Factors Contributing to the Outcome of the Revolutionary War

There are many reasons why the British lost and the Patriots won the Revolutionary War: near the top of the list is money, specifically the lack thereof.  Wars are expensive and as the 1700s drew to a close, Britain was up to her neck in them.  The Revolutionary War was but the American theater of a much wider war in which Britain was involved and the Brits were simply overextended.  In 1778, France formed a formal alliance with the American colonies.[1]  French naval pressure upon British shipping prohibitively increased the cost to Britain of maintaining its already expensive trans-Atlantic lines of communication to the American continent.  Moreover, in 1779 Spain entered the war against Britain and, the following year, so did the Dutch.[2]  By this time, Britain simply had too many irons in the fire and began to adjust its national strategy to focus upon the more immediate threats to its national security—the Spanish, the French, and the Dutch—which meant that it had no choice but to curtail its efforts to put down the rebellious American colonies.  Besides, by the early 1780s, Britain had little to show for its campaign against the colonies despite substantial investment in terms of men and resources.  Economic pressure fell much more severely upon the patriots, however.  Their only way through was to print money and rely upon foreign loans—primarily from France.[3]  Moreover, they held the home field advantage.

In Defense of Washington's Five Rules

Some have suggested that Washington’s Five Rules may have been his attempt to apply vague western ideals of just warfare to this existential threat to the fledgling American nation about to declare its independence. I believe the guiding ideals in Washington’s mind were military ones. His paramount concern was victory. “We have taken up Arms in Defence of our Liberty, our Property; our Wives and our Children,” he had written in his open letter to the people of Canada. “We are determined to preserve them or die." [1] The motivations behind his instructions to Col. Arnold, therefore, sprang not from an impulse of chivalrousness but from military necessity.

The first four rules were each in some measure calibrated to put Arnold’s and General Montgomery’s troops—and, by extension, the American colonial position, in the best possible light. They were clearly aimed at winning support. Canadian support was essential if the Americans were to realize their objective of driving off the British from their northern border, for at Quebec their forces were outnumbered 2-to-1. [2]

It is doubtful whether Washington’s commanders hewed very closely to any of the rules. Number five directed them to withdraw if their objectives could not be met. Instead, they laid siege to the city for more than four months and only retreated in the face of British reinforcements arriving once the spring thaws cleared the St. Lawrence Seaway for shipping. [3] The fact that Montgomery’s and Arnold’s combined forces suffered such a “shattering defeat,” suggests that rules one through four were pretty much ignored also. [4]

Washington seeking
the One whose battle is really was

Author David McCoullough suggests that the defeat at Quebec sapped Washington’s general staff of the nerve required to mount an assault on the heavily fortified British garrison at Boston in early 1776. It was while they were considering such a plan that a rider brought the dispatch to Washington with the news that the mission to Quebec had failed, that Montgomery was dead, that Arnold was severely wounded, and that Quebec instead of falling had been reinforced. Even before this discouraging information reached him, Washington, near despairing, had a just a few days before written to Joseph Reed. Recounting the innumerable disadvantages he labored under and the deplorable state of his army, and marveling that the British seemed totally blind to these facts, else they would have not spared a minute more in launching an overwhelming attack, Washington wrote—

“If I shall be able to rise superior to these, and many other difficulties which might be enumerated, I shall most religiously believe that the finger of Providence is in it. To blind the eyes of our enemies; for sure if we get well through this month, it must be for want of their knowing the disadvantages we labor under.” [5]

Such language, especially prefaced as it was by that gigantic word ‘if,’ tells me that if George Washington ever imagined that his army’s cause was just, in the traditional western idealistic sense, such thoughts were as far from his mind now as they could possibly be.  I don't think anyone who knows anything at all about George Washington would deny that he was a man of honor. And while it's not accurate to say that he cared about winning at the expense of everything else, I don't think he accepted his commission with the intention of losing, however so honorably he might have done so.

George Washington’s Five Rules for Honorable War, by Ray Raphael

George Washington

Were it not for the fact that George Washington died more than two centuries ago, I might have suspected that he lifted his Five Rules from Army Field Manuel 3-24, Counterinsurgency, last revised in 2006.  In fact, a central purpose behind Raphael’s article is to offer the example of Washington to contemporary U.S. commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan. [1]  Washington’s rules were actually a set of instructions he gave to one of his expeditionary commanders, Colonel Benedict Arnold.  What they generally have in common with Army counterinsurgency doctrine is that success is not measured by the amount of territory conquered but by capturing the hearts and minds of the people.  Here, as captured by Raphael, are Washington’s five rules—

