Revolutionary War (1775–83)

Revolutionary War (1775–83) CausesMilitary and Diplomatic CourseDomestic CoursePostwar ImpactChanging Interpretations
Revolutionary War (1775–83): Causes The roots of the Revolutionary War ran deep in the structure of the British empire, an entity transformed, like the British state itself, by the Anglo‐French wars of the eighteenth century. After the fourth of these conflicts, the Seven Years' (or French and Indian) War, the British government tried to reform the now greatly expanded empire. The American colonists resisted, creating a series of crises that culminated in the armed rebellion of 1775.

The Imperial Background.

With the Glorious Revolution (1688), England's foreign policy took the anti‐French path it followed until 1815—a path that led to four wars before 1775. These conflicts spawned a British nationalism with powerfully anti‐Catholic overtones. They also transformed the British state into the most powerful fiscal‐military agency in Europe.

Britain's greatest weapon was its funded national debt, which harnessed private savings to military ends. British financiers, managing the joint stock corporations—the Bank of England, the South Seas Company, the East India Company—loaned the government money in wartime; the government used postwar tax revenues to pay interest on what became a perpetual debt. The demand for revenues stimulated the growth of another fiscal engine, the Treasury. A “Real Whig” (or “Country”) political ideology emerged, which denounced this powerful state as the enemy of liberty, stressed the dangers of standing armies, and insisted that consent to taxation was the property holder's sole bulwark against “enslavement” by would‐be tyrants in the government. “Country” ideology dominated the language of political opposition, but barely slowed the growth of the state. Each war's demands—and the stability of a securities market underwritten by tax monies—overrode the objections of those who feared expansion of state power.

The third Anglo‐French War (1739–48) brought America back in to British strategic calculations for the first time. New England colonists attacked Canada, conquering Louisbourg, the naval base that controlled access to the St. Lawrence. This prevented French reinforcement and resupply, and would have led to the conquest of Canada, had not merchants in Albany traded overland with Québec and kept New York neutral in the fighting. This independent foreign policy outraged British administrators, especially Lord Halifax. Between 1748 and 1754, Halifax and his associates at the Board of Trade planned reforms to ensure that in future wars the empire would function as a unit.

The Seven Years' War (1754–63) Destabilizes Imperial Relations.

The French and Indian War, which became the Seven Years' War in Europe, created unprecedented problems of finance and control for Britain. In the war's early years, before 1758, the colonists traded with the enemy and refused to pay for British military operations. The ministry of William Pitt (1757–61) solved the first problem by offering to reimburse the colonies for part of their war expenses; the second solved itself as Britain conquered French colonies in Canada and the Caribbean. Pitt's victories and policies, however, doubled the national debt and made his successor determined to contain costs and reform the empire.

Beginning with George Grenville in 1763, a series of British ministers tightened the bonds of empire while trying to spread some of the costs of imperial defense to the colonies. They revived Halifax's plans to increase metropolitan supervision over imperial trade and the internal polities of the colonies, but also responded to the urgent legacies of war. As early as 1762, Whitehall planned to station fifteen regular army battalions permanently in America, with the colonists paying the bill. When the Peace of Paris in 1763 added all France's holdings east of the Mississippi River to the empire, the army became the de facto administrator of the conquests.

Ministerial efforts to stamp out illegal trade (which resumed after the peace treaty returned to France its richest sugar islands) coincided with attempts to subordinate the colonies to the metropolis. Colonists who believed that Anglo‐American cooperation and shared sacrifice had achieved the victory were outraged, and the patriotic fervor of the war evaporated in the face of postwar reforms. Chaos ensued when Parliament tried to extract money directly from the colonies with the Stamp Act of 1765.

The Stamp Act protests expressed outrage at British control. Adapting “Real Whig” ideology to their own needs, Americans insisted that as long as they remained unrepresented in the House of Commons, Britain had no right to tax them; submission to taxation without consent would enslave the colonists to whatever faction controlled Parliament. In the face of virtual anarchy, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in March 1766, but rejected the American understanding of taxation. According to British constitutional conceptions, taxation was a function of sovereignty (the state's ultimate power to take property and life), which the Glorious Revolution had vested in the king in Parliament. Parliament made its claims explicit by asserting its sovereignty over the colonies in a Declaratory Act that preceded the Stamp Act repeal.

After 1766, Parliament searched for ways to assert its authority. A new set of trade regulations and taxes, the Townshend Duties—named for Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend, one‐time protégé of Lord Halifax—aroused a second wave of colonial opposition beginning in 1767. Deliberation and nonviolence marked this phase of resistance as radical leaders in several provinces clarified American political principles and promoted intercolonial cooperation. The result, a reasonably effective boycott of British imports in 1769, demonstrated the colonies' ability to dispense with the empire.

Unable to retreat in any way that would grant the validity of colonial arguments, Parliament in the spring of 1770 opted (at the urging of a new prime minister, Lord North) to repeal all but one of the Townshend Duties. Retaining a single tax, on tea, kept up Parliament's claim to authority while conciliating the colonists. This concession came none too soon.

On 5 March 1770, the same day North proposed partial repeal in Parliament, a squad of British soldiers fired into a taunting Boston crowd, killing five men. Troops had garrisoned Boston since October 1768 to protect customs officials, and had encountered little opposition before this so‐called “Boston Massacre.” To people who accepted the “Real Whig” maxim that standing armies were tyrants' tools, the “massacre” proved Britain's determination to rule by force. In the face of uncontrollable riots, Gen. Thomas Gage, the British commander in chief, handed over the soldiers for trial and withdrew the troops from Boston.

Before trials could be held, news arrived of the partial repeal of the Townshend Duties. Merchants jumped at the chance to end the unprofitable boycott; by fall, when the juries returned verdicts of manslaughter against two soldiers and acquitted the rest, the nonimportation movement had dissolved. The colonists continued to boycott tea, but otherwise business as usual resumed within the empire.

Yet business as usual in 1771 was not what it had been in 1750. The conquests—Canada, East and West Florida, and the vast trans‐Appalachian realm that stretched to the Mississippi—beckoned land‐hungry Britons and colonists alike. The Proclamation of 1763, the crown's attempt to separate white settlement from Indian country by a line drawn at the crest of the Appalachians, had failed; western army units had been withdrawn to the seaboard colonies until by late 1771 only one significant detachment remained, in Illinois. Squatters swarmed into the Ohio Valley, and Indian‐white relations drifted ever closer to war.

The growing chaos in the west revealed an empire in disarray. Yet empires can exist for centuries in decayed forms without creating revolutions, and British authority in North America might merely have declined indefinitely had not seeds of imperial conflict, planted by the Seven Years' War, borne fruit.

The Tea Crisis and the Dissolution of Empire: 1773–75.

British army and naval forces, together with the East India Company's private army, had seized France's East Indian trading stations during the war; thereafter, the company opportunistically gained control of northeastern India. The costs of government and defense, however, outran the company's revenues, and by 1773 it faced bankruptcy. This would wreck British financial markets, but the Treasury had no funds to bail the company out. The only solution was to turn the company's vast inventory of tea into money, so the ministry granted the company a monopoly on tea sales in America.

But colonists saw the Tea Act of 1773 as an effort to force them to consume a taxed commodity, and no colonial port would allow the tea to be landed. Bostonians actually destroyed three shiploads on 16 December 1773, an action that goaded North's ministry into regarrisoning Boston and proposing a set of Coercive Acts. As passed by Parliament in May and early June 1774, these measures closed the port of Boston until the town paid for the tea; rewrote the Massachusetts charter to give the governor great power over local affairs and protect royal officials—including soldiers—from prosecution in colony courts; and authorized the quartering of troops in private homes. General Gage was appointed governor of the province.

Meanwhile, Parliament also tried to sort out the problems in the west by attaching much of trans‐Appalachia to the province of Quebec. The Quebec Act protected Roman Catholicism within the province and sanctioned French legal procedures in its courts, which made it look as if thousands of western settlers would be governed by a cryptopapist regime. The Protestant colonists lumped the Quebec Act and the Coercive Acts together as “Intolerable Acts” and resolved to stand fast.

The result was the most effective intercolonial resistance movement yet. On 5 September 1774, representatives of the colonies convened in a Continental Congress to protest the Intolerable Acts and create a nonimportation measure called the Continental Association. The association empowered local committees of safety to enforce the agreement, creating a crude intercolonial union and vesting police powers in radical hands. Agreeing to meet again on 10 May 1775 if the British government had not yet repealed the Intolerable Acts, Congress adjourned on 26 October.

By then, Massachusetts patriots had created an extralegal government called the Provincial Congress, taken control of the province's arms, and organized self‐defense forces. The ministry ordered General Gage to take military action to forestall rebellion. Receiving these orders too late to capture the Provincial Congress, Gage tried to seize munitions stockpiled at Concord. This triggered the Battles of Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775, and grew into a general New England uprising. When Congress reconvened on 10 May, its only alternatives were to disavow rebellion and disband or to take control of the incipient war on behalf of all thirteen colonies. It chose the latter course, adopting the New England forces as a Continental army and appointing George Washington as commander in chief on 15 June 1775. Although it would be a year before the colonies declared independence from Britain, the Revolutionary War had begun.

