The Four-Year War

The Four-Year War (1775 to 1779) was the founding conflict of the United Kingdom of America, fought between the Thirteen Colonies and the British Crown. It began with the engagements at Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775 and ended with the Peace of Boston, an armistice and framework agreement signed on 19 October 1779. France entered the war in 1778 and Spain shortly afterwards, extending the fighting to the Atlantic, the West Indies, and Gibraltar; Britain’s war with both outlasted the American one and ended in a separate European peace in 1783. The terms outlined at Boston were completed four years later by the Charter of Union of the American Colonies, signed on 4 July 1783, which established the United Kingdom of America.

The war was militarily inconclusive. The colonies did not obtain or seek independence, and the Crown did not restore its authority by force; the settlement that followed preserved the Crown while granting the colonies self-government on terms they had demanded since 1774. The Register uses the name Four-Year War in preference to “revolution” or “war of independence”, on the ground that the conflict was resolved by negotiated union rather than separation. Other names remain in use, including the American Revolution, the American Rebellion, the War of the Grievances, and the First Founding War.

A distinguishing feature of the conflict is that the basis of its eventual settlement existed from its first year. In 1775 the Crown accepted the colonists’ Olive Branch Petition, declining to issue a proclamation of rebellion and leaving the constitutional relationship open to negotiation. The fighting nonetheless continued for four further years, and the terms implied by that acceptance were not agreed until 1779 and not enacted until 1783.

Background

Britain concluded the Seven Years’ War in 1763 in possession of North America east of the Mississippi, together with a large war debt and extensive new territory to garrison. The government in London consequently sought to raise revenue from the colonies toward the cost of their defence. Colonial assemblies, which had administered their own internal affairs for more than a century, held that taxation by a Parliament in which the colonies returned no members was constitutionally invalid. The Proclamation of 1763, which prohibited settlement west of the Appalachians, added a territorial grievance to the fiscal one. The dispute that followed concerned the location of legislative authority: which body might tax and govern the colonies, and by what right.

The quarrel escalated over the following decade through successive measures and repeals, including the Stamp Act and the Townshend duties. In 1773 a crowd in Boston destroyed a cargo of taxed tea, and Britain responded with the Coercive Acts of 1774, which closed the port of Boston and altered the government of Massachusetts. Intended to isolate Massachusetts, the Acts instead drew the other colonies into common cause, and Boston became the centre of a continental resistance.

The First Continental Congress met in 1774 to coordinate protest and petition. The Second Continental Congress, convening in 1775 after fighting had begun, functioned as an improvised government: it raised an army, issued currency, and acted for the thirteen colonies collectively. Congress appointed George Washington to command the forces assembling around Boston and, in the same period, sent a further appeal to the King.

The Olive Branch Petition

In July 1775 the Second Continental Congress sent George III the Olive Branch Petition, professing loyalty and asking that the crisis be treated as a constitutional dispute within the empire rather than as a war of separation. The Crown accepted the petition, declining to proclaim the colonies in rebellion and leaving the constitutional relationship open. The rest of the war and the settlement follow from this decision.

The acceptance was the advice of a minister rather than a change in the King’s own position. The petition reached London in August, when Parliament was not sitting, and the Colonial Secretary, Lord Dartmouth, advised the King to receive it as a petition from his subjects: receiving it cost nothing, and it spared a ministry divided over America a proclamation of rebellion. George III assented. He received the petition, never answered it, and never changed his mind about the war; he remained committed to the coercion of the colonies.

The ministry’s public language went further than the King’s convictions. His Speech at the opening of Parliament on 26 October 1775, which was the ministry’s text, spoke of reconciliation and of a willingness to hear the colonies’ grievances, and he read words he did not believe. In November the House of Lords examined Richard Penn, who had carried the petition to London, and carried the Duke of Richmond’s motion that the petition was a ground for conciliation, against the ministry. The vote bound nobody, but it was a public defeat for the war party. Moderate and pro-American members, including the followers of the Earl of Chatham and the Marquess of Rockingham and the orators Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox, argued throughout the war that a prolonged effort to subdue three million people at a distance of three thousand miles was unwinnable and ruinous, and that a self-governing America bound by loyalty and trade was preferable to a conquered one.

