Although the American Revolution was a serious thing, there was plenty of humor in it, too. Even the people living through it found things to laugh at, as most of us do, even during hard times. Here’s one example from a few months before the war started:
Many British soldiers were stationed in Boston during the years leading up the revolution. Some Americans, anxious to weaken the British army, encouraged and helped soldiers to desert. They would offer money, entice them with promises of land, give them clothes to disguise themselves, and help them sneak out of town. Although these plans sometimes worked, and many soldiers did in fact desert, sometimes the plans backfired. In December 1774, a couple of people in Boston wrote about how a British corporal tricked a Yankee “recruiting officer”:
Last week a corporal of one of the regiments was asked by a countryman to desert, and offered six dollars a month to teach their militia; the corporal pretended to be willing, and the countryman procured him a good suit of cloaths, which he put on and tied up his own in a bundle. They then went to mount the countryman’s horse, when the corporal pretending he was not horseman enough to ride behind, the countryman allowed him to place himself in the saddle, and then got up behind; when they were seated, the corporal, instead of riding out of town, set the horse a galloping towards the Barracks, which when the Yankee discovered, he threw himself off, and the corporal continued his rout to the barracks. The countryman did not think fit to call for either horse or cloaths, and the matter being represented to the General, he has ordered the Corporal to keep both.
You can imagine how the two men felt: the “Yanky” would have been frightened — not to mention angry — at the fact that he could easily have been caught and punished by the redcoats for trying to help one of them desert, at the fact that he had lost his horse and the clothes he had furnished, and at the fact that the corporal had made a fool of him. The British corporal, on the other hand, would have been laughing at how he had tricked this foolish country yokel and gotten himself a horse and some good clothes in the process. I imagine him sharing the laugh with his friends, telling and re-telling the story to everyone who wanted to hear it — perhaps even making a “fish story” out of it, and enjoying it as his listeners laughed.
The problem is that so many people, then and now, consider battles and proclamations to be more important than stories like this. If more people had taken the time to write about the everyday things that made them laugh, then we’d have a much more amusing account of the Revolutionary War.
Source: Letters on the American Revolution, 1774-1776, edited by Margaret Wheeler Willard, pages 23-28.