Bibliography

Bernard Bailyn , The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 1965.
John Shy , Toward Lexington, 1965.
Merrill Jensen , The Founding of a Nation, 1968.
Pauline Maier , From Resistance to Revolution, 1972.
P. D. G. Thomas , British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis, 1975.
P. D. G. Thomas , The Townshend Duties Crisis, 1987.
John Brewer , The Sinews of Power, 1989.
P. D. G. Thomas , Tea Party to Independence, 1991.
Linda Colley , Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, 1992.
Thomas Fleming , Liberty! The American Revolution, 1997.

Fred Anderson

Revolutionary War (1775–83): Military and Diplomatic Course In proportion to contemporary population and wealth, the Revolutionary War destroyed more lives and property than any American conflict except the Civil War; in duration it exceeded all American wars until the one in Vietnam. It was also highly complex. It was a civil war, a war for political independence, and finally a European war conducted on a global scale. Only as a struggle for independence could it be said to have had merely two sides. As a civil war, its active parties were British and German (“Hessian”) regulars, American loyalist militias, and British‐allied Indians, who fought American patriot regulars (the Continental army), American patriot militias, and some American‐allied Indians. The uncommitted, however, comprised approximately two‐fifths of the population, and the outcome of the war ultimately depended on them. As a European conflict and a worldwide war for empire, Britain opposed the United States, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. American social conditions and British strategy shaped the course and determined the outcome of the civil war; but logistical and diplomatic factors governed the war's global phase, and these would strongly influence the nature of American independence.

By 1775, the population of British North America was doubling every twenty‐six years. High birth rates and heavy immigration bespoke easily available land, widely distributed among the farming population. The colonists' dispersion and ethnic diversity helped produce the fragmentation and political instability that became pronounced as populations spread westward after the French and Indian War (known in Britain as the Seven Years' War). The easy availability of land weakened American elites; lacking the ability to live off rents, gentlemen also lacked a secure economic and political base. The southern colonies had stable aristocracies, based on slave ownership; but even the greatest planters lived in fear of slave rebellions. Nor did colonial institutions create stability: governments were small, poor, unbureaucratized, and lacked permanent constabularies; neither a unified market economy nor a universally established church existed. Institutional weakness magnified American parochialism, and most colonists were suspicious of any authority not rooted in their own localities. Americans both distrusted and envied Europe, emulating British styles and institutions while resenting British sophistication. As provincials, colonists saw themselves as morally superior, yet culturally inferior, to the English.

British officers who had served in America during the Seven Years' War believed these conditions made Americans leaderless, lazy, and militarily ineffectual. Remembering the high rates of desertion and mutiny among provincial troops in 1755–60, in 1775 British commanders assumed a lack of toughness in the rebels, who—they thought—would collapse at the first application of force.

A Civil War and a War For Independence: 1775–78

Popular Insurrection and a Failed Police Action: 1775–76.

From the tea crisis of 1774 through the evacuation of Boston in March 1776, the British faced massive popular resistance among New Englanders. Insofar as even patriot leaders lagged behind public opinion after the so‐called “Intolerable Acts,” it is not surprising that the British commander in chief, Gen. Thomas Gage, failed to understand that the thousands of men who turned out on 19 April 1775 were not armed mobs, but property holders and their sons, who represented communities convinced that the British intended to enslave them. So popular was the rebellion that within a week of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, 20,000 New England militiamen were besieging the British in Boston, without anyone ordering them to do it.

When news of the fighting in Massachusetts reached the Second Continental Congress at Philadelphia, the delegates assumed responsibility for the New England militia—which on 15 June they designated a Continental army—and appointed a commander in chief from Virginia, George Washington. Provincials to the core, the delegates wanted a European‐style regular army to conduct a civilized war. The last thing they—or Washington—wanted was for guerrilla warfare to continue.

Meanwhile, Gage and his officers assumed that they were conducting a police action against agitator‐inspired mobs. Thus, when the Americans fortified a Charlestown hilltop on 17 June, the British decided to attack frontally. As Maj. Gen. John Burgoyne explained, they believed government authority “depends in a great measure upon the idea that trained troops are invincible against any numbers or any position of untrained rabble; and this idea was a little in suspense since the 19th of April.” The ensuing carnage and the realization that the rabble had not dispersed, but reorganized, compelled the British to reassess their assumptions. Between the Battle of Bunker Hill and the evacuation of Boston (17 March 1776), British commanders lost the illusion that they were involved in a police action, and the British ministry replaced Gage with Gen. William Howe, who understood the war as a confrontation between opposing armies. Howe's plans for 1776 ushered in the second stage of the war, which would last until Burgoyne's defeat at the Battles of Saratoga (September and October 1777).

Conventional War and Failed Negotiations: 1776–77.

Howe moved his base of operations in New York to regain the initiative against Washington. If he thrashed the rebel army, he reasoned, most Americans would return to the imperial fold; as popular enthusiasm waned, Congress would become willing to make peace. Howe wanted negotiation more than outright victory because he was not only commander in chief but (together with his brother, Adm. Lord Richard Howe) peace commissioner in America. This schizoid role handicapped him both as military leader and as diplomat; yet events of summer and fall 1776 suggested that he would succeed.

After the British evacuated Boston, defeats and disaster filled the rest of 1776. The army Congress had sent to invade Canada in June 1775 collapsed in the summer of 1776. After capturing Montréal, the Continentals failed to take Québec, and were forced to raise their siege when British reinforcements arrived by ship in May. By July, the Americans had retreated to Lake Champlain and—desperately hoping to slow the advance of Gen. Guy Carleton's powerful army on New York—built a small fleet of gunboats. At the Battle of Valcour Island (10 October 1776), Brig. Gen. Benedict Arnold succeeded in stalling Carleton's invasion, but had to withdraw to Fort Ticonderoga.

Meanwhile, the fervor of 1775 faded as General Washington tried to transform the Continentals into a regular army capable of holding New York against Howe. He had less than 20,000 troops on Long Island, Manhattan, and the lower Hudson on 25 June 1776 when Howe landed at Staten Island. Howe tried first to negotiate, but found that Congress's representatives, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, would settle for nothing less than independence. Howe then used his 32,000 troops, together with his brother's fleet and 10,000 sailors, to drive Washington off Long Island (27–30 August). Following him to Manhattan in mid‐September, Howe attacked again in October, compelling Washington to withdraw to White Plains. In November, Howe captured the critical posts of Fort Washington, New York, and Fort Lee, New Jersey. Washington retreated across New Jersey with a disintegrating army. He crossed the Delaware on 7 December with perhaps 5,000 troops fit for duty, and most of their enlistments would expire on 31 December.

Howe's strategy seemed to have worked brilliantly. The Continental army was collapsing; colonists in New York and New Jersey were eagerly swearing allegiance to the king, provisioning his forces, and enlisting in loyalist units. Howe saw popular support for the Revolution evaporating and assumed that Congress would soon negotiate. Yet two features of his campaign were about to produce the opposite effect. First, Howe's troops—particularly the Hessians and the loyalist irregulars—had handled civilian populations roughly. Every incident of rape and theft helped to crystallize popular opposition. Second, on 13 December, Howe sent his men into winter quarters, scattering them across central New Jersey in small cantonments—and thus exposing them to attack.

Venturing everything, Washington used what was left of his army to attack enemy units at Trenton, in late December 1776, and Princeton, in January 1777, and thus began to restore Continental morale. Howe, realizing the mistake of dispersing his units, reconcentrated them in the Lower Raritan Valley, allowing patriot militia to regain control of the province and nullify his recent successes. Howe did not yet see how counterproductive his approach had been, however, and planned to pursue Washington through Pennsylvania in 1777. The ministry, meanwhile, authorized Burgoyne to renew the invasion from Canada. Howe and Burgoyne assumed that loyalist support would emerge wherever the redcoats appeared. They were mistaken.

Burgoyne captured Fort Ticonderoga on 5 July, then pursued the fleeing Continentals through the woods south of Lake Champlain rather than proceeding to the Upper Hudson Valley via Lake George. Reaching the Hudson, he found that his Indian and Hessian allies had turned New Yorkers against him. When the supplies and loyalist supporters he expected never materialized, he found himself trapped. The northern Continental army under Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates, reinforced by militiamen from New England and New York, defeated Burgoyne at the two Battles of Saratoga (17 September and 5 October 1777). On 17 October, he signed a Convention that allowed him to return to England, but left his army prisoner. Saratoga cost the British over 6,000 casualties and captives. The prisoners of war, called the Convention army, were shifted from colony to colony for the rest of the war.

