Revolution, American

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REVOLUTION, AMERICAN

This entry includes 5 subentries:: Political History; Military History; Diplomatic Aspects; Financial Aspects; Profiteering

Political History

The American Revolution transformed thirteen British colonies into fourteen states (including Vermont) and bound them into one republic. It changed the identity of millions of people, and transformed their dominant political idea from unequal subjection to equal citizenship. It began with a parochial dispute about being British. Its debates escalated to fundamental questions of human existence. By creating the United States, the Revolution gained world-historical significance.

The Revolution also created a continent-spanning empire. To the victors every denizen was a subject, though not necessarily a citizen, of the United States. To Indians, nothing of the sort was true. They remained their own peoples. The Revolution helped begin the worldwide assault on slavery. It also let slavery spread across the Cotton Kingdom and gain enough strength that a southern republic nearly emerged out of the American republic's contradictions. Full of such contradictions, the Revolution was among the major modern transforming events.

British Power in the Colonies

At the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, Great Britain stood triumphant among western European powers. But the war had been expensive, and the colonies had seemed insubordinate and uncooperative, even though colonials gloried in being Britons. Parliament's position, given formal statement in 1765 by Sir William Blackstone, was that it possessed power over all Britons. Vaunted British liberty merely meant that the Crown could not act without Parliament's consent.

After 1763 successive British administrations tried to tax the colonies directly to pay for imperial defense and administration and to assert Parliament's power. The Revenue or "Sugar" Act (1764) taxed all sugar and molasses brought to the mainland colonies. Despite sporadic protests and a great deal of smuggling, it took force. The Stamp Act (1765) tried to tap colonial business by requiring official stamps on most transactions. Colonial resistance nullified it every where except Georgia, and it was repealed in 1766. The Declaratory Act (1766) announced that Parliament could legislate for the colonies "in all cases whatsoever." In 1767 the Townshend Acts taxed imported glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea. Resistance led to the repeal of all except the tea duty in 1770. All of the British taxes were to be paid in scarce coin rather than colonial paper money, which was denied the status of legal tender. Violators would be tried in vice-admiralty courts, where a royal judge would decide all matters.

After 1767 an American Board of Customs Commissioners was based in Boston. Troops were stationed there in 1768 to protect customs officials. In 1773 Parliament combined the tea tax with rescuing the bankrupt East India Company by letting it market tea directly to America. Most towns simply turned the tea ships around before they entered the port limits and had to declare their cargoes. But Boston could not. When intense negotiations about sending it back finally failed on 16 December 1773, "Mohawks" dumped the tea into the Harbor.

The "destruction of the tea" (not called the Boston Tea Party until decades later) changed the British position. The issue no longer was taxes; it was punishing Boston and Massachusetts. Early in 1774 Parliament passed four "Coercive" or "Intolerable" Acts, which closed the port of Boston, altered the Massachusetts government, allowed troops to be billeted on civilians, and permitted trials of British officials to be heard in Nova Scotia or Britain, because they supposedly could not get a fair trial in the original colony. This was despite the acquittal by a Massachusetts court of the soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre. General Thomas Gage, commander in chief in America, became governor of Massachusetts, and British headquarters moved from New York to Boston. Meanwhile the Quebec Act recognized Catholicism and French customs there and gave jurisdiction over the Ohio and Great Lakes country to the government in Montreal.

The Rise of Resistance

Resistance received a strong lead from notable provincials. They had become used to making laws, raising taxes, setting public officials' salaries, and debating high policy. They regarded their assemblies as local equivalents of Parliament. Now Parliament itself threatened their power and pride. Provincial assemblies passed resolutions, established Committees of Correspondence, and called for days of fasting. The sort of white men who sat in them started to work out the position that we know as "taxation without representation is tyranny." The phrase was coined by the fiery Boston lawyer James Otis, but it was not widely used. The elite's lead was important, but resolutions and pamphlets would not alone have altered even one British policy, let alone start to change the fundamental terms of American life. From the Stamp Act in 1765 to the dumping of the tea, the resistance movement's "punch" came from the port cities, thanks to both ordinary people's grievances and well-organized popular leadership.

"Ordinary people" is a broad term. In the port towns it covered seafarers, laborers, apprentices, journeymen artisans, master craftsmen, tavern keepers, and even small merchants. In the right circumstances it could cover slaves, though describing a crowd as comprising "sailors, Negroes, and boys" was a standard way to disown it. Crowd action was a normal part of eighteenth-century urban life. Some crowds amounted to a whole community defending itself when the militia, the sheriff's posse, or the volunteer fire company could not. Even gentlemen might be involved, perhaps disguised in costume or a workingman's long trousers.

Crowd action also could have a class content. Seafarers, rather than all "town-born," frustrated an attempt in 1747 to impress them off the Boston streets into the Royal Navy. Crowds could be rough, but they also could be sophisticated. Boston workingmen paraded with effigies each autumn on "Pope's Day" (5 November), which celebrated the unmasking of the seventeenth-century Gun-powder Plot to bomb Parliament. They were keeping alive their sense that to be British meant more than doing whatever Parliament said. It was to be Protestant and free, and on that day the crowd of Protestant freemen ruled Boston's streets.

For the most part these uprisings were traditional, aimed at restoring how things ought to be, but during the Stamp Act crisis of 1765–1766 a transformation began. An intercolonial network of Sons of Liberty emerged, combining militancy with political direction. For the most part they were men in the middle, not real plebeians but not gentry either. In Boston Samuel Adams was Harvard educated but very much a popular politician. Adams could (and often did) argue with the governor, but he also could talk to people like shoemaker Ebenezer Macintosh, who led one of the Pope's Day crowds. Macintosh brought out the crowds on 14 August 1765, in order to "convince" stamp distributor Andrew Oliver that he should resign before the Stamp Act even took force. Boston's depressed economy helps explain the crowd's intense anger.

Newport, New York City, and other places followed Boston's lead. Virginia's House of Burgesses passed powerful (if ambiguous) resolutions. These inspired more resolutions from other assemblies and from a congress of nine colonies that assembled in New York. Mary land pamphleteer Daniel Dulany demolished the British argument that the colonies were "virtually" represented in Parliament. Henceforth the British assertion would be simply that Parliament could do what it chose. Separate but coordinated nonimportation campaigns in the ports frustrated the Townshend Acts between 1768 and 1770, not completely but enough to bring repeal of all but the tax on tea.

Parallel to the tax problem, the issue of British soldiers became an irritant. Only New York had a longstanding garrison, and it was small until the Seven Years' War. When peace returned, the garrison remained so large that two separate barrack areas were needed to house the troops. Their off-duty competition for scarce jobs made them immensely unpopular, which also applied to the four-regiment garrison posted to Boston in 1768. Street brawls between soldiers seeking work and civilians broke out in New York in January 1770, and five Bostonians died when soldiers on guard duty at the customs house opened fire on a snowball-throwing crowd in Boston in March. Work was an issue there also, but Boston's bloodshed began when a customs informer fired into a hostile crowd, killing eleven-year-old Christopher Seider. Calm returned after the "Boston Massacre," but in 1772 Rhode Islanders captured and burned the revenue cutter Gaspée when it ran aground.

