Revolutionary War

Independence

King George III

Revolutionary War

• A classic war with professional armies• A civil war• A guerilla war• Pitted Indians allied with the British against

the Americans• Opportunity for freedom for enslaved Africans

or for fighting alongside white Americans

Combatants

• British• Americans • Loyalists• Slaves• French• Indians

Battle of Bunker Hill

• June 16, 1775• 2,500 British troops under General William

Howe• 1,400 Americans• British are victors– British: 226 dead, over 800 wounded– Americans: 140 dead, 271 wounded, 30 captured

British General William Howe

Thomas Paine

Thomas Jefferson

Continental Army

Quebec

• Late 1775, the Americans launched an expedition to conquer the cities of Montreal and Quebec before British reinforcements could arrive

• General Montgomery took Montreal in September of 1775

• Montgomery and General Benedict Arnold failed to take Quebec, and smallpox ravaged their ranks.

American officers

Colonel Benedict Arnold General Richard Montgomery

Battle of Long Island

• Main action of the first year came in New York• The British won the battle of Long Island in late August,

Washington evacuated his troops to Manhattan Island• knowing it would be hard to hold Manhattan, he moved

north to two forts along the Hudson River; • two armies engaged in limited skirmishing for two

months before British General Howe finally captured Fort Washington and Fort Lee;

• Washington retreated through New Jersey and into Pennsylvania; Howe again decided not to pursue.

• New Jersey—On December 25, Washington crossed the Delaware River and made a quick capture of German soldiers at Trenton;

• Major victory for Americans and lifted the morale of the troops.

Crossing the Delaware

The Hudson River Valley

• In 1777, Burgoyne assumed command of an army of 7,800 soldiers in Canada and began the northern squeeze on the Hudson River valley

• also had 1,000 “camp followers,” 400 Indian warriors, and 400 horses;

• captured Fort Ticonderoga with ease in July

British Leaders

General John Burgoyne Mohawk chief Joseph Brant

To the South

• Burgoyne’s army slowly moved South, expecting reinforcements

• rather than meet Burgoyne to isolate New England, however, General Howe sailed south to attack Philadelphia.

Ft. Stanwix

• reinforcements encountered Americans who refused to surrender

• the British laid siege to the fort with the help of Palatine German militiamen and Oneida Indians

• Mohawk chief Joseph Brant led an ambush on the Germans and Oneidas in a narrow ravine called Oriskany, killing nearly 500 out of 840 of them;

Indian v. Indian, German v. German• these were multiethnic battles with a high mortality

rate; • the British retreated at Fort Stanwix, depriving

Burgoyne of reinforcements.

Battle of Saratoga

• Burgoyne camped at the small village of Saratoga;

• American General Horatio Gates began moving his army toward Saratoga;

• the British won the first battle of Saratoga, but the Americans won the second;

• forced Burgoyne to surrender to American forces on October 17, 1777.

Valley Forge

• General Washington moved his troops into Valley Forge outside Philadelphia for the winter

• 2,000 men died of disease• 2,000 men deserted • Washington blamed the citizenry for lack of

support and of supplies

French Alliance

• American victory at Saratoga convinced France to enter the war

• Formal alliance signed 1778• French had been covertly providing weapons

and military advisers to the Americans well before 1778.

Southern Strategy and the End of the War

• Georgia and South Carolina• British forces abandoned New England and

focused on the South• they believed the South’s large slave

population would desert to the British and disrupt the southern society and economy

• also believed Georgia and South Carolina were loyalist strongholds.

Siege of Charleston

• Easy Victory in Georgia—Fell easily at the end of December 1778;

• the bulk of the Continental army was still in New York and New Jersey.

• British laid siege for five weeks; took Charleston in May 1870;

• General Charles Cornwallis established military rule of South Carolina by mid-summer.

• Battle of Camden—American troops arrived to strike back at Cornwallis by August 1780, the most devastating defeat of the war for the Americans.

Yorktown

• minor victories allowed Cornwallis to imagine he was succeeding in Virginia;

• moved toward Yorktown near the Chesapeake Bay to wait for backup.

• French Intervention—The French fleet beat British backup to the Chesapeake Bay;

• a five-day naval battle left the French navy in clear control of the coast;

Surrender at Yorktown• proved a decisive factor in

ending the war because French ships prevented any rescue of Cornwallis’s army.

• Surrender—Cornwallis and his 7,500 troops faced a combined French and American army of 16,000;

• French and Americans bombarded British fortifications at Yorktown for twelve days;

• Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, 1781.