From the author's Foreword:

"This book ... is concerned with the strange transmutation of local militia companies from all the Colonies into the first American Army. It ends with the Campaign of Trenton and Princeton, by which time a man of the period could reason that that American Army was an enduring, permanent entity, could foresee its probably survival.

"Specifically, we are concerned with what happened to a few imaginary people and with one actual regiment--John Glover's Marblehead men, the Twenty-first (later the Fourteenth) Massachusetts Infantry whose military descendants are now crossing bayonets with the Japanese instead of with the Hessians." (1944)