REVOLUTIONARY WAR

Revolutionary War in the U.S (1775-1783)

Revolutionary War in the U.S (1775-1783) in the North, South, and Middle Colonies

Revolutionary War

The Revolutionary War, also known as the War of American Independence, was long, demanding, vicious, and transforming. Between its outbreak at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775, and the British surrender at Yorktown, Virginia, on October 18, 1781, every place east of the Mississippi River saw armed conflict, save for the Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw country that would shortly become the Old Southwest. The casualty rate was roughly 120 in 10,000, the second heaviest of any large-scale American war. It may be that the British did not deploy their full might in the hope of winning their errant American cousins back to loyalty, as some historians have argued. But wherever loyalist and patriot Americans faced one another, as in the Carolina backcountry or western New York, the carnage was fearful and atrocities were common (Countryman, 1985). One way or another everybody within what became the United States took part in the conflict and felt its effects: whites; Natives; Africans; patriots; loyalists; neutrals; Northerners; Southerners; and backcountry folk, both men and women.

An Overview of the War

The first phase came in New England. By the war's outbreak the region's people were as ready as they could be for what they all knew would come, as David Hacket Fischer shows in Paul Revere's Ride (1994). They surrounded Boston with an impromptu army whose discipline rested on no more than consent and whose material survival depended entirely on good will. Yet the one major battle that the army fought, at Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775, demonstrated conclusively to the British that they faced a worthy enemy. George Washington took command of the army on July 3, 1775. Thereafter the two ...