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The new year, 1778, was a time of transition in the Revolutionary War because of Britain\'s inability to win in the northern colonies and because of the increasing part played by France. The French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, eager to settle an old score with Britain, convinced his royal master Louis XVI to permit France to funnel secret aid to the patriots in 1776 and 1777. That aid took the form of the government\'s handing over munitions, arms, and clothing to the playwright Caron de BEAUMARCHAIS and his fake \"Hortalez and Company,\" which in turn arranged with Benjamin Franklin and other patriot commissioners in Paris to have them shipped across the Atlantic.
Vergennes, however, was not willing to risk war with Britain until he was sure that the Americans had the ability to continue the fight and the commitment to eschew reconciliation with George III. Gates\'s victory at Saratoga, combined with rumors that Britain would offer America major concessions in return for peace, finally pushed France over the brink. Formal treaties of commerce and alliance were signed by American and French diplomats on Feb. 6, 1778. France became the first nation to recognize the infant country; it renounced all claims to North America east of the Mississippi River and agreed with the United States that neither would lay down its arms until American independence was guaranteed. Already Spain, a French ally, was giving America modest aid. It declared war on Britain in 1779, but without joining the United States in a formal alliance.
Valley Forge and the Battle of Monmouth
The winter of the signing of the French alliance was also the Continental Army\'s time of cruel suffering at VALLEY FORGE, although it was actually not the worst winter of the war. Spring brought Washington not only new recruits, but also an army better trained than ever before, due in considerable part to the labors of the Prussian general Baron von Steuben in drilling the troops at Valley Forge.
Spring meant, furthermore, additional pressure on British forces in the New World now that France was entering the struggle. Accordingly, Sir Henry Clinton, who became the new commander in chief when the Howes resigned (May 1778) and returned to England, now received important orders: evacuate his army from Philadelphia, concentrate his forces at New York City, and send men to guard against French threats against British islands in the Caribbean.
Washington, his confidence up, pursued Clinton on his cross-country march through New Jersey, and at Monmouth Courthouse the two armies clashed (June 28, 1778). For the Continentals, who traded volley for volley with the finest soldiers in Europe, it was a moral victory, although the outcome itself was indecisive. In three years of fighting, Britain had little to show for its exertions to regain America, and so it would remain in the northern states, where the heavy campaigning was at an end. Washington, who followed Clinton northward after Monmouth, spent the next three years observing the British from lines outside New York City.
War in the West
In one sense, the struggle on the western frontier paralleled the fighting to the east, in that neither side managed to get the upper hand. To be sure, most Indian tribes that involved themselves in the fray did so in the cause of the \"great white father,\" George III. They had long nourished grievances against the colonists, who had cheated them in land transactions and trade. But it is not clear that the aid of the tribesmen was a positive influence for Britain; their ferocious tactics may well have alienated many colonists who had been neutral or apathetic. Furthermore, because they demanded food in winter and a great variety of other goods and supplies, the Indians were a great financial and administrative burden for British frontier leaders.
Although Kentucky settlers were threatened periodically, in 1778 the young George Rogers CLARK weakened Britain\'s hold on the interior by overrunning enemy-controlled villages in present-day Illinois and Indiana. He also captured the controversial lieutenant governor of Detroit, Henry Hamilton, the alleged \"hair-buyer.\" Less significant was the role of the Kentuckian Daniel BOONE, a steady if unspectacular leader. Elsewhere in the West the contest seesawed back and forth. In the lower South the Cherokee proved to be the most formidable of Britain\'s warrior allies; although the patriot militia handed them a series of stinging defeats in 1776, the Cherokee continued to be troublesome, if not a serious threat. To check the devastating raids of the Iroquois on the New York-Pennsylvania frontier, Washington sent a striking force headed by Maj. Gen. John SULLIVAN into western New York, where the Americans laid waste to many tribal towns.
Even so, Sullivan, Clark, and the American commanders of the Western Department at Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh) could not eliminate all the anchor points of British power in the interior. Loyalist and Indian parties based in Detroit and Niagara continued to harass the frontier communities along the Ohio and in the valleys of western New York even after the conclusion of the war, thus contributing to the renewal of war between Britain and the United States in 1812.
War in the South
In the South, a region long neglected by Britain, the war reached its conclusion. Because of the British inability to prevail in the North, London\'s strategists gradually shifted their attention to the South, beginning in late 1778. They felt that section contained a higher percentage of Loyalists than any other part of America. Then, too, if choices had to be made after France\'s entry into the war had stretched British resources tissue thin, England preferred to save the South above all other areas. Its raw materials were the most valuable of all American commodities in the mother country\'s mercantile scheme.
