4 - The American Revolution

Summary

The small scale of our maps has deceived us…We have undertaken a war against farmers and farmhouses scattered throughout a wild waste of [a] continent and shall soon hear of our General being obliged to garrison woods, to scale mountains, to wait for boats and pontoons at rivers, and to have his convoys and escorts as large as armies. These, and a thousand such difficulties, will rise on us at the next stage of the war. I say the next stage, because we have hitherto spent one campaign, and some millions, in losing one landing place on Boston, and, at the charge of seven millions and a second campaign, we have replaced it with two other landing-places at Rhode Island and New York…Something more is required, than the mere mechanical business of fighting, in composing revolts and bringing back things to their former order.

A citizen of London upon hearing about the defeats at Trenton and Princeton.

This chapter addresses the peculiar framework within which the combatants in the Revolutionary War operated, particularly the British. There are innumerable lessons this conflict should suggest to the modern analyst, the most important of which is the obvious one of “know your enemy.” One might think, given the extensive experience the British had garnered in the major wars they had waged on the North American continent, that they would have possessed not only a general knowledge of their colonial opponent but also a finely tuned appreciation of his strengths and weaknesses – after all, they had used the colonies as a base for their assault on French Canada in three major conflicts: Queen Anne's War (the War of Spanish Succession, 1702–1712), the War of Austrian Succession (1745–1750), and the Seven Years’ War (the French and Indian War, 1756–1763).