Revolutionary War

Revolutionary War. The Revolutionary War (1775–1783) was simultaneously an ideological and a military struggle that pitted the rebellious British colonists in North America—and eventually their French, Dutch, and Spanish allies—against Great Britain, supported by German mercenaries. Although the imperial forces held significant advantages, the colonists won the war that established American independence. Victory was rooted in the Americans' belief in a revolutionary republican ideology, the willingness of an armed yeomanry to fight in defense of their locales, the advantages provided to the American forces by interior lines of supply, strong leadership in the person of George Washington, and the assistance provided by European powers hostile to Great Britain.

Origins.

The Revolution originated in constitutional, ideological, and demographic changes in the empire that converged in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War. Seeking to retire an enormous war debt and pay for the garrisoning of troops in North America, the imperial government instituted a series of internal and external taxes in North America. These taxes, especially the Sugar and Stamp Acts, were bitterly resented by the colonial population and led to a series of violent protests. At the core of the unrest was a constitutional claim by the colonists that they had to be actually represented in any legislative body that taxed them. In essence, they nullified the idea of the King‐in‐parliament as the empire's supreme authority, insisting on the supremacy of their local legislatures in matters of internal governance. This position was maintained and expanded throughout the 1760s and 1770s as Parliament passed first the Declaratory Act (1766), the Townshend Duties (1767), the Tea Acts (1773), and finally the Boston Port Bill (1774) in order to collect revenues and assert parliamentary authority. With each such effort, resistance expanded, leading to dramatic incidents like the Boston Massacre of March 1770 in which five rioters were shot by British troops; the burning of the revenue cutter Gaspée in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, in 1772; and the Boston Tea Party in December 1773. When Parliament passed the Boston Port Bill to punish the colonists for their actions in the Tea Party, aroused Americans began to announce their intentions to resist British tyranny—by force if necessary. In 1774, the first Continental Congress met in one last‐ditch effort to seek redress within the empire, and in early 1775, with a military confrontation brewing near Boston, Parliament declared Massachusetts in rebellion.

While the unraveling of empire between 1764 and 1775 was extraordinarily complex, two underlying factors seem crucial to understanding the formation of an autonomous American identity, one that scarcely existed consciously before the imperial crisis. One was the infiltration of country, republican, and libertarian discourse into American political and social life in the fifty or so years before the Revolution. These languages ultimately provided alternative models of social, political, and economic behavior for provincial Americans. They were used to criticize the existing imperial order and ultimately to establish new behavioral norms in the infant republic. The second factor that helped unravel the empire was the American population's extraordinary physical mobility. Such mobility weakened traditional social bonds and encourage the acceptance of new forms of social organization at all levels and in all regions of the colonies. It was this new people, still only half‐formed in 1775, that went to war against the eighteenth century's foremost military power.

Early Battles and the French Alliance.

Fighting commenced in earnest in April 1775 when the British commander General Thomas Gage sought to seize munitions hidden in the countryside near Boston and arrest the patriot leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock. A light British force marching toward the Massachusetts village of Concord on this mission dispersed a small militia unit at Lexington before reaching Concord. There they encountered a larger colonial force and realized that militia from across the Commonwealth, warned by Paul Revere and others, had anticipated their “surprise” march. In a running battle that took a heavy toll of British soldiers' lives, the New England militia forced the redcoats back to Boston and besieged the port city. On 17 June, a British assault force initiated the Battle of Bunker Hill to break the siege. Although the British emerged victorious, they received over a thousand casualties. The strength of opposition in New England led the British commanders to evacuate Boston in order to seek a decisive military victory in the Mid‐Atlantic region in 1776.

This decision rested on a sound strategic assessment. Not only were the major Mid‐Atlantic cities' ports easily held by the powerful British navy, but imperial authorities were convinced that a significant body of the King's Friends—as those Americans who were loyal to the Crown were called—were ready to rise when the royal army arrived. Moreover, victory in the Middle Colonies would cut land communication between the South and New England, isolating the rebellious regions. Accordingly, an army of more than 30,000 British regulars and Hessian mercenaries commanded by William Howe descended on New York harbor in July 1776, just as the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, declared American independence. A British fleet commanded by Howe's brother Richard supported the invasion of New York.

