Geography and the War of Independence

American Use of a Defensive Strategy to Survive the Revolution

Sep 20, 2008 Nicholas Efstathiou

During the American War of Independence American Colonial military leaders sought to fight a war of defense utilizing expansive geography.

The colonists’ strategic, operational, and tactical approaches to fighting the War of Independence reflected the political independence, the ideas of national liberty, and the strategic benefits of the colonies’ geography. According to Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski in their seminal work For the Common Defense,geographically the colonies were a loose confederation and lacked a center at which the British could strike. The colonial holdings in North America also consisted of such large amounts of territory that Britain did not have enough troops to hold all of which they took. Added to this was the reality that the logistical capacities of the British Army at that time were unequal to the task of dominating the depths of North America, regardless of Britain’s status as a world power.

The size of the colonies contributed to the colonists’ ideas regarding national liberty. For decades the colonists had functioned and thrived with little direction or guidance from Britain. The colonists thus had become accustomed to a specific level of independence. Richard Frank, in a lecture to Norwich University, stated that when the British decided that maintaining a closer eye on the colonies was necessary following the conclusion of the Great War for Empire, the colonists reacted poorly.

Under Parliament’s Watchful Eye

Colonial political leaders saw this suddenly elevated interest as an affront to their liberties as Englishmen, creating an immediate concern within the colonies regarding the issue of freedom. Part of this freedom concerned expansion, an issue that the British parliament was actively prohibiting, thus directly influencing the politics of the colonies, which John Grenier speaks of in work The First Way of War. Colonial politicians and citizens sought to maintain their freedom of expansion.

The political concerns of the colonies ran the gamut from expansionism into Native American territory to protecting frontier settlements from hostile and potentially hostile Native American tribes. Politically however, the revolutionary Continental Congress was weak, a direct result, according to Russell F. Weigley in his The American Way of War, of the colonial fear of a strong central government as represented by the British Parliament.

Fear and Government Involvement

Burdened with their own government’s fear the Continental Army then would suffer strategically, operationally, and tactically from reoccurring congressional indecisiveness and attempts at micromanagement of military operations. Yet this same fear and independence displayed by the colonial government was the ideological foundation for the concepts of personal and national liberty. The ideology of the revolutionaries proved indispensable, the esprit de corps it created regarding freedom allowed the colonial troops to overcome defeats, desertions, and logistical failures which would have crushed the morale of unmotivated troops.

The colonist military leaders thus focused on a strategy of defense, one which fit well into the strategic geographical situation of the colonies. With such a large amount of territory the revolutionary forces were able to slip away from larger British forces, ensuring the survival of the revolutionary movement in the American colonies. The factors of politics, ideology, and strategic geography, played an essential role in the overall approach of the colonies to their revolution and their eventual separation from Britain.

Sources

Frank, Richard. Lecture to Norwich University’s Military History Program (December 2007).

Grenier, John. The First Way of War. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Millet, Allan R. and Peter Maslowski. For the Common Defense. New York, NY: The Free Press, 1994.

Weigley, Russell F. The American Way of War. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1977.

The copyright of the article Geography and the War of Independence in Military History is owned by Nicholas Efstathiou. Permission to republish Geography and the War of Independence in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Colonial Army Recruitment Poster