2.6 War for Independence

In the summer of 1776, the British forces that had abandoned Boston arrived at New York. The largest expeditionary force in British history, including tens of thousands of German mercenaries known as Hessians, followed soon after. New York was the perfect location to launch expeditions aimed at seizing control of the Hudson River and isolating New England from the rest of the continent. Also, New York contained many loyalists, particularly among its merchant and Anglican communities. In October, the British finally launched an attack on Brooklyn and Manhattan. The Continental Army took severe losses before retreating through New Jersey.¹ With the onset of winter, Washington needed something to lift morale and encourage reenlistment. Therefore, he launched a successful surprise attack on the Hessian camp at Trenton on Christmas Day by ferrying the few thousand men he had left across the Delaware River under the cover of night. The victory won the Continental Army much-needed supplies and a morale boost following the disaster at New York.²

An even greater success followed in upstate New York. In 1777, British general John Burgoyne led an army from Canada to secure the Hudson River. In upstate New York, he was to meet up with a detachment of General William Howe’s forces marching north from Manhattan. However, Howe abandoned the plan without telling Burgoyne and instead sailed to Philadelphia to capture the new nation’s capital. The Continental Army defeated Burgoyne’s men at Saratoga, New York.³ This victory proved a major turning point in the war. Benjamin Franklin had been in Paris trying to secure a treaty of alliance with the French. However, the French were reluctant to back what seemed like an unlikely cause. News of the victory at Saratoga convinced the French that the cause might not have been as unlikely as they had thought. A Treaty of Amity and Commerce was signed on February 6, 1778. The treaty effectively turned a colonial rebellion into a global war as fighting between the British and French soon broke out in Europe and India.⁴

Howe had taken Philadelphia in 1777 but returned to New York once winter ended. He slowly realized that European military tactics would not work in North America. In Europe, armies fought head-on battles in attempt to seize major cities. However, in 1777, the British had held Philadelphia and New York and yet still weakened their position. Meanwhile, Washington realized after New York that the largely untrained Continental Army could not win head-on battles with the professional British army. So he developed his own logic of warfare that involved smaller, more frequent skirmishes and avoided major engagements that would risk his entire army. As long as he kept the army intact, the war would continue, no matter how many cities the British captured.

In 1778, the British shifted their attentions to the South, where they believed they enjoyed more popular support. Campaigns from Virginia to South Carolina and Georgia captured major cities, but the British simply did not have the manpower to retain military control. And upon their departures, severe fighting ensued between local patriots and loyalists, often pitting family members against one another. The War in the South was truly a civil war.⁵

By 1781, the British were also fighting France, Spain, and Holland. The British public’s support for the costly war in North America was quickly waning. The Americans took advantage of the British southern strategy with significant aid from the French army and navy. In October, Washington marched his troops from New York to Virginia in an effort to trap the British southern army under the command of General Charles Cornwallis. Cornwallis had dug his men in at Yorktown awaiting supplies and reinforcements from New York. However, the Continental and French armies arrived first, quickly followed by a French navy contingent, encircling Cornwallis’s forces and, after laying siege to the city, forcing his surrender. The capture of another army left the British without a new strategy and without public support to continue the war. Peace negotiations took place in France, and the war came to an official end on September 3, 1783.⁶

Americans celebrated their victory, but it came at great cost. Soldiers suffered through brutal winters with inadequate resources. During the single winter at Valley Forge in 1777–1778, over 2,500 Americans died from disease and exposure. Life was not easy on the home front either. Women on both sides of the conflict were frequently left alone to care for their households. In addition to their existing duties, women took on roles usually assigned to men on farms and in shops and taverns. Abigail Adams addressed the difficulties she encountered while “minding family affairs” on their farm in Braintree, Massachusetts. Abigail managed the planting and harvesting of crops, in the midst of severe labor shortages and inflation, while dealing with several tenants on the Adams property, raising her children, and making clothing and other household goods. In order to support the family economically during John’s frequent absences and the uncertainties of war, Abigail also invested in several speculative schemes and sold imported goods.⁷

