Camp Followers

Camp followers were the thousands women who travelled with and worked for the Continental and British armies during the American Revolution. Many of them were daughters, wives, or sisters of soldiers. For example, Martha Washington lived with George in the military’s winter quarters, hosted events for visiting diplomats and officers, and helped fundraise to purchase clothing for soldiers. Lucy Knox, wife of General Henry Knox, also joined her husband in camps and organized social events. Many other army women were related to lower-ranking soldiers, and historians only have access to some of their names from military records. Some officers, including George Washington, were frustrated by camp followers who sold alcohol or convinced soldiers to desert. However, these women also provided essential support to troops by mending clothes, cooking meals, selling goods, and caring for sick and wounded soldiers.¹

Joining the Army

Women took many different paths to the Continental and British Armies. Some enslaved women ran to the armies hoping to gain their freedom. In 1774, Virginia’s royal Governor John Murray (also known as the Earl of Dunmore) declared that enslaved people who liberated themselves from Patriot enslavers and served the British Army could become free. Within weeks of Dunmore’s Proclamation, eighty-seven Black Virginians ran to Dunmore. More than half of these freedom-seekers were women and girls. Other enslaved women ran to the Continental Army. Jane Wilson fled her enslaver, Cuthbert Bullitt, in February 1779. He guessed she had liberated herself to reunite with her husband, a colonel in the First Virginia Regiment.²

Free women also followed their family members in the military, sometimes because they had no safe place to stay during the war. This happened to women from places like New York City. Their husbands joined the Continental Army and left them in territory occupied by enemy troops. In Quebec, several women also felt unsafe staying on the home front when their husbands enlisted in the Continental Army because many of their neighbors were hostile Loyalists.

So, these women travelled with their soldier-husbands. Some went all the way to Yorktown, Virginia, where Washington’s army won independence from Britain. Others established a refugee camp in Albany, New York, and remained there when their husbands marched further South.³

Wartime Work

Once they began travelling with the army, some women sold their work to individual soldiers, who paid them cash for cooking or laundry. Other women were hired by regimental officers to wash and cook for groups of soldiers, or to care for men in hospitals. These women received rations (food) in exchange for their work. They women often slept in military huts or tents with their family members. Because they received rations, the army treated them as members of their husbands’ regiments, and even  punished them for mutiny and desertion.⁴

George Washington worried that these army women would tempt men to desert, drink, or disobey their officers. He urged his soldiers “to avoid lewd Women.” Washington also feared women who received rations were draining precious wartime resources. He ordered officers to “get rid of [camp followers] who are pregnant, or have children” to conserve food and supplies.  Washington also ordered his officers to not feed refugee women, including Canadian soldiers’ wives, unless they would find “immediate employ” as nurses for the army. Otherwise, supporting them would amount to “encouraging idleness.”⁵

Although Washington hesitated to support camp followers, he knew at least some women were necessary. When his generals grumbled that “the sick” had “suffered much for Want of good female nurses,” Washington allowed them to place advertisements in local newspapers. These advertisements asked “humane and industrious women” to work as nurses for “sufficient pay.”⁶

Camp followers also sometimes asserted their own importance and demanded pay. In one case, soldiers learned that Congress had ordered Washington to reduce rations by limiting “the Proportion of women” in his army. Women of a New York artillery regiment resisted. They assured Washington that they “earn[ed] their rations” by washing soldiers’ clothes, even though some soldiers never paid them back. Their rations made up for wages they never received. Their husbands supported them and threatened to desert if Washington enforced Congress’s demand. He had to yield. In another case, washerwomen for Continental Army General Anthony Wayne’s regiment went on strike. They were protesting men soldiers who picked up their clean clothes but never paid. Wayne reminded the women that they were not given “Victuals to distress and render the Men unfit for Duty, but to keep them clean and decent.” But he also ordered captains to “make stoppages from the pay” of men who were “not punctual in paying for all such Washing.”⁷

