Raising David Forman's Additional Continental Army Regiment

In spring 1776, David Forman raised four companies of Flying Camp for the Monmouth – Middlesex Counties regiment that he would soon command. He suffered through the summer and fall of 1776 with the Continental Army. With enlistments expiring on December 1, Forman led his men back into Monmouth County on November 24 and rounded up 100 Loyalists. A few weeks later, during the Freehold-Middletown Loyalist insurrection, Forman was robbed twice. He left New Jersey for Maryland and started recruiting a new regiment for the Continental Army.

Recruiting for Forman’s Additional Regiment

It is unclear if Forman had been formally authorized to recruit this new Continental regiment when he started recruiting. It was not until January 11, 1777, that George Washington officially authorized him to do so. In that letter, Washington encouraged Forman to select either David Brearley or Thomas Henderson as his Lt Colonel and Richard Howell as his first major. Washington also set out a few recruiting parameters. Specifically, the recruits:

1. Must be free men between ages of 17 and 50,

2. May not be British Army deserters or people convicted of disaffection,

3. Must enlist for either 3yrs or the length of war,

4. All mustering must conform to the rules set by the Continental Congress’s Board of War,

5. Inducements may be offered including a uniform, equipment, and help-pay pensions for the wounded.

There was no mention of a cash or land recruitment bounty. On January 13, Washington followed up with more formal and detailed “recruiting instructions” and authorization to offer recruiting bounties:

They shall receive a Bounty of Twenty Dollars and a Suit of Cloaths; the Cloaths to be given annually, as long as they continue in the Service. And at the end of the War, or the term of three Years, every private and Non-Commissioned Officer that shall complete his Service, agreeable to his engagement, shall be entitled to One hundred Acres of Land. Those that die, or are killed in the Service, their legal representatives are to be entitled to the same.

Forman’s was not an ordinary Continental Army regiment. It was an “Additional Regiment”—meaning a regiment of the Continental Army raised for a special purpose outside the Continental Line, the main body of the Army. In Forman’s case, his Additional Regiment would be stationed in Monmouth County for the dual purposes of defeating local Loyalists and breaking up illegal trade between Monmouth County and the British camps on Sandy Hook and Staten Island.

Whether recruiting in Maryland in December or home in Monmouth County in January, raising men for the Additional Regiment proved difficult. During the American Revolution, few regiments maintained their full strength of near 500 men, but Forman’s Additional Regiment never reached half that size.

As originally conceived, four companies of Forman’s regiment were supposed to be raised from Maryland and Delaware, but it appears that only one Maryland-Delaware company, captained by Forman’s nephew, Thomas Marsh Forman, raised an appreciable number of men. After the war, Thomas Marsh Forman would boast that he “recruited the largest company in the Regiment” but it appears that his company reached a peak strength of 33 men (slightly more than half of a full company).

The majority of Forman's recruits were raised in Monmouth County in early 1777. Two Monmouth County captains, John Combs and William Wikoff, raised 18 and 10 men respectively in January. John Burrowes, Jr., son of the County Committee Chair, would ultimately raise the largest company. He raised 26 men in February and 22 more men between March and June.

A document compiled later in the war suggests that Forman’s Additional Regiment raised only 90 men, of whom ten are listed as deserted; eight captured; five dead; and one invalid. However, this document is likely incomplete. It is probable that the actual number of men recruited into Forman’s Additional regiment was somewhat higher, as immediate desertions and deaths seem to have been left off this retrospectively-compiled roll. Additional evidence is of incompleteness is offered by the “casualty book” for John Burrowes’s company. It lists eight deserters in his company. If Burrowes’s one company had eight deserters, but Forman’s regiment had four functioning companies, it is improbable that the regiment had only ten deserters.

One of Forman’s recruits, Samuel Bennett, discussed his enlistment into Forman’s regiment in his postwar veteran’s pension application:

Enlisted at Toms River in the County of Monmouth in the month of May 1777 in the company of William Wikoff for the term of three years -- that the said Captain Wikoff did not fill up his company and sometime after he joined the company of Captain John Burrowes.

Silas Crane further noted: “The regiment [Forman’s Additional Regiment] was not completed, upon which Capt. Wikoff left the Army & Bennett was put in the company of John Burrowes.”

Monmouth men who wished to support the Continental cause in 1777 had a number of options. The State of New Jersey authorized a company of State Troops under Joshua Huddy to defend Monmouth County for a six-month term (Huddy would command similar companies later in the war as well). Huddy and Forman not only had overlapping missions, they likely competed for the same recruits. And Forman’s distant relative, Captain Jonathan Forman of Middletown, commanded a company raised from Monmouth County for the 4th Regiment of the New Jersey Line. Jonathan Forman recruited twelve new recruits from Monmouth County in the first half of 1777, placing him in competition with David Forman.