While Abigail remained safely out of the fray, other women were not so fortunate. The Revolution was not only fought on distant battlefields. It was fought on women’s very doorsteps, in the fields next to their homes. There was no way for women to avoid the conflict or the disruptions and devastations it caused. As the leader of the state militia during the Revolution, Mary Silliman’s husband, Gold, was absent from their home for much of the conflict. On the morning of July 7, 1779, when a British fleet attacked nearby Fairfield, Connecticut, it was Mary who calmly evacuated her household, including her children and servants, to North Stratford. When Gold was captured by loyalists and held prisoner, Mary, six months pregnant with their second child, wrote letters to try to secure his release. When such appeals were ineffectual, Mary spearheaded an effort, along with Connecticut Governor, John Trumbull, to capture a prominent Tory leader to exchange for her husband’s freedom.⁸

Slaves and free black Americans also impacted (and were impacted by) the Revolution. The British were the first to recruit black (or “Ethiopian”) regiments, as early as Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775 in Virginia, which promised freedom to any slaves who would escape their masters and join the British cause. At first, Washington, a slaveholder himself, resisted allowing black men to join the Continental Army, but he eventually relented. In 1775, Peter Salem’s master freed him to fight with the militia. Salem faced British Regulars in the battles at Lexington and Bunker Hill, where he fought valiantly with around three dozen other black Americans. Salem not only contributed to the cause, he earned the ability to determine his own life after his enlistment ended. Salem was not alone, but many more slaves seized on the tumult of war to run away and secure their own freedom directly. Historians estimate that between thirty thousand and one hundred thousand slaves deserted their masters during the war.⁹

Men and women together struggled through years of war and hardship. For patriots (and those who remained neutral), victory brought new political, social, and economic opportunities, but it also brought new uncertainties. The war decimated entire communities, particularly in the South. Thousands of women throughout the nation had been widowed. The American economy, weighed down by war debt and depreciated currencies, would have to be rebuilt following the war. State constitutions had created governments, but now men would have to figure out how to govern. The opportunities created by the Revolution had come at great cost, in both lives and fortune, and it was left to the survivors to seize those opportunities and help forge and define the new nation-state.

CrashCourse. Teas, Taxes, and the American Revolution: Crash Course World History #28. Produced by John Green. August 2, 2012, Video, 11:26.

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History Unshelved. The Revolution: Boston, Bloody Boston. Produced by the History Channel. 2006. Video, 45:13.

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WGBH Educational Foundation. The Coming of Independence: A Biography of America. Produced by Anneberg Learner. 2000. Video. 25.52.

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Results of the Revolutionary War

Between 1776 and 1777, as a result of declaring independence each colony, now states, set about creating state constitutions. Additionally, the Revolutions led to new political and social force that would ultimately increase participation in governance, spread religious toleration, and expand the diverse population, moving westward across the continent. There were opportunities unlike anything available earlier and these opportunities were open to men of all classes.

The written constitutions created by the new states were brand new. The British Constitution was largely unwritten, based on common law and understanding. Most of the states were fearful of a government controlled by one powerful individual and so they created weak governors and strong legislative bodies. A number of states included a bill of rights in the constitutions designed to protect the rights of individuals and prevent tyranny.

Initially, the Continental Congress was focused on the organization of state constitutions and devoted little attention to the national government. This is an oversight they will address in 1781 when they ratified the Articles of Confederation. The Articles simply put into place the powers and structures that Congress had been functioning under since the war began: each state had one vote in Congress; Congress would be a unicameral (one house) legislature with the power to conduct foreign relations, mediate disputes between the states, control maritime trade, regulate American Indian trade, and value state currency. That is it. “Congress was given no power to levy or collect taxes, regulate foreign or interstate commerce, or establish a federal judiciary.”¹⁰ Additionally, the Articles required unanimous consent for ratification or amendment. In essence, Congress’ hands were tied.

