American History question: Did we actually "Win" the American Revolutionary War, or...

...or did the British people just get tired of fighting the American home grown Insurgency in a far off land and all the reports of dead British solders and wasted money, lost in a long and drawn out War started by an arrogant King George?

Maybe it's just me, but even with all the times they taught us about the America Revolution, I remember the first few notable battles, and Washington at Vally Forge, but for the life of me, I can't remember how it ended.

Did the British basically just get tired of it all and withdrew there forces?:shrug:

On the battlefieds. The Russians were sending us war ships. The French were helping us.
I read recently that a mere 3% of Americans at that time were able to defeat the world British power. On the battlefields. Of course the banks are a different matter.

But if it wasn't for Columbus, we'd all be speaking Iroquois.
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I'd probably be back in Sicily, trying to make a living as a fisherman.

Really?

The British were the dominant power, and the French and the Russians maintained a tenuous alliance to act as a check on their power.

(on edit: link to source material added)

Most American warships were adapted merchant vessels of local manufacture.

In Chapter 18 of her Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, Mercy Otis Warren wrote about the desire among Europeans to keep the fighting in the Americas out of Europe (eg, France and England fought each other overseas, but not on the more natural homefront). When Britain got beligerent against the Dutch for supporting the rebellion, the rest of Europe objected:

A declaration of war against the Republic of Holland by the King of Great Britain was very unpleasing to most of the northern powers. The Baron Nolken, the Swedish ambassador resident at the Court of London, remonstrated against it in a state paper in which he observed "that the flame of war, kindled in another hemisphere, had communicated to Europe. But the King of Sweden still flattered himself that this conflagration would not extend beyond its first founds; and particularly that a nation entirely commercial, which had made neutrality the invariable foundation of its conduct, would not have been enveloped in it; and yet, nevertheless, this has happened, almost in the very moment when that power had entered in to the most inoffensive engagements with the King and his two northern allies.

"If the most exact impartiality that was ever observed could not exempt the King from immediately feeling the inconveniences of war by the considerable losses sustained by his commercial subjects, he had much greater reason to apprehend the consequences when those troubles were going to be extended; when an open war between Great Britain and the Republic of Holland multiplied them; and to conclude, when neutral commerce was about to endure new shackles, by the hostilities committed between those two powers." He added "The king could not but wish sincerely that the measures taken by the Empress of Russia for extinguishing this new war in its beginning might be crowned with the most perfect success."

That is, the Swedish Ambassador was commending ol' Kate in Leningrad Petersburg for not getting involved. Now Catherine the Great was a big fan of the American navy: she later hired John Paul Jones to fight against the Turks in the Black Sea--so there is a connection there. But if any Russian ships ended up in Yankee hands, it wasn't many and it wasn't official policy.
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Though they continued fighting for two more years in certain pockets in America, it was never again an all out effort on their part and they eventually quit.

So it was sort of both a military victory on our side and a gradual withdrawl on their part.

Another weak parallel would be to stack up British occupation of New York City against US control of Fallujah. Lots of atrocities (Redcoats had a nasty habit of raping the local girls and British court martials had a nasty habit of snickering at such crimes), lots of underground operations (Nathan Hale), destruction of hte city's buildings and infrastruction, and even a mass public exodus following the war (tens of thousands of American Tories resettled into Canada following the 1783 Treaty of Paris).
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The weapons may change, but the tactics and the effects never seem to change much. Hit the occupying army, run away, hit them again, run away, bleed them to death, the civilian population suffers the most from hunger, starvation, and reprisals, and the ending is always the same.

The superpower leaves in defeat and humiliation. And Bush seems proud of the fact that he's not curious about the world and never picks up a book. If he did, he might understand why so many of us with no military training at all knew that Iraq was going to end up the way it did.

A lot of people got hurt and killed, probably without much of an understanding of what they were dying for.

and they failed to secure arms depots.
The pro-British Americans were smaller in number, were largely confined in urban areas like New York and many fled the country.
Americans were good at improvised tactics and surprise attacks.
British mercenary forces were particularly hated and despised.
It was impossible for the British to defeat an enemy that kept disappearing and then reforming and coming back at them.
Some of this might sound familiar.

Did that King George whine about the insurgency? Or did he have delusions of being able to force a win through faith & willpower - but not troops, money & equipment?

You need to support the King, who is NOT mad by the way. God put him in that position.

The American forces mostly outfought us and though good generalship and a touch of luck, outmanuevered us. After Yorktown, it became increasingly obvious to Whitehall that the war was essentially unwinnable so political support gradually faded away.

