What is "continentals"

Usage examples of "continentals".

After numerous appeals —the men being addressed by companies—about 1,300 Continentals agreed to serve for six weeks more “on receipt of ten dollars bounty.

By the end of May, however, Washington again had a sizable army, as 8,000 to 9,000 Continentals had enlisted—this time for three years or the duration of the war.

Counting incoming Continentals, by mid-August Schuyler, stationed at the mouth of the Mohawk, had upward of 13,000 men.

Morgan’s riflemen, many of them perched in trees, communicated with one another by wild turkey calls and aimed at the “kingbirds” (as they called the British officers) while the Continentals swept the clearing with volleys of fire.

Meanwhile, Lincoln had banded his troops back into their regiments and called out the Continentals from the Charleston forts.

He had several thousand troops—including 1,450 Continentals and 2,500 militia—under his command, bolstered by about 2,000 enlisted from the North Carolina countryside.

This time he was effectively opposed at Springfield by a detachment of Continentals and, after burning the vil­lage, beat a second, more costly, retreat.

Greene had about as many Continentals to oppose him, but most of his militia, as was their wont after battle, had gone home.

Against him were Lafayette, twenty-three miles away at Richmond with 3,000 Continentals and militia, and Steuben, southeast of Charlottesville, training 500 more.

Detachments of Continentals and riflemen generally formed the advance, and the army never encamped wholly in one place.

Wash­ington had already sent most of his light infantry and the whole Pennsyl­vania Line to oppose the British in Virginia and left a mere 5,500 or so Continentals and Connecticut state troops spread along a wide arc to bottle up the British, Hessian, and Tory troops in New York.

It was therefore an act of great daring to pull 2,000 more Continentals out of their Hudson River positions for his celebrated march to the South.

They had few opponents -- an isolated body of continentals, a small squad of militia, for the first time drilling for future service, or a little troop of horse -- and these were quickly overcome.

The devoted Continentals alone kept their ground and bore the brunt of the action.

A laudable anxiety to be active at such a time, to show to the approaching Continentals that there was a spirit in the State which they came to succor, of which the most happy auguries might be entertained, prompted his morbid impatience at the long delay of his absentees.