The American Revolution

In 1775, Britain and Ireland together had over 11 million people, the largest navy in the world, a professional army, and a government that could borrow almost unlimited money. The thirteen colonies had about 2.5 million people, a fifth of them enslaved, no navy, no regular army, no power to tax, and no national government beyond a Congress of delegates. Many colonists wanted nothing to do with independence. Six years later, on October 19, 1781, a British army of about 8,000 men marched out of Yorktown, Virginia, and laid down its weapons. Explaining that outcome means weighing several causes against each other and supporting the ranking with evidence.

The odds in 1775

British advantages. The Royal Navy could move troops anywhere along the coast and blockade American ports. The British army was trained and disciplined, and Britain hired about 30,000 German soldiers, called Hessians after the state that supplied many of them. British credit allowed it to fund the war for years. Most Native nations, who saw colonial settlers as the greater threat to their land, sided with Britain; the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant led raids on the New York frontier, though the Oneida and Tuscarora supported the Patriots, splitting the Iroquois Confederacy.

Loyalists. Perhaps 15 to 20 percent of white colonists stayed loyal to the king, and about 19,000 served in Loyalist military units. They included royal officials, many Anglican clergy, merchants tied to British trade, recent immigrants, and backcountry farmers in the Carolinas who distrusted the coastal elites leading the Patriot cause. In November 1775 Virginia's royal governor, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to enslaved people of rebel masters who fought for the king, and several hundred joined his "Ethiopian Regiment." Over the course of the war, tens of thousands of enslaved people fled to British lines, while about 5,000 Black men served on the Patriot side. Between Loyalists and the neutral, the Patriots had to win a civil war at the same time as a war against Britain.

Patriot weaknesses. Congress could only request money from the states, so it printed paper Continental dollars that lost nearly all their value by 1780. Soldiers enlisted for short terms, went unpaid for months, and deserted in large numbers.

Yet Britain had problems the numbers hide. Its army was 3,000 miles from home, and orders and supplies took two months or more to cross the Atlantic. To win, Britain had to occupy and pacify a territory larger than Britain itself, among a hostile population; the Patriots only had to avoid losing. British leaders also counted on Loyalist support that rarely appeared in the strength they expected.

Militias and the Continental Army

Two kinds of American forces did different jobs, and you need both in an essay.

Militias were local units of part-time citizen soldiers. They fired the first shots at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, and harassed the British column back to Boston, inflicting about 270 casualties. At Bunker Hill (June 17, 1775) the British took the hill but lost over 1,000 of about 2,200 men engaged. More important over time, militias controlled the countryside: they drove out royal officials, disarmed and intimidated Loyalists, and made it impossible for British troops to hold territory they were not standing on. They also turned out in large numbers for key battles. At Saratoga in 1777 militia swelled the American army, and at Kings Mountain (October 1780), a force of backcountry militia destroyed a Loyalist army in the Carolinas.

The Continental Army, created by Congress in June 1775 with George Washington as commander, was the permanent force. Militia could not stand up to British regulars in open battle for long, so the Continental Army had to exist: as long as it survived, the rebellion survived. It improved over the war. At Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-1778, the Prussian officer Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben drilled the troops into a disciplined force, and in June 1778 at Monmouth, New Jersey, they fought British regulars to a standstill in open battle.

Historian John Shy, in A People Numerous and Armed (1976), argued that the militia's political role, controlling communities and forcing people to choose sides, mattered as much as its fighting.

Washington's leadership

Washington lost more battles than he won: Long Island, White Plains, Brandywine, Germantown. His leadership mattered for other reasons.

Strategy. After nearly losing his army around New York in 1776, Washington learned to avoid the single decisive battle the British wanted. He kept the army intact, retreated when he had to, and struck when the British were spread out. On the night of December 25-26, 1776, with enlistments about to expire and the cause near collapse, he crossed the icy Delaware River and captured about 900 Hessians at Trenton, then won again at Princeton on January 3, 1777. The victories were small, but they kept men in the army and restored belief that the war could be won.

Holding the army together. At Valley Forge, nearly 2,000 of roughly 12,000 soldiers died, most of them of typhus, typhoid and dysentery spread through cold, crowded, underfed camps. Washington kept the rest from dissolving, pleaded with Congress and the states for supplies, and brought in commanders such as Steuben and Nathanael Greene, who later led the southern campaign.

