The American Revolution was the direct result of a global conflict that ended twelve years before the shots fired on Lexington green. The Seven Years’ War (1754 – 1763), known in North America as the French and Indian War, was a continuation of the War of the Austrian Succession following a short peace among European nations. By 1756, Great Britain and France were making major military commitments in North America. Although Britain sent resources to aid Prussia and Hanover on the European mainland, partially to keep the French occupied there, the main British commitment was in North America and the West Indies. The war quickly escalated and soon involved all the great powers of Europe. It spread to distant lands, from the American frontier to Canada, Europe, the Caribbean, India, and beyond. The British government mobilized numerous regiments to send to the various fronts and dispatched its massive naval fleet to the different theaters of operation. Although the fighting in North America effectively ended in 1760, British forces, including American colonial troops, remained engaged in the West Indies until 1763.
The end of the Seven Years’ War found Great Britain deeply in debt. In the British view, the war had largely been fought for the interests of the American colonists. Indeed, one of those colonists serving the British army named George Washington led the detachment that fired the first shots of the war. The British Parliament decided to reduce the national debt and that the colonists across the Atlantic should help bear the cost of imperial administration: the organizing, administering, policing, and defending of the newly acquired territories ceded by France and Spain in the Treaty of Paris.
This decision was not without reason. Many Americans had perceived the French as encroaching on British lands along the Ohio River. Washington was pursuing a mission to deliver an ultimatum to the French to vacate the Ohio country or be removed by force when the first shots of the war rang out. It was this dispute between the French and the colonists deep in the interior of America that rapidly developed into a world war that forced Great Britain to fight on multiple fronts and expend more money than anyone had originally envisioned.
The cost of supporting British regiments, especially in faraway North America, was high. Since the war had begun to protect the interests of American colonists, why shouldn’t they foot a major portion of the bill? Parliament’s answer was one of its few options: taxation. An option it did not have was the ability to correctly predict how the Americans would react to these new taxes. The colonists protested the new measures by arguing that the war had been fought more for imperial interests than colonial ones. Many Americans also believed they had already helped pay the price of the war in blood and treasure. Although some American colonists were rich in terms of land holdings, nearly everyone was cash poor, without the specie required to pay new taxes.
Prior to 1764, American colonists had been left largely alone, had never been directly taxed by parliament, and rarely worried about the lack of representation in that body. The 1764 Sugar Act, which levied a tax on sugar and molasses, came first. This had the most impact on the New England colonies because they required sugar and its byproduct to produce the rum they traded for European goods. Outrage over the tax led to its repeal in 1765.
The colonists were not totally opposed to paying taxes. They had been paying taxes for years to the Crown, to their individual colonies, and to their counties. The slogan “taxation without representation” was the colonists’ effort to claim what they saw as their traditional right as freeborn British subjects to be taxed only by their own consent, or by their elected representatives in the lower houses (assemblies) of the legislatures of their own colonies. The colonists opposed the imposition of “internal” taxes, with Parliament bypassing their assemblies to tax them directly, as it would do with the Stamp Act of 1765.
Colonists were outraged not just at the idea of new (and in their view illegal) taxes, but that the tax revenues were to be used in Great Britain and not in the colonies where the taxes were to be paid. Parliament argued that it needed revenue to both pay off the country’s debts and provide for ongoing expenses. Maintaining a military presence in North America after the French and Indian War was an expensive proposition. The result was the passage of two more acts in 1765: the previously mentioned Stamp Act, and the Quartering Act (which required colonists to provide room and board for British soldiers on station in the colonies).
As upsetting as the quartering provision proved to be, the Stamp Act was even worse. The latter required colonists to purchase stamps to be affixed to most printed materials, from newspapers to legal documents. Outraged responses to the new tax ranged from throwing the stamps into American harbors when they were delivered from London, to attacking the homes of tax collectors and even assaulting the collectors themselves. The Stamp Act was rendered impotent through mass disobedience when many of the colonists refused to use the stamped paper required for business and legal documents. When ships full of raw materials could not be cleared to sail for England and Scotland, British factories slowed down and workers were laid off. Some colonial courts simply refused to use stamped documents or simply disregarded them.
