Introduction
The American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), also known as the American War of Independence, was a war between the Kingdom of Great Britain and thirteen British colonies on the North American continent (as well as some naval conflict). The war was the culmination of the political American Revolution, whereby the colonists overthrew British rule. In 1775, Revolutionaries seized control of each of the thirteen colonial governments, set up the Second Continental Congress, and formed a Continental Army. The following year, they formally declared their independence as a new nation, the United States of America. From 1778 onward, other European powers would fight on the American side in the war. Meanwhile, Native Americans and African Americans served on both sides. http://myrevolutionarywar.com/
The American Revolution not only created the American political nation but molded permanent characteristics of the culture that would develop within it. The Revolution is an event, consequently, whose meaning cannot be confined to the past. Whether we recognize it or not, the sense we make of the history of our national origins helps to define for us, as it has for generations before us, the values, purposes, and acceptable characteristics of our political institutions and cultural life.
To allow, therefore, the bicentennial celebration to degenerate into the hucksterism and confusion that threaten to overwhelm it would be a national humiliation. For when all the medallions have been struck, the pageantry performed, the commercial gimmicks exploited, and the market-tested historical hackwork published, there still remain the questions of what, in the context of the knowledge now available, the event was all about and what bearing it should have on our lives-questions that will surely be answered in some way or other, but not necessarily by those who are informed enough to distinguish fantasy from reality, partisan arguments from historical fact.
The land war in North America encompassed a large area, involving the interests of numerous colonial powers, and the incursions of France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic in 1778, 1779, and 1780 respectively, gave the war a more global character. The war in North America was divided into the northern campaign, encompassing New England, upstate New York, and Canada. The middle Atlantic campaign focused on operations in lower New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The southern campaign covered the operations from Virginia to Georgia. There was also some fighting on the West African coast, but this was relatively minor (Chamberlain, 1958).
The social history and the military history of the Revolution have seldom come together in the past because military historians tend to regard the war as an instrument managed on each side with more or less skill, while social historians treat military operations, if at all, as incidental to the study of politics and public finance. But if the war is restored to the central position that it had for the Revolutionary generation, and if it is seen not merely as an instrument but as a process, which entangled large numbers of people for a long period of time in experiences of remarkable intensity, then it may be possible to bring the study of the war and the study of the Revolution more closely together, to the benefit of both.
American strategy from 1775 to 1783 was indeed keyed to conventional operations, not simply to spare women, children, the aged, and property from the horrors of guerrilla warfare, but because a central army visibly helped to meet two acute needs: the need for internal unity and the need for external support. By being militarily conventional, American revolutionaries created at least the illusion of unified purpose, military strength, and political respectability, both at home and abroad. Whether they might have done better to be less conventional is an unanswerable, perhaps an idle, question, but it is not an anachronistic one, because it was raised at the time.
Lee (1964) thought that a conventional approach, which he ridiculed as Prussian, played to British strength and from American weakness, and he offered his own Swiss model for revolutionary war. He would have based American strategy on the militia and used regular forces primarily as a means to protect the militia from attack while it was being organized and trained. He would not have faced large British forces in pitched battles, except under the most favorable conditions like those at Bunker Hill or at the attack on Charleston in 1776, but would have given way to strength while nibbling it to death. He said little about the likely social consequences of his Swiss strategy, though presumably–political radical that he was–he was ready to accept them. His thinking was never consciously implemented or even fully developed before his downfall in 1778, but both its existence and its rejection are a measure of the extent to which the American Revolution was not a modern revolutionary war.
British efforts to interpret and put down rebellion in the American colonies divide into three distinct stages. For almost a decade of agitation before the war, successive British governments had defined their American problem as one of law enforcement and the maintenance of order; in general, legal measures were bound by the belief that, once legitimate grievances were redressed, trouble and resistance was the fault of a few recalcitrant individuals. Policy based on this belief failed, most obviously because these individuals seemed to command widespread local sympathy, an attitude that crippled judicial machinery. In early 1774, after the destruction of tea at Boston, the British government adopted a new interpretation of its American problem, which was that insurgency had a center-Boston–and that this center could and ought to be isolated and punished. The new policy assumed that other colonies, and even rural Massachusetts, were disturbed by the extremity of the latest acts of Boston insurgents and could be intimidated by the example made of the Boston community. The policy was thus seen to depend upon the application of overwhelming force, within the framework of civil law, to achieve clear-cut success at a single geographical point (Royster, 1979).
