The American Revolution sent shockwaves around the world, but how did the rebel Americans beat the British, arguably the most powerful military in the world at the time? Richard Bluttal explains by looking British weaknesses and American strengths.
A painting entitled The Battle of Long Island. By 21st century artist Domenick D'Andrea.
“The time is now near…” wrote Commander-in-Chief George Washington, which will “…determine whether Americans are to be Freemen or Slaves.” Over the course of the Revolutionary War, as many as 400,000 men from the ages of 16 to 60 fought against the British—about 25,000 gave their lives. Basic training was short, rations inadequate, and pay was poor. Some enlisted out of patriotism, some joined for the adventure, and others were drafted. Length of service varied from a few months to the duration of the war. Leaders like Washington soon discovered that instilling discipline and keeping an army of volunteers on the battlefield and off the wheat field (many soldiers were farmers who returned home during harvests without permission) was no easy feat. In 1778, the royal army consisted of nearly 50,000 regular troops combined with over 30,000 German (Hessian) mercenaries. George Washington, in contrast, never had more than 20,000 troops under his command at any one time. Most of these American soldiers were young (ranging in age from their early teens to their mid-20s), landless, unskilled, and poor. Others were indentured servants and slaves who were serving as substitutes for their masters and had been promised freedom at the war's end. Also in the Continental army were many women who cared for the sick and wounded, cooked, mended clothes, buried the dead, and sometimes served in combat.
The British seemed unbeatable. During the previous 100 years, the British had enjoyed triumph after triumph over nations as powerful as France and Spain. At first glance, the odds were clearly against the Americans. A closer look provides insight into how the underdogs emerged victorious.
Britain's military was the best in the world. Their soldiers were well equipped, well disciplined, well paid, and well fed. The British navy dominated the seas. Funds were much more easily raised by the Empire than by the Continental Congress. Some of those funds were used to hire Hessian mercenaries to fight the Americans.
The Americans had tremendous difficulty raising enough funds to purchase basic supplies for their troops, including shoes and blankets. The British had a winning tradition. Around one in five Americans openly favored the Crown, with about half of the population hoping to avoid the conflict altogether. Most Indian tribes sided with Britain, who promised protection of tribal lands.
So, we ask the question, how was it possible that the Americans could defeat the British. It certainly was a long shot, let’s see.
BRITISH WEAKNESSES
The British fought a war far from home. Military orders, troops, and supplies sometimes took months to reach their destinations. The British had an extremely difficult objective. Distance was a huge, huge factor. And it wasn’t just about getting orders across the ocean. The British supply chain was simply too long. They could only compensate by looting the local people—which certainly didn’t help the public opinion of “the King’s men.” They had to persuade the Americans to give up their claims of independence. As long as the war continued, the colonists' claim continued to gain validity. The geographic vastness of the colonies proved a hindrance to the British effort. Another weakness of the British army was fighting on the wooded and hilly terrain of the American colonies. The British sought flat, open ground so that they could fight in the European style they were accustomed to, with lines of men blasting away at each other with muskets from 50-75 yards. (Although the British had defeated the French in the French and Indian War, their most crucial victory had been at Quebec, on the Plains of Abraham, where the two foes battled as they might have in France). American soldiers were much more willing to fight from concealment and retreat to fight another day, leaving the British, their supply lines growing ever attenuated and more perilous, chasing after them.
The British had just fought a difficult war with the French and their native American allies in the French and Indian War. The cost to Britain was enormous. There were constant debates in the British Parliament about the funding of this new conflict, thousands of miles from the homeland.
A related weakness for the British was the fact that it was difficult for the government to recruit men into the army, since there was no military draft, and few able-bodied British men wanted the hard and dangerous life of the army overseas. In order to fulfill Gen. William Howe’s wish for 50,000 men to defeat the colonials, the British government was forced to turn to German mercenaries from the then-province of Hesse-Cassell (whom the Americans therefore called Hessians). Thirty-thousand British and Hessian troops were in fact sent to North America 1776, but since mercenaries felt no loyalty beyond a paycheck, they were prone to desertion.
