Except, of course, for the fact that that wasn’t Washington’s plan. Washington constantly wanted a big battle. It was his subordinates who constantly kept him from showing down with the British and kept him from what would have been a disastrous move, particularly early in the campaign.
And I’m a big admirer of Washington. He may not have had the proper strategy for the war, but at least he had the good sense to realize he wasn’t a great strategist and picked men who were good strategists and tacticians and actually listened to him. It’s the hallmark of a great leader, which Washington definitely was. I don’t think that we would have won if anyone else who was an option at the time had been in command, despite some of his missteps.
Well, I’ll disagree. No, it wasn’t close, in the sense that Britain was not close to winning. Britain was going to lose, and the only question was how many lives they’d throw away losing.
The issue at hand was not who was going to win what set-peice battle, but the fact that Britain had effectively lost its position as the legitimate governing entity in the Thirteen Colonies; the Colonies were not going to be subdued, and that was that. One more victory over the Continental troops would have had about as much effect as one more victory over the NVA or VC would have had in the Vietnam War.
It was touch and go. I see it more in political terms than in military ones. The British could have gone on fighting longer than the Americans, but did the British government have the will and support to do this? They might have occupied the US, but that would not have meant they could rule it, much less take it back to the conditions before 1775.
I happened once to read George Otto Trevelyan’s History of the American Revolution, which argues that British politics, primarily domestic, caused England to withdraw from the war. Trevelyan pointed out that the Tory government was vehemently opposed by the Whigs (Liberals) including the famous Charles James Fox. The Whigs thought the Americans had just grievances and opposed the war; they also thought that the Tories were corrupt. Most of all, the Whigs complained that King George III was actively making the Tories into a “King’s Party” against the spirit of the 1688 Revolution.
The Tories managed to hold off the Whigs until Cornwallis’ defeat and Yorktown. Coming soon after the French entry into the war, and based largely on the support of the French defeat, Yorktown toppled the North government. As I remember, the Whigs didn’t gain absolute power, but North was gone and the remainder of the government thought it wiser to fight the French alone than the Americans and French together.
One must remember that Trevelyan was a fierce Liberal and admirer of Charles James Fox, so his view of the American Revolution is somewhat prejudiced. One still has to accept that the Americans won in large part because the British prudently withdrew.
That said, the Americans did win several battles in a war that most British military men had started out thinking would be a mop-up of a band of rabble in upstate Massachusetts.
There’s a whole chapter on the subject in this book. Discusses ten things that could have gone wrong, of which avoiding getting trapped in Brooklyn was the most miraculous. OTOH, I’m in the camp that figures that, even had the British won this war, eventually the Colonies would have slipped away, at a guess, within a generation.
Even if the British had bent over backwards to hang on to the colonies and given them representation in the commons and the lords, and made the states a full part of the United Kingdom?
Totally unlikely, because it would have meant effectively capitulating to the colonists demands AFTER having had a hugely expensive war to defeat them, but it’s not inconcievable that the Americans could have been mollified enough to keep them on board, and thereby made history completely different. It would have meant so many changes to the status quo that it’s impossible to figure out where things would have gone from there - you could even suppose that this might end up with the United Republic of England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and North America at some point during the late 19th/early 20th century.
If you were into wild historical fantasies, that is.
The British government being what it was, I agree that it was almost certainly going to end up with the colonies cutting free one way or the other, in the same way that every other British colony eventually did.
Kenneth Roberts is an author who wrote several novels on set in that era after doing a decade of research. Great stuff.
I was surprised to find out how many colonists wanted to remain British subjects and how poorly they were treated by others. According to Roberts many had their property seized and had to flee for their lives.
I was also surprised to read that one of the British generals, with loyalties to a party not in power in Britain, hesitated to attack and end the war too soon because he didn’t want the opposing party to get credit for ending the war.
If the OP is could the U.S. have lost the war militarily and not won Independence on the battlefield the GQ answer is “*yes definitely *” and has been well answered.
If the OP (or question has morphed) into if the British had won the war militarily 1775-81, (i.e. if the Continental Army had been destroyed, its leaders captured, its remnants melted away) *could the British Army have put the genie back in the bottle and re-established the antebellum status quo * I think there is a GQ answer and that is: “no”.
Semi-GQ/Semi-GD/IMHO:
The “revolution” was a political event, an underground (at first) movement that resulted in Military Actions that were perhaps an inevitable outgrowth of it. The British didn’t have the financial resources, military resources or attention span (France and Spain) or the political will that ending the Revolutionary movement would have taken. They would have, almost certainly, had to make a political settlement sooner rather than later. So once the Revolution started, no amount of realistically available British resources were going to restore the Colonial political and social structure to reset the clock to 1769. In that sense, the revolution’s political aims (short of full Independence) were not going to be thwarted by British military victories in the late 70’s & early 80’s.
I hadn’t heard that before. It certainly seemed that the British generals periodically developed a case of what Lincoln would later (of his own generals) call “the slows,” and/or wouldn’t press their advantage. Are you thinking of Gage, Howe, Burgoyne, Cornwallis, or someone else?