Parliament was rapidly losing control of its colonies. American opposition and British industry protests translated into an act that cost more to enforce than the revenue it produced. Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1766.
In 1767 Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, which included taxes on such things as glass, lead, paper, paint, and tea. Although these taxes remained in place for the next few years, tempers continued to simmer across the Atlantic. Colonists opposed the Townshend Acts because they were an attempt by Parliament to disguise an “internal tax” as an “external tax.” Most Americans did not strenuously object to external taxes, such as import and export duties paid to the royal treasury. The Townshend duties, however, were an import tax designed to raise revenue so that the royal and proprietary governments could spend money independent of the colonial assemblies—thereby lessening the only check the colonists could exert on their governors.
Colonists once again turned to nonimportation and nonexportation to render the Townshend Acts counterproductive. Britain responded by dispatching additional troops to North America to help enforce the levies. These red-coated symbols of perceived British aggression became the objects of ridicule for many Americans. Tempers boiled over late one night in Boston in 1770 when a mob of colonists pelted a small detachment of British guards with snowballs and other objects. The soldiers opened fire, killing and wounding several Bostonians in what is known as the Boston Massacre. In an effort to calm tempers and prevent an open rebellion, Parliament repealed all the taxes except the one on tea. Ironically, the repeal came the same day the shots were fired in Boston.
With the exception of Massachusetts, a relative calm settled over the colonies until June 1774. When a group of Massachusetts colonists dressed as Indians stormed a British tea ship and threw chests of the precious cargo into Boston harbor in 1773 (an act that was repeated in many North American harbors, though with less notoriety), Parliament reached its tipping point. In 1774, the body voted to shut down the port of Boston, decreed that all colonial government officials would thenceforward have to be appointed by Parliament, and required that all legal trials be conducted in London. In essence, the colonists would no longer be permitted to run their own affairs. Americans responded by sending representatives to meet in Philadelphia in what would be known as the First Continental Congress. The delegates agreed to boycott all imports from Great Britain.
A column of British troops marched out of Boston toward Lexington on the night of April 18, 1775, in an effort to confiscate colonial arms and gunpowder. The skirmishes the next day at Lexington and Concord, followed by guerilla style fighting most of the way back to Boston left hundreds dead, wounded, and missing. The unrest in the colonies was now armed rebellion. George Washington was appointed commander in chief. The American Revolution was underway.
The war that followed lasted longer than anyone on either side imagined and would eventually bring in many of Europe’s great powers including France, Spain, and Holland. The war continued just as inauspiciously for the British when they suffered disproportionately high casualties on June 17 attacking Bunker’s (Breed’s) Hill near Boston. A months-long siege followed that eventually drove the British out of that important port city to Halifax in Nova Scotia, where they regrouped during the spring of 1776. When the British left Boston, the Continental Army represented the sole military force within the boundaries of the future United States. That fall and winter, an American force marched into Canada in an attempt to make it the fourteenth colony, but bad weather, disease, and the bloody failure at Quebec defeated the effort.
Whatever gains were achieved by the Americans in 1775 vanished in 1776. After the Declaration of Independence was signed in July, and while many colonists were still hoping for reconciliation, American armies suffered repeated defeats. The skeleton force left in Canada was driven back to Lake Champlain in New York. The rejuvenated and reinforced British in Nova Scotia under Gen. William Howe launched an amphibious operation against New York City, defeated the Continental Army on Long Island, at White Plains, and again at Fort Washington. By December, the decimated Continentals were in head-long retreat across central New Jersey with the British in hot pursuit. The rebellion teetered on the edge of collapse. Winter convinced Howe to end pursuit and finish off Washington the next spring.
