In 1769, parts of North America were in open rebellion against British royal authority. Parliament had imposed a series of measures on its subjects across the Atlantic that they found unacceptable. A British official had been tarred and feathered and paraded through the streets of Boston. No one at the time imagined that this act of colonial defiance would lead to the greatest single event in modern world history.
The trouble had been building for years. In 1756, Great Britain and France were locked in a bitter global contest for land and power, a struggle that spilled across continents and empires and became known as the Seven Years’ War. Winston Churchill once called it the First World War, and the description was accurate. It was a global conflict that played out on multiple continents, including North America, where the British and the French competed for territory, resources, and control.
After a prolonged seven-year fight, Britain emerged as the dominant European imperial power in North America. To be a North American British subject after the war meant you belonged to the most powerful empire on the planet. Life was good. Colonists had longer life expectancies, higher rates of literacy, and paid much lower taxes than people in Britain.
Many proudly called themselves freeborn Englishmen, and they viewed King George III as their protector, the hero who helped drive out their hated Catholic French enemies. But victory proved to be a double-edged sword. Britain gained a vast, sprawling American empire, and vast, sprawling overseas empires are expensive to maintain. Parliament decided it needed a standing army of about ten thousand troops in the colonies.
The Seven Years’ War had doubled Britain’s national debt. Never before had an empire spent so much on a transoceanic war. Parliament concluded that since the fighting had taken place in North America, and since colonial subjects would benefit from the aftermath, they should contribute to the cost. The colonists were taken aback.
They had not seen the financial demands coming. Parliament’s response evolved into a two-pronged approach. First, it taxed North American colonists at higher rates than ever before. Second, it restricted their westward expansion.
Parliament drew a line through the Appalachian Mountains and declared that colonists were not allowed to move west of it. This became known as the Proclamation Line of 1763. The idea was to contain the empire, to prevent settlers from spilling westward and igniting another costly war with Native peoples. But the line infuriated the colonists.
Many had believed the defeat of the French meant open season on all that land. Now their own land hunger was being curbed by the very empire they had fought for. Colonists felt the impositions represented a dual assault on their rights to property: the property they already had, in the form of taxation, and the property they wanted in the future, in the form of restrictions on westward movement. They began to mobilize.
Patriots objected to how Parliament governed the colonies. Loyalists, by contrast, either did not object or were unwilling to resist in the way the Patriots did. In 1765, a group of Boston Patriots united to challenge the new taxes and defend what they believed were their natural rights. They called themselves the Sons of Liberty.
They were a diverse group, economically spanning every level from the top one percent to the bottom. The movement quickly spread to other colonies, especially urban centers engaged in trade that was affected by British taxation. They began by vocally opposing parliamentary taxation, then used acts of violence and intimidation. They tarred and feathered tax collectors, burned people in effigy, and made it difficult to collect the taxes.
They reminded everyone that their rights as British subjects were being infringed. Parliament believed the best way to stamp out the resistance was to mobilize the army. Thousands of redcoats poured into Boston. Within a year, almost one in five people on the streets was a British soldier.
Boston was a small peninsula of about fifteen thousand people, and four thousand redcoats had arrived. It was frightening to the residents. The soldiers were a symbol of authority and a message of intimidation. They sometimes got into fights.
It created a volatile social situation. On March 5th, 1770, the simmering tension ignited. The trigger was a minor dispute between a soldier and a local tradesman. A British officer went into a barber shop, got a haircut, and left without paying.
A worker from the shop tried to get payment from him, but ran into a British soldier stationed outside Boston’s Custom House. The soldier struck him. Word spread quickly through the streets, and hundreds gathered at the Custom House, their anger focused on eight redcoats standing guard. One of the leaders of the crowd was Crispus Attucks, a man of Wampanoag and African descent who had spent years working as a dock hand in Boston.
