The military history of the American Revolution is more than the history of the War of Independence. The Revolution itself had important military causes. The experience of the Seven Years’ War (which started in 1754 in North America) conditioned British attitudes to the colonies after that conflict was over. From 1764, the British Parliament tried to raise taxes in America to pay for a new permanent military garrison. British politicians resisted colonial objections to parliamentary taxation at least partly because they feared that if the Americans established their right not to be taxed by Westminster, Parliament’s right to regulate colonial overseas trade would then be challenged. If the Americans broke out of the system of trade regulation, British ministers, MPs, and peers worried, then the Royal Navy would be seriously weakened.
The War of Independence, which began in 1775, was not the great American triumph that most accounts suggest. The British army faced a difficult task in suppressing a rebellion three thousand miles from Britain itself. French intervention on the American side in 1778 (followed by the Spanish in 1779, and the Dutch in 1780) made the task still more difficult. In the end, the war in America was won by the French as much as by the Americans. But in the wider imperial conflict, affecting the Caribbean, Central America, Europe, West Africa, and South Asia, the British fared much better. Even in its American dimension, the outcome was less clear cut than we usually imagine. The British, the nominal losers, retained great influence in the independent United States, which in economic terms remained in an essentially dependent relationship with the former mother country.
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A Military History of the American Revolution, 1754–1783
Stephen Conway
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Loyalists and the American Revolution
Rebecca Brannon
Loyalists supported the British cause and loyalty to the British sovereign during the American War for Independence. Their motivations were quite varied. A few enunciated a clear and sophisticated Loyalist ideology that privileged stability, constitutional restraint, and the benefits of membership in an empire. Others simply valued loyalty, while others chose the side they saw as more trustworthy or even the side they thought could best protect them in a raging civil war. Loyalists included white men and women of all ranks and occupations as well as Native Americans who allied with the British and enslaved Africans who resented their owners and saw the British as true, or at least possible, supporters of freedom and liberty. Their support helped Britain’s war effort considerably. But Britain never trusted or fully used its Loyalist allies, and after the war, Britain offered Loyalists only limited financial support. The majority reintegrated into the new United States, promising to be good citizens and to support the national project they had opposed. An unhappy minority became refugees who spread out across the world.
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Women and War in Early America
Gina M. Martino
Early American women incited, fought in, and brokered peace in conflicts that ranged from regional to nearly continental in scale during the 17th and 18th centuries. It is true that in most early American societies, warfare was considered a masculine activity. Nevertheless, war making, particularly in periods of endemic war, required the active participation of men and women. In some Indigenous polities, women decided when to wage war and which enemy captives would live or die. Other Indigenous women commanded troops as leaders of their polities, forging and shattering alliances with their Indigenous and European peers. For European women attempting to colonize contested regions of the continent, military readiness was part of everyday life. Even if these women did not participate in the masculinized theater of the militia drill, they did know how to produce ammunition and fire a musket. Beginning in the 1770s, early American women would participate in a conflict that was at once a colonial war, a revolutionary war, and a civil war. The American Revolution did not distinguish between the home and the front or the frontier town and the peaceful hamlet. Women would be touched by a war that mobilized their production skills, intellects, and physical strength. That same war would also displace hundreds of thousands of women, many of whom would never return home. But as they had through the whole of early American history, women would continue to adapt, resist, and mobilize.
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The Indigenous Roots of the American Revolution
Kristofer Ray
Euro-Americans existed firmly on the periphery of an Indigenous North America in 1763, hubristic claims of continental sovereignty notwithstanding. Nowhere is this reality more clear than in the Ohio Valley and Illinois Country. Try as it might, the post-1763 British Empire could not assume jurisdictional control over this space. Even to begin to try was a task requiring significant investment—both in terms of more systematic Indigenous diplomacy and in terms of reforming colonial political structures unfit to accommodate imperial western policy. North American officials understood the problems quite well and were willing to spearhead reform. Between 1763 and 1775 they supported increased investment to defray North American expenses. They called for programs that would end colonial corruption, something they feared undermined Indigenous diplomacy and made a mockery of the rule of law. Ultimately, they concluded that centralizing Indian affairs offered the best means by which to stabilize North America. Colonials (generally) and speculators and their surveyor corps (specifically) powerfully disagreed, however, seeing Indian country as an untapped resource and imperial restraints as threats to local autonomy. They rejected the idea of centralizing power over Indigenous affairs and used the rhetoric of British constitutional liberty to reframe corrupt behavior into something it emphatically was not.
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Women and Politics in the Era of the American Revolution
Sheila L. Skemp
Historians once assumed that, because women in the era of the American Revolution could not vote and showed very little interest in attaining the franchise, they were essentially apolitical beings. Scholars now recognize that women were actively engaged in the debates that accompanied the movement toward independence, and that after the war many sought a more expansive political role for themselves. Moreover, men welcomed women’s support for the war effort. If they saw women as especially fit for domestic duties, many continued to seek women’s political guidance and help even after the war ended.
