A Revolutionary People at War by Charles Royster

A Revolutionary People at War by Charles Royster

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. 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 (Charles, 1996).

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 sides faced each other across siege lines, until the British withdrew from Boston on March 17, 1776. Washington used that time to begin turning his militia into “ a respectable army” of disciplined soldiers. Most of the “Continentals” whom he led until Yorktown were not patriot farmers who had sprung to arms to protect their families but rather young, single, lower-class men, the very sort who might have worn red coats on the other side (Egerton, 2009).

The second phase of the war lasted from July 12, 1776 (when a major British fleet arrived in New York Harbor and prepared for invasion) until the end of 1778. The Americans lost New York City and its environs, not to regain them until the British departed on November 25, 1783. Washington nearly lost his whole army when better British tacticians trapped him in Brooklyn on August 27, 1776, but he retreated successfully to Manhattan Island and then to the New York State mainland and on into New Jersey. After evacuating the city (September 15), losing a battle at White Plains (October 28), and abandoning the garrisons at Forts Washington and Lee (November 16-18), Washington badly needed a victory. He achieved two, at Trenton (December 26) and Princeton (January ...