He was passionate about defending his fellow Bostonians. The crowd became increasingly agitated, throwing oyster shells, rocks, and debris at the soldiers while chanting kill them, kill them. They banged clubs together, creating an ominous staccato that drowned out the church bells. The noise grew louder, and the soldiers grew more anxious and defensive.
One soldier fired. Then others fired. When it was over, five men were dead and several more were wounded. Among the dead was Crispus Attucks.
The eight soldiers and their commander were arrested and stood trial for murder in one of the most closely watched cases in colonial America. They were defended by John Adams, one of the leaders of the anti-tax resistance movement. Adams was committed to autonomous governance in Massachusetts and greater participation in the British parliamentary system, but first and foremost he was a lawyer. He believed everybody had the right to a good defense.
He wanted to demonstrate that the colonies were based on the rule of law, not the passions of the mob. He won a remarkable victory. Most of the soldiers were exonerated. Only two were convicted of manslaughter, and their punishment was light: a branding on the thumb with the letter M.
But in the court of public opinion, the soldiers found no mercy. The event became known as the Boston Massacre. The city held the largest public funeral in its history for the martyrs, and history now sees them as the first casualties of the American Revolution. Patriotism spilled into the public sphere in a way it never had before.
An engraving by Henry Pelham, popularized by Paul Revere, coined the phrase and turned the massacre into a media firestorm. People talked about it constantly. The relationship between Britain and Boston had been damaged, perhaps beyond repair. There was still a chance to repair the relationship between Britain and the colonies, if one side was willing to back down.
In 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act, granting the East India Company a monopoly on the tea trade. The tax was lowered, but local merchants were cut out of their share. The principle of the unwanted monopoly, the loss of consumer choice, the manipulation of taxation from afar, all of it fueled fury. American patriots saw it as another assault on their right to self-government.
The Boston Sons of Liberty decided they would not allow British vessels to land their tea in the port. Under the cover of darkness, they snuck aboard East India Company ships anchored in Boston Harbor, dressed as Mohawk Indians. They were not trying to hide who they were. Everyone knew they were the Sons of Liberty.
But adopting that identity dramatized a kind of victimhood, a simple, virtuous people belonging to the land, fighting back against an inappropriate imposition. Using hatchets, they cut open the chests of tea and dumped it into the harbor. Other cities followed suit by blocking the East India Company ships from their ports. The protest, now known as the Boston Tea Party, laid bare a question that could no longer be ignored.
Should an empire rule its colonies, or should people be free to rule themselves? Parliament’s answer was clear. The colonies were to be subdued, by force if necessary. Parliament responded immediately and with great severity.
They passed what the colonists called the Coercive Acts. The acts put Massachusetts under martial law, imposed a military general as overseer, closed the port of Boston, and filled the town with occupying troops. The empire was saying, we can do what we want. The hostility pushed a large portion of the population that had been loyalist or neutral to reconsider.
If all the rights and governing institutions they held dear could be taken away at the snap of a finger, maybe they had to consider other options. In September 1774, delegates from twelve colonies met in Carpenter’s Hall in downtown Philadelphia. For about seven weeks they discussed a response to the Coercive Acts. They called their gathering the Continental Congress.
The colonies had more contact with Britain than with each other, and most people had never traveled more than a few miles from home. Among the delegates was John Adams, at the forefront of the anti-tax resistance movement since the 1760s. He was not a tall man, but he managed to look down on nearly everyone around him. Speaking of New England versus the rest of the colonies, he said, our language is better, our persons are handsomer, our spirit is greater, our laws are wiser, our religion is superior, and our education is better.
The congress wrestled with the idea of independence. They still saw themselves as loyal subjects of the Crown, but they refused to accept the tyranny of Parliament. The first Continental Congress proved the colonies could come together in a coordinated movement. They were already starting to think that they were not going to start a war, but Britain might.
They vowed to boycott all British goods and established Committees of Correspondence to keep communication flowing among the colonies. Roughly seven thousand people from all walks of life volunteered for these committees, from wealthy elites to landless individuals, white and black, men and women. Politics was becoming a common good. Women participated by changing the way they dressed, spinning homespun fabric, and refusing to consume British goods.