Of course, the assumption proved completely wrong. Coercive laws and the manifest intention to enforce them with troops gave insurgent leaders greater leverage than ever before outside Boston itself. Despite their misgivings, inhabitants of rural Massachusetts and other colonies concluded that they had no choice but to support Boston, since the new policy of community isolation and punishment seemed to threaten the political and legal integrity of every other community and colony. From this support, Boston acquired sufficient force to make the first military encounters–at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill–inconclusive and thus susceptible to interpretation as moral victories for the insurgents. Nothing did more to expand and consolidate rebel support throughout America.
Some aspects of the British performance in this first stage are worth noting. The outbreak of open fighting came in an attempt to break up what may be described as an insurgent base area whose existence cast doubt on the basic assumption.
With the outbreak of actual fighting, the concept of the problem as essentially a police action, however massive and extraordinary that action might be, quickly faded away and was replaced by the belief that the government faced a fairly con ventional war that could be conducted along classical lines. The American rebels were hastily organizing an army on the European model, and the game now seemed to be one of maneuvering in order to bring the rebel army to decisive battle or, better still, to destroy it without costly fighting. Accordingly, the British shifted their base from Boston, a dead end in terms of classical strategy, to New York, which was a superior port with access to the best lines of communication into the American interior. An incidental consideration, but no more than that, was the greater friendliness of the civilian population in the Middle Atlantic theater of operations as compared with New England (Paludan, 1972).
The underlying policy assumption of this second stage, not very closely examined at the time, was that success in conventional operations against the main rebel army would more or less automatically bring a restoration of political control in the wake of military victory. The assumption proved to be not wholly wrong. A series of tactical successes through the summer and fall of 1776 not only secured the New York port area but produced a striking collapse of resistance in New Jersey as well. Without any special effort by the British command, local rebel leaders fled or went into hiding as the main rebel army with drew. The local rebel militia, which had firmly controlled the communities of New Jersey, tended to disintegrate and to be replaced by an improvised loyal militia. It is clear that almost every civilian in New Jersey believed that the rebellion would collapse completely and that it was not too soon to reach an accommodation with the royal authorities. The government granted free pardon to all civilians who would take an oath of allegiance, and almost three thousand Americans accepted the offer in a few weeks, including one signer of the Declaration of Independence (Cunliffe, 1973).
The failure of the British campaign in New Jersey, after such a promising start, had two major causes, one external, the other internal. The internal cause is summarized in the remarks of two British observers: one noted that the lenient policy toward the civilian population “violently offends all those who have suffered for their attachment to government”; the other noted “the licentiousness of the troops, who committed every species of rapine and plunder.” There is ample evidence from both sides to confirm these observations. British regulars and especially their non-English-speaking German auxiliaries–products of the hard school of European warfare–tended to regard all civilians as possible rebels and hence fair game. Even if civilians avoided the regular foragers, they were not permitted to relapse into passive loyalty if they had ever shown the slightest sympathy for the rebel cause. Loyal bands of native militia regarded retribution as their principal function and were determined that no rebel should escape, pardon or no pardon. In many cases, former neutrals or lukewarm rebels found no advantage in submission to government and came to see flight, destruction, or resistance as the only available alternatives.
The other, external cause of failure stemmed from the British attempt to control and live off the central part of the state: brigade garrisons were deployed among towns, mainly for administrative convenience. Not surprisingly, the rebel main army, weak as it was, managed to achieve local superiority and exploit its excellent tactical intelligence to pick off two of these garrisons, at Trenton in late December and at Princeton in early January. The tactical effects of these small battles were modest, but the strategic and psychological effects were enormous. British forces withdrew from all exposed locations and henceforth concentrated in the area from Perth Amboy to New Brunswick. The morale of rebels, already sensitized by harsh treatment, soared; while the morale of loyal civilians, now out of range of British regular support, dropped sharply. Almost all New Jersey quickly came under insurgent control. The international repercussions of Trenton and Princeton were likewise serious (Skelton, 1992).
