Founding America (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Jack N. Rakove [6]
The military conflict that began in April 1775 finally ended eight years later, when the Treaty of Paris formally acknowledged the independence of the United States. The war placed an enormous strain on American resources. If the British had thought that Americans would simply break and run when faced with the disciplined formations of the royal army, the engagements at Concord and later at Bunker Hill quickly disabused them of that hope. In 1776 a massive British fleet brought 30,000 soldiers to New York. In a series of engagements, this force repeatedly outmaneuvered and pummeled Washington’s army, first occupying New York City, then threatening to liberate New Jersey from patriot control. Only Washington’s daring raids on Trenton and Princeton kept the American cause from collapsing.
The campaign of 1777 was arguably the turning point of the war. The strategic initiative belonged to Britain. While one British army, led by General John Burgoyne, was sent south from Canada, the forces based in New York under the command of General Sir William Howe and his brother, Admiral Lord Richard Howe, prepared to occupy Philadelphia, the American capital. But these campaigns were poorly coordinated, and both started late. While the Howes undertook a laborious movement by sea, sailing all the way up the Chesapeake Bay, Burgoyne’s force was slogging through the New York wilderness to transfer its line of attack from Lake Champlain to the Hudson River. American forces commanded by Horatio Gates built up strength by drawing on the militia of densely populated New England. In October, Burgoyne, short on supplies, surrendered his army at Saratoga, while the Howes occupied Philadelphia, which had little strategic significance.
The news of Saratoga had its decisive impact in Paris, where a trio of American commissioners, led by Benjamin Franklin, had been attempting to negotiate an alliance with Britain’s ancient enemy, France. In February 1778 the government of King Louis XVI was finally prepared to enter the war as America’s ally. Hard pressed to supply its army across 3,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean, Britain now faced a graver strategic challenge.
The British responded with a significant change of strategy. Late in 1778, they shifted the theater of operations from the Middle Atlantic states to the South, first occupying Savannah, then preparing to carry the war into the Carolinas and Virginia. There were significant pockets of loyalist strength in this region. The British also knew that the presence of hundreds of thousands of African-American slaves made these states the soft underbelly of the American union.
Over the next three years, British forces carried the war northward, until Virginia became the major site of battle. Other British forces remained encamped in New York City, under Washington’s watchful eye. The decisive development came in 1781, when a British army commanded by General Charles Cornwallis encamped on the peninsula between the York and James Rivers. Aware that a French fleet was available to clamp off seaward access, Washington secured a promise that the ships of Admiral Rochambeau would descend on the Chesapeake, while he himself managed a skillful march of a Franco-American force southward from New York. Isolated and besieged at Yorktown, Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, 1781.
News of this defeat led to the fall of Lord North’s government and the installation of a new ministry committed to ending the war and recognizing American independence. At Paris a peace commission of John Adams, John Jay, and Benjamin Franklin negotiated ably on behalf of American interests, securing favorable terms that granted the United States boundaries stretching westward to the Mississippi River. In April 1783 the definitive terms of the treaty were set.
So closed what Benjamin Rush later called “the first act