Download 07.I The War for Independence| WHAT STRATEGIES and tactics did

07.I The War for Independence| WHAT STRATEGIES and tactics did American forces employ in the war for
independence?
1. American Communities-A National Community Evolves at Valley Forge
A drum roll ushered in a January morning in 1778, summoning the Continental Army to roll call. Along a two-mile
line of log cabins, doors slowly opened and ragged men stepped out onto the frozen ground of Valley Forge.
“There comes a soldier,” wrote army surgeon Albigense Waldo. “His bare feet are seen through his worn-out
shoes, his legs nearly naked from the tattered remains of an only pair of stockings, his breeches not sufficient to
cover his nakedness, his shirt hanging in strings, his hair disheveled, his face meagre.” The reek of foul straw and
unwashed bodies filled the air. “No bread, no soldier!” The chant began as a barely audible murmur, then was
picked up by men all along the line. “No bread, no soldier! No bread, no soldier!” At last the chanting grew so loud
it could be heard at General Washington’s headquarters, a mile away. The 11,000 men of the American army were
surviving on little more than “fire-cake,” a mixture of flour and water baked hard before the fire that, according to
Waldo, turned “guts to pasteboard.” Two thousand men were without shoes; others were without blankets and
had to sit up all night about the fires to keep from freezing. Washington fired off an appeal for supplies to the
Continental Congress. “Three or four days of bad weather,” he wrote, “would prove our destruction.”
A year before, the army had suffered through a terrible winter at their encampment at Morristown, New Jersey. It
was their hard winter at Valley Forge, however, that became a national symbol of endurance. After suffering a
series of terrible defeats at the hands of a British force nearly twice their number, the soldiers of the Continental
Army had straggled into winter headquarters in this valley, some twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia, only to
find themselves at the mercy of indifferent local suppliers. Contractors demanded exorbitant rates for food and
clothing, rates the Congress refused to pay, and as a result, local farmers preferred to deal with the British, who
paid in pounds sterling, not depreciated Continental currency.
The 11,000 men of the Continental Army, who had not been paid for nearly six months, were divided into sixteen
brigades composed of regiments from the states. An unsympathetic observer described them as “a vagabond army
of ragamuffins,” and indeed many were drawn from the ranks of the poor and disadvantaged: indentured servants,
landless farmers, and nearly a thousand African Americans, both slave and free. Most of the men came from thinly
settled farm districts or small towns where precautions regarding sanitation had been unnecessary. Every thaw
that winter revealed ground covered with “much filth and nastiness,” and officers ordered sentinels to fire on any
man “easing himself elsewhere than at ye vaults.” Such conditions bred infectious epidemic diseases such as
typhoid that spread quickly among men already weakened from dysentery, malnutrition, and exposure. An
estimated 2,500 men lost their lives that winter. There were at least 700 women encamped at Valley Forge—
wives, lovers, cooks, laundresses, and prostitutes—and they were kept busy nursing the sick and burying the dead.
“What then is to become of this army?” Washington worried in December.
Despite the losses, however, the army that marched out of Valley Forge five months later was considerably
stronger for its experience there. As psychologists today understand, it is the spirit of community among fighting
men that contributes most to their success in battle. The men spent the late winter and spring drilling under the
strict command of Friedrich Wilhelm Augustus von Steuben, a Prussian officer who came to America to volunteer
for the American cause. The men learned to fight as a unit. But most important were the bonds forged among
them. Through “their hardships, dangers, and sufferings,” wrote Private Joseph Plumb Martin, soldiers from
hundreds of localities and a variety of ethnic backgrounds had fashioned “a band of brotherhood.” The brigades of
farmers, indentured servants, and former slaves became living examples of the egalitarian ideals of the Revolution.
To some American Patriots—as the supporters of the Revolution called themselves—the European-style
Continental Army betrayed the ideals of the citizen-soldier and the autonomy of local communities that were
central tenets of the Revolution. Washington argued strongly, however, that the Revolution could not be won
without a national army insulated from politics and able to withstand the shifting popular mood. Moreover, during
the critical period of the nation’s founding, the Continental Army acted as a popular democratic force,
counterbalancing the conservatism of the new republic’s elite leadership. The national spirit built at Valley Forge
would sustain the fighting men through years of war and provide momentum for the long process of forging a
national political system out of the persistent localism of American politics. The soldiers of the Continental Army
were among the first of their countrymen to think of themselves as Americans.
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2. The Patriot Forces
At the beginning of the Revolution, the British had the world’s best-equipped and most disciplined army, as well as
a navy that was unopposed in American waters. But they greatly underestimated the American capacity to fight.