Throughout this second stage of the war, the British military and naval commanders, the brothers Howe, were empowered to negotiate with rebel leaders. These negotiations came to nothing because the rebel military situation was never truly desperate except briefly at the end of 1776 and because rebel unity so patently depended on adherence to political demands that the British government was not yet willing to concede. It has sometimes been argued that the British attempt to unify politics and warfare inhibited military operations, because the Howe brothers allegedly withheld the full force of the military stick in order to dangle the political carrot more enticingly. Little contemporary evidence supports the criticism, though the Howes were bitterly attacked once their failure was apparent. The effects that a ruthless naval blockade and the pursuit of armed rebels to utter destruction might have had on any real pacification of the troubled areas were unpredictably double-edged.
The outline of the third and last stage of British strategy took a year to emerge from the confusion that followed the defeat at Saratoga. The French fished more openly and aggressively for advantage in North America, and the British response was to escalate by declaring war against France. The West Indies, where both powers had large economic and military stakes, pulled the strategic center of gravity southward and seaward. During 1778, the British army on the continent remained on the defensive, cut its commitments by evacuating Philadelphia, and used bases at New York and Rhode Island to carry out a campaign of coastal harassment, while Indian allies put pressure on the rebel frontiers. Meanwhile, a general reevaluation of British strategy was taking place (Gordon, 1975) .
The basic concept was to regain complete military control of some one major colony, restore full civil government, and then expand both control and government in a step-by-step operation conducted behind a slowly advancing screen of British regulars. From a police operation, and then a classical military confrontation, British strategy had finally become a comprehensive plan of pacification directed against a revolutionary war.
Large reinforcements in 1780 brought about the capture of Charleston and its large rebel garrison in May; a small rebel army that entered the Carolinas in August was quickly destroyed at Camden. Now British mounted forces successfully employed irregular tactics and achieved tactical mobility equal or superior to that of the rebels themselves. Upcountry, the loyal militia was organized district by district; men over forty were assigned to local defense, while those younger served as territorial auxiliaries (Cooper, 1968).
Almost every British action appears to have exacerbated this situation. The chronic rough treatment of civilians by regulars simply could not be curbed to any significant extent. Moreover, the British force under Tarleton that had successfully employed irregular tactics soon acquired in the course of its operations a reputation for inhumanity that drove apathetic civilians toward the rebels for protection. A proclamation offering full rights of citizenship and pardon to all who would take the oath of allegiance, but declaring all others as rebels, drove many paroled rebel prisoners out of the neutral position that they had assumed and back into active rebellion. At the same time, the conciliatory aspect of this policy infuriated loyal auxiliaries, militia, and irregulars, who increasingly ignored official policy and orders and took matters into their own hands. A loyalist observer, who had defected some time before from the rebel side, described South Carolina as “a piece of patch work, the inhabitants of every settlement, when united in sentiment, being in arms for the side they liked best, and making continual inroads into one another’s settlements.” During this civil war, there was little difference between loyalists and rebels in terms of organization, tactics, or the use of terror. Pacification had failed well before a new rebel army was organized under Gen. Nathanael Greene in central North Carolina (Crackel, 1987).
The failure of pacification, and the appearance of this large rebel force to the northward, led General Cornwallis to return, almost with a sigh of relief, to more conventional operations. Priorities were shifted, mobile forces were concentrated, and the principal objective became the destruction of the rebel army through maneuver, battle, and pursuit. This reversion to the strategy of 1776-1777 ended in the disaster at Yorktown in October 1781, when the British navy momentarily lost control of sea lines of communication with its southern army. From that time on, all serious attempts to pacify the American interior were given up, and only New York and Charleston were kept as impregnable enclaves until the declaration of peace in early 1783.
Certain aspects of the failure of this third stage of British strategy require emphasis. One is that neither British nor rebel leaders regarded the bloody civil war in the South as “favorable” to their side; both tried to curb it in order to gain political control and to prevent large-scale alienation of potentially friendly civilians. But it was beneficial to the rebels inasmuch as they could choose to operate in prorebel areas while the British were constrained to operate everywhere. Furthermore, the relative proximity of a large British regular army had a surprisingly unfavorable effect on civilian attitudes. Civilians tended to overreact to the army. Depending on the particular circumstances, civilians were intimidated by it and so behaved “loyally,” for which they later suffered; or they were disillusioned by its predatory conduct and lack of sympathy for the precarious position of the civilian; or they felt secure in its presence and committed violent acts under its aegis, which ultimately created prorebel sympathy; or they saw it as an alternative, a place of flight and refuge; or they were demoralized when it moved away and refused to protect them, their homes, and families (Rowe, 1988).
Every major British troop movement in the American Revolution created shock waves of civilian behavior in the surrounding area. Only the scale of British operations in the South, where the British were more aware of the problem and tried to control it, makes those shock waves especially visible in the latter stages of the conflict. But repeatedly, throughout the war, loyal and neutral civilians had responded excessively, prematurely, and unwisely, at least in terms of their own personal security, to the appearance of British troops, only to see those troops withdraw or move elsewhere. British leaders throughout the war had assumed that civilian attitudes and behavior were more or less constant factors that could be measured by civilian actions; American behavior on any one occasion was taken not only to indicate attitudes but also to predict behavior on the next occasion. In fact, each of these occasions brought about a permanent change in the attitude and behavior of those civilians who were involved in, or even aware of, what happened; over time, these occasions had a major, cumulative effect. By 1780-1781, earlier in some places, most Americans, however weary, unhappy, or apathetic toward the rebellion they might be, were fairly sure of one thing: the British government no longer could or would maintain its presence, and sooner or later the rebels would return. Under these circumstances, civilian attitudes could no longer be manipulated by British policies or actions (Russell, 1984).
Role of Militia in the Revolutionary War
For all its failings, however, the militia played a crucial role in the Revolution. First and foremost, patriot militia ensured that rebellious Americans gained control of local and state governments early in the war. The British failed to devise a counterrevolutionary strategy that would have allowed them to restore the Crown’s authority in even one colony. Local patriot control ensured use of the militia system to mobilize troops. The states managed to provide enough soldiers to sustain the Continental army, organize their own forces, and turn out temporary militia units. Patriot control of the state militia systems gave the Americans the only institutional means available for mobilization.
Throughout the 1790s, the Washington and Adams administrations sought ways to avoid using the ineffective militia. The most obvious alternative was to enlarge the Army. Congress approved increases twice in the 1790s, first to defeat the Ohio Indian coalition, then for the Quasi-War with France, but it reduced the Army once the crises ended. Federalist administrations also experimented with recruiting levies, that is, volunteer forces raised directly by the federal government. Congress authorized volunteers for the Ohio campaigns and the Quasi-War episode. Federalist leaders preferred the volunteer levies because they were raised outside the militia system, and the president commissioned their officers. For all that, the levies resembled provincial colonial forces not only in their military inefficiency but in the way they were recruited. Moreover, presidents could not always avoid using militia. Washington called state forces to federal service to quell the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 because national law required the use of only militia and no other forces to enforce federal statutes (Crackel, 1987).
Federalist attempts to establish a national militia also foundered because the nation lacked the funds and bureaucratic agencies to implement even a modest national system, had one been politically acceptable. In any event, neither Federalists nor Republicans made serious efforts to improve the citizen soldiery, including the District of Columbia system, which fell directly under congressional control. Finally, as John Shy suggests, the nation faced only limited probabilities of internal dissolution and even less likelihood of external destruction, for the nation’s geographic expanse and wealth assured its security. Fundamental security, coupled with an enduring provincialism, a distaste for armies and strong central governments, and administrative underdevelopment explain the failure of militia reform. Although Americans accepted the need for a constabulary army, they did not see the need to rationalize and centralize the state citizen soldiery. As a consequence, the Militia Act of 1792 became a part of American military policy by perpetuating the colonial practice through which the states mobilized the citizen soldiers necessary to bolster the Army in a national emergency (Shy, 1987).
William Skelton (1992) asserts that although American politicians continued to praise citizen soldiers as the nation’s chief defenders, after Calhoun’s reforms “the regular army effectively replaced the militia at the center of the land defense system.”
Although the Army dominated war-time command throughout the nineteenth century, its institutional maturation did not eliminate, as Skelton implies, the nation’s need to call on state soldiers in time of war. Although Congress occasionally expanded the Army in these years, it refused to support a peacetime regular force large enough to absorb new men to fight a war. Calhoun’s reforms failed to solve the major military problem left over from the early republic era: how to augment the Army with trained soldiers in a crisis. State-recruited volunteer soldiers, whose only qualification for military duty was their willingness to serve, remained the mainstay of wartime forces (Paludan, 1972).
