However important constitution-making of the states and the Union may have been to the Revolutionaries, it would mean nothing if independence were not achieved. Once Britain had determined to enforce its authority with troops, Americans knew that they had to take up arms to support their beliefs and their hopes for the future. For over a year before the Declaration of Independence, American and British forces had been at war. It was a war that would go on for nearly eight years—the longest conflict in American history until the Vietnam War two centuries later.
The war for independence passed through a series of distinct phases, growing and widening until what had begun in British eyes as a breakdown in governmental authority in a section of the empire became a worldwide struggle. For the first time in the eighteenth century, Great Britain found itself diplomatically isolated; at one point in 1779 it was even threatened with French invasion. The war for American independence thus eventually became an important episode in Britain’s long struggle with France for global supremacy, a struggle that went back a century and would continue for another generation into the nineteenth century.
British troops had suffered heavy losses in their first clashes with the American militia in Massachusetts in the spring of 1775—at Lexington and Concord and especially in the bloody battle of Bunker Hill. This initial experience convinced the British government that it was not simply dealing with a New England mob, and it swept away almost every objection the members of the ministry had to a conquest of the colonies. During the summer of 1775 the Second Continental Congress appointed fourteen generals, authorized the invasion of Canada, and organized a Continental field army under George Washington. Aware that the southern colonies were suspicious of Massachusetts’s fanaticism, John Adams pushed for the selection of the forty-three-year-old Virginia militia colonel as commander in chief. It was an inspired choice. Washington, who attended the Congress in uniform, looked the part: he was tall and composed, with a dignified soldierlike air that inspired confidence. He was, as one congressman said, “no harum-scarum, ranting, swearing fellow, but sober, steady, and calm.”
All these congressional actions only confirmed the British government’s realization that it was now involved in a military rather than a police action. This new understanding of what Britain was up against dictated a conventional eighteenth-century military policy of maneuver and battle between organized armies.
This change of strategy required that the British evacuate Boston and transfer their main forces to New York, with its presumably more sympathetic population, its superior port, and its central position. Accordingly, in the summer of 1776, Sir William Howe, who replaced Gage as commander in chief of the British army in North America, sailed into New York Harbor with a force of more than 30,000 men. Howe aimed to cut New England off from the other rebels and to defeat Washington’s army in a decisive battle. He was to spend the next two frustrating years trying to realize this plan.
On the face of it, a military struggle seemed to promise all the advantage to Great Britain. Britain was the most powerful nation in the world, with a population of about 11 million, compared with only 2.5 million colonists, a fifth of whom were black slaves. The British navy was the largest in the world, with nearly half its ships initially committed to the American struggle. The British army was a well-trained professional force, numbering at one point in 1778 nearly 50,000 troops stationed in North America alone; and more than 30,000 hired German mercenaries were added to this force during the war.
To confront this military might the Americans had to start from scratch. The Continental Army they created numbered usually less than 5,000 troops, supplemented by state militia units of varying sizes. In most cases inexperienced amateur officers served as the American military leaders. Washington, the commander in chief, for example, had been only a regimental colonel on the Virginia frontier and had little firsthand knowledge of combat. He knew nothing about moving large masses of soldiers and had never conducted a siege of a fortified position. Many of Washington’s officers were drawn from the middling ranks of the society and were hardly traditional gentlemen. There were innkeepers who were captains and shoemakers who were colonels, exclaimed an astonished French officer. Indeed, “it often happens that the Americans ask the French officers what their trade is in France.” Not surprisingly, most British officers thought that the American army was “but a contemptible band of vagrants, deserters and thieves” and no match for His Majesty’s redcoats. One British general even boasted that with a thousand grenadiers he could “go from one end of America to the other, and geld all the males, partly by force and partly by a little coaxing.”