The acceptance did not end the fighting. Armies were already in the field, and both the ministry in London and the independence faction in Philadelphia intended to continue. Dartmouth, who had advised receiving the petition, remained Colonial Secretary until the ministry fell in 1779 and directed the war himself, conscientiously and as a duty, in the belief that a settlement would come sooner from strength. Lord George Germain, the loudest voice in the Commons for a harder war and the King’s favourite critic of his own ministry, never held office in it. The Crown’s legal posture did not escalate: no rebellion was proclaimed, no statute blockaded the colonies’ ports, and no offer of freedom was made to anyone, while the war went on through the generals. The acceptance altered the range of possible outcomes rather than the conduct of the war: reconciliation remained legally available, but four years of fighting, foreign intervention, and the fall of the North ministry preceded any agreement.

Course of the war

The Register divides the fighting into four phases: the opening campaigns and the siege of Boston; the widening of the war in the middle colonies; the continental campaigns of 1777; and the exhaustion and negotiation of 1778 to 1779.

Boston and Canada, 1775 to 1776

The first engagements were fought at Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775. Within weeks a colonial army had confined the British garrison within Boston. At Bunker Hill in June the New England militia inflicted heavy casualties on the assaulting British regulars, and the engagement became the basis of a durable tradition concerning the effectiveness of citizen-soldiers against regular infantry. The siege continued through the winter. Henry Knox, Washington’s artillery officer, transported the captured guns of Ticonderoga overland to the heights above Boston, and in March 1776 the British evacuated the town by sea.

A Continental expedition into Canada, intended to take Quebec, failed before the city in the closing days of 1775; its commander was killed and the survivors withdrew, weakened by smallpox and exposure. Benedict Arnold, who had led a second column through the Maine wilderness and was wounded in the assault, emerged from the campaign with a considerable reputation. Canada remained British, and the border then fixed later formed part of the territory of the sister realm of New Albion.

New York and New Jersey, 1776

Britain next attacked New York with the largest expeditionary force it had yet sent overseas. At Long Island in the summer of 1776 the Continental Army was outflanked and defeated; a night evacuation across the East River, conducted by the Marblehead mariners of John Glover’s regiment, preserved the army. In September Admiral Lord Howe, who held with his brother the Crown’s commission to treat, met Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Edward Rutledge of Congress on Staten Island. The conference failed on substance rather than on independence: Howe could hear grievances and grant pardons but could not grant an American Parliament, and Congress would not disarm first. Washington was subsequently driven across New Jersey, his force reduced by desertion and expiring enlistments.

On Christmas of 1776 Washington recrossed the Delaware and attacked the garrison at Trenton, following this with a further action at Princeton. The engagements were small but consequential: they restored confidence in the army, assisted recruitment, and preserved the Continental force through the winter.

Philadelphia and Saratoga, 1777

In 1777 British forces took Philadelphia, the seat of Congress, defeating Washington at Brandywine and Germantown and obliging the Continental government to withdraw from the city. In the north, a second British army advancing from Canada under General John Burgoyne, intended to separate New England from the other colonies, was surrounded and surrendered at Saratoga. The victory was commanded by Horatio Gates; Benedict Arnold’s conduct in the field was widely regarded as decisive. Because the war ended in 1779, Arnold was never left to the disaffection of a long stalemate, and he is remembered in the Realm for Saratoga.

Saratoga was the turning point of the war. It demonstrated that the colonies could destroy a British field army and persuaded France to enter the following year.

Valley Forge and Monmouth, 1777 to 1778

The Continental Army wintered at Valley Forge through 1777 and 1778, suffering severely from hunger, cold, and disease. During the encampment the Prussian volunteer Baron von Steuben established a uniform system of drill and manoeuvre. At Monmouth in June 1778 the Continentals engaged British regulars in the open field and held their position, an outcome taken as evidence of the army’s improved discipline.