With a native officer corps and considerable experience in the colonial wars of the eighteenth century, the Patriot
forces proved formidable. The British also misperceived the sources of the conflict. Seeing the rebellion as the
work of a small group of disgruntled conspirators, initially they defined their objective as defeating this Patriot
opposition. They believed that in the wake of a military victory they could easily reassert political control. But the
geography of eastern North America offered no single vital center whose conquest would end the war. The
Patriots had the advantage of fighting on their own ground and among a population thinly spread over a territory
stretching along 1,500 miles of coastline and extending 100 miles or more into the interior. When the British
succeeded in defeating the Patriots in one area, resistance would spring up in another. The key factor in the
outcome of the war for independence, then, was the popular support for the American cause.
Most American men of fighting age had to face the call to arms. From a population of approximately 350,000
eligible men, more than 200,000 saw action, though no more than 25,000 were engaged at any one time. More
than 100,000 served in the Continental Army, under Washington’s command and the authority of the Continental
Congress; the rest served in Patriot militia companies.
These militias—armed bodies of men drawn from local communities—proved important in the defense of their
own areas, for they had homes as well as local reputations to protect. But the Revolutionary War was not won by
citizen-soldiers who exchanged plows for guns, or backcountry riflemen who picked off British soldiers from behind
trees. In the exuberant days of 1776, many Patriots did believe that militias alone could win the war against the
British. As one observer noted, “The Rage Militaire, as the French call a passion for arms, has taken possession of
the whole Continent.” But because men preferred to serve with their neighbors in local companies rather than
subject themselves to the discipline of the regular service, the states failed to meet their quotas for regiments in
the Continental Army. Serving short terms of enlistment, often with officers of their own choosing, militiamen
resisted discipline. Indeed, in the face of battle, militia companies demonstrated appalling rates of desertion.
The final victory, rather, resulted primarily from the steady struggle of the Continental Army. The American
Revolution had little in common with modern national liberation movements in which armed populations engage
in guerrilla warfare. Washington and his officers wanted a force that could directly engage the British, and from
the beginning of the war, he argued with a skeptical Congress that victory could be won only with a full
commitment to a truly national army. His views conflicted with popular fears of a standing army. Congress initially
refused to invoke a draft or mandate army enlistments exceeding one year.
The failings of the militias in the early battles of the war sobered Congress, however, and it responded with greatly
enlarged state quotas for the army and extended the term of service to three years or the war’s duration. To spur
enlistment, Congress offered bounties, regular wages, and promises of free land after victory. By the spring of
1777, Washington’s army had grown to nearly 9,000 men.
Discipline was essential in a conflict in which men fired at close range, charged with bayonets drawn, and engaged
in hand-to-hand combat. One Connecticut soldier wrote of the effects of cannon on his regiment: “The ball first cut
off the head of Smith, a stout heavy man, and dashed it open, then took Taylor across the bowels; it then struck
Sergeant Garret of our company on the hip, took off the point of the hip bone.” And he concluded: “Oh! What a
sight that was, to see within a distance of six rods those men with their legs and arms and guns and packs all in a
heap.” A sergeant witnessed British troops slaughtering wounded Americans during the battles in New Jersey:
“The men that was wounded in the thigh or leg, they dashed out their brains with their muskets and run them
through with their bayonets, made them like sieves. This was barbarity to the utmost.”
According to the best estimates, a total of 25,324 American men died in the Revolutionary War, approximately
6,800 from wounds suffered in battle, 8,000 from the effects of disease, the rest as prisoners of war or missing in
action. Regiments of the Continental Army experienced the heaviest casualty rates, sometimes approaching 40
percent. Indeed, the casualty rate overall was higher than in any other American conflict except the Civil War. In
most areas, the war claimed few civilian lives, for it was confined largely to direct engagements between armies.
There were many noncombatant casualties, however, in the backcountry and the South, where Patriot and
Loyalist militias waged vicious campaigns of violence.
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Both the Continentals and the militias played important political roles as well. At a time when Americans identified
most strongly with their local communities or their states, the Continental Army, through experiences like the
Valley Forge winter, evolved into a powerful force for nationalist sentiment. But shortages of food and pay led to
several notable army mutinies. In the most serious incident, among the Pennsylvania Line in January 1781, enlisted
men killed one officer, wounded two others, and set off from their winter quarters in New Jersey for Philadelphia
to ask Congress to uphold its commitments. As they marched, they were joined by British agents who encouraged
them to go over to the king. Enraged at this attempt at subversion, the mutineers hanged the agents and gave up
their resistance. Angry as they were at Congress, they were Americans first and hated the British. More than
100,000 men from every state served in the Continental Army, contributing mightily to the unity of purpose—the
formation of a national community—that was essential to the process of nation making.
