The American Revolution, 1775–1783

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the five interlocking factors the College Board CED identifies as having produced the American victory: militias, the Continental Army, Washington's leadership, ideological resilience, and European assistance.
• Trace the strategic arc of the war from Lexington and Concord (April 1775) through Saratoga (1777), Valley Forge (1777-1778), and Yorktown (1781), to the Treaty of Paris (1783).
• Explain why the American victory at Saratoga was decisive in producing the French alliance, and how that alliance transformed a colonial rebellion into a global war.
• Account for the Revolution as both a war for independence and a civil war among colonists, citing roughly equal proportions of Patriots, Loyalists, and neutrals at the war's outset.
• Describe the Revolution's varied effects on women, African Americans, and American Indian nations, including the consequences of Lord Dunmore's Proclamation and the post-war displacement of British-allied tribes.

On April 19, 1775, around seventy Massachusetts militiamen drew up on Lexington Common in front of roughly seven hundred British regulars. A shot was fired, no one knew by whom, and within minutes eight Patriots lay dead. The British column marched on to Concord, found the militia stores already moved, took heavy fire on the march back to Boston, and lost roughly two hundred and seventy-three men to colonial musketry. Ralph Waldo Emerson would later call it "the shot heard round the world." What had been a constitutional argument over taxation became, that morning, a war.

The Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia three weeks later. It had no formal authority to do anything, and yet it appropriated to itself the powers of a national government: it appointed George Washington commander of a new Continental Army on June 15, 1775, drafted the Olive Branch Petition, organized a Continental Navy, and a year later, on July 2, 1776, voted for independence. Washington took command of the army outside Boston nine days after the bloody British victory at Bunker Hill (June 17, 1775), where colonial militia inflicted more than a thousand casualties on advancing British regulars before running out of ammunition. The lesson Bunker Hill taught both sides was that the Patriot cause would not be quickly snuffed out (KC-3.1.II.E).

The first two years of the war went badly for the Patriots. British forces pushed Washington out of New York City in the summer of 1776, captured Philadelphia in September 1777, and seemed within reach of cutting New England off from the southern colonies. The American victories at Trenton and Princeton in the snowy weeks of December 1776 and January 1777 kept the army from disintegrating. The strategic turn came in October 1777, when an American force under Horatio Gates surrounded and captured a British army of roughly six thousand under General John Burgoyne at Saratoga, in upstate New York. Saratoga was the war's turning point, not because it broke British power, but because it convinced the French government that the rebels were a viable military partner. France signed a Treaty of Alliance with the United States in February 1778; Spain entered the war as a French ally in 1779; the Dutch Republic followed in 1780. A colonial uprising had become an Atlantic-world conflict (KC-3.1.II.E).

Saratoga did not end the war. The winter that followed, at Valley Forge in eastern Pennsylvania, was the lowest point of Continental Army morale. Roughly twelve thousand soldiers spent five months in hastily built log huts, short on shoes, blankets, and rations; perhaps two thousand died of disease and exposure. The Prussian volunteer Friedrich von Steuben drilled the survivors into a more professional fighting force, and the army that emerged in the spring of 1778 was meaningfully different from the one that had limped into camp the previous December. The Continental Army never matched the British in pitched battles in open ground, but after Valley Forge it could maneuver, hold, and fight on close to even terms.

The British shifted their main effort south after 1778, hoping that Loyalist sympathy in the Carolinas and Georgia would let them roll up the rebellion from the bottom. Charleston fell in May 1780. The southern war that followed was savage; militia bands of Patriots and Loyalists fought a partisan campaign neighbor against neighbor across the Carolina backcountry, with massacres on both sides. American commanders Nathanael Greene and Daniel Morgan did not need to win pitched battles; they needed only to keep the British army moving, bleeding, and unable to garrison the territory it claimed. By the autumn of 1781, Lord Charles Cornwallis had retreated his army to the Virginia coast at Yorktown, intending to be supplied or evacuated by the Royal Navy. A French fleet under Admiral de Grasse arrived first, defeated the Royal Navy at the Battle of the Chesapeake on September 5, 1781, and bottled Cornwallis up against the sea. Washington's army marched south from New York; French troops under Rochambeau marched with him; combined Franco-American forces totaling roughly seventeen thousand laid siege to Cornwallis's eight thousand. On October 19, 1781, the British army marched out and laid down its arms (KC-3.1.II.E).