Resistance Becomes Revolution

The same year Boston named a committee to rouse awareness in backcountry towns. Initially the committee met with suspicion, but after the passage of the Coercive Acts country people reorganized their militias, closed the royal courts, and shut down the new government outside occupied Boston. This was the moment when ordinary country people first became directly involved. By shutting down the government rather than just resisting one law or policy, it also was the moment when resistance began turning into revolution. Committees of correspondence began to form outside Massachusetts, partly to exchange information and partly to rally support. The First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia at summer's end. It worked out the position that all colonials would support Massachusetts by direct aid and by boycotting British commerce, and it called for committees of association to guarantee compliance. During the autumn tense New Englanders gathered supplies, conducted militia drills, and set up lines of quick communication.

They showed their temper by rallying quickly after a rumor of fighting at Boston spread through eastern New England in October. They showed their organization and their full readiness on 19 April 1775, when real fighting broke out at the towns of Lexington and Concord after a British expedition tried to seize supplies and capture leaders. Massachusetts men drove the troops back with heavy losses, gathered into an impromptu army, and besieged Boston, which the British army controlled. In June they inflicted massive injuries on another British force at Breed's (Bunker) Hill. Massachusetts had been in revolution since the closure of the courts the previous summer. Now it was at war.

When war broke out General and Governor Gage was under orders from London to act, even though he knew his troops were too few for the task. Each side knew the other's plans, and townsmen were ready for the alarm that Paul Revere spread as the troops prepared to move. Whoever fired first, the colonial militia gave the redcoats a terrible drubbing, besieged Boston, and gave British regulars another drubbing before they yielded Breed's (Bunker) Hill in June. Shortly after that, George Washington, who had appeared at the Second Continental Congress in uniform, arrived to take command. A stalemate followed until artillery captured from Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain could be placed on Dorchester Heights. That made Boston untenable, and the British withdrew in March 1776.

Outside New England the news of fighting changed the mood from disquiet and support to angry solidarity. Committees of Safety took form and began to drain power away from regular governments. The elite New Yorker Gouverneur Morris described one meeting to elect a committee as "the mob" beginning "to think and to reason." He likened the plebeians to "poor reptiles" and predicted that "'ere noon they will bite." When the news arrived from Lexington, a real mob broke open the city arsenal and seized the weapons stored there. Small farmers outside New England began to ponder their own interests. Slaves in Virginia quietly approached the royal governor and offered their services. They knew at least vaguely about Somerset's Case (1772), which seemed to outlaw slavery within Britain. As early as 1768 Ohio country Indians had been exploring the idea of unity. Now they and most others began considering which side to choose.

The Debate over Independence

Throughout the quarter-century from 1764, when the first protests against the Sugar Act appeared, until the end of the great debate about ratifying the federal Constitution in 1789, American writers argued. Until 1774 their debate was about the problem of being British while not dwelling in Britain. London set the terms of the argument even though writers like Daniel Dulany (Maryland) and John Dickinson (Delaware and Pennsylvania) wrote with great power and usually won their points.

Thomas Jefferson's A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774) broke free of that agenda. He, Thomas Paine, John Adams (Thoughts on Government, 1776) and others were declaring intellectual independence and beginning to address the problems that Americans would face as a separate people. The first result would be justifying independence in 1776. The second would be state-level arguments about how to be republican. The third would be the creation of the republic over a dozen intensely conflict-ridden but very creative years.

Paine's Common Sense (1776) made the argument for independence and republicanism, calling for the simplest of political institutions to replace the old order. Not everybody was ready, and some people were moving to the king's side. Others dreaded Paine's call for extreme political simplicity, particularly Adams, whose Thoughts on Government made the call for institutional complexity and balance. That debate would continue until 1788. Adams also suggested that any new constitution would need some sort of popular ratification. New York artisans and farmers in western Massachusetts were making the same point. More immediately, doubters and moderates had to be convinced, particularly in New York and in Pennsylvania, whose old government continued to meet in the same building as Congress until May 1776.

Congress moved toward independence gradually between April and July, opening the ports to non-British trade, calling for remaining royal government to end, and finally naming the five-man committee that drafted its Declaration to the world. It also named committees to begin the business of foreign affairs, particularly with France, which already was giving clandestine aid, and to draft Articles of Confederation binding the separate states. Until that document was finally approved in 1781, there was no real basis for the United States to exist. Yet during those years Congress organized an army, supported a war, presided over the beginnings of a national economy, and won an alliance with France and financial aid from the Netherlands.

The Declaration of Independence has three parts: an eloquent statement about human rights, a long bill of indictment against "the present king of Britain," and the formal statement of separation. Of these the most important at the time was the attack on King George. The Declaration did not attack monarchy in principle. That would have been foolish, given the need for French aid. What Jefferson wrote was not what Congress finally declared. To the Virginian's chagrin, his collective editor cut much of his impassioned rhetoric toward the document's end, including his attempt to blame slavery on King George, which Jefferson himself saw as the final and most powerful charge. Historically the charge was ridiculous; Virginians had wanted their slaves. But slavery was emerging as a moral and political problem that cut across all other lines of dispute, including that of loyal Briton and revolutionary American. When British writer Samuel Johnson asked in 1776 how it was "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes," his revulsion was just as strong as Jefferson's.

The War Is Fought

Congress voted independence on July 2 and accepted the final draft on July 4. It was not fully signed until early August. By then an enormous fleet was discharging British and hired German troops on Staten Island, preparing to capture New York City. Expecting the invasion, George Washington had moved his half-trained and ill-equipped Continental Army to Brooklyn. His attempt to defend the city in the "Battle of Long Island" failed, but a superb retreat to Manhattan got most of his troops out of the way of capture. The Americans continued to retreat, first upstate and then across the Hudson River into New Jersey. Washington's strategy until 1781 would be to keep the army intact, rather than to win set pieces, unless a stroke was needed for purposes of military and civilian morale. He achieved two such strokes, one at Trenton in December 1776 and the other at Princeton in January 1777. New York City would remain in British hands until 1783.

The only great set-piece battles after Long Island were Saratoga in 1777, when American victory helped bring France into the conflict openly, and Yorktown in 1781. The French fleet made that possible by blocking the Chesapeake until a combined army under Washington could cut Lord Cornwallis and his troops off, breaking the British political will to continue.