Meanwhile, Howe defeated Washington in Pennsylvania at the Battle of the Brandywine (11 September 1777), but again failed to destroy his army. He seized Philadelphia at the end of September. Washington counterattacked unsuccessfully at Germantown (4 October), then lost the Delaware River forts that commanded Philadelphia's water approaches (15–21 November). Unlike the previous year, defeat did not threaten to dissolve the army, which went into winter quarters at Valley Forge on 11 December. Thanks to Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, who improved the army's training during the winter, and to Nathanael Greene, who as quartermaster general reformed the supply system, the Continentals emerged from Valley Forge tougher and better organized than ever.

Thus, Howe's conventional war strategy failed again. Congress refused to negotiate; redcoat, loyalist, and Hessian abuse of civilians reanimated popular resistance; and patriot militiamen controlled whatever territory the British could not occupy.

Howe failed because he misinterpreted civilian attitudes. What he took for incipient loyalism was no more than the reluctance of many Americans—in the Middle Colonies probably a majority—to take sides. He never understood how the very arrival of the British army (and especially its loyalist, Hessian, and Indian auxiliaries) drove neutrals into alliance with the patriots. By contrast, Washington used enormous restraint in dealing with civilians, refusing to confiscate food and clothing even when his men at Valley Forge were starving. Above all, he deferred to Congress's wishes in order to demonstrate the army's subordination to civil authority.

State governments employed their militia forces with similar restraint. On the whole, prosecutors and militia units tolerated neutral behavior as a manifestation of localism, not loyalism. Knowing that Americans distrusted centralized power, they required only minimal support: anyone who paid his taxes, kept his mouth shut, and turned up for militia duty would be left alone. The practice of allowing men drafted for military duty to hire substitutes, and the parsimonious, quasi‐legal use of force in making examples of notorious Tories helped win the acquiescence, if not the hearts and minds, of neutrals. Finally, governments retained the goodwill of property holders by hesitating to confiscate supplies for the army. This restraint had two effects: the Continental army remained chronically undermanned and undersupplied; and neutrals were not driven to loyalism.

The French Alliance and a World War: 1778–83

Turning Point: 1777–78.

Howe's indecisive campaign and Burgoyne's spectacular defeat convinced the French, who heretofore had offered only covert aid, to enter into open alliance with the United States. Congress had first sent delegates to Paris in 1776; Benjamin Franklin and his colleagues had raised money and publicized America's cause, but France's foreign minister, the comte de Vergennes, had remained cautious. The events of 1777, however, changed his mind. On 17 December 1777, France recognized the United States diplomatically, and soon thereafter it presented drafts of two treaties to the American commissioners. The first of these, the Treaty of Amity and Commerce, offered the United States preferential trading privileges in France. The second, the Treaty of Alliance, was to take effect at the beginning of hostilities between France and Britain; it promised that France would not press any further claims to Canada, would refrain from negotiating peace with Britain on any grounds other than American independence, and guaranteed to the United States any territories French troops might conquer in North America during the war. Signed on 6 February 1778, both treaties were ratified in Congress on 4 May 1778.

Hoping to nullify the alliance, the British ministry dispatched the earl of Carlisle to negotiate with Congress. The Carlisle Commission could promise anything short of independence, but Congress would settle for no less. While Carlisle made overtures until November 1778 and military activity in North America came to a standstill, naval warfare broke out between France and Britain. War in Europe transformed a colonial fight for independence into a larger—ultimately worldwide—struggle that the British could not win.

From June 1778 onward, the British had to defend the home islands against invasion, protect Gibraltar, and shield the valuable, vulnerable West Indian sugar islands (especially Jamaica) from attack. This meant that Howe's successor, Gen. Henry Clinton, would have fewer men and bigger logistical problems than ever, and that he could no longer assume the Royal Navy's superiority in American waters. His response, a new strategy, reflected these new circumstances, as well as his estimate of American social conditions.

Conquest, Pacification, and Civil War in the South: 1778–81.

Clinton knew that in Georgia and South Carolina, low country rice planters lived in fear that their slaves (two‐thirds of the population) would rebel, and that long‐standing animosities divided lowland whites from the poorer, more numerous backcountry farmers. This convinced him that his best hope of victory lay in the Lower South; he also understood that to retain control of even this region, he would have to win the support, or at least the compliance, of the uncommitted population. Clinton therefore decided to move the war to the South, using loyalist units not as auxiliaries in conventional operations, but as pacification forces. Once the regulars cleared the countryside of rebels, loyalist units would organize local self‐defense forces to keep the patriot militia at bay. When law and order had been established, they would hand control over to civilians, who would reinstitute civil government under crown auspices.

Pacification began promisingly with the invasion of Georgia in the winter of 1778–79. Savannah fell to a 3,500‐man British force under Lt. Col. Archibald Campbell on 29 December 1778; hundreds of Georgians volunteered as loyalist irregulars, and quickly garrisoned what the regulars conquered. Redcoats took Augusta on 29 January 1779, then stood off two Continental attempts to retake the town. American forces withdrew to Charleston. By the end of July 1779, royal government had been reinstituted under a civilian governor. A Franco‐American force under Admiral d’Estaing and Maj. Gen. Benjamin Lincoln besieged Savannah in October 1779, but d’Estaing soon withdrew to the West Indies and Lincoln returned to Charleston. Georgia became Clinton's base for carrying the war to South Carolina.

The invasion began in the spring of 1780 with a spectacular success: Clinton came from New York with over 8,000 men to direct the campaign, trapping Lincoln in Charleston, which fell on 12 May. The surrender of Lincoln's 2,600‐man garrison obliterated the Continental presence in the Lower South. Clinton established outposts throughout the countryside and recruited loyalists to hold them, making every effort to avoid repeating past mistakes. After forbidding looting and appointing an inspector general to keep the loyalists in line, he left Charleston in early summer, taking a third of his troops back to New York.

Clinton did not know it, but his pacification program would engulf the Lower South in a sanguinary civil war. He had already alienated most of the planter gentry by encouraging slaves to run away to the British lines and offering them refuge; he even permitted a black unit, the Carolina Corps, to be formed of ex‐slaves, alarming Southern whites fully as much as Burgoyne had alarmed New Yorkers by employing Indians as auxiliaries. Thus even before he left for New York, Clinton had begun to alienate would‐be neutrals, and had given patriot planters a reason not to lay down their arms and sit out the remainder of the war. The bands of patriot partisans who retreated to the swamps and mountains could no more be rooted out than the loyalists could be restrained from settling old scores. Patriot irregulars like Thomas Sumter and Francis Marion made terrorist attacks on loyalists and regular detachments, and the Tory legions of Banastre Tarleton and Patrick Ferguson answered terror with terror. Patriot militiamen, for example, massacred many of Ferguson's loyalists after the Battle of King's Mountain (7 October 1780), retaliating for Tarleton's earlier massacre of patriots at the Battle of Waxhaws (29 May); these were, however, only the best known atrocities in a savage guerrilla war.

Loyalist attacks swelled patriot ranks with former neutrals throughout the backcountry during the summer and fall of 1780. Meanwhile in the low country, Clinton's policy of encouraging slaves to run away brought tens of thousands of them to British camps in search of freedom. Planters lost sympathy with the British as their labor forces vanished. By year's end, pacification was doomed in low country and backcountry alike. Clinton was perhaps the last to know. Back in New York he expected an attack by the French fleet and an expeditionary force under the comte de Rochambeau, France's new commander in chief in America.

Clinton had left behind about 8,000 men under the command of Lord Charles Cornwallis, whose inability to control a chaotic region intensified his dislike of Clinton and pacification. He preferred action, and with a field army of about 4,000 men responded decisively when a Continental force under Horatio Gates attempted to invade South Carolina. After routing Gates at the Battle of Camden (16 August 1780), Cornwallis concentrated on defeating the next Continental general to appear, Nathanael Greene.

Greene assumed command of a shattered Continental force at Charlotte, North Carolina, on 2 December 1780, and immediately took the offensive. He daringly divided his 2,000 Continentals and militiamen into two bodies, taking about 1,500 men under his own command and assigning the rest to Brig. Gen. Daniel Morgan. Morgan struck southwest into the backcountry and defeated Tarleton's loyalist legion at the Battle of Cowpens, 17 January 1781; then he retreated to North Carolina and rejoined Greene at the Catawba River. Cornwallis gave chase; Greene withdrew northeastward toward the Dan River, near the Virginia border. Cornwallis lacked the boats to cross the Dan and halted on 17 February 1781, turning toward Hillsborough to replenish his provisions. Greene crossed back into North Carolina and sent detachments to harass his enemy. On 25 February 1781, the cavalry legion of Lt. Col. Henry Lee (“Light‐Horse Harry”) annihilated a loyalist unit at the Haw River, leading Cornwallis's loyalists to abandon him. When Greene finally joined forces on 15 March at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, Cornwallis had just 1,600 redcoats to attack 4,450 Continentals and militia.

