The Geopolitics of the American Revolution
By Jeremy Black
July 27, 2017
The image is clear, the message obvious. Across a sun-kissed meadow, dappled with shade, lines of British soldiers, resplendent in red, move slowly forward, while brave American Patriots crouch behind trees and stone walls ready to blast these idiots to pieces. Frequently repeated on page and screen, the image has one central message: one side, the American, represented the future in warfare, and one side, the American, was bound to prevail. Thus, the war is readily located in both political and military terms. In each, it apparently represents the triumph of modernity and the start of a new age: of democracy and popular warfare. The linkage of military service and political rights therefore proved a potent contribution. Before these popular, national forces, the ancien régime, the old order, with its mercenaries, professionals, and, at sea, unmotivated conscripts, was bound to crumble, and its troops were doomed to lose. Thus, the political location of the struggle, in terms of the defining struggle for freedom, apparently helps locate the conflict as the start of modern warfare, while, considering the war in the latter light, helps fix our understanding of the political dimension. Definition in terms of modernity and modernization also explains success, as most people assume that the future is bound to prevail over the past.
In making the war an apparently foregone conclusion, this approach has several misleading consequences. First, it allows most historians of the period to devote insufficient attention to the fighting and, instead, to focus on traditional (constitution-framing) and modish (gender et al) topics, neglecting the central point about the importance of war in American history: no victory, no independence, no constitution, no newish society. Second, making the British defeat inevitable gravely underrates the Patriot (not American, as not all Americans fought the British) achievement. Third, making British defeat inevitable removes the sense of uncertainty in which contemporaries made choices.
Rethinking the War of Independence
Instead, the war needs rethinking. It has to be understood as a formidable challenge for the Patriots. Britain in 1775 was the strongest empire in the world. Other states, especially, but not only, China and Russia, had larger armies, but no other state had Britain’s capacity for force projection, for exerting power at a great distance. As a result, the geopolitical situation is very different from today. As the Russians showed in Cuba in 1962, it is now possible for “Continental” powers to back opposition to the USA in the Americas, a point more recently demonstrated with Venezuela. Britain not only had the largest navy in the world, but also a navy that had soundly beaten the second largest navy, that of France, as recently as 1759, in the key year of conflict in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63). With this navy, Britain had a network of bases, especially around the North Atlantic, particularly Plymouth and Portsmouth in Britain, Halifax in Nova Scotia, and Kingston, Jamaica and English Harbour, Antigua in the West Indies.
The British navy also rested on the best system of public finances in the world. The National Debt, guaranteed by Parliament, enjoyed international confidence to an extent unmatched among Britain’s rivals, and the British could therefore borrow abroad as well as at home, and in large amounts. Indeed, the War of Independence was to be waged by the British without a serious financial crisis. In part, this ability reflected the buoyancy of government customs revenues, based as they were on Britain’s leading role in Europe’s global trading system.
Rich and creditworthy, as Russia would not be today, but China would, Britain was also politically stable, albeit within the constraints of the parliamentary system. The government of Frederick, Lord North had just won the general election of 1774. Under the Septennial Act, it did not have to fight another election until 1781. In fact, perfectly legally, it was to hold the next election in 1780, and to win that. The opposition criticized the war in America, but the government was in control of parliament and this control was not lost until early 1782: there was a collapse in parliamentary confidence after defeat at Yorktown the previous October.
As far as North America was concerned, the British army had plenty of experience in fighting there, and successfully so, as a result of conquering Canada from the French in 1758-60 during the Seven Years’ War (otherwise known as the French and Indian War). Furthermore, compared to Havana and Manila, which the British had captured from Spain in 1762 (prefiguring the American achievement in taking both from Spain in 1898), the eastern seaboard of North America was a relatively benign area for British operations. The killer diseases of the Tropics, such as yellow fever, were absent from New England, the original center of the Revolution.
