by Charles Ray

Created on: May 28, 2011   Last Updated: June 02, 2011

If you think the Revolutionary War was all about establishing a new country on the shores of what was then known as the New World, then think again.  The most revolutionary thing about the Revolutionary War was that achieved what it did not originally set out to achieve. 

Fought between 1775 and 1783, it began as a dispute between the Parliament of Britain and the American colonists.  The Parliament insisted it had to right to tax the colonies, and the Americans, claiming their rights as Englishmen, insisted on No

Taxation without Representation, and violently opposed the Stamp Act of 1865 as a violation of the English constitution. 

The colonies formed a Continental Congress to press their claims and formed shadow governments in each colony.  The Americans then boycotted British tea in protest against the tax, and the British responded by ending the limited self-government that had been allowed in the colonies, and putting them under the control of the army.  General Thomas Gage was designated governor of the American colonies.  He sent a contingent of British troops to Boston to seize rebel arms, which was confronted and nearly destroyed by local militia, known as ‘Minutemen.”  The battles at Lexington and Concord, were the ‘shots heard around the world’ and led to all out war between Britain and her colonial subjects. 

Initially, a series of battles between the British army and the militia of the thirteen colonies, with the Royal Navy controlling the sea and coastal towns, and the colonists controlling the inland area where 90 percent of the people lived, it quickly became a global conflict.  France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic secretly supplied supplies and weapons to the colonists beginning in 1776.  The European support, rather than being aimed at securing independence for the colonies as is often taught in history classes, was designed to weaken Britain’s naval superiority and gain control of overseas English colonial outposts.  This is no where better evidenced than by the fact that the first French attack took place, not in America, but was a naval bombardment of the English outpost at Bunce Island, off the coast of Sierra Leone in West Africa.

While the Spanish entered the war in 1779 as an ally of France, renewing the Bourbon Family Compact, unlike France, it initially refused to recognize the independence of the United States when it was declared, fearing

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