In a near‐disastrous failure of strategic thinking, George Washington and the American commanders deployed their forces on Long Island and Manhattan, in effect inviting Britain's amphibious armada to trap them. In late August, a British force decisively defeated the Continental Army at Brooklyn Heights. The American army escaped total annihilation by retreating by rowboat past the British navy to Manhattan. Realizing that their position in New York was untenable, the American forces withdrew from Manhattan after fighting Howe's troops at Harlem Heights, leaving behind a force of three thousand that was subsequently captured. New York City, at that time comprising only the southern tip of Manhattan, was partially burned, probably by American sympathizers.

The subsequent months were the most desperate of the war. The rump of the Continental army fled across New Jersey, pursued by British forces under General Charles Cornwallis. Compounding Washington's problems was a serious split in the American general staff concerning tactics. Washington and the core of the officers wanted to create a European‐style army that could engage the enemy in close combat. However, Charles Lee, a British‐born military adventurer of considerable ability who received the rank of general in the American army through congressional patronage, recommended a guerrilla‐style battle of attrition against the invaders. The disagreement became pronounced in the fall of 1776 when Lee, commanding American forces east of the Hudson River near White Plains, New York, refused to move to help the beleaguered Washington as the main army fled across New Jersey. Only when Lee was captured in early December did this clash temporarily abate.

With his army disintegrating and his officers in conflict, Washington needed a victory to revive the American cause. With this in mind he recrossed the Delaware River on 26 December and launched successful counterattacks at Trenton and later at Princeton. Although of limited military significance, these victories lifted American morale. However, the American cause suffered new defeats in 1777 as Washington lost Philadelphia after being defeated at Brandywine Creek and Germantown. But that October an American army led by Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold surrounded a British force under General John Burgoyne advancing southward through upstate New York and decisively defeated it near Saratoga. On 17 October, Burgoyne and his army of 5,700 surrendered. This disastrous defeat ended the British efforts to split New England from the rest of the colonies.

The American victories in 1776 and 1777 encouraged diplomatic initiatives in Europe that became vital to ultimate victory. From the outbreak of fighting in 1775, the Congress and the American military realized the importance of securing foreign aid. These efforts centered on France, but also involved diplomatic initiatives to the Dutch Republic and Spain. All three powers had reason to fear British influence, and were thus cautiously inclined to support the rebellious colonists. While none endorsed the radical republicanism pervasive in the colonies, they were anxious to take the opportunity to weaken Britain. Led by Silas Deane and Benjamin Franklin, American diplomats as early as 1776 gained nonofficial assistance in the form of guns and money from the three European powers. After the Battle of Saratoga, the French recognized America as an independent country and signed a military alliance with the new nation. French military help proved to be critical to the American cause.

The addition of the powerful French fleet to balance the overwhelming British naval supremacy immediately improved America's strategic position. Although American privateers and commerce raiders had been able to significantly hinder British resupply of their forces in America, the French had a formal fleet of the line and provided bases from which American ships could operate in European waters. It was from such a base that John Paul Jones, sailing the Bonhomme Richard, defeated the heavily armed British warship Serapis in September 1779. And it was the French fleet that made possible the victory at Yorktown in 1781 when they drove off a British naval force sent to aid Cornwallis.

American Society at War.

Had the French monarchy known the true condition of Washington's army and American society in the winter of 1777, it might have hesitated before signing the treaty of assistance. After defeats at Brandywine Creek and Germantown in Pennsylvania, Washington's army went into the first of a series of brutally uncomfortable winter encampments in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The following summer, as the armies again maneuvered against one another in the Mid‐Atlantic colonies, widespread fighting among Americans broke out in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. While this fighting was diffuse, it was probably far more widespread in the region than historians have suspected. In New Jersey's Hackensack River Valley and Pine Barrens, in Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley, and throughout upstate New York and on Long Island, Americans fell on one another in a series of struggles for local supremacy. Religious and ethnic divisions seem to have shaped loyalties in this civil strife. In the Wyoming Valley, for instance, German settlers and Native Americans assisted by British troops warred against New Englanders who had been trying to settle in the area since the 1750s, basing their claims on a Connecticut land grant. Their bloody conflict led to widespread assaults on civilians as well as combatants, and violence continued in the area well into the 1790s.

The war also encouraged fighting along ethnic, religious, and racial lines in the South. From the late 1770s until 1783, violence between contending groups of Americans—and between them and various Native American groups—turned large parts of the southern countryside into combat zones. These conflicts fell out along ethnic lines, with religion and locale playing secondary roles in deciding allegiance. In South Carolina, German and Scots‐Irish settlers in the interior strongly tended towards loyalism. They were culturally alienated from the Charlestown elite and bitter at their treatment before the war during the upheaval known as the South Carolina Regulation.

