THE POOR AND THE WRETCHED FIGHT THE RICH MAN'S WAR

D. Peter MacLeod, Northern Armageddon: The Battle of the Plains of Abraham and the Making of the American Revolution  (New York: Knopf, 2016) (The poor and marginal members of society are the ones whose bodies are put at risk to fight the rich man's and elite man's war. "Most of Wolfe's soldiers had been recruited from among the marginal populations of Britain and British America. Individuals who found themselves deprived of any other way to earn a wage or living lives so relentlessly grim that any alternative seemed preferable frequently sought refuge in an army that provided a desperate chance for subsistence, escape, and adventure." "James Wolfe referred to the first of these motives in 1756 when, ordered to Gloucestershire to deal with unrest among local weavers, he noted, 'I hope it will turn out a good recruiting party, for the people are so oppressed, so poor and so wretched, that they will perhaps hazard a knock on the pate [head] for bread and clothes, and turn soldiers through sheer necessity.'" "The soldiers of the Seventy-Eighth were a special case. Recruited by Lieutenant Colonel Simon Fraser, master of Lovat and chief of Clan Fraser, they came for the most part from Scottish clans that had repelled against the Crown in 1745." "In joining this battalion, Highlanders were serving not so much the Crown as their colonel's ambitions. A prominent rebel, Lovat's father had been executed for his role in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745-46. Lovat, who played an equivocal role during the uprising, had raised the regiment in hopes of buying his way back into the good graces of the British government with the lives of his fellow Scots. Wounded earlier in the summer, he remained in camp convalescing while his regiment went into battle without him." Id. at 180-181. And so it goes!).