Yet such a contrast of numbers and abilities was deceptive, for the British disadvantages were immense and perhaps overwhelming—even at the beginning when their opportunities to put down the rebellion were greatest. Great Britain had to carry on the war three thousand miles across the Atlantic, with consequent problems of communications and logistics; even supplying the army with food became a problem. At the same time, Britain had to wage a different kind of war from any the country had ever fought in the eighteenth century. A well-trained army might have been able to conquer the American forces, but, as one French officer observed at the end, America itself was unconquerable. The great breadth of territory and the wild nature of the terrain made conventional maneuverings and operations difficult and cumbersome. The fragmented and local character of authority in America inhibited decisive action by the British. There was no nerve center anywhere whose capture would destroy the rebellion. The British generals came to see that engaging Washington’s army in battle ought to be their main objective; but, said the British commander in chief, they did not know how to do it, “as the enemy moves with so much more celerity than we possibly can.”
Washington for his part realized at the outset that the American side of the war should be defensive. “We should on all occasions avoid a general Action,” he told Congress in September 1776, “or put anything to the risque unless compelled by a necessity into which we ought never to be drawn.” Although he never saw himself as a guerrilla leader and concentrated throughout on creating a professional army with which he was often eager to confront the British in open battle, his troops actually spent a good deal of time skirmishing with the enemy, harassing them and depriving them of food and supplies whenever possible. In such circumstances the Americans’ reliance on amateur militia forces and the weakness of their organized army made the Americans, as a Swiss officer noted, more dangerous than “if they had a regular army.” The British never clearly understood what they were up against—a revolutionary struggle involving widespread support in the population. Hence they continually underestimated the staying power of the rebels and overestimated the strength of the loyalists. And in the end, independence came to mean more to the Americans than reconquest did to the English.
From the outset the English objective could never be as simple and clear-cut as the Americans’ desire for independence. Conquest by itself could not restore political relations and imperial harmony. Many people in England were reluctant to engage in a civil war, and several officers actually refused on grounds of conscience to serve in America. Although the king, the bulk of the Parliament, and most members of the English ministry were intent on subjugating America by force, the British commanders appointed in 1775 never shared this overriding urge for outright coercion. These commanders—Sir William Howe and his brother Admiral Richard, Lord Howe, who was in charge of the navy—saw themselves not simply as conquerors but also as peacemakers. They had in fact been authorized by Lord North to seek a political solution while putting down the rebellion with force. Consequently they interrupted their military operations with peace feelers to Washington and the Continental Congress, and they tried to avoid plundering and ravaging the American countryside and ports out of fear of destroying a hope for reconciliation. This “sentimental manner of waging war,” as Lord George Germain, head of the American Department, called it, weakened the morale of British officers and troops and left the loyalists confused and disillusioned.
The policy of the Howe brothers was not as ineffectual initially as it later appeared. After defeating Washington on Long Island in August 1776 and driving him from New York City in the fall of 1776, General Howe had Washington in pell-mell retreat southward. Instead of pursuing Washington across the Delaware River, Howe resorted to a piecemeal occupation of New Jersey. He extended his lines and deployed brigade garrisons at a half-dozen towns around the area with the aim of gradually convincing the rebels that the British army was invincible. Loyalist militiamen emerged from hiding and through a series of ferocious local struggles with patriot groups began to assume control of northern New Jersey. Nearly 5,000 Americans, including one signer of the Declaration of Independence, came forward to accept Howe’s offer of pardon and to swear loyalty to the crown. American prospects at the end of 1776 were as low as they ever would be during the war. These were, as Thomas Paine wrote, “times that try men’s souls.”
The Howes’ policy of leniency and pacification, however, was marred by plundering by British troops and by loyalist recriminations against the rebels. But even more important in undermining the British successes of 1776 were Washington’s brilliant strokes in picking off two of Howe’s extended outposts at Trenton on December 25–26, 1776, and at Princeton on January 3, 1777. With these victories Washington forced the British to withdraw from the banks of the Delaware and to leave the newly formed bands of loyalists to fend for themselves. Patriot morale soared, oaths of loyalty to the king declined, and patriot militia moved back into control of local areas vacated by the withdrawing British troops. With New Jersey torn by ferocious partisan or guerrilla warfare, the British again had to reconsider their plans.