In most communities, Patriots had seized control of local government during the period of committee organizing in
1774 and 1775 (see Chapter 6), and with war imminent, they pressed the obligation to serve in a Patriot militia
upon most eligible men. In Farmington, Connecticut, in 1776, eighteen men who failed to join the muster of the
local militia were imprisoned “on suspicion of their being inimical to America.” After individual grilling by the
authorities, they petitioned for pardon. They were “penitent of their former conduct,” it was reported, and
understood “that there was no such thing” as remaining neutral. Probably the most important role of the Patriot
militias was to force even the most apathetic of Americans to choose sides under the close scrutiny of their
neighbors.
As men marched off to war, many women assumed the management of family farms and businesses. Abigail
Adams, for example, ran the Adams family’s farm at Quincy for years, reporting on operations in frequent letters
to her husband, John, letters that included commentary on the American struggle for independence and the
political structure of the new republic. Some women participated even more directly in patriotic politics. Mercy
Otis Warren, sister of the Patriot James Otis Jr., turned her home into a center of Patriot political activity and
published a series of satires supporting the American cause and scorning the Loyalists. Thousands of women
volunteered to support the war effort by working as seamstresses, nurses, even spies.
It was common for women to travel with the armies of both sides. Some “camp followers,” as they were called,
were prostitutes, but most were wives, cooks, launderers, and nurses. An observer of the British army after one
terrible battle noted the presence of “great numbers of women, who seemed to be the beasts of burthen, having a
bushel basket on their backs, by which they were bent double. The contents seemed to be pots and kettles,
various sorts of furniture, children peeping thro’ gridirons and other utensils, some very young infants who were
born on the road, the women [with] bare feet, cloath’d in dirty raggs. . . .” Women not only shared the hardships
with the soldiers, they were present on the battlefields carrying water, food, and supplies to the soldiers in the
front lines, under cannon and musket fire. Tales were later told of one “Molly Pitcher,” a wife who took her
husband’s place at the cannon when he was killed by shrapnel. The Continental Congress later awarded a pension
to Margaret Corbin, who was wounded while filling in for her mortally wounded husband. In fact, many such
women won pensions for wounds suffered in battle: Mary Hays McCauley, known to the soldiers as “Sgt.
McCauley,” and Anna Maria Lane, wife of a Connecticut enlisted man, who “in the garb and with the courage of a
soldier performed extraordinary military services and received a severe wound at the Battle of Germantown.” One
historian estimates that several hundred women disguised themselves as men and enlisted; one of them, Deborah
Sampson of Massachusetts, was the subject of a sensational biography after the war and became the first
American woman to embark on a lecture tour.
3. The Loyalists
Not all Americans were Patriots. Many sat on the fence, confused by the conflict, and waiting for a clear turn in the
tide of the struggle before declaring their allegiance. Between a fifth and a third of the population, somewhere
between half a million and a million people, remained loyal to the British crown. They called themselves Loyalists,
but to Patriots were known as the Tories, the popular name for the conservative party in England, which
traditionally supported the authority of the king over Parliament.
A large proportion of the Loyalists—some two-thirds of those who later filed for compensation from the British
government—were relatively recent migrants to the colonies, born in England, Scotland, or Ireland. Others, such as
royal officeholders or Anglican clergymen, were dependent on the British government for their salaries. Many
Loyalists were men of conservative temperament, fearful of political or social upheaval. The Loyalists included
members of ethnic minorities who had been persecuted by the dominant majority, such as the Highland Scots of
the Carolinas and western New York, and southern tenant farmers who had Patriot landlords. As this suggests,
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Loyalists were particularly strong in some colonies. They were nearly a majority in New York, and were so
numerous in Pennsylvania that an officer of the Continental Army described that colony as “the enemy’s country.”
In Georgia, Loyalists made up such a large majority that the colony would probably have abandoned the
revolutionary movement had the British not surrendered at Yorktown in 1781.
Patriots passed state treason acts that prohibited speaking or writing against the Revolution. They also punished
Loyalists by issuing bills of attainder, a legal process (later made illegal by the United States Constitution) by which
those who refused to swear allegiance to the Patriot cause lost their civil rights as well as their property. In some
areas, Loyalists faced mob violence. One favorite punishment was the “grand Tory ride,” in which a crowd hauled
the victim through the streets astride a sharp fence rail. Another was tarring and feathering, in which men were
stripped to “buff and breeches” and their naked flesh coated liberally with heated tar and chicken feathers. One
broadside recommended that Patriots “then hold a lighted Candle to the feathers, and try to set it all on fire.” The
torment rarely went that far, but it was brutally painful nonetheless.