Cornwallis's superbly disciplined regulars carried the day at Guilford, but a third were killed or wounded while Greene sustained losses of perhaps 10 percent. Cornwallis headed for Wilmington, where he could be resupplied by sea. After a brief rest, he marched north to Virginia. There he hoped to trap the Continentals of the marquis de Lafayette, who had been fencing with a 3,000‐man British force under the turncoat American general, Benedict Arnold. (Arnold had accepted a British command and a large payment in return for his promise to hand over the fortress of West Point, New York, in 1780. The plot failed, but Arnold escaped to fight for the British.) Arnold had picked up substantial loyalist support, and Cornwallis convinced himself that taking Virginia would somehow secure the Carolinas and Georgia. Greene, he assumed, would move to support Lafayette.

But Greene returned to South Carolina and attacked the scattered British garrisons there. Thus, while Cornwallis pursued Lafayette, British commanders in South Carolina and Georgia found themselves forced to withdraw to the coastal enclaves of Wilmington, Charleston, and Savannah. Behind them, patriot militia units reasserted control over the countryside.

Clinton sent troops from New York, giving Cornwallis over 7,000 men to bring Lafayette's 1,200 Continentals (and variable numbers of militiamen) to bay. When Lafayette refused to be trapped, Cornwallis used cavalry units and loyalist auxiliaries to attack rebel property. The more successful these raids were—and some, like Tarleton's Charlottesville raid in June and his 400‐mile swing through the Southside in July, were spectacular—the more Lafayette's support grew. Reinforced by Continentals from Pennsylvania, Lafayette shadowed Cornwallis down the York peninsula in August, as he moved to establish a base with access to the sea: Yorktown.

After three years of bungled or thwarted operations, the French Navy finally exerted a decisive effect on land operations. From the beginning of the alliance, French admirals had preferred to cruise the Caribbean whenever possible; they entered North American waters only when the hurricane season made West Indian operations hazardous. Rochambeau's expeditionary force, in America since July 1780, had so far sat in Newport, Rhode Island. Washington and Rochambeau had planned to attack New York, but the arrival of Admiral de Grasse's fleet and the news that Cornwallis had moved to Yorktown changed everything. When de Grasse announced that he would operate in the Chesapeake until 15 October, Washington decided to trap Cornwallis. He marched south with half his army and most of the French expeditionary force on 20 August. On 14 September, he joined forces with Lafayette on the York Peninsula.

De Grasse had already debarked troops and sailed back to the bay's entrance. There, on 5 September, he met the British fleet of Adm. Thomas Graves. In the ensuing battle off the Chesapeake Capes, de Grasse repelled Grave's fleet, inflicting damage that forced it back to New York. This decided the outcome of the campaign, and—in a sense—the war. Within days, Admiral de Barras's squadron arrived from Newport with supplies and siege artillery. Cornwallis was doomed.

The Franco‐American army marched to Yorktown on 28 September and prepared to lay siege. Formal operations opened on 6 October and lasted until Cornwallis had endured a week of bombardment. When he surrendered on 20 October, the allies took charge of a quarter of the British army in America—8,000 troops—and a mountain of equipment.

The Battle of Yorktown did not deal a death blow to British military strength, but it made the ministry's position in Parliament untenable. The prime minister, Lord North, had long hoped to resign; he left office early in 1782. Clinton was recalled and replaced by Gen. Guy Carleton. Pressed by demands in other theaters, Whitehall suspended military activity in America.

Endgame: 1782–83.

Carleton reached New York in May 1782 and ended offensive operations until the political settlement could be negotiated in Europe. The British had already abandoned Wilmington (January 1782); they would soon evacuate Savannah (July) and Charleston (December). Washington observed Carleton from his Hudson River fortifications, but took no further action.

Meanwhile, the war went from bad to worse for Britain. Following Yorktown, de Grasse had sailed up the Caribbean, where he seized Nevis, St. Christopher, and Montserrat. In April 1782, he threatened the grandest prize of all, Jamaica; and although Adm. George Romney thwarted that attempt in a battle off the Isles des Saintes near Guadeloupe, it remained possible that a combined Franco‐Spanish force would mount a new invasion once the hurricane season had passed. Spain, indeed, had become a critical actor in the war. Following the declaration of war in June 1779, Spanish forces had attacked British posts in West Florida, taking Natchez (5 October 1779), Mobile (14 March 1780), and Pensacola (8 May 1781). Worse, from Britain's perspective, was Spain's conquest of Minorca (5 February 1782) and its repeated threats to Gibraltar. After blockading the fortress in 1779–80 and 1781–82, Spanish naval and land forces besieged it in 1782, trying to storm it in September. The attack failed, but Spain could still seal the straits and starve out the garrison. Finally, Dutch trade had been so valuable to America, Spain, and France that the British had declared war against Holland in December 1780. Dutch belligerency made it virtually impossible for the Royal Navy to operate in the North Sea and raised the possibility that Holland's East Indies fleet would aid the French against British forces in India, where by 1782 the situation looked grave.

Peace commissioners met in Paris as early as April 1782, but only in October did Britain's representatives agree to recognize American independence. Thereafter, the U.S. commissioners—Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay—quickly agreed on articles with the British. The French, nearly bankrupt, were also willing to make peace, having revenged the humiliation of 1763 by depriving Britain of thirteen valuable colonies. Spain, however, refused to parley while it might still take Gibraltar, and it was not until 20 January 1783 that preliminary articles were signed. On 4 February, Britain announced the cessation of hostilities. Congress ratified the treaty on 15 April; the formal articles were concluded at the Peace of Paris on 3 September.

The peace treaty strongly favored the United States. Britain recognized American independence, agreed to boundaries between the Great Lakes and the 31st parallel as far west as the Mississippi River, recognized American fishing rights off Newfoundland, and promised to evacuate its posts on American territory “with all convenient speed.” The United States in turn agreed to pay all debts due to British creditors and compensate loyalists for their confiscated property. The states proved slow to compensate the loyalists, and the British retained posts in the Northwest until 1796; but in other respects the peace restored amity with remarkable speed, given the length and ferocity of the war.

It was not British benevolence but desperation that accounted for the character of the Peace of Paris. Reeling militarily and isolated diplomatically, Britain faced severe financial peril and a public sick of war. In the end, Britain made peace on generous terms because it needed to trade with its former colonies, just as the United States—bankrupt and facing economic collapse—needed to reestablish the commercial connections war had severed.

Wherever the British army went between 1775 and 1781, it invariably alienated the people whose support it needed most, the neutrals. When the fighting started in 1775, only New England had a patriot majority; elsewhere, local minorities of armed patriots intimidated smaller loyalist minorities, and most colonists avoided committing themselves. No British commander in chief ever found a way to turn the neutrals into active supporters—or keep his troops from providing endless object lessons in British “tyranny.”

Thus, over a long and bitter war, the neutrals dwindled in number everywhere. No matter how many battles the British army won, it could not maintain control—and protect its supporters—outside of ports like New York, Charleston, and Savannah. Whenever the army left an area, its collaborators had to choose between fleeing as refugees and remaining to face the patriot militias that reasserted control as soon as the last redcoat had departed. Clinton's recognition of this pattern led both to his southern pacification plan and to the opening of the war's most destructive phase, which nullified the promise of his strategy. Even before Yorktown, Americans were war‐weary; but even the most apathetic of them could see that the British government would never sustain its presence in America, and sooner or later the patriots would return. Thus the war educated Americans in the practical politics of self‐interest and survival. Ultimately, the neutrals, and many loyalists, chose patriot rule over exile.

This is not to minimize the role of republican ideology in influencing the shape of Revolutionary events, but only to contextualize it. Far from being an autonomous intellectual construct, revolutionary republicanism was a dynamic ideological response to changing conditions, and was itself shaped by the war—particularly insofar as the coercion of populations by armed force gave immediate meaning to the concept of tyranny and encouraged patriot leaders to take stringent steps toward subordinating military to civil authority in the postwar era.

Nor does the recognition of the war as decisively shaped by social factors diminish the importance of French intervention. Even in the indecisive first years of the alliance, the French Navy denied the Royal Navy supremacy on the Atlantic, making the American war difficult to sustain; French matériel and money enabled the Continental army to survive overwhelming difficulties. By denying Cornwallis his escape route, the French Fleet allowed a Franco‐American army to besiege Yorktown; French cannon, fired from emplacements laid out by French engineers, persuaded Cornwallis to surrender. The imminent threat of further losses to French, Spanish, and Dutch forces gave British opposition politicians sufficient leverage to end the war. French participation thus determined when and how the war ended; but it did not make the difference between winning and losing for the British. American society itself had rendered the Revolutionary War a fight that Britain could not win.

