The American Revolution

This book chronicles the American Revolution from its roots in the 1750s through the Treaty of Paris in 1783, drawing on letters, diaries, and first-person accounts to portray the conflict as a violent, complicated struggle experienced by ordinary people on every side.

The narrative begins in 1754, when 22-year-old Virginia militia colonel George Washington led an ambush against French-Canadian soldiers in the Ohio Country, sparking the Seven Years' War (called the French and Indian War in America). Britain won by 1760, but the victory doubled the national debt. To fund troops stationed in the colonies, Parliament imposed new taxes, beginning with the Stamp Act of 1765. Colonists resisted fiercely: Mobs destroyed the property of stamp distributors, merchants boycotted British goods, and propagandist Samuel Adams broadened opposition by warning that if trade could be taxed, land could follow. Parliament repealed the act in 1766 but asserted through the Declaratory Act its authority to legislate for the colonies "in all cases whatsoever."

New duties on tea and other goods provoked further boycotts, in which women played central roles. British troops occupying Boston clashed with civilians, killing five in the incident Patriots dubbed the "Boston Massacre" of 1770. After the Tea Act of 1773 granted the East India Company a monopoly on colonial tea sales, men disguised as Native Americans dumped 342 crates of tea into Boston Harbor. Prime Minister Lord North retaliated with punitive laws Patriots called the "Intolerable Acts." Instead of isolating Boston, the acts united the colonies, and delegates from 12 colonies gathered for the First Continental Congress in September 1774.

Armed conflict began on April 19, 1775, when British regulars fired on militiamen at Lexington Green, killing eight. At Concord's North Bridge, militiamen fired back. The British retreated to Boston under relentless attack. The book introduces recurring witnesses, including 14-year-old fifer John Greenwood, who walked over 100 miles from Maine hoping to find his parents, and 10-year-old Betsy Ambler, whose Virginia family's life as Crown officials disintegrated as the conflict spread.

Congress named Washington commander in chief in June 1775. At the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, the British took the hilltop but at a cost of over 1,000 casualties. Free Black men and Native Americans from the Stockbridge community served in Patriot ranks from the start. Continental colonel Benedict Arnold led a harrowing expedition through the Maine wilderness toward Quebec City; about 400 men turned back, fell ill, or died before the survivors joined General Richard Montgomery for a failed New Year's Eve assault that killed Montgomery and wounded Arnold. Virginia's royal governor Lord Dunmore offered freedom to enslaved people who joined the British, and some 800 reached his ships, enlisting in the "Ethiopian Regiment."

English-born pamphleteer Thomas Paine's Common Sense, published in January 1776, argued that hereditary monarchy was absurd and shifted public opinion toward independence. Continental officer Henry Knox hauled 60 tons of captured artillery from Fort Ticonderoga to Cambridge in winter, enabling Washington to fortify Dorchester Heights and force the British to evacuate Boston in March 1776. Virginia delegate Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, ratified on July 4, condensing Enlightenment philosophy into the assertion that "all men are created equal."

The British struck back. General William Howe assembled 24,000 soldiers, including 8,600 Hessians (German troops hired by Britain), 400 ships, and 10,000 sailors. At the Battle of Long Island on August 27, a flanking maneuver routed the Patriot army, but Washington orchestrated a nighttime evacuation across the East River, saving his force. Defeats followed at Kip's Bay, White Plains, and Fort Washington. By December, desertions and expiring enlistments had reduced the army to a desperate remnant. On Christmas night, Washington crossed the ice-choked Delaware River and captured the Hessian garrison at Trenton, followed by a victory at Princeton that revived Patriot morale.

The campaigns of 1777 proved decisive. General John Burgoyne invaded from Canada but bogged down in the forests of upstate New York while rebel axmen blocked his path. His Native allies' killing of Jane McCrea, a young woman engaged to a Loyalist officer, rallied militia across the region. At the Battles of Saratoga, Arnold's aggressive leadership helped inflict crippling losses, and on October 17, Burgoyne surrendered his entire army of nearly 6,000 troops. News of Saratoga reached Paris in December and proved the catalyst that Benjamin Franklin, the American diplomat in France, had been working toward. On February 6, 1778, France signed two treaties recognizing American independence and promising full military support.

Washington's army endured a brutal winter at Valley Forge in 1777-78, where soldiers died at a rate of roughly 1,000 per month and nearly 3,000 were officially unfit for duty. Baron Friedrich von Steuben, a Prussian volunteer, transformed the force through systematic training. France's entry forced Britain to defend its global empire. Sir Henry Clinton, the new British commander, evacuated Philadelphia, and Washington attacked at the Battle of Monmouth on June 28, 1778, proving the Continental Army could stand against British regulars.

The war expanded to the frontier. Cherokee warriors attacked settlements, provoking militia reprisals that burned dozens of towns and forced the cession of millions of acres. Washington sent nearly a third of his army to destroy settlements of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) in upstate New York, burning 40 towns and driving thousands of refugees toward British protection.

Britain shifted its strategy southward. Savannah fell in December 1778, and Charleston surrendered in May 1780, costing the Patriots over 5,000 men. British brutality ignited fierce partisan resistance. After Continental general Horatio Gates suffered catastrophic defeat at Camden, Washington sent General Nathanael Greene south. Greene divided his outnumbered force, and Continental general Daniel Morgan destroyed British lieutenant colonel Banastre Tarleton's legion at Cowpens in January 1781. Greene lost three subsequent battles but inflicted such heavy casualties that the British abandoned the Carolinas.

General Cornwallis marched north into Virginia against Clinton's orders. Now serving as a British officer after his plot to surrender West Point was exposed in 1780, Arnold raided Richmond, forcing Governor Jefferson to flee. Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau, the French army's commander, marched their combined forces 450 miles to Virginia when they learned a French fleet under Admiral de Grasse was sailing for the Chesapeake. De Grasse defeated the British navy at the Battle of the Capes on September 5, 1781, trapping Cornwallis at Yorktown.

The siege began September 28 with 18,000 allied troops. On October 14, American and French forces stormed two key fortifications. Cornwallis's escape attempt failed, and on October 19, he surrendered his army of over 6,000. Immediately afterward, enslavers arrived to reclaim people who had fled to the British.

The Treaty of Paris, signed in 1783, declared the former colonies "free, sovereign and independent states" with boundaries stretching to the Mississippi, but Native peoples who had fought as British allies were abandoned and unmentioned. Some 60,000 Loyalists departed for Nova Scotia, the Bahamas, and elsewhere. Sir Guy Carleton, the British commander overseeing the evacuation, honored promises of freedom to Black Loyalists, registering nearly 3,000 names in a ledger called "The Book of Negroes." Yet emancipation remained limited largely to northern states.

On December 23, 1783, Washington resigned his commission to Congress in Annapolis, demonstrating civilian control of the military. The revolution was won, but the work of building a nation capable of fulfilling its founding promises was only beginning.