Granted, those women who wanted a more active and unmediated relationship to the body politic faced severe legal and ideological obstacles. The common law system of coverture gave married women no control over their bodies or to property, and thus accorded them no formal venue to express their political opinions. Religious convention had it that women, the “weaker sex,” were the authors of original sin. The ideology associated with “republicanism” argued that the attributes of independence, self-reliance, physical strength, and bravery were exclusively masculine virtues. Many observers characterized women as essentially selfish and frivolous creatures who hungered after luxuries and could not contain their carnal appetites. Nevertheless, some women carved out political roles for themselves.
In the lead up to the war, many women played active, even essential roles in various non-consumption movements, promising to refrain from purchasing English goods, and attacking those merchants who refused to boycott prohibited goods. Some took to the streets, participating in riots that periodically disturbed the tranquility of colonial cities. A few published plays and poems proclaiming their patriotic views. Those women, who would become loyalists, were also active, never reluctant, to express their disapproval of the protest movement.
During the war, many women demonstrated their loyalty to the patriot cause by shouldering the burdens of absent husbands. They managed farms and businesses. First in Philadelphia, and then in other cities, women went from door to door collecting money for the Continental Army. Some accompanied husbands to the battlefront, where they tended to the material needs of soldiers. A very few disguised themselves as men and joined the army, exposing as a lie the notion that only men had the capacity to sacrifice their lives for the good of the country. Loyalist women continued to express their political views, even though doing so brought them little more than physical suffering and emotional pain. African American women took advantage of wartime chaos to run away from their masters and forge new, independent lives for themselves.
After the war, women marched in parades, lobbied and petitioned legislators, attended sessions of Congress, and participated in political rallies—lending their support to particular candidates or factions. Elite women published novels, poems, and plays. Some hosted salons where men and women gathered to discuss political issues. In New Jersey, single property-owning women voted.
By the end of the century, however, proponents of women’s political rights lost ground, in part because new “scientific” notions of gender difference prepared the way for the concept of “separate spheres.” Politics became more organized, leaving little room for women to express their views “out of doors,” even as judges and legislators defined women as naturally dependent. Still, white, middle class women in particular took advantage of better educational opportunities, finding ways to influence the public sphere without demanding formal political rights. They read, wrote, and organized benevolent societies, laying the groundwork for the antebellum reform movements of the mid-19th century.
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Smuggling and Illicit Trade in British America
Andrew Rutledge
Illicit trade was an endemic feature of life in 17th- and 18th-century British America, shaping economies and societies from the Caribbean to Newfoundland. Owing to the illegal nature of smuggling in British America, its scale is impossible to estimate, but surviving records from traders and imperial officials testify to the determination of merchants to exchange goods and enslaved peoples across imperial borders and their success in doing so. The same was true for British Americans’ trading partners in the French, Spanish, and Dutch empires. Contraband trade was carried out in a variety of ways, ranging from open commerce in colonial ports to clandestine landings of cargoes on barren shorelines. The lives of both free and enslaved colonists were affected by it, either directly as sailors or laborers on smuggling voyages or indirectly as consumers of illegally imported goods such as tea, molasses, rum, or cloth.
Most interimperial trade was labeled illegal under a series of laws known as the Navigation Acts passed between 1661 and 1696 that sought to exclude foreigners from the trade of the British Empire and ensure its products flowed to the mother country. But hampered by insufficient resources and intransigent colonial attitudes, customs agents could do little to curtail smuggling. Yet despite the arguments of some historians seeking to tie illicit trade to the coming of the American Revolution, smugglers engaged in it, seeking profits, not political or economic independence. In British North America, merchants smuggled to French and Dutch territories because the returns outweighed the risks, and because smuggling offered a means of earning the funds needed to repay their creditors in the British Isles. While in the Caribbean, island merchants enjoyed imperial support for their trade with Spanish America even as they condemned the illicit commerce of their northern cousins.
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The Draft in U.S. History
Megan Threlkeld
The issue of compulsory military service has been contested in the United States since before its founding. In a nation characterized by both liberalism and republicanism, there is an inherent tension between the idea that individuals should be able to determine their own destiny and the idea that all citizens have a duty to serve their country. Prior to the 20th century, conscription occurred mainly on the level of local militias, first in the British colonies and later in individual states. It was during the Civil War that the first federal drafts were instituted, both in the Union and the Confederacy. In the North, the draft was unpopular and largely ineffective. Congress revived national conscription when the United States entered World War I and established the Selective Service System to oversee the process. That draft ended when U.S. belligerency ended in 1918. The first peacetime draft was implemented in 1940; with the exception of one year, it remained in effect until 1973. Its most controversial days came during the Vietnam War, when thousands of people across the country demonstrated against it and, in some cases, outright refused to be inducted. The draft stopped with the end of the war, but in 1980, Congress reinstated compulsory Selective Service registration. More than two decades into the 21st century, male citizens and immigrant noncitizens are still required to register within thirty days of their eighteenth birthday.
The very idea of “selective service” is ambiguous. It is selective because not everyone is conscripted, but it is compulsory because one can be prosecuted for failing to register or to comply with orders of draft boards. Especially during the Cold War, one of the system’s main functions was not to procure soldiers but to identify and exempt from service those men best suited for other endeavors framed as national service: higher education, careers in science and engineering, and even supporting families. That fact, combined with the decentralized nature of the Selective Service System itself, left the process vulnerable to the prejudices of local draft boards and meant that those most likely to be drafted were poor and nonwhite.
