly always’ meant subordination and lack of freedom. As such, he continues, ‘the word “slave” was one of the most favoured terms of abuse’.7 The few accounts from the ranks to employ the analogy bear this out. They suggest that the serviceman-as-slave simile shamed and humiliated them.
The arguments that follow offer a new lens through which to view eighteenth-century authors who used the comparison to advocate for soldiers’ greater freedom of conscience, higher wages, lighter punishments or shorter terms of service.
Motivation and Remuneration
No historians have investigated the ways that contemporaries targeted rankers’ lack of autonomy and poor pay as signs of their enslavement. Peter Way comes closest, but he does not use this terminology. Way characterises the eighteenth-century ranker as an ‘unfree’ labourer in the sense that ‘the military labour contract’ had ‘stripped away’ the rights accorded other workers.8 This section traces the way that servicemen’s low wages and inability to exercise initiative leant themselves to slavery allegations. Most importantly, it shows that different political contexts determined the way the metaphor was deployed. These indicate that the metaphor was more often intended to hurt, rather than help, the servicemen to whom it was applied.
Connections between soldiering and enslavement often revolved around the contrast between a citizen militia and a standing army. Although the latter had become an accepted part of Britain’s military in the eighteenth century, it was still subject to criticism for its contingent of foreign auxiliaries. As Matthew McCormack explains, even the Britons in the standing army could appear as ‘the tool of a would-be despot’, in contrast to militiamen whose service was more readily understood as ‘an expression of the people’s power’.9 Thus, at the time of the militia reform at mid-century, the language of enslavement could be applied to regular soldiers. In 1758, for example – one year after the passage of the English Militia Act – a contributor to the Whitehall Evening Post noted that armies of patriots who ‘go’st to War in earnest’ separate ‘the true Soldier from the Slave’.10 Militiamen defending their homes and families were the most obvious ‘earnest’ fighters, compared to the abject redcoat sent to advance another leader’s cause.
A few years later, a similar enslavement metaphor reappeared, this time as the tool of a Jacobite sympathizer. In the aftermath of the failed Jacobite rebellion of 1745, its surviving adherents used the comparison to criticize the troops who successfully routed their attack. An Aberdeen printer published a translation of a French article in 1761 pointing to ‘those whose lot it is to be driven to take up arms’ in service of ‘belligerent Sovereigns’ as ‘enslaved’.11 The rhetoric of troops’ bondage proved to be a valuable tool for those who sought to cast doubt on the legitimacy of a king’s leadership, particularly when the latter had been victorious in battle.
Similar analogies resurfaced in the rhetoric deployed by the British supporters of the French Revolution. In this case, it was the French citizen army that seemed such a welcome contrast to opposing British and European forces. Thomas Paine lauded the Frenchman in uniform who, unlike his ancièn regime predecessors, ‘is no longer the Slave of a Despot, but…is become one of the Nation, …interested…in its defence’.12 ‘The man who fights for the liberty of his country feels motives which no hireling can feel’, Helen Maria Williams echoed in 1796. Again, she drew a sharp distinction between these conscience-driven warriors and the traditional soldier who ‘remains the same sullen slave, subjected to the same coarse discipline of blows, and marches forward only because he knows that retreat is death’.13 A radical pamphlet printed the previous year exhorted Britons to hearken back to an idealized past when armed service amounted to militia duties. ‘Formerly the Soldier was united with the Citizen, and the toil and danger of arms lasted no longer than while the enemy was upon the territory’, but now ‘The Soldier, deprived of the dignity of man, is…whipped like a slave’. The French Republic would, it promised, ‘hasten the dissolution’ of such enslavement.14
It is noteworthy that imagery of the earlier American Revolution is different. This is undoubtedly due to the colonies’ infamous reliance on plantation slavery. One opponent of the king’s war against the thirteen colonies complained that Britain’s ‘soldiers are taught to believe that they are mere machines’. This was a problematic ‘doctrine for pretended Saints to propagate in a free state; where the Soldier and the Citizen should be always united, and the free Subject never wholly sunk in the military Slave’.15 At the same time, no British or American sympathizers highlighted the rebel army’s freedom against this apparent enslavement of its red-coated enemy.16 Pro-revolutionaries deployed slave analogies in response to arguments by the English ‘that those who keep Slaves have…no Right to Liberty themselves’.
This statement appeared in a mock debate ‘between an ENGLISHMAN, a SCOTCHMAN, and an AMERICAN, on the subject of SLAVERY’, published in London’s Public Advertiser newspaper in 1770. The ‘American’ rebutted it by pointing out his critics’ hypocrisy in condemning his colony’s slave system when they, too, sanctioned slave-like conditions among their own people. He censured the ‘Scotchman’ for the treatment of coalminers in his region, and England for its terms of military service. Alluding to impressment and high enlistment bounties as signs that ‘the sailor is often forced into Service’ and ‘the Soldier is generally bought’, the American went even further.17 The ‘slavery’ England imposed on its infantrymen was far worse, he argued, because Americans ‘cannot command a Slave of ours to….commit MURDER!…But Soldiers must, on Pain of Death, obey’, even if ordered to ‘cut the Throats of your Children in the Colonies, or shoot your Women and Children in St. G----e’s F---ds’.18 The latter refers to the St. George’s Fields Massacre of 1768, where soldiers fired on a crowd of John Wilkes’ supporters gathered outside a London prison to celebrate his release. As Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker point out, it was a powerful symbol of the ‘unprecedented’ use of the army to deal with rioters in that period.19 None of the soldiers who fired on the crowd were punished for the deaths of innocent bystanders that resulted from their actions, adding fuel to Wilkite radicalism.
