student in Philadelphia. Having qualified as a doctor, Blake’s high reputation led in time to his election as mayor of Washington, where he founded the city’s first school and its public health service. Wilkinson was never likely to follow that path. He enjoyed the idea of being a doctor more than the reality.
What weighed most heavily with him was the attraction of studying in Philadelphia. If Baltimore was another region, the City of Brotherly Love was a different universe. In 1774, it was the largest city in British America, with a population of forty thousand, paved streets, a university, a hospital, theaters, such public amenities as a library and firefighting service, and the sort of polite society where a young man short on money but long on charm could hope to flourish. This was where he began his real education, in which “I sought by imitating the best examples to acquire gracefulness of address and ease of manners.” Girls were his motivation or, in the elaborate language he used when dressing up the naked truth, “These inclinations were seconded by my solicitude to merit the acquaintance of the most accomplished and respectable of the fair sex, whose ages corresponded with my own.” His formal education took second place.
Philadelphia’s medical curriculum covered anatomy and surgery, the supporting sciences of chemistry, botany, and pharmacy, as well as the critically important field known as materia medica, which included diagnosis of ills and prescription of cures. Students were expected to take three years to graduate, but Wilkinson had the added advantage of staying with an elderly relative, John Bond, who was an experienced doctor. Many eighteenth-century students learned their trade by serving as apprentices to qualified physicians, and Wilkinson undoubtedly picked up some additional skills from his host. In April 1775, after less than two years’ study, he impatiently decided he was qualified to practice medicine.
He set up his practice in the distant settlement of Monocacy, Maryland, about forty miles west of Baltimore. It had been settled for barely a generation, and mostly by Germans, whose language Wilkinson did not speak. Aged seventeen, only partially trained and short of money, he was probably unable to find a more desirable area, but the drab routine of administering pills to inarticulate farmers and taking their blood was hardly likely to appeal to someone who had devoted so much energy to getting ahead in Philadelphia’s high society. Before the summer was over, he had discovered a new, more exciting vocation.
On his very first day in Philadelphia, Wilkinson happened to see a military parade, with a company of artillery and four companies of infantry. The spectacle of marching redcoats, fife- and-drum bands, and horse- drawn guns thrilled him. “It appeared like enchantment,” he wrote, “and my bosom throbbed with delight, and from that day I felt the strongest inclination to military life.” The flames of his enchantement were fanned by Dr. Bond’s reminiscences of his earlier career as a military surgeon during the French and Indian War. “Like any old soldier [he] took pleasure in recounting the details of battles, particularly Braddock’s defeat near Pittsburgh and Wolfe’s victory on the Plains of Abraham, and to this circumstance I ascribe my earliest military predilections.”
When news of the shots fired at Lexington reached Monocacy, Wilkinson’s immediate instinct was to join the fight against the British, but what drove him was the desire for battle rather than the love of liberty. “My youth had not allowed me the time or means to investigate the merits of the controversy,” he conceded. So far as constitutional matters were concerned, it was enough to know that the representatives of the thirteen states assembled in congress had opted for rebellion, a choice “seconded by my feelings and supported by that predilection for arms which I had previously imbibed.” His reaction was typical of the bellicose fury that swept through the colonies in response to the shedding of American blood. In the words of one Philadelphia correspondent, “The
A company made up of planters’ sons had been assembled in Georgetown, Maryland, about forty miles away, and once a week Wilkinson rode down the Potomac Valley to drill with them. This was his first taste of soldiering, and the patriotic excitement of preparing for war swept away his thin ambition to be a doctor. Less than three months after setting up his practice, he had enlisted in the army. For Wilkinson, the obvious unit to join was the Maryland militia, but no company existed in Monocacy, and to be commissioned into the Georgetown company, he would, as an outsider, have to put his name forward to the local committee of safety. Intoxicated by the news of the battle of Bunker Hill and by his own dreams of glory, however, he decided “not to await the tardy procedings of committees and conventions” and in July 1775 rode straight toward the sound of gunfire in Boston.
2
CITIZENS AND SOLDIERS
THE YOUNG SUBALTERN’S TIMING could not have been better. The Continental Army, created by Congress in June 1775 with General George Washington as its commander, had just begun to send its first units to Boston to reinforce the New England militia besieging General Thomas Gage’s army of redcoats. Wilkinson immediately attached himself as a volunteer to a Pennsylvania rifle company, but the new army needed officers. That September, on the basis of his short training at Georgetown, Wilkinson was appointed a captain in the recently raised Second Continental Regiment, commanded by Colonel James Reed. Put in command of a troop made up largely of frontiersmen, the
The young captain was appalled by “the familiarity which prevailed among the soldiers and officers of all ranks; from the colonel to the private, I observed but little distinction, and I could not refrain from remarking to the young gentlemen with whom I had made acquaintance that the military discipline of their troops was not so conspicuous as the civil subordination of the community in which I had lived.” His reaction might have been expected, given the sharp contrast between his Maryland-bred, aristocratic outlook and the democratic habits of riflemen drawn largely from New Hampshire, but it was part of a larger clash that divided both the army and Congress itself.
Within weeks of taking command of the New England militia outside Boston, George Washington came to a similar conclusion about the civilian soldiers from the north. Like his newest lieutenant, he was shocked by the “irregularities” of their behavior toward officers, their lack of discipline, and their tendency to leave camp whenever they felt they could be more useful at home. “All the General Officers agree,” he reported to Congress, “that no Dependence can be put on the Militia for a continuance in Camp, or Regularity and Discipline during the short time they may stay.” Washington never doubted that the Continental Army had to be made up of full- time, or at least long- serving, professional soldiers if they were to defeat the disciplined ranks and firepower of British troops. The conviction was etched into him by long years in command of the Virginia militia and experience of action with trained British forces during the French and Indian War.
Nevertheless, the New England militia had inflicted such heavy losses on their attackers in the battle of Bunker Hill that the British never again attempted to break out of Boston. “When I look to the consequences of it in the loss of so many brave Officers, I do it with horror,” General William Howe reported to London after his hard-won victory. “The Success is too dearly bought.” Nor did every American general agree with the commander in chief’s assessment. Washington’s adjutant general, Horatio Gates, who had been trained as a professional soldier in the British army, declared that he “never desired to see better soldiers than the New England men made.” And Congress remained hostile to the threat of political intimidation posed by professional soldiers. “A Standing Army, however necessary it may be at some times, is always dangerous to the Liberties of the People,” Samuel Adams declared. “Soldiers are apt to consider themselves as a Body distinct from the rest of the Citizens.”
Thus from the start of his military career, Wilkinson was caught up in the struggle between supporters of the regulars and the militia. In military terms, the argument turned on matters of discipline, pay, and length of enlistment, but the implications of creating a professional soldiery reached beyond the army. In the minds of most independent-minded Americans, the militia represented the true spirit of the Revolution, men who took up arms, not for pay or promotion, but for sheer patriotic commitment to their country and to the ideals it reperesented.
“Our troops are animated with the Love of Freedom,” New England delegates to Congress declared in February 1776. “We confess that they have not the Advantages arising from Experience and Discipline. But Facts have shewn that native Courage warmed with Patriotism is sufficient to counterbalance these Advantages.”
That belief lay at the heart of the battle for liberty. Just as independent citizens were superior to obedient