Political judgment. Washington accepted that the army served Congress, even when Congress failed it. In March 1783 at Newburgh, New York, when unpaid officers talked of defying Congress, he persuaded them to stand down. His respect for civilian authority made him trusted, which later made him the obvious choice for president.

Commitment and resilience

The Patriots could lose battle after battle because enough people kept choosing to fight, supply and endure. In December 1776, as Washington's army shrank, Thomas Paine published the first of his American Crisis essays, and Washington reportedly had it read aloud to his troops. Soldiers came back after defeats and terrible winters. When the Pennsylvania and New Jersey lines mutinied over pay in 1781, they demanded their wages but did not go over to the British. Civilians boycotted, raised money and made supplies (Topic 3.3), and Patriot committees kept local government running.

British conduct often strengthened that commitment. Plundering by British and Hessian troops in New Jersey in 1776 turned neutral farmers against them, and in the South, raids by British cavalry and the burning of farms drove many wavering colonists toward the Patriots. Britain needed to win over the population and repeatedly did the opposite.

European allies

Foreign help made the American victory possible on the scale it happened. France, eager to reverse its defeat of 1763 (Topic 3.2), began secretly sending money, muskets and gunpowder in 1776, before it was openly at war. Benjamin Franklin, in Paris from late 1776, worked to turn that aid into an alliance.

The turning point was Saratoga. In 1777 General John Burgoyne marched south from Canada to cut New England off along the Hudson, but the support he expected never arrived, and on October 17, 1777, he surrendered nearly 6,000 men. The victory convinced France that the Americans could win. On February 6, 1778, France signed a treaty of alliance with the United States, promising to fight until independence was won. Spain entered the war against Britain in 1779 as France's ally, and its governor of Louisiana, Bernardo de Gálvez, took British posts on the Gulf Coast, including Pensacola in 1781. The Dutch Republic lent money and recognized the United States in 1782.

The alliance turned a colonial rebellion into a global war. Britain now had to defend its sugar islands in the Caribbean, Gibraltar, India, and even Britain itself from invasion, so it could no longer concentrate on America.

The war ended in the South. Britain shifted its efforts there after 1778, expecting Loyalist support, and took Savannah (1778) and Charleston (1780), where General Benjamin Lincoln surrendered about 5,000 men. But Greene's Continentals and southern militia wore the British down at Kings Mountain, Cowpens (January 1781) and Guilford Courthouse (March 1781). General Charles Cornwallis moved into Virginia and dug in at Yorktown to wait for the navy. Instead, a French fleet under Admiral de Grasse defeated the British fleet off the Virginia capes on September 5, 1781, and sealed the Chesapeake. Washington and the French general Rochambeau marched their armies, roughly half French, from New York to Virginia and trapped Cornwallis. He surrendered on October 19, 1781.

In March 1782, Lord North's government fell. In the Treaty of Paris (September 3, 1783), Britain recognized American independence, with borders running west to the Mississippi River, and gave Americans fishing rights off Newfoundland; in a separate treaty, Britain returned Florida to Spain. Congress agreed to recommend that states restore Loyalists' property, which most states ignored. About 60,000 Loyalists, and thousands of formerly enslaved people who had fought for Britain, left with the British, many to Canada.

Historians weigh these factors differently. Piers Mackesy's The War for America (1964) and Andrew O'Shaughnessy's The Men Who Lost America (2013) argue that Britain's leaders were not simply incompetent; they faced a nearly impossible task once the war became global. Others stress American political mobilization, as Shy did.

Worked examples

Where students lose points

On the exam

This topic's skill is supporting an argument with specific, relevant evidence. Long-essay prompts on the Revolution can ask about the relative importance of factors in the American victory or about the war's effects; multiple-choice sets may use a letter from Washington, a Loyalist's account, or an excerpt such as Paine's. Match evidence to the factor it proves: Saratoga, the alliance and Yorktown for French aid; Trenton, Princeton and Valley Forge for Washington's leadership and the army's resilience; Lexington, Concord and Kings Mountain for militias.