Revolutionary War

Revolutionary War, name applied to the War of Independence (1775–83) fought by the British colonies in the present U.S. against the mother country. Underlying causes were social, economic, political, religious, and geographic, but signs of the coming struggle were first marked by such difficulties between governors and assemblies as that involving Andros. Colonists were particularly stirred by the imperialist policies exhibited in the Navigation Acts which attempted to compel importation and exportation exclusively with England, the Molasses Act, the Stamp Act, and the Townshend acts. Opposition to these measures appeared in many published works, ranging from the constitutional objections of John Dickinson's Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1768) to the inflammatory writings of Samuel Adams. It included also the more literary propaganda of Benjamin Franklin and Francis Hopkinson, such as, respectively, Edict by the King of Prussia (1773) and A Pretty Story (1774); the satirical mock‐epic M'Fingal (1775–76) by John Trumbull; and the political satires in dramatic form by Mercy Otis Warren. Prior to the beginning of hostilities and all through them, Freneau wrote so much on public and personal issues of the times that he earned the sobriquet “the poet of the American Revolution.” After the further cleavages following the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the Boston Port bill, and the Quebec Act, the Continental Congresses were convened. When Governor Gage tried to seize ammunition and stores at Concord after the famous midnight ride of Paul Revere, memorialized and popularized by Longfellow almost a century later, he met armed resistance (April 19, 1775), later celebrated in Emerson's Concord Hymn. Washington was made the commander of the Revolutionary Forces (June 1775), but the colonies were split between the predominantly middle‐class and lower‐class advocates of independence and the generally wealthy Loyalists, who found their spokesmen in the poets Jonathan Odell and Joseph Stansbury. The moderate nonpartisan view appears in Robert Munford's play The Patriots. The British suffered heavy losses in taking Bunker Hill, the subject of a verse play by Brackenridge, but they occupied Boston, where General Burgoyne wrote and produced his play The Blockade. A fictive incident of the time is treated in Hawthorne's Howe's Masquerade. During this period Paine's Common Sense was a stirring call to liberty, but it was more than a year after the Battle of Lexington that the Declaration of Independence was signed. The first issue of The Crisis by Paine was published in a period of desperation after the rapid retreat of the patriots and the capture of New York by Howe, but five days after it was issued Washington recrossed the Delaware (Dec. 23, 1776) and captured Trenton and Princeton. The next year Washington suffered heavy losses, particularly at Brandywine, and retreated north of Philadelphia for a winter of extreme hardship, the subject of Maxwell Anderson's historical drama Valley Forge. In 1778 the Americans began to win victories, and while the French fleet aided on the coast, George Rogers Clark gained success in the west, a subject of later historical novels, including Churchill's The Crossing. Benedict Arnold's treason was discovered, and his collaborator André became a sentimentalized figure in a play by William Dunlap and in later drama and fiction. Battles in the South were treated later as the subject of the Revolutionary Romances of William Gilmore Simms. The chief naval maneuvers of the war consisted of the privateering activities of John Paul Jones, celebrated by Cooper in The Pilot, and the naval aid given to various land campaigns. The war concluded after the French fleet blockaded Cornwallis in Virginia, while Washington, assisted by Lafayette and Rochambeau, came south to force his surrender at Yorktown (Oct. 19, 1781).