The American Revolution is also known
as the American Revolutionary War and the U.S. War of Independence. The
conflict arose from growing tensions between residents of Great Britain’s 13
North American colonies and the colonial government, which represented the
British crown. Skirmishes between British troops and colonial militiamen in
Lexington and Concord in April 1775 kicked off the armed conflict, and by the
following summer, the rebels were waging a full-scale war for their
independence. France entered the American Revolution on the side of the
colonists in 1778, turning what had essentially been a Civil War into an
international conflict. After French assistance helped the Continental Army
force the British surrender at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781, the Americans had
effectively won their independence, though fighting would not formally end
until 1783.
Lead Up to the
Revolutionary War
For more than a decade
before the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775, tensions had been
building between colonists and the British authorities. Attempts by the British
government to raise revenue by taxing the colonies (notably the Stamp Act of
1765, the Townshend Tariffs of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773) met with heated protest
among many colonists, who resented their lack of representation in Parliament
and demanded the same rights as other British subjects. Colonial resistance led
to violence in 1770, when British soldiers opened fire on a mob of colonists,
killing five men in what was known as the Boston Massacre. After December 1773,
when a band of Bostonians dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded British ships and
dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor, an outraged Parliament passed a
series of measures (known as the Intolerable, or Coercive Acts) designed to
reassert imperial authority in Massachusetts.
Did You Know?
Now most
famous as a traitor to the American cause, General Benedict Arnold began the
Revolutionary War as one of its earliest heroes, helping lead rebel forces in
the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775.
In response, a group of colonial
delegates (including George Washington of Virginia, John and Samuel Adams of
Massachusetts, Patrick Henry of Virginia and John Jay of New York) met in
Philadelphia in September 1774 to give voice to their grievances against the
British crown. This First Continental Congress did not go so far as to demand
independence from Britain, but it denounced taxation without representation, as
well as the maintenance of the British army in the colonies without their
consent, and issued a declaration of the rights due every citizen, including
life, liberty, property, assembly and trial by jury. The Continental Congress
voted to meet again in May 1775 to consider further action, but by that time
violence had already broken out. On April 19, local militiamen clashed with
British soldiers in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, marking the first
shots fired in the Revolutionary War
Declaring Independence
(1775-76)
When the Second Continental Congress
convened in Philadelphia, delegates–including new additions Benjamin Franklin and
Thomas Jefferson–voted to form a Continental Army, with Washington as its
commander in chief. On June 17, in the Revolution’s first major battle,
colonial forces inflicted heavy casualties on the British regiment of General
William Howe at Breed’s Hill in Boston. The engagement (known as the Battle of
Bunker Hill) ended in British victory, but lent encouragement to the
revolutionary cause. Throughout that fall and winter, Washington’s forces
struggled to keep the British contained in Boston, but artillery captured at
Fort Ticonderoga in New York helped shift the balance of that struggle in late
winter. The British evacuated the city in March 1776, with Howe and his men
retreating to Canada to prepare a major invasion of New York.
By June 1776, with the Revolutionary War
in full swing, a growing majority of the colonists had come to favor
independence from Britain. On July 4, the Continental Congress voted to adopt
the Declaration of Independence, drafted by a five-man committee including
Franklin and John Adams but written mainly by Jefferson. That same month,
determined to crush the rebellion, the British government sent a large fleet,
along with more than 34,000 troops to New York. In August, Howe’s Redcoats
routed the Continental Army on Long Island; Washington was forced to evacuate
his troops from New York City by September. Pushed across the Delaware River,
Washington fought back with a surprise attack in Trenton, New Jersey, on
Christmas night and won another victory at Princeton to revive the rebels’
flagging hopes before making winter quarters at Morristown.
Saratoga: Revolutionary War
Turning Point (1777-1778)
British strategy in 1777 involved two
main prongs of attack, aimed at separating New England (where the rebellion
enjoyed the most popular support) from the other colonies. To that end, General
John Burgoyne’s army aimed to march south from Canada toward a planned meeting
with Howe’s forces on the Hudson River. Burgoyne’s men dealt a devastating loss
to the Americans in July by retaking Fort Ticonderoga, while Howe decided to
move his troops southward from New York to confront Washington’s army near the
Chesapeake Bay. The British defeated the Americans at Brandywine Creek,
Pennsylvania, on September 11 and entered Philadelphia on September 25.
