British forces under Benedict Arnold reached Richmond in January, 1781
Source: Leventhal Map Collection, Boston Public Library, Skirmish at Richmond Jan. 5th. 1781
British forces under Benedict Arnold reached Richmond in January, 1781
Source: Leventhal Map Collection, Boston Public Library, Skirmish at Richmond Jan. 5th. 1781
Between 1775-1783, 13 colonies openly rebelled against Great Britain and successfully fought a war that enabled the creation of the United States of America. The conflict began long before the actual fighting. Just before the outbreak of the French and Indian War, which was triggered by a military force led by George Washington that killed a French officer in 1754, London officials shifted their approach to managing the North American colonies.
Throughput the 1600's, there was little oversight or interference in local government by Parliament or the ministers of the king/queen. In the 1720's, Navigation Act restrictions on trade were relaxed. Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole endorsed "salutary neglect" of the mercantile restraints on trade with other European countries. That policy, along with ineffective administration from royal officials chosen more for patronage rather than competency, allowed the colonial economies to grow. Virginians acquired agricultural tools, cloth, consumer products, and enslaved Africans from ships sailing from the Netherlands, France, and Caribbean islands at a lower cost than from ships Great Britain.
The new approach, "imperial administration," constrained the power of the General Assembly. Virginia's leaders objected to the imposition of new bureaucratic regulations and especially new taxes. Colonists drew a philosophical distinction between taxes to regulate trade vs. "internal taxes" designed to raise revenue and pay off debts incurred by King George II, King George III, and Parliament.
From the colonial perspective, taxes for revenue were unacceptable because the colonies had no representation in Parliament and no opportunity to constrain such taxes from becoming excessively high. The colonial system lacked effective checks and balances to protect the landowners and businesses in the colonies from seeing too high a percentage of their wealth drained away.
Virginians expressed their objections to imperial administration in their response to the Proclamation of 1763 and the Parson's Cause case that same year. In response to the 1765 Stamp Act, Virginians joined in boycotting British imports. No Virginia delegation was sent to the Continental Congress in 1765 because the House of Burgesses was not in session to select representatives.
The Townsend Acts triggered another boycott in the different colonies, but the strongest reaction to imperial administration was in Massachusetts. I 1765 a mob destroyed Governor Thomas Hutchinson's house in protest of the Stamp Act. Samuel Adams quickly organized the Sons of Liberty to agitate against the exercise of colonial power emphasizing "No Taxation Without Representation."
To reduce smuggling and increase the collection of revenue, British customs commissioners were sent in 1767 to Boston. A British warship arrived in 1778. After John Hancock's Liberty was seized for smuggling in June 1768, a mob rioted and forced the collector of the port to flee to England. In response, British troops were sent to occupy Boston.
Benjamin Franklin in London correctly predicted that troops on garrison duty, with little to do, would create trouble. He wrote:1
The riots were followed by the Boston Massacre in 1770, in which troops were provoked to open fire and five men were killed. The Tea Party in 1773 showed the intensity of local feeling.
the Tea Part in 1773, unlike other mob actions organized by the Sons of Liberty in Boston, was non-violent
Source: Library of Congress, Skirmish at Richmond Jan. 5th. 1781
Even though the British debts were in part to pay off the costs of winning the French and Indian War, the dispute over taxation without representation led to a transformation in the political connections between 13 colonial governments vs. King George III and Parliament.
Virginians played a leading role in both the political and military components of the American Revolution. At the local level, independent companies separate from the authorized colonial militia began to form in 1774. After the initial outbreak of fighting in Massachusetts, members of the Virginia General Assembly organized five unauthorized conventions that replaced royal government. The Fifth Virginia Convention declared independence in May, 1776. It adopted the first state constitution a month later.
British reinforcements for military operations were sent to Boston, not to Virginia. Realizing he could not obtain enough reinforcements from Great Britain, Governor Dunmore issued a proclamation in November 1775 inviting enslaved men to obtain their freedom by fighting for the British military. His willingness to overturn the social structure and provide arms to black men pushed many reluctant whites into supporting the rebellion.
The British efforts to end the insurrection in the 13 colonies was counter-effective. Rather than accommodate concerns and mobilize support within each colony from those willing to stay loyal, officials in London focused on forceful suppression without proposing substantive offers for policy and symbolic changes that would lead to reconciliation.