By then the war had touched virtually everybody inside the whole zone that Britain had won in 1763. Even the Southwest, where Choctaws and Chickasaws were nominally pro-British but primarily interested in their own independence, saw an influx of loyalist refugees, as well as military aid from the Spanish authorities in New Orleans to the Americans farther east. Spain entered the war not as an outright ally of the United States, but rather to honor its own alliance with France. The "old northwest," New York State, eastern Pennsylvania, the Chesapeake, the southern backcountry, and the Carolina and Georgia lowlands all witnessed massive material destruction. Among all American wars, the struggle for independence was the second longest, after Vietnam. The rate of military casualties in relation to the population was the second highest after the Civil War.

The Revolution's Aftermath

At the war's end perhaps sixty thousand white refugees fled, going to Canada and Britain. Thousands of black people who had sought the king's freedom secured it by fleeing too, on the ships that left Savannah, Charleston, and New York late in 1783. The Mohawk Indians, who had been actively pro-British, went to Canada; most others believed they had lost nothing, whichever side they had chosen. The treaty signed in Paris that year provided almost everything the Americans could have wanted. It yielded not just the areas where American troops were in control but also the three major occupied ports. It also ceded the entire zone east of the Mississippi, south of the Great Lakes, and north of Florida, whatever Indians thought about it. Washington rightly called his fellow Americans "lords of a great empire" in 1784.

Within America changes were unfolding rapidly. Vermont abolished slavery in 1777 when it declared its own independence from New York. Pennsylvania began gradual abolition in 1780, to be completed in 1799. The Massachusetts Supreme Court decreed slavery's immediate abolition there in 1783. Women were starting to raise their voices about public affairs and about their own concerns. During the war all the states persecuted loyalists, attainting them by name in statutes that confiscated their property and threatened them with death. The Penn family lost their feudal proprietorship over Pennsylvania. The material demands of the war generated a national economy, which simply had not existed prior to independence. The experiences of war as seen from the center of national politics and of diplomacy began turning the provincial gentlemen who had been mostly strangers when they first assembled in 1774 into a national elite with a common point of view and an increasingly common purpose.

Deciding on a New Political Order

The greatest immediate problem after independence was to work out the terms of a new political order. John Adams wanted to "glide insensibly" from the old order to the new, with minimal change in institutions or customs. That is what happened in Connecticut and Rhode Island, which already ran their own affairs entirely. But elsewhere the old institutions collapsed at independence, and new ones had to be built from the beginning. Thomas Paine thought that annual assemblies "with a president only" would do, and that is close to what came to be in Pennsylvania and Vermont. The idea horrified John Adams in Massachusetts, New York's John Jay, and Maryland leader Charles Carroll of Carrollton. Each state created complex institutions that their designers intended to balance society's elements against one another. Following British tradition and wanting to protect private property, they tried to define those elements in terms of "the few" and "the many," with property requirements for voting and holding public office.

The state constitutions of New York (1777) and Massachusetts (1780) foreshadowed the structure of executive branch, legislative branch, and judicial branch that the United States Constitution would establish. That document's authors intended to sort men who were qualified to rule from the rest. When they wrote it in 1787, they had come firmly to believe that ordinary people had shown themselves unfit to rule by their conduct in the separate states. But the Constitution says nothing about social distinctions among citizens, let alone about property requirements for voting and holding office. Its sorting out would be indirect, on the unproven premise that on a large stage only the truly qualified could emerge.

Perhaps the worst intellectual problem was figuring out how to be a republican people at all. It was not enough to depose the king, as the English had deposed James II in 1688. They had simply called new joint monarchs, James's daughter Mary and her husband, William, to the throne, but there would be no European prince for Americans. Nor was it enough to draw up a set of new institutions, call the document a constitution, and declare it in operation. Most states did try to do exactly that. The possible consequences became apparent when South Carolina's legislature repealed the state's two-year-old constitution in 1778. The governor vetoed the repeal and then resigned his office, leaving the state with neither a certain basis for its own institutions nor anybody in charge. Not until Massachusetts employed the devices of both a special convention to write a constitution and a special process to ratify it in 1780 did the notion of "the people" being its own sovereign begin to take on operational meaning. That device has underpinned American constitutional thinking ever since.

The movement for the federal Constitution sprang from the inadequacies of the Articles of Confederation, which rendered Congress nearly powerless, from foreign debts that could not be paid and treaty obligations that could not be met, from the Revolution's surge of "new men" into power at the state level, and from what those men did with the power they gained. That included continuing to persecute loyalists despite the peace treaty, cushioning the problems of debtors by staying suits and issuing cheap paper money, and looking to local needs ahead of national ones. The men we call "the Framers" already knew one another thanks to wartime experience, and they had developed a common perspective. To their minds the whole situation pointed toward disaster, particularly after Shays's Rebellion (1786) seemed to threaten the very government of Massachusetts.

Alexander Hamilton of New York began writing essays in favor of strong government as early as 1782. James Madison of Virginia retreated from the frustrations of serving in Congress to ponder political science. Serving as American minister in London, John Adams tried to defend "the constitutions of the United States." George Washington wrote worried letters to his friends. Informal meetings at Mount Vernon (1785) and Annapolis (1786) led to a call for a general convention to "propose amendments" to the Articles of Confederation, which would meet in Philadelphia in 1787.

That call had no legal basis, but Congress endorsed it, and only Rhode Island failed to send delegates. Even their absence could have been fatal, since amending the Articles required the legislatures of all thirteen founding states (excluding Vermont, which went unrecognized) to consent. The convention sidestepped that problem by providing that the Constitution would take effect when special conventions in nine states accepted it. The solution was strictly illegal, but by June 1788 nine states had ratified, though the majority of voters probably intended to reject it. Institutional stability finally returned when the United States Congress assembled and George Washington assumed the presidency early in 1789.

The Constitution solved the problems of political authority, political order, and political economy among the republic's citizens that the Revolution had raised. It created a huge common market within which a commercial economy could flourish. It gave the United States the strength to survive in a difficult, dangerous world and to create its own continent-spanning empire. The Northwest Ordinances adopted by the old Congress during the same period solved the problem of incorporating that American empire into the republic, both politically and economically. But the Constitution failed completely to address the issues of equality and freedom that people who were not white and not male had raised during the Revolution.

Those questions had had no place on the old agenda for discussion and action that had gone with being British in America. They would have very prominent places on the new agenda that sprang from the Revolution's proposition that to be American was to be equal and free. Part of what was revolutionary about American independence was that it happened at all, given Britain's strength and the amount of disruption required. Part was working out a way for republicanism to work over an enormous area. Part was opening up those questions of American equality, identity, and belonging, even though most would remain unanswered long after George Washington became president.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Calloway, Colin. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Countryman, Edward. The American Revolution. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985. Revised edition in preparation.

Frey, Sylvia. Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Greene, Jack P., and J. R. Pole, eds. A Companion to the American Revolution. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000.

Gross, Robert A. The Minutemen and Their World. Rev. ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.

