I recently heard the Revolution was essentially 25 battles scattered through seven years (with various and assorted skirmishes thrown in here and there).
Does anyone know how many days of actual fighting took place during the Revolution?
Define your parameters:
“actual fighting”: do you mean including skirmishes in the Western theater, guerrilla attacks by settlers on Amerinds and vice versa, naval battles in the Caribbean, etc.?
“days”: how do you count the days? Does the “Battle of Trenton” count as one day, or two? Crossing the Delaware started before midnight, but the actual fight in Trenton (such as it was) did not occur until the next day. Etc.
Here’s a list of the major battles.
There are 25.
http://www.theamericanrevolution.org/battles.aspx
Much of the effort involved recruiting men and keeping the army intact. Washington wrote many letters to the Continental Congress requesting money and supplies for his troops. Valley Forge was a difficult period when much of the army could have left and gone home.
The British knew a major crushing defeat could eliminate the revolutionary army. They trapped Washington in NY on Long Island. His army made their famous nighttime escape.
To answer you best, we need to know why you are asking. What it is you are trying to decide about.
This is mainly because what constitutes “fighting” depends on that.
Example: a lot of battles are primarily made up of maneuvers, with shooting being the smaller portion. But maneuvering IS part of the “fighting,” just as resupply actions are. But if all you are interested is, is actual shooting time, then it’s going to be very difficult to answer.
There is a whole different meaning to “fighting” in warfare of that era, compared to today. I don’t have the figures at hand, but I recall that through the Clinton 8-year administration, there were US or allied bombings on more than half the calendar days, directed at Iraqi targets usually occupied by people (belligerents or civilians) in enforcement of the No-fly Zone. In other words, more than half the days there was physical destruction of enemy assets or casualties through the deployment of war ordinance. Obviously, every day, every minute, there was military activity if one includes maneuvers, resupply actions, etc.
Nevertheless, the American people considered the nation to not even be at war through this entire eight-year period, when aerial bombing raids took place on more days than not, and were in fact so common and routine, no mention of them was made by the media.
The OP is asking how many calendar days occurred during the Revolutionary War in which military hardware was deployed with lethal or destructive effect by one side or the other. During Clinton’s “peacetime”, the answer is some 1,500 out of 3,000. For the Revolutionary War, of similar duration, it might have been about one-tenth of that.
I don’t agree with this, although I fully understand your point - it’s a good thing to recognize. However, that leaves something major out of the Revolution.
There were a lot of minor bands of armed men, loosely allied to one cause or another, fighting on their own across the country, though more in the south. We simply can’t know if even a single day really passed without a shot being fired in anger in a skirmish somewhere - in fact, we simply have no record of what happened in most cases. It probably wasn’t that bloody in the end, but there would have been a lot of low-level violence, theft & so forth throughout the war period.
The battles accounted for a very small part of the sum total of clashes. And this wasn’t unimportant, since arguably the British lost the war because of it.
I just got done reading about the Wars of the Roses. It was just ~20 battles (many an hour long or less) scattered over a generation, plus the occasional violent mob of commoners that had to be put down. But the King of England changed 6 times over that period.
“War” is in most uses a political term, and it often doesn’t get applied to violent actions that don’t result in anything. So, a handful of scattered battles results in dynastic change or independence for a nation? That’s a war. Continuous violent destruction, applied over decades, but doesn’t do much besides making some foreigners thousands of miles away mad at us? Hey, I guess that’s peacetime.
Idle curiosity. I had always thought the fighting went on fairly steadily for seven years. Then I heard the Revolution could more accurately be described as a series of battles that were often weeks or even months apart.
That’s not uncommon for wars of that age and earlier. Battles (not seiges) lasting more than one day only started becoming the norm in the late 19th century, and constant fighting became a feature late in the American Civil War. Total War was the norm from thereout.
These threads might be of interest, too: