The American Revolution 1776-1783

1. The American Revolution 1776-1783 The American Revolution was not only a rebellion against Great Britain, but also a civil war. What factors influenced colonists to take sides? Secondly, what did the colonies look like during the Rebellion? Describe how opposing armies, unscrupulous merchants, Colonial militia’s and legislature’s shaped the Revolutionary period.

2. Who Served the Patriot Cause • About 25% of population supported ideologically, and an even smaller number materially (225,000 colonists served during the war: 1790 white population 3.1 million). • Rich mans war and poor mans fight: Rich: “often find means to screen themselves altogether from those military services which the poor and indigent are on all occasion’s taken from their homes to perform in person.” • Washington believed he needed 20,000 soldiers to fight the British: Servants, the unemployed, unmarried farm laborers and male heads of household. Congress eventually barred freedmen and slaves from serving in the Continental Army: did serve with distinction in some colonial militias. • Muster list of 11th Continental Regiment: Mostly young, poor, and foreign-born (German, English, Scottish, and Irish). Most ordinary workers and tradesman: laborers, farmers, weavers, shoemakers, tailors, soap boilers, saddlers, carpenters, blacksmiths, and silversmiths. • African Americans: Served in Northern Militias from the start of the war, and as replacements for the Southern gentry. In all about 5,000 black men served the Patriot cause. • American troops: very little discipline nor did they have any concept of sanitation, cleanliness, or sobriety. • Overall Continental Army relatively untrained and poorly armed.

3. Loyalists: Tories • 1/5 of colonial population actively fought for the crown, and another 1/5 remained neutral (Quakers) another 80,000 loyalists fled to Canada, Nova Scotia, England, and the British West Indies. (Franklin’s son was a loyalist Governor of New Jersey) • In many cases “Loyalists were the King’s friends and others… were the patriot’s enemies.” • Loyalist ranks: Anglican Clergy, Methodists, North Carolina Regulators, Lawyers trained in England, thousands of wealthy merchants and planters: stood to loose their fortunes. Majority made up of ordinary tenant farmers and artisans. • “The rhetoric of freedom and unalienable rights for freeborn Englishmen rang hollow for men who for years had struggled for security on the land they worked. For them, the tyranny of their landlords was far more injurious than the English tyranny bemoaned by the American patriots.” • Hudson River Valley controlled by a few wealthy families. • Manorialism: Manor lords leased land to tenant farmers, who paid annual rents for the right to farm on modest parcels.

4. Loyalists • Loyalist’s estates were ceased and their property sold at auction. Process extremely corrupt. • “Patriot Commissioners” could and did fail to advertise the sale, fail to publish an accurate inventory, holding the auction at an inconvenient time, close the bidding at a specific hour after a confederate had placed a bid, and so maneuver the whole thing that a favored buyer would get the property at a bargain price. • British offered slaves freedom if they join British side: 50,000 slaves fled across British lines. 20,000 slaves enlisted to fight in the British Army in exchange for their freedom, (Over 20,000 died of small pox epidemic). • Native Americans were largely loyalists: Iroquois: grew fearful of western expansion by colonists: British promised to stop expansion • “Like most African Americans, the majority of Native Americans painfully reached the conclusion that preserving political and territorial integrity could be best achieved by fighting against the side that proclaimed the equality of all men.”

5. Northern Theatre of Operations: 1775-1780. • Expulsion of British from Boston and Charlestown gave the American Colonists false hope of a short victory. The British had no intention of leaving their most valuable possession so quickly. • New York became the next battle ground for American Independence. • British Army: 10,000 Redcoats land in New York, supported by 30,000 German Hessian mercenaries as well as over 50,000 Loyalist’s. • Royal Navy crucial to British war effort. • British Plan: Land at New York march up the Hudson River Valley toward Albany and cut off the Northern colonies along the Hudson River. • August 27, 1776: British won a decisive victory at Long Island, killing or wounding over 1,500 Americans; Howe also took Fort Lee and Fort Washington, bagging an additional 3,000 American prisoners. • Washington retreated across the Delaware into Pennsylvania, while Congress fled Philadelphia for Baltimore (Dark time for the Rebellion). • Washington lost 90% of his army, by the time he retreated into Pennsylvania. • Christmas Night 1776: Washington crosses the Delaware taking Trenton by surprise as well as defeating the British force at Princeton (January 3, 1776). • These two victories saved the Revolution. Put the British on the defensive forcing their evacuation of New Jersey.

6. Northern Theatre of Operations: 1775-1780. • Washington spent first winter at Morristown while Congress returned to Philadelphia. British pulled back to New Brunswick and eventually New York City. • British strategy 1777: Howe’s 3 pronged Attack designed to bring rebellion to its knees. • General Howe to take Philadelphia: attack by sea, landed 13,000 men at the Head of Elk, Maryland: arrived August 24, 1777. • Gen. John Burgoyne march south from Canada: Objective Albany. • Gen. Henry Clinton would hold New York City. • Colonel Barry St. Leger would advance east from Oswego in upstate New York. • Howe: Attacks Continental Army on September 11, 1777 at Battle of Brandywine. • Occupied Philadelphia two weeks later, congress fled to Lancaster then York Pennsylvania. • Washington attacked British at Germantown (October 4, 1777), failed to dislodge British from Philadelphia (Complex plan poor execution). • Washington settles into winter quarters December 19, 1777 at Valley Forge, Pa.

7. Northern Theatre of Operations: 1775-1780. • John Burgoyne: Attacked Fort Ticonderoga taking it without a fight. St. Leger and his Indian Allies took Ft. Schuyler in August of 1777, but had to retreat when Benedict Arnold with a force of 1,000 men retook Ft. Schuyler. • Burgoyne led his force of 7,800 men towards Albany after taking Fort Ticonderoga. • American forces kept falling back leading the British farther away from their supply bases in Canada. • Saratoga: October 17, 1777. Burgoyne decisively defeated, surrender’s his entire army. Northern push to isolate the New England colonies decisively defeated. • Saratoga: Turning point in the war: Boosted patriot morale, it also proved to the French that the Americans could win the war. • Saratoga convinced Louis XVI that Americans deserved official aid (Money, Troops, and the French Navy). • Alliance brokered by Benjamin Franklin: French recognized American Independence, free trade with French possessions, committed troops to North America, and relinquished any claims to territory in North America. • May 4, 1778 American Congress voted unanimously to ratify the French Alliance (Britain declared war on France).

8. West Point: Key to the Continent: Lake Champlain-Hudson River Line • The strategic importance of the position stemmed from its situation. The colonies were naturally divided by a line which ran from British Canada south through Lake Champlain and its tributaries, and down the Hudson River to British New York. • Because of Britain’s Navy, and her well-disciplined infantry, superbly effective in formal open battles, this entire line was extremely vulnerable to capture. • It could be defended effectively only in the rugged mountains where the Hudson flows into a gorge: West Point. • West Point: key to colonial communications network, troop movement, and supplies between New England and the South. • Without supplies and troops from Connecticut and Massachusetts Revolution would have failed.

9. French Alliance • 1776-1777: Covert Aid through foreign agents (Dutch), and French Port agents who would look the other way as an American merchant ship was loaded with the materials of war. • Hortalez & Co. of Paris: 90% of the munitions of war: gunpowder, arms, and manufactured articles came from France. • March 2, 1776 Continental Congress sent Silas Deane as an agent to France to buy supplies. • Why?: Seven Years’ War, France lost her commerce and credit in India. She lost Canada, Louisiana, Isle Royale, Acadia, and Senegal. • France surrendered deeply in debt. • Most important of all France desired to regain her lost honor. • “Once the centre of all European activity, she became, an unheeded onlooker. None cared for her favor or wishes.”

10. Northern Theatre of Operations: 1775-1780. • Valley Forge: winter of 1777-1778. • Forged a professional Army. • 9,000 Troops wintered at encampment. • Spring 1778: Henry Clinton pulled British forces out of Philadelphia in order to concentrate in New York. • Battle of Monmouth Court House, June 28, 1778: final battle in the Northern Theater. Pitted newly trained American forces against British regulars on an equal footing.

11. War in the West and South • The War in the West: Native American tribes such as the Iroquois, Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Chickasaw waged a violent war against American colonists. Terrorized American settlements taking scalps for British bounties. • Late 1778: British took the city of Savannah, Georgia. Led by General Lord Cornwallis also set sites on Charles Town, quell the rebellion. • Cornwallis took Charles Town and captured over 5,000 continental troops under the command of Benjamin Lincoln in May of 1780. • Brutal partisan warfare, bordering on civil war: Banastre Tarleton led British irregular soldiers mainly loyalists on a bloody rampage. Americans led by Thomas Sumter and Francis Marion “The Swamp Fox” countered this threat and were equally ferocious. • Camden, South Carolina: British destroy American Army under Horatio Gates “Hero of Saratoga” on August 16, 1780. Put South Carolina firmly in British control. Washington replaced Gates with Nathaniel Greene in October of 1780. • Battle’s of King’s Mountain, Cowpens, and Yorktown destroyed any hope of a British victory in the south and for that matter on the North American Continent.