Bibliography

Christopher Ward , The War of the Revolution, 1952.
Piers Mackesy , The War for America, 1775–1783, 1964.
Mark Mayo Boatner III , Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, 1966.
Don Higginbotham , The War of American Independence, 1971.
John Shy, ed., A People Numerous and Armed, 1976.
Charles Royster , A Revolutionary People at War, 1979.
Ronald Hoffman, et al., eds., Diplomacy and Revolution, 1981.
James Kirby Martin and and Mark Lender , A Respectable Army, 1982.
Robert Middlekauff , The Glorious Cause, 1982.
Ronald Hoffman, et al., eds., Arms and Independence, 1984.
Jonathan R. Dull , A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution, 1985.
Ronald Hoffman, et al., eds., An Uncivil War, 1985.
Ronald Hoffman, et al., eds., Peace and Peacemakers, 1986.
John Ferling, ed., The World Turned Upside Down, 1988.
Don Higginbotham, ed., War and Society in Revolutionary America, 1988.
Russell F. Weigley , The Age of Battles, 1991.

Fred Anderson

Revolutionary War (1775–1783): Domestic Course The War of Independence, the Pennsylvania Centinel suggested in 1785, had removed that “great reluctance to innovation, so remarkable in old communities.” The Centinel did not exaggerate. Between 1776 and 1783, American patriots had to organize new governments, raise and supply a substantial army, create a system of public finance, and manufacture goods once imported from Europe. Beyond these sizable tasks, they had to deal with pressing problems: tens of thousands of loyalists ready to fight for their king; 500,000 enslaved Africans and African Americans, who might themselves revolt for liberty; and a farm economy increasingly dependent on the labor of women and youth. The task was formidable; the stakes high. The war might be fought by soldiers and generals, but it would be won or lost by civilians and civic leaders.

Political Innovation and Conflict.

Patriot leaders acted swiftly to establish the legitimacy of their rule. On 10 May 1776, Congress urged patriots to suppress royal authority and establish institutions based on popular rule. By the end of 1776, Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania had written new constitutions, and Connecticut and Rhode Island had transformed their colonial charters into republican documents by deleting all references to the king.

The Declaration of Independence stated the republican principle of popular sovereignty, and the Delaware Constitution interpreted that to mean the exercise of political power: “the Right of the People to participate in the Legislature.” But most patriots gave a narrow definition to the political nation, restricting voting and office holding to propertied white men. Conservative patriots were more adamant, denying that popular sovereignty meant rule by men who owned only a little property.

In the heat of revolution, radical patriots embraced a democratic outlook: every citizen who supported the rebellion—property owner or not—had “an equal claim to all privileges, liberties and immunities,” declared an article in the Maryland Gazette. This democratic republicanism received fullest expression in Pennsylvania, where Scots‐Irish farmers, Philadelphia artisans, and Enlightenment‐influenced intellectuals cooperated to create the most democratic institutions of government in America or Europe. The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 abolished property owning as a qualification for political participation, giving all men who paid taxes the right to vote and hold office.

Pennsylvania's radical constitution alarmed leading patriots in other states, who feared that ordinary citizens would use their numerical advantage to levy heavy taxes on the rich. They insisted on constitutions that would keep the “better sort” in power. Thus, the New York Constitution of 1777, written chiefly by John Jay, used property qualifications to exclude one‐half of the white men from voting for the governor and the upper house of the legislature, while the South Carolina Constitution of 1778 restricted membership in the state legislature to the richest 10 percent of the white population.

Nonetheless, the Revolutionary War democratized American politics. The new states constitutions apportioned seats in the legislatures on the basis of population, giving yeomen farmers in western areas more equal representation. Moreover, republican ideology raised the political consciousness of ordinary Americans. During the war, many patriot militiamen claimed the right to elect their officers; subsequently, many veterans, whether or not they had property, demanded the franchise. And when they voted, they chose different sorts of leaders. Before the war, about 85 percent of the assembly were wealthy men; by 1784, however, middling farmers and artisans controlled the lower houses of most northern states and formed a sizable minority in the southern states.

Political innovation also took place on the national level as the Continental Congress devised the first national constitution. The Articles of Confederation, approved by Congress on 15 November 1777, provided for a loose confederation in which “each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence” and all powers and rights not “expressly delegated” to the United States. The Confederation government had the authority to declare war and make peace, to conclude treaties with foreign nations, to borrow and print money, and to requisition funds from the states “for the common defense or general welfare.” The body charged with exercising these powers was the Congress, in which each state had one vote, regardless of its population. Because of disputes among the states over the title to western lands, the articles were not ratified until 1781. Threatened by the army of Gen. Charles Cornwallis, Virginia finally ceded its land claims to Congress in 1781, and Maryland, the final holdout, ratified the articles.

Wartime Finance.

Congress's main problem was not land but money. Because opposition to taxes had fueled the independence movement, patriot officials hesitated to impose taxes. To finance the war, the states first borrowed money, in gold or silver or British currency, from wealthy individuals. These funds quickly ran out, so the states created a new paper currency—the dollar—and issued notes with a face value of $260 million, using it to pay soldiers and purchase supplies. Since the new notes were printed in huge quantities and not backed by gold or silver or by tax revenues or mortgages on land, they quickly depreciated. Indeed, North Carolina's paper money came to be worth so little that the state government itself refused to accept it.

The monetary system created by the Continental Congress collapsed as well, despite the efforts of Robert Morris, the Philadelphia merchant who became superintendent of finance in February 1781. To raise domestic loans, Congress borrowed $6 million from France and pledged it as security; wealthy Americans promptly purchased $27 million in Continental loan certificates. Congress also financed the war by printing money—some $191 million to 1779. By that time, so much currency had been printed that it took $42 in Continental bills to buy goods worth $1 in gold or silver. And things got worse, with the ratio increasing to 100 to 1 in 1780 and 146 to 1 in 1781. At that point, not even the most virtuous patriot farmers would sell food to the American army.

The failure of wartime finance nearly doomed the patriot cause. In 1780, Gen. George Washington called urgently for a national system of taxation, warning that otherwise “our cause is lost.” However, unanimous consent was required to amend the articles, and in 1781 Rhode Island rejected Superintendent Morris's proposal for a national tariff, an import duty of 5 percent on foreign goods. Two years later, New York blocked another proposed national tariff.

Consequently the war was financed through inflated currency, a hidden system of taxation that bore particularly hard on the farmers, artisans, and soldiers who received paper money for supplies and military pay. As soon as these men or their families received the currency, it lost purchasing power—literally depreciating in their pockets. Individually, these losses were small, amounting to a tiny “tax” every time an ordinary citizen received a paper dollar, kept it for a week, and then spent it. But collectively these “currency taxes” paid for the struggle for independence.

The Limits of Republican Virtues.

Patriots knew that winning the war depended on patriotism, and were at first optimistic that their republican ideology would inspire public virtue and self‐sacrifice. “The word republic,” wrote Thomas Paine, “means the public good, or the good of the whole.” And, continued Philadelphia patriot Benjamin Rush: “Every man in a republic is public property. His time and talents—his youth—his manhood—his old age—nay more, life, all belong to his country.”

But rhetoric could not create an army. Because yeoman farmers and militiamen preferred to serve in local units near their fields and families, few propertied Americans volunteered for service in the enlisted ranks of the Continental army. Consequently, except for the officers, most of its recruits were drawn from the lower ranks of society. For example, most troops commanded by Gen. William Smallwood of Maryland were either poor American‐born youths or older foreign‐born men—British ex‐convicts or former indentured servants. Historians continue to debate motivation for enlistment and continued service—the roles of economic gain (a bonus of $20 cash and the promise of 100 acres), belief in the cause of liberty and republicanism, and psychological commitments to their comrades. Confronted by a reluctant citizenry and a lack of funds, Congress fell far short of its goal of a regular army of 75,000 men; the total Continental force never reached half that number.

As economic hardship brought the war closer to home, civilians also lost their zeal for self‐sacrifice. The British naval blockade nearly eliminated the New England fishing industry and cut off the supply of European manufactured goods to American consumers. Domestic trade and production declined as well. The British occupation of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia put thousands of people out of work; the population of New York City declined from 21,000 in 1774 to less than half that at war's end. In the Chesapeake, the British blockade denied tobacco planters access to European markets, forcing them to turn to the cultivation of wheat, corn, and other foodstuffs. All across the land, ordinary commercial activity slackened as farmers and artisans adapted to a war economy.

The scarcity of imported goods brought a sharp rise in prices and widespread appeals for government regulation. Consumers decried merchants and traders as “enemies, extortioners, and monopolizers.” In 1777, a convention of New England states tried to limit the price of domestic commodities and imported goods to 175 percent of their prewar level. To enforce this directive, the Massachusetts legislature passed an “Act to Prevent Monopoly and Oppression,” but so many farmers and artisans refused to sell at the established prices that consumers had to pay the market price “or submit to starving.”

The upward movement of prices—for grain and meat as well as manufactures—stimulated the economy. Army contractors roamed the countryside, offering farmers high prices for food, horses, and wagon transport. State governments encouraged artisans and entrepreneurs to manufacture military clothing, guns and gunpowder, and other scarce items—and with good results. By the end of the war, artisans in the town of Lynn, Massachusetts, were producing over 50,000 pairs of shoes each year. As Alexander Hamilton noted, the northern countryside had become “a vast scene of household manufacturing.” With financial self‐interest supplementing republican virtue, Americans laid the basis for economic as well as political independence.