Similar soldier-as-slave imagery reappears in the months following the Peterloo massacre in 1819. Tom Wooler’s radical journal mocked the army as a place ‘where tyrants dictate to slaves’, forcing rankers to act against their own conscience and hang their own fathers, if ordered. Echoing the militia debates of the previous century, Wooler criticized the peacetime ‘standing army’ of ‘hirelings’ who operated entirely at the King’s will, unlike ‘citizen’ soldiers who acted as ‘the affectionate protector of his unarmed fellow-countrymen’. He went on to praise the ‘American peasants and untrained citizens’ of the patriot army that had defeated the British forces back in 1783.20 Enslavement metaphors bolstered reformers’ rhetoric when troops were deployed against protestors and made a striking contrast to conscience-driven citizen-soldiers.
British soldiers’ inadequate pay also evoked a variety of comparisons with slavery. This was particularly apparent at mid-century, when Britain experienced what Nick Rogers has called a ‘demobilization crisis’.21 The short-lived peace following the War of Austrian Succession was marked by economic and social instability. This sparked calls for reform, including from advocates for Britain’s newly discharged servicemen. One such treatise identified the latter as uniquely fitting ‘the Essence of Slavery’. Beyond the dangers and length of his service, the infantryman’s most grievous wrong is his lack of ‘a just Compensation for his Time and Service’, argued the anonymous author.22
Novelist and Westminster Justice of the Peace Henry Fielding also weighed in. Although his better-known contribution to the demobilization crisis debate said surprisingly little about servicemen, he did acknowledge them in his Covent Garden Journal.23 With his usual acerbic wit in a popular essay on ‘contempt’, Fielding was bemused by the man who, slavelike, ‘hires himself out to be shot at for five pence a day’. This extremely low-paid hireling nonetheless ‘looks with a contemptuous air on all his brethren’ of the labouring classes ‘from whence he himself was taken’. His former associates now ‘despise’ him and his fellow soldiers, and ‘comfort’ themselves in being free to ‘live with no master’ any longer than they choose.24 As a member of the establishment, Fielding was more puzzled than outraged at the aptness of the comparison between soldiering and enslavement.
The same was not true of the anonymous radical pamphleteer writing four decades later, when tensions had escalated across the Channel. This revolutionary sympathizer warned the ruling classes that by ‘feed[ing the soldier] on hard crusts’, they encouraged him to desert when ‘the People offer him a better meal’. Only then will ‘the Soldier…be exalted from the state of a Slave into a Man’, the pamphleteer proclaimed.25 These observations were likely intended to encourage resistance in the ranks and may have had an impact. Fears of mutiny prompted authorities to issue reforms increasing army pay in 1797. Though the gains did very little to improve soldiers’ actual conditions of service, they seem to have cured radical authors of comparing army wages to enslavement.26 No civilians after this date published similar analogies in reference to soldiers’ low pay.
Apart from these radical calls for servicemen to resist their enslavement, most of the rhetoric highlighting the bondage of armed service depicted soldiers as trained killers. These authors presented servicemen as mindless puppets of an employer whose low wages made them a threat to civilians, rather than an ally. Proponents of militia reform, and supporters of the Jacobite rebellion and the French Revolution maligned the rank and file of the standing army for their lack of political will. Opponents of the war against the thirteen colonies pointed to the hypocrisy of condemning plantation slavery while drilling soldiers into mechanical obedience that denied them personal autonomy. The next section investigates contemporaries’ negative depictions further.
Discipline and Constraint
The following paragraphs explore eighteenth-century arguments that the army’s excessive control over soldiers’ lives and use of the lash made servicemen akin to slaves. Subsequent historians have echoed these observations, but none have interrogated the rhetoric or examined its context. Gillian Russell contends, for example, that ‘the most powerful sign…to reinforce the analogy between [the soldier’s] condition and that of the black slave was the practice of flogging’.27 A surprisingly varied group of eighteenth-century authors from libertarians to plantation owners connected the army’s excessive use of the lash to enslavement. The latter clearly had little interest in advocating for soldiers.
The same was true of some commentators who invoked enslavement imagery in relation to the army’s power to compel troops to serve in perpetuity. Though ‘life’ service technically ended when a soldier was too old or infirm to be of use, it still ensured that all of his productive years belonged to the army. Even aging veterans felt the army’s control of their whereabouts under the terms of its pension system.28 Throughout the eighteenth century, many who accepted the king’s shilling were enlisted for life, but manpower shortages periodically introduced options of limited terms of service.29 In relaxing traditional recruitment standards, officials invited deliberation of their legitimacy. This section will show that those on both sides of the debate invoked enslavement to advance their argument. Far from liberating the ranks, the analogy served only to perpetuate their subjugation.
Thus, it was that, in a debate in the House of Lords during the War of Austrian Succession, Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, opined that ‘being tied for Life’ made the ‘English Soldier…a Slave’. ‘I think it a most preposterous Regulation in a free Country, to make Slaves of those who are to defend the Liberties of their Country’, he added.30 Independent MP Thomas Pitt tried to introduce a bill in the 1749 and 1750 parliamentary sessions that also would impose limits on the rank-and-file period of enlistment. Again, he used similar language. ‘I must look upon our soldiers as slaves’, he declared; ‘for every man who is bound to a master for life, I must look on as [a] slave’.31 These doubts surfaced again during the American Revolutionary War, less than four months after Parliament had agreed to offer recruits a three-year term of service in 1775. Criticism of Britain’s role in the conflict claimed that the man in the ranks was little more than a ‘military Slave’, begging the question: ‘If an Officer can resign…why is a private Soldier to be denied the same right…?’32
The situation became more complicated when the House of Commons again included limited terms of service in the Mutiny Acts of 1779 and 1780. With the French having only recently entered the war alongside the colonists and threatening invasion, anxieties about Britain’s troops were high. This was also the period which was to see the last army impressment, with parliamentary debates covered by newspapers for the first time in Britain’s history.33 An MP who had fought alongside General Wolfe in North America suggested that, if new recruits were enlisted for seven years, the same opportunity should be offered retroactively to all soldiers. Currently, he argued, ‘the unfortunate Soldier was, in England, little better than a Slave’, in having ‘a Yoke fastened on him, from which Death, or Loss of Limbs, could alone redeem him’.34
An anonymous ‘English officer’ felt compelled to publish his own response to such arguments. With a title pronouncing the piece to be his ‘honest sentiments’, the officer accorded it a necessity that a soldier ‘becomes a slave for life’, since absolute submission was required for optimal battle performance.35 Life service would remain for another 68 years.36 Both sides of the debate apparently agreed that British servicemen’s unlimited term of service enslaved them, but these conditions remained, even as the abolitionist movement grew.
