American Revolutionary War

• 1. Introduction

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  On the morning of the 19th of April 1775, a British column marched toward the town of Concord, Massachusetts, with orders to seize militia weapons stored there and arrest two men: John Hancock and Samuel Adams. What followed was a skirmish so brief it barely qualified as a battle. Yet within hours, thousands of colonial militia had converged on the roads around Boston, and a war that would last eight years had begun. The American Revolutionary War ran from that April morning through the 3rd of September 1783, touching not just North America but the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean. At stake was whether thirteen British colonies could break free of the most powerful empire on earth and govern themselves. The outcome was uncertain for most of those eight years. George Washington, commanding an army that was often hungry, unpaid, and outnumbered, had to outlast British resolve more than he had to destroy British forces. This is the story of how he managed it, and what it cost.

• 2. A Decade of Grievances

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  The 1763 Peace of Paris that ended the Seven Years' War left Britain dominant in North America but deeply in debt. Parliament turned to the colonies to help pay for their own defense. The Grenville ministry instructed the Royal Navy to enforce customs duties that had long been ignored. The 1733 Molasses Act was suddenly taken seriously, and it hit hard: roughly 85 percent of New England rum exports depended on imported molasses. The Sugar Act and Stamp Act followed, piling new taxes onto the poorest colonists first. When riots broke out in Boston in 1768 after authorities seized the sloop Liberty on suspicion of smuggling, British troops were sent to occupy the city. On the 5th of March 1770, those troops fired on rock-throwing civilians, killing five people. The event became known as the Boston Massacre. Parliament partially backed down with the North Ministry, repealing most of the Townshend Acts but insisting on keeping a tea duty to preserve the principle that it had the right to tax the colonies at all. That insistence on principle over practicality proved costly. In April 1772, colonists staged what became known as the Pine Tree Riot in Weare, New Hampshire, the first American tax revolt against royal authority. In December 1773, the Sons of Liberty, disguised as Mohawks, dumped crates of tea into Boston Harbor. Parliament retaliated with the Intolerable Acts, targeted specifically at Massachusetts, which only widened colonial sympathy for the Patriot cause and brought twelve of the thirteen colonies together at the First Continental Congress in 1774. The Congress's boycott of British goods worked: imports fell by 97 percent between 1774 and 1775. Parliament responded not with concession but with blockade.

• 3. Building an Army from Scratch

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  On the 14th of June 1775, Congress established the Continental Army, an institution that would evolve into the modern United States Army. Two days later, John Hancock officially proclaimed Washington "General and Commander in Chief of the army of the United Colonies." Washington assumed command on July 3. What he inherited was a patchwork: local militias that served for only weeks or months, carried little training and usually no uniforms, and were reluctant to travel far from home. His first act was to avoid the kind of pitched battle his untrained troops could not yet win. When Colonel Henry Knox arrived in early March 1776 with heavy artillery captured at Fort Ticonderoga, Washington placed the guns overnight on Dorchester Heights, overlooking Boston and its harbor. British commander William Howe, fearing a repeat of the bloody frontal assault at Bunker Hill, evacuated the city on March 17 without a fight. It was the Continental Army's first major strategic success. Washington never directly commanded more than 17,000 men at any one time. About 250,000 American men served at some point as regulars or militia across the entire war, but the army was never larger than 90,000 in the field simultaneously. The turning point in professional quality came during the winter at Valley Forge in 1777-78, when Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben introduced Prussian drill and infantry tactics to model companies in each regiment, who then trained their home units. When the army emerged from Valley Forge in June 1778, it demonstrated new capability at the Battle of Monmouth, including a Black Rhode Island regiment that repelled a British bayonet charge and then counter-charged, the first such action by that unit as part of Washington's army.

• 4. The Turning Point at Saratoga

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  In the summer of 1777, British General John Burgoyne set out from Montreal with a mixed force of British regulars, German soldiers, and Canadian militia, aiming to push south through the Hudson Valley to Albany. The plan was strategically coherent on paper: cut off New England from the southern colonies, then crush the rebellion in pieces. On July 5, Burgoyne captured Fort Ticonderoga. But General Horatio Gates' retreating Americans tore up roads, destroyed bridges, dammed streams, and stripped the countryside of food. By August, Burgoyne was sending out large foraging parties; one such force of more than 700 troops was captured at the Battle of Bennington on August 16. A coordinating British column under Barry St. Leger, meant to push east from Lake Ontario, was abandoned by its Indian allies and withdrew to Quebec on August 22 after failing to take Fort Stanwix. Isolated and outnumbered, Burgoyne pressed on to Saratoga. An attempt to break through Gates' lines at Freeman's Farm on September 19 cost the British 600 casualties. A second push on October 7 was repulsed at Bemis Heights with heavy losses. By October 11, persistent rain had turned the British camp into what one account called a "squalid hell." Burgoyne capitulated on October 17. Around 6,222 soldiers surrendered, including German forces under General Friedrich Adolf Riedesel. The victory convinced France that an independent United States was a viable military partner. Within months, France signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce and a defensive Treaty of Alliance. Spain followed in the Treaty of Aranjuez the following year, though without formally allying with the Americans. The diplomatic reversal transformed a colonial rebellion into a world war.

