The Revolutionary War: Strategy, Alliances & New York · Grade 7 Social Studies

Part 1 · The campaign that nearly ended it

Britain sent the largest expeditionary force it had ever despatched — some 32,000 troops and hundreds of ships — to take New York in the summer of 1776, days after independence was declared. At the Battle of Long Island in August, Howe outflanked the American position and drove it back to Brooklyn Heights with the East River behind it.

What saved the army was a night evacuation. Over the dark hours of 29 August, Marblehead fishermen under John Glover ferried roughly nine thousand men across the river in small boats, with a providential fog holding into the morning. Washington is said to have left in the last boat. Nothing was won; everything that mattered was preserved.

The British held New York City for the rest of the war, until 1783 — seven years, the longest occupation of any American city. It became the base for operations, the refuge for tens of thousands of Loyalists, and the port from which the British finally sailed. Washington's attacks on the Hessian garrison at Trenton on the night after Christmas 1776 and at Princeton days later were small in scale and enormous in effect, because they came at the moment enlistments were expiring and the cause looked finished.

Part 2 · Saratoga, and a world war again

The British plan for 1777 was to cut the colonies in half along the Hudson: Burgoyne south from Canada, a second force east through the Mohawk valley, Howe north from New York. If New England were severed from the rest, the rebellion could be defeated in pieces.

It failed comprehensively. The Mohawk valley column was stopped at Oriskany and Fort Stanwix; Howe went to Philadelphia instead; Burgoyne, slowed to a crawl in forested country and short of supplies, was surrounded and surrendered his whole army of nearly six thousand at Saratoga in October 1777.

Valley Forge belongs in the same year and is usually remembered wrongly. The winter of 1777–78 was not unusually cold; the disaster was supply, and roughly two thousand men died of disease and malnutrition in camp. What came out of it was an army that could manoeuvre: Baron von Steuben, a Prussian officer, spent the winter drilling the Continentals into troops who could form line, change front and use the bayonet. The army that marched out in June 1778 was a different instrument from the one that marched in.

The consequence was diplomatic. France had been supplying the Americans covertly for two years while waiting for evidence they could win. Saratoga was the evidence. In February 1778 France signed treaties of alliance and commerce, and what had been a colonial rebellion became a global war, with Spain joining in 1779 and the Dutch in 1780. Britain now had to defend the Caribbean, Gibraltar and India, and could no longer concentrate on America.

Part 3 · The Confederacy divided

For the Haudenosaunee the war was a catastrophe of a different kind. The Confederacy's rule was that the six nations acted together or not at all, and on this question they could not agree. The Oneida and Tuscarora largely sided with the Americans — Oneidas carried corn to Valley Forge and fought at Oriskany — while the Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga and most Onondaga sided with the British, under leaders including Joseph Brant.

In 1777 the council fire at Onondaga was covered, the formal sign that the Confederacy could not reach a common decision. At Oriskany that August, Oneida and Mohawk fighters met on opposite sides, which is precisely what the Great Law had been founded to prevent.

Brant is worth knowing as a person rather than a label. A Mohawk leader educated at a colonial school, fluent in English and several Iroquoian languages, he travelled to London in 1775, was received at court, and judged that the colonists’ hunger for land was the greater threat to his people than the Crown. That was a reasoned calculation about which side would respect the Proclamation line, and the Treaty of Paris proved him right about the Americans and wrong about British protection.

The American response to frontier raids came in 1779, when Washington sent General Sullivan with orders to destroy Haudenosaunee capacity to make war. The expedition burned around forty towns, cut down orchards and destroyed stored corn before winter. Thousands fled to British posts at Niagara, where many died in the hard winter that followed. The Oneida, who had fought for the Americans, lost their towns too — burned by British-allied forces in reprisal.

Part 4 · How it ended, and on whose terms

The last phase moved south. Britain hoped Loyalist support in the Carolinas would let it roll the rebellion up from below; the campaign bled it instead, in a vicious partisan war. Cornwallis moved into Virginia and fortified a position on the coast at Yorktown in 1781.

The trap that closed on him was mostly French. A French fleet under de Grasse drove off the Royal Navy at the Chesapeake, cutting off escape by sea, while Washington and Rochambeau marched south from New York. Of the roughly 19,000 troops besieging Cornwallis, about half were French. He surrendered in October 1781.

New York mattered to the end. The British evacuated the city on 25 November 1783, a date New Yorkers kept as Evacuation Day for more than a century, and Washington rode in the same afternoon. The Hudson had been the strategic spine of the whole war — it was to seize control of it that Benedict Arnold tried in 1780 to hand over West Point, the fortress guarding the river, in the most famous act of treason in American history.

The Treaty of Paris of 1783 recognised independence and set generous boundaries — west to the Mississippi, which no American army had taken and which Britain's Native allies had not been consulted about. The nations who had fought alongside the British, and those who had fought for the Americans, discovered that their land had been assigned by two European-descended powers at a table in Europe.