Congress’s Own: A Canadian Regiment, the Continental Army, and the American Union by Holly A. Mayer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Congress’s Own: A Canadian Regiment, the Continental Army, and the American Union by Holly A. Mayer Gregory T. Knouff Congress’s Own: A Canadian Regiment, the Continental Army, and the American Union. By Holly A. Mayer. Campaigns and Commanders. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021. 408 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. As the Continental army invaded Quebec in 1775, Congress envisioned it as a possible fourteenth rebellious province. Thinking in such broad North American terms, Congress authorized the raising of two Canadian Regiments in January 1776. The second of these—which was variously referred to as Second Canadian, Old Canadian, and Hazen’s but came to be known as Congress’s Own—is the subject of Holly A. Mayer’s ambitious new study. Mayer links this unit, one of the few regiments attached to the army but not raised by a specific state, to the construction of the American nation, showing how it reflected the diversity and indeterminate status of the emerging nation. A far-reaching fusing of older and more recent approaches to early North American military history, Mayer’s work builds on Charles Royster’s foundational A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783, which argued for the role of the Continental army in making early nationalism. At the same time, her work speaks to recent scholarship on how the army shaped American national identities in terms of gender, family, age, race, and enslavement.1 Mayer argues that the Continental army and Congress’s Own Regiment in particular constituted a borderland. She draws on borderland theory to show how Congress’s Own created new imagined communities that shaped and reflected the emerging United States. For Mayer, this borderland was [End Page 182] both a process and place.2 The place was not geographic but rather was located within the army, which moved across space and along military borders that its very presence constructed. The process was community formation among diverse people who previously had little in common but were bound together by the Continental army’s hierarchy and relation to the civilian government. Service conveyed a sense of belonging to the new nation as the regiment itself embodied elements of the republic. The regiment mirrored the divisions of state, local, and national authority as well as the territorial ambitions of the revolutionaries. Its commanding officer, Colonel Moses Hazen, originally from Massachusetts, had multiple land and business ties to Quebec and northern New England and was a borderland figure himself. Meanwhile, its officer corps embodied George Washington’s hope for a nationalized professional military, as it was composed of residents of many states, Europe, and Canada. Although the unit was known as “infernals” (153), in part because of its heterogeneity and its officers’ reputations as contentious, Mayer also emphasizes its successes in battles and in expanding U.S. borders. She demonstrates that the unit proved competent against British forces at Brandywine, Germantown, and the siege of Yorktown. Less well-known, but vitally important to showing how the regiment constructed imagined national borders, is Mayer’s analysis of how its soldiers were also agents of early U.S. expansionism. The regiment’s 1779 expedition to the Coos Country—a borderland between New York, New Hampshire, and the claims of Vermont separatists, as well as homeland to Abenakis—exerted a U.S. military claim to the region. Initially part of a vanguard for another invasion of the Saint Lawrence valley in Canada, the unit ended up constructing networks of supply and fortification, essentially creating and constituting a border in the region. Mayer’s concluding chapter on how regimental veterans sought economic competence in the postwar period implies that their postwar migrations into borderland regions continued. In some cases, they took up claims to bounty land warrants and became settler colonists of American empire in the contested boundaries of the early republic. It is difficult to overstate how well-researched Mayer’s work is. Using wide-ranging sources including muster rolls, orderly books, Revolutionary [End Page 183] War pension applications, correspondence, and journals, she paints a comprehensive portrait of the regiment over time that focuses on both officers and enlisted men. The book carefully documents...