• 5. Foreign Alliances and Their Costs

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  French foreign minister Vergennes had viewed the 1763 Peace of Paris as a national humiliation. Long before the formal alliance, he was already quietly funding a government front company to purchase munitions for the Patriots, shipped in neutral Dutch vessels and imported through Sint Eustatius in the Caribbean. The sugar islands France sought to protect made the financial logic clear: in 1772, the value of sugar and coffee produced by Saint-Domingue alone exceeded the value of all American exports combined. Over 20 percent of Congressmen voted against the French alliance, fearing the colonies would simply exchange one form of foreign domination for another. Congress agreed with reluctance, and as military fortunes improved, its enthusiasm for French obligations quietly faded. That reluctance would have lasting consequences: because the US had agreed not to make a separate peace with Britain, and France had committed in the Treaty of Aranjuez to keep fighting until Spain recovered Gibraltar, the US was effectively bound to Spain's war aims without knowing it. The US would not sign another treaty with France until the NATO agreement of 1949. Silas Deane, sent to Paris to negotiate, also promised French officers promotion and command positions in the Continental Army. Among those who accepted was Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, whom Congress appointed a major general on the 31st of July 1777. He would become Washington's most important liaison to the French forces that arrived later. Spain's contributions, though indirect, proved strategically vital: Bernardo de Gálvez, the Governor of Spanish Louisiana, opened New Orleans as a supply route to Pittsburgh, bypassing the British Atlantic blockade. He then launched offensive operations against British outposts along the Gulf Coast, clearing forts at Baton Rouge, Natchez, and eventually Mobile and Pensacola, denying the Royal Navy bases in the south and cutting British arms supply to their Indian allies between the Mississippi and the Appalachians.

• 6. The Southern Campaign's Brutality

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  Lord Germain's Southern Strategy rested on an assumption that proved badly wrong: that Loyalist support in the south would mean British regulars could secure the region with relatively few troops. Lieutenant-Colonel Archibald Campbell captured Savannah on the 29th of December 1778, and recruited a Loyalist militia of nearly 1,100 men, many of whom, by some accounts, joined only after Campbell threatened to confiscate their property. Unreliable troops made from unwilling recruits performed accordingly: they were defeated by Patriot militia at the Battle of Kettle Creek on the 14th of February 1779. The war in the south grew steadily more vicious. Charleston fell in May 1780 with over 5,000 Patriot prisoners taken, the most serious Patriot defeat of the entire war. On May 29, Lieutenant-Colonel Banastre Tarleton's mainly Loyalist force routed a Continental Army unit nearly three times its size at Waxhaws, an engagement that became controversial for allegations of massacre and was later used as a Patriot recruiting tool. The British practice of requiring captured Patriots to fight their former comrades, rather than simply sending them home after swearing not to bear arms, turned formerly neutral landowners against them. Across South Carolina, skirmishes at Williamson's Plantation, Cedar Springs, Rocky Mount, and Hanging Rock signaled widespread resistance to the new oaths. The north had its own brutality. The Sullivan Expedition from July to September 1779 involved more than 4,000 Patriot soldiers in a scorched earth campaign that destroyed more than 40 Iroquois villages and 160,000 bushels of maize. Though it left the British-allied Iroquois destitute, it did not end raids: some 5,000 Iroquois fled to Canada, where British supply allowed them to continue striking across the frontier. By the end of the war, about 7 percent of Kentucky settlers had been killed in battles against Native Americans, compared to roughly 1 percent of the population in the Thirteen Colonies proper.

• 7. Yorktown and the End

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  By the summer of 1781, British General Cornwallis had moved his army into Virginia after a grinding campaign through the Carolinas that won battles but failed to pacify the countryside. Clinton, based in New York, ordered Cornwallis to establish a fortified coastal base where the Royal Navy could evacuate troops if needed. Cornwallis chose Yorktown. What neither man accounted for was the French navy. Admiral Francois Joseph Paul de Grasse had been freed to move to the Atlantic seaboard when Spain agreed to defend the French West Indies. On September 5, de Grasse intercepted a Royal Navy fleet under Admiral Thomas Graves at the Battle of the Chesapeake. The battle was indecisive in terms of ship losses, but Graves was forced to retreat, leaving Cornwallis cut off from relief. A combined Franco-American army of around 19,000 men surrounded Yorktown. Cornwallis had abandoned his outer defenses early, expecting evacuation within days; those positions were promptly occupied by the besiegers. An attempted escape across the York River at Gloucester Point failed in bad weather. On October 16, under heavy bombardment and running low on supplies, Cornwallis sent emissaries to Washington. After twelve hours of negotiations, surrender terms were finalized the following day. Responsibility for the defeat became a bitter public dispute between Cornwallis, Clinton, and Germain. Clinton bore most of the blame and spent the rest of his life in relative obscurity. Fighting in North America effectively ended, though British wars with France and Spain continued for two more years. On the 3rd of September 1783, the Treaty of Paris was signed. Britain acknowledged US sovereignty and independence. Washington resigned as commander-in-chief, and on the 25th of November 1783, the last British forces departed New York City. The final ship carrying the last British occupation troops was under the command of General Sir Guy Carleton, the man who had replaced Clinton.