Women and the War Effort.

Women workers played a large part in the expansion in production, particularly in the cloth industry. When the war cut off imports from Europe, government officials requisitioned clothing directly from the people. In Connecticut, officials called upon the citizens of Hartford to provide 1,000 coats and 1,600 shirts, and assessed smaller towns on a proportionate basis. Soldiers added their own pleas. Capt. Edward Rogers lost “all the shirts except the one on my back,” at the Battle of Long Island and wrote to his wife, “the making of cloath … must go on.”

Patriot women stepped into the breach, increasing production of homespun cloth. One Massachusetts town claimed an annual output of 30,000 yards of cloth, while women in Elizabeth, New Jersey, promised “upwards of 100,000 yards of linnen and woolen cloth.” With their husbands and sons away, many women also assumed the burden of farm production. Some went into the fields themselves, plowing fields or cutting and loading grain. Others supervised hired laborers or slaves, acquiring a taste for decision making in the process. “We have sow’d our oats as you desired,” Sarah Cobb Paine wrote to her absent husband; “had I been master I should have planted it to Corn.”

Some upper‐class women also entered into political debate, filling their letters and diaries (and undoubtedly their conversations) with opinions on public issues. “The men say we have no business [with politics],” Eliza Wilkinson of South Carolina complained in 1783; “they won’t even allow us liberty of thought, and that is all I want.” Other women, such as Abigail Adams, asked men to create a republican legal order to replace the common law rules of coverture that completely subordinated married women to their husbands. And a few women, inspired by revolutionary ideology, repudiated prevailing assumptions of women's inferiority. In 1779, Judith Sargent Murray, daughter of a wealthy New England merchant, wrote “On the Equality of the Sexes. In this essay, Murray systematically compared the intellectual faculties of men and women, arguing that women had a capacity for memory equal to that of men, and more imagination; any inferiority in judgment and reasoning, she argued, was due to lack of training.

A few men paid some attention to women's requests for greater social and legal equality. In Massachusetts, the state's attorney general persuaded a jury that girls had equal rights under the state's constitution and should not be deprived of schooling. Benjamin Rush, in his Thoughts on Female Education (1787), advocated the intellectual training of women, so they would “be an agreeable companion for a sensible man.” Rush likewise praised “republican mothers” who instructed “their sons in the principles of liberty and government.” But most patriots viewed women as inferior and subordinate. Politics remained a male preserve, with most state constitutions explicitly restricting suffrage to men. Because of deeply ingrained cultural assumptions of female inferiority, women entered the new republics as second‐class citizens.

Slavery Weakened.

For enslaved African Americans, as for women, war and republicanism brought new opportunities. Taking advantage of the disruptions of war, many blacks fled from their patriot owners and sought freedom behind British lines. Two white neighbors of Richard Henry Lee, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, lost “every slave they had in the world,” as did nearly “all those who were nearly the enemy.” More than 5,000 blacks left Charleston, South Carolina, with the departing British army. Other enslaved African Americans used wartime loyalty to their patriot masters to bargain for their liberty. Under a Manumission Act of 1782, Virginia planters granted freedom to more than 10,000 slaves.

Equally important was the intellectual attack against slavery. In Virginia, a Methodist conference declared slavery “contrary to the Golden Law of God on which hang all the Law and Prophets, and the unalienable Rights of Mankind, as well as every Principle of Revolution.” Such arguments prompted black emancipation in the northern states, where there were relatively few slaves. By 1784, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island had abolished slavery. To protect white property rights, the Pennsylvania Emancipation Act awarded freedom only to slaves born after 1780—and then only after they had served their mothers' masters for twenty‐eight years. Such economic concerns among whites, as well as racial prejudice, prevented emancipation in the South, where slaves accounted for 30 to 60 percent of the population and represented a huge financial investment. But those blacks who had won their freedom during the Revolutionary War began to develop churches, social institutions, and a partly autonomous African American culture.

The Fate of the Loyalists.

Even as most free African Americans chose to remain in the land of their birth, tens of thousands of loyalists emigrated to Canada and other British possessions. As early as 1765, many wealthy Americans—and thousands of ordinary colonists—had feared that resistance to Britain would end in mob rule, and the violent activities of the Sons of Liberty seemed to prove the point.

Once war came, it quickly turned into a civil conflict. Patriot committees of safety backed by armed militiamen collected taxes, sent food and clothing to the Continental army, and imposed fines or jail sentences on those who failed to support the patriot cause. “There is no such thing as remaining neutral,” declared the Committee of Safety of Farmington, Connecticut, and mobs of New England patriots beat suspected loyalists or destroyed their property. In the Middle Colonies, the contest between loyalists and patriots was more even. In New Jersey, most New Light members of the Dutch Reformed Church—enthusiastic Protestants—actively supported the American cause, but the more conservative Old Lights became loyalists. As the British and American armies marched back and forth across the state, those with reputations as patriots and loyalists fled from their homes to escape arrest—or worse. Soldiers and partisans looted farms, seeking plunder or revenge. Beginning in 1778, British strategies relied heavily on southern loyalists, mobilizing recent immigrants, such as the Scottish Highlanders in North Carolina, and using them to hold territory won by the British army. Their strategy turned the South into an arena of bitter partisan warfare, with atrocities on both sides.

As the war turned in favor of the patriots, loyalists feared for their lives—especially since more than 55,000 loyalists had fought for the British as regular soldiers or militia. More than 100,000 loyalists emigrated to Canada, the West Indies, or Britain. Those who moved to Canada—where they became known as the United Empire Loyalists—assumed the leadership of the English‐speaking colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Ontario.

Some patriots wanted to confiscate the property of the departed “traitors,” and the passions of war lent urgency to their arguments. When the British army invaded the South, the North Carolina assembly confiscated loyalists' estates outright. Officials in New York also seized loyalists' lands and goods. However, many patriots opposed these seizures as contrary to republican property rights. Consequently, most states seized only a limited amount of property—that owned by notorious loyalists—so that, unlike France after 1789 or Russia after 1917, the revolutionary upheaval did not drastically alter the structure of American society.

Still, the loyalist exodus disrupted the established social order in many states as upwardly mobile patriot merchants climbed to the top of the economic ladder. In Massachusetts, the Lowell, Higginson, Jackson, and Cabot families filled the vacuum created by the departure of the Hutchinsons and Apthorps and their friends. Small‐scale traders in Philadelphia and its environs likewise stepped into vacancies created when loyalist Anglican and neutral/pacifist Quaker mercantile firms collapsed during the war. These changes replaced a conservative economic elite—one that invested primarily in foreign trade and urban real estate—with a group of more entrepreneurial‐minded republican merchants.

In economic life, as in politics, finance, and gender and racial relations, the Revolutionary War was just that: a dramatic disruption of established life that demanded innovation and changed forever the course of American history.

Bibliography

Willi Paul Adams , The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era, 1980.
Richard Buel, Jr. , Dear Liberty: Connecticut's Mobilization for the Revolutionary War, 1980.
William G. Anderson , The Price of Liberty: The Public Debt of the American Revolution, 1983.
Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the American Revolution, 1983.
Ronald Hoffman, Thad W. Tate, and Peter J. Albert, eds., An Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry during the American Revolution, 1985.
Robert M. Calhoon et al. , The Loyalist Perception, 1989.
Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Women in the Age of the American Revolution, 1989.
Gary B. Nash , Race and Revolution, 1990.
Alfred F. Young, ed. Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, 1993.
Jean Butenhoff Lee , The Price of Nationhood: The American Revolution in Charles County, 1994.

James A. Henretta

Revolutionary War (1775–83): Postwar Impact The new nation still faced critical unresolved issues even after the peace was signed in the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Some were social and political issues opened in the decade before the war broke out, such as who should vote or what defined the public good, occasionally raising questions for long‐term consideration such as the future of slavery or the place of women in society. Others were problems created by the war itself. Effective control over much of the landmass ceded by Britain had yet to be achieved; acceptance by the nations of the world required diplomacy and a clear articulation of American national interests; economic adjustments had to be made to compensate for lost privileges in the British market; and internal differences of opinion about how best to govern the nation had to be resolved. The American Revolution entered its final phase with both leaders and the people asking themselves what kind of country they wanted and how best to achieve it. The ringing phrases of the Declaration of Independence promised much, but what did they mean?

All of the nations involved in the Revolutionary War—both the allies and the adversaries of the United States—made the postwar adjustment difficult. The British were eager enough to end the war; indeed, British public opinion demanded it. But in surrendering the vast terrain south of the Great Lakes, and west of the Appalachians to the Mississippi River, the British negotiators signed away the very land George III, in his famous Royal Proclamation of 1763, had promised to protect as Indian hunting grounds. Britain's Indian allies, a decided majority of the Indians who chose sides in the Revolutionary War, felt betrayed. When American settlers, unchecked by the United States, began streaming across the Appalachians into the Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee regions even before the war ended, bitter clashes with the Indians ensued. Claiming that they sought only to maintain order on a lawless frontier, the British reneged on their treaty promise and maintained British troops on American soil. They remained at Detroit and other western forts until the mid‐1790s, encouraging the Indians to believe that they would protect them against the American onslaught, and arguing that the trade in skins and furs (to which the British were entitled) required policing.