Washington rebounded to strike Germantown in early October before withdrawing
to winter quarters near Valley Forge.
Howe’s move had left Burgoyne’s army exposed
near Saratoga, New York, and the British suffered the consequences of this on
September 19, when an American force under General Horatio Gates defeated them
at Freeman’s Farm (known as the first Battle of Saratoga). After suffering
another defeat on October 7 at Bemis Heights (the Second Battle of Saratoga),
Burgoyne surrendered his remaining forces on October 17. The American victory
Saratoga would prove to be a turning point of the American Revolution, as it
prompted France (which had been secretly aiding the rebels since 1776) to enter
the war openly on the American side, though it would not formally declare war
on Great Britain until June 1778. The American Revolution, which had begun as a
civil conflict between Britain and its colonies, had become a world war.
Stalemate in the North,
Battle in the South (1778-1781)
During the long, hard winter at Valley
Forge, Washington’s troops benefited from the training and discipline of the
Prussian military officer Baron Friedrich von Steuben (sent by the French) and
the leadership of the French aristocrat Marquis de Lafayette. On June 28, 1778,
as British forces under Sir Henry Clinton (who had replaced Howe as supreme
commander) attempted to withdraw from Philadelphia to New York, Washington’s
army attacked them near Monmouth, New Jersey. The battle effectively ended in a
draw, as the Americans held their ground, but Clinton was able to get his army
and supplies safely to New York. On July 8, a French fleet commanded by the
Comte d’Estaing arrived off the Atlantic coast, ready to do battle with the
British. A joint attack on the British at Newport, Rhode Island, in late July
failed, and for the most part the war settled into a stalemate phase in the
North.
The Americans
suffered a number of setbacks from 1779 to 1781, including the defection of
General Benedict Arnold to the British and the first serious mutinies within
the Continental Army. In the South, the British occupied Georgia by early 1779
and captured Charleston, South Carolina in May 1780. British forces under Lord
Charles Cornwallis then began an offensives in the region, crushing Gates’
American troops at Camden in mid-August, though the Americans scored a victory
over Loyalist forces at King’s Mountain in early October. Nathanael Green
replaced Gates as the American commander in the South that December. Under
Green’s command, General Daniel Morgan scored a victory against a British force
led by Colonel Banastre Tarleton at Cowpens, South Carolina, on January 17,
1781.
Revolutionary War Draws to
a Close (1781-83)
By the fall of 1781, Greene’s American
forces had managed to force Cornwallis and his men to withdraw to Virginia’s
Yorktown peninsula, near where the York River empties into Chesapeake Bay.
Supported by a French army commanded by General Jean Baptiste de Rochambeau,
Washington moved against Yorktown with a total of around 14,000 soldiers, while
a fleet of 36 French warships offshore prevented British reinforcement or
evacuation. Trapped and overpowered, Cornwallis was forced to surrender his
entire army on October 19. Claiming illness, the British general sent his
deputy, Charles O’Hara, to surrender; after O’Hara approached Rochambeau to
surrender his sword (the Frenchman deferred to Washington), Washington gave the
nod to his own deputy, Benjamin Lincoln, who accepted it.
Though the movement for American
independence effectively triumphed at Yorktown, contemporary observers did not
see that as the decisive victory yet. British forces remained stationed around
Charleston, and the powerful main army still resided in New York. Though
neither side would take decisive action over the better part of the next two
years, the British removal of their troops from Charleston and Savannah in late
1782 finally pointed to the end of the conflict. British and American
negotiators in Paris signed preliminary peace terms in Paris late that
November, and on September 3, 1783, Great Britain formally recognized the
independence of the United States in the Treaty of Paris. At the same time,
Britain signed separate peace treaties with France and Spain (which had entered
the conflict in 1779), bringing the American Revolution to a close after eight
long years.
source: history.com
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