Holton, Woody. Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. Rev. ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996.

Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Young, Alfred F. The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.

EdwardCountryman

See alsoConstitution of the United States ; Continental Congress ; Intolerable Acts ; Revolution, American: Military History ; Sons of Liberty (American Revolution) ; Sugar Acts ; "Taxation without Representation" andvol. 9:Address of the Continental Congress to Inhabitants of Canada ; Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress ; Declaration of Independence ; Common Sense ; Letters of Abigail and John Adams ; Massachusetts Circular Letter ; Patrick Henry's Resolves ; The Pennsylvania Farmer's Remedy ; The Continental Association .

Military History

Without the War of Independence, there would have been no American Revolution and no American national state in the eighteenth century. Even if Britain had granted her disgruntled colonists separation from the empire in 1775 or 1776, the statement holds true. This generalization about the link between war and American state formation also applies to the creation of many nations since the Early Modern Era in Europe, which saw the emergence of the national state in something remotely approaching its modern form between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. America, in some measure, followed the pattern of weak kingdoms and other polities in Europe, since wars led to centralizing tendencies because of the heavy taxes, large armies, and bureaucratic agencies needed to energize and manage military undertakings. Some of those forms of centralization and bureaucratization remained permanently with the advent of peace in Spain, France, Sweden, and, in time, Britain.

It has seldom been noted that the earliest beginnings of war and state formation in America date back to almost a century before the War of Independence and other events that led to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Britain's four imperial wars with France between 1689 and 1763 resulted in the growth of permanent powers for the thirteen British American legislative assemblies. Dependent on the colonies for men and money to defend the frontiers and to send expeditions against Canada, the colonial lawmakers became military policymakers by indicating the way monies were spent, the number of men to be raised, and the length and location of their service. In using wars as a way to increase their authority, the colonial legislatures seized greater control over military affairs than the House of Commons ever acquired in Britain. These were the bodies that led the resistance against Britain's new imperial program after 1763 and that produced American leaders in the War of Independence. Without the institutional gains from those previous wars in the New World, these assembles would hardly have been able to challenge Britain.

Beginning in 1774, after a decade of opposing British efforts to tax the colonies and to tighten the imperial system in other ways as well, the assemblies, meeting independently as de facto provincial congresses, took control of colonial governments, including the militias, and elected delegates to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The following year, just after fighting erupted at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, the Second Continental Congress met and began to function as a quasi-central government. It took command of the New England colonial forces besieging the British in Boston, appointed George Washington commander in chief, and declared independence the following year. No organic growth of an American nation lay behind these actions, nor can American nationalism provide the explanation. Colonial rivalries and jealousies were deep and of long standing. Benjamin Franklin once remarked that the colonies had a greater dislike for one another than they had for Britain, and those sentiments hardly disappeared completely after independence. They were muted only to a limited degree by the war and the separation from Britain. Yet, concerns for self-preservation can propel people of different interests and traditions a vast distance—people who were reluctant revolutionaries, who found the break with the mother country a painful experience.

As for Britain, she had refused to work for a political solution to the problem of the constitutional relationship between London and her North American dependencies. That is why General Thomas Gage, stationed in Boston, received orders that resulted in his dispatching a troop column on 18 April 1775 to destroy the Massachusetts militia's military stores at Concord. The voices of conciliation and compromise in Parliament, led by Lord Chatham, never received a hearing, even though they prophetically warned of a difficult war of overwhelming costs and of French and Spanish intervention on the side of the rebellion.

The Resources of America

Unlike most revolutionaries in modern history, the Americans began the war in control of the infrastructure of the country. They did so through the provincial congresses, which provided written constitutions for the newly independent states, and through their command of the militias. Though often ineffective in pitched battles against British regulars, poorly trained militia performed a valuable constabularly role on the local scene in the Revolutionary War. As a result the loyalists, or tories, were always on the defensive, except when backed by the presence of a Royal Army. A South Carolina loyalist official, James Simpson, correctly observed that the great contribution of the militia was in sustaining civil governments; "their civil institutions" gave the rebels "the whole of their strength." Moreover, Americans fought on their own soil, very different from the relatively flat battlefields of western Europe, over which armies had swept back and forth for centuries. The militia and the Continental army knew the densely wooded country, with its mountains, valleys, swamps, and rivers, and made effective use of them. Americans, particularly the militia, sometimes used night

attacks and resorted to winter fighting. Another plus for the Americans was an abundance of manpower. Certainly most white men between ages eighteen and forty-five saw some military service, whether in the militia or the Continental army. The militia understandably preferred to serve under their own local officers, and the states usually limited their active service to anywhere from a few months to as much as a year. They were most valuable to Washington in the winter months when regular Continental enlistments usually ended and a virtually new army had yet to be raised for service in the following spring and summer.

One does not have to be slavishly devoted to a great man theory of history to maintain that Washington was the most valuable asset for the Americans—in any event, the greatest human asset. From the beginning, he showed his total commitment to civil control of the military. He himself was a former colonial legislator and a member of the Congress that appointed him in June 1775. He kept the lawmakers informed of his activities and unfailingly obeyed their instructions, although he was honest and open in making it known when he disagreed with his masters. Congress moved at a slower pace in the process of nation building than had been the case during the early modern European wars. That fact frustrated Washington, but he knew the foremost problem was that the newly independent states were initially hesitant to create a strong central government. Congress, however, had wasted no time in 1776 in beginning the process, drafting the Articles of Confederation; however, disagreement about certain allocations of powers along with state jealousies kept the document from being formally ratified by all the thirteen states, as required, until 1781. Washington conceded that it was difficult to create an American constitutional union in the midst of war, at a time when Congress was deflected by its myriad military and diplomatic responsibilities. The loosely structured Confederation was a kind of federalism, more like the pre-1776 version of imperial federalism than the form of federalism to triumph after the war in 1787.

Washington himself was militarily conservative and so was Congress. A massive guerrilla war might well have spawned countless atrocities, the destruction of cities, and the weakening of American social and political institutions. As a French and Indian War colonel, commanding the Virginia forces, he had sought to make his regiment as professional as possible, calling for strict discipline, rigorous training, and officers well read in European military literature. The same attitude shaped his thinking about the Continental army. The army suffered its share of defeats, but even on those occasions it often fought reasonably well. And it had open space in which to retreat and regroup. Washington escaped across New Jersey after the loss of New York City. General Nathanael Greene, pursued by Lord Cornwallis in the South, fled across the Dan River into Virginia. The army learned from its mistakes and steadily improved, displaying incredible staying power in a contest that lasted eight and one-half years. Much of the credit for its progress goes to Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, the so-called Prussian drillmaster, and to a cluster of French officers who constituted the corps of engineers.