The frustrations of recruiting in competition with other state and Continental units forced Forman to complain. On May 28, 1777, Forman and his senior officers wrote the Continental Congress about the difficulties of recruiting with a Continental Congress bounty when richer bounties were being offered by the New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland legislatures:

By the laws of such State Legislatures, we have too much reason to fear the recruiting service as it respects a certain part of the Army of the United States will be much impeded... We are sorry to find that certain laws passed by the Legislatures of Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey, that we are by no means considered to be on equal footing with the other Regiments, but we are laid under such restrictions as amounting, in all its consequences, to an entire prohibition.

Forman concluded, "We therefore hope your Honorable House will consider our situation and put us on a respectable footing, by establishing our authority to equality in the different States.” Forman’s memorial was referred to Congress’s Board of War; there is no evidence that it was acted upon.

Forman’s recruiting problems had previously led him to propose drafting Loyalist insurrectionaries into his regiment. This plan was not approved, but he was given permission to recruit jailed Loyalists into his regiment—the Loyalists receiving a pardon if they voluntarily enlisted into Forman’s regiment for the length of the war. This topic is discussed in a later article. Beyond recruiting troubles, Forman’s men lacked uniforms until they captured a British ship with hundreds of British uniforms. The weak results of this initiative is the subject of another article.

The Performance of Forman’s Additional Regiment

Though undersized, Forman’s men were active in Monmouth County’s local war over the next year, but the record of the regiment was generally disappointing. The regiment’s existence helped Monmouth County’s Whigs restore Continental rule after the collapse of the Loyalist insurrections in January 1777. And Forman’s regiment, more or less, replaced Francis Gurney’s Pennsylvania regiment when Gurney left the county on February 5. But Forman’s regiment was not on the front lines in Middletown when the Monmouth militia was routed by British regulars at the Battle of the Navesink and the regiment’s first battle, a doomed attack on Sandy Hook, was quickly repulsed by the heavy guns of a British frigate.

Over the next half year, Forman’s regiment participated in the defense of the county from the first Loyalist raids, and the regiment was Forman’s de facto muscle when Forman was commissioned a General of the New Jersey militia and flirted with martial law in Monmouth County. By the summer of 1777, Forman’s men were stationed at Manasquan, ostensibly to guard the salt works of the Monmouth shore. But with Forman’s men serving at a salt works that he co-owned, credible charges of conflicts of interest soon emerged. This and other abuses would lead to a dispute between Forman and the New Jersey Legislature, climaxing with Forman losing his militia commission and command of his regiment in early 1778.

Caption: Captain Thomas Marsh Forman of Cecil County, Maryland, raised a company of Maryland men to defend Monmouth County in David Forman’s Additional Regiment of the Continental Army.

Related Historic Site: Rogers Tavern Museum (Perryville, Maryland)

Sources: National Archives, Revolutionary War Rolls, Coll. 108, p34-60; National Archives, Revolutionary War Rolls, Coll. 105-8; Revolutionary War Veterans' Pension Application of Thomas Marsh Forman of Maryland, National Archives, p19; National Archives, Revolutionary War Rolls, Coll. 106, p32-76; National Archives, Revolutionary War Veterans' Pension Application, Thomas Marsh Forman of MD, www.fold3.com/image/#19575180; New Jersey State Archives, Dept. of Defense, Revolutionary War, Numbered Manuscripts, #3777; Robert K. Wright, Jr., The Continental Army (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1983), pp. 100, 321; New Jersey State Archives, Dept of Defense, Revolutionary War, Numbered Manuscripts, #2528; George Washington to David Forman, The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 8, 6 January 1777 – 27 March 1777, ed. Frank E. Grizzard, Jr. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998, pp. 44–45; John Fitzpatrick, The Writings of George Washington, US Govt Printing Office, Washington DC, vol 6, p 494.  Rutgers University Library Special Collections, Neilson Family Papers; Pennsylvania Archives, Series I, v5, p209; David Fowler, Egregious Villains, Wood Rangers, and London Traders (Ph.D. Dissertation: Rutgers University, 1987) p 49; “List of New Jersey Troops”, Numbered Records, National Archive; Casualty Book, Capt. John Burrowes, New Jersey State Archives, Dept of Defense, Revolutionary War, Numbered Manuscripts, #3777; National Archives, revolutionary War veterans Pension Applications, New Jersey - Samuel Bennett; William Harrison to David Forman, National Archives, Papers of the Continental Congress, reel 49, item 41, vol. 3, #179-80; Library of Congress, Journals of the Continental Congress, vol. 8, p 394; Muster Rolls, John Burrowes’s Company, National Archives, Revolutionary War Rolls, Coll. 105, p35, 36, 38, 41, 44, 46.