Britain entered the war as the world's greatest naval power, with a professional army and deep credit. The rebels had no navy worth the name, a Congress that could not tax, and an army that melted away when enlistments ran out. That the colonists won at all needs explaining, and much of the explanation lies outside the thirteen colonies.

A hard beginning

In June 1775 the Second Continental Congress named George Washington commander of a new Continental Army. That same month British troops took the hills above Charlestown at Bunker Hill, but lost about a thousand men killed and wounded doing it. Britain then raised a huge force for 1776, including the "Hessians," German soldiers hired by the British crown from Hesse-Kassel and other small states. About thirty thousand Germans served in all. General William Howe drove Washington out of New York that autumn, and the army seemed close to collapse.

Washington saved it with a gamble. On the night of 25 December 1776 he crossed the icy Delaware River, and the next morning at Trenton his troops captured about nine hundred Hessians. Neither battle was large, but together they kept the army and the cause alive.

Saratoga and the French alliance

In 1777 a British army under General John Burgoyne marched south from Canada to cut New England off from the other colonies. It bogged down in the forests of upstate New York, and on 17 October 1777 Burgoyne surrendered his whole army at Saratoga. Saratoga was the turning point because it helped persuade France to enter the war openly. France had been sending money and weapons in secret since 1776, hoping to avenge its defeat in 1763. Benjamin Franklin, a celebrity in Paris, negotiated the treaties of alliance signed in February 1778.

Meanwhile the Continental Army spent the winter of 1777 to 1778 at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where perhaps two thousand soldiers died of disease. A Prussian volunteer, Baron von Steuben, drilled the survivors into a far more disciplined force.

A world war

French entry changed the war's shape. Spain joined in 1779 as an ally of France, not of the United States, since it feared rebellion in its own American colonies but wanted to recover Gibraltar and Florida. The governor of Spanish Louisiana, Bernardo de Gálvez, led campaigns along the Gulf Coast, and in 1781 Gálvez captured Pensacola in West Florida after a two month siege. The Dutch Republic, a major trading partner of the rebels, was at war with Britain from 1780.

From London the war now looked very different. Britain had to defend Gibraltar, the sugar islands of the Caribbean, which were worth more to it than many mainland colonies, and its interests in India, all against two great navies at once. Reconquering America became one priority among several, and not always the first.

The southern campaign and Yorktown

Britain turned south, hoping Loyalists there would rise to help. It took Charleston in 1780 with about five thousand prisoners, but the southern backcountry dissolved into brutal fighting between neighbors, and American victories at Kings Mountain and Cowpens wore the British down. In 1781 General Charles Cornwallis moved into Virginia and dug in at Yorktown to wait for the navy.

The navy never came. A French fleet under the Comte de Grasse beat a British fleet off the Chesapeake Capes in September 1781, and at Yorktown a French fleet blocked any British help by sea. Washington and the French general Rochambeau marched their armies south and besieged the town. Cornwallis surrendered on 19 October 1781. In March 1782 Lord North's government fell, and peace talks began.

Native nations

For most Native nations the war was a choice between two dangers, and most sided with Britain, judging colonial hunger for land the greater threat. The Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy, had kept unity for centuries. The war split the Haudenosaunee, with most Oneidas and Tuscaroras backing the Patriots while many Mohawks, Senecas and others followed the British. The Mohawk leader Joseph Brant led raids on frontier settlements, and in 1779 an American army under John Sullivan burned some forty Haudenosaunee towns and their crops.

The Treaty of Paris, signed on 3 September 1783, recognized American independence and set the western border at the Mississippi. Britain handed over its Native allies' lands without consulting them. Native leaders were stunned to learn that a king they had fought for had given away territory he never owned.

Worked example: who won at Yorktown?

Count the forces at Yorktown. Washington commanded roughly eight thousand Continental soldiers and militia. Rochambeau brought nearly as many French regulars. De Grasse's fleet held the sea, and its ships carried more French troops from the Caribbean. Spanish officials in Havana helped raise money for the campaign. On the other side stood British soldiers, German auxiliaries and a number of enslaved people who had fled to British lines hoping for freedom. The surrender was, in other words, a multinational event. Notice how the story changes depending on where you stand. American memory treats Yorktown as a national triumph. French historians see revenge for 1763 and a step toward their own crisis of 1789. British observers saw a lost campaign in a war that went on in the Caribbean and India. All three are true at once.