The British strategy for 1777 involved sending an army of 8,000, including 3,000 Germans and several hundred Indians, under General John Burgoyne southward from Canada by way of Lake Champlain to recapture Fort Ticonderoga. Near Albany, Burgoyne was to join a secondary force under Lieutenant Colonel Barry St. Leger, moving eastward through the Mohawk Valley, and General Howe, advancing northward from New York City through the Hudson Valley. The ultimate aim of the campaign was to isolate New England and break the back of the rebellion. It was assumed in Britain that General Howe would cooperate with Burgoyne. But Howe continued to believe that there was widespread loyalist support in the middle states and decided to capture Philadelphia, the seat of the congressional government. Howe moved on Philadelphia by sea and landed after much delay at the head of Chesapeake Bay in late August 1777. Believing he could not give up the Continental capital without a struggle, Washington confronted Howe at Brandywine, Pennsylvania, on September 11 and later on October 4 at Germantown and was defeated in both battles. But his defeats were not disastrous: They proved that the American army was capable of organized combat, and they prevented Howe from moving north to help Burgoyne. Howe’s capture of Philadelphia demonstrated that loyalist sentiment reached only as far as British arms, and it scarcely justified what happened to Burgoyne’s army in the North.
After St. Leger’s force was turned back at Oriskany, New York, in the summer of 1777, Burgoyne and his huge, slow-moving entourage from Canada increasingly found their supply lines stretched thin and their flanks harassed by patriot militia from New England. Burgoyne’s baggage train was over three miles long; his personal baggage alone took up over thirty carts. By felling trees, destroying bridges, and diverting streams, the patriots did all they could to make the wild terrain even more impassable than it was. Burgoyne had to build over forty new bridges as well as repair old ones. At one point he was covering less than one mile a day. This sluggish pace only worsened the problem of supply. One of his lieutenants declared that for every hour Burgoyne spent thinking how to fight his army he had to devote twenty hours figuring out how to feed it.
While Burgoyne’s slow advance gave the American forces in the Hudson Valley needed time to collect themselves, the British army was diminishing. When 900 of Burgoyne’s men attempted to seize provisions from a patriot arsenal in Bennington, Vermont, they were defeated by 2,000 New England militia under John Stark. Another 900 redcoats were detached to garrison Ticonderoga. Believing that his reputation rested on the success of his Canadian invasion, Burgoyne determined to press on. On September 13–14 he crossed the Hudson, cutting off his supply lines and communications with his rear. When he reached Saratoga, he confronted a growing American force of over 10,000 men under General Horatio Gates. Two bloody battles, in which General Benedict Arnold distinguished himself, convinced Burgoyne of the hopelessness of his situation, and in October 1777 he surrendered his entire army to the Americans.
Saratoga was the turning point. It suggested that reconquest of America might be beyond British strength. It brought France openly into the struggle. And it led to a change in the British command and a fundamental alteration in strategy.
From the beginning of the rebellion France had been secretly supplying the Americans money and arms in the hope of revenging its defeat in the Seven Years’ War. In 1776, Benjamin Franklin had gone to Paris to serve as the unofficial American ambassador. By 1777, French ports had been opened to American privateers, and French officers were joining Washington’s army. It seemed only a matter of time before France recognized the new republic. The British ministry realized at once the significance of Burgoyne’s surrender, and by appointing the Carlisle Commission early in 1778 made new efforts to negotiate a settlement. The British government now offered the rebels a return to the imperial status before 1763—indeed, everything the Americans had originally wanted. These British overtures, which Franklin skillfully used in Paris to play on French fears of an Anglo-American reconciliation, led the government of King Louis XVI in February 1778 to sign two treaties with the United States: one a commercial arrangement, the other a military alliance pledged to American independence—the first and only military alliance for the United States until that of NATO in 1949. In 1779 Spain became allied with France, in the hope of recovering its earlier losses from England, especially Gibraltar. And in 1780 Russia formed a League of Armed Neutrality, which nearly all of the maritime states of Europe eventually joined. For the first time in the eighteenth century, Britain was diplomatically isolated.
After 1778 putting down the rebellion became secondary to Britain’s global struggle with the Bourbon powers, France and Spain. The center of the war effort in America shifted seaward and southward as Britain sought to protect its possessions in the West Indies. General Howe was replaced by Sir Henry Clinton; a more ruthless policy was adopted, including the bombardment of American ports, raids on the countryside, and attempts to buy off the rebel leaders, with Benedict Arnold’s treason being the most conspicuous result. Arnold was a brilliant battlefield commander who came to resent the way state and congressional officials were treating him. In 1779 he entered into secret negotiations with Sir Henry Clinton to turn over West Point to the British in return for money and a royal commission in the British army. Although the plot to turn over West Point was thwarted in 1780, Arnold escaped and became a British general. For successive generations of Americans, Arnold personified the meaning of treason.