The most infamous American supporter of the British cause was Benedict Arnold, whose name has become
synonymous, in the United States, with treason. Arnold was a hero of the early battles of the Revolution on the
American side. But in 1779, angry and resentful about what he perceived to be assignments and rank below his
station, he became a paid informer of General Henry Clinton, head of the British army in New York City. In 1780,
Patriots uncovered Arnold’s plot to betray the strategic post at West Point on the Hudson River, which he
commanded. After fleeing to the British, who paid him a handsome stipend and pension, he became a brigadier
general in the British army. Benedict Arnold became the most hated man in America. In his hometown of Norwich,
Connecticut, a crowd destroyed the gravestones of his family, and in cities and towns throughout America,
thousands burned his effigy. During the last two years of the war, he led British raids against his home state as well
as against Virginia, and after the Revolution he lived in England until his death in 1801.
The British strategy for suppressing the Revolution depended on mobilizing the Loyalists, but in most areas this
proved impossible, since they were not a monolithic group, but were divided in their opinions. As many as 50,000
Loyalists, however, fought for the king during the Revolution. Many joined Loyalist militias or engaged in irregular
warfare, especially in the Lower South. In 1780, when Washington’s Continentals numbered about 9,000, there
were 8,000 American Loyalists serving in the British army in America.
As many as 80,000 Loyalists fled the country during and after the Revolution. Many went to England or the British
West Indies, but the largest number settled in Canada; the Canadian provinces of Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New
Brunswick honor Loyalist refugees as founders. Loyalist property was confiscated by the states and sold at public
auction. Although the British government compensated many for their losses, most Loyalists were unhappy exiles.
“I earnestly wish to spend the remainder of my days in America,” wrote William Pepperell, formerly of Maine, from
London in 1778. “I love the country, I love the people.” Former governor Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts
wrote that he “had rather die in a little country farm-house in New England than in the best nobleman’s seat in old
England.” Despite their disagreement with the Patriots on essential political questions, they remained Americans,
and they mourned the loss of their country.
4. The Campaign for New York and New Jersey
During the winter of 1775–76 the British developed a strategic plan for the war. From his base at Halifax, Nova
Scotia, Sir William Howe was to take his army to New York City, which the British navy would make impregnable.
From there Howe was to drive north along the Hudson River, while another British army marched south from
Canada to Albany. There the two armies would converge, cutting New England off from the rest of the colonies,
then turn eastward to reduce the rebellious Yankees into submission. Washington, who had arrived at Boston to
take command of the militia forces there in the summer of 1775, anticipated this strategy, and in the spring of
1776, he shifted his forces southward toward New York.
In early July, as Congress was taking its final vote on the Declaration of Independence, the British began their
operation at New York City, landing 32,000 men, a third of them Hessian mercenaries (from the German state of
Hesse), on Staten Island. The Americans, meanwhile, set up fortified positions across the harbor in Brooklyn.
Attacking in late August, the British inflicted heavy casualties on the Americans, and the militia forces under
Washington’s command proved unreliable under fire. The Battle of Long Island ended in disaster for the Patriots,
and they were forced to withdraw across the East River to Manhattan.
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The British offered Congress an opportunity to negotiate, and on September 6, 1776, Benjamin Franklin, John
Adams, and Edward Rutledge sat down on Staten Island with General Howe and his brother, Admiral Richard
Howe. But the meeting ended when the Howe brothers demanded repeal of the Declaration of Independence.
This set the stage for another round of fighting. Six days later, the British invaded Manhattan, and only an
American stand at Harlem Heights prevented the destruction of a large portion of the Patriot army. Enjoying naval
control of the harbor, the British quickly outflanked the American positions. In a series of battles over the next few
months, the British forced Washington back at White Plains and overran the American posts of Fort Washington
and Fort Lee, on either side of the Hudson River. By November, the Americans were fleeing south across New
Jersey in a frantic attempt to avoid the British under General Charles Cornwallis.
