It's a topic that has been analyzed, perused, dissected and mulled over by anyone who has ever taken a course in causes in American History. Why did England-back in the day, the greatest military power since the Roman Legions-lose the American Revolution?
It is generally agreed that England made a number of crucial mistakes prior to Lexington and Concord that led to the Revolution. Some point to the debt England incurred after the French & Indian War. Some say the English never should have ousted the French from North America which resulted in a vastly reduced threat to England's colonists. Others claim that the English army fought one too many wars in a very short time span, locking horns with the French from 1754-1763 and then taking on the colonists from 1775-1783. That's a lot of fighting for some very tired soldiers who probably wanted nothing more than to go home. But the seeming lynchpin that led to war seems to be a series of laws passed by the British designed to tax and control the colonies. All valid points but still two questions remain: 1) Was the American Revolution avoidable? 2) If war wasn't unavoidable, what steps could the English have taken to win?
First some background. In the years prior to the Revolution, the English Parliamnet passed several laws to pay off their debts from the French & Indian War. The first of these laws was the Stamp Act which required colonists to have all legal documents, newspapers and even playing cards to be stamped. Naturally this angered the colonists who had to pay a fee for this stamp. Mistake number two was the Quartering Act-one of four laws that made up the Intolerable Acts. This law required colonists to house and feed English troops in their own homes. The third mistake was the Tea Act which taxed tea-a very popular drink in colonial America. This further angered the colonists and eventually led to the Boston Tea Party. But the coup de grasse were the Intolerable Acts, a series of laws to punish Bostonians for their part in the Boston Tea Party.
What steps could have been taken to avoid war? For starters, George III could have shared the cost of the French & Indian War with the colonists. Yes it would have taken longer to pay off his war debt, but by the same token he would have avoided the Revolution which ended up costing him more money. The Quartering Act was a horrendous mistake. Bullying and cajoling will only work for so long. Forcing the colonists to provide the army with food and housing was just asking for trouble. Had the King seen fit to remove most of the army after the French & Indian War, the colonists would have felt less threatened by a military presence and therefore that much more cooperative.
By March 1775, the die was cast. If the crown couldn't tax nor scare the colonists into submission, they'd use more persuasive methods. But colonial patience was at an end. On April 19, 1775 the colonists gave the English a taste of things to come when they fired on British troops at Lexington and spent the rest of the day picking off soldiers en route back to Boston. General George Gage-the royal governor of what was then called the Massachusetts Bay Colony-lost well over 270 men with 100 more wounded. The fact that Minutemen were using guerrilla tactics proved to be a continuing problem that hampered the English forces until the war's end.
Gage came up with a simple plan to win the war-divide enemy forces and pound them into dust with a vastly larger and better trained army. It might have worked too had it not been for several contingencies. First, the English were counting on Loyalists (colonists who stayed loyal to the crown during the revolution) for assistance. It simply didn't register that the rebels would make quick work of the Loyalists by burning their crops, confiscating their property and making life miserable for all Loyalists. Then too, there simply weren't enough Loyalists to make a serious dent in the colonial war effort. Secondly the English made the serious mistake of underestimating their enemy's fighting abilities. The rebels had become quite adept at guerrilla fighting during the French & Indian War. The English were used to European style warfare-two armies facing each other in an open area> Then they'd spend the better part of the battle charging and trying to outflank each other until one side or the other decided to regroup and fight another day. Guerrilla warfare was almost completely alien to the English method of fighting battles. Finally the colonies received financial help from France who were still smarting from their loss in the French & Indian War and probably relished the idea of administering a sound thrashing to their neighbors on the other side of the English Channel.
Yet its one of those quirks of war that the greatest of obstacles faced during the Revolution was a seemingly unimportant detail. In this case it was the color of English uniforms. Those bright red outfits could be seen at quite a distance and made for excellent targets. One would think that the English might have learned something after suffering the same problem during their previous war with the French-no such luck.
Gage faced some serious problems entering the war. How to deal with those problems? Re-training his army to fight a guerrilla war would have taken some time, but a goal well within his grasp. Keep in mind these were soldiers who were used to one method of fighting-the same way battles had been fought for thousands of years. Changing the color of their uniforms was probably not possible. Like all armies of that age, crown forces wore the colors of their flag-the Union Jack, who colors were (and are) red, white and blue. Had they changed the color of their outfits to blue, it would have made the colonists' job that much more difficult at spotting the enemy at night and in forests.
The rest is pretty well worn material. The colonists fought a war of attrition from 1775 until late 1776. Fortunes changed when Washington routed an Hessian garrison (the Hessians were German mercenaries fighting for England) in Trenton on Christmas night, 1776. In October 1777, Benedict Arnold nearly wiped out a vastly depleted English army at Saratoga which marked the turning point of the war. That winter at Valley Forge, Baron Von Steuben, whipped the rag tag Continental army under Washington into a professional fighting force. Washington wrapped up the whole affair at Yorktown in 1781 when he routed the English under the command of general Howe.
Which mistake lost the war for England? Had to pinpoint one. Most likely it was a series of mistakes. The English didn't have the slightest clue how to fight a guerrilla war, plus they were fighting in a strange country against an enemy that they vastly underestimated. Goes back to an old saying "proud words wear tall boots." In other words if the English wanted to talk the talk they'd better walk the walk. No question the English were brimming with arrogance and looked up ramshackle Continental army and various militias as easy prey. Just goes to show-some folks never learn from their mistakes.