Surrender of Lord Cornwallis by John Trumbull (Architect of the Capitol)
The American War of Independence freed the 13 British colonies in North America from British rule and set the stage for the United States’ bold experiment in self-government. Fighting raged across the continent for eight years, leaving tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians dead and permanently reshaping the political and social fabric of the Western Hemisphere.
From the start, victory seemed anything but inevitable. A small, loosely organized confederation of independent colonies, with a population of less than two and a half million and no standing army or strong central government, faced one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations on earth—an empire with an experienced professional army, the world’s most formidable navy, and a government able to mobilize vast resources to suppress the rebellion.
Historian Christopher Hamner traces the war from its roots in the crises of the 1770s to the first shots fired at Lexington and Concord, through the surrender of British troops under Gen. Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown, and the Treaty of Paris that followed. Drawing on primary sources, Hamner highlights critical moments of strategy, courage, and contingency, providing rich historical context for the colonists’ improbable victory.
March 19 Opening Shots: The Boston Massacre, Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill
In the years following Britain’s hard-won victory in the Seven Years’ War, tensions between the colonies and the crown steadily escalated. Parliament’s increasingly punitive measures were intended to assert royal authority, but they only deepened colonial resistance. Hamner examines the first violent confrontations between colonists and the British Army: the 1770 exchange of insults, rocks, and bullets in Boston that became known as the Boston Massacre, the April 1775 clashes at Lexington and Concord—later immortalized by Ralph Waldo Emerson as “the shot heard ’round the world”—and the larger battle at Bunker Hill the following June. These encounters began to harden positions on both sides, setting the stage for a full-scale revolution.
April 23 Dunmore’s Proclamation: Freedom and Unfreedom in the War of Independence
In November 1775, in response to the heightening tensions between colonists and the Crown, the royal governor of Virginia issued Dunmore’s Proclamation. The decree promised freedom to “all indented servants, negroes, or others” who joined the British Army, and ultimately led hundreds of enslaved Black persons to run away to British lines.
Lord Dunmore was no abolitionist, and his proclamation was as much a practical measure designed to strengthen the crown’s position in Virginia as it was a moral condemnation of the institution of chattel slavery. But the announcement enraged Virgina planters and stoked fears of a violent uprising of the enslaved among white colonists. Hamner focuses on the paradox of freedom during the American Revolution, and on the way that the half-million Black people held in chains when the war erupted in 1775 shaped both the war and the political philosophy underpinning it.
May 21 Christmas 1776: Princeton and Trenton
The American army found itself at a precarious low point as 1776 ended. Morale in the ranks was low after a series of recent defeats at the hands of the British, and many soldiers planned to leave the army and return home when their enlistments expired at the end of the year. Commander-in-Chief George Washington himself confessed in a letter in early December that “I think the game is pretty near up.”
Spurred by opportunity, necessity, and desperation, Washington’s Continentals launched a pair of audacious attacks in New Jersey between December 25 and the first week of January. Crossing a half-frozen Delaware River on Christmas, Washington’s troops surprised and overwhelmed a body of German mercenaries in Trenton, capturing two-thirds of them with little loss of their own. Ten days later his forces attacked British regulars at Princeton, inflicting several hundred more casualties. From a military standpoint, the British losses were modest, but the Continentals’ success proved to be a critical boon to the patriot cause. Hamner examines both the battles and their impact on the war in its second pivotal year.
June 25 British Strategy in the American War of Independence
For the American colonists, the War of Independence was the focus of their experience for nearly a decade. For the British, the war to restore Crown authority in the colonies was merely one theater of a wider global struggle for power, influence, and wealth—particularly with their old rival France, where tensions would erupt again into a five-year war in 1778.
Hamner focuses on the evolving British strategy for fighting the war in the colonies, examining some of the massive challenges involved in waging war across the Atlantic Ocean. He analyzes the diplomatic and logistical obstacles Parliament faced in attempting to use military force to restore authority in the colonies and looks at the ways different British commanders waged the war in different colonial theaters.
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