Life After the American Revolution 

After the American Revolution, life was full of opportunity and danger for camp followers. When the applied for widows’ pensions—payments women received in exchange for their husbands’ military service—many women described their own labor, too. These women wanted compensation and recognition. For instance, New York camp follower Sarah Osborn Benjamin only needed to describe her husbands’ service when she applied for a pension. Instead, she shared extensive details about her own work as a cook and washerwoman. She even claimed that she met George Washington when she brough “beef and bread, and Coffee, (in a gallon pot) to the soldiers in the entrenchment” at Yorktown. Washington asked her if she “was not afraid of the Cannon balls.” She replied “no, the bullets would not cheat the gallows—that it would not do for the men to fight and starve too.” Sarah clearly believed her own experiences should be shared and rewarded.⁸

Another woman, Jane Norton, also shared her own service. In her pension application, she included a letter of recommendation from Colonel Thomas Forrest. He wrote that Jane had traveled with her husband’s regiment. She was persistent in “attending and relieving the sick & wounded at all times.” “She participated in the sufferings and privations with her husband, and perhaps was the means of keeping her husband a faithful Soldier unto the end,” Forrest wrote: “I do hereby recommend her as meriting [a pension].”And an “old woman” who worked as a nurse for the Virginia State Guard nurse—perhaps Connecticut veteran Anna Maria Lane—felt emboldened refused to continue working until she received wages in addition to the provided housing and rations. She reasoned that guardsmen received pay just as Continental Army soldiers did, so why shouldn’t she receive wages like a Continental Army nurse? Her supervising doctor forwarded her complaint to Governor James Monroe, who conceded.⁹

Formerly enslaved women fought not for pay, but for freedom. British troops evacuated 10,000 Black freedom-seekers to Savannah and Charleston. From there, many were reenslaved and sold to the Caribbean.3,000 more Black refugees received certificates that declared their freedom, then boarded ships for Nova Scotia. Although they were legally free there, they were by no means equal to white residents. Many self-liberated women could only earn wages as domestic servants for white refugees. Their white neighbors blamed them for driving down average wages and responded with violence.¹⁰

All of these women’s enduring fights for freedom and stability reminds us that for many, the American Revolution did not end with the War for Independence but continued long after.

Riley Sutherland, Ph.D. Candidate, Harvard University

Notes

1. Estimates of the number of army women vary widely from a few thousand (Holly Mayer) to ten thousand (Linda Grant DePauw). For numerical estimations, see Mayer, Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community during the American Revolution (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 133; Walter Hart Blumenthal, Women Camp Followers of the American Revolution (Philadelphia: George S. MacManus Company, 1952), 93–95; Grant DePauw, “Women in Combat: The Revolutionary War Experience,” Armed Forces and Society 7:2 (Winter 1981): 209–26.

2. Karen Cook Bell, Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 67–69; Riley Sutherland, “Virginia Women during the American Revolution” in Encyclopedia Virginia, March 20, 2025, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/virginia-women-during-the-american-revolution; “One Hundred Pounds Reward,” Pennsylvania Packet, 7 Oct. 1779; “Proof of the Effectives,” 3 October 1778, roll 0092, RG93, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter NARA); “Return of Capt. Thomas W. Ewell’s Company First Virginia State Regiment,” 8 Sep. 1778, roll 0093, RG93, NARA; “Ran Away,” New Jersey Gazette, 17 January 1781; “Proof of the Effectives,” 3 October 1778, RG93, NARA; “Return of Capt. Thomas W. Ewell’s Company First Virginia State Regiment,” 8 Sep. 1778, RG93, NARA.

3. "Washington to Robert Morris, 29 Jan. 1783," Founders Online; Washington to Henry Knox, 8 March 1783, GLC02437.09364, Henry Knox Papers, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History; Allan S. Everest, Moses Hazen and the Canadian Refugees in the American Revolution (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1976), 115–19.

