5 - The Formation of the Militia and Posse
Summary
Warfare in this era was not restricted to conflict involving regular troops and their opponents. Indeed, there was no hard and fast rule differentiating combatant and non-combatant. This was true especially in time of civil strife, where civilian forces were often raised in the localities as well as centrally. Some were raised in support of the established government, such as loyalist militia in the American colonies in the 1770s or by the insurgents to supplement the more or less ‘regular’ forces, such as the American Patriot Militia. They were not primarily envisaged as being responsible for defeating the main Jacobite army either in battle or in siege warfare, but were seen as playing a secondary role in support of the Crown's regular forces, though this key distinction has not always been recognized. This chapter will, then, examine the state's other formal military forces. These were the militia and posse, to see how they were raised, officered, manned and armed and how they were trained. Their successes and shortcomings in their formative stages are important to understand before we proceed to Chapter 7, which will rate their effectiveness in the tasks in which they were deemed able to perform or those they had to deal with due to the circumstances of the wider campaign.
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- The Jacobite CampaignsThe British State at War, pp. 125 - 144Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014