Britain, as usual, opened a new theater of campaigning with a string of triumphs. In December 1778 small British expeditions from New York and Florida subdued Georgia. Fighting in 1779 was inconclusive along the Georgia-South Carolina border, and a combined Franco-American assault on British-held Savannah was beaten off. In February 1780 Britain greatly expanded its southern beachhead when Sir Henry Clinton arrived in South Carolina from New York with 8,700 additional troops. He soon laid siege to Charleston, where on May 12 American Maj. Gen. Benjamin Lincoln surrendered the city and its more than 5,000 defenders. A second, hastily assembled American Southern army under Horatio Gates was crushed at Camden in upper South Carolina (Aug. 16, 1780) by Lord Cornwallis, whom Clinton had left in command when he returned to New York.
These English victories did not extinguish the flames of rebellion. Britain found pacification of the back country difficult. Rebel small-unit operations continued under such local, legendary guerrilla leaders as Francis MARION and Thomas SUMTER. And a body of patriot frontiersmen, mainly from the Watauga settlements in present-day eastern Tennessee, wiped out a 1,000-man contingent of Loyalist troops at King\'s Mountain on the border of the Carolinas (Oct. 7, 1780).
As the guerrillas tied down Cornwallis, still a third American army formed in the South under Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene, who then launched the most effective military campaign of the war. Greene\'s basic plan was to keep his numerically superior antagonist, Cornwallis, off balance by a series of rapid movements and by cooperating with the South Carolina guerrilla leaders. Greene audaciously divided his small army, sending Brig. Gen. Daniel Morgan into western South Carolina, where he destroyed Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton\'s Tory Legion at Cowpens (Jan. 17, 1781). When Cornwallis pursued Morgan, Greene united his army, led Cornwallis on an exhausting chase into North Carolina, and finally fought him to a draw at Guilford Courthouse (Mar. 15, 1781). While the British general limped eastward and then northward to the Virginia coast, the resourceful Greene returned to South Carolina, and between April and July picked off, one by one, every British post save Charleston and Savannah, where the enemy remained isolated and impotent until peace came.
Cornwallis, meanwhile, was sealing his own fate in Virginia, where he united with a raiding expedition under Benedict Arnold (now in British service), already in that state, and erected a base at the port of Yorktown. Both his superior, Clinton, in New York and General Washington recognized that Cornwallis was vulnerable to a land-and-sea blockade on a Virginia peninsula. But Cornwallis refused to leave, arguing the doubtful proposition that Britain would have to capture Virginia in order to have lasting success in the lower South.
At this point, Franco-American army and naval operations, hitherto disappointing in their results, now determined the fate of Cornwallis. Adding to his forces the French troops of the Comte de ROCHAMBEAU in Rhode Island, Washington raced southward and opened siege operations before Yorktown on October 6, while a French fleet under the Comte de GRASSE sealed off a sea escape. Clinton hastened a naval squadron from New York to the Chesapeake, but it was repulsed by de Grasse. After suffering through an intensive artillery bombardment, Cornwallis, on Oct. 19, 1781, surrendered his nearly 8,000 troops to the 17,000-man allied force. The British failed in the South for several reasons, including an exaggerated estimate of Loyalist support, an inadequate program of pacification, and a failure to recognize the significance of sea power.
Conclusion
The war in America rapidly ground to a halt after Yorktown, a war in which neither side had seemingly the energy or the resources to obtain a total victory. Certainly British leaders had lost all enthusiasm for subduing America, although Britain and its European enemies, France and Spain, continued to duel on far-flung battlefronts until the conclusion of peace in 1783.
The struggle had been so unusual that contemporary military thinkers believed that no European nation would ever have to engage in the kind of conflict that Britain had confronted in America between 1775 and 1783. England had dispatched 60,000 soldiers across an ocean to fight a prolonged war in an alien environment against a people who were numerous and armed. It was a task never paralleled in the past.
As for the Americans, if they won no clear-cut military victory, if they could not drive out the British completely, if Clinton\'s forces continued after Yorktown to occupy important cities and interior posts, they nonetheless scored a decisive triumph at the peace conference in Paris. Taking advantage of suspicions between the European rivals and sensing England\'s desire to be generous in order to pry America out of the French orbit, John JAY and Benjamin Franklin secured not only British recognition of American independence but also the entire region from the Appalachians to the Mississippi River as part of the United States. The final Treaty of Paris was signed on Sept. 3, 1783, and ratified by the Continental Congress on Jan. 14, 1784.
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