The resistance effort began at the family level, with each family deciding to forgo tea and buy from local suppliers. Committee members enforced the boycotts with strong-arm tactics. They printed violators’ names in newspapers, confronted them publicly, sometimes mobbed them, and even smeared their homes with Hillsborough paint, which was basically excrement. British imports fell by more than ninety percent.
Between the summer of 1774 and the summer of 1775, a pivot moment arrived. The growing Massachusetts militia, famously known as the Minute Men, began stockpiling weapons. They were not preparing for a full-scale war. They were preparing to give the British Army enough of a headache that it would decide the trouble was not worth it and repeal the Coercive Acts.
Britain ordered its army to seize all colonial weapons and stamp out the rebellion before it spread. The British sent an expedition of their best troops from the Boston Garrison to seize a purported stockpile of arms and ammunition the Patriots had hoarded in Concord. As they headed into the Massachusetts countryside, word spread. Paul Revere made his famous midnight ride.
He did not yell the British are coming, because he thought of himself as British. He would have said the regulars are coming or the redcoats are coming. He and one other rider, William Dawes, took different routes. Then two became four, became eight, became sixteen, and the message spread in all directions.
At dawn, colonial militiamen gathered on the green at Lexington, ten miles from Boston, to block the road to Concord. The British Army, one of the finest fighting machines on the planet, marched into view in neatly dressed formation. It seemed an utterly uneven fight. The two sides faced off, each hoping shots would not be exchanged.
Then a gun went off, and all hell broke loose. Nobody knows who fired first. Ralph Waldo Emerson later called it the shot heard round the world. The British unleashed a ragged volley while their officers shouted cease fire.
The Americans ran, many shot in the back. The Massachusetts militia fell back as the redcoats pushed on toward Concord. When the British reached Concord, they did not find the expected military supplies. They found a handful of carts and set them ablaze.
The Massachusetts militia saw flames and believed the British had set the town on fire. Reinforcements arrived from across the countryside. At Concord Bridge, the Patriots stood their ground and opened fire. For the first time, British soldiers had been killed.
The British commander had no choice but to retreat. The redcoats began a rapid sixteen-mile gauntlet back to Boston. Militiamen from all over the colony came to meet them. The British were used to fighting in wide open fields, but Massachusetts was full of trees and barricades.
The colonists used what their detractors called Indian-style warfare, shooting from behind cover rather than confronting the British in open battle. It was enormously effective. The numbers of militiamen grew throughout the day as they took shots at the retreating soldiers. The redcoat army lost almost three hundred men.
Nobody knew at the time that they had ignited a war. But it had changed. Some people no longer considered themselves part of the British Empire after being fired upon and firing back. In May 1775, delegates gathered in Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress.
They had to decide whether united action was needed after the clashes at Lexington and Concord. They issued the Olive Branch Petition, an attempt to convince King George III that they wished to remain his loyal subjects under certain conditions, so long as Parliament returned them to their rights and privileges as freeborn Englishmen. Some members of Congress thought it might work. Others rolled their eyes, believing it was too far gone.
At the same time, they decided to form a national army. They adopted the army at Cambridge, the New England Army, and changed its name to the Continental Army. As Congress waited for Britain’s reply, tension turned again to Boston. The American commander William Prescott ordered his men to fortify Bunker Hill, the taller of two hills on the Charlestown peninsula overlooking Boston Harbor.
But on the evening before the battle, he ordered them instead to fortify the lower and closer Breed’s Hill, a position that more eminently threatened the British ships. The British woke to find Breed’s Hill occupied and realized it posed an immense threat to their shipping and to the town. They felt they had no choice but to retake it. The British commanders thought they would handle the problem quickly, seeing the Americans as a ragtag group with little training.
