he started his military career as a pfc and has worked his way up through the ranks and has a an incredible perspective and he'll share a little bit of his. personal experience and how that's sort of launched. interest in this question of military discipline in the american american style of military discipline that rose out of the experience of the continental army now lieutenant colonel scully is certainly no stranger to the museum. he's a regular presence down here. up until the present unpleasantness with coronavirus we were accustomed to regular visits from sean and his cadets. history department coming down to visit the museum to kind of use it as a live learning laboratory. they came down when in january of 2018. we unveiled our exhibition among his troops, washington's war tent in newly discovered watercolor. and actually we're it was wonderful to be able to show those cadets and original watercolor a panoramic painting of west point painted in the summer of 1782 by air charles law fault. he also unveiled special app kind of virtual view of west point in the era of revolutionary war here at the museum on our one year anniversary. so sean's talked this evening is based on his book and i'm just going to show it to you here contest for liberty military leadership in the continental army or recognize the image of the painting for those of you who have visited the museum. you've seen the large version of kudar's painting of washington and rochambeau and the french officers at yorktown in 1781. now we encourage you throughout the evening if you have questions to use the chat function, and send those along and we'll try to get to as many of those as we can at the at the end of the evening. and also there's a special interactive feature this evening that lieutenant colonel skull is going to tee you up for you're going to want to use this you'll actually be doing some voting along the way and providing some interaction. so without further ado, please join me in a warm welcome for lieutenant colonel shawnigan. he take it away. okay, sorry about that. we've tested this a couple of times and i'm still going to make some mistakes. so i've apologize for that everybody get evening and thank you to the museum of the american revolution to scott to hannah to everyone who works at the museum friend my inviting me to be the the first one to do this. seminar or webinar with everybody this year. so i want to start. by talking about how i got to this topic this topic on military leadership in the american revolution and it actually starts when i was a private first class back in 1997. i entered the army in 1995 and in 1997, i was in albania. and my job was to train soldiers from former warsaw pact countries who were interested in joining native. and one of the things that i noticed was that their officers acted very differently from ours. and the the story that i like to tell that that seems to epitomize this difference. is that in the american army the officers eat last? the soldiers eat first and we eat by rank of by order of the most junior officer. to the most senior or sorry the most junior soldier to the most senior officer. and when i noticed when i was in those mountains in albania, was that the officers from these other countries acted completely differently they ate first. they believe that they by virtue of their rank by virtue of their status that they should eat first and their soldiers seem to agree with this. and at the time i just thought that made them bad leaders. i didn't think anything else about it. i was very convinced that the american way of doing things was the way to do things and but it always stuck with me. i always thought about it. and then i was doing my graduate work at the university of massachusetts in amherst. and i started studying military leadership in the seven years war in new england, and i realized that the british army seemed to think that the new england officers were terrible officers. and i was trying to figure out why that was the case when in fact some of those new england regiments seem to do pretty well particularly when they were on their own. and then i went to mosula rack in 2009 as a military advisor when i was a major as a military advisor and a supervisor of iraqi soldiers iraqi police. and and kurdish peshmerga and what i found out was that i couldn't leave those soldiers in the same way that i led american soldiers. that if i allowed them to eat before me or if i open the door for them and allowed them to walk into the building for me. they didn't view that as a sign of respect. they viewed it as a weakness. as if i wasn't willing to take my rightful place as the leader of the group. and and this really began my my thoughts about about leadership about what did what? what is leadership? it's it's a it's a term that a lot of people don't necessarily want to define though the united states army. does define it it defines it as providing purpose direction and motivation? but those terms seem to me to be american terms. they they didn't seem to fit the other that i had seen. at the same time i was moving into the study of the american revolution and i did want to study the continental army and so i began to look at leadership in the continental army and tried to understand that and to start i decided that i needed to figure out a way to define leadership. that would allow me to avoid any cultural traps if you would, you know, it's historians. we don't want to bring our own present into the past and try to judge the past that way and so what i what i decided was that leadership is a cultural negotiation of authority. it it that negotiation is dependent upon the culture within which it's being being had. and this negotiation is between the leaders and the lead to determine how both decisions and their method of execution are reached. um now in in other studies of the continental army and of in the continental army leadership is usually understood in to other ways and so to get started with that discussion. i'm going to go ahead and share my screen. and now you should see me much smaller, which is i think appropriate and you should see the the painting that we all know here up on the screen. you know. leadership is usually understood in one of two ways by historians. first they will focus on strategic and tactical decisions and they'll have arguments about whether or not washington was a was a good leader in his strategy of avoiding a major defeat or whether the british should have won. the war could have won the war. um, or they'll look at tactical decisions. for example a german town should should