In the long run, attacks on shops and warehouses proved useless, for merchants’ supplies rapidly dwindled. In these circumstances, women’s ability to improvise proved more important than their “oeconomy.” The most serious threat was the absence of a salt supply, since colonial families relied on salt to preserve meat over the winter. Experimentation proved that a lye extracted from walnut ashes could be used as a preservative, although it did little to improve the taste of the food. Other substitutes followed, including sage and herb teas and an ersatz rum made from corn syrup for local army use.

  In the end, of course, it was the absence of men, not of supplies, that taxed women’s resourcefulness. Some had encouraged that absence. As one Philadelphia woman proudly wrote: “I will tell you what I have done … My only brother I have sent to the American camp with my prayers and blessings. I hope he will not disgrace me … and had I twenty sons and brothers they should go.” Others were filled with regret. But whether they had resisted the military service of husband or father or encouraged it, the war left women alone with the responsibilities of home, farm, or shop and family in circumstances that were daunting. Inflation quickly ate up the ordinary family’s savings, and a soldier’s pay, though faithfully sent home whenever it was actually received, could not support that family. By 1778 it was said that four months’ pay could not purchase a single bushel of wheat. Enlisted men received letters daily, demanding or pleading for their return. In a rush of words, one such desperate wife poured out a litany of grievances: “I am without bread, and cannot get any, the Committee will not supply me, my children will starve, or if they do not, they must freeze, we have no wood, neither can we get any—Pray Come Home.” Faced with such realities, men often deserted, slipping out of camp as harvest time approached or disappearing at night as winter set in.

  Not every husband would—or could—return home, however. Nor did every woman left to manage her husband’s or father’s affairs find the experience disastrous. There were, after all, profits to be made in wartime—armies to be fed and shortages of food to be overcome in the regions where fighting was concentrated. Especially in New England, where the fighting ended almost as soon as the war officially began, some women were able to turn a profit from a farm. For many more, there was satisfaction in simply preserving the family’s farm or business through the long economic crisis. As one historian discovered, subtle changes in pronouns in the correspondence between wife and husband reflected larger changes in women’s sense of their familial role. At first, thinking of herself as a surrogate, or deputy husband, a woman might report to her husband on the condition of “his” farm or “his” crops. As months or years passed, that same woman slipped into a discussion of “our” farm and “our” crops. Not a few of them made the transition to a sense of hard-earned ownership that the young Eliza Lucas had made, that is, to “my” farm and “my” crop.

  Throughout the war, the destruction of property wrought by an army on the move amazed civilians. The usually unflappable Eliza Lucas Pinckney was shaken by the ruin she saw around her in 1780–81 in the wake of British troop movements. Suffering was universal, she wrote, “crops, stock, boats, carts, etc all gone taken or destroyed.” Circumstances were the same in Georgia. “Property of every kind has been taken from its inhabitants,” wrote one survivor, “their Negros, Horses, & Cattle drove and carried away.” And the demand that women open their homes to the quartering of troops meant further damage. A Long Island woman recorded the daily destruction of her property by the Hessian troops she had been forced to house. The soldiers “take the fence rails to burn, so that the fields are all left open, and the cattle stray away and are often lost; burn fires all night on the ground, and to replenish them, go into the woods and cut down all the young saplings, thereby destroying the growth of ages.” When the soldiers, some of them living in her kitchen, received their monthly rations of rum, “we have trying and grievous scenes to go through, fighting, brawls, drumming and fifing, and dancing the night long.” Friendly armies did as much damage as the enemy, as Loyalist Elizabeth Drinker discovered when a British officer commandeered her home. He put his own horses in her stable, moved into the front parlors, took over an upstairs room and the kitchen, and gave noisy dinner parties at her expense.

  The loss of property was not the only thing to be feared when an army was near. Civilians, women in particular, felt so vulnerable to physical violence and to fatal disease that sometimes the mere rumor of an approaching army was enough to produce panic. In 1776 word that the British were sailing up the Chesapeake led to frantic efforts both to flee and to defend the city of Annapolis. “What with the darkness of night, thunder, lightning, and rain,” wrote one woman, added to the “cries of women and children, people hurrying their effects into the country, drums beating to arms,” the arrival of ships could be no more terrible than the preparation for it.

  Such fears were well grounded. Smallpox and dysentery spread through Boston during the British occupation in 1775 and moved quickly into the surrounding countryside, killing women and children as well as soldiers and militiamen. Fires during the battle for New York City in 1776 left a quarter of the civilian population homeless. Although many of these civilians were women and children, gender was not the defining factor where disease or raging fires were concerned. But being female did make women vulnerable to rape. From the large-scale rapes documented in Fairfield and New Haven, Connecticut, in July of 1779 to the individual attacks reported in New Jersey or New York, the threat of physical violence against women was a persistent fear and a historical reality. Women of all ages were victims, from the thirteen-year-old raped by six soldiers to the backcountry matrons raped by Europeans disguised as Indians.

