♪ Voice: The next will be a trying campaign.

And as all that is dear and valuable may depend upon the issue of it, let us have a respectable army, such as will be competent to every exigency.

George Washington.

Narrator: Spring was coming.

Armies would soon be again on the move.

And Washington wanted to be ready for whatever the British were planning next.

Congress had come back to Philadelphia, but while they were in exile in Baltimore, it had become clear that expecting delegates to make instant decisions about the battlefield was impractical.

They had voted to grant General Washington total control over his army for a period of six months and authorized him to imprison without trial suspected Loyalists or anyone who refused to supply his army.

Some delegates had feared that affording Washington such powers would make him a dictator, betraying the principles for which they were supposed to be fighting.

General Nathanael Greene sought to reassure them.

Voice: I can see no evil nor danger to the states in delegating such powers to the general.

There was never a man who might seem more safely trusted, nor a time when there was a louder call.

[Greene] ♪ Narrator: Most of Washington's new recruits signed on for three years and a ten-dollar bonus, but those who signed up for the duration of the war were promised a twenty-dollar bonus, and 100 "free" acres of Indian land when the war was over.

Man: When we think about what was offered to the Continental soldier, Indian land at the end of it all-- that land hasn't been taken, ceded, bought.

That land is still Indian land, right?

It tells you that the entire Revolution is premised on the future possibility.

Narrator: These soldiers were different from the men who had rallied after Lexington and Concord.

Most of them had been farmers and artisans, propertied men with taxes to pay, creditors to appease, crops to sow and harvest.

From now on, the Continental Army would be made up predominantly of the poorest of the poor-- jobless laborers and landless tenants, second and third sons without hope of an inheritance, debtors and British deserters, indentured servants and apprentices, felons hoping to win pardons for their service, immigrants from Ireland, and immigrants from Germany, or their descendants who had never learned English.

John Adams had worried that only "the meanest, idlest, most intemperate and worthless men" in America could ever be persuaded to serve more than a year.

But victory would be impossible without them.

When patriotic speeches and free rum failed to attract enough recruits, some states instituted drafts.

Names were drawn from a hat.

Married men were exempted.

Propertied draftees wanting to avoid service could hire substitutes at fees to be negotiated with their replacements.

Some towns managed to avoid sending any of men to war by paying men from neighboring villages to go.

South Carolina advertised for "vagrants and idle disorderly persons."

Thousands of African Americans, enslaved and free, served alongside Whites in units from New England all the way south to Georgia.

Some volunteered, some were drafted.

Many stood in for their gun-shy enslavers.

Connecticut and Rhode Island would later promise enslaved recruits their freedom when the war ended.

From 1777 onward, the American Revolution, begun in part to defend the interests of property-owners, would be fought mostly by men who owned little or no property at all.

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