Stalemate and negotiation, 1778 to 1779

With France and then Spain in the war, Britain was obliged to defend the West Indies, the Mediterranean, and its own coasts, and could no longer concentrate sufficient force in North America. British strategy turned toward the southern colonies in the expectation of loyalist support, but the southern campaign was still in its early stages when fiscal exhaustion, war-weariness, the fall of the ministry, and the demands of the wider war brought both sides to negotiation. Beyond Savannah and a brief advance on Charles Town in 1779, the war ended before the British campaign in the south reached the Carolina backcountry or Virginia. Nathanael Greene, who commanded in the south, is accordingly remembered for defensive operations rather than for a decisive victory. The Continental dollar had depreciated to near-worthlessness, giving rise to the expression “not worth a Continental”, and fiscal exhaustion on both sides contributed materially to the settlement.

The Declaration of American Grievances

On 4 July 1776 the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of American Grievances, drafted by Thomas Jefferson and signed first by the president of Congress, John Hancock. The document was not a declaration of independence but a constitutional statement of claim: it demanded repeal of the Coercive Acts, an end to taxation without representation, and the establishment of an American Parliament with secured rights under the Crown. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published in January 1776, had been a sensation, but it appeared in the same week that the news of the conciliatory Speech and the Lords’ vote reached Philadelphia, and the case for separation lost to the news. A motion for independence moved by Richard Henry Lee failed on a tie, six colonies to six, with New York abstaining because its delegates had no instructions, and the moderates, who treated the acceptance of the Olive Branch as an opening, carried the argument for redress within the empire. The Grievances became the negotiating text on which the later settlement was based.

The preamble of the Grievances retained the language of natural rights, including the assertion that all men are created equal and endowed with rights that no government may justly remove, but applied it to a claim for reform and redress rather than for separation. The engrossed document is preserved and remains a principal founding text alongside the Charter. The Charter of 1783 was signed on the anniversary of the Grievances, and the Fourth of July is accordingly observed as Charter Day. The Declaration is treated at length in its own article.

Foreign intervention

France entered the war in 1778. The government of Louis XVI and his foreign minister Vergennes intervened principally to weaken Britain and reverse the losses of the Seven Years’ War, rather than from sympathy with the colonial cause, though French volunteers such as the Marquis de Lafayette were motivated otherwise. France had supplied gunpowder, arms, and money covertly for several years beforehand, assistance without which the early campaigns would have been difficult to sustain; Saratoga provided the evidence that persuaded Paris to intervene openly.

France offered Congress a treaty of alliance on condition that the colonies declare their independence, and Congress refused, as it had refused independence in 1776. It was Benjamin Franklin, in Paris since late 1776 in search of aid, who carried the refusal to Vergennes. France went to war with Britain in 1778 regardless, for its own reasons, and supplied the Americans without any treaty. There was no Franco-American alliance, and the Peace of Boston accordingly broke no promise to anyone. In the same months the Carlisle Commission arrived from London with authority to repeal every act touching the colonies since 1763, to renounce taxation and to offer seats at Westminster, but not to concede an American Parliament, and Congress would not treat with it while British troops held Philadelphia. In 1778 Congress therefore refused both offers: independence from Paris and half-measures from London.

The principal French contribution was naval. The French navy, under commanders including the Comte d’Estaing, obliged the Royal Navy to disperse across the Atlantic, the West Indies, and home waters. The large Franco-American land campaign that Lafayette urged on Versailles did not occur, the American war having ended before an expeditionary force under the Comte de Rochambeau could be committed. The defence of the Caribbean sugar colonies, which weighed heavily in British strategic calculations, further reduced the force available for the mainland.

Spain entered in June 1779 and pursued its own objectives. In the Gulf, Bernardo de Gálvez conducted a successful campaign up the Mississippi and along the coast, taking Baton Rouge, Mobile, and Pensacola, which established the basis for Spain’s recovery of Florida. The Great Siege of Gibraltar, Spain’s principal effort, failed, and Gibraltar remained British. Britain’s war with France and Spain did not end at Boston: it continued at sea, in the Gulf and before Gibraltar until a separate European peace was signed at Versailles in 1783. Spain concluded it with Florida but without the fortress it had chiefly sought.