King George III and Parrliament assumed at the beginning that the conflict was existential. If 13 colonies escaped the empire, then colonists and enslaved people in the more-valuable sugar colonies in the Caribbean would follow. Ireland would fall like another domino and Great Britain would be limited to just England, Scotland, and Wales.
As part of the effort to expel the royal governor and the British fleet providing support, the city of Norfolk was totally destroyed in January-February, 1776. Though the British started the destruction, the Virginia and North Carolina troops did far more of the damage in order to block the Royal Navy from using the city as a Chesapeake Bay base. Hampton, Portsmouth, Suffolk, Petersburg, and Richmond were raided and damaged by British forces during the war, along with Tidewater plantations, but the burning of the largest city in Virginia was done by the command of Virginia's revolutionary leaders.
Many of the formerly enslaved who fled to Governor Dunmore's bases on the Elizabeth River and his fleet died of typhus and smallpox before they could fight. In the end, Dunmore was unable to recruit and retain enough men, white and black, to create a loyalist army and return to Williamsburg. He was forced to leave his last base on the Chesapeake Bay in August, 1776.
Virginia was largely free of British forces between August 1776-December 1779. During that period, it was a major source of supplies and troops. The lead mines on the New River were expanded, and with forced labor supplied bullets to the Continental Army and state forces. The most direct impact of the American Revolution on most Virginia families before British troops began marching through the countryside in 1780 was the number of men who were killed or wounded, or who died from disease while in a military unit.
At the first Continental Congress in 1774, the delegates from Massachusetts (the most aggressive colony challenging royal authority) intentionally pushed for Virginia delegates to have the most prominent role. Peyton Randolph, Speaker of the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, was elected to preside over the first meeting on the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.
Unhappy British Americans were pressing at the time for resolution, not revolution. There was still a chance for King George III and Parliament to settle differences with the 12 colonies who sent delegates to Philadelphia in 1774.
in 1774, representatives from 12 colonies meeting in a Continental Congress sought a peaceful resolution of grievances rather than a military revolution
Source: Wiipedia, Continental Congress (by Charles Édouard Armand-Dumaresq, 1873)
After the first major fighting at Lexington and Concord in April 1775 and then at Bunker Hill in June, the British government sought to regain control over the colonies simply by force. It did not use counterinsurgency tactics to win the "hearts and minds" of the dissatified British citizens.
The Second Continental Congress adopted a two-prong strategy. On June 14, 1775, it established a Continental Army. Reorganizing the militia companies keeping the British Regulars trapped in Boston into an army, independent of British control, was a clear step towards separation from royal rule. At the time, none of the colonies proposed to alter their official status as colonies.
A day later, the delegates in Philadelphia appointed George Washington to be the army commander. He was an ideal candidate. He had military experience and came from Virginia, demonstrating that the insurrection was broader than just Massachusetts. Washington was politically astute. He acknowledged that he served under the authority of the Continental Congress, and he had never been commissioned in the British army - unlike potential commanders Charles Lee and Horatio Gates.
On July 8, 1775, the Second Continental Congress tried its other prong and approved the Olive Branch Petition. That appeal was intended to re-establish the legitimacy of Parliamentary rule under new conditions. John Dickinson rewrote Thomas Jefferson's draft to ensure the tone emphasized reconciliation rather than independence. King George III refused to read it and declared the colonies to be in open rebellion on August 23, 1775.
In 1776, Richard Henry Lee introduced the resolution in the Continental Congress calling for the colonies to declare independence from Great Britain.
Though Virginians shaped policies in the Continental Congress, General George Washington ended up as the "indispensable man." He managed to organize a scattered group of militia into a Continental Army. He keep a military force in the field despite political rivalries among the colonies/states, poorly trained and poorly-equipped troops, inadequate funding by the Continental Congress to pay soldiers and acquire supplies, and numerous defeats by more-professional troops from Great Britain and what today is Germany.
He negotiated conflicting agendas of the members of the Continental Congress and officials in evolving state governments, managed the egos of officers and soldiers so most remained committed to the war effort, and personally faced down at least one attempted mutiny in 1782.