The civil fighting in the South was as vicious, if not more so, than that in the North. Whigs and Tories routinely targeted civilians in parts of South Carolina and North Carolina, and in some areas refugee crises were intentionally created as a means of controlling the countryside. One Whig militia unit operating in Surry County, North Carolina, routinely used torture to extract information, even threatening prisoners with castration if they did not cooperate. In South Carolina, the term “Tarleton's Quarter”—that is, the refusal to take prisoners in battle—became commonplace after Tories serving under Banastre Tarleton massacred prisoners after the Battle of Waxhaw Creek in 1780. At one point, Nathanael Greene begged Anthony Wayne to restrain the militia from attacking Tory civilians in retaliation, so vicious had the fighting become.

The war between the Whigs and Tories was not the only war fought. South Carolina had another civil war, between the powerful Cherokee Indian nation, which sided with the British, and the American militia. Cherokee resentments had been growing since the 1760s, when settlers from South Carolina and Georgia had pushed onto Cherokee lands. The Cherokee also had longstanding economic relationships with British traders. Like the war between the Whigs and Tories, this war was ferocious. Massacre followed massacre, atrocity followed atrocity, until all bounds of civil order collapsed.

The army's travails and the civil fighting were in part indicative of political and social problems in the new republic. A displaced and squabbling Congress struggled to supply the army. It was only nominally successful. The troops suffered widespread winter shortages of food and clothing, first at Valley Forge and later at Morristown, New Jersey. To complicate matters, the Articles of Confederation limited Congress's powers, and its relationship to the state governments was poorly defined. The states' economies began to experience hyperinflation as state governments printed paper money to meet war expenditures. The resulting currency devaluation and the erosion of the states' financial power posed a serious threat to the war effort because the state governments, the only bodies empowered to raise troops, used bounties as a key incentive for enlistment. All the states, moreover, lost considerable political, legal, and economic talent as loyalists fled into New York City and other British strongholds.

Despite these problems, several key factors sustained the American cause. The revolutionaries were fighting for independence and a republicanized society. These compelling goals gave them the will to continue the war. America was a society dominated by farmers, the majority of whom—around 80 percent—supported the Revolution's goals. These yeomen might not have rushed to join the Continental army, but they fought in the militia in defense of their towns and farms, making it difficult for the British army to operate in the countryside. Finally, Americans had in George Washington a leader in whom the soldiers, politicians, and people could believe. Washington's qualities as a general have been debated, but his leadership abilities are beyond doubt. A skilled politician, he adeptly handled the Congress, the French allies, and his own troops at numerous difficult moments.

The Shift South and the War's Final Phase.

Military stalemate in the Mid‐Atlantic region in 1778 encouraged British commanders to reconsider again their strategic policy. It was then that the war shifted to the South and entered its final (1779–1783) phase. The southern campaign started auspiciously for the British. In late 1778 and 1779, British forces reconquered Georgia, the only state completely subdued during the war. The British restored the royal governor and displaced the radical unicameral legislature that had assumed power in the state in 1776. Georgians who supported American independence were arrested by British authorities. Early in 1780, Georgia became a launching pad for a serious British offensive in the Carolinas that seemed likely to result in the complete reconquest of these states as well. In May 1780 General Henry Clinton captured Charleston, South Carolina, and over 3,000 American troops under the command of Benjamin Lincoln. Resistance to the British in South Carolina collapsed. Alarmed by these developments, General Washington and the Congress dispatched the hero of Saratoga, Horatio Gates, with reinforcements for the southern department. Gates, with ill‐trained and ill‐armed troops, rushed to engage Cornwallis without proper preparation and the subsequent battle at Camden, South Carolina, is generally regarded as the single worst defeat in American military history. A bayonet charge by the redcoats put Gates's army to flight, and Gates himself galloped off the battlefield on horseback. After this disaster, guerrilla war waged by Francis Marion, Thomas Sumner, and several other American commanders, with followers in the Carolina countryside, was the only visible sign of American resistance to the British in South Carolina.

It was in this darkest moment that American prospects began to brighten. New hope arrived in the American camp from two sources. Late in 1780, a group of hill country militia thoroughly defeated a loyalist force at the Battle of King's Mountain. This victory secured the southern interior for the American cause. The Congress dispatched one of Washington's ablest subordinates, Nathanael Greene, to take command of the southern department. Greene, a Rhode Island Quaker, had served with Washington since the beginning of the war and developed a reputation for courage and sound judgment. Arriving with few resources and men, Greene began to rebuild the American army in the Carolinas in the late fall of 1780. Harassed by Cornwallis's army, Greene took the audacious step of dividing his forces. Taking most of his inexperienced men into winter quarters for training, he sent a picked group out to battle under the command of Daniel Morgan.