With morale desperately low, whole militia companies deserted; others, announcing the end of their terms of
enlistment, left for home. American resistance seemed to be collapsing all around Washington. “Our troops will
not do their duty,” he wrote painfully to Congress as he crossed the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. Upon
receiving his message, the delegates in Philadelphia fled to Baltimore. “I think the game is pretty near up,”
Washington admitted to his brother. But rather than fall back, which would surely have meant the dissolution of
his entire force, he decided to risk a counterattack. On Christmas night 1776, he led 2,400 troops back across the
Delaware, and the next morning defeated the Hessian forces in a surprise attack on their headquarters at Trenton,
New Jersey. The Americans inflicted further heavy losses on the British at Princeton, then drove them all the way
back to the environs of New York City.
Although these small victories had little strategic importance, they salvaged American morale. As Washington
settled into winter headquarters at Morristown, he realized he had to pursue a defensive strategy, avoiding direct
confrontations with the British while checking their advances and hurting them wherever possible. “We cannot
conquer the British force at once,” wrote Major General Nathaniel Greene, “but they cannot conquer us at all.”
This last sentiment was more a hope than a conviction, but it defined the essentially defensive American strategy
of the Revolution. Most important to that strategy was the survival of the Continental Army.
5. The Northern Campaigns of 1777
The fighting with the American forces had prevented Howe from moving north up the Hudson River, and the
British advance southward from Canada had been stalled by American resistance at Lake Champlain. In 1777,
however, the British decided to replay their strategy. From Canada they dispatched General John Burgoyne with
nearly 8,000 British and German troops. Howe was to move his force from New York, first taking the city of
Philadelphia, the seat of the Continental Congress, and then moving north to meet Burgoyne (see Map 7-2).
Fort Ticonderoga fell to Burgoyne on July 6, but by August, the general found himself bogged down and harassed
by Patriot militias in the rough country south of Lake George. After several defeats in September at the hands of an
American army commanded by General Horatio Gates, Burgoyne retreated to Saratoga. There his army was
surrounded by a considerably larger force of Americans, and on October 19, lacking alternatives, he surrendered
his nearly 6,000 men. It would be the biggest British defeat until Yorktown, decisive because it forced the nations
of Europe to recognize that the Americans had a fighting chance to win their Revolution.
The Americans were less successful against Howe. A force of 15,000 British troops left New York in July, landing a
month later at the northern end of Chesapeake Bay. On September 11, the British outflanked the American
defensive position at Brandywine Creek, thirty-five miles southwest of Philadelphia, inflicting heavy casualties and
forcing Washington to fall back. Ten days later, the British surprised the American encampment at Paoli, only
twenty-five miles from the city, leaving many Patriots dead on the field of battle. This cleared the way for the
British occupation of Philadelphia, which occurred on September 26. The Continental Congress fled to the country
town of York. Washington attempted a valiant counterattack at Germantown north of the city on October 4, but
initial success was followed by tactical miscoordination that doomed the operation.
After this campaign, the Continentals headed into winter quarters at Valley Forge, the bitterness of their defeats
muted somewhat by news of Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga. The British had possession of Philadelphia, the
most important city in North America, but it would prove of little strategic value. The Continental Congress
continued to operate at York, so the unified effort suffered little disruption. At the end of two years of fighting,
despite numerous military victories, the British strategy for suppressing the Revolution had to be judged a failure.
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6. The French Alliance and the Spanish Borderlands
During these two years of fighting, the Americans were sustained by loans from France and Spain, traditional allies
against Great Britain. Both saw an opportunity to win back North American territories lost as a result of the Seven
Years’ War. The Continental Congress sent a diplomatic delegation to Paris headed by Benjamin Franklin. The
urbane and cosmopolitan Franklin, who captured French hearts by dressing in homespun and wearing a
“frontiersman” fur cap, established excellent relations with Comte de Vergennes, the French foreign minister.
Franklin negotiated for recognition of American independence and a Franco-American alliance against the British,
in addition to loans from the French to finance the Revolution. Vergennes longed to weaken the British empire any
way he could, and was inclined to support the Americans. But reluctant to encourage a republican revolution
against monarchy and colonialism, he hesitated.
In England, meanwhile, the Whig opposition argued strongly against the war. “The measures toward America are
erroneous,” declared their leader Lord Rockingham, “adherence to them is destruction.” William Pitt, in the last
year of his life, warned his countrymen to “beware the gathering storm” if and when France decided to support
the Americans actively. When, in December 1777, news of Burgoyne’s surrender reached London, British Prime
Minister Frederick Lord North urgently dispatched agents to open peace discussions with Franklin in Paris. But it
was too late. The victory at Saratoga, as well as fears of British conciliation with the revolutionaries, had persuaded
French Foreign Minister Vergennes to tie France to the United States. In mid-December he informed Franklin that
the king’s council had decided to recognize American independence.
