Snatched back from the recruiters

What happened

In the spring of 1758 Massachusetts was asked for another army. Governor Thomas Pownall had offered four pounds and a good blanket to volunteers, so few came forward that when the offer ran out on 2 May he fell back on the draft. British recruiting officers, who had been fighting the province for months over where they might lodge in Boston, worked the town's streets and taverns with a sergeant, a drummer and a few privates in red coats. Rothbard says their methods included dragging drunken men into the army, and that the people erupted angrily in a series of riots, attacking and beating up recruiting squads (CiL, p. 750). The British had to keep a large force in Massachusetts to crush what looked like an imminent rebellion. The draftees who did go fought the war another way, by deserting in numbers, refusing to obey officers and going on sick call, while Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson rounded up deserters with paid informers. General Wolfe, Rothbard notes, wrote in despair that the Americans "desert by battalions, officers and all" (CiL, p. 750).