699. Who Was Joseph Plumb Martin?

Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Way the World Works. We are once again continuing my series on unsung heroes of the founding generation for America 250. I have been so excited doing this. Today we're going to talk about a guy named Joseph Plumb Martin. And I say a guy, but he was a boy. He was a very young boy. And I want to talk about him today and how courageous he was and his contribution to the American cause to helping us fight for our independence back in long, long ago before my day, I said fight for my independence, but I was not born yet. But

you know what I mean? We're all still continuing to honor that legacy that our founders and all these brave unsung heroes, everything they did to get us to where we are today. Now Joseph's a really interesting character, because a lot of these stories I've been telling earlier, I've been talking about people who didn't actually fight in the war or people like there was Deborah Samson, who was a woman who disguised herself at almost like the story Mulah on the Disney movie, to fight in the war. So there were some soldiers, but then I talked about the baker who baked the

bread for the revolutionary soldiers and the tailor who spied for George Washington was able to help us get a leg up on the British when they were coming after trying to capture George Washington. Now today I want to talk about somebody who did fight, who was an actual soldier, but he was very, very young. And he did something that was very rare for the time. And that was he later after the war wrote a memoir about his experiences that told a different story. Because war, remember, people look back on it with like all this glory and oh, was this

wonderful noble thing, even now as I'm talking about the revolution to you guys, I'm talking about it in that way, right? We think about it as this, this glorious revolution where we were able to have our independence and get the Constitution and the Declaration and everything we have today. But wars, as we've also talked about, are not pleasant things, right? Wars are awful, war is a racket, war is just horrible and there is, you know, people go hungry and people die and people lose limbs and it's just really horrifying. And so in a time when people were really glorifying

everything that happened in the war, Joseph Plumb Martin was giving them a story that they had never heard before, but that's going to come much later. Let's start from the beginning. So in June 1776, that's before the Declaration assigned, but we're already pretty much in war because there was Lexington and Concord, but Joseph is only 15 years old and he was ready to go. He was ready to fight. He was a little farm boy. He was, you know, nothing, nothing special, not a trained soldier. And his grandparents were like, absolutely not, you're 15, you're not going

to the war. And he threatened to run away. And I think they kind of capitulated, they basically gave in and we're like, okay, so things are things are getting started, right? And they're holding these enlistments to people to get a volunteer army first. And so people are lining up because, remember, this is a cause they really believe in. And what I love about this is the enlistment. These are voluntary enlistments, right? We've talked about conscription or what we called the draft in in earlier episodes where governments have forced people to go fight their wars for them.

That usually happens when it's a very unpopular war, but that's not what's happening during the revolution. They're asking for volunteers. And so Joseph is very eager, even though he's so young and he decides he wants to fight. So he goes to enlist. Now the crowd is crazy. A lot of times these signups were just in like public calls or even taverns, right? Taverns were actually where a lot of business, a lot of decisions were getting made because it was like a local meeting spot. And they were usually more than one. But that was where a lot of things happened, a lot of these

these types of enlistments or, you know, gatherings of sorts. And so he goes, and it's really, really chaotic. And somebody bumps into him and actually right as he's about to go sign his name up because he was bumped into it was a little scribble. Now a lot of people could not write at the time. So the enlistment officer was actually like, Oh, we'll take it the scribble. It's fine. Well, you're good. You're golden. Let's go. And he said, no, he's like, I don't want it to be a scribble. I want to proudly write my name on this document saying that I want to fight that I believe in

this. I believe in the American cause. And so he signs his name boldly and proudly. And again, I think this is so powerful one because it shows that he wanted to go. No one was making him go. This was his voluntary consensual choice. And as we know, we love to hear that, right? We love consent. We love voluntary action. So this is something that he believes clearly, very passionately about. So those first six months of war, he is all over he's fighting. He is, you know, in the in the battles. So this is not something he's witnessing from afar. He is right in it. In 1777, his enlistment

runs out because I think there were time periods. Things got a little crazy throughout the war. That was actually something George Washington really worried about as they started losing ground is that when people's enlistment periods were up, they were just going to leave. And a lot of them did. And I don't blame them because it was just so awful. They weren't getting paid. There was a lot going on. So his Joseph's first enlistment period ends in about 19 or 19 1777. I've got ahead a little bit 1777. And he immediately reenlists and goes back to the war. And I can only imagine parents

out there. Can you imagine his grandparents worry? I mean, grown men were dying here. You have a 15 year old boy who was just so eager to go. And I know I would probably be losing sleep, just being so worried about him all the time. But he goes back. And then when that enlistment period is over, he enlists again and ends up fighting until 1783. And remember, he's young. So he's starting as a private that's like bottom of the heap. But he grows into a sergeant by the end of the war, which is really interesting. Because one thing I've seen throughout this revolutionary and even

regular history, but a lot of this founding history that I've been getting really, really into lately is how a lot of these people who didn't have much in way of money, they weren't wealthy, or people who weren't particularly well read. I don't want to say they weren't smart because I think there's lots of different kinds of smart. But people who didn't have a lot of your intellectual knowledge that you got from books, people like that, who didn't think they could rise up in the world by being lawyers or doctors, or have the money to start a business. A lot of them used