As part of their new strategy the British intended to abandon Philadelphia and assume a defensive position in New York and Rhode Island. Concentrating their forces in the West Indies, they aimed to secure military control of ports in the Deep South, restore civil royal government with loyalist support, and then methodically move the army northward as a screen behind which local loyalists would gradually pacify the rebel territories. This strategy was based on an assumption that the South, with its scattered, presumably more loyalist population living in fear of Indian raids and slave uprisings, was especially vulnerable to the reassertion of British authority.
The British evacuation of Philadelphia in June 1778 offered Washington an opportunity to attack the extended slow-moving British column. Although Washington’s troops had suffered terribly from lack of food and clothing during the previous winter of 1777–78 at Valley Forge, they had actually emerged a more unified and disciplined fighting force. Led by Baron von Steuben, a former aide-de-camp to the king of Prussia, the army trained and drilled and reorganized itself and developed a new pride and esprit. Despite opposition from some of his generals, especially General Charles Lee, who had no confidence in von Steuben’s training, Washington was eager to test his newly disciplined troops against Clinton’s withdrawing redcoats. Although the hard-fought battle of Monmouth, New Jersey, on June 28 ended in a draw, Washington and Congress considered it a victory, for the American regulars had stood up to the best of the British regulars.
Washington’s ultimate success as the American commander in chief, however, never stemmed from his military abilities. He was never a traditional military hero. He had no smashing, stunning victories, and his tactical and strategic maneuvers were never the sort that awed men. Instead, it was his character and political talent and judgment that mattered most. His stoicism, dignity, and perseverance in the face of seemingly impossible odds came to symbolize the entire Revolutionary cause. As the war went on year after year, his stature only grew, and by 1779 Americans were celebrating his birthday as well as the Fourth of July. Washington always deferred to civilian leadership and never lost the support of the Congress, even when exaggerated rumors of a cabal involving Thomas Conway, an Irish-born French officer, and General Horatio Gates, the victor at Saratoga, seemed to threaten his position in the fall and winter of 1777–78. He was always loyal to his fellow officers in the Continental Army and they to him; they trusted him, and with good reason. What he lacked in military skill he made up with prudence and wisdom. When in the wake of the French alliance the French nobleman the Marquis de Lafayette, who had been in the struggle since 1777, proposed a Franco-American scheme for conquering Canada, the excited Congress readily agreed. Washington, however, pointed out that France had her own interests and was scarcely to be trusted in the retaking of Canada, and the scheme quietly died.
With the center of British operations removed to the South, Washington was left in the North over the next few years trying to put down mutinies in his army and pleading for French military and naval support. All he could do was avoid giving Clinton an opportunity to defeat him in a decisive battle and watch in frustration at the initial successes of the new British strategy of pacification in the South. During the winter of 1778–79 the British captured Savannah and Augusta and restored royal civil government in Georgia. Although constant American militia attacks slowed the British advance, on May 12, 1780, with the surrender of General Benjamin Lincoln and his American army of 5,500, the British finally took Charleston, South Carolina. It was the greatest American loss of soldiers in the entire war. A new, hastily assembled American southern army under General Gates rashly moved into South Carolina to stop the British offensive. On August 16, 1780, at Camden, South Carolina, Gates suffered a devastating defeat, which destroyed not only his new American army but his military reputation as well. But the British were not able to consolidate their gains and give the loyalists the military protection needed to pacify the countryside. Loyalist retaliations against Whig patriots for past harsh treatment, along with British plunder of the backcountry, particularly by the ruthless commander Colonel Banastre Tarleton, drove countless Georgians and Carolinians into partisan activity in support of the Revolution. Colorful leaders like Thomas Sumter and Francis Marion organized irregular bands of patriots to harass the loyalists and the British army. The war in the lower South became a series of bloody guerrilla skirmishes with atrocities on both sides.