Commentators on military flogging deployed soldier-as-slave imagery with similar complexity. The first to align the army’s use of the lash with enslavement in print was Charles Lucas, a fiery Dublin MP. In 1768, he published a fifty-page denunciation of the military justice system that generated enough attention to necessitate a second print run.37 It championed the case of a low-ranking artilleryman who had asked for a regimental and then a general court martial to hear his complaints about corruption, only to be tried by the very officers his complaint had targeted. Lucas accorded the circumstances of his trial and the imprisonment and five-hundred lash sentence that emerged from it to be a sign that rankers were ‘considered as slaves, cut off from the ordinary protection of the laws’.38 Lucas’ call for reform to the army system of punishments fell on deaf ears, though Ireland’s lord lieutenant called Lucas the ‘Wilkes of Ireland’ and complained that he was ‘poisoning all the soldiery’.39
Several decades would pass before more radical voices would rise against army flogging and employ enslavement metaphors in print. In 1795, an anonymous radical pamphlet lamented England’s soldiers as being routinely ‘whipped like a slave’ and ‘beaten by their boyish Officers’.40 A year later, witnessing ‘the frequent blows with the cane, and the austere ill humour’ of the officers drilling the men, a member of the London Corresponding Society remarked it ‘a melancholy consideration…that to understand the duties of a soldier it should be necessary to endure the treatment of a slave’.41 That same year, Jacobin sympathizers distributed handbills amongst British soldiers with similar language. One exhorted them to rise up against their officers and refuse to be ‘whipt like a slave’, for example.42 Various radical authors agitated against flogging in the following century, with modest success.43
As the abolitionist movement gained traction in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, the plantocracy found great fodder in the harsh punitive measures doled out by the army and navy. Proslavery advocates questioned abolitionists’ criticisms of plantation justice when Britain’s soldiers were notorious for having received greater whippings than plantation workers. ‘If ever Mr. Wilberforce (the famous abolitionist) has seen one of his fellow-subjects in this country, a sailor or a soldier in his majesty’s service, punished with five hundred lashes, he has seen a punishment that infinitely exceeds…any inflicted on a negro in the West Indies’, averred one such author.44 Another condemned the ‘disgusting punishments’ in the military, and suggested that those in bondage on southern plantations underwent ‘punishments’ that were far less ‘severe when compared with the discipline of the army or navy’.45 An advocate for Jamaican planters observed that ‘Ten, twenty, or even thirty lashes, is in general the punishment of negroes for stealing pigs, poultry, lands, or sheep, or for desertion’. He went on to add that, unlike regimental drummers, sugar plantation managers never needed ‘to have a surgeon stand by, to give his opinion…that the criminal can support no greater degree of torment and live!’46
One army doctor, the progressive surgeon’s mate of the 10th Foot who wrote a book on his regimental duties, was forced to acknowledge this after it was drawn to his attention by his early reviewers. In the next edition of his book, he admitted that ‘the West-Indian planter’ often executed lighter whippings that would allow enslaved labourers to return to work within a day, whereas for the soldier, ‘weeks, and often months pass away, and he is not recovered’. He was quick to qualify this, however, noting that he referred only to ‘the most judicious and most merciful of the planters’.47 Advocates for reform to army discipline could clearly experience discomfort aligning their arguments with those of plantation owners.
Seven years earlier, a print of Africans laying like sardines aboard the Brookes slave ship had first appeared and stirred such horror that it became immediately popular, undergoing many reprintings.48 It dramatically increased awareness of enslaved peoples’ inhumane travel conditions, making it a readily identifiable metaphor for those who marvelled at the number of men marched onto troopships and sent to serve on the empire’s frontiers.49 This prompted novelist Charlotte Turner Smith to facetiously remark that ‘Negroes on board Guineamen are allowed almost as much room as a Soldier in a Transport’.50 Again, this kind of comparison could just as easily be turned to serve the anti-abolitionist cause. One proponent of plantation slavery posed the rhetorical question of whether ‘a Soldier’ was not also ‘a Slave’, in having to ‘burn under the Torrid, or freeze under the frigid Zone, at the word of Command’.51 He was slave-like in being shipped off to endure the cold winters of North America or the scorching summers of India without consideration of his own inclinations.
In sum, critics of army discipline and control who characterized recruits as abjectly servile inadvertently fed the plantocracy agenda and arguably effected minimal improvement in the actual conditions of rank-and-file service. The final section tests the impact of such comparisons on the men themselves.
Defining Themselves as Slaves
By revealing corroborating statements in rankers’ own accounts of their military service, it is possible to discern how enslavement metaphors corroded rankers’ self-esteem. Linch and McCormack have suggested that ‘the allegation that martial law made soldiers oppressed and unfree would not necessarily have been accepted by the soldiers themselves’.52 The arguments that follow show that a few men, at least, did accept such allegations and were demoralized by them. After explaining just how low this number of writers was, this section will move on to analyze their use of the metaphor to highlight their hard work, harsh treatment and complete lack of autonomy. As some of the examples in the previous section have shown, not all civilians were contemptuous; some were compassionate, but their sympathy seems to have meant very little to the men in the ranks. Like those civilians, military authors used enslavement narratives to highlight their oppression, but unlike those writers, they went beyond that to affirm their inherent worth and individuality.