military service to rise up the ranks. And do you know who else did that? George Washington. George Washington did not consider himself a very smart man. And if you read about him and read into history, he was never somebody who would give a lot of ideas. He would give his opinion on ideas and he would he obviously believed in the American cause. But the military was really good for him because that gave him the opportunity to make something of himself. And so I think with with Joseph, you're going to see some of that too. And it worked because he went from being a private

to being a sergeant. And so he's going to rise up. And that's going to be, I mean, his entire, you know, not childhood because he was 15. He was a kid, but he wasn't like a young kid. He wasn't five. But he's going to really grow up within the Revolutionary War. He's going to really grow up in those battlefields. And I can't imagine how just hardened that would make you. But he definitely earned the role of sergeant. And he lived through the worst of it, right? There were so many periods of time during the Revolutionary War where all our soldiers were starving. I mean, you can't even

imagine how starving they were. Sometimes they could only eat one tiny meal a day if it was available to them. And there were they were getting funds from Congress. They weren't getting food. Sometimes they had just to rely on on the kindness of people offering to give them food or the Baker General. We talked about him in another episode who was baking bread. They didn't have a lot. And then of course, there's that one horrible winter where a lot of soldiers didn't even have shoes. They didn't have proper clothes. They were freezing, but they fought because they believed in it. They

fought because they felt like they had to because it was their independence. It was our country's independence on the line. And so Joseph is seeing all this. He's seeing these horrors. He's seeing people lose limbs. He's seeing his friends die. It's just it's so bad. I mean, it is constant sorrow and just constant, you know, just horrific. Again, I've never been to war. I can only imagine. I don't think I would have done very well. But there was another part to it too. Yes, obviously it was fighting. It was it was seeing people get hurt. But there was also a lot of like people forget that a

lot of war was building trenches or, you know, long days just kind of sitting around and doing labor waiting for what the next move is going to be. And so there's a lot of downtime. It wasn't all these bloody gory battles. Usually it was a battle dealing with the aftermath, which was people again being killed or severely injured and then, you know, digging ditches or trenches or building defenses. So there's a lot of war that isn't this like glory of running towards people with your musket. It's like downtime and hard labor. So there's all these things. And then we have to remember

all the frustration that happened from the soldiers themselves because they weren't getting paid some of the time because Congress didn't have money. They weren't giving them money. So they weren't getting paid. Some of them came back and found that not only were they never paid after the war, but their farms were being seized for not paying their taxes. So there's a lot of things going on that was not great, like the treatment of soldiers, which is going to lead to the Articles Confederation turning into the Constitution, because there was the argument that, oh, it's because we didn't

have a strong central government that was able to do that. And we've gone back and forth on whether or not that's a good or bad thing or maybe somewhere in between. So we're not going to talk about that here. But this is his firsthand soldier experience, right? But nobody was writing about this because you have to remember at the time when the war is over, we are concentrated on this new country. And then when the Articles of Confederation start falling apart, it's the Constitutional Convention and it's these, even though that was kind of secret, but people got a new, but I was like an

open secret. But there was all this other stuff going on. We're building a new country that the soldiers firsthand account is often being forgotten, which is interesting because you're going to have at least two soldier uprisings. You're going to have a Shays rebellion and you're going to have the whiskey militia, which is going to come and it's going to be this big thing because soldiers are going to be feeling like they were treated unfairly or soldiers who came back are going to come back and find out they were owing all these taxes or owed all these taxes. And so it's a very tumultuous time.

So long after the war, Joseph is now 70 years old. I remember he was 15 when he gets into the war and he tells all of this. He writes his whole story down, the good, the bad, the ugly. What war really meant that it wasn't just this glory. It wasn't just these mythical figures like George Washington that it was brutal and that they persevered even still. And this is going to be impactful, but not yet. Two people actually aren't going to really read this book. They're not going to care too much, but it's going to be a really good written record because we don't have much of that. One, not everybody could read and write back then. So you weren't getting first-hand accounts. Nobody

was updating their status or tweeting about what was going on. But he's going to write this book and it's going to be a different kind of book than something even George Washington would have written in his diary or letters. It's going to be a very nitty gritty and true firsthand account. And again, no one's going to read it, but like 100 years later, it's going to become big and people are going to read it. And we're going to realize that we have this really great firsthand account of this amazing 15-year-old soldier who had the wherewithal two years later document

everything he experienced. And that's so important because the storytellers, you guys, the people who write down their experiences, that's how we learn about them throughout history. You might think it's silly to keep a journal or to keep some people call it a diary or whatever you want to call it. Some people might think that's silly to keep it. Like, why is anyone going to care? But you never know. Maybe it's just your kid someday reading in, finding out more about you and what you liked and how you thought. So these memoirs, he wasn't

keeping it at the time, but he wrote it later. But these firsthand accounts are so important and they help shape history and they help really paint the bigger picture of what was going on. So I just think Joseph Plumb Martin is so cool. And I think he's another one of these great unsung heroes that I'm so glad to know more about. So I will leave it there. As always, don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast. And until next time, I will talk to you later.