Military success was not guaranteed. Many times it looked like the American army would collapse a soldiers returned home as their enlistments expired or simply deserted. One key general chose to betray the new country and help the British capture the key fortress at West Point, while others demonstrated a lack of competence. While in camp at Valley Forge in December 1777, Washington wrote that because of the inadequate amount of food and clothing:2
Throughout the war, Washington established the pattern of civilian control over the military. He made decisions, and changed some, based on the authority of civilian leaders in the Continental Congress. After the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, he resigned his commission at a time when he could have established control over the new nation as a form of dictator or substitute monarch. George III supposedly said that his resignation would make Washington "the greatest man in the world."3
the British commissioners who negotiated the 1783 Treaty of Paris declined to show up for their portrait
Source: Maryland State House, American Commissioners of the Preliminary Peace Negotiations with Great Britain (by Benjamin West, unfinished in 1783)
Suppression of loyalists was effective in 1775-1776. The land and personal property of outspoken loyalists were seized, including all of Lord Dunmore's assets that he could not take with him when he fled Williamsburg in June 1775. Norfolk, the center of loyalist support, was totally destroyed in January 1776. The rebels/patriots forced Governor Dunmore and the British forces to sail out of the Chesapeake Bay in August 1776. Troops and supplies were then sent from Virginia to support the Continental Army; Virginia served primarily as a supply base through 1780.
The number and significance of battles fought in Virginia during the American Revolution were relatively few. The initial British strategy was to isolate Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire fom the other colonies. The divide-and-conquer approach would deter the mid-Atlantic and southern colonies from joining the insurrection while the British Army captured the leading rebels and suppressed the nascent rebellion in New England.
That strategy collapsed in late 1777 when an invading army from Canada, led by by General John Burgoyne, was defeated at Saratoga, New York. The French officially declared war in 1778. To ensure there were sufficient Regular Army and Royal Navy forces to counter the French (and later the Spanish and Dutch) in the Caribbean, Mediterranean Sea, and India, the British pivoted to a "southern strategy."
The occupation of New York City was maintained, but that force was not expanded to the size necessary to defeat George Washington's army there. Instead, British units were sent to Georgia and South Carolina. They were expected to march north and regain control at least up to Virginia. Military capture of the southern colonies was supposed to lead to restoration of royal rule, with loyalists regaining control and filling the colonial assemblies with men supportive of the re-established royal governor.
After a year of fighting partisans and Continental Army units in the southern colonies, British victory in the south would free up the army units and ships. They would return to New England, defeat the Continental Army surrounding New York City, reoccupy Boston, and finish suppressing the rebellion. Royal government would be effective again in all 13 colonies. The leading traitors, including many who had signed a declaration declaring independence, would be hung by the neck until dead.
The southern strategy failed because the loyalists in the south were unable to maintain control after Regular Army units left an area. The British captured Savannah and Charles Town. The Regulars, together with units of well-organized loyalists, defeated the Continental Army at Waxhaws and Camden. A royal governor did return to Georgia.
However, rebels regained control of the countryside as soon as the British army marched away. In the civil war, especially vicious in South Carolina, there were not enough loyalists. General Charles Cornwallis commanded a powerful force, but his loyalist unis were defeated at Kings Mountain and Cowpens. As Cornwallis marched into North Carolina, he did not create new pockets of loyalist control. Instead, his army was gradually reduced by battles and skirmishes.
The British sent a raiding party into Virginia in 1779 to disrupt the supply chain which sent troops, clothing, and weapons south. Commodore George Collier and General Edward Mathew spent only two weeks in the state. At the end of 1780, a force led by now-British General Benedict Arnold conducted more raids up to Richmond from a base established at Portsmouth. General William Phillips brought more troops in March.
After marching across North Carolina and getting resupplied at Wilmington, Cornwallis arrived with his army at Petersburg in May, 1781. He marched across the state at will. He was harassed by General Lafayette, but the main forces of the Continental Army were surrounding New York City or serving with General Nathanael Greene in South Carolina.
General Washington tried to bring his army south from New York in early 1781 to surround the British and capture Benedict Arnold at Portsmouth. He could not get the French Fleet to cooperate in time; that opportunity was missed.
Later in 1781, the French and Americans were able to coordinate effectively after General Cornwallis encamped at Yorktown and waited for resupply and reinforcement. Washington and the Compte de Rochambeau slipped away from New York City and Newport, Rhode Island and marched to Williamsburg. The French fleet at Newport led by Admiral de Barras, and the larger fleet in the Caribbean led by Admiral Comte de Grasse sailed to the Chesapeake Bay.
The French ships prevented British Admiral Thomas Graves from recuing Cornwallis. The surrender of the British army at Yorktown in October 1781 convinced Parliament and ultimately King George III to stop fighting in North America. The war with France, Spain, and the Netherlands continued into 1783. The end of the American Revolution did not occur until the Treaty of Paris was signed on September 3, 1783 and then ratified in 1784.
