How Protest Became a War for Independence

PART II — U.S. HISTORY, 1491 TO THE PRESENT · CHAPTER 9

By 1776, resistance had become an argument over political legitimacy. Thomas Paine attacked monarchy in language meant for a broad colonial audience. The Declaration of Independence made a more formal claim: government existed to protect rights and could be rejected when it persistently violated them.

Those ideas helped justify independence. They did not win the war. American survival depended on manpower, local mobilization, military adaptation, British strategic problems, and eventually French money, troops, ships, and diplomacy. Saratoga mattered partly because it helped convince France that the American rebellion could survive.

The war also created choices that a simple Patriot-versus-British story misses. Enslaved people evaluated competing paths to freedom. Native nations weighed which side posed the greater danger to land and sovereignty. Loyalists faced confiscation, displacement, or migration. The Revolution was a war for independence, but it was also a civil and international conflict.

Ideas Give Resistance a Language

Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, published in January 1776, attacked monarchy itself rather than just specific British policies, arguing in plain language that hereditary rule was absurd and that America’s interests lay in independence, not reconciliation. It sold widely and helped shift public opinion at a moment when many colonists still hoped for compromise.

The Declaration of Independence, adopted in July 1776, gave the break a formal justification. Drawing on Enlightenment arguments about natural rights and government by consent, it claimed that a government which persistently violated the rights of the governed could be rightfully overthrown, then listed specific grievances against the king to support that claim.

Republicanism Added Another Fear

Natural-rights language was only part of Revolutionary political thought. Colonists also drew on republican ideas that warned against corruption, standing armies, patronage, and concentrated power. A republic depended on civic virtue and on citizens who could resist rulers placing private interest above the public good.

That republican fear helps explain why many colonists interpreted new taxes, customs enforcement, and troops in colonial cities as parts of a larger threat to liberty. The argument was not simply that a tax cost money. The larger claim was that unchecked imperial power could become corrupt and arbitrary.

Independence Becomes a Defensible Position

Fighting began at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, more than a year before independence was declared. Through 1775, the Second Continental Congress still pursued a mixed strategy, raising an army under George Washington while also sending the Olive Branch Petition asking the king to intervene against Parliament. The king’s rejection of that petition, combined with growing military engagement, pushed colonial opinion further toward the position Paine had argued for.

The War Was Also an International War

American independence was never only a contest between the colonies and Britain. France, still resentful after its losses in the Seven Years’ War, watched the conflict closely for an opportunity to weaken its rival. Spain and the Dutch Republic had their own reasons to see British power checked. American diplomats, including Benjamin Franklin in Paris, worked deliberately to draw these rivalries into the war on the American side.

French Support Changes the Military Balance

The American victory at Saratoga in 1777, where British General John Burgoyne surrendered an entire army, convinced France that the rebellion had a real chance of success. France formally allied with the United States in 1778, providing money, weapons, troops, and, critically, a navy that could challenge British control of the Atlantic.

That naval support proved decisive at Yorktown in 1781, where a French fleet blocked British evacuation by sea while American and French land forces surrounded General Cornwallis. Without French ships holding the Chesapeake, Cornwallis could likely have escaped the siege that effectively ended major fighting.

Black Americans Used the War to Pursue Freedom

Black Americans, enslaved and free, evaluated the war in terms of which side offered a real path to freedom. In 1775, Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, promised freedom to enslaved people who fled their Patriot owners and joined British forces, and thousands took that offer over the course of the war. Others found opportunities to serve, and sometimes gain freedom, in Patriot militias and the Continental Army, particularly in northern states.

Neither side offered a consistent or guaranteed path to liberty. Patriot promises of freedom were unevenly honored, and Britain’s wartime offer did not reflect a broader commitment to ending slavery. Black Americans made wartime choices under real constraints, weighing risk and opportunity rather than simply picking a side out of loyalty.

Native Nations Face a Different Set of Risks

Many Native nations facing settler expansion saw British limits on western settlement as a possible check on colonial land hunger, but Native choices varied by nation, region, and local rivalries. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy split over the war: the Oneida and Tuscarora generally supported the Patriots, while the Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga generally allied with Britain. The conflict fractured a confederacy that had endured for generations.

Whichever side a Native nation chose, the war often brought devastation rather than protection. American campaigns such as the Sullivan Expedition of 1779 destroyed Haudenosaunee towns and food supplies in retaliation for raids tied to the British alliance. Native nations entered the war trying to protect land and sovereignty and largely emerged from it with both further threatened, regardless of which side they had supported.

Loyalists Had Their Own Reasons

Loyalists were not one social type. Some valued political and commercial ties to Britain. Some feared that resistance would bring disorder or war. Royal officials and people whose livelihoods depended on imperial institutions had obvious reasons to remain loyal. Others simply believed Parliament retained legitimate authority.

Patriot victory brought confiscation and harassment in some states, and tens of thousands of Loyalists eventually left the United States for Canada, Britain, the Caribbean, or other parts of the empire. Their presence is useful evidence that colonial opinion did not move uniformly toward independence.

Reading the Revolution as Multiple Conflicts

A strong essay on the Revolution treats it as several overlapping conflicts at once: a war for independence from Britain, an international war drawing in France and other powers, and a set of separate, high-stakes choices for enslaved people, Native nations, and Loyalists whose interests did not automatically align with either army. Naming which conflict a piece of evidence speaks to, rather than folding everything into a single Patriot-versus-British narrative, is what turns a general fact into a precise argument.

Answer without looking back.

EXPLAIN WHY INDEPENDENCE REQUIRED MORE THAN PATRIOT ARMIES

1 What argument did Thomas Paine make in Common Sense, and how did it differ from earlier colonial complaints?

2 Why does the timing of Lexington and Concord versus the Declaration of Independence matter for understanding how independence became the colonial position?

3 Explain why the Battle of Saratoga mattered for France’s decision to ally with the United States.

4 Describe the choice Lord Dunmore’s proclamation offered enslaved Virginians, and explain why neither side offered a guaranteed path to freedom.

5 Why did the Haudenosaunee Confederacy split over the Revolutionary War, and what did Native nations generally risk regardless of which side they chose?