In the South, Lord Cornwallis was now in command of the British forces. He was impatient with the gradual policy of pacification and was eager to demonstrate British strength by dramatically carrying the war into North Carolina. With his army constantly bedeviled by patriot guerrillas, he had just begun moving northward when he learned that his left flank had been destroyed at King’s Mountain on October 7, 1780. The news forced him to return to South Carolina. In the meantime the Americans had begun organizing a third southern army under the command of a thirty-eight-year-old ex-Quaker from Rhode Island, Nathanael Greene, recently quartermaster general of the Continental Army. Shrewdly avoiding a direct confrontation with Cornwallis, Greene compelled the British to divide their forces. On January 17, 1781, at Cowpens in western South Carolina, a detached corps of Greene’s army under Daniel Morgan defeated “Bloody” Tarleton’s Tory Legion and changed the course of British strategy in the South.
Cornwallis cut his ties with his base in Charleston and turned his army into a mobile striking force, determined to chase down the elusive American army. After an indecisive battle with Greene at Guilford Courthouse on March 15, 1781, Cornwallis’s tired and battered soldiers withdrew to Wilmington on the North Carolina coast with the intention of moving the seat of war northward into Virginia. Thus ended the British experiment with a thorough program of pacification. During the spring and summer of 1781, patriot forces regained control of most of the lower South.
Although marauding by British forces in the summer of 1781 frightened Virginians and humiliated Governor Thomas Jefferson, Cornwallis could not convince his commander in chief, Clinton, in New York to make Virginia the center of British military operations. The haggling between the two generals enabled the Americans to bolster their Virginia troops under the command of Lafayette. Cornwallis’s withdrawal to the Virginia coast and his eventual isolation at Yorktown gave the combined American and French army of nearly 17,000 men under Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau the opportunity it was looking for. The French fleet under Admiral de Grasse moved into Chesapeake Bay and blocked Cornwallis’s planned escape by sea. Thus surrounded and bombarded at Yorktown, Cornwallis was forced to surrender his army of 8,000 troops to Washington in October 1781. Britain’s policy since 1778 of spreading its control along the entire Atlantic seaboard depended on maintaining naval superiority; and when this superiority was temporarily lost in 1781, the entire plan collapsed. Although the war dragged on for several months, everyone knew that Yorktown meant American independence.
The long war was costly for the new country: more than 25,000 American military deaths—nearly 1 percent of the population, second only to the Civil War in deaths relative to population.
Despite the end of the war, the peace still had to be won. The main objective of the new nation—independence from Great Britain—was clear and straightforward. But this objective and others concerning America’s territorial boundaries and its rights to the Newfoundland fisheries had to be reconciled with the aims of America’s ally, France, and with the aims of France’s ally, Spain, which had been at war with Great Britain since 1779. The United States and France had pledged in 1778 not to make a separate peace with Britain. But since France was bound to Spain against Britain until Gibraltar was recovered, there was great danger of American interests getting lost in the machinations of the European powers. Despite the desire of France and Spain to humiliate Britain, neither Bourbon monarchy really wanted a strong and independent American republic. Spain in particular feared the spread of republicanism among its South American colonies and sought to protect its interests in the Mississippi Valley.
Although Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay, the American negotiators in Europe, were only, in Adams’s words, “militia diplomats,” they wound their way through the intricate corridors of international politics with professional diplomatic skill. Despite instructions from the Congress to do nothing without consulting the French, the American diplomats decided to negotiate with Britain alone. By hinting at the possibility of weakening the Franco-American alliance, they persuaded Great Britain to recognize the independence of the United States and to agree to much more generous boundaries for the new country than the French and particularly the Spanish were willing to support. On the west, the United States reached to the Mississippi River; on the south, to the thirty-first parallel; and on the north, to roughly the present boundary with Canada. The American negotiators then presented this preliminary Anglo-American treaty to France and persuaded the French to accept it by suggesting that allies must conceal their differences from their enemies. The prospect of American peace with Britain now compelled Spain to abandon its demands for Gibraltar and to settle for the return of East and West Florida. In the final treaty signed on September 3, 1783, the United States, by shrewdly playing off the mutual fears of the European powers, gained both independence and concessions that stunned the French and indeed all of Europe. It was the greatest achievement in the history of American diplomacy.