The difficulties states faced in mobilizing troops together with federal failure to reform the institution have led historians to conclude erroneously that the militia had disappeared by the 1830s. If the term militia is defined to mean compulsory military training and service rendered to the state then indeed it had ceased to function. (Cunliffe, 1973). It is more instructive analytically, however, to think of the states as maintaining militia systems, rather than militias. They endured in part because states and territories complied with the Constitution and the Militia Act of 1792. Mary Ellen Rowe discerns a “militia tradition” that migrants took with them wherever they went. (Rowe, 1988) Moreover, the militia remained a vehicle for political advancement at the local level until compulsory musters disappeared. More importantly, state militia systems supported the volunteer uniformed militia and administered mobilizations. Through these functions, the states preserved their traditional role of providing wartime soldiers and kept alive the idea of the citizen soldier (Brundage, 1958).
Conclusion
Great Britain with its larger and better trained army and navy launched a huge land and sea effort to crush the revolution. However, they had to transport and supply its army across the Atlantic Ocean. As the war continued, the British won many battles but gained little from their victories. The American patriots always formed new forces and continued the fight. http://www.42explore2.com/revolt.htm
Moment’s reflection on the nature of the Revolutionary War may moderate our expectations. The Revolutionary effort against Great Britain tended to suppress or encompass social conflicts. Where it did not, where hostility between social groups rose to a level of intensity approximating that of the conflict with the mother country, one group or the other would be likely to join with the loyalists. Some merchants in New York City, for example, felt that the local Revolutionary leaders threatened their interests more than the mother country did; and similarly some tenant farmers of the Hudson valley felt more bitter toward their patriot landlords than they did toward king and Parliament. But these men, whether merchants or tenants, by joining the loyalist side deprived themselves of a part in any contest about who should rule at home. Loyalism in this way tended to absorb social groups that felt endangered or oppressed by the Revolutionary party (Shy, 1987). It operated as a safety valve to remove from the American side men who felt a high degree of social discontent. Or to change the figure, it drew off men at either end of the political spectrum, reducing the range of disagreements. It removed from the scene the intransigents, of whatever persuasion, who might have prevented the achievement of consensus.
Reference:
Charles Lee, 1964: The Soldier as Radical,” in George Athan Billias, ed., George Washington’s Generals (New York),
http://myrevolutionarywar.com/
http://www.42explore2.com/revolt.
Jerry M. Cooper, “The Wisconsin Militia, 1832-1900,” Master’s thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1968, 191-94; for Ohio.
John Shy, ed., A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 193-224.
Lyle D. Brundage, “The Organization, Administration, and Training of the United States Ordinary and Volunteer Militia, 1792-1861″ (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1958) 202-215.
Marcus Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775-1865, 2d ed. (New York: Free Press, 1973) 147-155
Marcus Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775-1865, 2d ed. (New York: Free Press, 1973) 147-155
Martin K. Gordon, The Militia of the District of Columbia, 1790-1815 (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1975) 50-63.
Mary Ellen Rowe, The Sure Bulwark of the Republic: The Militia Tradition and the Yakima War Volunteers (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1988), 14.
Mary Ellen Rowe, The Sure Bulwark of the Republic: The Militia Tradition and the Yakima War Volunteers (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1988), 14.
Paludan, “The American Civil War Considered as a Crisis in Law and Order”, American Historical Review 77 (Oct. 1972): 1015, 1031.
Paludan, “The American Civil War Considered as a Crisis in Law and Order”, American Historical Review 77 (Oct. 1972): 1015, 1031.
Robert S. Chamberlain, “The Northern State Militia”, Civil War History 4 (June 1958): 105-9.
Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 25-26.
Russell F. Weigley History of the United States Army, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, 21-45.
Shy, “Force, Order, and Democracy in the American Revolution”, in Jack P. Greene, ed., The American Revolution: Its Character and Limits (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 75-79.
Theodore Crackel, Mr. Jefferson’s Army: Political and Social Reform of the Military Establishment, 1801-1809 ( New York: New York University Press, 1987) 111-121.
Theodore Crackel, Mr. Jefferson’s Army: Political and Social Reform of the Military Establishment, 1801-1809 ( New York: New York University Press, 1987) 111-121.
William Skelton, An American Profession of Arms: The Army Officer Corps, 1784-1861 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992) 213-234