On Sept. And on Oct. On Dec. Brudenell wrote from London, to H. Howe, who drove the rebel forces from Manhattan, though at great cost. Write to Ciara Nugent at ciara. By Ciara Nugent. Get our History Newsletter. Put today's news in context and see highlights from the archives.
Please enter a valid email address. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now. Watch it now, Wondrium. They wore British fashions, read British books, sometimes affected British accents, and they resented the tax schemes of Grenville and Townsend as much for the suggestion that America consisted only of plantations as for the price that it exacted from their pocketbooks.
They had not come to Philadelphia to make a revolution. They thought they had come to Philadelphia to prevent Parliament from making a revolution, or at least a revolution that would upset all their hopes to be considered equal partners in the business of the British Empire. The members of the Continental Congress were unused to working with each other. The problem was that larger political purposes were already starting to take shape whether they liked it or not.
Learn more about the Great War for Empire. When Paul Revere clattered into Philadelphia on September 16, , with a copy of the Suffolk Resolves in hand, a fault line cracked open within the Congress between those who wanted to do more and those who wanted to do less, regardless of what colony they represented. There is no good vocabulary to describe these two sides.
And the adoption of the Suffolk Resolves by the Congress put the initiative, however slight, in the hands of the radicals.
Thus, at first blush, it was possible to be amused by Sons of Liberty disguising themselves as Mohawks and pitching tea in the Boston harbor or calling out the militia at Lexington and Concord. It was less amusing when the delegates of the Congress looked around at home and found the Sons of Liberty parading through the streets of Boston and Philadelphia.
Talking loudly about having the power of lessening property when it became excessive in individuals. Without the psychological benefits of those battles, it is debatable whether a viable Continental Army could have been raised in that first year of war or whether public morale would have withstood the terrible defeats of But at Trenton in late December , Washington achieved a great victory, destroying a Hessian force of nearly 1, men; a week later, on January 3, he defeated a British force at Princeton, New Jersey.
A third turning point occurred when Congress abandoned one-year enlistments and transformed the Continental Army into a standing army, made up of regulars who volunteered—or were conscripted—for long-term service.
A standing army was contrary to American tradition and was viewed as unacceptable by citizens who understood that history was filled with instances of generals who had used their armies to gain dictatorial powers.
The campaign that unfolded in the South during and was the final turning point of the conflict. After failing to crush the rebellion in New England and the mid-Atlantic states, the British turned their attention in to the South, hoping to retake Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. At first the Southern Strategy, as the British termed the initiative, achieved spectacular results. Within 20 months, the redcoats had wiped out three American armies, retaken Savannah and Charleston, occupied a substantial portion of the South Carolina backcountry, and killed, wounded or captured 7, American soldiers, nearly equaling the British losses at Saratoga.
But the colonists were not broken. In October , rebel militia and backcountry volunteers destroyed an army of more than 1, Loyalists at Kings Mountain in South Carolina. After that rout, Cornwallis found it nearly impossible to persuade Loyalists to join the cause. In January , Cornwallis marched an army of more than 4, men to North Carolina, hoping to cut supply routes that sustained partisans farther south.
Nathanael Greene, Cornwallis lost some 1, men, nearly 40 percent of the troops under his command at the outset of the North Carolina campaign. In April , despairing of crushing the insurgency in the Carolinas, he took his army into Virginia, where he hoped to sever supply routes linking the upper and lower South.
It was a fateful decision, as it put Cornwallis on a course that would lead that autumn to disaster at Yorktown, where he was trapped and compelled to surrender more than 8, men on October 19, In August , the Continental Army was routed in its first test on Long Island in part because Washington failed to properly reconnoiter and he attempted to defend too large an area for the size of his army.
Washington did not take the blame for what had gone wrong. In the fall of , when Gen. William Howe invaded Pennsylvania, Washington committed his entire army in an attempt to prevent the loss of Philadelphia. During the Battle of Brandywine, in September, he once again froze with indecision. For nearly two hours information poured into headquarters that the British were attempting a flanking maneuver—a move that would, if successful, entrap much of the Continental Army—and Washington failed to respond.
Later, Washington was painfully slow to grasp the significance of the war in the Southern states. For the most part, he committed troops to that theater only when Congress ordered him to do so.
By then, it was too late to prevent the surrender of Charleston in May and the subsequent losses among American troops in the South. In the final analysis, he was the proper choice to serve as commander of the Continental Army. Once the revolutionary war was lost, some in Britain argued that it had been unwinnable.
For generals and admirals who were defending their reputations, and for patriots who found it painful to acknowledge defeat, the concept of foreordained failure was alluring. Nothing could have been done, or so the argument went, to have altered the outcome. Lord North was condemned, not for having lost the war, but for having led his country into a conflict in which victory was impossible.
In reality, Britain might well have won the war. The battle for New York in gave England an excellent opportunity for a decisive victory. France had not yet allied with the Americans. Washington and most of his lieutenants were rank amateurs. Continental Army soldiers could not have been more untried. William Howe trapped much of the American Army and might have administered a fatal blow. But the excessively cautious Howe was slow to act, ultimately allowing Washington to slip away.
Britain still might have prevailed in London had formulated a sound strategy that called for Howe, with his large force, which included a naval arm, to advance up the Hudson River and rendezvous at Albany with General Burgoyne, who was to invade New York from Canada. When the rebels did engage—the thinking went—they would face a giant British pincer maneuver that would doom them to catastrophic losses.
Though the operation offered the prospect of decisive victory, Howe scuttled it. Believing that Burgoyne needed no assistance and obsessed by a desire to capture Philadelphia—home of the Continental Congress—Howe opted to move against Pennsylvania instead. He took Philadelphia, but he accomplished little by his action. Meanwhile, Burgoyne suffered total defeat at Saratoga.
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