Their supreme overconfidence meant they did not take the enemy seriously. The British marched against the redoubt at the top of the hill. The Americans were almost totally protected, only their heads exposed, while the British were wide open. As soon as the British made their first effort to come up the hill, the militiamen fired.
It was an absolute bloodbath. The British were repulsed, rallied, and advanced again with bayonets. Again the fire came from the fortified position, and they were forced to fall back. The Americans had little ammunition and were told not to fire until they were almost eye to eye.
The British broke through to the fortification only when the men at the top ran out of ammunition. Even though the British took the ground, the Massachusetts militia had inflicted such tremendous casualties that the victory was in name only. The redcoats lost about a thousand men killed or wounded, about forty percent of the entire attacking force. If the redcoats did not think the Americans meant business before, it was painfully apparent now.
The Americans were in this war to win it. Parliament rejected the Olive Branch Petition and declared the colonies in open rebellion. Any hope of reconciliation was gone. The colonies felt there was no way back.
If they did not have the rights of British subjects, then maybe they should not be British subjects at all. They were not just being asked to decide on political independence. They were being asked a deeper question: what did political belonging mean? To whom did they owe allegiance?
The idea of being a subject of the king was a comfort blanket. Those pushing for independence were saying, let us throw away that comfort blanket and create something new. It was a radical leap. In the late eighteenth century, monarchies were considered stable and enduring, while republics were considered short-lived and unstable.
A republic was a truly radical, revolutionary, and scary way of thinking, and not everyone was on board. In 1776, delegates from almost all of the thirteen colonies met again in the Second Continental Congress, in a period of real crisis. In that room in Philadelphia were some of the major figures of the revolutionary era: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock. The colonial rebellion had become a shooting war, and it was clear to almost everyone that this was moving toward an even bigger armed conflict.
People thought they were at the point of no return. They had concluded the relationship with Parliament had to be fundamentally severed. But many sympathized with the protests while not wanting to risk everything on the outlandish idea of independence. In a world of big empires, Britain, Spain, and France, the colonies could not make their way as a nation without help.
Part of the purpose of the declaration was to make the case to the rest of the world that independence was justified by the unjust actions of the British king. For months, the delegates grappled with the question. Congress chose Thomas Jefferson to put the ideas of the revolution into prose that would sing, concise and luminous. He had established a name for himself with words, having written a powerful pamphlet in 1774 that circulated throughout the colonies.
Jefferson adopted ideas from Enlightenment thinkers, the right to life, liberty, and self-governance, ideas that had been circulating for a hundred years. But what Jefferson did that the Enlightenment thinkers could not was put these words into practice. He wrote that all men are created equal, entitled to certain unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But at the same time, he was being waited on by an enslaved black man.
Like many of his peers, Jefferson belonged to the slaveholding elite, those who profited from the forced labor of hundreds of thousands of enslaved black people across North America. By 1776, enslaved people amounted to one-fifth of the entire American population. Jefferson knew that owning enslaved people of African descent was not square with Enlightenment ideals. But the substance of his wealth in Virginia was in the enslaved people who worked the landed property he inherited from his father.
In his original draft of the Declaration, he included a lengthy passage railing against the king for perpetrating the traffic in captive Africans. He told himself that slavery was an institution Britain had entailed on North America, and that someone like him who inherited enslaved people was almost a passive victim of a giant system set up for Britain’s gain. He wanted to argue it was not their responsibility. They were not being inconsistent in denouncing their own enslavement while living with the wreckage of slavery.
Jefferson’s draft was brought before Congress, where his words were challenged, debated, and reshaped. His first draft was far longer than what they ended up with. There was a fierce back and forth that frustrated Jefferson, who hated to see his prose picked apart. His long diatribe about how the king imposed slavery on the colonists was reduced to a very short clause: he has incited domestic insurrections amongst us.
Jefferson agonized over the alterations, but he knew compromise was the price of unity. On July 2nd, 1776, Congress declared independence. But they celebrated the press release on July 4th, because that was what circulated. The Declaration was short enough to be printed on a single page, posted at meeting halls and public buildings, read aloud in coffee houses and taverns and public squares.