If Washington's principal task was to hold his army together, he had two reasons for doing so. One was simply to outlast the British, to wear them down, to destroy their will to win a war that became an endlessly long contest of attrition. And it worked, just as North Vietnam's similar approach eventually spelled failure for the United States in Southeast Asia in the 1970s. For in both the earlier and later war, political pressures and public opinion generally led Britain and the United States, respectively, to withdraw from a quagmire, although both countries were still quite capable from a narrow military perspective of continuing the struggle. The second dimension of Washington's job was to foster a sense of unity in the army and, from his perspective, in the new nation as a whole. Washington urged the officers and men of the army to forsake religious, ethnic, and provincial jealousies. He contended with Protestants who did not like Catholics and Jews and conservative Protestant ministers who opposed the appointment of John Murray, the father of American Universalism, as an army chaplain. New England men did not want to serve under New York officers and frontier riflemen fought with Marblehead fishermen from Massachusetts. In his general orders, he constantly encouraged his soldiers to think of themselves first as Americans and not simply as Virginians or Pennsylvanians or Georgians. He enjoyed his greatest success in inculcating national identity and esprit in his officers, including Nathanael Greene, Henry Knox, Anthony Wayne, Henry Lee, and John Marshall. As a person, he emerged as the most visible symbol of unity for Americans. And as an institution, his army stood out as the most visible symbol of unity for his countrymen.

The Resources of Britain

Britain had certain formidable advantages over the colonies at the outbreak of the war. One was a growing sense of national identity that increased the unity of England, Scotland, and Wales. It was based on a mighty empire, economic growth, success in war, and anti-Catholicism. When had Britain ever lost a war? She was the dominant superpower in Europe after humiliating France and Spain in the Seven Years' War (the French and Indian War in North America). Her post-1688 imperial wars had been fueled by a dynamic economy stimulated by the Industrial Revolution. At the same time, the government pioneered in new methods of taxation and deficit financing. The result was the development of a "fiscal-military state." The actual war machinery was headed by the king, George III, who was far from a figurehead. Ministers still had to be acceptable to him and so did military commanders. His job in wartime was to back his ministers and to dispense patronage to members of Parliament and other public figures who supported his government. He served as a cheerleader rather than as a planner of campaigns or as one involving himself in day-to-day decisions.

Human power constituted another plus for Britain. Her population came to eleven million, whereas there were fewer than three million colonials, of whom one-sixth were held in slavery. In 1775 the army numbered 48,000 men, of whom many were veterans of warfare and proud of their regiments and their traditions. The regimental officers were competent, some of them outstanding. The commanding generals who served in America, all veterans of the Seven Years' War, were sound by the standards of their day, but none displayed the talents of a Wolfe or a Wellington. The navy, long England's first line of defense and its pride, was the largest in the kingdom's history, although post-1763 budget restraints had led to its deterioration. It no longer in 1775 maintained the two-power standard: the numerical equal of Britain and Spain. But commanders were almost all reputable figures, superior to most senior officers of the Bourbon navies. If the Royal Navy used impressment to meet its critical manpower needs, the army turned to the German states, as did other countries needing foreign mercenaries. The ministry purchased the services of 33,000 from six principalities, the great majority of this human flesh coming from Brunswick and Hesse-Cassel. Valuable additions, they not surprisingly were of uneven quality. Having no real stake in the conflict, several thousand deserted and remained in America, lured by land and German American kinsmen in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Additional human resources were found in America: loyalists and Native Americans. Perhaps two-thirds of the politically active Americans supported the Revolution. That left a sizable number who were neutralists or loyalists, and in fact colonials not uncommonly changed sides depending on who was winning and how they were treated. In the early years, Britain displayed a good deal of indifference to the king's friends, and in the later years, when French entry created a shortage of redcoats in North America, Britain turned too fully to the loyalists and exaggerated their strength, for by that time many Crown adherents had become angered by the army's indifference or mistreatment of them. Even so, perhaps some twenty thousand at one time or another took up arms against the revolutionaries. The Native Americans, as in the imperial wars, influenced the balance of power in the interior. Although both sides courted the tribesmen, the British were better versed in Indian affairs and benefited from the Native Americans' resentment against colonial encroachments on their lands. Consequently, the great majority of the participating Indians fought on the British side.

If the American disadvantages were obvious from the outset—their historic provincial jealousies, largely agricultural economy, and lack of a strong central government—British problems became apparent as the contest progressed. Lord North, the first minister, admitted he knew little of managing a war effort. The direction of military affairs then fell on the secretary of state for the colonies, Lord George Germain, able but prickly, hardly a dynamic war leader as William Pitt had been in the Seven Years' War. Problems of transportation, communication, and supply over the three-thousand-mile Atlantic increased in a war that lasted eight and one-half years. The generals and admirals, most of them members of Parliament, did not trust the ministry—the feeling was mutual—and were members of different factions in the House of Commons. The loyalists, as already indicated, contributed less than London officialdom had hoped. Even the Indians, although they wreaked havoc in the region later known as Kentucky, the Ohio country, and western New York, may have been more of a negative than a positive factor, for their depredations tended to unite and energize western settlers.

The War in New England

In general, the war moved from north to south in terms of where the brunt of the fighting took place between the regular armies of Britain and America. The first year of the conflict saw the colonists on the offensive. Even before Washington's arrival at the American camp at Cambridge in July 1775, the New Englanders, after forcing a British column back from Concord, laid siege to Boston and fought the bloody but inconclusive Battle of Bunker Hill on 17 June. In that clash, General Thomas Gage, the British commander in chief, sanctioned an attack against the well-entrenched Americans that brought the redcoats a Pyrrhic victory. Before finally driving the colonials back, the British suffered their heaviest losses of any battle during the war, their casualties amounting to 42 percent of the 2,500 troops engaged. While Washington continued the siege, he sent a small American force from his camp through the Maine woods to attack Quebec. Its commander, Benedict Arnold, had gained recent renown, along with Ethan Allen, in seizing small British garrisons at Forts Ticonderoga and Crown Point on Lake Champlain in upper New York. Outside the Canadian city, he met a second American army under Richard Montgomery that had advanced up the Hudson–Lake Champlain waterway. On New Year's Eve, the two American columns were repulsed. Montgomery met death and Arnold took a bullet in the leg. The following year, the Americans were thrown out of Canada and thus ended Congress's serious effort to make the Canadians the fourteenth colony in rebellion.

During the siege of Boston, Washington forged an army out of what he described as a "mixed multitude of

people," bringing order and discipline. He dismissed incompetent officers and elevated younger men with potential such as Henry Knox of Massachusetts and Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, who became his most valuable subordinates and served throughout the war. He communicated regularly his needs and his objectives to the New England governments, and he deferred to their authority and their laws, winning their respect and esteem. He proved to New Englanders and to Congress that Americans need not fear an army composed of their own citizens. From his fortified positions surrounding Boston on the land side, he brought increasing pressure on British general William Howe, Gage's successor. After Washington planted artillery on Dorchester Heights, within range of the city, Howe evacuated his army by sea on 17 March. Retiring to Nova Scotia, he sought to re-group, await reinforcements, and attack New York City. Massachusetts appeared to be the center of the rebellion, and New York seemed to offer the prospect of greater success.