The war led to independence from Great Britain for the citizens of Virginia. Some of the non-citizens also found freedom - though they had to leave Virginia.
Wherever British troops marched, enslaved people took the opportunity to escape. Royal Navy raids on plantations in Tidewater also created opportunities to flee to freedom. In many cases, the raiders were guided to places with livestock to seize by those who had escaped. In the process, the guides helped their families and others to join them on British ships. Many of the enslaved escapees ended up succumbing to smallpox, typhus, and other diseases, but some ended up leaving Virginia with British forces between 1776-1783.
Thousands of troops marching across Virginia, accompanied by fleeing slaves and other camp followers, left a trail of destruction. At the very start of the conflict Norfolk, the largest town in the colony, was burned to the ground. The shipyard at Gosport on the Elizabeth River and a new Virginia Navy shipyard built on the Chickahominy River were also burned. Plantations from the Chesapeake Bay to the Blue Ridge were raided, with the destruction of livestock and crops, fences, farm equipment, and houses. Public buildings in the capital of Richmond were destroyed, as were military facilities such as the barracks at Chesterfield Court House and the Westham Armory upstream of Richmond.
In 1775, long before the end of the war, effective royal rule had been eliminated in Virginia. The colony became an independent state, in a loose confederation with 12 others, starting in May 1776.
Threat of British attack forced the shift of the state capital from Williamsburg to Richmond in 1780. The British army led by now-British General Benedict Arnold then torched the public buildings in Richmond. Norfolk and Yorktown were destroyed during the war. So were plantations in Tidewater within reach of Navy raiders, such as William Brent's house on Aquia Creek, but George Washington's Mount Vernon was spared. The Governor's Palace in Williamsburg burned, by arson or accident, at the end of 1781.
Virginia's biggest industry, agriculture, was impacted during the American Revolution. On a small scale, individual farms in the Piedmont on the route of Cornwallis' army in 1781 were looted. On a larger scale. most acres that had grown tobacco for export before the war were converted to growing crops for food and fiber. The Royal Navy's control of the seas made shipping tobacco too hazardous, while Scottish merchants were viewed as as dangerous loyalists and forced to leave in 1776.
The demographic shift of the population westward continued even during the war, and settlers willing to move deep into the backcountry remained vulnerable to Native American raids. The military successes of George Rogers Clark led to Great Britain ceding land stretching westward to the Mississippi River, but the original occupants had not been displaced. Following the Treaty of Paris, the new United States government tried the same techniques as the British. It sought to constrain settlement of western lands in order to minimize warfare with the tribes.
The institution of slavery remained intact in 1783. Philosophical arguments about fighting for American liberty did not extend to freeing the enslaved people owned by white Virginians. Even Lord Dunmore never planned to emancipate all of the enslaved. He desired to raise an army by promising freedom to those who had been enslaved by the rebelling Virginians, while protecting the "property" of loyalists.
White Virginians reacted strongly to Governor Dunmore's Emancipation Proclamation. It raised fears of a general uprising of the 40% of the population held in bondage, causing whites to become radicalized and support independence. Most of the enslaved people who fled to the British and were recaptured were returned to their masters, or forced to work in the lead mines of Fincastle County.
Almost all revolutions transform societies and re-allocate power and wealth from the initial elite to one or more groups at the end of fighting. However, the gentry in Virginia retained control throughout the war. The wealthy landowners (and slaveowners) kept populist leaders such as Patrick Henry under control; there was no uprising of the landless and small farmers as occurred during Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. In 1783 the political, economic, and social power remained with the same class as at the start of the revolution.
The 1776 constitution created representation to accompany taxation. The new form of government restructured the General Assembly and minimized the authority of the governor. The electorate remained restricted to while, male property owners. Those who could vote continued to select from the wealthy elite in each county to serve as delegates and state senators, while the state legislature itself chose the governor.
To gain support for the revolution, the elite did grant religious freedoms to Baptists, Presbyterians, Catholics, and other religious minorities. The General Assembly eliminated the mandatory tax used to fund salaries for Church of England ministers. Most of them moved to England early in the war, along with Scottish merchants. Without ministers or support from members of the vestry, most of whom were unwilling to consider the king as the head of their church, the power of the state-established church waned.