4. Regimental Orders, 29 Jan. 1778, 18 March 1778 in Valley Forge Orderly Book of General George Weedon of the Continental Army Under Command of Genl. George Washington, in the Campaign of 1777–8 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1902), 215–16; General Orders, 5 March 1782 in Richard Showman, et al., Papers of General Nathanael Greene, 13 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976–2005), 10:443–44; General Orders, 3 July 1778, “Headquarters Orderly Book from Coxheath Camp,” MSS L2009F1 [Bound], Library of the Society of the Cincinnati; 23 Dec. 1777, 1 Dec. 1779, in Edward Field, ed., Diary of Colonel Israel Angell (Providence: Preston and Rounds Company, 1899), 14, 99.

5. "Washington, General Orders, 28 June 1776" in The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 5, 16 June 1776 – 12 August 1776, ed. Philander D. Chase (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 129–130, accessed via Founders Online; "Washington to John Hancock, 28 June 1776" in The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 5, 16 June 1776 – 12 August 1776, ed. Philander D. Chase, 132–136, accessed via Founders Online; Washington, "General Orders, 4 August 1777" in The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 10, 11 June 1777 – 18 August 1777, ed. Frank E. Grizzard, Jr., 496–497, accessed via Founders Online, July 31, 2025; "Washington to Brig. Gen. John Stark, 5 August 1778" in The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 16, 1 July–14 September 1778, ed. David R. Hoth, 256–257, accessed via Founders Online, July 31, 2025; Harry Ward, George Washington's Enforcers: Policing the Continental Army (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 61–62.

6. “Report of the Committee sent to the Northern Department” in Orderly Book of the Northern Army, at Ticonderoga and Mt. Independence, From October 17th, 1776, to January 8th, 1777, Munsell’s Historical Series, no. 3 (Albany: J. Munsell, 1858), 162–63; 18 April 1778 in John Joseph Stoudt, Ordeal at Valley Forge: A Day-by-Day Chronicle From from December 17, 1777 to June 18, 1778, Compiled from the Original Sources (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), 237; advertisements, New York Gazette, 29 July 1776; Pennsylvania Evening Post, 9 Jan. 1777, 4 July 1778; Loane, Following the Drum, 124; Elaine G. Breslaw, Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic: Health Care in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 86–88.

7.  "Washington to Robert Morris, 29 Jan. 1783," Founders Online; Washington to Henry Knox, 8 March 1783, GLC02437.09364, Henry Knox Papers, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History; Regimental Orders, 10 Nov. 1776 and 23 Nov. 1776, Orderly Book of the Northern Army, at Ticonderoga and Mt. Independence, From October 17th, 1776, to January 8th, 1777, Munsell’s Historical Series, no. 3 (Albany: J. Munsell, 1858), 128, 116; Loane, Following the Drum, 121.

8. Sarah Osborn Benjamin, Pension File W4558, RG15, NARA.

9. Jane Norton, Pension File W4556, RG15, NARA; John H. Foushee to James Monroe, Jan. 15, 1802, James Monroe Papers in Virginia Repositories, ed. Curtis Wiswell Garrison and David Lawrence Thomas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Library, 1969), microfilm, (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1989), reel 7, frames 1644–1645; James Greenhow to James Monroe, James Monroe Papers in Virginia Repositories, ed. Garrison and Thomas, microfilm, reel 8, frames 182–84; James Monroe to James Greenhow, March 16, 1802. James Monroe Papers in Virginia Repositories, ed. Garrison and Thomas, microfilm, reel 2, frame 284; John Lane, deposition, 5 July 1819, Pension File S238129, roll 1520, RG 15, NARA; Paul Aron, “‘Fighting as a Common Soldier’: Anna Maria Lane Distinguished Herself in Battle and Won a Military Pension," Trend and Tradition 2:2 (Spring 2017), 86–88; Sandra Gioia Treadway, “Anna Maria Lane: An Uncommon Soldier of the American Revolution," Virginia Cavalcade 37:3 (1998)  134–43; John Archer Carter, “Richmond’s Ann Maria Lane—Heroine of Germantown," Richmond Magazine 14 (May 1928), 3–32.

10. Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 3–36.

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