Yorktown did not formally end the war. Skirmishing continued in the West Indies and along the southern frontier for two more years. But Lord North's ministry fell in March 1782, the new British government opened peace negotiations, and in September 1783 the Treaty of Paris recognized the United States as an independent sovereign nation, set the western boundary at the Mississippi, granted American fishing rights off Newfoundland, and obligated the new federal government to recommend that states restore confiscated Loyalist property (a recommendation many states ignored). The boundary terms were extraordinarily generous to a nation that had never won a clear strategic victory unaided; they reflected British eagerness to detach the Americans from the French and to position the new United States as a future trading partner.

Why did the Patriots win? The CED's answer is plural, not singular. Colonial militias denied Britain control of the countryside; British regulars could march wherever they chose during daylight, but at night the surrounding country belonged to whichever side the local farmers favored, and across most of the rebellious colonies that side was the Patriots. The Continental Army survived long enough to fight the campaigns that mattered; an army that does not break is, in eighteenth-century warfare, an army that cannot be defeated. Washington's leadership mattered less for tactical brilliance than for political endurance: he kept the army subordinate to civilian authority, he kept it in the field through the worst winters, and he resigned his commission in December 1783 rather than seek the executive power his army would have given him. The colonists' ideological commitment kept officers reenlisting, kept soldiers walking out of Valley Forge in the spring, and kept civilians paying the taxes that the Continental Congress could not actually collect. And European assistance, especially French naval power and money, supplied the strategic edge the Patriots could not generate on their own (KC-3.1.II.E).

Independence was also a civil conflict. John Adams later guessed that one third of colonists supported the Revolution, one third supported the Crown, and one third remained neutral or shifted with circumstances. Modern historians put active Patriots at roughly forty to forty-five percent, active Loyalists at fifteen to twenty percent, and neutrals or fence-sitters at the remainder. Loyalist concentrations were heaviest in New York, parts of New Jersey, and the southern backcountry. After the war, somewhere between sixty and eighty thousand Loyalists left for Britain, Canada, and the British West Indies, taking property, slaves, and family connections with them. The neighbor-against-neighbor violence of the Carolina backcountry, the ethnic conflict in the Mohawk Valley, and the destruction of Iroquois villages by Continental forces in 1779 all marked the war as something more than a contest between two regular armies (KC-3.1.II.E).

The Revolution opened doors and slammed others shut. Women ran farms and businesses while men served, followed armies as cooks, laundresses, and battlefield nurses, raised funds, joined boycott committees, and asserted political claims. Abigail Adams's letter of March 1776 asking her husband to "remember the ladies" is the era's best-known example, but she was not alone; Esther de Berdt Reed organized a Philadelphia women's fund-raising association that contributed thousands of dollars to the Continental Army. African Americans served on both sides. After the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, issued his November 1775 proclamation offering freedom to enslaved men who escaped from rebel masters and bore arms for the Crown, perhaps as many as twenty thousand enslaved people fled to British lines over the course of the war. Roughly five thousand free and enslaved African Americans served in the Continental Army and state militias, sometimes as substitutes for masters who did not want to serve. The Revolution thus simultaneously generated the language of universal natural rights and produced the largest slave emancipation in North American history before 1863, with most of the freedom claims coming under the British flag rather than the Patriot one. American Indian nations mostly sided with Britain, calculating that a victorious Britain would constrain colonial westward expansion as it had tried to do in the Proclamation of 1763. The Iroquois Confederacy split, with Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, and Seneca nations fighting alongside the British and Oneida and Tuscarora nations supporting the Patriots. The Treaty of Paris ignored every one of these nations and treated their lands as British territory to be ceded to the new United States (KC-3.1.II.E).

Eight and a half years of fighting, compressed to the engagements students need to know for the AP exam.

Three sources span the arc of the war: a 1775 royal proclamation that reframed the conflict's social meaning, a 1781 record of the decisive military engagement, and the 1783 treaty that recognized American sovereignty.

1. (Causation) The CED lists five factors that produced the American victory. Rank them from most to least decisive, and defend your top choice with at least two pieces of specific evidence from the period 1775 to 1783.
2. (Causation) Saratoga is conventionally identified as the turning point of the war. Account for the strategic reasoning behind that label. What changed about the war after October 1777 that had not changed after Trenton, Bunker Hill, or the Declaration of Independence?
3. (Comparison) Compare the language of liberty in the Declaration of Independence (1776) with the language of liberty in Lord Dunmore's Proclamation (1775). Whom did each document promise to free, and from what?
4. (Continuity and Change) Examine the war's effect on three groups: white women, enslaved African Americans, and American Indian nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. For each, identify one continuity from the colonial period and one shift produced by the war.
5. (Causation) Account for the boundary terms of the Treaty of Paris. Why did Britain grant the new United States the territory east of the Mississippi when its army had been surrendered, not annihilated, and when much of the southern interior was still in royal hands at the war's end?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.