Once white Americans began advocating for their universal rights, black Americans naturally began to ask, what about our universal rights? Shouldn’t universal rights be applied universally? When the Declaration was printed and sent out into the world, news traveled slowly. It would take weeks before King George III would get the official word.
But the language of liberty was spreading from colony to colony. People talked about it in taverns and over dinner tables. It would have been hard to hide from enslaved people, especially once the war started, with all the talk about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, about tyranny and resisting oppression. A relatively small population of African Americans who were born free or had won their freedom became prime movers in promoting the idea that all men are created equal meant what it said.
A mixed-race former Continental soldier named Lemuel Haynes, though free himself, wrote a pamphlet opposing slavery shortly after the Declaration appeared. He called it Liberty Further Extended and opened it with an epigraph: we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That made him the first person to ever quote the Declaration’s phrase created equal. There were eruptions across the colonies demonstrating that the language of liberty was contagious.
In Charleston, South Carolina, the largest port of entry in North America for enslaved Africans, white patriot leaders staged a rally chanting liberty, liberty. A couple of weeks later, enslaved people were out in the same part of town chanting the exact same words. The slaveholding elite did not take kindly to it. They imposed a curfew and sent slave patrols through the city.
They were anxious about the idea that if a war came, enslaved people would be their Achilles’ heel. At the same time that the American Revolution unfolded, an African-American Revolution unfolded as well, where black people asked for the same rights and the same liberty. It was the same revolution. Black Americans discovered the power of language to realize their vision for a freer future, but they also recognized that language was not enough.
Some British officials saw an opportunity. Handled correctly, one revolution could be used to crush the other. White Americans called for independence from the British. Black Americans called for independence from white Americans.
Sometimes these two wars aligned. Sometimes they were in mortal conflict. Slavery existed in every colony when the Declaration was signed, and most enslaved people were in Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, where slave labor was at the center of plantation economies producing tobacco and rice. The working conditions were horrible, the death toll incredibly high, and masters worked enslaved people to death.
In 1775, Virginia’s Crown Governor Lord Dunmore intended to capitalize on the disruption. A loyal colonial administrator, he had served as governor of New York before moving to Virginia. When the shooting began in Massachusetts, his first move was to seize the gunpowder and keep it away from the rebels, which alienated the Virginia elites who had thought he might be a bridge between them and Britain. By summer he was forced to flee the governor’s mansion in Williamsburg, and by fall he was forced off the mainland altogether, finding himself on a ship off the outskirts of Norfolk.
From that ship he issued his infamous proclamation. It told enslaved people that if they fought for Britain, he would grant them their freedom. But there were two conditions. Only enslaved people of patriot enslavers were included; if your enslaver was a loyalist, the offer did not open to you.
And the unstated condition was that you had to survive the war to get your freedom. They were not just having freedom bestowed on them. They were earning it at the potential cost of their own lives. Suddenly, enslaved people became terrifyingly mobile.
Every opportunity, they passed the word and took flight to Dunmore’s lines. Hundreds found freedom behind his lines. Nothing did more to infuriate colonists against the Crown than the Dunmore Proclamation. It was absolutely destabilizing for Virginia’s planters, who could not do what they did without enslaved labor.
George Washington lost several enslaved laborers to Dunmore’s army and called him an arch traitor to the rights of humanity and a monster. The proclamation sparked a wave of self-emancipation among black Americans desperate for freedom, while simultaneously pushing many white Americans toward the cause of independence. Dunmore issued his proclamation seeking men. He wanted soldiers.
But along with enslaved men came enslaved women and children, whole families seeking protection and freedom under the British banner. Within months, somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand black people had taken refuge with him, and many offered to serve militarily. They served as cooks, guides, nurses, and laborers, helping to keep the army in fighting shape. Dunmore raised between two and three hundred black men into a force he called the Ethiopian Regiment, armed to fight the very people who had enslaved them.
