So one of the arguments for the second amendment is that it provides a bulwark against tyranny. Gun nuts frequently point to the revolutionary war (along with stuff going on in the arab spring) to demonstrate the utility of firearms in overthrowing tyranny.
MtM has been questioning whether irregulars (or minutemen/militiamen) were anywhere near as useful as popular mythology would have us believe.
Maybe this should be in general questions but were armed civilians important to the revolutionary war?
Irregular units may have helped some; they knew the land more than the British regulars, and they had some decent officers to work with.
Honestly though, without France and Spain, the Revolution probably would have been lost. What they don’t tell us in American history books is that many people here in what would become the United States still identified as British and many went home after the War. Paul Revere never shouted “The British are coming! The British are coming!” He may have said “The Regulars are coming!”, but to say the former would hardly have made sense and might even would have alerted Loyalist spies.
The irregulars were very important especially in the beginning, and they were important throughout in that they kept the colonies in a State of “perpetual rebellion” regardless of what the Continental Army was up to in a particular theater.
The actual battles of strategic consequence were primarily fought by Continentals, and where militia were part of it they were of the type that had formed into more permanent companies. Minutemen were typically just for immediate defensive purposes and weren’t necessarily bound to participate in longer campaigns, thus limiting their utility in such efforts.
It’s actually highly unlikely that without France and Spain the Revolution would have been lost (note the Dutch gave significant financial aid as well.) Primarily because the colonies had around 2.5m residents, it was a 3,000 mile 2-month travel by ship from the UK to the colonies, and the war effort was financially very expensive and massively unpopular among many leading British politicians and its people. With power projection capabilities of the era, the British had a very difficult job. The colonies were big and had relatively high populations relative to other colonial possessions, and were spread over a huge geographic area.
The British won a lot of battles and continuously occupied key strategic points but it did not seem to seriously impact the war effort. Most likely the only way the British would have won is if the main Continental Army force under Washington was captured or destroyed, as that may have so demoralized the patriots that support for the cause completely collapsed.
The loyalist population is not accurately known, and will vary from 10%-30% with a mean of around 15% of the population. Only about 3% of the colonial population left the colonies to remain under British rule after the war, most of those going to Canada and becoming “United Empire Loyalists.” The old saying that “one-third supported independence, one-third was neutral, and one-third were loyalists” isn’t considered to be that accurate these days. But I actually learned that saying in High School when scholarship was a little less advanced on the issue, I’ve never heard of a American history curriculum covering the American Revolution that doesn’t make mention of the loyalists, so I’m not sure what history books Norvaal has been reading but I suggest he stop reading them.
I never said that our history books left out loyalists entirely. I simply meant that most Americans do not realize just how “British” many people here considered themselves at that time.
This is from the Wikipedia article on Paul Revere (btw, just so you know, I learned the truth about Paul Revere in college, not just Wikipedia…)
“Riding through present-day Somerville, Medford, and Arlington, Revere warned patriots along his route, many of whom set out on horseback to deliver warnings of their own. By the end of the night there were probably as many as 40 riders throughout Middlesex County carrying the news of the army’s advance. Revere did not shout the phrase later attributed to him (“The British are coming!”): His mission depended on secrecy, the countryside was filled with British army patrols, and most of the Massachusetts colonists (who were predominantly English in ethnic origin[44]) still considered themselves British.[45][46] Revere’s warning, according to eyewitness accounts of the ride and Revere’s own descriptions, was “The Regulars are coming out.”[47]”
I will concede to you that I did not consider the Netherlands, but perhaps you could be so kind as to explain how the Patriots would have won decisive battles like Yorktown without the French. The French also kept the British occupied in theaters away from the colonies, so how can you be so sure that the Patriots would not have been swamped without that assistance?
In the early days of the Revolution there weren’t any regulars because, doh, there was no US. IIRC, the Continental Army was formed in 1776 (in either June or July), which was after the revolution had already started. It didn’t instantly form up as a trained and able fighting force either. Until it did, it was basically armed militia or simply citizen soldiers using their own firearms who did all the fighting. Without that early support we’d have never gotten to the point where we were viable enough for France to throw down on our side.
No idea what this question is asking. In the modern era, the militia is basically the National Guard. We are a major nation state, so people aren’t expected to provide their own guns or weapons for even militia type service…and hasn’t been for over a century. The last instance where I can think where a major force used at least some of their own weapons would perhaps have been the Confederacy, where at least some of their troops used their own firearms (I suppose some on the Union side did too, as you could bring, say, your Henry’s repeating rifle to war if you wanted too…and I think all of the Gatling guns were purchased privately as well, though I might be misremembering this part).
But you actually said most Americans aren’t taught that a large portion of the population were loyalists, that’s contrary to my experience of education here in America.
Most of the popular understanding of the Paul Revere story is based on a 19th century poem, not historical writing.
The British did not have significant deployments of soldiers anywhere else in the world during the American Revolution, so they weren’t kept occupied in other theaters by French/Spanish/Dutch involvement. That affected their Navy, but not their ground forces.