The War in the Middle States

Phase two of the struggle took place in the middle states, from 1776 to 1778. Except for the brief months of the Yorktown campaign in late 1781, Washington remained continuously in that theater. His balance sheet shows mixed results. In 1776 the London ministry elected to make a massive display of force, one that would quell the colonial uprising; it was the largest expeditionary undertaking in English history to that time. In the summer of that year General William Howe and his brother, Admiral Richard, Lord Howe appeared before New York City with seventy-three warships, several hundred transports, and 32,000 troops. The British plan was to take the New York capital, and cut off New England from the rest of the colonies. The Howes believed that if they could over-whelm the Puritan colonies, allegedly the most rebellious region, they would have a good chance of ending the uprising, especially if in the process they inflicted a decisive defeat on Washington, who had moved down from Boston to oppose them. But in some measure the Howes had mixed motives. They came as peace commissioners as well as conquerors. Both had been moderates on imperial questions and they seemingly hoped to bring the Americans to a cessation of hostilities by negotiation if possible. If so, they had little to offer in a meeting with a congressional delegation, only to accept an American agreement to stop the fighting before any London officials would consider concessions on policy.

For Britain, the campaign of 1776 began on a positive note and ended on a negative one. Washington suffered a series of setbacks in the New York City area between August and November and ran the risk of losing his army. Defeated on Long Island, he escaped to Manhattan and retreated up the island, fighting a series of battles at Kips Bay, Harlem Heights, and White Plains as the British unsuccessfully tried to get behind him and seal off his escape. But General Howe did capture Fort Washington, which Washington had unwisely left garrisoned on Manhattan. Washington then fled through New Jersey and reached safety by crossing the Delaware River to the Pennsylvania side. Even so, the year terminated with sparkling American counterstrokes. General Guy Carleton, after throwing the American invasion force of Montgomery and Arnold out of Canada, headed down Lake Champlain in hopes of linking up with Howe somewhere on the Hudson. But a setback at the hands of a tiny American fleet under Arnold on that lake, along with the lateness of the season, led Carleton to withdraw to Canada. And Washington, always an aggressive commander, was down but not out. At the end of December he struck back at the British, already settled into winter quarters, overwhelming their garrisons at Trenton and Princeton in New Jersey and then escaping in the first week of the new year into secure lodgings for the season in the hills around Morristown. The year 1777 displayed marked similarities to 1776, with two British armies in the field. The Canadian-based army, now under General John Burgoyne, pressed down the Lake Champlain–Hudson trough, but without a commitment

from General Howe to link up on the Hudson or elsewhere. Howe, leaving Sir Henry Clinton with a garrison in New York City, put to sea with most of his army for a strike at Philadelphia, leaving Burgoyne to his own devices. Lord Germain had sanctioned a campaign without a unifying concept, and Howe and Burgoyne did not trust each other. Overconfidence in the wilderness of upper New York led to Burgoyne's downfall. His army literally broke down in the heavily wooded terrain. Near Saratoga, New York, Burgoyne twice attacked General Horatio Gates's well-entrenched American northern army on Bemis Heights. Twice repulsed with heavy losses, Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga on 17 October. His loss of over six thousand men demonstrated that European armies, with their bright uniforms and traditional linear formations, did not fare well in the interior of North America.

William Howe, smarter than Burgoyne in some respects, avoided the interior and recognized the importance of staying close to coastal urban areas to keep his supply lines open. Moreover, he won two battles in the fall of 1777. Landing his force at the head of Chesapeake Bay, he advanced on Philadelphia until Washington blocked his route at Brandywine Creek in southern Pennsylvania. After heavy fighting and turning Washington's right flank on 11 September, Howe pushed his opponent aside and occupied Philadelphia. Washington counterpunched on 4 October, staging a night assault on Howe's advance base at Germantown, Pennsylvania. Again the fighting was spirited, but Washington's battle plan was too complicated and he pulled back and soon went into winter quarters at Valley Forge, some twenty miles from Philadelphia.

The campaigns of 1776 and 1777 revealed the weaknesses of Britain military planning—a lack of overall strategic thinking, an inadequate naval blockade, and a lack of coordination on land. The Howe brothers, increasingly pessimistic about military victory over America and resenting criticism in London circles, resigned and returned to the metropolis to defend their reputation and attribute their failures to Germain and others. Washington, in contrast, showed remarkable persistence and fortitude, keeping his army alive and using the winter and spring of 1777–1778 to survive the Valley Forge winter and to becoming more professional with each passing year through longer enlistments, larger bounties, and better training. It was at Valley Forge that Steuben, the drillmaster, made his mark on the army by standardizing drill and battlefield tactics.

The International War

Britain's failure to subdue New England and the middle states by the spring of 1778 combined with French entry on the side of America changed the scope and character of the conflict. Nursing old grievances against England, France moved from giving clandestine support to the revolutionaries—providing military stores funneled through a fictitious company and allowing the tiny Continental navy and rebel privateers use of her ports—to signing treaties of commerce and alliance with the United States in February 1778. Gallic dangers led Britain to spread her military and naval resources more thinly in America in order to protect the home kingdom and her valuable West Indian sugar islands. Sir Henry Clinton, General Howe's successor as commander in chief in America, evacuated Philadelphia in order to concentrate his forces at New York City and to send troops to the Caribbean. Breaking camp at Valley Forge, Washington pursued him across New Jersey, attacking his rear guard at Monmouth Courthouse on 28 June 1778. As the day wore on, a full-scale battle resulted. The Continental army, much enlarged and trained by Steuben, gave one of its best performances of the war. The outcome was indecisive, but the American regulars had more than held their own against veteran British troops, obtaining a moral victory that they sorely needed after their Brandywine and Germantown reversals. Washington's army followed behind Clinton and took up positions outside New York City at White Plains. The two armies were back in the same proximity of two years earlier, a sign that Howe's and Clinton's wanderings had little to show for. It was a matter of up and down and round and round, in the caustic words of the London Evening Post.

There were no more major battles in New England or the middle states after Monmouth, only skirmishes, raids, and Indian incursions on the fringes as Washington settled in to observing the British in New York City, although the British garrisoned Stony Point and other small posts on the Lower Hudson until they were dislodged or pressured to relinquish them. Unfortunately for Washington, although the French alliance resulted in a substantial increase in military supplies from France, his new allies failed to play an active role in the American part of the international war until quite late. In 1778 Admiral the Comte d'Estaing failed to intercept a British convoy bound from Philadelphia to New York City and a storm destroyed his chances of defeating Admiral Howe off the coast of Rhode Island. For over two years Washington remained in a holding pattern, not moving his base of operations until the Yorktown campaign of 1781. The most traumatic event of those years was the treason of his ablest combat general, Benedict Arnold, whose plot to turn over the strategic bastion of West Point to Clinton in return for money and a British generalship fell through,

with Arnold himself escaping but his contact man, Major John Andre, being captured and executed as a spy.