It was also an area particularly vulnerable to amphibious operations, in which the British were especially skilled. In 1775, 75 percent of the American population of European and African descent lived within 75 miles of the coast, and this percentage included most people who counted politically. Their vulnerability to seapower was greatly accentuated by the poorly developed state of the roads and bridges, which led to an emphasis on coastal traffic. Moreover, inland towns such as Philadelphia and Albany, were also ports reachable up rivers. All the major towns could be reached by water, while the eastern seaboard of North America is bisected by waterways that help maritime penetration: round Charleston; further north, the Chesapeake, the Delaware and Long Island Sound; and, countering any American invasion of Canada, the St. Lawrence. The last, for example, enabled a British naval squadron to relieve Quebec from American siege in 1776 as soon as the ice in the St. Lawrence melted.
Once ashore in North America, the British did not have to face a new type of foe, nor a revolution on the battlefield. Pressed by George Washington, the commander of the Patriot national army (Continental Army), to adopt the form of a conventional European army, the Americans relied on the volley fire and linear formations with which the British were familiar. The major difference to conflict in Europe was that the general absence of cavalry from the battlefield ensured that troops fought in a more open order. Also, compared to war in Europe, both sides employed relatively few cannons. The Patriots did not inherit a significant artillery park, but there was also, for both sides, a question of fitness for purpose (the use of appropriate methods) which is so often a rule in military history. In this case, the great distances within America and the poor nature of inland communications discouraged a reliance on cannons, which were relatively slow to move. As a result, although cannons played a role in some battles, such as the indecisive one at Monmouth Court House (1778), these clashes were not characterized by the efficient exchanges of concentrated and sustained artillery fire seen in Western and Central Europe, nor did the Patriots match the development of artillery standardization and organization then being pursued by the French. The role of the rifle is frequently discussed and, on land, the Patriots found the rifle very useful in sniping. However, its slow rate of fire (compared to the musket) and inability to carry a bayonet (again compared to the musket) gravely reduced its value as a battlefield weapon and notably so against advancing infantry. Anyway, the British also had riflemen.
Far from being revolutionary, the American War of Independence did not see new weapons that transformed warfare. One was tried by the Patriots—the submarine. Had it worked, it would have changed the war, as the British were dependent on their navy and its anchorages were undefended. However, as yet, the submarine could not fulfil its potential: the dependence on human energy for propulsion and on staying partially above the surface for oxygen, made it only an intimation of the future. The submarine of the late eighteenth century was not viable, whereas those of the American Civil War (1861-5) were. The Ferguson breech-loading rifle proved effective in the hands of the British at the battles of Saratoga and Brandywine in 1777, but it was costly and difficult to make compared to the Brown Bess musket. Only about 100 were used in action by Ferguson’s Experimental Rifle Corps which was disbanded after Ferguson was wounded at Brandywine.
Organizationally, the British were challenged by the Patriots. The major role of the Patriot militia created a particular problem for the British. This was true both in operational terms, for example by restricting the range of the British supply-gatherers, and in the political context of the conflict, especially in harrying Loyalists. At the outset of the Revolution, militia overcame royal governors, and defeated supporting Loyalists. In December 1775, the Earl of Dunmore, the last royal Governor of Virginia, was beaten by Virginia militia at Great Bridge; Josiah Martin, his North Carolina counterpart, following in February 1776 at Moore’s Creek Bridge. These successes helped give the Americans strategic depth in the face of British amphibious attacks. Furthermore, the militia could provide at least temporary reinforcements for the Continental Army. It helped to ensure that the British were outnumbered, which limited their effectiveness as an occupation force.
Lastly, the political context was crucial. Had all the British colonies in the Western Hemisphere rebelled, then the British would not have stood a chance. Fortunately for the British, the economically most crucial ones (the West Indies sugar islands, such as Jamaica and Barbados) and the strategically vital ones, those with the naval bases (Nova Scotia, Jamaica, Antigua) did not rebel. As a result, the British had safe bases – to both the north and the south of the Thirteen Colonies, from which to mount operations. When, in March 1776, General Sir William Howe withdrew from Boston, leaving the Patriots victoriously in control of the Thirteen Colonies, he did not have to retreat to Britain. Instead, he sailed to Halifax, Nova Scotia, a key naval base, and rebuilt his force, so that summer, the Empire could strike back, with British forces landing on Staten Island at the start of the New York campaign. The eventually successful British defence of Canada in 1776 ensured that, as with that from East Florida (modern Florida minus the panhandle) into Georgia, there were also land frontiers across which the Patriots could be attacked.