We may not have won a battle like Yorktown by ourselves, but we didn’t need to, we just had to keep alive. The British had to crush the rebellion. In the end the American coastline is far too vast to ever be effectively blockaded with 18th century naval power, even if 100% of the British fleet were devoted to the cause they would have only intercepted a small portion of smuggled goods. The American colonies were also far too decentralized to be suppressed by even 100,000 British soldiers (which would be around 2x more than the United Kingdom had in total throughout the entire Empire at that point.) So I don’t actually see how the British win. They accomplished most of their strategic goals in the war and it did nothing to materially change the war’s direction.
The British had a really big powerful Navy, with something like over 150,000 sailors at that point. But their standing Army had never been particularly large, they were highly trained and effective but whenever they got involved in continental wars (like the 7 Years War, War of the Austrian Succession etc) they tended to work in concert with other continental powers and heavily leveraged their Navy to effect. What would have been required to win the war for the British would have been a very, very large force of infantry. Something the British both did not have, could not have supplied, and probably would have gone bankrupt trying. The war was a fiscal mess for the British as it was, and if not for a very recalcitrant King who was openly hostile with parliamentary majorities for much of the war it’s likely the British would have cut their losses much earlier on and said screw it.
There is a reason they hired over 30,000 German mercenaries, they knew they needed a lot of manpower to achieve their goals, but even that was not enough.
I think the closest they had come was early in the war when Washington made some missteps and his army was almost captured/destroyed, his Army of Continentals was the most important in terms of political attention and if destroyed may have sapped the will of the patriots to fight.
Battles like Saratoga showed even without any foreign assistance even beating us in the field wasn’t always a guarantee for the British, and actually maintaining effective control of any territory after the invading armies left proved an impossibility.
“What they don’t tell us in American history books is that many people here in what would become the United States still identified as British and many went home after the War.”
My wording was not clear, but I never actually meant that there were no Loyalists mentioned in American school books for the reasons listed below:
In 1976, this country celebrated its Bicentennial. Why? Because most Americans believe that this is the year that the United States became an effectively independent power, when, in fact, her independence would not be decided until the 1780s. This assumption would imply that every civilian here in the colonies became an “American” in 1776, regardless of whether or not they were loyal to the British Crown. After all, some Patriots were British-born, and some Loyalists were American born.
Being loyal to the Crown and identifying as British (as I explicitly stated above) are two different things. For example, let us use your conservative estimate of the Loyalist population here during the Revolution. It was 10%, correct? Yet only 3% (still a large number) departed from the colonies following the Revolution. Why? Because the 3% definitely identified as British and not American! So the other 7% must have either died or gradually accepted that they had become Americans.
Also, F.Y.I. I’m no dummy; I was recognized as an “Outstanding Student in History” in college, and I learned enough there to know that history is more of a humanity than a science, which is part of the reason why we have the “Great Debates.”
You make a strong argument for American victory regardless of foreign support. But wasn’t it the War’s length that eventually made it expensive and unpopular in Parliament? What if it had ended sooner?
Alright, I feel I misunderstood your words and see what you’re saying now.
Arguably the bicentennial was just a celebration of the 200th anniversary of adopting the Declaration of Independence. I would say that July 4th, 1776 is the only day that truly makes sense to celebrate. Yes, the Treaty of Paris was the date the British recognized it, but we did have a functioning national government throughout the period 1776-1783 (and before that, a bit) and while we may not have had control of all our territory consistently it’s a fair start date for our birth.
I personally prefer the July 2, 1776 date as the birth date of the country because that was the day the Continental Congress made the fateful decision to break away from the mother country. John Adams and other Founding Fathers agreed that July 2 should have been the date considered America’s birth date. But, July 4th was the date the wording of the DoI was adopted, and thus the date actually written on the DoI, so it’s always taken precedence.
My estimate was around 15%, but it varies from 10-30%, the wide range is because there isn’t a real sure fire way to know with any more accuracy.
I did not intend to make it seem I was calling you dumb.
The war was very unpopular with the Whigs in Parliament from the very beginning. They believed (probably correctly) that war would be disastrously expensive and painful even if won, and believed it wholly unnecessary. Their position was that they could work out an agreement where the colonists get some of the things they want while still giving Parliament some of the things they want, the colonies would stay in the imperial fold and all would be well. If the Whigs in Parliament had won the day, it’s highly possible America would have come to some arrangement similar to what Canada had later, and who knows what happens after that.
Instead the Tories won, and George III (I often point out he’s the last British monarch to exercise any real power with any level of consistency) would have had it no other way. He repeatedly refused to work with PMs that didn’t agree with his belligerent policy toward the colonies, and finally when he got Lord North he basically press ganged him into staying PM for the duration of the war even though North begged to resign many times.
The war became less popular over time, such that by the final several years if the UK had a true democracy at that point the anti-war parties probably would have taken control of government and their PM would have ended it, but in that era when the King still had real say about who he picked as PM he was able to keep the war going.