They were trained by British regulars, commanded by white loyalist officers, and given sashes that said liberty to slaves. Dunmore rushed the regiment into battle too quickly. As Patriot forces marched on his position at Norfolk, his troops fortified the Great Bridge, a key river crossing on the approach to the town. It was hardly a defensible position, and Dunmore knew it.
He threw the Ethiopian Regiment against a better prepared, better trained Patriot force. The British advanced across the narrow bridge. The Patriots held their fire, then unleashed a deadly volley. Within an hour the battle was over.
Dunmore lost more than a hundred troops, and many formerly enslaved men of the Ethiopian Regiment were killed or captured. Dunmore abandoned many of his black freedom seekers on the coast of Virginia as he sailed away to safety in New York. His plan collapsed, and the Patriots claimed victory. But he had unleashed the idea: freedom through war.
The British soon realized that the desire for liberty could become a weapon of overwhelming force. Dunmore’s Proclamation set off a process by which enslaved black people looked to Britain as an agent of emancipation. Other self-liberated enslaved people formed bands of militia to resist their former patriot oppressors, engaging in hit-and-run tactics, attacking supply lines, and striking fear into patriot forces for months. Perhaps as many as one hundred thousand black people fled their enslavers and sought freedom behind British lines.
It was nothing short of a slave rebellion on a world historic scale. As Britain swelled its ranks with formerly enslaved soldiers, the Patriots seized. Black men had been taking part in revolutionary battles since the very beginning, at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. But when the Patriots formed a national army, they were deeply uneasy about the presence of black men with guns.
George Washington, born into a slaveholding plantation family, was accustomed to seeing black people strictly in subordinate roles. When he assumed command of the Continental Army, he and his council of war imposed a ban on black troops. The common prejudice was that black soldiers would not be as capable as white soldiers, or that they might depress the morale of white soldiers. Washington knew no other life than being surrounded by enslaved people, and the presence of black men within his army scrambled what he saw as the natural racial hierarchy.
Those ideas started to shift out of pure necessity. The Patriots were in dire need of soldiers. Washington knew his army was chronically undermanned and outmatched. It was hard to turn away willing soldiers when he was in such dire straits.
Congress recognized the necessity and authorized him to enlist black soldiers. Their experience was no different from the average white infantry soldier. They endured difficult winters, insufficient clothing and food, and the same fears about whether the revolution would work. When facing British troops, they acted with incredible valor.
Many were fighting for their own personal emancipation, so they were extra motivated to ensure the American cause won. Washington noticed. His views began to shift, thanks in part to the African-American men in his own ranks, including his personal valet, William Lee, who went to war with him, had his own horse and uniform, and was by Washington’s side in battle. Desperate for more troops and inspired by the patriotism of black men under his command, Washington agreed to a bold plan: enlist a limited number of enslaved men in exchange for freedom.
These troops formed the first Rhode Island regiment, known as the black regiment because it was a blend of black and indigenous troops. They served with distinction and incredible courage. Washington could not help but notice. It began to shift his thinking about slavery and the moral evil of the institution.
The ties of brotherhood on the battlefield chipped away at the racist stereotypes that had run rampant. By 1779, the Patriot Army was desperate for soldiers. Washington’s aide John Laurens proposed a radical solution: enlist three thousand enslaved men in South Carolina, offering them freedom for their service. Laurens was the least likely ally one could imagine for African Americans.
He was the son of one of North America’s largest and wealthiest slave traders, who over his long career had probably bought and sold somewhere between ten thousand enslaved people. John Laurens’s future wealth and prosperity rested on the labor forcibly extracted from these people. Yet John Laurens said he wanted no part of it. He believed black men could make the defining contribution to the revolutionary cause.