The Treaty of Alliance between France and “the United States of North America” was to take effect “should war
break out” between France and Great Britain. The French pledged to “maintain effectually the liberty, sovereignty,
and independence” of its ally. “Neither of the two parties,” the treaty read, “shall conclude either truce or peace
with Great Britain, without the formal consent of the other.” France agreed to guarantee to the United States all
the “northern parts of America” as well as other “conquests” made in the war, while the United States promised to
recognize French acquisitions of British islands in the West Indies. In March, the French ambassador in London
officially informed the British government of the treaty. Fighting between the two countries broke out in June.
A year later, Spain also entered the war. Spanish officials in New Orleans were already providing substantial
ammunition and provisions for American forts in the West, including supplies of beef from herds of cattle driven to
New Orleans by vaqueros (cowboys) from Texas. In New Spain, the viceroy levied a special tax to pay for these
supplies, and borderland colonists in Sonora, Texas, New Mexico, and California contributed their share. Father
Junípero Serra, president of the California missions, prescribed a weekly prayer for American victory. But American
attempts to establish a formal Spanish alliance met with failure. The Spanish saw the Revolution as an opportunity
to regain Florida from the British and extend their control of the Mississippi Valley, but they feared the threat the
Americans would pose to New Spain. “Its people are active, industrious, and aggressive,” one official in Mexico
wrote of the new nation, and “it would be culpable negligence on our part not to thwart their schemes for
conquest.”
Thus the Spanish pursued an independent strategy against the British, seizing the weakly defended Mississippi
River towns of Natchez and Baton Rouge in 1779, and winning the important Gulf ports of Mobile in 1780 and
Pensacola in 1781. The victory at Pensacola was achieved with the help of several companies of Florida exiles,
many of them African Americans. Alarmed by the quick spread of American settlements west of the Appalachians,
the Spanish attempted to establish a claim of their own to the British territory north of the Ohio; they sent an
expedition into the Northwest that, in 1781, succeeded in taking the minor British post of St. Joseph in present-day
Michigan.
The first French ambassador to the United States arrived with instructions to do everything he could to prevent the
Americans from enlarging their territory at the expense of the Spanish borderland colonies. Like the Spanish, the
French also feared the potential power of an independent American nation. Several years before, Vergennes had
warned the British that if the Americans gained their independence, they “would immediately set about forming a
great marine [naval armed force],” and use it in the Caribbean to “conquer both your islands and ours.” Eventually
they would sweep south and “not leave a foot of that hemisphere in the possession of any European power.”
Many American leaders did indeed have expansionist aspirations, and understood that the wartime alliance with
France and tacit support of Spain were mere expedients.
Worried over the consequences of French involvement, in the spring of 1778, Lord North sent a peace commission
to America with promises to repeal the parliamentary legislation that had provoked the crisis in the first place, and
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pledged never again to impose revenue taxes on the colonies. Three years earlier, such a pledge would surely have
forestalled the movement toward independence. But the Continental Congress now declared that any person
coming to terms with the British peace commission would be considered a traitor; the only possible topics of
discussion were the withdrawal of British forces and the recognition of American independence.
With France in the war, the British rethought their military strategy. Considering their West Indies sugar colonies at
risk, they shipped 5,000 troops from New York to the Caribbean, and succeeded in beating back a French attack.
Fearing the arrival of the French fleet along the North American coast, the new British commander in America,
General Henry Clinton, evacuated Philadelphia in June 1778. Washington’s Continentals, fresh out of Valley Forge,
went in hot pursuit. In the Battle of Monmouth, fighting in stifling New Jersey heat on June 28, the British blunted
the American drive and succeeded in beating an orderly retreat to New York City. The Americans, headquartered
at West Point, took up defensive positions surrounding the lower Hudson River. Confidence in an impending
victory now spread through the Patriot army. But after a failed American–French joint campaign against the
British at Newport, Rhode Island, General Washington decided on a defensive strategy. Although the Americans
enjoyed several small successes in the Northeast over the next two years, the war there went into a stall.
7. Indian Peoples and the Revolution in the West
At the beginning of the conflict, both sides solicited Indian support. A committee of the Continental Congress
reported that “securing and preserving the friendship of Indian nations appears to be a subject of the utmost
moment to these colonies.” Most important was the stance of the Iroquois Confederacy—long one of the most
potent political forces in colonial North America. A delegation from Congress told the Iroquois that the conflict was
a “family quarrel” and urged them to keep out of it. British agents, on the other hand, pressed the Iroquois to unite
against the Americans. Many Indian leaders were reluctant to get involved: “We are unwilling to join on either side
of such a contest,” declared an Oneida chief. “Let us Indians be all of one mind, and live with one another, and you
white people settle your own disputes between yourselves.”