With the signing of the 1783 Treaty of Paris, land companies lost the opportunity to survey and sell the acreage they had been granted prior to the revolution. Virginia ceded its claim to the Northwest Territory to the new national government, abandoning claims to the Pittsburgh area. New settlers would acquire ownership from the Confederation Congress and then the Federal government established in 1789, except for military reserves established first in what became the states of Kentucky and Ohio. Those acres were dedicated to fulfilling land bounties promised to military veterans due to their service.
Virginia did re-open its land office in 1779. While it ceded the Northwest Territory to the national government and supported Kentucky becoming a separate state, Virginia officials retained control of land stretching west to the Ohio River until the creation of West Virginia in 1863.
Source: American Battlefield Trust, The Revolutionary War in the North: Animated Battle Map
French support was essential to the success of the American Revolution. George Washington and other American generals won few military battles. Washington's Continental Army was forced out of New York City in 1776 and Philadelphia in 1777. The largest surrender of the rebelling colonists occurred in 1780, when General Benjamin Lincoln was besieged in Charles Town. The Virginia Line of the Continental Army ended up as prisoners of the British.
General Nathaniel Greene, who was forced out of South Carolina and North Carolina until he could use the Dan River in Virginia as a defensive barrier, summarized the tactics of the Continental Army:4
Source: American Battlefield Trust, The Revolutionary War in the South: Animated Battle Map
French troops, guns, and ships provided the essential support needed to achieve military success. The entry of the French, and later the Spanish and Dutch, transformed the war in North America into a worldwide conflict. The British Navy was forced to disperse its ships to places as far away as the Indian Ocean. The longest battle was far away from North America, the 1779-1783 siege at Gibraltar. The attack by the French and Spanish there in September 1782 was also the largest battle of the war.5
General Henry Clinton in New York had to reduce his army and send reinforcements to the Caribbean, in order to protect the more-valuable sugar islands. Clinton abandoned Philadelphia in 1778 and Newport (Rhode Island) in 1779, concentrating his troops in New York to prevent George Washington from capturing that city. General Charles Cornwallis was forced to rely upon loyalists in his failed efforts to conquer and hold onto South Carolina and North Carolina; there were not enough Regulars to expand his army.
French money, distributed as partial compensation for back pay, was key to uplifting morale of George Washington's troops around New York before they started south to Yorktown. The siege there depended upon the compte de Rochambeau's artillery.
Without the French fleet led by Admiral François-Joseph-Paul, comte de Grasse, the British fleet from New York would have been able to evacuate or reinforce Cornwallis in September 1781. The Battle of Yorktown was won at sea at the Battle of the Capes by the French ships before the first cannon was fired at the land fortifications occupied by Cornwallis's troops.
The persistence of the soldiers in the Continental Army and Navy, plus various state forces, was the most important factor in convincing the British Parliament and King George III that the war was un-winnable. There were not enough loyalists in the 13 states, not even in Georgia and South Carolina, to restore royal control. The British could capture territory, but could retain control of only a few cities along the Atlantic Ocean coastline and a few forts deep in the backcountry.
Public support for independence, and the willingness of soldiers and sailors to continue the fight, determined the final military outcome of the American Revolution. Great Britain grew tired of the conflict and the expense, while the rebelling colonists showed a willingness to keep fighting despite military defeats. Releasing its claim to the 13 colonies allowed it to focus resources of fighting France, Spain, and the Netherlands.
The political result of the 1783 Treaty of Paris was a new United States of America in which the central government exerted little control. It was responsible for a war debt which could not be repaid, and there were deep-seated conflicts between the different states over control of western lands. European nations anticipated the colonies united in 1783 would fragment into separate nations; some might even become colonies again.
Virginians played a leading role in creating the new nation after the fighting ended. What Great Britain recognized as an independent nation in 1783 was a weak confederacy of 13 separate nation states. The Articles of Confederation finally were discarded and replaced with a new US Constitution in 1789. After eight years of leadership by an "indispensable man," George Washington, in 1796 there was finally a united nation which could be governed effectively by elected leaders.
General Cornwallis marched across Virginia between May-September 1781 before establishing a base at Yorktown
Source: US Army Center of Military History, The War in Virginia, 1781 (Map 2)
the burgesses initially used economic pressure to forces changes in British policy, and continued to socialize with Governor Dunmore even after he dissolved the House of Burgesses in May 1774
Source: Virginia Chronicle, Virginia Gazette (May 26, 1774, p.3)