Portraits of War

The Battle of Princeton (1782)
by James Peale

QUICK FACTS

Within nine months, the Americans exhaust their supply of gunpowder. Not able to manufacture it in sufficient quantities, they rely on imports — mainly from the Caribbean.

CONTENTS

Battles

British Commanders-in-Chief in North America

Lieutenant General Jeffrey Amherst, 1758—63
Major General Thomas Gage, 1763—75
Lieutenant General William Howe, 1775—78
Lieutenant General Henry Clinton, 1778—82
General Guy Carleton, 1782—83

Continental Army Commander-in-Chief

General George Washington, 1775—83

Perspectives

By attacking slavery more fiercely than ever before, Revolutionary Americans freed tens of thousands of slaves. But the Revolution’s libertarian and egalitarian message had perverse consequences. It forced those Southerners who chose to retain slavery to fall back on the alleged racial deficiencies of blacks as a justification for an institution that hitherto they had taken for granted and had never before needed to justify. The anti-slavery movement that arose out of the Revolution inadvertently produced racism in America.

— Gordon S. Wood

Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (2009)