Ultimately, however, the British proved more persuasive with their argument that a Patriot victory would mean
the extension of American settlements into native homelands. Indian peoples fought in the Revolution for some of
the same reasons Patriots did—political independence, cultural integrity, and the protection of their land and
property—but Indian fears of American expansion led them to oppose the Patriot rhetoric of natural rights and the
equality of all men. Almost all the tribes that engaged in the fighting did so on the side of the British.
British officials marshaled the support of Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws in the South, supplying
them with arms from the British arsenal at Pensacola until it was taken by the Spanish in 1781. The result was
ferocious fighting in the southern backcountry. In the summer of 1776, a large number of Cherokees, led by the
warrior chief Dragging Canoe (Tsiyu-Gunsini), attacked dozens of American settlements. It took hard fighting
before Patriot militia companies managed to drive the Cherokees into the mountains, destroying many of their
towns. Although the Cherokees eventually made an official peace, sporadic violence between Patriots and Indians
continued along the southern frontier.
Among the Iroquois of New York, the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea) succeeded in bringing most
Iroquois warriors into the British camp, although he was opposed by chiefs of the Oneidas and Tuscaroras, who
supported the Patriots. In 1777 and 1778, Iroquois and Loyalist forces raided the northern frontiers of New York
and Pennsylvania. In retaliation, an American army invaded the Iroquois homelands in 1779. Supported by Oneida
and Tuscarora warriors, the Americans destroyed dozens of western villages and thousands of acres of crops. For
the first time since the birth of their confederacy in the fifteenth century, the Iroquois were fighting each other.
Across the mountains, the Ohio Indians formed an effective alliance under the British at Detroit, and in 1777 and
1778, they sent warriors south against pioneer communities in western Virginia and Kentucky that had been
founded in defiance of the Proclamation of 1763. Boonesborough, Kentucky, was nearly destroyed by repeated
attacks, and the Americans barely held out. Virginian George Rogers Clark countered by organizing an expedition
of Kentucky militia against the old French settlements in the Illinois country, which were controlled by the British.
They succeeded in taking the British post at Kaskaskia in the summer of 1778, and in early 1779, in a daring winter
raid on Vincennes, they captured Colonel Henry Hamilton, British commander in the West, infamously known as
“the Scalp Buyer” because of the bounty he had placed on Patriots’ lives.
But Clark lacked the strength to attack the strategic British garrison at Detroit. Coordinating his Iroquois forces
with those in Ohio, Brant mounted a new set of offensives that cast a shadow over Clark’s successes. Raids back
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and forth across the Ohio River by Indians and Americans claimed hundreds of lives over the next three years. The
war in the West would not end with the conclusion of hostilities in the East. With barely a pause, the fighting in the
trans-Appalachian West between Americans and Indians would continue for another two decades.
8. The War in the South
The most important fighting of the Revolution took place in the South. There the war had begun with a slave
uprising. In late 1775, Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation declaring the
emancipation of all slaves and indentured servants who would desert their masters and take up arms for the
British. More than 800 slaves responded to Dunmore’s call. They were given uniforms emblazoned with the motto
“Liberty to Slaves” and organized into an “Ethiopian Corps” that fought alongside Loyalists and British troops,
plundering coastal plantations and liberating more slaves. Patriots rallied, and finally routed Dunmore’s army,
killing many armed slaves. Many others succumbed to a virulent epidemic of smallpox. But at least 300 sailed away
with Dunmore when he evacuated Virginia in July 1776.
General Clinton regained the initiative for Britain in December 1778 by sending a force from New York against
Georgia, the weakest of the colonies. The British crushed the Patriot militia at Savannah and began organizing
Loyalists into a fighting force in an effort to reclaim the colony. Several American counterattacks failed, including
one in which they were supported by the French fleet, which bombarded Savannah. Encouraged by their success in
Georgia, the British decided to apply the lessons learned there throughout the South. This involved a fundamental
change from a strategy of military conquest to one of pacification. Territory would be retaken step by step, then
handed over to Loyalists, who would reassert colonial authority loyal to the crown. In October 1779, Clinton
evacuated Rhode Island, the last British stronghold in New England, and sailed for the South with 8,000 troops.
