Battles

battles  |  campaigns  |  maps

Battle Location End Date Sort descending
Battle of Lexington and Concord Massachusetts 19-Apr-1775
Battle of Fort Ticonderoga New York 10-May-1775
Battle of Bunker Hill Massachusetts 17-Jun-1775
Battle of Quebec Quebec, Canada 31-Dec-1775
Fortification of Dorchester Heights Massachusetts 04-Mar-1776
Battle of Long Island New York 27-Aug-1776
Battle of Harlem Heights New York 16-Sep-1776
Battle of Valcour Island New York 11-Oct-1776
Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge North Carolina 27-Oct-1776
Battle of White Plains New York 28-Oct-1776
Battle of Fort Washington New York 16-Nov-1776
Battle of Trenton New Jersey 26-Dec-1776
Battle of Princeton New Jersey 03-Jan-1777
Siege of Fort Ticonderoga New York 06-Jul-1777
Battle of Oriskany New York 06-Aug-1777
Battle of Bennington New York 16-Aug-1777
Battle of Brandywine Pennsylvania 11-Sep-1777
Battle of Germantown Pennsylvania 04-Oct-1777
Battle of Fort Montgomery and Fort Clinton New York 06-Oct-1777
Battles of Saratoga New York 07-Oct-1777
Battle of Red Bank (Fort Mercer) New Jersey 22-Oct-1777
Siege of Mud Island Fort (Fort Mifflin) Pennsylvania 15-Nov-1777
Battle of Rhode Island Rhode Island 08-Feb-1778
Battle of Monmouth New Jersey 28-Jun-1778
Battle of Savannah Georgia 29-Dec-1778
Battle of Stony Point New York 15-Jul-1779
Siege of Savannah Georgia 20-Oct-1779
Siege of Charleston South Carolina 12-May-1780
Battle of Waxhaws South Carolina 29-May-1780
Battle of Camden South Carolina 16-Aug-1780
Battle of Kings Mountain South Carolina 07-Oct-1780
Battle of Guilford Courthouse North Carolina 15-Mar-1781
Battle of Chesapeake Capes Virginia — Chesapeake Bay 05-Sep-1781
Battle of Groton Heights Connecticut 06-Sep-1781
Battle of Eutaw Springs South Carolina 08-Sep-1781
Siege of Yorktown Virginia 19-Oct-1781
Battle of Cowpens South Carolina 07-Nov-1781

The unattractive truth was that the arrival of the provisional treaty ending the war in April 1783 made the Continental Army superfluous, and the sooner it disappeared, the better. Congress eventually voted to provide full pay for five years for officers in lieu of half pay for life, but doing so was a purely rhetorical exercise, since there was no money in the federal coffers to pay anyone. Even that meaningless commitment generated widespread criticism, especially in New England, where returning officers were greeted with newspaper editorials describing them as blood-beaked vultures feeding at the public trough. At least in retrospect, the dissolution of the Continental Army in the spring of 1783 was one of the most poignant scenes in American history, as the men who had stayed the course and won the war were ushered off without pay, with paper pensions and only grudging recognition of their service.

Joseph J. Ellis
The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783—1789 (2015)