More serious were the Loyalists, for this was a civil conflict, the first major American civil war. Loyalists fought and died for their vision of America, just as Patriots did, and in some areas, especially Georgia, North Carolina, the eastern shore of the Chesapeake, and parts of New Jersey and New York, Loyalists were numerous. Furthermore, the boundaries between Patriots and noncommitted, and noncommitted and Loyalists, were porous, not fixed. Politically, the British had to move as many Americans as possible across these boundaries; and Patriot strategy provided them with their opportunity. The Patriot emphasis on position warfare in order to protect their major cities – New York in 1776, Philadelphia in 1777, and Charleston in 1780 – gave the British repeated chances to defeat their opponents, and thus to bring many Americans back under the Crown and affect opinion elsewhere within America.
A New Type of Revolution
Both sides, initially imagined a short conflict, but the war became a lengthy struggle that pitted the world’s leading maritime power against a portion of its subjects. It proved relatively simple for the Patriots to drive the poorly prepared British from the rebellious Thirteen Colonies, especially outside Massachusetts, as the British concentrated their forces there. Their situational awareness of the colonies was seriously inadequate. When, under threat from Patriot artillery positions overlooking the harbour, they withdrew from Boston in March 1776, leaving the British without any bases in these colonies; but the British then made a formidable attempt to regain the colonies. Helped by the fact that in 1776 they were at war with no other power, they sent the largest army they had hitherto deployed abroad. Its arrival on Staten Island in the summer of 1776 signalled a major attempt to regain both the initiative and control, inaugurating the second stage in the war which, unlike the first, was to end with neither side in complete territorial control. Indeed, at the close of the conflict, the British evacuated the major port-cities of Charleston and New York; the Patriots were not strong enough to drive them away.
For the Patriots to sustain this effort, it was necessary that the war was a political as much as a military struggle, one in which the revolutionaries had to convince themselves and the British that there was no alternative to independence. The resulting politicization of much of the American public, and the motivation of many of their troops, were important aspects of what was to be seen as modern warfare: in the West, a notion of popular commitment was important to this definition. There was little in the War of American Independence, however, of the emphasis on large armed forces and the mass production of munitions that were to be such obvious aspects of the industrial, or total, warfare waged by Western states in the late nineteenth, and early and mid-twentieth centuries. Moreover, by the early twenty-first century, the ability to rely on professional military forces composed of volunteers helped ensure that popular commitment was not a key element, as shown by American, British, and French military interventions overseas.
A popular fight for independence was not unprecedented in the eighteenth century. Within the Western world, it was possible, for example, to point to the Swiss in the thirteenth century and the Dutch in the sixteenth century, both of whom had overthrown Habsburg forces and created republics. In the eighteenth century itself, the American Revolution was only one of a number of popular uprisings within the British Empire; but those by the Jacobites in Scotland in 1715 and 1745, and by nationalists in Ireland in 1798, were all suppressed.
The uniquely successful character of the American Revolution focuses attention on the political and military factors that were specific to this struggle, the problem facing all anti-imperial insurrections. Among them, it is important to emphasize the distance between the colonies and Britain. Indeed, America was the first of the European transoceanic colonies to rebel, and it led the way to the successful rebellion of Haiti against France in the 1790s, and those of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the New World in the 1810s and 1820s.
Campaigning in North America posed serious problems for the British, particularly with logistics (supplies), and with defining an appropriate strategy that could translate triumph in battle into victory in the war. War, then, as at the present day, is a matter of forcing one’s will on an opponent, and, although victory in battle can help achieve this end, such victory is not generally enough. The political problem for the British was that they needed to persuade the Patriots to surrender: the British had insufficient forces to conquer and occupy more than a portion of the Thirteen Colonies, and, partly as a result, the war, as John Adams, a prominent Patriot, claimed, had been lost by the British before the fighting had begun. This was certainly true in New England, Adams’ base, where there were few Loyalists, but was less the case elsewhere.