12. Colonial Militia: Southern Campaign, 1780-1783. • “ The militiaman, forced to develop his strategy and tactics to the sound of the war whoop and within range of the arrow and the tomahawk, proved by his survival that he knew how to fight the Indian. The regular, on the other hand, prepared for the dress-parade and close order tactics which then dominated European warfare, did not possess this vital knowledge.” • Militia, like Native Americans, had learned to fight from cover and conduct hit-and-run raids, not fight in the European sense. Militia were ineffective in this setting, but deadly, when fighting on their own terms. • Francis Marion “Swamp Fox” operated out of the lower Carolina swamps, conducting hit-and-run raids on unsuspecting British and Loyalist units. • Nelson’s Ferry, August 19-20 1780: Marion learned of Gates defeat at Camden. Ambushed British regulars escorting 150 prisoners of the Maryland Line, Marion destroyed the British detachment and rescued the POW’s.

13. Colonial Home Front • The war between Americans and England dislocated the market economy. The prolonged clash of arms cut off avenues of trade to the West Indies and continental Europe, created shortages as marauding American and British armies requisitioned food and livestock, forced the Americans to rely on paper currency, leading to rampant inflation, and offered unusual opportunities for unscrupulous merchants, retailers, and even farmers to manipulate the price of food stuffs. • Merchants, like Thomas Boylston of Boston, withheld products from the market, causing price’s to sky rocket. • Congress needed huge sums of money to keep the troops in the field. Wealthy patriots initially supported the revolution, soon went broke, congress did not yet have authority to tax population. By 1780 Congress had printed over $200 million in paper currency. • Paper currency created a crisis of public trust: Currency essentially worthless. (By 1779, $42 paper to buy $1 worth of specie currency (gold or silver).

14. Colonial Home Front • Salt in Maryland and Virginia sold for $1 a bag in 1776 by 1779 same bag cost $3,500. • Philadelphia militiaman complained in June 1777: “Every article of life or convenience was raised upon us, eight, or twelve fold at least.” • Hoarding led to mob violence with colonial women ransacking warehouses taking coffee and sugar by force from greedy merchants (Boston, Philadelphia). • Between 1776-1779 there were more than 30 such food riots. • Women became deeply involved in the majority of these food riots.

15. Prisoners of War • American POWs kept on prison barges in New York Harbor died in droves of malnutrition and disease. • Fewer then 800 of the 4,500 prisoners taken in the New York campaign survived captivity. 8,000 to 11,500 Americans died in British captivity. • British and Hessian Pow’s: Not held in isolated camps but in American towns: Reading, Pennsylvania. • Cultivated there own gardens, hired themselves out as farm labor, and attended local parties.

16. Not so Permanent Government • Articles of Confederation, ratified 1777, made law March 1,1781 (Maryland last to ratify): “Perpetual union between the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. • Each state has one vote 13 votes needed to ratify. • 13 Articles: Article 1, named the confederacy of states the United States of America. • America’s “transitional” constitution, Heavily flawed. • Why?: No power of national taxation, no national power to control trade, weak executive branch, and crippled governments efforts to conduct foreign policy. • States had power to collect taxes, issue currency, provide own militia. • Impossible to govern, no way to enforce national legislation. • National Government’s main function was to control foreign policy, Indian affairs, and conclude treaties.

17. Treaty of Paris, 1783. • November 1782: All parties set their names on the Treaty of Paris: United States, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and Henry Laurens. • Treaty recognized American Independence, America not to push past the Mississippi River and respect the rights of former Loyalists. • Both parties agreed to settle all previous debts, and to return all British subjects and Loyalist property. • Spain regained Florida from the British, • Britain retained Canada. • Treaty signed on September 2, 1783. • The last British troops marched from New York on November 25, 1783, “equipped for show with their scarlet uniforms,” a woman recalled; the patriots marched in, “ill-clad and weather beaten… but then they were our troops… and my eyes were full.”

18. Problems with the Articles of Confederation • United States unable to enforce all aspects of the Treaty of Paris, particularly Articles IV and V. • British retained western forts (Oswego, Niagara, and Detroit), which encouraged hostile tribes to resist American westward expansion. • April 1784,Spain closed lower Mississippi River to American navigation. • British prevented American goods from reaching England while flooding America with English products. • Congress was helpless under the Articles of Confederation. Congress had no power to enforce or negotiate. • A stronger document was needed to solidify the Union. • A Federal Government was the answer to America’s problems, according to several prominent politicians of the time, including James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, still others like Thomas Jefferson, had other ideas how America should be protected and shaped.