1.   Don't Assume You Are Welcome
2. Cultivate Local Support
3. Respect Local Religious Practices
4. Don't Abuse Prisoners
5. Withdraw if Your Objectives Are Unobtainable

Though territorial gain was not Washington’s primary consideration, it nevertheless was a consideration.  He hoped that by winning the confidence of the citizens of Quebec (predominately French), he might persuade them to come over to support the American cause and help him thwart British designs on colonies by capturing “the gateway to the St. Lawrence River and thereby to all of Canada.” [2]  But to do so, Washington felt it necessary to forge an alliance—or at least an understanding—with the citizens of Quebec.  Moreover, Washington felt that to ignore the Canadian situation would leave the colonies exposed to a “potential [British] threat along the northern border.” [3]

To that end, he launched an invasion of the city of Quebec, to be led by General Richard Montgomery and Col. Arnold.  The two officer’s forces were to rendezvous at the fortified city which, for Arnold and his men, was a long and arduous journey.

In warning Col. Arnold not to assume his welcome, Washington exhibited a keen awareness of certain political realities.  The Brits had horned in on the French in Quebec a dozen years previously and were exerting increasing control over what the French felt was a sovereign French territorial possession.  Washington hoped that French bitterness against the English would push them over to the American’s side.  Nevertheless, there remained strong opposition between the French and Americans, mainly on religious grounds, which was strong enough, Washington felt, to preclude any alliance the Americans might hope to build.

His warnings concerning the necessity of gaining the support of the locals, respecting their religious practices, and the treatment of prisoners, stemmed from his understanding of the youth and inexperience of his fledgling Army.  A misstep in any one of these areas, however slight—and particularly if an egregious one—could very conceivably ruin the entire expedition and add disadvantage on top of disadvantage.

His final instruction to Col. Arnold was that the American forces were to withdraw if their objectives proved unattainable. [4]  There was a battle at Quebec, though for some reason Raphael does not mention it.  General Montgomery was slain and Col. Arnold was wounded.  Raphael writes that Arnold “saw his mission through.”  [5]  However, Washington biographer, Ron Chernow described it as a “shattering defeat,” a “catastrophe,” and “a severe setback for Washington, whose first strategic plan had misfired.”  [6]

Given Washington’s Five Rules at the outset of the mission, and the bitterly disappointing defeat at the end, I suppose that one could draw the moral lesson from this story that, at least for our forefathers, the road to Quebec was paved with good intentions.

What I learned from this article

If I were asked, before reading this article, who was the first U.S. commander to lead an invasion of a foreign country, George Washington would not have been one my first ten choices.  This surprise stems from, I must confess, my relative ignorance both of Washington and his times.  Of the former, I learned something of his sentiments as he expressed them in an open letter to the people of Canada—

“We have taken up Arms in Defence of our Liberty, our Property; our Wives and our Children: We are determined to preserve them or die." [7]

Of the latter, I was surprised to learn of the degree of anti-Catholicism that existed and some of the ways in which this sentiment was expressed.  I was appalled to learn of the desecration of George Whitefield’s grave by American soldiers which gave the Quebec expedition something of the flavor of a religious crusade.

Not directly from the article, but from the supplementary research to write this analysis, I learned something about the troops who fought under Col. Benedict Arnold during this time.  I mention it because it is of a piece with something I learned earlier in the course while writing an analysis on Creasy’s account of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.  Creasy, in the course of his account, described Wellington’s soldiers’ daily fare, and wrote of “ammunition bread” as one of their staples.  Ron Chernow, in his biography of Washington wrote of Col Arnold’s men subsisting in 1775 on things like “soap and candles and … boiled moccasins.” [8]  Thirty years separated these two campaigns, Arnold’s and Wellington’s, so one could infer that civilization had made considerable progress by Wellington’s day, simply by comparing the two armies’ chow.  Alternatively, since in that era these two events, Waterloo and the Revolutionary War, may be considered contemporary to each another, one may detect a subtle sense of superiority within the British profession of arms, as opposed to their poorer American cousins, for at least the British had bread.  One could argue that herein lay the real reason that the Revolutionary War was won by those soap devouring, moccasin chewing Americans.

Notes.

1.  Ray Raphael, “Washington’s 5 Rules for Honorable War,” Historynet (December 11, 2009), http://www.historynet.com/washingtons-5-rules-for-honorable-war.htm (accessed November 30, 2011).  “Indeed,” writes Raphael, “[Washington’s] instructions could offer useful insights to contemporary American leaders and soldiers as they carry out military campaigns in distant lands.”

2.  Ibid.

3.  Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: PenguinPress, 2010), 210.

4.  Raphael.

5.  Ibid.

6.  Chernow.

7.  Ibid.

8.  Ibid.