washington have made the decision to split his forces and four columns given the lack of training and the conditions at the time. the other the other focus would be on honor. there's quite a few works that look at honor and they usually focus on washington attempting to create an officer a gentleman officer core and it the tendency there for the soldiery for look at soldiers over the course of the war is that they become men of lower social status. and then increased durations of enlistment and harsher punishments led to the continental army looking more like the british. the problems from my perspective on both of these approaches. is that the first approach gives us no sense that soldiers played much of a part in the outcome of the war. and the second approach denies as a sense that there was much of a relationship between officers and soldiers instead. we get a sense that each group developed identity separate from one another and didn't seem to really engage with one another in any real way. what my investigation determined instead was that there was a rich military tradition in the colonies prior to the war and that greatly influenced the development of the continental army during the revolution. these traditions pitted washington's expectations against the traditions of new england and we'll get into that in more detail here in just a minute. and given the fluidity of its development during a time of war leadership in the army was largely a factor of negotiations between officers and soldiers that created something new. something different and this was because the soldiers in the continental army had more agency. then we might expect. and this forced officers to understand something that we might actually assume today. and that is that if you want to lead soldiers here, you must first convince them to follow. here okay. so tonight what i'm going to do is lead you through an investigation of how leadership worked in four main topics. we're going to talk about recruiting. we're going to talk about recruiting because that'll help us understand. where did these soldiers and officers come from and how did their traditions influence the way they viewed leadership? and we're going to talk about discipline and by discipline. i mean the enforcement of military laws in other words the use of coercion in many ways to get soldiers to do what they were supposed to do or to punish them for failing to do so. the third topic will be on training. and the way i view training is the attempt to get the soldiers to commit themselves to the processes of the army to the tactical necessities of war and to the ideology of the revolution and then fourth we're going to talk a little bit about how all of this came together in a very tense period of time towards the end of the war. but to get started i'd like for us to play a little bit of a game. all right, and so what you're going to see here now on your screen? is www.menti.com and if you'll put that into your smartphone into your tablet some other device that you probably have next to you besides your computer. if you go to that website and you put the code in there that you see at the top five nine nine one zero six nine. it will bring you to this screen here on your phone and i would ask that you take a moment and answer this question. what is the most important characteristic of a good leader and i'll give you a minute or two to answer and we'll see what happens. right now as we see the the answers coming in here the way this word cloud works for those of you who haven't seen one of these before is that the larger the word the more frequently that word has been used by the people that are participating. i don't want to influence anybody's decisions here. so i'm just going to give it a little bit more time. okay. so i'm sure more answers will be coming in as we move forward, but let's take a look at some of the words that are the largest here. right now notice that empathy. is central so this would mean that this is probably the the trait that has is the most popular among the people with us tonight and it's interesting that we would pick empathy right and the reason that i think that that's interesting is because for a good leader. to be a good leader if we believe that the most important characteristic is empathy then what we're saying is is that the most important thing that a leader needs to do is think about the people that he or she leads. and that fits very well with our culture that makes sense in a democracy in a republic where the power comes from below from the people and is granted to those in charge. right because we then expect that those people will then show their empathy for us and that will make us want to follow them. but what if we came from a society that had very different values what if we came say from 18th century england when a class system was very much in effect when people weren't known as citizens, but instead they were known as subjects subjects of the king. now admittedly by the 18th century. we have a lot of wig philosophers who are saying no power is coming up from the people but in but if we could put ourselves in a position where we think about what if we thought power came from the top down would empathy be something that we would expect? would we expect necessarily somebody in a different class to lead by example as is one of the other more common words here? and so i want you to think about. these words remember these and see if perhaps what we don't start to see in the continental army. in the 18th century during the american revolution if we don't start to see that in fact these same characteristics are the characteristics that they thought were important for them to be good leaders during the war. so i'll go to the next slide. okay. now i mentioned that there was a rich colonial tradition of military service that influence the development of the continental army. and the strongest of those military traditions came from new england. and in particular it came from the colony of massachusetts. in each of the colonial wars fought in the 18th century, massachusetts raised a provincial army comprised of voluntarily enlisted soldiers who enlisted for a single campaign season. and the officers were selected based on their ability to enlist those men. so what that matt was those would be officers? had to show either in their towns or in their counties that they were good leaders or leaders, that could be trusted. and if so, those men would be willing to enlist with them and that would determine the rank if they didn't have that trust. they couldn't enlist those men. they