  Women who had been raped were often reluctant to report the attack. The price for public disclosure was too high. As one Princeton man conceded, “Against both Justice and Reason We Despise these Poor Innocent Sufferers … Many virtuous women have suffered in this Manner and kept it Secret for fear of making their lives miserable.” At times the women’s reluctance was based on the futility of the disclosure rather than its potential damage to their reputation. In the fall and winter of 1776, for example, officers of the British occupying forces based on Staten Island and in New Jersey did little to halt the systematic and brutal rapes of local women reported to them. Indeed, cavalry commander Lord Rawdon preferred to cast the situation in lighthearted terms. “The fair nymphs of this isle [Staten Island] are in wonderful tribulation,” he wrote to his uncle. “A girl cannot step into the bushes to pluck a rose without running the most imminent risk of being ravished.” The results amused him greatly, he added, for “we have the most entertaining court-martials every day.”

  Women’s impulse to flee from the military’s presence was understandable, but many commented on its futility. The lesson Margaret Livingston learned when she fled New York only to reencounter the British in Connecticut was to “never move from the place providence has placed me in come what Foe that will.” A North Carolinian echoed these sentiments: “The English are certainly at Halifax but I suppose they will be every where & I will fix myself here it is as safe as anywhere else & I can be no longer tossed about.” A Pennsylvania woman put it bluntly to John Adams, in terms Grace Galloway would surely understand. “If the two opposite Armys were to come alternately ten times,” Adams recalled her saying, “she would stand by her Property untill she should be kill’d. If she must be a Beggar, it should be where she was known.”

  The presence of the army did not, of course, strike every woman with apprehension or fear. There was a benign aspect to military occupation that was as real in the experiences of some women as rape was for others. Young women from Winchester, Virginia, to Newport, Rhode Island, to Philadelphia recorded with pleasure the presence of an occupying army whose officer corps provided dancing partners, dinner guests, and opportunities for flirtation. One young woman admitted that “she wishe[d] there was to be [more war] if it were not for the shedding of blood.” The war, as she understood it, was a seasonal ebb and flow of discomfort and delight: “They had a little fighting, to be sure, in the summer, but when winter came they forgot all the calamities of war and drowned their cares in assemblies, concerts, card parties, etc.”

  For African-American women, the impact of military occupation was equally unpredictable. For some, the opportunity for freedom arose from the disruption of white society’s daily life. But in many cases, military occupation separated black families. As white families fled an enemy, they took their slaves with them—dividing black husbands and wives, parents and children in the process. In New York City, for example, few enslaved wives and husbands shared the same master. When rebel families fled from the city and Loyalists from the surrounding countryside fled to it, many black families were thus broken apart.

  Not all wartime damage was due to the demands of the military or to its thoughtless abuse. As Grace Galloway could testify, Loyalist women suffered the loss of property and the fall into poverty at the hands of former neighbors. Their houses were plundered, their shops destroyed, their families sometimes ejected naked from their homes. For these women, the enemy never broke camp and moved on.

  If the Revolutionary War came to the majority of women, it is also true that a sizable minority went to it. Well over 20,000 wives, lovers, fiancees, and prostitutes filled both the American and the British army camps throughout the war, transforming these sites into bustling towns. The motives of these “camp followers” were various: some feared starvation if they remained at home, others Indian attack; some could not bear the loneliness or anxiety of not knowing their husband’s fate; and some saw profit to be made from both sex and theft. Black women, sometimes accompanied by their children, came to the British army camps in a bid for freedom from their rebel masters. British officials encouraged these desertions by Southern slaves, offering sanctuary less out of humanitarian motives than in hopes of demoralizing rebel planters and disrupting the Southern economy.

  Camp followers were considered necessary evils by British commanders, who understood the value of women. Their mercenary soldiers were less likely to desert if their wives and families came to war with them. Thus, the British institutionalized camp following, especially among their German troops, and allowed female civilians rations and supplies to bring aboard their transport ships. In their ledger books, ship officers carefully recorded the women and the expenses they accrued as “baggage.”

  The American commanders liked camp followers no better than their enemies did, although they, too, acknowledged their usefulness. A wife in camp could promise a reliable soldier. Indeed, American commanders were not above keeping enslaved African-American women hostage in the camps to ensure that their soldier-husbands did not desert. And women in the camps could be enlisted as nurses, cooks, launderers, and food foragers —a menial labor force skilled in domestic arts and also willing to take on the unpleasant duty of stripping the enemy dead for useful items. Despite women’s service to the army, supply sergeants begrudged the extra rations, skimpy though they were, that they doled out to women. Their concerns were not entirely unreasonable, of course. Supplies at winter camps such as Valley Forge were scarce and women and children were unwelcome extra mouths. In addition, army officers had to grapple with the very real problems caused by campsite prostitution: disease, theft, and black-market sales of soldiers’ liquor to the Indians in exchange for supplies. The prostitutes who flocked to Washington’s army in New York reached alarming proportions, and several soldiers were killed at or near their reputed meeting grounds. The colonel responsible for breaking up fights between soldiers and women called his mission “Hell’s work.” Frustrated by the endless trouble, he railed against the “bitchfoxy jades, jills, haggs, [and] strums” who defied his regulation.