The War in the South

In the winter of 1778–1779 the war began taking on a southern complexion. Unsuccessful in the north and fearful of French attacks in Europe and the West Indies, Britain tried its luck in the South. For several years southern loyalists had argued that the king's friends were most numerous in their region and that the South's agricultural resources were the most valuable part of the king's North American empire. With manpower resources stretched tissue thin, the idea of relying heavily on loyalists was beguiling. Yet there were reasons to question it, especially because of events there in 1776. A British naval assault on Charles Town, South Carolina, had been turned away and uprisings of loyalists in North Carolina and Cherokee in the backcountry had been crushed. The new southern policy was adopted only in piecemeal fashion, perhaps because Clinton was less enthusiastic about it than Germain. A small British expeditionary force overran Georgia at roughly the end of 1778, but in 1779 alack of sufficient royal troops delayed a serious attempt to overwhelm South Carolina. Finally, Clinton himself brought several thousand additional men from New York and laid siege to Charles Town, which fell to Sir Henry on 12 May 1780, a devastating loss for the Americans since over five thousand continentals and militiamen were taken. A newly raised American southern army met a similar fate in upper South Carolina when it suffered a stinging defeat at Camden on 16 August and its remnant was scattered and demoralized. Clinton, by now back in New York City, had instructed Lord Cornwallis, commanding the southern operation, not to invade North Carolina and Virginia until he had secured the backcountry and had organized the loyalists into an effective constabulary for controlling the vast stretches behind the lines. But Cornwallis exaggerated the strength and effectiveness of the tories and underestimated the resistance movement led by partisan or guerrilla leaders such as Francis Marion, Thomas Sumter, and Andrew Pickens. On 7 October 1780, near the North Carolina border, Cornwallis's one-thousand-man loyalist left wing was destroyed by far-western frontiersmen at King's Mountain.

By December 1780 the southern conflict had become a duel between Cornwallis and Nathanael Greene, who regrouped and augmented the American southern forces. Dividing his small army, Greene sent General Daniel Morgan into the South Carolina backcountry, where he defeated Banastre Tarleton's Tory Legion on 17 January 1781. Greene then reunited his forces and escaped northward from Cornwallis into Virginia. Returning to North Carolina, he fought Cornwallis at Guilford Courthouse (later Greensboro) on 15 March, inflicting heavy casualties on the British, although neither side could claim a victory. Greene had played a cat-and-mouse game with his opponent. After wearing Cornwallis down, the British general limped to the North Carolina coast and then on

to the Virginia Chesapeake. Greene continued his strategy of movement, isolating and picking off one by one British posts in South Carolina. His brilliant campaigning had left the enemy in control of only Charles Town and Savannah.

Washington too displayed boldness in 1781, racing south in an effort to trap Cornwallis on the Yorktown Peninsula in cooperation with French naval forces under Admiral the Comte de Grasse, and a French military force under General the Comte de Rochambeau. Cornwallis was doomed. His eight thousand men faced a Franco-American army of seventeen thousand, and Admiral de Grasse beat back British naval efforts to rescue the beleaguered Cornwallis. The month-long siege ended 17 October when Cornwallis surrendered. (Contrary to legend, British musicians did not play a tune called "The World Turned Upside Down" while redcoats stacked their arms.) The outcome of the war was determined in the south, since Yorktown destroyed Britain's will to pursue the conflict in America, although fighting continued elsewhere between England and France and the latter's Bourbon ally Spain in 1782. British mistakes were their loyalist policy and Cornwallis's errors in abandoning South Carolina too quickly and moving to Virginia, where he became vulnerable to Franco-American land and sea cooperation. The year 1781 saw both Greene and Washington at their best and, for the first time, active French participation in America.

The War and American Society

The conflict impacted the lives of Americans in countless ways. In the short term, it did little for African Americans, although some hundreds of blacks fought in Washington's army, and thousands of bondsmen fled to the British, where some received their freedom but many were mistreated, a large percentage of them enslaved by royal authorities and tories. Women of ten assumed the responsibilities of men in shops and on farms as their sons and husbands took up arms. A comparative few even served in Washington's army and countless others moved with the army, fulfilling various needs such as washing and cooking. An organization of females founded by Esther Reed of Philadelphia raised money with the idea of providing soldiers some of the amenities of life. Some Americans acquired land for the first time by purchasing confiscated tory property, although most of that real estate went to the highest bidder to acquire money for war needs. Native Americans were losers without qualification. Without Britain as a buffer, the tide of American settlement rolled inexorably westward during and after the war, particularly into what became Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio. Inflation, paper money, and lack of specie hurt all sectors, including the officers and men of the Continental army. Late in the war there were small mutinies by the rank and file and grumbling by officers, especially at the field-grade level, seemed ominous. The desertion rate, about 20 percent of enlisted men, seems high but not by European standards. In March 1783 Washington doused the fires of officer discontent in a dramatic appearance before the officers at Newburgh, New York, promising to see that Congress addressed their legitimate grievances. In the final analysis, the army showed its loyalty to Washington and to civilian control, one of the great legacies of the Revolution. The officers and men returned peacefully to the civilian society from which they had come.

The most important consequences of the war itself, in addition to the precedent of civil control, were two in number. First, the treaty of peace in 1783 not only recognized America's independence but acknowledged its claims to the Mississippi River as the country's western boundary. Diplomats John Jay, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin were tough at the bargaining table, but they profited by the rivalry between England and France, both of which sought American goodwill in the postwar world. The last consequence saw the final phase of the process of state formation in America. The foremost political and military leaders, almost without exception, had become nationalists. They felt that the war showed that the Revolution could not reach its logical culmination without a central government with the authority to unite America and to protect it from domestic violence and foreign dangers. The result was the Constitution of 1787, which was both a political and a military document. The military provisions proved to be so comprehensive that amendments in that area have never been added to the original document.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carp, E. Wayne. To Starve the Army at Pleasure: Continental Army Administration and American Political Culture, 1775–1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Higginbotham, Don. The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policy, and Practice, 1763–1789. New York: Macmillan, 1971.

———. George Washington and the American Military Tradition. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.

Mackesy, Piers. The War for America, 1775–1783. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964.

Mayer, Holly A. Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community During the American Revolution. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.

Royster, Charles. A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979.

Shy, John. A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence. Rev. ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990.

Willcox, William B. Portrait of a General: Sir Henry Clinton in the War of Independence. New York: Knopf, 1964.

