AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE, WAR OF (1775–1783). The War of American Independence began on 19 April 1775 with firefights at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. It ended on 28 June 1783, when a British force ceased operations against the French, who were aiding rebels in southern India. Barring Vietnam, it was the longest war in the history of the United States to the twenty-first century. It involved most European powers as either belligerents or watchful observers. In one way or another it touched every part of what had been British America, including not only the thirteen east coast colonies but also Canada and Native American country as well as the West Indies and the open Atlantic. The war destroyed one empire and created another.
The war was not synonymous with the American Revolution. That larger civil, cultural, social, and economic transformation sprawled over a quarter century between the first colonial challenges to British authority in 1764 and the implementation of the U.S. Constitution in 1789. Unlike the later Southern war to preserve slavery and destroy the United States, it does not have a military narrative strong enough to carry the whole story of the American Republic's creation. But the war was central to the Revolution's process and its outcome.
Two myths about the war need dismissal. One, long favored in patriotic annals, is that virtuous citizen-soldiers put down their plows, threw off tyranny, and returned to daily life. The other is that British power was so overwhelming as to render American victory almost inexplicable. Americans did believe they fought in a good cause, but there were many dissenters. The fiercest fighting pitted white colonials, black people, and Natives in a melee that engulfed them all. For patriot whites the war did end in triumph. Loyalist whites emigrated at the war's end in larger percentages than those in which people left revolutionary France. The war shook slavery severely, and thousands of former slaves also departed with the British. Though most Indians had no reason to count themselves among the war's losers, it ended in disaster for virtually all of them.
THREE PHASES
With hindsight the North American story has three phases. In the first, for roughly a year following Lexington, Britain attempted a police action to contain and put down a local rebellion. The goal was to combine a show of force with relative lenience. This phase is associated primarily with General Thomas Gage (1721–1787), who in 1775 was both civil governor of Massachusetts and commander in chief in North America. But the hope of reconciliation carried over to his successors, the brothers Admiral Lord Richard Howe (1726–1799) and General Sir William Howe (1729–1814), whose appointments made them peace commissioners as well as joint commanders.
From the spring of 1776 until the autumn of 1778 both Britons and Americans understood the confrontation in terms of conventional European warfare. Nonetheless there was a difference. The Howes sought control of American cities. They abandoned Boston (17 March 1776) when Americans placed artillery on Dorchester Heights and made the town indefensible. The British regrouped at Halifax, Nova Scotia, marshaled their largest seaborne force prior to the twentieth century, and seized New York City (15 September 1776). It remained in British hands until 1783. Their forces included regiments of hired German "Hessians," named for the principality of Hesse that supplied them.