Unfortunately for the British army, Washington had other ideas. The second calendar year of war ended with Washington leading the ragged and demoralized remnants of the Continental Army across the Delaware River in a daring Christmas night operation leading to an assault against a Hessian outpost at Trenton, New Jersey. The stunning and lopsided American victory was followed up in early January of 1777 when Washington recrossed the Delaware River, repulsed a column led by Gen. Charles Cornwallis, and then conducted a night flank march around the surprised British general to engage an enemy detachment in Cornwallis’s rear at Princeton, New Jersey, on January 3. Washington’s pair of victories infused the patriot cause with fresh vigor while simultaneously forcing General Howe, the senior British officer in North America, to withdraw many of his New Jersey outposts into the New York City area for the winter.
Following his only sizeable battle victories of the war until Yorktown in 1781, Washington quickly moved his remnant of an army into winter quarters in the Watchung Mountains in and around Morristown, New Jersey. Washington’s primary tasks that winter and spring of 1777 were to rebuild, reorganize, and reequip his army. The British, meanwhile, maintained their general headquarters in New York, with their field headquarters in New Brunswick, New Jersey, a provincial trading town on the Raritan River. Additional outposts under the command of Lord Cornwallis dotted the landscape between the Raritan and Perth Amboy, the capital of East Jersey.
The appointment by the Continental Congress of George Washington as commander in chief of the fledgling American army proved wise in the long run. It was also risky. The Virginian had never commanded large bodies of men in combat, and had exercised but limited departmental command during the French and Indian War. He had never served as a British Regular, nor had he attended any European military schools.
Following the 1776 loss of New York City, Washington adopted a strategy of avoiding major pitched battles except if it was possible to receive an attack while defending a strong position. This, he believed, would keep the Continental Army intact and in the field. Another option proposed by Charles Lee, one of Washington’s generals and a former British officer, was to wage an “irregular” war with smaller forces to drain away British strength. In many ways, this idea would be incorporated into Washington’s larger strategy. Many members of Congress, however, favored a perimeter defense—the defense of every colony and every major city. This was a political favorite, but would have spread out Continental forces and guaranteed defeat everywhere.1
Washington would become best known for conducting essentially a Fabian-style of warfare. After his losses in New York, Washington realized that his inexperienced troops were no match for European professionals. Although he repeatedly told Congress he needed a larger professional army of his own, he also realized his smaller army was easier to supply and could move more quickly than the British. By attacking with speed and retreating even more rapidly, Washington could avoid suffering substantial casualties, preserve his command, and live to fight another day. In other words, Washington would use the forests and interior of North America to avoid major battles and eventually frustrate and make it too expensive for England to suppress the colonists. He thus sought to preserve the Continental Army while stalling the British until he was in a better condition to fight on terms of his own choosing. Washington described his strategy as “time, caution, and worrying the enemy until we could be better provided with arms and other means, and had better disciplined troops to carry on.”2
The war grew more unpopular in London with each passing month as the financial cost of waging it rose with the losses in manpower and assets. The British leaders needed to find a way to bring the war to a speedy conclusion. As one of his biographers noted, despite the need to preserve his army, Washington “nursed fantasies throughout the war about fighting a grand climactic battle that would end the conflict with a single stroke.”3 The usually disciplined Virginian, however, refused to do so and instead fought a war of attrition in keeping with the general Fabian strategy he favored. He believed that once the leaders of the British government got tired of losing men and equipment, of spending a great deal of money, and of dealing with the resultant criticism at home, they would quit.
As noted, when the battles around New York demonstrated that Washington’s army was not ready to win head-to-head fights against the British, he resorted to unconventional warfare like daybreak assaults, sneak attacks, and trickery, with Trenton and Princeton providing two good examples. Guerilla warfare, known at that time as partisan warfare or petite guerre, would also become a major component of American strategy. However, by 1777 the British had also made great strides in the same direction, and supplemented their light infantry, dragoons, and Highlanders with German jaegers (elite light infantry suitable for many purposes).
When the 1777 campaign season opened, the Continental Army was still a long way from being able to match British capabilities.