He had allies in Washington and Alexander Hamilton, and the Continental Congress approved the plan. But it had to go to the South Carolina legislature for final approval. The plan met fierce resistance. South Carolina’s slaveholding elite refused to risk their wealth or power, fearing that freedom for some could unravel the system of labor on which they depended.
There was nervousness about the implications for the future. When you bring people into an army, you do it with the understanding that by fighting they buy a stake in the society that follows. The notion that enslaved people might serve in the Continental Army was truly dangerous and radical. South Carolina’s commitment to the revolution was only conditional.
In a choice between preserving slavery and American independence, the South Carolina elite would choose slavery every time. There was too much money to be made. For a brief shining moment, it seemed possible that the United States would take a vastly different path toward greater equality. But that moment passed.
Despite the fact that Thomas Jefferson wrote the immortal words all men are created equal, it did not mean equality for all. It did not mean freedom for all. This might be the greatest tragedy of the revolutionary era. Slavery would continue to spread across North America despite the revolutionary potential of the independence movement.
Yet the language of that movement would inspire Americans for generations to come as they worked to fulfill the promises of the revolution and ensure that all men and all women would one day be equal. On July 4th, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was printed and sent out into the world. According to one legend, King George III wrote in his diary, nothing of importance happened today. That legend is not true.
George did not keep a diary. But for him, nothing of importance did happen that day. The declaration was superfluous in his eyes. The war had already started more than a year before, and weeks before the Declaration crossed the Atlantic, he had already dispatched a mighty invasion force.
The largest invasion force ever to set sail from Europe was en route to New York. New York was a prime location to launch operations. It had a deep-water port at the mouth of the Hudson River Valley, navigable by ships of war, and it was the pathway to Canada. British commanders believed there was a large loyalist population there, and once they showed a little force, most inhabitants would return to loyalty and obedience.
Their strategy was to take New York in the middle of the colonies, then have a separate invasion force cut them off from the north. The rebellious thirteen colonies were just a small slice of Britain’s global empire, and yet King George committed nearly everything to their defeat: half the Royal Navy, two-thirds of the British Army, and a large force of German mercenaries. The British force was disciplined, trained in light infantry tactics and amphibious landings, prepared and ready for battle. For the Americans, the cause seemed hopeless in certain obvious ways.
But George Washington believed they needed to take the fight to New York. When Washington arrived, he split his forces between Manhattan and Long Island. They seized and occupied high ground and defended three key passes. Then he made one of his worst military decisions of the revolution.
A fourth pass, known as Jamaica Pass, he left with only a couple of militiamen, thinking the British would not use it. The British learned of the route from loyalists, had local farmers guide them past Washington’s troops, and flanked the American position. Long Island was Washington’s first great test, and it was a crushing setback. His army was outmaneuvered and pinned down.
Washington ordered a retreat. The retreat took longer than anticipated, but at the exact moment the sun began to rise, a fortuitous fog settled over the harbor and obscured their movements. Washington was the last person to leave Long Island. But he had an impossible task defending Manhattan.
He established a front along the Eastern River but posted only a handful of militia at a place called Kip’s Bay. The British commander recognized the weakness, landed a major force, routed the militia, and came between Washington’s troops. When Washington saw his men fleeing en masse, he threw his hat on the ground and yelled, are these the men with which I am to defend America? He tried beating them to get them to turn around and face the British guns.
His aides finally dragged him from the scene. Washington and his army were forced to retreat from Manhattan, abandoning New York to the victorious British, who were greeted by jubilant citizens who still saw them as countrymen. Washington and the Continental Army retreated well away from the pursuing British. The British did not seek to capture him.
They slowly pursued, bringing printed loyalty oaths and encouraging people to sign them, saying all would be forgiven. Thousands of people signed, from all walks of life, including Richard Stockton of New Jersey, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Morale plummets. They had failed their first major test.
It was one of the lowest moments of the American Revolution. The British confined American prisoners to hulks sitting off the coast. These prison ships had astronomical casualty rates. Three times as many American soldiers died in British custody as died in combat.