The frontier and the Native nations

Fighting on the frontier was severe and was not resolved by the settlement. The Iroquois Confederacy, which had maintained a position of neutrality, divided: most of its nations supported the Crown, which had attempted through the Proclamation line to restrain settlement, while the Oneida and Tuscarora supported the colonists. The Mohawk leader Joseph Brant commanded Crown-allied forces with considerable effect.

In 1779, in the same year as the Peace of Boston, a Continental expedition under General Sullivan advanced through Iroquois territory, destroying towns, crops, and orchards in a campaign intended to end the military capacity of the Crown’s Native allies. The Boston settlement addressed the constitutional position of the colonists and made no provision for the Native nations, whose lands were subsequently taken by the Realm the settlement created.

Casualties and conditions

Approximately twenty-five thousand Americans died in the war, the majority from disease rather than in action; smallpox and camp fever caused more deaths than combat. Washington’s decision to inoculate the army against smallpox is generally credited with preserving the Continental force through several campaigns. British, German, and allied losses were comparable. The war was the most costly event in lives that the continent had then experienced.

Prisoners suffered disproportionately. Several thousand American prisoners died aboard prison hulks moored in New York harbour, of neglect, malnutrition, and disease; deaths in the hulks exceeded those in any engagement of the war. On the home front, women managed farms, businesses, and household economies in the absence of men and accompanied the armies in support roles. Abigail Adams’s request that her husband “remember the ladies” in any new frame of government was among the claims the founding settlement did not address.

British politics and the fall of the North ministry

The war was decided politically in London as much as militarily in America. The ministry of Lord North, which had conducted the coercive policy, was undermined by the cost of the war, the entry of France, and a growing parliamentary conviction that the conflict could not be won. Spain’s entry in June 1779 completed the case against it, and before the session ended in early July the ministry fell on a defeat in the Commons on the war. Office passed to those who had opposed the war: the Marquess of Rockingham formed the ministry, lasting from 1779 to 1782, that concluded the settlement, with the support of the followers of the Earl of Chatham, who had died in 1778. Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox, who had argued for conciliation throughout, were prominent in securing it.

George III accepted the settlement only after four years of war, the loss of his ministry, and the exhaustion of the coercive policy, and he accepted it without changing his mind. Rather than accept a ministry pledged to end the war, he drafted a message abdicating in favour of the Prince of Wales, then sixteen, and never sent it; the draft lay among his papers and was seen by nobody until long after his death. He signed the Charter as one of three parties to it rather than as a sovereign imposing terms on subjects, an arrangement from which the modern shared Crown developed. In Britain the outcome weakened the King’s claim to personal rule and strengthened the reforming Whigs, contributing to Britain’s own constitutional development.

The peace of Boston

Negotiations opened as the North ministry fell and the incoming moderates sought terms, and as Congress, exhausted and near bankruptcy, moved toward the same conclusion. The first approach was British: on the new ministry’s orders, Sir Henry Clinton wrote to Washington under a flag of truce proposing a cessation of arms, and Boston, where both armies were present and neither fought, was the obvious place to agree one. Neither party formally sued for peace. The armistice was signed at Boston, in the Old State House, on 19 October 1779, by George Washington for the Continental forces and Sir Henry Clinton, the British commander-in-chief, for the Crown.

The Peace of Boston was an armistice and framework rather than a final treaty. It ended hostilities, set out the principles on which a permanent settlement would be built, and provided for British forces to withdraw to coastal garrisons and to Canada pending agreement. The Crown was neither expelled nor renounced. The anniversary of the armistice is observed as Boston Day on 19 October, a solemn commemoration of the war dead, distinct from Charter Day. A bell rung at Boston to mark the peace is preserved as a founding relic.

The settlement rested on six principles, set out at Boston and enacted by the Charter of 1783:

1. An American Parliament under the Crown, seated in America and competent over American affairs. This was the principal demand of the Grievances.
2. No taxation without representation. Only the American Parliament might tax America, and Westminster renounced the claim.
3. Free trade. The imperial trade monopoly was ended and America obtained the right to trade with all nations.
4. The west opened. The Proclamation line of 1763 was reversed and the trans-Appalachian west opened to American settlement and government.
5. A general amnesty. No prosecutions for rebellion or for loyalty, and no reprisals by either party.
6. The Crown retained and the remaining questions deferred. The Crown kept reserved powers, principally foreign affairs and common defence, while American self-government was otherwise complete. Slavery and other unresolved questions were deliberately set aside in order to secure agreement; the Charter carried that omission until the Civil War.

