Minutemen. Embattled farmers. A legion of citizen-soldiers leaving their plows in the field, grabbing their musket and powder horn, standing up to the mightiest empire in the world, and securing their (and, if you’re American, your) everlasting liberty through sheer courage and pluck.

Yeah, that didn’t happen.

It’s okay if you still think that happened. Until fairly recently, professional historians even thought it happened. But there are these cool things called documents – such as, oh, the payrolls of the Continental Army – that just won’t bow to the narrative. In fact, credit for winning the American Revolution goes almost entirely to a small but dedicated officer corps (mostly aristocrats, many of whom were financially ruined by their years of service) and landless poor, who had no plow to leave.

Why did we ever think otherwise? Two reasons: first, the American army really did consist of citizen-soldiers from the outset of armed rebellion in April 1775 through about August or September 1776. Here’s what they were good at:

1. Sniping at a British column which was not trying to attack them
2. Defending Breed’s Hill from an entrenched position (I must say, they did this remarkably well)
3. Taking Fort Ticonderoga entirely by surprise (although much of the credit here must go to the bravado of Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen)
4. Keeping the British bottled up in Boston (although much of the credit here must go to George Washington, who never let the British commanders realize how weak his army really was)

So what were they bad at? Well, they got the everloving snot beaten out of them during one of the dumbest escapades of any war, the invasion of Canada. Then they were defeated time and again as an unstoppable British force seized New York City and much of New Jersey in the fall of ’76. After that, they went home. For the remaining five years of real fighting, the embattled farmers played no significant role.

To put it bluntly, untrained amateurs could not and did not stand up to a professional army. Washington realized this early on and successfully pushed for a disciplined fighting force, molded in the European tradition, with terms of enlistment ranging from three years to the duration of the war. By 1778 such a force (though small) existed. From this point on Washington never lost a battle. And his model army was made up largely of the urban poor, former criminals, and freed indentured servants and slaves.

From time to time, pressured by Washington and Congress, the states drafted soldiers from the available pool of able-bodied men; however, it was perfectly legal for a (rich) draftee to hire a substitute. Typical is the case of teenage Joseph Martin, who announced his intention to enlist in the Connecticut militia in 1776 and – to his delight – found himself the prize in a bidding war as prosperous citizens lined up to hire him to take their place.

So the dirty work of actually winning the Revolution was done, at least among the rank and file, by economic ne’er-do-wells. This is a matter of public record, and you can’t really blame the middle class for preferring civilian life. The second reason we don’t hold this fact in the popular conception, though, is a dirty little secret: in the century following the war’s end, “historians” like Mercy Otis Warren and George Bancroft flat-out lied, perpetuating the myth of the virtuous citizen-soldier in gushing prose and mentioning down-and-outers only when it was convenient, e.g. when a few regiments mutinied in early 1781.

Mutiny!? Well, you see, before 1788 the federal government had no power to levy taxes. In hindsight, that may seem pretty stupid. It really was. During the war, neither officers nor enlisted men were paid (or supplied) in anything like a regular fashion. And yes, a few disgruntled enlistees did revolt (Washington saw it coming a mile away and handled it like a pro). But that was nothing compared to the Newburgh Conspiracy of March 1783, in which a good many officers (including the not-often-enough-maligned Horatio Gates) planned to march on Congress before the army could be disbanded. Here again, Washington quelled the unrest, in what might have been his greatest single service to his country, sparing us from a military dictatorship. So one cannot single out the poor for reacting harshly to civilian mistreatment; their aristocratic “betters” went much farther down that road.

After the first year of the war, middle and upper-class citizens stayed home. Many became speculators, turning huge wartime profits at the expense of those protecting them from a vengeful king. And once the danger had passed, these same noncombatants duly grabbed back the credit for securing their freedom from tyranny.

It’s not a very happy story, I’m afraid. But it’s true, and it set the stage for an America that hasn’t ever really changed.