It is important to underscore, at the outset, that civilians were far more likely than those in uniform to compare service to enslavement. Only a small handful of the (already sparse) print authored by privates and non-commissioned officers used similar imagery. Slave analogies are absent from early spiritual autobiographies, for example. The vocabulary was certainly available to them – in one instance, a Methodist ranker considered himself to have been ‘enslaved’ to ‘liquor’ – but they never applied the term to their conditions of service.53 Commissioned officers, too, eschewed slave imagery in favour of more paternalist metaphors befitting a caring fiscal-military state.54 They were more likely to cast rankers as helpless children needing their guidance and oversight, than as enslaved.55
I have found only seven rank-and-file soldiers (and one lieutenant promoted from the ranks) who employed the term ‘slave’ in relation to themselves and their comrades. Unlike civilian authors, they either wrote privately, anonymously, or published their accounts long after their discharge, to evade the army’s control over them. As a process of recollection of enslavement, veterans’ autobiographies that were published in print operated as acts of liberation and reassertions of their inherent humanity.
Rather than self-advocates deftly employing a rhetorical device however, the soldiers who characterized themselves as slaves often seem like tired, wounded figures.56 Some members of the rank and file internalized the contempt civilians had infused into enslavement metaphors. Far from reliving battle glories, ranker memoirists showcased their workaday suffering.57 Johann Gottfried Seume, a Hessian soldier serving in Britain’s Halifax garrison in 1782, wrote that his duties were such ‘that a galley slave would not envy’.58 A Peninsular War veteran recounted being ‘wrought like slaves’ by a pitiless adjutant who expected the men to spend long days erecting gun platforms, filling sandbags and shovelling trenches on the Spanish coast while continuing to perform guard duties and parade.59 Another memoirist who fought in the same campaign echoed Seume’s earlier expression, describing himself and his companions ‘working like galley slaves’ to erect fortifications in the heights above Roncesvalles in 1813.60 As their own writing attests, recruits felt shamed and constrained by their army duties, particularly those mundane garrison chores and drilling performed far away from the battlefield.
Three voices from the ranks made statements surprisingly like those of anti-abolitionists. As the previous section has shown, the latter contrasted army discipline with the comparatively lighter use of the lash on plantations. Decades before this proslavery lobby made such prominent mention of military flogging, an anonymous soldier known only as ‘Jonas’ published his journal from his service in the ranks during the Seven Years' War. He stressed that officers’ tyranny was even greater in remote colonial outposts, far from civilian censure. There, he averred ‘the soldier is used far worse than a negroe slave’.61 Jonas can hardly be considered an anti-abolitionist, having uttered several expressions of condemnation of Caribbean planters elsewhere in his book.62 Private James Aytoun, the second soldier, wished that abolitionist William Wilberforce had ‘looked at home, to the conditions of soldiers and sailors’, before condemning those of the enslaved. He pointed to enslaved peoples’ comparatively better provisions and treatment, but this was more to highlight the hunger and corporal punishment he and his fellow servicemen suffered in the Caribbean in the 1790s.63
The third soldier who voiced similar observations is Bombardier Alexander Alexander, a Scotsman who had enlisted in the artillery after having worked as an overseer on a cotton plantation in Curaçao. He later claimed that he had never seen its enslaved inhabitants ‘punished to the extent I saw the soldiers suffer, … and for offences, too, of which a slave proprietor would have taken no notice’.64 Sir Francis Burdett had made a similar argument in the 1812 sitting of parliament.65 These statements were against flogging more than slavery. Indeed, Alexander’s came so long after the abolitionists had succeeded in ending the slave trade, he could have no interest in serving the plantocracy side of the old debate. Like Jonas and Aytoun, his comments emerged entirely from the need to emphasize the suffering that men in the ranks endured, and to remind readers of their humanity.66
Alexander Alexander’s account is especially revelatory. Later in his autobiography, he described his return to Britain after serving in Sri Lanka. In uniform but off duty in a Hertfordshire pub, the Scottish bombardier overheard some local labourers complaining about government. When he raised doubts about the legitimacy of their grievances, they reacted with a stream of invective:
what are you but a slave yourself to them, a poor pitiful scoundrel, who has sold himself for a shilling a day; body and mind, you cannot have a will of your own, or do one thing but what you are bid, and must go to be shot at like a cock at Shrovetide; there is not a spark of spirit in thy body or thee would not wear that coat.67
Spoken as it was in a period when twelve thousand soldiers were deployed against British citizens – ‘more than had landed…in Portugal in 1808’ – this statement resonates with civilian responses to troop repression of the St. George’s Fields and Peterloo riots observed in the first section.68 The artilleryman has left us with the only account of a serviceman being directly confronted by civilians’ enslavement analogies.
Alexander confessed himself to have been ‘humbled and dispirited’ by the exchange, retreating in shame to his quarters above the bar.69 The power of the slave metaphor remained with him long after its 1812 occurrence, to be reproduced in mortifying detail in his published memoirs almost two decades later. It is highly unlikely that Alexander was aware of the earlier commentators who contrasted conscience-driven citizen-soldiers with ‘hirelings’ like him. Regardless, his autobiography implicitly responded to such commentary. It resonates with the rank-and-file ‘loyalist ripostes’ of 1797 uncovered by Nick Mansfield but lacks their bravado. These handbills affirmed men’s genuine, heartfelt desire to serve their king, and, Mansfield argues, ‘rejected the radical accusation that they were slaves dominated by cruel…officers’.70 Along with Alexander’s account, this serves as a powerful reminder that, beneath the uniforms of the ‘standing army’, were men with their own individual opinions and emotions.
