When Did American Independence Become Inevitable?

Retreat from Long Island N.Y., 1856, Artist John McNevin, Library of Congress
https://www.loc.gov/item/2006675653/

 A fresh look at America's road to independence

Historical speculation can serve as a good starting point for historical discussions. It requires knowledge of both the facts and motivations of the people involved to speculate how events might have played out differently.  I’m asking the question, was American independence inevitable? To clarify, I’m not talking about gradual independence as a member of the commonwealth like Australia and Canada. But rather a full unilateral declaration of independence secured through force.  

It’s fair to argue we're all slaves to destiny.  That history isn't random, but is the result of existing circumstances.  Without changing the circumstances, history is destined to play out the same way.  That may be true, but participants in historical events don’t know that destiny.  They have free will to make a range of decisions that will affect the outcome.  I’m approaching this on the assumption that destiny isn’t set and individuals can change their decisions and begin a ripple effect altering the course of events. 

History 101

It’s probably worth looking at the most obvious answers first, the ones we learned in history class.  America finally decided to declare their independence on July 4th, 1776, except that’s not quite right.  The Continental Congress actually voted to declare independence on July 2nd, the 4th is just when they signed the document.  However, that’s still not really right either because congress began the process of writing the Declaration of Independence on June 11th.  They wouldn’t have done that if they didn’t have the support to pass it.  So by June 11th, 1776, congress clearly had the support to pass a vote on independence, but I think it’s also clear by that time we’d been on a track towards independence for a while.

The conventional idea that the battle of Yorktown was the moment American independence became inevitable is likewise, unsatisfactory. Some argue that in fact Yorktown didn’t necessarily secure American independence.  They make the point that Great Britain had a powerful military and was more than capable of continuing the fight if they wanted to. In reality though, by that point the King had lost support for his war for the colonies resulting in Parliament pulling the plug on the whole operation.  The war had been going poorly for a while and they were tired of throwing good money after bad with little chance of better results.  We’ll need to take a closer look at the events before and during the Revolution to suss out the point when American Independence became inevitable.

Trouble Brewing

The first important event in prying America out of the imperial arms of Great Britain was the French-Indian War.  This might seem odd at first because that conflict secured Britain’s North American colonies from French expansionism. Not only did they secure their colonies, but they added Canada to the fold of the British Empire. It seems this would tighten the bonds between colony and mother country.  However, the forced quartering of troops, British high-handedness, and frequent incompetence led to a general feeling of resentment towards Britain in the colonies.  Many felt they had made sacrifices without much to show for it.  Perhaps worse, rather than praising their role in victory, British officials often derided colonial contributions to the war.  Still, the idea of independence at that point was nearly unthinkable.

Where most history textbooks start talking about the independence movement is with the series of British attempts to tax the colonists in the 1760s.  Without detailing all these tax acts, the Stamp Act is rightly considered to be a pivotal point in America’s journey towards independence.  Up to this point the colonies were more likely to view each other as rivals than allies. The colonial response to these taxes was the first instance of a coordinated American resistance to British rule. In part the intensity of the American response was due to indignation over being made to cover British war debts when they had already shouldered much of the cost, but received little of the benefit. 

The repeal of the Stamp Act showed the power of the colonies when they acted together. However, in hindsight, perhaps the most important aspect of the repeal was the Declaratory Act. It stated that Parliament could legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.”  In the colonists' minds they had won the stand-off over the Stamp Act and forced Britain to acknowledge their autonomy. Most saw the Declaratory Act as a symbolic face-saving measure.  The British might have avoided the Revolution if that was the case.  However, from the British standpoint the Declaratory Act was perhaps the most important part of the repeal.  In their minds the repeal had been a practical matter, but they hadn’t conceded anything. This fundamental misunderstanding colored both the American and British responses to the events leading to the revolution. 

The Tide Turns

1770 is the year when the teeter-totter between independence and loyalty to the crown finally tipped in favor of independence.  The event that pushed them in that direction was the Boston Massacre. This was obviously an important development, but it’s often under emphasized.  This is because there was a 5-year gap between this event and the beginning of the war. But the massacre gave the small independence movement a rallying cry.  On the anniversary each year resistance leaders made fiery speeches decrying the British presence in North America.  This combined with the ongoing stationing of soldiers in the colonies and the tax on tea gave legitimacy to the independence movement. It wasn’t just a wacky idea that a few radicals had anymore.  Regular people were taking it seriously.  

It was still possible the British could have taken a more conciliatory position and undercut the independence movement.  That’s something they never seriously considered though.  The British thought they were being reasonable.  Parliament seemed to understand the potential for American independence even before the Americans did. They saw the size, prosperity and rapid growth of the colonies and couldn’t help but fear their eventual independence.  However, from their standpoint giving the Americans greater autonomy seemed like a step towards an evitable independence.  Parliament argued they had to maintain their control over the colonies in order to prevent them from moving in that direction.  They failed to understand it was this policy that was pushing the colonies towards independence.    

