The British had accumulated large debts from financing the French and Indian War (1754 to 1763). After the war, the ongoing expenses of maintaining garrisons of English soldiers in North America also mounted.
The colonists argued that they were capable of defending themselves and didn’t need armies sent from across the Atlantic. Such armies were not only unnecessary, but often caused problems (fights, drunkenness, rowdiness, theft, vandalism, etc.) among the people whom they were allegedly defending.
A long series of parliamentary actions, even dating back to before 1754 but increasing thereafter, amounted to repeated taxes on the colonists. The evils of taxation were amplified by the fact that the colonists were not allowed to elect any of their own representatives to Parliament.
The residents of the thirteen colonies were supposed to be British citizens, on a legal par with those living in England, but in reality, they were denied the right to freely elect their own representatives.
In addition to the brutalities of taxation, the colonists were subjected to other forms of economic terror. Regulations listed certain products which colonists could purchase only from England, not from any other countries. Certain products from the colonies could be shipped only to England and not to other countries.
Beyond economic concerns, the colonists desire religious freedom: the spiritual landscape of North America included a diverse collection of Lutherans, Jews, Methodists, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, Quakers, Baptists, and other groups. The British government, however, acknowledged Anglicanism (Episcopalianism) as the only official church.
Politically, the colonists had two goals: first, participation by freely electing representatives to Parliament; second, freedom of speech and of the press.
The English were oblivious to the human misery which they caused. Making it even worse, Parliament inflicted an additional form of oppression on the colonists in 1763: the Proclamation Line. This boundary forbid the residents of the thirteen colonies from settling west of a line drawn on the map.
The Americans were forbidden from pioneering into the largely unsettled and uninhabited lands west of the existing colonial civilization, as historians Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski write:
The imperial program sparked colonial resistance. In the West, Americans refused to conform to the Proclamation Line or obey the trade regulations. But on the seaboard resistance was more ominous as colonists defiantly challenged Parliament’s authority to impose taxes, especially the Stamp Act. An intercolonial Stamp Act Congress met in New York and issued protests. People adopted nonimportation agreements, uniting most Americans in an attempt to put economic pressure on England to repeal the act. Most importantly, colonists responded with violence. Groups calling themselves “Sons of Liberty” enforced the nonimportation agreements, forced stamp agents to resign, and mobilized mobs to ransack the homes of unpopular Crown officials. The Connecticut and New York Sons of Liberty even signed a treaty pledging aid if British troops tried to enforce the Stamp Act. In the face of this opposition, Parliament repealed the act but passed a Declaratory Act proclaiming Parliament’s right “to bind” the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.”
The colonial response to Britain’s economic aggression galvanized resistance and united the colonies. Organizations within colonies, and among colonies, created a network which would grow stronger and eventually coordinate the revolution: an organization which would more and more clearly the demands for relief from taxation, the demands for elected representation, the demands for freedom of speech and of the press and of religion, and the demands for political liberty and eventually complete political independence.
The organizations which arose in opposition to the English taxes were organizations which were a part of creating a new identity: the identity of being, not English subjects living in America, but rather the identity of being Americans.
Wars are nothing new in history, but America’s Revolutionary War was a new type of war. The wars up until that point in time were driven mainly by dynastic ambition or material greed.
America’s struggle for independence was not a “top-down” war, called for and motivated by a small leadership class, but rather was a “bottom-up” war, reflecting the political desperation of the middle and lower classes who’d suffered horribly under British taxation.
To say that the American Revolution was caused largely by taxes seems, at first glance, to imply that the colonists were greedy people motivated by material wealth. But the Americans had the insight that taxes struck at much more than one’s wallet. Taxes are an assault on human dignity. Taxation is not only a violation of property rights, but in subtle and nefarious ways, a violation of all human and civil rights.
To fight a war, not because the royal family decreed it, but because the broad lower and middle classes were seeking their human and civil rights — seeking liberty, freedom, and opportunity — this was a new and different kind of war.
A new type of war called for new types of strategies.
George Washington and the Continental Army were working, not merely to capture selected military or economic targets, but rather to expel the British military from the land, and to liberate that land, as historian Russell Weigley writes:
The paradox of George Washington’s mode of strategy wran deeper than its most obvious feature, the incongruity between a defensive strategy and the necessity to remove the British forces from North America in order to secure political independence. There existed a further incongruity between the eighteenth-century conventionality of the ideas about warfare entertained and applied by the wealthy and conservative Virginia gentleman turned Commander in Chief of a revolutionary army, and the incorrigibility revolutionary dimensions of the war in which Washington had to fight. For in terms of the eighteenth century’s conceptions of war, the War of American Independence was indeed revolutionary. It is a commonplace of history, but a correct one, to assert that in Europe the eighteenth century was an age of limited war. Until the French Revolution at the end of the century, European armies of the period carefully restrained the destructiveness of war, and they did so because European statesmen restrained the aims of war. A variety of considerations, all involving the statesmen’s and soldiers’ awareness of the delicacy of the social fabric of Europe under the ancien regime, made European war in the eighteenth century habitually a contest for limited objectives of a fortress or province or two or of favorable dynastic alliance. The War of American Independence was revolutionary in the very scope of the Americans’ objective: to eliminate British power completely from the vast extent of the thirteen rebellious colonies.
Had George Washington and the American been able to fight a true war of attrition, they would have gladly done so. But the Continental Army lacked money, supplies, and men sufficient for that strategy. Because it was not a true war of attrition, the American Revolution inflicted fewer casualties that it might otherwise have.
Washington’s strategy was, instead, a modified version of attrition. He worked to develop his forces into nimble and mobile units; the British were, by comparison, clunky and slow-moving. Washington developed strong intelligence networks, informing him of British activities.
The British forces were larger and better equipped, so Washington avoided large-scale confrontations in battle. He opted for surprise attacks and raids. In so doing, he left the British continually harassed, fatigued, and nervous.
Instead of outlasting the British in a traditional version of a war of attrition, Washington exhausted and unnerved the British.
By war’s end, Washington was finally able to enjoy numerical superiority when facing the British at Yorktown in 1781, due in part to French armies who joined the Americans. But throughout most of the war, Washington’s forces were smaller than their British opponents, and had to rely on speed, agility, and elements of surprise.