America's allies were almost as difficult. France and Spain both hoped that the United States would get less than it got: the French were dissatisfied with the privileged position given American fishermen in the North Atlantic cod fishery, while the Spanish resented the American western boundary at the Mississippi. Spain insisted that Americans had no right to navigate the Mississippi River, and tensions persisted between the two nations until 1795, when a compromise was reached. Meanwhile, Spain, behaving like the British in the Northwest, encouraged Indians on the southwest frontier to defy the Americans.

The United States dealt with these issues both militarily and diplomatically. Even though Congress had disbanded the Continental Army, reduced the military establishment to the 1st American Regiment, and sold off the ships of the navy, troops were assigned to the frontier, where they negotiated the first new treaties with the western Indians. For their part, the Indians sought compromise and retention of their land rights and created a confederacy to present a united front. But the contradiction between official American promises and unrestrained settler violence created divisions among the native leaders, and in the end the war hawks on both sides won out. The task of bringing peace to the Northwest forced Congress to increase the size of the army, and, in a series of frontier battles, to resolve the matter by force of arms.

Meanwhile, American diplomats, led by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, promoted American interests in Europe. Jefferson went to France (where he remained until the early months of the French Revolution), working to preserve the outward friendship of the wartime alliance, while retaining American freedom of action. With Jefferson's help, France became the chief trading partner of the United States. Adams arrived at the Court of St. James in 1785 as the first American official to confront George III on behalf of the new nation. Both Jefferson and Adams disliked European social distinctions and economic disparities, but each also formed strong attachments to which they later clung, and which helped define their subsequent political followings in the United States, especially in the 1790s when Americans responded to the progress of the French Revolution.

The relations of the United States with the rest of the world depended in large measure on American success in adjusting to new economic imperatives. In 1783, a good many Americans hoped to restore their economic links with Britain, and for a few months after the war, trade was reopened and vigorously pursued. But the British ministry soon decided to cut Americans out of the preferential marketplace of the British empire while merchants tightened credit when it became apparent that Americans lacked the cash to pay for British manufactures. Congress struggled with the problems of economic adjustment. From his position as superintendent of finance, Robert Morris tried to reorganize credit in the country by establishing a Bank of North America (BNA) as a private bank with a public mandate to serve the Congress and the nation as a central bank. The first American banks were chartered in several states during the 1780s, although the BNA itself ran into trouble politically and financially and lost its Pennsylvania charter before the decade was out. Alexander Hamilton of New York argued that Morris had taken the right track, and that the United States must solve its economic problems by consolidating the national debt and creating a national bank. Meanwhile, Congress sought most‐favored‐nation treaties with European nations, and individual merchant houses pressed to open new markets that included the Far East.

The problems of economic adjustment created antagonisms among Americans themselves, and contributed substantially to the political and social division eventually expressed in a debate over the constitution. Nationalists who were to become identified as Federalists argued that the central government needed strengthening, and eventually they insisted that only a new constitution could give the United States the energy it needed to attain economic stability and national respectability. Localists who preferred the decentralized structure provided by the Articles of Confederation rejected the notion of complete constitutional revision and became Anti‐Federalists, although most agreed that Congress might need additional powers to tackle the difficult problems of the time.

These were more than superficial disagreements over how best to govern a young republic experiencing short‐term economic problems. The divisions represented fundamental differences of opinion about what the American Revolution was about and what independence was meant to accomplish. The war had created some of the divisions and sharpened others. In many states, local antagonism toward Tories or loyalists persisted; 60,000–80,000 loyalists fled the United States as refugees, and legislatures were divided over whether to let Tories return. Most that had confiscated Tory estates refused compensation. States denied Tory and British creditors the right to collect old debts, despite the article in the peace treaty requiring it and Congress's urging the states to comply. The U.S. Army itself was divided at war's end between an officer class that had sought and won promises of a postwar pension, and men in the ranks who had been paid in depreciated government script and vague promises. When, after the war, the officers organized the Society of Cincinnati to promote their right to a commutation, or lump‐sum payment in lieu of pensions, many Americans, including rank‐and‐file veterans, complained about the emergence of aristocracy in American society. The war had created other tensions not easily dissipated: wartime shortages of provisions, inflation caused by the printing of paper money, and fears about the manipulation of prices by hoarders and forestallers pitted rural against urban dwellers and farmers against merchants. After the war, a short‐lived burst of consumer spending fueled by loose credit arrangements set the stage for bitter social resentments when merchants suddenly contracted credit and called for payment of debts. Many states saw violent demonstrations against debtor courts in 1785–86; Massachusetts faced armed rebellion.

What has been called Shays's Rebellion, an armed protest by farmer‐regulators in western Massachusetts in the fall and winter of 1786–87, was in reality only the most visible sign of a widespread discontent. Forced court closures were common throughout New England; in New Hampshire, protestors for a short time held the legislature hostage; and throughout Massachusetts, farmers complained to the legislature about tax laws, the shortage of money, and the greed of merchants. But only 2,000 or so actually took up arms in the Connecticut River Valley towns of western Massachusetts, and were forcibly suppressed by a hastily recruited government force of about 5,000 under Benjamin Lincoln. Capt. Daniel Shays, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, and other leaders of the uprising, managed to escape into neighboring Vermont, and the rest of the rebels were dispersed. The Massachusetts government eventually provided reprieves or pardons for all, but the experience left Americans divided.

It is too simple to equate the divisions of Shays' Rebellion with Federalist–Anti‐Federalist divisions over the Constitution of 1787, but a good many Americans at the time did so; both sides used divisive rhetoric and identified antagonistic interests. Federalists claimed to be merchants, creditors, and commercial farmers, all sound money people who sought order and stability both in the economy and in the larger society, and portrayed their opponents as poor farmers, debtors, or localists who failed to understand the needs of a nation. Anti‐Federalists saw themselves as honest husbandmen who were up against rapacious merchants and monied holders of public securities. America's urban‐rural split curiously lumped a good many commercial farmers on the urban side of the divide, but also united urban artisans with merchants in the Federalist effort to strengthen the American economy through a revitalized national policy. Even if the divisions were not as precise as contemporaries suggested, the debate over the Constitution shows that there were divisions in American society created or perhaps sharpened by the American Revolution, and in particular by the war. Writing in the famous Federalist Papers, James Madison was to argue that the new Constitution made sense in such a society: it was designed to steer conflicting interests into reasoned debate and compromise.

In practice, not even the new federal Constitution could resolve all of the questions the Revolution had opened. It did, however, provide a democratic framework for resolving such issues in the future, and as Madison envisaged it, it provided a forum for the enormous diversity of condition and opinion that already existed in the United States and was to continue. George Washington's first administration and the statesmen of the First Congress strengthened popular acceptance of the new Constitution, convincing Americans that their diverse views were fairly represented in government and that their rights were adequately protected. The Revolution, however, had also left a legacy of healthy skepticism about government. Americans argued variously that evangelical religion held better answers, that families must protect values, that women had a special role in nurturing “virtuous” citizens, that both public and private education must be expanded, or that the complexities of modern life required an informed citizenry well served by a free press. There was paradox in the new American culture; there was also vibrancy and excitement and enormous optimism.
[See also Civil‐Military Relations; Native American Wars: Wars Between Native Americans and Europeans and Euro‐Americans; Newburgh “Conspiracy” (1783); Society and War.]

Bibliography

Merrill Jensen , The New Nation: A History of the United States during the Confederation, 1950.
Wallace Brown , The Good Americans: The Loyalists in the American Revolution, 1969.
Richard H. Kohn , Eagle and Sword, 1975.
Paul H. Smith, ed., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, 25 vols., 1976–98.
Jack N. Rakove , The Beginnings of National Politics, 1979.
David P. Szatmary , Shays' Rebellion, 1980.
Jonathan R. Dull , A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution, 1985.
Robert A. Gross, ed., In Debt to Shays, 1993.
Colin G. Calloway , The American Revolution in Indian Country, 1995.

Stephen E. Patterson

Revolutionary War (1775–83): Changing Interpretations It has been argued that the American Revolution is the central event of American history, and it has occasioned more scholarship than any other episode save the Civil War. Yet, when former President John Adams asked Thomas McKean in 1815 who would write the Revolution's history, he posed a challenge that historians still confront. The secret sessions and debates, now lost along with other critical information that vanished when the participants died, leave many vital gaps in our understanding. What was the real story?