There is one lone soldier’s voice that explicitly used an enslavement analogy to lobby for an end to military flogging. John Shipp, who began his service as a private in the 22nd regiment in 1797 and rose from the ranks to a lieutenancy, penned The Private Soldier after leaving the army. Published in 1834, one year after parliament passed the Abolition of Slavery Act, Shipp’s book also took advantage of the growth in public scrutiny of military discipline to advocate for an end to this form of punishment.71 He nonetheless concludes by lamenting ‘that there is so much difficulty in rousing public philanthropy’ in the soldier’s ‘relief’. ‘The groans of the far distant slave have been heard’, he continues, asking ‘how is it then, that…our private soldiers…have been so long labouring under the scourge of the cat?’ He recounted sitting by comrades’ bedsides as they languished of wounds incurred by the army’s corporal punishment and lamented the ‘apathy’ of his civilian countrymen.72
Shipp had a different weapon in his arsenal than Thomas Paine, Helen Maria Williams, and the other Jacobin sympathizers outlined in the first section. They invoked the British private’s metaphorical enslavement to incite a revolution, but Shipp was writing from a different perspective. The period after Waterloo saw rising radicalism, but Shipp was not a Bonapartist Jacobin.73 In fact, he considered it a ‘monstrous anomaly’ that the army ‘of the greatest despot that ever lived, marched to meet the enemy with upraised heads and spotless backs’, yet ‘the soldiers of Britain…hung their heads like slaves at the exhibition of the scourge; and…exhibited to all the degradation to which they were subject’. He sought to shame his fellow Britons and the government by this comparison to France. Significantly, like the example of Alexander discussed above, Shipp emphasized his fellow servicemen’s humanity, describing them as ‘high spirited’, ‘brave’, and ‘beautiful’, yet broken by ‘this damnable instrument’.74
Four of the seven authors from the ranks explicitly linked their travel constraints to slavery. Again, the most pointed comment came from Alexander in describing his trip to Asia with his regiment. He claimed that he and his fellow soldiers were ‘packed together like negroes in the hold of a slave-ship’ and contrasted their state with that of the ‘cabin passengers on board, who were rioting in plenty of water and every luxury, but who looked upon us poor soldiers as if we had been animals of an inferior creation, and seemed afraid lest any of us should come near them’.75 James Aytoun of the 30th Regiment asserted that the Caribbean’s enslaved ‘negroes have a great deal more liberty than soldiers’. Where the latter ‘are liable to be flogged if more than a mile from barracks, camp or quarters’, he observed, the former enjoyed frequent visits to neighbouring plantations ‘six or seven miles’ away ‘to see a favourite black wench or [attend] a dance’.76 A sergeant of the 94th regiment posited he and his counterparts to be ‘a mere piece of machinery in the hands of his superiors, to be moved only as they please’.77 ‘In short’, observed an anonymous ranker of the 71st, ‘we were slaves, that must…perish with cold, or walk to the end of the world if commanded’.78 These servicemen chose to highlight their own metaphorical enslavement in having no control over their destination or mode of travel, subject to the whims of masters with little interest in their physical comfort.
The enslavement inherent in lifetime terms of service was also not lost on one army author. It is worth remarking, however, that the only voice from the ranks to corroborate the thralldom of life service came from a man who had eschewed that option. Joseph Donaldson, a sergeant in the 94th Scots Brigade, served only six years (from 1809 to 1815) and eventually trained as a surgeon after his discharge. Donaldson drew a dramatic contrast between his civilian existence and his life in the red coat. He lamented the way in which his fellow rankers denigrated any man who, ‘when accused by superiors of something of which he was not guilty, ventured to speak in his own defence’. Men of ‘superior…intellect’, like himself, were told ‘you have no right to think[;]…do what you are ordered…, right or wrong’. Such a culture, he argued, transformed the most autonomous individuals into ‘tractable beasts of burthen’. Those who signed on for life were drawn into an ‘overwhelming vortex of abject slavishness’. Sadly, he concluded, if the goal was ‘to make a man an abject slave to the will of his superiors…there could not have been a better school chosen than the army’.79 The prospect of a lifetime of mute submission to tyrannical officers – its very hopelessness of escape – broke a man’s will and figuratively enslaved him.
Half a century before, the military author known only as ‘Jonas’ expressed a similar sense of despair. On the final page of his anonymous memoir, Jonas lamented that ‘the British soldier and sailor are looked on’ – actually seen by civilians – ‘no longer than they are wanted’.80 Their enslavement, no matter how metaphorical, rendered them invisible except where they could serve another’s purpose. His words seem to apply all too well to those civilians who labelled soldiers as slaves and wrought very little change in the conditions of army service.
Conclusion
Jonas, Donaldson, Alexander and the few common soldiers like them who voiced their sense of their own enslavement in the ranks of the British army add subjectivity to what is generally a story of objectification. They put a human face on the amorphous mass of men in red, blue and green coats. Their propensity to be characterized as slaves set British rankers of the regular army apart from militiamen or colonial recruits. Where contemporaries tended to see the militia as protecting them from enslavement, and bondsmen in the colonies might join as a means to escape indentured servitude, the British regular instead seemed to enslave himself by taking the king’s shilling.81 His apparent lack of freedom became fodder for a host of commentators in eighteenth-century print, ranging from Jacobites and revolutionaries, to sitting Members of Parliament, officers and anti-abolitionists.
This article has shown that armed service was seen as comparable to enslavement for inveigling men to give up their autonomy over their lives. It removed their free will, paid them little, drilled and whipped them into submission, demanded obedience for life, and sent them in crowded ships to toil in extreme heat and cold. These features lent themselves most readily to the enslavement analogies circulating in print. They were especially likely to surface at times of heightened anxiety, like the demobilization crisis of mid-century and the American and French Revolutionary War periods. Civilian protestors used such metaphors to denigrate the troops deployed against them. Abolition debates generated comparisons between soldiering and slavery, but it did not drive the narrative as much as one might think, nor were abolitionists lobbying for improvement to common soldiers’ lot. Their uncanny resemblance to enslaved people was more likely to be remarked by those seeking to prolong plantation thralldom than by those seeking its end.
