Minutemen

MINUTEMEN. The term minutemen denotes members of the militia who volunteered to be ready to turn out for active service at literally a moment's notice. While the need to spring instantly into arms existed from the earliest days of settlement, in Massachusetts at least, the term minnit men seems to have been used first in 1756, during the French and Indian War. In the months before the outbreak of hostilities with Britain, volunteer military organizations with this mandate sprang up in all the colonies, although not all of these units were institutionally distinct from the militia.

The term minuteman is most closely associated with the units that appeared in Massachusetts in the wake of the Powder Alarm of 1 September 1774. As a means of eliminating supporters of royal government from the existing militia organizations, the Worcester County Convention called on 6 September for the resignations of all officers in the three county regiments and for the town militia companies to elect new officers. The town companies were rearranged to form seven new regiments, and new field officers were elected and instructed to organize one-third of the men in each new regiment to be ready to assemble under arms on a minute's notice. On 21 September 1774, this rapid-response portion of the militia was specifically referred to as "minutemen." The Massachusetts Provincial Congress, meeting in October, found that the militia in other counties were adopting the same system, and on 26 October it directed that this reorganization be completed across the colony.

Over the next six months, the process of purging royal supporters and creating new minuteman companies was undertaken with a mixture of urgency and deliberateness. The transition had not been completed by mid-April 1775, but enough had been accomplished so that the opponents of royal government were in firm command of the dual system of militia and minutemen when the regulars marched out of Boston on the night of 18 April. The men who stood in Captain John Parker's company on Lexington green on the morning of 19 April 1775 were true minutemen, and minuteman companies from surrounding towns led the attack at Concord Bridge later in the day. While the minutemen fulfilled the function for which they had been created, the bulk of the Massachusetts citizen-soldiers who turned out on 19 April were enrolled in ordinary or "common" militia companies. Once in the field, there was little to distinguish minuteman from militiaman, although the parallel command structure did have to be sorted out during active combat. When the Provincial Congress a few days later authorized the creation of volunteer companies enlisted for eight months of service (to the end of December 1775), the separate structure of minuteman companies and regiments was allowed to lapse. Men who had served in the minuteman and militia companies on 19 April formed the backbone of the "eight-months' army," demonstrating once again their willingness to undertake the defense of their rights by force of arms.

On 18 July 1775, Congress recommended that other colonies organize units of minutemen for short terms of service, and Maryland, North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Connecticut are known to have complied. The creation of separate minuteman companies was generally replaced by designating a rotating portion of the existing militia companies as the first responders.

SEE ALSO Lexington and Concord.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Castle, Norman, ed. The Minutemen, 1775–1975. Southborough, Mass.: Yankee Colour Corporation, 1975.

French, Allen. The First Year of the American Revolution. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934.

??????. "Minutemen." In Dictionary of American History. Edited by James Truslow Adams. 2d revised. edition. 5 vols. New York: Scribners, 1942.

Massachusetts, Secretary of the Commonwealth. Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War: A Compilation from the Archives. 17 vols. Boston: Wright and Potter Printing, State Printers, 1896–1908.

Wroth, L. Kinvin, et al., eds. Province in Rebellion: A Documentary History of the Founding of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1774–1775. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975.

                                revised by Harold E. Selesky