The Colonists Were Bigger Than the Redcoats — and Food Was One Reason
When I look at the men who lined up against the redcoats, I think the familiar picture needs adjusting.
They were ragged in places. They were short on powder. They were not always trained like the British regulars. But man for man, many of the American-born colonists were physically bigger than the European world they came from.
And one major reason was food.
By the late 1700s, height records show that American-born men had a real advantage over many Europeans. Historian John Komlos found that Americans were “as much as 6.6 cm taller than Englishmen,” and he pointed to the “immense nutritional advantages of the New World.” That is not folklore. That is what shows up in the bones, in enlistment records, and in the bodies of men raised on a different continent.
The American colonist had grown up with access to meat, game, milk, butter, cheese, fish, eggs, and open land in quantities the European poor could often only imagine. Colonial diets varied by region, but one constant was that families raised animals, hunted wild game, caught fish, and made their own dairy. Colonial forests were filled with turkey, venison, rabbit, duck, and other game that became staples of meat-heavy diets.
His cousin who stayed in Europe often lived in a more crowded, class-bound world, where bread, porridge, and scarcity did more of the feeding. The British soldiers shipped over to fight him were often recruited from the lower ranks of society — farm laborers, weavers, shoemakers, and other working men.
That gap was not luck. It was diet, land, disease burden, and childhood conditions. But diet was a major part of it.
The pattern held right across the continent. A century later, researchers found that the equestrian Plains tribes were among the tallest people in the world. The average adult male stood about 172.6 centimeters, roughly five foot eight, taller than most European populations of the same period. Their food world was built around bison, game, fat, movement, and access to animal nutrition. Richard Steckel, one of the researchers, said, “What these height data show is the ingenuity and adaptability of the equestrian Plains tribes.”
So the lesson is not hard to see.
Feed a population enough meat, milk, fat, protein, and total calories, and bodies grow. Feed it scarcity, crowding, class rationing, and bread-heavy survival food, and the body records that too.
Even writers of the age understood that America was different. Crèvecoeur wrote of the American farmer, “We have no princes, for whom we toil, starve, and bleed.” He was talking about freedom and class, but the same idea ran through the food supply. More land meant more cattle, more game, more dairy, and more of the foods that build a frame.
So when I picture the ragtag colonists facing down the finest army in the world, I adjust the image.
They may not have looked polished.
They may not have marched like professionals.
But many of them were the bigger men.
They had been raised on a land so thick with animal food that an ordinary farmhand could eat in a way much of Europe’s poor could not. Meat was not a luxury reserved only for the top of society. Game was in the woods. Milk was in the barn. Butter and cheese were on the table. Fish came from the rivers and coast.
They did not just want independence.
They had been built, quite literally, by the abundance the old country had spent centuries keeping away from people like them.