DonHigginbotham

See alsoBrandywine Creek, Battle of ; Camden, Battle of ; Colonial Wars ; French in the American Revolution ; Guilford Courthouse, Battle of ; Indians in the Revolution ; Long Island, Battle of ; New York City, Capture of ; Newburgh Addresses ; Paris, Treaty of (1783) ; Princeton, Battle of ; Provincial Congresses ; Saratoga Campaign ; Savannah, Siege of (1779) ; Ticonderoga, Capture of ; Trenton, Battle of ; White Plains, Battle of ; andvol. 9:Battle of Lexington, American and British Accounts ; Correspondence Leading to British Surrender ; Letters of Eliza Wilkinson ; Life at Valley Forge, 1777–1778 ; A Soldier's Love Letter .

Diplomatic Aspects

During the decade before the American Revolution, European diplomacy was focused on the convulsions in eastern Europe that culminated in the first partition of Poland. Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, the French foreign minister in 1775, realized that the partition posed a danger to France. Unknown to the young King Louis XVI, Vergennes had been a charter member of a secret diplomatic organization devoted to restoring French influence in Poland and to blocking Russian expansion. Since he regarded Great Britain as Russia's chief backer, he believed that depriving Britain of her monopoly of American trade would weaken her and, hence, Russia.

In late 1775, a French agent, Julien-Alexandre Archard de Bonvouloir, met in Philadelphia with a committee of the Continental Congress. He assured them that France had no intention of retaking Canada and encouraged them to send ships to France; they in turn asked to purchase military supplies. Vergennes received the king's permission to sell supplies to Congress, and France subsequently loaned money to a trading company that planned to exchange military supplies for American tobacco. Simultaneously, France began to rebuild and resupply her navy, which would take until the end of 1777.

As Congress moved toward a declaration of independence, it became more ready to accept French assistance. It sent the congressional delegate Silas Deane to France to purchase supplies and then appointed Deane, Benjamin Franklin, and Arthur Lee as commissioners to negotiate a commercial treaty. At the beginning of 1777, the commissioners assembled in Paris. Initially, the French government was willing to loan them money but not to risk a premature war by signing a treaty. Naval rearmament permitted France to become directly involved in the war, but first Vergennes had to convince King Louis XVI. Luckily, news of the American victory at Saratoga arrived in early December. Vergennes argued that there was now a danger that the Americans would compromise with Britain and abandon independence. The commissioners played along by meeting with British agents. The king gave way and, in exchange for a treaty of amity and commerce, the commissioners would agree to a treaty of alliance, prohibiting the United States from abandoning independence or making a separate peace. Both treaties were signed on 6 February 1778.

By summer, France and Britain were at war. France hoped to win a quick victory by sending a fleet to attack British-held New York, but the attack failed. Knowing her navy would soon be badly outnumbered by the British, France sought the assistance of Spain, the only other great naval power. Spain distrusted the United States, but in mid-1779, the French promised to help retake Gibraltar from Britain and convinced her to join the war. A coalition was formed, and in 1781 a Dutch fleet in the North Sea and a Spanish-French fleet off the southern coast of England helped prevent Britain from sending the ships to rescue general Cornwallis at Yorktown.

The French government sent large sums to Congress to prevent its bankruptcy, which was handled by Benjamin Franklin, the sole American representative in Paris for most of the period from 1779 to mid-1782. American representatives John Jay in Spain and John Adams in the Netherlands procured smaller sums.

Cornwallis's capture led to the beginning of peace negotiations, which were largely the work of Franklin and the Earl of Shelburne, the British home secretary from March to July, 1782, and, thereafter, prime minister. Franklin refused to make a separate peace in exchange for British recognition of American independence, demanding in addition the Mississippi as a border and a share in the Newfoundland fishery. At the end of July, Shelburne accepted Franklin's conditions, hoping to use a separate peace to pressure France to make peace also. (If America made a separate peace, the British could send their large garrison at New York to attack the French West Indies.) Franklin, Jay, and Henry Laurens reached agreement with the British on 30 November 1782. Vergennes well realized that France now had to make peace or fight without American aid. Shelburne had offered him a carrot as well as a stick—future British help against Russia—but France could not make peace unless Spain also agreed. Luckily, Spain finally was convinced to accept the return of Florida and Minorca in lieu of Gibraltar. A general peace agreement was reached on 20 January 1783.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dull, Jonathan R. A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985.

Hoffman, Ronald and Peter J. Albert, eds. Diplomacy and Revolution: The Franco-American Alliance of 1778. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1981.

———. Peace and the Peacemakers: The Treaty of 1783. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1986.

Hutson, James H. John Adams and the Diplomacy of the American Revolution. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1980.

Scott, H. M. British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Stinchcombe, William C. The American Revolution and the French Alliance. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1969.

Jonathan R.Dull

Financial Aspects

Because of colonial hatred of any form of taxation, one of the most difficult tasks that faced the Continental Congress was raising money to finance the revolutionary war. Following hostilities at Bunker Hill in June 1775, an issue of $2 million in bills of credit was voted, based on the credit of the states. Depreciation set in shortly, and by March 1780, in spite of legal-tender laws and an attempt to fix prices, the value of continental currency in silver had fallen to forty to one. Debtors pursued their creditors and prices rose to unheard-of heights. "Not worth a continental" became a phrase of derision and stark reality.

A system of direct requisitions on the states for corn, beef, pork, and other supplies was resorted to in 1780 but proved equally discouraging, for it lacked an efficient plan of assessment and record. Other means used to obtain funds included domestic and foreign loans; quartermaster, commissary, and purchasing agent certificates; lotteries; and prize money received from the sale of captured enemy vessels. Foreign loans secured from France, Spain, and Holland through the influence of Benjamin Franklin and John Adams proved invaluable. These, and an outright gift from France, did much to strengthen colonial morale and finance.

At war's close, Finance Superintendent Robert Morris was hampered by local jealousies, continued state refusal to levy taxes, and inadequate financial provisions of the Articles of Confederation. It remained for the new Constitution and the financial genius of Alexander Hamilton to place the United States on a firm national and international credit basis.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carp, E. Wayne. To Starve the Army at Pleasure: Continental Army Administration and American Political Culture, 1775–1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Ferguson, James E. The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776–1790. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961.

McDonald, Forrest. We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1992.

ElizabethWarren/a. g.

Profiteering

The American Revolution left the colonies without hard currency and cut off from European trade. The Continental Congress repeatedly issued unbacked paper currency, creating rapid inflation. The increased risks and costs of importing goods, along with scarce supplies and overwhelming demand, added to inflationary pressures. Profiteers bought available commodities, held them until prices rose, and then sold for high profits. The Continental army suffered throughout the war from profiteers, but government efforts to halt them failed. Even the 1787 Constitutional Convention's resolution to protect public securities benefited profiteers, who bought up great amounts of the paper money that was almost worthless during the Revolution and gained fortunes by redeeming it at face value.