wouldn't be given that right. and military punishments in massachusetts and throughout colonial new england were relatively light for the day. in fact, they were amazingly like for the most infractions of military law could only be punished by a maximum of 39 lashes of the whip. now that sounds terrible to us today. but in fact that's a biblical limitation that these congregationalist new englanders to decide upon because in the bible it says that only a beast could be whipped 40 times. so 39 was the maximum. you're gonna see that it comparison to the british army. that's that's quite quite a low number. and there were very few crimes that were death penalties capital crimes and even if you were convicted of that the governor of massachusetts had to approve your death sentence and the governor of massachusetts was elected by the colony not appointed by the crown. as an example of this right? we see here a picture of the battle of lake george. it was fought in 1755 and in this battle colonel of frame williams is killed in an ambush. he's the commander of regiment on a hampshire county massachusetts the county seat being northampton. after the battle because of frame williams was killed the general in charge. he was from new york needed to determine who would be the next commander the regiment. and instead of picking seth pomeroy, who is the lieutenant colonel of that regiment. he picked timothy ruggles. who was the most senior of the massachusetts officers at that location on lake george and as soon as he did so the soldiers of the regiment told him that's fine. you violated our enlistments were going home. and general ends of why what are you talking about? they said we didn't enlist under colonel ruggles. we enlisted under colonel palmeroy, and if we don't get colonel palmeroying way in command we're going home. and this set up a flurry of communications from northampton and in fact seth pomeroy was appointed the colonel. so the soldiers had a very clear agency to determine who was going to be their leader. now further south in the colony of virginia during the seven years where you have a very different very different development military tradition in the south was much less. it was much less robust. and militias were usually focused on domestic policing particular. they were worried about slavery volt. during the seven years war virginia had to create a new provincial system and they did so based on the british model. which made sense because their society was much more class-based. there was a planter class that had most of the land and most of the wealth. there was a smaller middle class that were free yeoman farmers who wish to enter into the planter class and then you had a base of poor white who did not own any property who were there and often seen as a problem in the colony and so the model that virginia came up with was gentleman officers and lower class men who were forced into service. the military laws that virginia selected look just like the british articles of war they can give last counts as high as 500 per infraction. and after a rough start for the first two years of that war the virginia regiment actually started to do well when the british government agreed to reimburse the virginia house of burgesses for the soldiers that they were paying for and so they went from trying to draft poor landless men into pain for these men, but they remained very much a class based. organization with very harsh punishments now in this painting here you see washington at the battle of monica halo. now washington is actually the officer in the blue and red at the canon pointing his sword washington became very famous in this battle because while the british general general edward bradig dies here washington is credited with saving what's left of the british and american forces there and getting them back into virginia safely from the forks of the ohio near presenting pittsburgh. what washington learned from his time during the seven years' war was that the british model was the right model that the british model was a successful way to command armies and discipline soldiers. now fast forward to 1775 after april of 1775 boston is surrounded by a new england army all of the soldiers that surround boston during this period of time come from, massachusetts, connecticut, new hampshire, rhode island. it's not until later in the year that soldiers show up from pennsylvania and a few from virginia. and during this period of time they seem to be doing. all right, they kept the british bottled up in boston though this painting here obviously famous painting shows the tragedy of the death of joseph warren at at the battle and while the british claimed victory at the battle of bunker hill in june of 1775. sir henry clinton was very famous for saying that if the british had a few more victim one more victory like this, they would surely lose the war. it was so costly to the british army. and when i ask you a question and let's see, who knows the answer here. who commanded the continental army at the battle of bunker hill? it looks like israel putnam and way in prescott are winning. wait until we get to about 50 and then we'll all start up again. okay. so it looks like the majority of us say israel putnam and then it's way in prescott, and then artemis war and george washington. well, it's kind of a trick question. but israel putnam is the wrong answer he was there and he was back on bunker hill a guiding the soldiers towards the front as best he could and trying to get as many reinforcements for prescott for william prescott as he could. but actually at the battle william prescott is in charge of the of the command in the redout, but in fact both artemis ward and george washington overall commanded the army artemis ward commanded the army in in reality on the ground, but just three days earlier the continental congress had actually declared the united armies of the colonies as the continental army and placed george, washington in charge. but why was artemis ward in charge before washington arrived? he was in charge because he was the senior officer from massachusetts in massachusetts was seen as the most important of the colonies represented in the forces surrounding boston for several different reasons, one of one of which i've already talked about which is their strong military tradition from the past. but during this period of time artemis ward is doing everything he can to try to create a unified army, but the reality is is that each regiment that was there was a regiment raised by a colonel at the behest of his colony. the man had enlisted