Soldier authors emphasized the enslavement of their back-breaking work, merciless floggings and complete subjugation to army command. However, other rank-and-file memoirists’ refusal to acknowledge the resemblance between slavery and armed service is just as significant. Unlike Nicholas Mansfield, Kevin Linch, and Mathew McCormack’s suspicion that soldiers were inclined to reject such comparisons, this article’s findings suggest that they tacitly accepted them. Most probably sidestepped the analogy, rather than denying it outright. Many who wrote long after their discharge vividly recalled the hardships and horrors of service, but never explicitly connected it with slavery. As existing research has already shown, their service motivation came as much – if not more – from a sense of loyalty and honour as from fear of reprisals.82 They preferred to present their suffering through a lens that emphasized their identity as warriors of sensibility, and as sons, brothers, husbands, fathers, or neighbours.83
Their accounts differed little from fellow soldiers who explicitly invoked enslavement metaphors; both underscored the human beings beneath the uniform. This paper demonstrates that civilians who applied bondage analogies to men in uniform rarely wrought any real improvement in the conditions of service that had given rise to the comparison. Far from encouraging resistance in the ranks, the rhetoric of enslavement simply subjugated them further. In this sense, it anticipates more recent debates on the terminology of ‘slaves’ versus ‘enslaved people’.84 The few soldiers who took up their pens to repeat this analogy lamented civilians’ inability to fully appreciate the realities of their situation, and to recognize that calling them ‘slaves’ erased them as thinking, feeling fellow men. Then, and now, words matter.
Kevin Linch and Matthew McCormack, ‘Defining Soldiers: Britain’s Military, c. 1740-1815', War in History 20, no. 2 (2013), 144-159.
A. J. Randall, Riotous assemblies: popular protest in Hanoverian England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), p. 38; J. E. Cookson, ‘War', in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, ed. Ian McCalman, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), p. 30; J. E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation, 1793-1815 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997), p. 111; Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793-1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 12-13; and Richard Glover, Peninsular Preparation: The Reform of the British Army, 1795-1809 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1963), p. 221.
Kenneth Morgan, Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America (Oxford: OUP, 2008), p. 149.
Ingrid H. Tague, ‘Companions, Servants or Slaves? Considering Animals in Eighteenth-Century Britain', Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 39 (2010), p. 115; Jane Moore, ‘Sex, Slavery and Rights in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindications', in The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 34-36; and Patricia Hollis, ‘Anti-Slavery and British Working-Class Radicalism in the Years of Reform', in Anti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey, ed. Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (Folkstone, Kent: Dawson, 1980), pp. 294-315.
Srividhya Swaminathan and Adam R. Beach, ‘Introduction: Invoking Slavery in Literature and Scholarship', in Srividhya Swaminathan and Adam R. Beach, Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 1-18. Significantly, this book makes no reference to soldiers.
Glover, Peninsular Preparation, 221.
John Richardson, Slavery and Augustan Literature: Swift, Pope and Gay (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 3-4.
Peter Way, ‘Class and the Common Soldier in the Seven Years’ War', Labor History 44, no. 4 (2003), p. 458.
Matthew McCormack, Embodying the Militia in Georgian England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015), p. 158. See also, pp. 13-28.
‘The Contrast', Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer (London, England) January 3 1758-January 5 1758; issue 1843, p. 1.
The Aberdeen magazine for the year 1761… (Aberdeen, 1761), pp. 74-75.
Thomas Paine, A letter to the Earl of Shelburne, now Marquis of Landsdowne, on his speech, July 10, 1782, respecting the acknowledgement of American…. (London, 1791), p. 14; Thomas Paine, Thoughts on the peace, and the probable advantages thereof to the United States of America new edn (London, 1791), pp. 26-27; ‘Paris, Jan 14', Sun (London, England), Monday, January 18, 1796; and True Briton (1793) (London, England), Tuesday, January 19, 1796.
Helen Maria Williams, Letters containing a sketch of the politics of France, from the thirty-first of May, 1793, till the twenty-eighth of July 1794… (Dublin, 1796), pp. 186-187.
The Curses and Causes of War… (Spitalfields, 1795), p. 4.
‘To the PRINTER of the GAZETTEER', Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (London, England), Wednesday, April 3, 1776.
On discourse around the value of colonial troops, see Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000), pp. 130-133.
The allusion to being ‘bought’ also might relate to criticisms of a standing army as containing men who fought for money rather than patriotism or principle. Linch and McCormack, ‘Defining', pp. 148-149. On high bounties, see Arthur N. Gilbert, ’An Analysis of Some Eighteenth-Century Army Recruiting Records', JSAHR 54 (1976), pp. 40-42.
‘A Conversation between an ENGLISHMAN, a SCOTCHMAN, and an AMERICAN, on the subject of SLAVERY', Public Advertiser (London), Tuesday, January 30, 1770.
Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 277-278.
‘The Duties of the Real and Pretended Soldiers of Great Britain', The Black Dwarf III, no. 48 (December 1, 1819), pp. 774, 778.
‘It might seem odd to characterize the demobilization after the War of Austrian Succession as a “crisis”’, Rogers acknowledges, but ‘the mid-century era was not one of patrician confidence or Georgian calm: it was one of deep anxiety…about the state of the country and its capacity to continue a war that everyone feared had been abandoned only temporarily'. Nicholas Rogers, Mayhem: Post-War Crime and Violence in Britain, 1748-53 (New Haven: Yale UP, 2012), pp. 4, 5.
An inquiry into the rights of free subjects, in which The Cases of the British Sailors and Common Soldiers are distinctly Consider’d and Compar’d… (London, 1749), pp. 17, 33.
Rogers, Mayhem, 162, also remarks upon Fielding’s silence on servicemen’s plight, suggesting that schemes offering demobilized soldiers and sailors land and herring industry jobs ‘so absolved the conscience of people like Fielding…that demobilization was dismissed as the central social problem of the postwar years'.
The Covent-Garden Journal, 61, Saturday, August 29, 1752, reprinted in Henry Fielding, The Works of Henry Fielding, Esq; with the life of the author (London, 1762), IV: 432. Redcoats’ contempt was likely genuine. McCormack, Embodying, pp. 133-135, argues that uniforms conferred a sense of social elevation on those from the humbler classes who wore them, though this was probably more achievable in the militiamen of his study than of those enlisted for life in a regiment of the line.
Le tocsin! or the address of Citizen Famine!!! to the oppressors of his counry[sic] (London, 1793), p. 6.
