Revolutionary War

(1775–83)

The Revolutionary War was the military phase of a much larger and longer conflict between Great Britain and its 13 North American colonies over the constitutional nature of the British Empire and the proper relationship of the colonies to the mother country. The conflict had its immediate roots in the aftermath of the French and Indian War—known also as the Seven Years’ War or the Great War for Empire—when a series of parliamentary acts intended to reform imperial governance and increase revenues to service wartime debts provoked [Page 729]widespread colonial protests. Because of generally lax British governance prior to the French and Indian War, the American colonies had matured and developed their own distinctive political philosophy, one that was deeply suspicious of any perceived attempts at curtailing their accustomed rights and privileges. Thus, many colonists suspected ministerial motives and concluded that a parliamentary conspiracy was aimed at suppressing colonial freedoms and reducing the colonists to conditions of servitude. Politically sophisticated and long used to governing themselves, many colonists organized committees of correspondence, intercolonial congresses, and, finally, began preparing to resist by force British attempts at enforcing imperial rule.

The outbreak of violence both subsumed and contributed to social protest and the radicalization in parts of society. Mob action had been a staple of colonial protest in the years preceding the outbreak of violence and contributed to the growth of revolutionary sentiment. In major cities protestors rioted in reaction to the Stamp Act of 1765, a confrontation between a mob and sentries provoked the Boston Massacre of 1770, Rhode Islanders seized and burned the revenue cutter Gaspée in 1772, and Bostonians destroyed tea in 1773. In the backcountry, uprisings against Hudson River Valley landlords, an irregular war between New York and the Green Mountain Boys over title to the Hampshire Grants, and Scots-Irish frontier vigilantism against Indians on the Pennsylvania frontier, punctuated the 1760s and 1770s. In the Carolinas prewar protest and vigilante groups, known as Regulators, fought against established authority for more equitable political rights.