This essay examines the reciprocal contest of wills as mediated through the use of political violence from roughly 1773 to the end of the war in 1783. In other terms, it covers the escalating application of violence and how that led to outright war in April 1775, as well as the war itself. In both periods, violence was used to influence the will of one’s opponent and the political preferences of the undecided—but sometimes its political intent was exceeded, with escalatory effects. Three broad categories of violence are considered here. The first, “intimidative and catalytic” was primarily associated with the period from 1773 to 1776, in which violence was used by both sides, mostly publicly, to force political opponents to accede or step aside. Some of those efforts at intimidation catalyzed further violence, leading ultimately to armed military confrontation. Once the war had begun, the strong conventions associated with “war” shaped military behavior by both sides’ regular forces, although not always successfully, and always subject to logistical requirements. These behaviors form the second category of “Regular and Logistical.” The third category, “Retaliatory” was primarily associated with peripheral militia forces, which were much less restrained by the customs and usages of war, and often instead indulged in escalating retaliation.

Chapter 1 examines the first, and arguably most important, act of rogue diplomacy in American history: the refusal of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay to heed the Continental Congress's instructions that they make no peace with Britain without first obtaining French consent. The government of Louis XVI had kept the American Revolution afloat through nearly a decade of war, and the French foreign minister - Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes - expected his American allies to follow Paris's lead during peace negotiations, but Adams, Jay, and particularly Franklin executed a briliant end-run around Versailles and concluded a separate treaty with London that gave the infant United States far more generous borders (along with other concessions) than Vergennes or Louis ever would have countenanced. By defying the Congress, and by profiting so immensely thereby, Franklin, Jay, and Adams established a standard of diplomatic insubordination that endures to the present day.