Glover, Peninsular Preparation, 220, characterized the wage increase as ‘belated and modest'. Coinciding with a rise in bread prices, it failed to lift the infantryman out of poverty. Glover (p. 221) cited civilian artisans earning 28 shillings per week in contrast to the soldier’s seven shillings, seven pence weekly wage in 1806.
Russell, The Theatres of War, 13. See also Cookson, The British Armed Nation, 111; and Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), pp. 410-414.
Even Chelsea out-pensioners were constrained by the requirement to be on-site quarterly to collect their pensions, and might even have to perform garrison duty if the army determined them to be of capacity to do so. Stephen Brumwell, ‘Home From the Wars', History Today 52, no. 3 (March 2002), p. 45.
In 1745, men could enlist for as little as six months in order to help fight the Jacobites, but the terms usually ranged from three to five years or the duration of the war, whichever was longer. Charles M. Clode, The Military Forces of the Crown; Their Administration and Government (London: John Murray, 1869), II: pp. 18, 23-27; Cookson, The British Armed Nation, 121; Glover, Peninsular Preparation, pp. 241-242; Colonel H. C. B. Rogers, The British Army in the Eighteenth Century (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1977), p. 61.
The history and proceedings of the House of Lords… vol. 8 (London, 1742–44), p. 102.
‘The JOURNAL of a Learned and Political Club,… Containing the SPEECHES … on the Bill for limiting the Times and Conditions of Discharge from the Military Service', The London Magazine. Or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer 19, (June 1750), p. 250.
‘To the PRINTER of the GAZETTEER'. See also ‘A Conversation', when the ‘AMERICAN’ responded to criticisms of the hypocrisy of slaveowners demanding liberty by countering that Britain also had slaves in its soldiers. Among other qualities of enslavement, he raised the point that the British soldier was ‘engaged for Life'.
Arthur N. Gilbert, 'Charles Jenkinson and the Last Army Press, 1779', Military Affairs 42, no. 1 (Feb. 1978), p. 8. See also Stephen S. Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), pp. 153-155.
‘House of Commons', St. James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post (London, England), February 20, 1779.
The honest sentiments of an English officer on the army of Great Britain, Vol I. (London, 1779), p. 52.
From 1806 to 1808, recruits signed on for only seven years, but the option of life service with a larger bounty was reintroduced in 1808 alongside the more limited term on offer until 1815.
An advertisement for the second edition of Lucas’ pamphlet proclaimed that ‘so great was the demand for this publication, that between four and five thousand were sold off in a few days'. Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (London, England), Friday, April 15, 1768. ‘Saturday, April 23. London, Extract of a letter from Madrass, dated Nov. 5, 1767', Lloyd’s Evening Post (London, England), April 22, 1768-April 25, 1768, said that the news of the artilleryman’s trial and sentence made ‘a prodigious noise’ in Dublin, and ‘subscriptions are every where collected for him'.
Charles Lucas, A mirror for courts martial: in which the complaints, trial, sentence, and punishment, of David Blakeney, are represented… (Dublin, 1768), p. 39. See pages 44, 45, and 47 for similar comparisons to slavery in the document.
Viscount Townshend, Rutland MSS, 2.303 (1768), quoted in Sean J. Murphy, 'Lucas, Charles (1713–1771), politician and physician', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 Sep. 2004; Accessed 2 Feb. 2022. https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-17124.
Curses and Causes, p. 4.
John Gale Jones, Sketch of a political tour through Rochester, Chatham, Maidstone, Gravesend, &c including reflections on…the progress of the societies instituted for the purpose of obtaining a parliamentary reform (London, 1796), pp. 25-26.
‘Appendix No. 7, Copy of Papers found upon Richard Fuller, for the Seduction of the Soldiery', in Report of the Committee of Secrecy of the House of Commons (London, Printed for J. Wright, 1799), p. 26. See also Nick Mansfield, Soldiers as Citizens: Popular Politics and the Nineteenth-Century British Military (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2019), pp. 63-65.
Mansfield, Soldiers as Citizens, 31–4; and J. R. Dinwiddy, ‘The Early Nineteenth-Century Campaign against Flogging in the Army', The English Historical Review 97, no. 383 (April, 1982), pp. 309, 314, 322-323, 325.
Othello, Strictures on the slave trade, and their manner of treatment in the West-India Islands… (London, 1790), p. 14.
A Country Gentleman’s Reasons for voting against Mr. Wilberforce’s Motion for a bill to prohibit the importation of negroes into the colonies (London, 1792), pp. 44, 64. Very similar language is used in the House of Commons of Great Britain, Abstract of the evidence, contained in the report of the Lords of the Committee of Council, relative to the slave-trade, and the treatment of the Slaves in the Sugar Islands… (1790), p. 15.
Gilbert Francklyn, Observations, occasioned by the attempts made in England to effect the abolition of the slave trade; shewing, the manner in which negroes are treated in the British Colonies in The West-Indies… (London, 1789), p. 41, original emphasis.
Robert Hamilton, The duties of a regimental surgeon considered: with…hints relative to a more respectable practice… (London, 1794), pp. 54-55. Dinwiddy, ‘The Early Nineteenth-Century Campaign', p. 314, states that opponents to army flogging drew upon Hamilton’s treatise in the following decades.
Morgan, Slavery, p. 160.
On the popularity of troop embarkations for spectators, see Jennine Hurl-Eamon, Marriage and the British Army in the Long Eighteenth Century: The Girl I Left Behind Me (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 42, 44, 48-49, 58-59; and Jennine Hurl-Eamon, Women, Families, and the British Army, 1700-1880, Volume II: In the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic War Era (London: Routledge, 2020), p. 78.
This remark appeared in a footnote to explain why her novel’s hero, Orlando, ‘saw himself in a little crowded vessel, where nothing could equal the inconvenience to which his soldiers were subjected, but that which the miserable negroes endure in their passage to slavery'. Charlotte Turner Smith, The Old Manor House (London, 1793), III: 252n, original emphasis.
‘To the Printer of the St. J. CHRONICLE', St. James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post (London, England), March 18, 1788-March 20, 1788.
