American Revolution
Lexington and Concord
While the battles at Lexington and Concord, two small towns outside of Boston, in April 1775 may not fully constitute the “shot heard round the world,” these early skirmishes signified that the relationship between the United Kingdom and its North American colonies had been fundamentally disrupted. Following the passage and implementation of the Coercive Acts, known to Americans as the Intolerable Acts, in the spring of 1774, tensions between the British government and the American colonists increased. The presence of British soldiers, the hated redcoats, incensed American colonists, while the British government became increasingly alarmed and infuriated by reports of American colonists secretly stockpiling weapons. When the British army, under the command of General Thomas Gage, sought to recover these weapons during the night of April 18, 1775, American militiamen, the famous minutemen, were warned primarily by Samuel Prescott and William Dawes, the two riders accompanying the briefly detained Paul Revere, of the advancing British force. After a brief standoff at Lexington, in which the vastly outnumbered colonial minutemen were routed by the British, the larger battle at Concord resulted in a humiliating British retreat to Boston in the early morning hours of April 19, 1775. Within 2 months, armed conflict would rage on the prominent hills outside of Boston as colonial militias sought to force British forces out of the city.
Bunker Hill
As confrontations between the American colonists and the British continued in Boston, greater numbers of American colonists openly called for creating an independent government, army, and currency, critical steps towards full independence. American militias sought to reinforce Bunker and Breed’s Hills outside Boston in mid June 1775. While the British finally drove the colonial forces from these hills in the afternoon of June 17, 1775, British losses were more than double those of the colonists, a worrying sign for British commanders who expected colonial resistance to collapse when confronted by superior British numbers.
First and Second Continental Congresses
While the First Continental Congress ended without taking more authoritative steps than calling for significant and quite successful boycotts of British goods, the Second Continental Congress (1775-1781) would provide a more enduring and impactful governing body and framework for the American cause. The Second Continental Congress authorized the creation of the Continental Army with George Washington as its commander and the issuance of the Continental dollar, a new currency that would replace the British pound in the American economy. The Second Continental Congress also conducted foreign relations with France, Spain and Netherlands and articulated the reasons for the war in the Declaration of Causes, the Olive Branch Petition, and the Declaration of Independence. The Second Continental Congress would also be the governing body enshrined in the Articles of Confederation, the legal framework for the United States government until the ratification of the United States Constitution in 1789.
Siege of Boston
The first militarily significant American victory in the American Revolution occurred at Fort Ticonderoga on May 10, 1775 where Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys from New Hampshire seized a British fortress and the 80 cannons and artillery pieces within that would prove decisive in the nearly yearlong siege of Boston; the infamous traitor Benedict Arnold also served valiantly in the American cause at Ticonderoga before his subsequent fall from grace. While George Washington and the newly established Continental Army continually harassed British forces in Boston, Henry Knox, later Secretary of War for President George Washington, and his men began the arduous process of hauling the cannon and artillery pieces all the way to the Dorchester Heights outside Boston, a feat that sealed Washington’s victory in the Siege of Boston on March 17, 1776, when the British forces realized that newly installed artillery combined with their perilous position on a largely indefensible peninsula known as the Neck signified their impending defeat.
Declaring Independence
Throughout the years long struggles for reconciliation between the American colonists and the British government, a rising chorus of voices increasingly agitated for full American independence. Initially a distinctive minority of the colonists, these independence seeking colonists gradually gained greater acceptance in the wake of British insistence on asserting stricter control over the colonies. In July 1775, the Second Continental Congress signed and sent the Olive Branch Petition to King George III, urging the British king to rescind the Intolerable Acts and to restore the previous state of friendship and peace between the colonies and the crown. Upon receiving the Olive Branch Petition, an incensed King George III vowed to punish the rebellious colonists for their insolence and treason.
Excerpt from The Olive Branch Petition, July 5, 1775
What a difference a year makes. 1 day before a year had passed, the Second Continental Congress authorized the issuance of the Declaration of Independence, a fundamentally different document articulating the grievances of the Americans against the same King George III that they beseeched a year earlier to restore their previous peaceful and prosperous arrangement. Written primarily by Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence laid out the reasons, heavily steeped in natural law, and aimed at both domestic and international audiences, for American independence. Whereas the Olive Branch Petition directly blamed Parliament and the king’s ministers for promoting injurious and unjust policies, Jefferson and the committee tasked with writing the Declaration of Independence, headed by John Adams, placed the blame for the wrongs necessitating such a dramatic rupture at the feet of King George III.