Landing at Savannah, the British force marched overland to Charleston, where they overwhelmed the American
defenders and forced the surrender of more than 5,000 troops in May 1780. It was the most significant American
defeat of the war. Horatio Gates, the hero of Saratoga, led a detachment of Continentals southward, but in August
they were defeated by General Cornwallis at Camden, South Carolina. Patriot resistance collapsed in the Lower
South, and American fortunes were suddenly at their lowest ebb since the beginning of the war.
During the British campaign through the South, thousands of slaves responded to a British promise of liberty to
those who would fight. In response, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina grudgingly attempted to recruit free
persons of color and even slaves into their armed forces. Northern states, led by New England, had already
solicited African American recruits, and Rhode Island had placed an African American regiment in the field. Some
of these men served in the infantry, and many more were commissary workers or teamsters. By war’s end, at least
5,000 African Americans had served in Patriot militias or the Continental Army, and in the Upper South some
slaves won their freedom through military service. In the Lower South, however, where the numerical superiority
of slaves bred fears of rebellion among white people, there was no similar movement.
The southern campaign was marked by vicious violence between partisan militias of Patriots and Loyalists. “The
Whigs and Tories persecute each other with little less than savage fury,” wrote General Greene, appointed to
succeed Gates after the disaster at Camden. “There is nothing but murders and devastations in every quarter.”
The violence peaked in September 1780 with Cornwallis’s invasion of North Carolina, where the Patriots were
stronger and better organized. There the British found their southern strategy untenable: plundering towns and
farms in order to feed the army in the interior had the effect of producing angry support for the Patriots. In
October at King’s Mountain, in the backcountry near the boundary between the Carolinas, Patriot sharpshooters
outflanked and destroyed a Loyalist force, and in January 1781, Loyalists were again defeated at the Battle of the
Cowpens, not far from King’s Mountain.
Into 1781, the Continentals and Patriot militias waged what General Greene called a fugitive war of hit and run
against the British. “I am quite tired of marching about the country in quest of adventures,” Cornwallis wrote; he
declared himself “totally in the dark” about what to do next. He won a victory over the Patriots at Guilford Court
House in March, but, finally deciding he would not be able to hold the Carolinas as long as Virginia remained a base
of support and supply for the Americans, he led his army north in the summer of 1781, establishing a base of
operations at Yorktown, on Chesapeake Bay. His withdrawal from North Carolina allowed Greene to reestablish
Patriot control of the Lower South.
9. Yorktown
While the British raged through the South, the stalemate continued in the Northeast. In the summer of 1780,
taking advantage of the British evacuation of Rhode Island, the French landed 5,000 troops at Newport under the
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command of General Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau. But it was not until the spring of
1781 that the general risked joining his force to Washington’s Continentals north of New York City. They planned a
campaign against the British in Manhattan, but in August, Washington learned that the French Caribbean fleet was
headed for the Chesapeake. If he and Rochambeau could move their troops south, they might lock Cornwallis into
his camp at Yorktown. Leaving a small force behind as a decoy, the two generals marched their 16,000 men
overland to the Virginia shore in little more than a month.
The maneuver was a complete success. The French and Americans surrounded the British encampment and began
a siege. “If you cannot relieve me very soon,” Cornwallis wrote Clinton in New York, “you must expect to hear the
worst.” French and American heavy artillery hammered the British unmercifully until the middle of October. After
the failure of a planned retreat across the York River, Cornwallis opened negotiations for the surrender of his army.
Two days later, on October 19, 1781, between lines of victorious American and French soldiers, the British troops
came out from their trenches to surrender, marching to the melancholy tune of “The World Turned Upside Down”:
If buttercups buzzed after the bee,
If boats were on land, churches on sea,
If summer were spring and t’other way round,
Then all the world would be upside down.
It must have seemed that way to Cornwallis. Pleading illness, he sent his second-in-command, General Charles
O’Hara, to surrender. O’Hara first approached General Rochambeau, but the Frenchman waved him toward
Washington. To the British, it was inconceivable that they would be required to surrender to former subordinates.
Everyone knew this was an event of incalculable importance, but few guessed it was the end of the war, for the
British still controlled New York.
In London, at the end of November, Lord North received the news “as he would have taken a ball in the breast,”
reported the colonial secretary. “Oh God!” he moaned, “it is all over!” British fortunes were at low ebb in India, the
West Indies, Florida, and the Mediterranean, the cost of the war was enormous, and there was little support
among the public and members of Parliament for it. King George III wished to press on, but North submitted his
resignation, and in March 1782, the king agreed to a new government headed by the Whig leader Charles WatsonWentworth, Marquess of Rockingham, who favored granting Americans their independence.
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