Another weakness of the British, especially at the outset of the war, was its disdain for the colonial fighters it was facing – Burgoyne would famously call the Americans “a rabble in arms" -- and be defeated by them at the battle of Saratoga. Gen. Thomas Gage, commanding 2,200 British soldiers at the Battle of Bunker Hill (really Breed’s Hill) in June of 1775, sent his men in frontal charges against this “rabble,” only to see the American stand their ground and kill or wound half of the British forces. Finally, the British faced a failure in coordinating strategic objectives -- their commanders, King George III and his ministers in England, were never quite on the same page as to the best way to defeat the Americans, in part because the same distances that made resupply difficult kept communication uncertain and lacking in timeliness.
AMERICAN STRENGTHS
With so many Americans undecided, the war became in great measure a battle to win popular support. If the patriots could succeed in selling their ideas of revolution to the public, then popular support might follow and the British would be doomed.
Even with military victory, it would have been impossible for the Crown to regain the allegiance of the people. Revolution would merely flare up at a later date.
In the long run, however, the patriots were much more successful attracting support. American patriots won the war of propaganda. Committees of Correspondence persuaded many fence-sitters to join the patriot cause. Writings such as Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" stirred newfound American nationalism.
As to the war strategy, the Native American allies taught the Americans a whole different kind of warfare, guerrilla or snake warfare. The greatest use of guerrilla warfare during the American Revolution took place during the Southern Campaign. Led by American general, Nathanael Greene, and aided by Baron Friedrich von Steuben, guerrilla warfare was used extensively in the later years of the war. In the forests of the South, Greene was able to draw British forces away from their supplies and then engage them with small fighting units in order to inflict damage. By dividing his forces, Greene was able to spread his soldiers across a wider area. As a result, British General Charles Cornwallis and the Southern detachment of the British Army often found extreme difficulty finding the Americans and successfully contending with them in skirmishes. Also, the Americans knew the country. They’d been fighting the Indians (sometimes accompanied by the French) for decades before the Revolution. They knew how to take advantage of terrain, and they did. And then, of course, you had the backwoodsmen, who generally had Kentucky rifles—which were an entirely different order of weapon from the smoothbore Brown Bess muskets the British had: they shot longer and straighter. Now if you’re a Patriot in a buckskin jacket, lying in the brush and aiming at a block of men wearing bright red coats in the woods, crammed together in Napoleonic squares (which was how European armies fought even before Napoleon), trying to shoot from daylight into shadow… who do you think is going to hit the target? Was this why the Americans were called ragtag soldiers?
Many politicians were calling this group of colonists, ragtag soldiers. I think James Volo (MA in Military History and Wars, American Military University) addresses this concept of ragtag soldiers very well. “The American were not a rag-tag bunch of farmers. They had been exposed to and part of the defensive forces of the several colonies since their founding. Most of the soldiers who fought for the English colonies prior to the final cataclysm of the French and Indian War were colonials. Only after 1759 were large numbers of regulars sent to the English colonies. However, these colonials were not formed into a simple citizen army but rather were regular provincial troops—formed into regiments and paid by the colony. From this point provincial regiments were established to replace the less formal militia units in major operations. In many colonies they became permanent organizations known as the Governor's Foot Guard, or Horse Guard. In later times, they became the Royal Americas or the Queen's Rangers. There remains in America the cherished romantic concept of the militia as "minutemen," a mythical army of self-trained and self-armed warriors springing from the colonial soil in times of trouble. This is not completely true. Most of the American officer of the Revolution — like Washington himself — had been officers or NCOs in the French Wars, and many of the Rev War NCOs (excepting the youngest) had served as soldiers in that war — Putnam, Stephen, Hazen, Pomeroy, Wooster, Stuart, Schuyler. Virginia established a system of paid, mounted rangers in the 17th century of almost 1,000 men. They patrolled the frontiers, held down depredations, and tried to keep abreast of the attitudes of the natives for a century. The New England colonies established a similar but less extensive system of rangers along their northern borders in the French and Indian War to protect the outlying settlers from the ravages of sudden attack. The best-known group of rangers was that raised by Robert Rogers from among the tough woodsmen of the New Hampshire frontier. Israel Putnam, one of the later and now a general in the American Revolution, had helped to inform the establishment of British Light Infantry. The British at the end of the war could not believe that a bookseller (Knox), and blacksmith (Greene) and a tavern keeper (Putnam) had beaten them.“
AVOIDING A KNOCK-OUT BLOW
Washington's strategy of avoiding large-scale confrontations with the royal army made it impossible for the British to deliver a knock-out blow. Only once during the Revolution (at Charleston, S.C. in 1780) did an American army surrender to British forces.