So yeah, in a sense, we withdrew our forces but we did so because it was obvious that was our only reasonable option.

We don't usually get that here in our schools, as you probably already guessed.

My question came from something Eddie Izzard said on The Daily Show tonight. He blamed it mostly on the King sending second-rate Generals and then the night before that, (Wednesday) Michael Barone gave a lot of credit to lessons learned in the ouster of King James the 2nd in 1688, in his new book

"Our First Revolution..."

<http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/index.jhtml?ml_video=88122>

<http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/the_daily_show/videos/most_recent/index.jhtml>

Btw, I'm assuming, from your comments, that you are (or were) British, so may I ask, what do most British schools call our "American Revolution?"

EDIT: or sometimes the "war of independance".

There was significant argument against the war almost from the beginning. It looked nothing like today's anti-imperial opposition, but was more than just the occasional "Gee, Lord North, d'ya really think this is the best way to handle these tea parties?"

Essentially, it was well known that the men who became teh Founders didn't originally intend revolution but protest and it was Whitehall's ridiculous over-reaction that forced them to revolution. Since that was well known, Parliament (and, according to contempory rumour, the Royal household) was split but when it became clear that the war was unwinnable, the pro-war faction more or less withered away.

That it really boiled down to a matter of resources, and when they were again available (1812) you came back.

-Hoot

In many ways, the American Revolution was, to us, an extension of the long-running feud with France. I don't know if you're aware but by the end of the war, the French were supplying three-quarters of the gunpowder, most of the money and a fair amount of troops.

The problem here is that, like most history, there isn't a single cause for the British retreat. We were rapidly running out of resources and it was obvious to everyone that we couldn't win in the current enviroment and part of Parliament thought that the war was our own fault (for so massively overreacting to the tea party) in the first place so political support drained away. Resources were becoming a problem. We weren't quite at the level of throwing rocks at the enemy but the unspoken question occured that it would be senseless to waste what resources we had on a war that, in the circumstances of the time, we simply couldn't win.

1812 was slightly different. Parliament figured that the situation had changed enough and we now had enough resources to win or, at least, make enough of a fight of it to save some face. Also, as a people, the British (and I'm one of 'em so I'm allowed to say this) are exceptionally stubborn. You've heard of "British tenacity", right? Well, the defeat in the Revolution rankled and kind of stuck in our craw so when the opportunity to save a little face occured, we took it. Also, we didn't actually start the war of 1812. The US declared war on us in retaliation for our imposing illegal trade restrictions on American trade with the French (who we were also at war with at the time).

It turns out that King George was actively financing BOTH SIDES
of that particular "rebellion".

So, was it a REAL rebellion, a pre-planned bit of "political theatre", or just
a Machivellian Monarch hedging his bets in uncertain times?

Or perhaps a bit of all 3? Benedict Arnold might have some info
that would shed light on the "subjects".....

Cowpens, King's Mountain, Guilford Courthouse, etc. These all led to Yorktown.

...in Indiana, and I don't ever remember being taught most of that.

I wonder if it's part of that North/South rivalry that people always talk about that's behind that?

There was fairly strong opposition to the war in the colonies in Parliament as it was a serious drain on the Treasury that seemed to be leading to no resolution.

However, by the last year of the Revolution, the Americans were scoring serious victories on the battlefield. Nathaneal Greene was arguably the greatest military genius of the war and he drove the British out of the South, forcing the events at Yorktown. And Yorktown was a decisive victory in any era.

the British had bigger problems than the colonists at the time. Not everything is about America's supremacy.

Many of them stayed in America.

who supported the revolution. George III wasn't a bad king, he was actually quite progressive in many areas, nor was he especially arrogant. However, even at this point in time, England had a representational monarchy with the king having few actual powers (albeit more than the current monarch has)to affect the way his government carried out its policies. All that being equal, England was getting tired of American War and when the French and Spanish allied themselves with us against her, the specter of another 7 Years' War (aka French and Indian War here in the US) reared its ugly head. The 7 Years' War has arguable been called the First First World War. It was fought on multiple continents (Europe, North America and Asia) by multiple world powers. England was simply not prepared to engage in a multi-continent war against the French and the Spanish. With the French fleet making sure that the English fleet didn't relieve Yorktown, French soldiers fighting at Yorktown alongside American troops and French and Spanish money and arms doing the fighting, the defeat of Cornwallis was the last straw. Actually, if I remember correctly, there had already been tentative peace negotiation feelers put out by the English prior to Yorktown. After it, they had no effective fighting force left in the nascent US, the troops in New York being blockaded by a combination French-US fleet. They had no other option but to retreat to the peace conference.