Linch and McCormack, ‘Defining', p. 151. See also Mansfield, Citizens, p. 65.
‘The Life of Sampson Staniforth. Written by Himself’ in Thomas Jackson, ed., Lives of early Methodist Preachers, chiefly written by themselves, 3rd edn. (London: Wesleyan-Methodist Book-Room, 1865-1878), p. IV: 118; see also pp. I: 240, 272-302; II: 108-20, 278-289; IV: 111–138; VI: 140–5. These memoirs (usually in the form of letters written to Wesley) relate to service in the War of Austrian Succession, in the East India Company, and quelling the Jacobite and Heart of Oak riots.
Erica Charters, ‘The Caring Fiscal-Military State During the Seven Years War, 1756–1763', The Historical Journal 52, no. 4 (2009), pp. 921-941; and Erica Charters, Disease, War, and the Imperial State: The Welfare of the British Armed Forces During the Seven Years’ War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 2-3, 184-187, 195-196.
This is a chapter in my book manuscript, provisionally entitled Childhood and War from the Age of Wolfe to Wellington.
The broken veteran was a common image of popular literature. Simon Parkes, ‘“Wooden Legs and Tales of Sorrow Done”. The Literary Broken Soldier of the Late Eighteenth Century', Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 36, no. 2 (2013), pp. 191-207; and Caroline Nielsen, ‘The Chelsea Out-Pensioners: Image and Reality in Eighteenth-Century and Early Nineteenth-Century Social Care’ (PhD thesis: Newcastle University, 2014), pp. 233-239.
Neil Ramsey, The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780-1835, (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011), p. 45.
Johann Gottfried Seume, letter dated Halifax, 1782, translated and reprinted in William W. Goodwin et al, ‘November Meeting, 1887', Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Second Series, Vol. 4 (1887-1889), p. 7. I am grateful to Ilya Berkovich for this reference.
[Joseph Donaldson], Recollections of An Eventful Life, Chiefly Passed in the Army, (Glasgow: W. R. McPhun, 1824), p. 123.
Thomas, Journal of a Soldier of the Seventy-First,…from 1806-1815, ed. John Howell (Edinburgh: printed for William and Charles Tait, 1819), p. 196.
Jonas, A Soldier’s Journal… (London, 1770), p. 180.
Jonas, A Soldier’s Journal, pp. 100-104, 117-119.
James Aytoun, Redcoats in the Caribbean ([S.I.]: Blackburn Recreation Services Department, 1984), p. 30. See also pages 21, 22, 29. Aytoun was not pro-slavery or a friend to the plantocracy as much as he was contemptuous of abolitionists. This can be seen in his comment (p. 35) that ‘if the gentlemen who take delight in long speeches on the abolition of slaves were to club their guineas and form a fund to purchase slaves and set them free it would be better than long speeches and luxurious dinners'.
Alexander Alexander, The Life of Alexander Alexander: Written by Himself, and Edited by John Howell…In Two Volumes (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and London: T. Cadell, 1830), pp. I: 87-88. See also pages 83, 129, 167.
‘A Negro Slave was not treated with such barbarity as a British Soldier, for…a Master could not inflict as many lashes'. The Examiner 220 (March 15, 1812), p. 169.
Despite their inability to end flogging, ‘considerable prominence was given, in Parliament and elsewhere, to the statistics on Army flogging included in the autobiography of…Alexander Alexander’ by the anti-flogging lobby. J. S. Cockburn, ‘Punishment and Brutalization in the English Enlightenment', Law and History Review 12, no. 1 (Spring, 1994), p. 177.
Alexander, The Life, p. I: 215. For more references to the low opinion of soldiering among the labouring classes, see pages 90-91, 213-214, 231.
Clive Emsley, British Society and the French Wars 1793-1815 (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 158.
Alexander, The Life, p. I: 216.
Mansfield, Soldiers as Citizens, pp. 65-67. ‘Even if these loyal handbills originated with offers and through NCO pressure on rankers, some privates signed their names', Mansfield (p. 67) observes.
Dinwiddy, ‘The Early Nineteenth-Century Campaign', pp. 326, 330.
John Shipp, The Private Soldier (Liverpool: Printed by Johnson and Son, 1834), p. 174. See also pages 63, 158.
Emsley, British Society, pp. 174-177; Mansfield, Soldiers as Citizens, pp. 111-114.
Shipp, The Private, pp. 175-176.
Alexander, The Life, p. I: 98
Aytoun, Redcoats, pp. 28-29.
[Donaldson], Recollections, p. 90.
Vicissitudes in the life of a Scottish soldier. Written by himself (London: Henry Colburn, 1827), p. 42. See also Alexander, The Life, p. I: 215.
[Donaldson], Recollections, pp. 84-87, emphasis in original.
Jonas, A Soldier’s Journal, p. 191.
McCormack, Embodying, pp. 84, 104; and Way, ‘Class', p. 464.
Ilya Berkovich, Motivation in War: The Experience of Common Soldiers in Old-Regime Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), especially chapters three, five and six.
Jennine Hurl-Eamon, ‘Husbands, Sons, Brothers and Neighbours: Eighteenth-Century Soldiers’ Efforts to Maintain Civilian Ties’, Journal of Military History 86, no. 2 (2022), pp. 299-320.
Katy Waldman, ‘Slave or Enslaved Person? It’s not just an academic debate for historians of American slavery’ Slate 19 May, 2015; and Eric Zorn, ‘Language matters: The shift from “slave” to “enslaved person” may be difficult, but it’s important', Chicago Tribune 6 September, 2019.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements: I am especially grateful to Ilya Berkovich for lengthy discussions on this topic and for providing me with several references. He, along with James Davey, helped me to organize the ‘Slavery and the Military Workshop,’ on 12 July, 2021, where I presented an early draft of this article. I appreciate the comments and insights they and the other participants, along with this journal’s reviewers, have offered.
Funding: The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant number 435-2016-0862).
ORCID iD: Jennine Hurl-Eamon https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2574-7330