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A History | The Winning of Independence 1777-1783 | The Summing Up: Reasons, Lessons and Meaning
The Summing Up: Reasons, Lessons and Meaning
The American victory in the War of the Revolution was a product of many factors, no one of which can be
positively assigned first importance. Washington, looking back on the vicissitudes of eight years, could only
explain it as the intervention of "Divine Providence." American historians in the nineteenth century
saw that "Divine Providence" as having been manifested primarily in the character and genius of the
modest Commander in Chief himself. Washington's leadership was clearly one of the principal factors in American
success; it seems fair to say that the Revolution could hardly have succeeded without him. Yet in many of the
events that led to victory Bennington,
Saratoga, King's Mountain, and
Cowpens, to name but a fewhis personal influence was remote.
Today many scholars stress not the astonishment that Washington felt at the
victory of a weak and divided confederation of American states over the greatest power of the age, but the
practical difficulties the British faced in suppressing the revolt. These were indeed great but they do not
appear to have been insuperable if one considers military victory alone and not its political consequences.
The British forfeited several chances for military victory in 1776-77, and again in 1780 they might have won
had they been able to throw 10,000 fresh troops into the American war. American military leaders were more
resourceful and imaginative than the British commanders, and they proved quite capable of profiting from
British blunders. In addition to Washington, Nathanael Greene,
Henry Knox, Daniel Morgan, and
Benedict Arnold showed remarkable military abilities, and of the foreign
volunteers Steuben and the young Lafayette were outstanding. The
resourcefulness of this extraordinary group of leaders was matched by the dedication of the Continental rank a
nd file to the cause. Only men so dedicated could have endured the hardships of the march to
Quebec, the crossing of the Delaware, Valley Forge,
Morristown, and Greene's forced marches in the southern campaign. British and Hessian professionals never
showed the same spirit; their virtues were exhibited principally in situations where discipline and training
counted most.
The militia, the men who fought battles and then went home, also exhibited this spirit on many occasions. The
militiamen have been generally maligned as useless by one school of thought, and glorified by another as the
true victors in the war. In any balanced view it must be recognized that their contributions were great,
though they would have counted for little without a Continental Army to give
the American cause that continued sustenance that only a permanent force in being could give it. It was the
ubiquity of the militia that made British victories over the Continentals in the field so meaningless. And the
success with which the militia did operate derived from the firm political control the patriots had established
over the countryside long before the British were in any position to challenge itthe situation that made the
British task so difficult in the first place.
For all these American virtues and British difficulties and mistakes, the Americans still required French
aid money, supplies, and in the last phase military force to win a decisive and clear-cut military victory.
Most of the muskets, bayonets, and cannon used by the Continental Army came from France. The French contested
the control of the seas that was so vital to the British, and compelled them to divert forces from the
American mainland to other areas. The final stroke at Yorktown, though a
product of Washington's strategic conception, was possible only because of the temporary predominance of
French naval power off the American coast and the presence of a French army.
French aid was doubly necessary because the American war effort lacked strong national direction. The
Revolution showed conclusively the need for a central government with power to harness the nation's resources
for war. It is not surprising that in 1787 nearly all those who had struggled so long and hard as leaders in
the Continental Army or in administrative positions under the Congress were to be found in the ranks of the
supporters of a new constitution creating such a central government with a strong executive and the power
to "raise armies and navies," call out the militia, and levy taxes directly to support itself.
Strictly military lessons of the Revolution were more equivocal. Tactical innovations were not radical but they
did represent a culmination of the trend, which started during the
French and Indian War, toward employment of light troops as skirmishers in conjunction with traditional
linear formations. By the end of the war both armies were fighting in this fashion. The Americans strove to
develop the same proficiency as the British in regular line-of-battle tactics, while the British adapted to
the American terrain and tactics by themselves employing skirmishers and fighting when possible from behind
cover. Washington was himself a military conservative, and Steuben's training program was designed to equip
American troops to fight in European fashion with modifications to provide for the increased use of light
infantry. The guerrilla tactics that characterized many actions, principally those of the militia, were no
product of the design of Washington or his leading subordinates but of circumstances over which they had
little control. The American rifle, most useful in guerrilla actions or in the hands of skirmishers,
played no decisive role in the Revolution. It was of great value in wooded areas, as at Saratoga and
King's Mountain, but for open-field fighting its slow rate of fire and lack of a bayonet made it inferior
to the musket.
Since both militia and Continentals played roles in winning the war, the Revolutionary experience provided
ammunition for two diametrically opposed schools of thought on American military policy: the one advocating
a large Regular Army, the other reliance on the militia as the bulwark of national defense. The real issue,
as Washington fully recognized, was less militia versus Regularsfor he never believed the infant republic
needed a large standing armythan the extent to which militia could be trained and organized to form a reliable
national reserve. The lesson Washington drew from the Revolution was that the militia should be "well
regulated," that is, trained and organized under uniform national system in all the states and
subject to call into national service in war or emergency.
The lesson had far greater implications for the future than any of the tactical changes wrought by the
American Revolution. It balanced the rights of freedom and equality, proclaimed in
the Declaration of Independence, with a corresponding obligation
of all citizens for military service to the nation. This concept, which was to find explicit expression in
the "nation in arms" during the French Revolution, was also implicit in the American, and it
portended the end of eighteenth century limited war, fought by professional armies officered by an
aristocratic class. As Steuben so well recognized, American Continentals were not professional soldiers in
the European sense, and militia even less so. They were, instead, a people's army fighting for a cause. In
this sense then, the American Revolution began the "democratization of war," a process that was
eventually to lead to national conscription and a new concept of total war for total victory.
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