Morgan maneuvered shrewdly in northern South Carolina, setting the stage for one of the war's critical battles. Pursued by Cornwallis's best subordinate, Banastre Tarleton, Morgan, with a mixed force of militia and Continental regulars numbering around 1,000 men, turned to fight on a low series of hills known locally as “Cowpens.” Morgan understood how to use frontier militia to his advantage. He instructed them to fire twice and then run; when Tarleton's infantry surged forward in pursuit, Morgan's cavalry enveloped their wing and won a crushing victory. Although only several thousand combatants were involved in the Battle of Cowpens on 17 January 1780, it ranks along with Trenton and Saratoga as one of the war's crucial victories. Had Morgan been defeated, Greene's army would have likely been beaten in turn, resulting in at least a partial failure of the struggle for American independence.

Instead, 1781 saw a renewed American army in the field in the South. Greene's army engaged Cornwallis's at Guilford Court House in March, inflicting heavy losses on the British. After recovering in North Carolina, Cornwallis marched north to Virginia's Yorktown peninsula, where he was soon trapped by combined American and French land‐sea forces. After a final assault on 17 October led by Washington's young aide Alexander Hamilton, the British forces asked for terms, and on the 19th, 7,000 British soldiers surrendered as their musicians fittingly played the old tune “A World Turned Upside Down.”

Aftermath.

The official termination of hostilities took almost two years after the Yorktown surrender. The American negotiators in Paris, led by Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay, secured important concessions from the British, including the recognition of the United States of America with the Mississippi River as its western boundary.

American authorities faced many problems at home. The currency had been devalued, the army—units of which were owed years of pay—needed to be demobilized, British troops remained in many locales, and the American loyalists needed to be dealt with. Mutinies in the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Continental lines over lack of pay and insufferable conditions had broken out in January 1781, and discontent remained strong at the war's end. Rumors circulated of mutiny or even a coup by disgruntled officers who had been promised pensions for life and who realized that Congress would likely renege on all or part of these promises. But General Washington, always careful to yield to civil authority, calmed the army and controlled the unruly tempers within the officers' corps with a powerful address at his Newburgh, New York, headquarters in March 1783.

The problem of the American loyalists was less easily solved. Many had borne arms or given aid to George III's armies. The Treaty of Paris that officially ended the war included language intended to encourage their reintegration into American society and the restoration of their seized property. But hatreds on both sides, reflecting political differences as well as the intense civil fighting of the war years, remained too deep. Tens of thousands of the King's Friends went into exile in Canada, Britain, and the British West Indies. Particularly difficult was the plight of former slaves who had served the king in order to gain their freedom. Some of them had been fighting since the outbreak of war in 1775 and 1776, when Lord Dunmore, Virginia's last royal governor, set up the Kings' Standard and offered freedom to African‐American slaves who fled from their masters to serve the British army. But at the war's end, they were in grave danger of losing that freedom. Some were resold into slavery in the West Indies; British authorities settled a much larger population in Nova Scotia; and still others eventually made their way to Sierra Leone in West Africa, where they established several communities.

The Revolution unleashed a host of social changes. It disrupted old patterns of life and replaced them with new social relationships; led to the creation of new private and public institutions; changed the relationship of men to women; affected the lives of the Native American tribes east of the Mississippi (generally negatively); and partially ruptured the slaveholding system. Not only had over 20,000 slaves run away to the British army, but thousands more served in the American army, and slavery would gradually disappear in the northern states after the war's end.

The Revolution's meaning cannot be grasped simply by recounting the military course of events. The military and political revolutions intersected with and were part of other changes—in population, economy, physical and social mobility, in science, learning, and eventually technology—that would remake American society in profound ways in the fifty years after the war's end. And yet to acknowledge these things is not to diminish the centrality of the Revolutionary War to the American nation and the American experience.
See also Agriculture: 1770s to 1890; Albany Congress; Colonial Era; Early Republic, Era of the; Expansionism; German Americans; Immigration; Indian History and Culture: From 1500 to 1800; Indian Wars; Irish Americans; Jefferson, Thomas; Middle West, The; Military, The; Proclamation of 1763; Revolution and Constitution, Era of; Yorktown, Battle of.

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Brendan McConville