They packed the ships so tight that prisoners were stewing in their own filth. Doctors who went below deck had so little oxygen that lanterns would not stay lit long enough to complete their rounds. Imagine being trapped in a prison ship for months. By December 1776, an army that had been eighteen or nineteen thousand had reduced to about six thousand.
Many soldiers thought of the cause as futile and began to desert. Congress left Philadelphia to safety. If nobody re-enlisted, that would be the end. Washington realized he had one last opportunity to inspire people to continue supporting the cause.
He needed to do something decisive and dramatic. Across the icy Delaware River lay the British outpost of Trenton. The men at Trenton were having a great Christmas, confident and fortified, protected by the freezing river. Nobody in their right mind would attempt a crossing of an ice-choked river in the dead of winter.
With twenty-four hundred troops, Washington attempted the audacious crossing in the teeth of a vicious storm. Many soldiers did not know how to swim, and they were weighed down with clothes, supplies, and ammunition. Washington made the brilliant strategic choice of selecting local sailors from Philadelphia to man the boats, and they got everyone across without losing a single person or horse. They landed, maneuvered toward Trenton, and took the garrison completely by surprise.
The attack was a resounding success. Nearly a thousand troops fighting for Britain were captured, and American casualties were light. One man was hit and probably mortally wounded, but a surgeon’s mate rushed to the scene, clamped the wound, and saved his life. About forty years later, James Monroe would be elected the fifth president of the United States.
Washington followed the capture of Trenton with another triumph at Princeton. The revolution was galvanized. Throughout 1777, American forces pressed their advantage, winning a string of key battles. Then came the resounding victory at Saratoga, where an entire British force surrendered, probably the most decisive triumph of the war.
It was the first moment people in London sat up and thought they might not actually win. But an army cannot survive on victories alone. By the winter of 1777, supplies were diminishing, casualties were climbing, and the cost of war grew heavier each day. Washington’s army of about twelve thousand men limped into Valley Forge for their winter quarters.
It was a particularly long and brutal winter. Soldiers marched without shoes, leaving a trail of blood in the snow from scabbed and bleeding feet. There were no pre-existing barracks, so the men spent the first part of the frigid winter constructing their own log huts. The huts were hovels, unshinked, wind blowing through them.
There were not enough blankets or warm clothing. Increasingly, even firewood became impossible to provide as the surrounding trees had been cut down. They were reduced to one meal a day. The Quartermaster General position was vacant, and the army was out of everything.
Sickness and disease became pronounced. People died from sickness to a much greater degree than from battlefield injuries. In cramped, unhygienic conditions, the army experienced plague. On average, the Continental Army lost ten to fifteen men a day.
Thomas Paine captured the mood once again. These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of their country, but he that stands by it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.
Yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. Washington found an ally in a young, ambitious aide named Alexander Hamilton, who identified many of the problems with Congress and argued it needed far stronger centralized power to supply the military. Washington was constantly pleading with Congress for more men, more money, more provisions, presenting them with a choice: be better provisioned, or starve and disperse. But the young United States had no money.
The revolutionary government was weak by design. The Americans had just broken from a powerful centralized government, and the last thing they wanted was to recreate it. Congress could not tax Americans directly. It had to get money through the individual states, which often did not respond quickly or fully.
Many states hoarded supplies and money, worrying the British would show up next. Congress printed paper money, which was worth less than what it said on its face, leading to a rapid inflationary spiral. When things went badly and Congress considered changing commanders, they knew they could not, because the army was called Washington’s army. He had deep loyalty to his troops, always stayed in winter quarters with them, and would not go into his own quarters until they had huts.
Farmers surrounding Valley Forge were more inclined to sell their produce to the British, who paid in hard currency, than to accept the relatively worthless Continental currency. Washington was limited by his unwillingness to use force against American citizens. The dwindling forces at Valley Forge knew that if they could not survive the winter, they could not win the war.
Fortunately, and unbeknownst to them, help was on the way.
