Vanishing Ranks: Rawlings’ Rifle Regiment and the Struggle to Recruit for the Frontier

The Continental Congress directed the organization of the Maryland and Virginia Rifle Regiment (Rawlings’ regiment) in resolutions dated June 17 and 27, 1776.[1] The force was a combination of six newly-formed companies from the two states and three independent rifle companies organized a year before. The nine-company regiment was still completing organization on November 16 when approximately two-thirds of its 420 officers and enlisted men were captured or killed at the Battle of Fort Washington.[2] In the battle’s aftermath, the officers struggled to replenish the regiment’s numbers, and it never returned to full strength.

The effort to rebuild the unit was set in motion when its commander, Lt. Col. Moses Rawlings, returned to the Continental army in January 1778, having been exchanged after his capture at Fort Washington. He was initially without a command because his remaining troops had been attached to Col. Daniel Morgan’s Provisional Rifle Corps in mid-1777 and to the 4th Maryland Regiment in late 1777.[3] On March 27, however, the Council of Maryland formally recommended to the Board of War that Rawlings command the Maryland militia guard at the prisoner-of-war camp at Fort Frederick, western Maryland.[4] Rawlings accepted the position, but he struggled to maintain an adequate guard primarily because of the lack of a consistently trained and dedicated militia force. Beginning in the late spring of 1778, he started replacing the militiamen with Continental army recruits and a few of his regiment’s recently exchanged prisoners of war.[5]

Rawlings’ effort to gradually add enlistees to his renewed army command met only with limited success. On October 9 Congress issued a proclamation to help him with the process:

That if any of the states in which Colonel Moses Rawlins shall recruit for his regiment shall give to persons inlisting in the same, for three years, or during the war, the bounty allowed by the State, in addition to the continental bounty, the men so furnished, not being inhabitants of any other of the United States, shall be credited to the quota of the State in which they shall be inlisted.[6]

This unusual ruling permitted Rawlings and his remaining officers to recruit outside Maryland. Any non-Marylander who enlisted for three years or the duration of the war, and who was not an inhabitant of any other of the United States, would receive both the bounty (enlistment bonus) of the state in which he enlisted and the continental bounty. Congress also would give that state credit toward their Continental Army troop quotas for any recruits they provided. Implementation of the resolution nonetheless failed to significantly increase the regiment’s numbers, reflecting the Continental army’s pervasive recruitment difficulties at this time of the war.[7]