Vague language in the Articles led to conflicts between the states over western land claims, but finances actually posed the most persistent problem for the new government. Because they couldn’t levy taxes, the Revolutionary War was largely financed by printing more and more money which led to inflation. In 1781, faced with the total collapse of the monetary system, Congress undertook some ambitious reform – the established a department of finance and asked the states to amend the Articles to allow Congress to levy a tax on imported goods. This temporarily staved off collapse, but was never enforced because two of the states refused to ratify the amendment.

After the war, probably in retaliation for American victory, Great Britain, France, and Spain all restricted trade access to their colonies. This significantly curtailed American trade and Congress could do nothing but watch. This did, however, force Americans to concentrate on new markets including the domestic market instead of solely relying on trade overseas.

Another consequence of the war was the spreading of democratic principles. More and more men – white men, in particular – had a voice in politics, many for the first time. There were limits. In the build up to independence and the war itself, women had an unprecedented presence in public life. Following the Revolution, women were pushed back to the peripheries. Important for the period was the concept of “republican motherhood” and the belief that in order for the republic to survive and prosper, children must be taught how to be good citizens of the republic. As education was predominantly at the behest of mothers, women became very important for spreading the ideals of the republic even as their public presence was limited.

Loyalists too suffered as a result of the Revolution. The Treaty of Paris, 1783, included a clause to protect loyalists property and required compensation for property lost during the war, but the new United States couldn’t and didn’t enforce this. Many loyalists who had never lived anywhere outside North America fled to England where they were treated as outsiders. Others resettled in other areas of the British Empire like Canada.

Additionally, thousands of former slaves who had fought for or escaped with the British army left. The Treaty of Paris required that British troops leave runaway slaves in America, but British military commanders mostly upheld their promises and evacuated thousand to other areas of the British Empire. There, black loyalists continued to face social and economic marginalization, however. Ideas of independence and liberty did lead some Americans to manumit their slaves, and most northern states passed gradual emancipation laws. Slaves who were part of the revolutionary generation and exposed to the rhetoric of equality began to incorporate these claims into slave revolts and resistance, setting the stage for future decades of conflict.
And finally, as described in the American Yawp,

Native Americans, too, participated in and were affected by the Revolution. Many Native American groups, such as the Shawnee, Creek, Cherokee, and Iroquois, had sided with the British. They had hoped for a British victory that would continue to restrain the land-hungry colonial settlers from moving west beyond the Appalachian Mountains. Unfortunately, the Americans’ victory and Native Americans’ support for the British created a pretense for justifying rapid and often brutal expansion into the western territories. Native American peoples would continue to be displaced and pushed farther west throughout the nineteenth century. Ultimately, American independence marked the beginning of the end of what had remained of Native American independence.¹¹

Notes

1. Barnet Schecter, The Battle for New York: The City at the Heart of the American Revolution (New York: Walker, 2002).
2. David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
3. Richard M. Ketchum, Saratoga: Turning Point of America’s Revolutionary War (New York: Holt, 1997).
4. For more on Franklin’s diplomacy in France, see Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (New York: Thorndike Press, 2005).
5. David K. Wilson, The Southern Strategy: Britain’s Conquest of South Carolina and Georgia, 1775–1780 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005).
6. Richard M. Ketchum, Victory at Yorktown: The Campaign That Won the Revolution (New York: Holt, 2004).
7. Woody Holton, Abigail Adams (New York: Free Press, 2009), 208–217.
8. Joy Day Buel and Richard Buel, The Way of Duty: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America (New York: Norton, 1995), 145–170.
9. For discussion of these numerical estimates, see Gary Nash’s introduction to Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, Press, 1996), xxiii.
10. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, eds., “Chapter 5,” The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open US History Textbook (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), VI. The Consequences of the American Revolution, at http://www.americanyawp.com/text/05-the-american-revolution/.
11. Locke, “Chapter 5,” VI. The Consequences of the American Revolution.