Although the Revolutionary War affected the lives of more than 2 million Americans, it was fought one battle at a time in geographically distant locations by armies that rarely numbered more than ten thousand per side.

The Revolution is often remembered by the words and deeds of great statesmen like Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams, but it was the average man with his musket and sword who did the dirty work of taking on the British in battle after battle. And this difficult and dangerous work was largely performed by soldiers between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Boys as young as eleven and men over the age of fifty also were occasionally recruited for military service. In The Book of the Continental Soldier, Harold L. Peterson describes the American soldiers assembled in Boston in 1775:

[It] was truly a motley [group], more a mob...