It was the mainstreaming of anti-British sentiment that led to the rapid and unified resistance to the Coercive Acts following the Boston Tea Party.  These acts brought the independence movement even more out into the open.  Yet it was the Boston Massacre that had transformed the colonial attitude towards the British from annoyance over taxes to outright anger. This slow simmering anger mentally prepared colonists to accept the idea of independence as the events of 1774 and 1775 played out.  Nothing short of a complete change in British colonial policy was likely to avert the coming war for independence, something the British simply weren’t prepared to do.   

Shouldn’t Be Too Hard

So, by 1770 America was moving on a clear path towards independence that just needed an event like the Boston Tea Party to galvanize American resistance to the British.  But it’s one thing to want independence, it’s another to actually attain it. Most rebellions fail, and the Americans were rebelling against the most powerful empire in the world. Fear of failure gave Americans pause in officially pronouncing their independence, even after fighting began. This fear was well placed.  

The war seemingly began well for the ragtag Americans with a strong showing on April 19th, 1775, at Lexington and Concord.  More significantly, two months later a more coordinated American force engaged the British in the Battle of Bunker Hill.  The battle ended in an effective stalemate, but inflicted heavy losses on the British. By the spring of 1776 the siege of Boston forced the British to abandon the city.  However, these early victories were only against the relatively small garrisons of British troops stationed in America and a few reinforcements, not the main British Army. 

Any misconceptions the colonists had about the capabilities of the British army were about to be decisively corrected.  In Boston the British had about 6,000 troops.  After landing on Long Island with fresh reinforcements from England the British fielded an army of 32,000.  Opposing the British was George Washington with an army of 19,000.  Given that Washington was on the defensive and the colonists had been similarly outnumbered in Boston it might have seemed the Americans had a decent shot of success. But the numbers belie the reality of the situation. The British had a trained and fully equipped army with naval support. The untrained and disorganized American army had chronic shortages of food, artillery and ammunition. 

Over the course of the late summer and fall of 1776 the British routed the Americans in battle after battle.  At times American units put up stiff resistance, but this tended to be the exception rather than the rule.  Simply put, the American army was no match for the British in open battle. Washington’s greatest achievement as a general was avoiding capture and a complete collapse of his army.  That might sound like a slam on Washington, but given the situation, keeping his army together was a remarkable achievement.  Surprisingly, this low point in the military campaign was also the moment when British defeat became inevitable. 

Tick Tock

Despite the British seemingly undefeatable army, they also had disadvantages.  They were attempting to fight a war across an ocean.  Intelligence reports and supplies typically took about two months to cross the ocean, sometimes as long as 3 months. That meant correspondence could easily take four to six months to get a reply.  The British also had a whole empire to defend with enemies all around looking for opportunities to take advantage of any perceived weakness.  Also, as strong as their army was, it simply wasn’t possible to occupy an area as large as the thirteen colonies.

British victory was dependent on the quick and complete destruction of the Continental Army. In the fall of 1776 the British won decisive victories at Long Island, Kip’s Bay, Harlem Heights, White Plains and Fort Washington, but through it all Washington’s army remained intact. It’s a great historical what-if to speculate what would have happened if the British had cut off Washington’s retreat at Long Island and destroyed the Continental Army.  But that’s not what happened. The British never again had an opportunity to capture the entire American army in a single battle.  Rather, over the course of the coming years the Americans grew stronger as their army became more seasoned, while the British grew weaker and bogged down in battles with the French in the Caribbean.  

It wasn’t clear at the time, but the failure of the British to defeat the Continentals in the fall of 1776 doomed their ultimate chance of victory in America. Washington never again risked total defeat in a single battle.  There was a clock ticking on how long Parliament was going to fund this war.  It was just a matter of time until they were going to grow tired of funding a never-ending war in the colonies.  Perhaps their greatest miscalculation was in overestimating the number of loyalists in the colonies. They always wanted to believe that the majority of the people were on their side.  They fundamentally failed to understand how their policies had poisoned the Americans' opinions against them. 

Conclusion

After the Boston Massacre average American colonists started looking at the British as occupiers rather than compatriots. To be clear, most people in the colonies weren’t actively supporting independence at that point. There was however a shift in how Americans viewed the British.  Conflict became inevitable without a serious shift in British policies towards the colonies that they were unwilling to make.  By the time that conflict came, despite British military strength, their overconfidence about loyalist support and failure to score an early knockout blow made the war unwinnable by the end of 1776.