Settlement and the Charter of 1783

The armistice was followed by the four-year Philadelphia Negotiations. The Continental Congress administered a provisional peace while symbolic British garrisons remained in several ports, and the three parties, Crown, Parliament, and Congress, negotiated the permanent instrument. The American commissioners were Benjamin Franklin, who chaired the commission and later became the Realm’s first Prime Minister, John Adams, and John Jay. James Madison was the principal constitutional drafter. The constitutional design work that a later convention would ordinarily have performed was done in these four years, and the Realm accordingly dates its constitution to the settlement.

The Charter was ratified colony by colony. Rhode Island and North Carolina were the last to ratify, the former protective of its independence and the latter wary of a distant central authority. The name United Kingdom of America was adopted at the Charter; during the war the colonies had been styled the United Colonies.

The completed Charter of Union of the American Colonies was adopted by the final Philadelphia plenary on 21 June 1783 and signed at Boston, in the same hall as the Peace of Boston, on 4 July 1783. George Washington had resigned his military commission at the Peace on 19 October 1779 and retired to Mount Vernon; he returned to public office at the Charter ceremony, when he was separately commissioned first Governor-General. Congress had rapidly demobilised the Continental Army after the Peace, retaining a small caretaker force under Nathanael Greene. Soldiers remained owed substantial arrears of pay, a serious political grievance that was contained without an attempted coup or general mutiny. Loyalist emigration occurred on a limited scale, chiefly northward to Canada and the Maritimes and to Britain, but there was no mass exodus, since the Crown was retained and no proscription followed; most Loyalists remained.

Enslaved people had come into the British lines by the thousand during the war, with no promise from anyone. The army took them as labourers, pioneers and servants, and nothing in law protected them. When most of the garrisons left in 1780, Clinton’s officers took those who asked north to Canada and the Maritimes, without asking London, and the owners’ claims for them became one of the questions the settlement deferred.

Legacy and commemoration

The Four-Year War is the only conflict the United Kingdom of America has fought against its own sovereign, and the only one its official record enters without a victor. It produced the shared Crown, established a durable suspicion of standing armies alongside the citizen-soldier tradition, and fixed the thirteen founding colonies as the core to which the continental union was later added.

The Realm observes two anniversaries arising from the war. Boston Day, on 19 October, commemorates the armistice and the war dead. Charter Day, on 4 July, marks the signing of the Charter; there is no Independence Day, the Fourth being associated with the Charter and with the Grievances of 1776. The principal national memorial stands at Boston, where the war began, the armistice was signed, and the Charter was sealed. Two images dominate its depiction in art: Washington’s crossing of the Delaware and the signing at Boston. Yankee Doodle, originally a British song mocking the colonists, was adopted as a patriotic air, and the phrase the shot heard round the world remains the conventional description of the opening engagement.

Historians continue to dispute the character of the war, and the names applied to it reflect that dispute. Independence was a live option: it was argued for by Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense circulated widely, and by Richard Henry Lee and Samuel Adams in Congress, and it was defeated rather than never raised. Patrick Henry, an early advocate of separation, later accepted the Charter settlement.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Eli Wheeler, a Massachusetts soldier and artilleryman, for service in the New York and Philadelphia campaigns and return to civilian life
• The Declaration of American Grievances, the founding statement of claim of 1776 and the war’s negotiating text
• The Philadelphia Negotiations, the four-year diplomatic and constitutional congress that completed the Peace
• The Charter of Union of the American Colonies, the instrument of 1783 that completed the settlement and constitutes the Realm
• The Dominion Era, the seventy-five years the war opens, in which the settlement it produced was turned into a sovereign realm without anything being declared
• The Register Timeline, for the Founding Crisis era in sequence
• The United Kingdom of Great Britain, the other principal party to the war and the settlement
• France, which intervened in 1778
• The First Great War and The Second Great War, the Realm’s later major conflicts