The thing is too, while there was American irregular fighting against the British Army (especially at the beginning of the war, and, most notably, at the Battle of Cowpens), where they often didn’t do very well, a lot of the American militias’ actions were against Loyalist militia units
George Washington knew what militia could do-- perform as an auxiliary to regulars and provide emergency manpower.
One reason why he might not have trusted militia is that they nearly led to his capture or death at the Battle of Long Island, where militia switched sides.
He did see a use for militia, as I mentioned:
Note the “provided with uniform Arms”. This quote was from 1783, so the Second Amendment would have been in effect and he still pointed out that expecting your militia to supply its own arms was undesirable. I read this as Washington expecting the militia to enhance the power of the government, not to provide a check to the power of the government.
From Wikipedia’s “Criticism” section of the article on Minutemen:
I’m not sure how prevalent the idea that militia was a key component of the success of the American Revolution is. It does seem to me that culturally the Minuteman is celebrated while the Continental Army, which, so far as I can tell, was the key element of victory, is somewhat overlooked. Sadly, the only examples I can think of are the Minuteman Missile and the game Civilization V, where an annoyed-looking Washington leads an American faction with the Minuteman as its signature unit.
This is my understanding of the situation as well.
The idea apparently stems from a John Adams quote. However, he was actually talking about American support for the French Revolution. If you’re interested, here’s a claim on the Loyalist vs Patriot breakdown:
FYI: In the pit thread, the OP argued for the 2nd amendment as a “bulwark against tyranny”. Here, he poses a narrow question to shed light on a broader one, a good scholarly strategy.
I’m not a military historian but it’s my understanding that:
Trained armies beat irregulars with guns. (There have been threads on this.)
Irregulars beat unarmed civilians until the cops show up.
The Revolutionary War was won by armies, not irregulars. Irregulars played a vital role at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Though the Americans lost, the battle demonstrated that Americans were willing to die for the cause, something that was by no means clear up to that point. My post is my cite. (Or actually my quote in my post is my cite.)
How much time in Basic Training is devoted to weapons handling anyway? It seems to me that being able to shoot a gun, while not trivial, doesn’t constitute the majority of soldier training, unless of course you are a sharpshooter, a specialist activity. Many posters can correct me on this point. I said in the other thread that camp hygiene could be a lot more relevant.
There’s actually a new book out, Revolutionary Summer that, "undermine[s] the popular myth that the birth of the United States was an “Immaculate Conception,” a victory won by local militias rather than by “a standing army of regular soldiers.” " Cite. The reviewer uses the term “Myth” I think because this isn’t something that was ever really believed by professional historians. Armies win wars: irregulars can only bully people and make life miserable for foreign invaders.
We should make sure we don’t confuse things. Minutemen which were specifically mentioned in the OP and militia aren’t 1:1. Minutemen were part of the militia, but only constituted about a quarter of their number.
Their primary function was not to win battles, so even talking about them in that context misses the point. In a large country with around 2.5m people (imagine how sparse the 13 States today that were the original 13 colonies would be if combined they had under 3m residents) there was no effective way to keep garrisons everywhere. Minutemen were essential in responding to certain types of unforeseen and immediate threats.
While they were specifically preparing for clashes with the British in the 1770s, they have their origins in groups of ready militia members who would respond to Indian raids–something still common especially in the Western parts of the colonies at that time. Their origins are in the 1600s, when portions of the Massachusetts militia were selected to serve as “ready responders” to any and all threats (almost always native raids at that point.)
They were not legally obligated to march under orders of any Continental Army officers, nor could they be compelled to march in offensive war outside of their home area. But there was a lot of fighting in the American Revolution that weren’t pitched battles. The British understood many of the limitations I’ve alluded to, and one way they sought to remedy their deficiencies was by funding and supporting Loyalist militias that would attack Patriot areas and Native bands that would attack Patriot areas. Those threats were mostly unmatched by Continental forces because the Continental Armies were more than busy fighting in traditional battles with British Regulars.
If there had been no militia forces, then the Native raiding bands and Loyalist militias would have substantially degraded quality of life and etc for Patriot aligned towns and areas and could have easily turned popular opinion against the war effort.
Sometimes however, militia leaders or companies would agree to travel outside their home State for various expeditions. Sometimes under the command of Continental Army officers, or attached to a Continental Army, too.
True, but then consider the casualty rates inflicted upon them, the general destruction of their country (and the low level of development that they started out with anyway) and, in the case of Western nations, our general reluctance to use good old fashioned (read: Brutal) civilian conquest tactics.
My mistake, that wasn’t until the 1790s. Looks like Washington was right again on the issue: when a Uniform Militia was attempted the legislation called for members to provide their own arms within specifications. Estimates of compliance varied between 15% and 60%. Second Amendment to the United States Constitution - Wikipedia
I suspect that the Americans were attempting to avoid a standing army, in spite of the experiences of the Revolution, and do it on the cheap.