The direct assistance of France and Spain, and the indirect assistance of the Dutch was of great importance to the revolution. It also gave the Americans a fighting chance against the Royal Navy, battles like Penobscot proved that the Americans hadn’t much of a chance against the British navy. However, the intervention of French and Spanish navies changed this. The Americans also had the help of privateers. With the French and Spanish against them as well, Britain ended up fighting a war that they couldn’t win. From 1776 to 1783 France supplied the United States with millions of livres in cash and credit. France also committed 63 warships, 22,000 sailors and 12,000 soldiers to the war, and these forces suffered relatively heavy casualties as a result. The French navy transported reinforcements, fought off a British fleet, and protected Washington’s forces in Virginia. French assistance was crucial in securing the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781. Prior to the onset of the American Revolution, the original 13 colonies had no real naval force other than an abundance of merchant vessels that were engaged in domestic and foreign trade. The colonies' merchant service had vast experience with the open sea and with warfare, which included British naval expeditions against Cartagena, Spain, and Nova Scotia during the nine years of war with France (1754–1763). Thus, the importance of naval power was recognized early in the conflict. On 13 October 1775, the Continental Congress authorized the creation of the Continental Navy and established the U.S. Marine Corps on 10 November. By 1776, the colonies had 27 warships—in contrast to the powerful Royal British Navy, which had about 270 warships. Also problematic was that American commanders were often confronted by sailors and Marines who had not been adequately trained and lacked discipline.
Perhaps the single most important reason for the patriot victory was the breadth of popular support for the Revolution. The Revolution would have failed miserably without the participation of thousands of ordinary farmers, artisans, and laborers who put themselves into the line of fire. The Revolution's support cut across region, religion, and social rank. Common farmers, artisans, shopkeepers, petty merchants were major actors during the Revolution. Ex-servants, uneducated farmers, immigrants, and slaves emerged into prominence in the Continental Army.
The growth of popular participation in politics began even before the Revolution. In the years preceding the war, thousands of ordinary Americans began to participate in politics--in non-importation and non-exportation campaigns, in anti-Tory mobs, and in committees of correspondence linking inland villages and seaports. Many men joined groups like the Sons of Liberty to protest British encroachments on American liberties. Many women took the lead in boycotts of British goods; they also took up the spinning wheel to produce homespun clothes. During the Revolution itself, some 400,000 Americans, including at least 5,000 African Americans, served in the fighting for at least some time.
CONCLUSION
The Revolution had momentous consequences. It created the United States. It transformed a monarchical society, in which the colonists were subjects of the Crown, into a republic, in which they were citizens and participants in the political process. The Revolution also gave a new political significance to the middling elements of society-- artisans, merchants, farmers, and traders--and made it impossible for elites to openly disparage ordinary people.
Above all, the Revolution popularized certain radical ideals--especially a commitment to liberty, equality, government of the people, and rule of law. However, compromised in practice, these egalitarian ideals inspired a spirit of reform. Slavery, the subordination of women, and religious intolerance--all became problems in a way that they had never been before.
The Revolution also set into motion larger changes in American life. It inspired Americans to try to reconstruct their society in line with republican principles. The Revolution inspired many Americans to question slavery and other forms of dependence, such as indentured servitude and apprenticeship. By the early 19th century, the northern states had either abolished slavery or adopted gradual emancipation plans. Meanwhile, white indentured servitude had virtually disappeared.
What do you think of American strengths and British weaknesses during the American Revolution? Let us know below.
Now read Richard’s series of articles on trauma and medicine during war, starting with the American Revolution here.