Excerpt from The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
Military setbacks
While American Patriots were initially energized by Washington’s victory in the Siege of Boston and the issuance of the Declaration of Independence, British military victories on Long Island in August 1776 and at Brandywine Creek outside Philadelphia in September 1777, coupled with severe financial and logistical challenges for the Continental Army, made American victory seem unlikely. Even when the Continental Army enjoyed momentary military success, such as at the Battle of Trenton in December 1776, the Americans struggled to follow up these successes with significant victories.
Victory at Saratoga
Fortunately for the American cause, within a month of the humiliating defeat at Brandywine Creek, the Continental Army won its most significant victory in the early years of the war at Saratoga in upstate New York. Consisting of 2 battles fought in the span of 3 weeks, American victory at the second Battle of Saratoga, one of the few early battles where American forces clearly outnumbered the British, resulted in a rout, and capture of a significant portion, of British General John Burgoyne’s forces. Saratoga has often been hailed as the “turning point” in the American Revolution because many participants at the time as well as later observers concluded that the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga was instrumental in convincing the French government to openly support the American cause for independence and to sign the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with the United States in February 1778.
An uncivil war
While the casualties from the American Revolution were much less than in the Civil War, American casualties, wounded, killed, and missing, amounted to over 1% of the population of the country; unfortunately, information for Native American casualties from the American Revolution are often incomplete, but it is clear that indigenous societies suffered during and after the American Revolution, with many societies being forcefully dispossessed of their lands. For enslaved peoples, the American Revolution offered an immediate juxtaposition of the soaring rhetoric that Thomas Jefferson incorporated in the Declaration of Independence and the maintenance of the peculiar institution that deprived thousands of Americans, both those who had been born in the colonies and those who had been forcibly imported from Africa and the Caribbean, of the very same liberty that enslaved people were required to reinforce. In November 1775, Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to enslaved peoples who fought for the British against the Americans; Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation induced thousands of enslaved peoples to join the British cause, angering many Americans.
Fighting in the southern states, or colonies from the British perspective, has frequently been depicted as the most violent of the Revolutionary War. Greater proportions of southern settlers remained loyal to the British cause; consequently, fighting in the southern states, or colonies, featured more reprisal attacks and massacres than in the other states, or colonies. The most prominent example of retaliatory Patriot-led executions occurred in the aftermath of the Battle of King’s Mountain in North Carolina in October 1780; American soldiers reportedly sought to avenge what they perceived to be massacres of American prisoners of war ordered by British Colonel Tarleton after the British victory at the Battle of Waxhaws in May 1780.
The British southern strategy campaign required capturing and holding critical ports, including Savannah and Charleston; British military successes in the south were eventually undone through the guerrilla warfare tactics of Francis Marion, known as the Swamp Fox, and General Nathaniel Greene’s emphasis on fighting small, quick engagements with the British and then withdrawing into the countryside, further away from British-held cities on the coast, forcing the British to choose between pursuing the American forces further into the interior, including into forests and swamps, or ceding control of these areas to the Americans. Even when the British won the Battle of Guilford Courthouse in March 1781, Nathaniel Greene’s orderly retreat combined with heavy British losses forced Lord Cornwallis to move northward towards what would be the most important battle for American independence, the Battle of Yorktown.
The world turned upside down
With the British still in control of major port cities including Charleston and New York, and the Americans increasingly controlling the interior of many states, or colonies, the military situation changed dramatically in the fall of 1781. George Washington sought to move his Continental Army northward to link up with French allies and prevent Lord Cornwallis from joining with other British armies. In the late summer of 1781, the French Navy, under the command of Admiral d’Estaing and Comte de Grasse, defeated the British Navy at the Battle of the Chesapeake in September 1781, permitting*Washington to join forces with French commanders including Lieutenant General Rochambeau. With British forces outnumbered and cut off from resupply, Cornwallis surrendered his army to Washington on October 19, 1781. While the “world [seemed] turned upside down,” the song played by the British military band during the surrender ceremony, as a result of the American victory at Yorktown, the war would not end until the Treaty of Paris was signed on September 3, 1783.