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... the war to adopt what we would call guerrilla tactics, breaking all the conventional rules of eighteenth-century warfare in order to survive and to maintain their identity as a people's army. Although most Americans believed that a citizen's army was consistent with the principles of liberty and self-government for which they fought, George Washington and his aides chafed at what they deemed the lack of professionalism among American can soldiers. When aid from France began arriving in massive quantities, American military leaders put it to work in training a professional American army. The last great battle of the war -- Yorktown, in 1781 -- was a clash of professional armies, fought in a manner that would have seemed familiar to Marlborough in the early 1700 s or Wellington in the early 1800 s. In 1776, the "smart money" was on Britain; most observers believed that British military might and naval power would be more than enough to shatter the colonists's part of resistance.
Why didn't it turn out that way? The Americans (no longer colonists after 4 July 1776) had a cause (independence) to fight for and, even when that cause seemed remote, homes and families to defend. Even though they scored repeated victories over the disorganized, badly trained, and badly supplied Americans throughout the first years of the war (for example, New York and Brandywine, 1776) the difficulty of subduing a continent-wide revolution escaped the British, who also underestimated the Americans' military skill and commitment. By decisively defeating British General John Burgoyne's army at Saratoga, New York (1777), the Americans managed to prove to the French government that the American cause was worth a Franco-American alliance and a war with Britain.
The resulting combination of American and French soldiers, resources, and planning proved to be too much for the overextended British forces. At the negotiations of 1782 - 1783, the American diplomats are a match for the best the British or the French had to offer. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay negotiated a valuable treaty of peace that recognized American independence from Britain and won land concessions from Britain to the new nation that doubled the size of the United States. III. The Revolution at Home, 1775 - 1783 The Revolution was more than just a war for independence from Great Britain.
It also was a struggle to define what the new nation would be by framing instruments and institutions of government, revising the laws of the individual states, and policing the loyalties of the American people. First, the Americans wrote new state constitutions to replace their former colonial charters and to restore legitimate government deriving its authority from the people. They thus made major contributions to the theory and practice of constitution-making and democratic government. Some state constitutions deeply influenced the framing and adoption of the Constitution of the United States in 1787 - 1788 -- Virginia (the first written declaration of rights), New York (the first popularly elected executive, armed with a veto that could be overridden by a super majority vote in the legislature), and Massachusetts (ideas of separation of powers and checks and balances, the constitutional convention as a method for framing constitutions, and popular ratification as a method for adopting constitutions). Second, Americans revised their states' laws to purge them of vestiges of the colonial past, setting in motion currents of change that in the next century would transform American law and society. In Virginia, Thomas Jefferson led an effort to establish religious liberty by ending the "establishment" of the Church of England and recognizing liberty of conscience for all, and to reform the law of property by permitting greater freedom in the purchase, transfer, and bequeathing of land.
He also tried without success to promote the education of the people by establishing public schools. Third, by enforcing demands of loyalty to the Revolution, the Americans created the idea that one could choose one's citizenship and political loyalty. In the process of establishing loyalty oaths and tests of patriotism, the leaders of the Revolution also created categories of people -- both "King's Friends" and those who wanted to remain "on the fence" -- known to historians as Loyalists. The Revolution was as much a civil war as the Civil War of 1861 - 1865, dividing states, communities, and even families lies. As the war wore on, the Americans imposed stricter tests of loyalty, forcing even those who wanted to sit the war out to choose sides.
In the process, they broke up families and violated individual rights. The lessons of the Loyalist experience w ere not lost on the Americans, however. Even as tens of thousands of Loyalists fled the United States at war's end for Britain, Canada, or the Caribbean, they left a legacy: stricter standards for defining and punishing the crime of treason that became bulwarks of American liberty. Fourth, recent scholarship has established that the American Revolution was not merely an enterprise of white men. Women (on both sides) also took part, whether by collecting supplies and amassing money for the war effort, or by running farms and businesses so their fathers, husbands, and sons could fight, or by providing intelligence of enemy movements. Blacks, some of them freed or runaway slaves, also fought on both sides -- only to find themselves abandoned at war's end.
Indians were drawn into the conflict, some siding with the British against the Americans (whom they resented for their efforts to push white settlement into Indian territory), others aiding the Americans and the French, still others caught between the contending forces and paying terribly for their bad luck. It is still vigorously disputed just how the Revolution affected the social and economic conditions of the American people. In the 1920 s, J. Franklin Jameson asserted that the American Revolution had to be understood as a social movement, and that it promoted widespread democratization in a variety of ways -- by removing legal restrictions on land ownership, by broadening the range of religious denominations and sects whose members could take part in public and private life as equals safe from discrimination, and by shattering colonial patterns of deference and elite authority. Although many historians have disputed particular elements of Jameson's thesis, the most recent study of this question, Gordon S. Wood's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution, is a vigorous, learned, and historically sophisticated reformulation of the Jameson thesis -- even though Wood maintains that American democratization was a step that took place despite the expectations of the leaders of the Revolution, who wished to preserve an elitist politics of republican leaders benevolently guiding the "common sort. " Wood's critics fault his work for discounting or overlooking continuing American social, political, and legal discrimination against African- Americans, Indians, and women; Wood responds that he rightly stresses the distinctive democratization of America by contrast with the rest of the Western world rather than judging the Americans of the Revolution...
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Research essay sample on American Revolution Civil War
