By Fred Fuller
Though it doesn’t seem to be getting much attention in the media, the American Revolution had already begun 250 years ago, as of this year. The first battles of the War for Independence took place in April 1775 at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, followed by the Battle of Bunker Hill near Boston in June 1775.
By September of 1775, George Washington had been appointed the commander of the American Continental Army, and thousands of American militiamen had encircled the British Army at Boston and laid siege, eventually forcing the British to withdraw from the rebelling colonies in March of 1776. But the British regrouped in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and with large numbers of additional troops from Britain, they invaded New York in July 1776 and nearly captured Washington’s army. The Revolutionary War then continued until 1783.
It’s not well known that there were more than thirteen British colonies in North America in 1775, but only thirteen joined the rebellion against the British crown: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.
The British colonies of East Florida and West Florida remained loyal to the King and became a refuge for Loyalists fleeing the rebelling colonies. Georgia was the last of the thirteen colonies to join the rebellion—in July 1775. The region that eventually became the state of Maine played an important part in the Revolution, but it was considered a part of Massachusetts at that time.
Nova Scotia would have been the fourteenth colony to join the Revolution. It was one of the largest British colonies, and many people there supported independence. But mostly because of American privateer ship raids on Nova Scotia villages, the majority of Nova Scotians remained loyal to Britain. Some colonists left Nova Scotia to join the American Continental Army, and thousands of British Loyalists fled the thirteen rebelling colonies to settle in Nova Scotia.
Actually, one could say the American Revolution began several decades before 1775. As the British colonies grew larger and more independent, they gradually began to resent the tariffs imposed by Britain and the ignoring of their rights that were codified in the English Bill of Rights of 1689.
Between 1625 and 1775, the colonial population grew from two thousand to 2.4 million. That population included people subject to slavery, which was legal in all of the colonies.
There had been many wars in the colonies before the Revolution, especially during the displacement of Native Americans. There were the Anglo–Powhatan Wars, a series of three wars between 1609 and 1646 involving settlers of the Colony of Virginia and the native Powhatan people. There was the Pequot War (1636 –1638), which drove the indigenous people out of Connecticut. And there was King Phillip’s War (1675 – 1678), in which New Englanders defeated an alliance of Native Americans led by a Wampanoag tribal leader whom the English called “King Philip.”
According to various historians, King Philip’s War was the greatest calamity in seventeenth-century New England and is considered by many to be the deadliest war in Colonial American history. In the space of little more than a year, twelve of the region’s towns were destroyed and many more were damaged. The economy of Plymouth and Rhode Island Colonies was all but ruined, and their population was decimated. They lost one-tenth of all men available for military service. More than half of New England’s towns were attacked by Natives. King Philip’s War started the development of an independent American identity. The New England colonists faced their enemies without support from any European government or military, and this began to give them a group identity separate and distinct from Britain.
There was also a series of wars between the British and the Dutch from the 1650s until 1674, when the Dutch finally surrendered New Amsterdam to the English, who renamed it New York.
In 1676, there was Bacon’s Rebellion, an armed uprising in colonial Virginia led by Nathaniel Bacon, against Colonial Governor William Berkeley after Berkeley refused Bacon’s request to drive Native Americans out of Virginia. Also fueled by economic hardship, falling tobacco prices, and high taxes, the rebellion saw colonial forces attack Native villages and ultimately burn Virginia’s colonial capital, Jamestown. Thousands of Virginians from all classes and races rose up in arms against Berkeley, who fled Jamestown and went back to England. The alliance between European indentured servants and Africans (a mix of indentured, enslaved, and free Negroes) disturbed the colonial upper class. They responded by hardening the racial caste of slavery with the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 in an attempt to divide the two races and prevent similar united uprisings.
Then there was the French and Indian War (1754 –1763), which was part of a global war in Europe known as the Seven Years’ War. The French and the British used Native American allies to fight each other for control of their American colonies. This war provided military training to many Americans who fought with the British, including George Washington. The continuing rivalry between France and Britain was one of the main reasons that the French came to the United States’ aid in the American Revolution. Without France’s help, Britain might have defeated the Americans.
In 1772, slavery was effectively ended in Britain with the legal decision known as the Somerset Case, which declared that the enslavement of a man named James Somerset, an African brought from Virginia to England, had no basis in English common law. This decision in England worried plantation owners in the American South, where the economy was largely based on slave ownership. This encouraged the Southern colonies to support independence from Britain.
Many of the circumstances that led to the American Revolution had to do with global trade policies, which will be the subject of Part 3 of this series. History is not simple, and we can learn a lot by looking more deeply into it, beyond the myths that we all hold in our heads.