Historians, of course, have not hesitated to offer accounts of the Revolution. Several key questions have defined their interpretations. How and when did the Americans come to consider themselves a nation different from Great Britain? Was the Revolutionary War inevitable? To what degree was the Revolutionary War a civil war? Was there a struggle for power among the factions in the United States during the war? Why independence? Could the British government have prevented the separation? Why did the British pursue the measures they did?

Military historians have often focused on George Washington's overall strategy and have debated whether the American victory could have been achieved without the Continental army, which was its centerpiece. Was the French Alliance critical, or not? To what extent did British strategy and tactics work against an imperial victory by politicizing the American population? Why did the British devastate so much of Scotland in warfare thirty years earlier but do so little, comparatively, to the rebellious colonies in North America?

Finally, how should we interpret the U.S. Constitution? Was it a counterrevolutionary document created to serve the class interests of its framers, or did it realize and embody the ideological promise of revolutionary republicanism? Perhaps most intriguing of all, why did the Revolution not turn upon itself and devour its own as in so many other revolutions? There was no terror—once the war ended, its violence was soon forgotten, and its effects dissipated; unlike most other revolutionary peoples in the Americas, those of the United States escaped militarization or dictatorship by their War of Independence.

The Revolution's first historians witnessed the events they described. Their highly colored, contingent, localized, and biased narratives made impassioned arguments for the justice of their cause, whether loyalist or Whig. Two valuable loyalist accounts are Peter Oliver's violently partisan Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion (1781; published 1961), and the third and fourth volumes of Thomas Hutchinson's History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay (1767, 1828), which provide a more balanced and insightful view. Their Whig counterparts are Mercy Otis Warren's three‐volume History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution (1805), which gives a contemporary woman's view of politics and a relatively balanced account; and Dr. David Ramsay's History of the American Revolution (1789), the only contemporary narrative to focus on the Revolution outside New England. The most significant work published in the immediate post‐Revolutionary period, Mason Locke Weem's Life of Washington (1809), treated Washington's as an exemplary life, and fictionalized shamelessly to make its points. It influenced more Americans than any of the other early accounts.

The first significant school of interpretation on the Revolution, the Nationalist school, emerged in the mid‐nineteenth century. These historians collected thousands of documents and built the first archives of Revolutionary writings; their narratives stressed the inevitability of the American victory and endowed the story with providential significance. Jared Sparks, the librarian of Harvard College, was the first great figure of this school, publishing some 100 volumes on the Revolutionary period, including a 12‐volume Life and Writings of George Washington (1833–39) and a 10‐volume Works of Benjamin Franklin (1836–40). The dominating writer of Nationalist history, George Bancroft, published a ten‐volume History of the United States (1834–74), the last six volumes of which detail the events of the Revolution. For the Nationalists, the Revolution was above all a moral tale, acted out by great men whose virtue ensured America's progress toward its destiny of freedom.

The first academic interpreters of the Revolution, the Imperial school, appeared at the end of the nineteenth century. Writing principally from British documents and employing the critical methods pioneered by the German historian Leopold von Ranke, the Imperial historians scorned the providentialism of the Nationalists. Their version of the Revolution emphasized institutional factors and tended to empathize with the British; the most ardent among them regarded the Revolution as the result of a series of unfortunate misunderstandings—a colossal mistake. The most important figures and works in this school include Charles McLean Andrews, The Colonial Background of the American Revolution (1931); Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire Before the American Revolution, fourteen vols. (1936–69); and Leonard Woods Larabee, Royal Government in America (1930).

Twentieth‐century historians can be grouped into three major schools: the Progressives, the Neo‐Whigs, and the Modernists. The Progressives emphasized social science methods, embraced the frontier theory of Frederick Jackson Turner, and tended to explain the Revolution in terms of class conflict—a struggle not only for home rule but over who (as Carl Becker put it) “should rule at home.” They rejected the institutional focus and anglophilia of the Imperial historians and created a Revolution that was preeminently a struggle between common men with democratic aspirations, and their aristocratic, would‐be masters. Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence (1922), Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., The Colonial Merchant and the American Revolution (1918), John Franklin Jameson, The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (1926), and John C. Miller, Samuel Adams (1936) are some of the more significant works by members of this school.

The post–World War II generation of scholars, called Neo‐Whigs, reacted against the Progressives' class conflict–based interpretation and described a revolutionary movement that emerged from a broadly shared republican (or “Real Whig”) political ideology. Concerned with decision making and explaining human behavior in conflict situations, these historians generally view the Revolution as a conservative movement to protect American rights from the acts of Parliament after 1760. The most influential figure in this school, Bernard Bailyn, has produced several books and essays, most notably The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) and The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (1974). Other significant representatives include Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (1958); and Edmund and Helen Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis (1953), Bernhard Knollenberg, Origins of the American Revolution (1960), Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution (1972), Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts (1970), and Jack Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics (1979).

Modernists carry on the interpretative debates of earlier historians. Gordon S. Wood, in two of the most important works on the era, The Creation of the American Republic (1969) and The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), synthesizes the Progressive argument for a counterrevolutionary Constitution with the ideological analysis of the Neo‐Whigs, and argues that the Revolution represented a real change in colonial society, not a conservative reaction. In A Struggle for Power (1996), Theodore Draper provides a detailed synthesis covering the ten years before the war began, and explicitly downplays the ideological quality of the Revolution in favor of the political pragmatism of the revolutionaries. Draper's lack of interest in ideology as opposed to power mirrors the earlier work of James Kirby Martin, Men in Rebellion (1973).

The war itself has received increasing notice as an agent of revolutionary change. John Shy's suggestive essays in A People Numerous and Armed (1976), first pointed the way toward interpreting the Revolution as dynamically related to the War of Independence; two other distinguished collections of articles edited by Ronald Hoffman and Peter Albert, Arms and Independence (1984) and An Uncivil War (1985), offer valuable case studies of the war in local contexts. E. Wayne Carp explains the roles of localism and political culture as they influenced the supply and support of the Continental army in his To Starve the Army at Pleasure (1984). Charles Royster describes the interactions between the war, republicanism, and the Continental army in A Revolutionary People at War (1979). R. Arthur Bowler explores an important cause of the British failure to crush the rebellion in Logistics and the Failure of the British Army in America (1975), while Sylvia R. Frey describes the British army's social character in The British Soldier in America (1981). In The Military Experience in the Age of Reason (1988), Christopher Duffy develops a clear perspective on how war and society intertwined in the eighteenth century. Other significant works on the British forces and the war include Piers Mackesy , The Way for America (1964)
; John Shy , Toward Lexington (1965)
; William Seymour , The Price of Folly (1995)
; John Tilley , The British Navy and the American Revolution (1987)
; and Nathan Miller , Sea of Glory (1974)
. The secret and intelligence aspects of the war are covered in John Bakeless 's Turncoats, Traitors and Heroes (1959)
and Carl Van Doren 's Secret History of the American Revolution (1941)
.

One notable trend in modern scholarship is to include the story of common people and minority groups. Sylvia R. Frey 's Water from the Rock (1991)
and Slavery in North Carolina (1995) by Marvin L. Michael Kay and and Lorin Cary
explore the African American role in war and society. The Price of Nationhood (1994), by Jean B. Lee , studies Charles County, Maryland, as transformed by the war
; while Robert Gross , The Minutemen and Their World (1976)
, examines Concord, Massachusetts. David Hackett Fisher recounts the coming of the war in Boston in Paul Revere's Ride (1994)
. John Selby , The Revolution in Virginia (1988)
, and Richard Buel , Dear Liberty: Connecticut's Mobilization in the Revolutionary War (1981)
, are strong colonywide studies of the war's impact.

Two classics in the history of Revolutionary‐era women are Mary Beth Norton , Liberty's Daughters (1980
) and Linda Kerber , Women of the Republic (1980)
; Ronald Hoffman and Peter Albert, eds., Women in the Age of the American Revolution (1989)
, collects several excellent essays.

Native Americans have lately received notable treatments in Richard White , The Middle Ground (1991)
; Gregory Evans Down , A Spirited Resistance (1992)
; Tom Hatley , The Dividing Paths (1993)
; and Colin Calloway , The American Revolution in Indian Country (1995)
, all of which depict Native Americans not as mere victims, but historical actors.

In general, there are two areas where further scholarship is needed. Apart from works on diplomacy and Lee Kennett 's French Forces in America (1977)
, the French role remains largely unexplored. Finally, the hidden war that John Adams hinted at remains to be researched. Though its sources are few, it is now, as then, the greatest gap in our knowledge of an era that marks a turning point not only in American history but in the history of the world.

Bibliography

James Kirby Martin , A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763–1789, 1982.
Colin D. Calloway , The American Revolution in Indian Country, 1995.
Martin V. Kwasny , Washington's Partisan War, 1775–1783, 1996.
Holly A. Mayer , Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community During the American Revolution, 1996.
Charles P. Neimeyer , America Goes to War: A Social History of the Continental Army, 1996.
Richard Buel, Jr. , In Irons: Britain's Naval Supremacy and the American Revolutionary Economy, 1998.

Paul J. Sanborn