  General Washington, in particular, fumed about camp followers, regularly complaining that pregnant women, small children, chickens, dogs, and domestic paraphernalia drastically diminished his army’s mobility. On occasion, his orders that women march separately from men and through a city’s back streets and alleys sparked resistance. One Philadelphia observer reported that the women and children were “spirited off into the quaint, dirty little alleyways and side streets. But they hated it. The army had barely passed through the main thoroughfares before these camp followers poured after their soldiers again, their hair flying, their brows beady with the heat, their belongings slung over one shoulder, chattering and yelling in sluttish shrills as they went and spitting in the gutters.”

  This observer, like many commentators, saw the camp followers through a biased lens of gentility. As many soldiers were drawn from the working or impoverished ranks of society, their wives were unlikely to exhibit the social graces of the eighteenth-century lady. And the presence of prostitutes among their ranks marked the soldiers’ wives as “sluttish” by association. When the wives of high-ranking officers, including General Washington’s Martha, arrived to spend the winter camp months with their husbands, these ladies were treated far differently than the wives of enlisted men.

  Enlisted men, on the other hand, and sometimes their immediate officers, developed an admiration for camp followers. A soldier’s wife asked no special treatment—and received none. Her rations were sparer, her blanket no warmer, and she was expected to endure the misery of lice, dysentery, and long marches without complaint. When a woman proved more durable than her husband, the soldiers readily acknowledged her fortitude. A sergeant’s wife won the admiration of one observer as they crossed a swamp on Benedict Arnold’s harrowing march to Canada. “Now Mrs. Grier,” he recalled, “had got before me. My mind was humbled, yet astonished, at the exertions of this good woman. Her clothes more than waist high, she waded before me to firm ground.” Despite the lifting of her skirts, this camp follower remained “a virtuous and respectable woman” in the eyes of the soldiers she accompanied.

  Many of the Mrs. Griers saw combat and did battle. As water and ammunition carriers, the wives of soldiers sometimes observed the moment of their widowhood and took up their dead or dying husband’s place on the battlefield or beside the cannon. Known generically as “Molly Pitchers,” because of the water they carried to cool the cannons and to quench the men’s thirst, a number of these women filed for pensions from the government for their service. Among them were invalids left crippled by their war wounds. Few were compensated, although in July 1779, Congress did grant a military pension to Margaret Corbin, who had been hit by grapeshot at her husband’s post, captured by the British, and left completely disabled by her injuries.

  Wives like Margaret Corbin, Mrs. Grier, and Mary “Molly Pitcher” Ludwig may have participated in the Revolution out of loyalty to, or dependence on, their husbands rather than out of a political commitment to national independence. They also may have entered the military camp with loyalty to a political cause as well articulated and elaborated as their husband’s. Since they have not left a record of their personal motives, we cannot be certain. Women’s applications for military pensions, and the many petitions received from women by local, state, and national governments requesting compensation for requisitioned property or relief from poverty suggest that women were deeply conscious of the services given and sacrifices made to the creation of an independent nation. Whether patriotism is synonymous with political consciousness is perhaps the question. What can be said is that these women had made direct individual contributions to the public good, to the larger commonwealth rather than to the “little commonwealth” of family, and they wished their role to be acknowledged.

  Some women found other ways to serve the military. A few set aside their society’s gender boundaries completely, donning men’s clothing—assuming a male identity—to enlist in the American Army. The most famous of these women, Deborah Sampson Gannett, saw active service as Robert Shirtliffe until she was revealed as a woman by a physician tending to her fever. Gannett slipped with similar ease back into a female role, marrying in the postwar years and bearing several children. How many other white women saw battle as men is unknown.

  A significant number of white women chose to use their society’s gender-based assumptions to advance the cause they supported. As spies and saboteurs, some women used their femininity as a disguise to gather intelligence and convey sensitive information. Their stories are numerous and frequently told. Some of these spies acted spontaneously, seizing the opportunity to obtain critical information about the enemy in their midst. In South Carolina, for example, a fifteen-year-old farmer’s daughter named Dicey Langston outwitted the Loyalist troops who had camped beside her family’s farm. As she went about her daily chores, she took careful note of the troops’ number, their supplies, and even their morale. She conveyed this information to American forces in the neighboring county. It was several months before the Loyalists realized who the spy among them was. And in Philadelphia, Lydia Darragh made similar use of the enemy’s shortsightedness to serve General Washington. Officers of the British occupying army paid little attention to Darragh as she served their evening meals. While they talked strategy and made plans for their spring campaign, Darragh listened and remembered. She passed along almost verbatim accounts to George Washington, smuggling messages past unsuspecting British soldiers by sewing them into the linings of her pockets.