British forces under Benedict Arnold reached Richmond in January, 1781
Source: Leventhal Map Collection, Boston Public Library, Skirmish at Richmond Jan. 5th. 1781
British forces under Benedict Arnold reached Richmond in January, 1781
Source: Leventhal Map Collection, Boston Public Library, Skirmish at Richmond Jan. 5th. 1781
Between 1775-1783, 13 colonies rebelled against Great Britain and successfully fought a war that enabled the creation of the United States of America. Virginians played a leading role in both the political and military components of the American Revolution. The state was largely free of British forces between 1776-1780, and became a major source of supplies and troops. The lead mines on the New River were expanded, and with forced labor supplied bullets to the Continental Army and state forces.
At the first Continental Congress in 1774, the delegates from Massachusetts (the most aggressive colony challenging royal authority) intentionally pushed for Virginia delegates to have the most prominent role. Peyton Randolph, Speaker of the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, was elected to preside over the first meeting on the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Unhappy British Americans were pressing at the time for resolution, not revolution. There was still a chance for King George III and Parliament to settle differences with the 12 colonies who sent delegates to Philadelphia in 1774.
In 1775 George Washington was chosen to be the commander of the Continental Army. In 1776, Richard Henry Lee introduced the resolution in the Continental Congress calling for the colonies to declare independence from Great Britain.
Virginians in the Continental Congress played a leading role, but General George Washington ended up as the "indispensable man." He managed to organize a scattered group of militia into a Continental Army. He keep a military force in the field despite political rivalries among the colonies/states, poorly trained and poorly-equipped troops, inadequate funding by the Continental Congress to pay soldiers and acquire supplies, and numerous defeats by more-professional troops from Great Britain and what today is Germany. He negotiated conflicting agendas of the members of the Continental Congress and officials in evolving state governments, managed the egos of officers and soldiers so most remained committed to the war effort, and personally faced down at least one attempted mutiny in 1782.
Military success was not guaranteed. Many times it looked like the American army would collapse a soldiers returned home as their enlistments expired or simply deserted. One key general chose to betray the new country and help the British capture the key fortress at West Point, while others demonstrated a lack of competence. While in camp at Valley Forge in December 1777, Washington wrote that because of the inadequate amount of food and clothing:1
Throughout the war, Washington established the pattern of civilian control over the military. He made decisions, and changed some, based on the authority of civilian leaders in the Continental Congress. After the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, he resigned his commission at a time when he could have established control over the new nation as a form of dictator or substitute monarch. George III supposedly said that his resignation would make Washington "the greatest man in the world."2
the British commissioners who negotiated the 1783 Treaty of Paris declined to show up for their portrait
Source: Maryland State House, American Commissioners of the Preliminary Peace Negotiations with Great Britain (by Benjamin West, unfinished in 1783)
Suppression of loyalists was effective in 1775-1776. The land and personal property of outspoken loyalists were seized, including all of Lord Dunmore's assets that he could not take with him when he fled Williamsburg in June 1775. Norfolk, the center of loyalist support, was totally destroyed in January 1776. The rebels/patriots forced Governor Dunmore and the British forces to sail out of the Chesapeake Bay in August 1776. Troops and supplies were then sent from Virginia to support the Continental Army; Virginia served primarily as a supply base until General Charles Conrwallis invaded in 1780.
The number and significance of battles fought in Virginia during the American Revolution were relatively few. The defeat of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781 is justifiably famous because it was critical to convincing King George III and Parliament to stop fighting.
The most important impact of the American Revolution on Virginia families was the number of men who were killed or wounded, or who died from disease while in a military unit. The war led to independence from Great Britain for the citizens of Virginia. Some of the non-citizens also found freedom - though they had to leave Virginia.
Wherever British troops marched, enslaved people took the opportunity to escape. Royal Navy raids on plantations in Tidewater also created opportunities to flee to freedom. In many cases, the raiders were guided to places with livestock to seize by those who had escaped. In the process, the guides helped their families and others to join them on British ships. Many of the enslaved escapees ended up succumbing to smallpox, typhus, and other diseases, but some ended up leaving Virginia with British forces between 1776-1783.
Thousands of troops marching across Virginia, accompanied by fleeing slaves and other camp followers, left a trail of destruction. At the very start of the conflict Norfolk, the largest town in the colony, was burned to the ground. The shipyard at Gosport on the Elizabeth River and a new Virginia Navy shipyard built on the Chickahominy River were also burned. Plantations from the Chesapeake Bay to the Blue Ridge were raided, with the destruction of livestock and crops, fences, farm equipment, and houses. Public buildings in the capital of Richmond were destroyed, as were military facilities such as the barracks at Chesterfield Court House and the Westham Armory upstream of Richmond.
Long before the end of the war, royal rule had been eliminated. Virginia was an independent state, in a loose confederation with 12 others, starting in 1776.
Threat of British attack forced the shift of the state capital from Williamsburg to Richmond in 1780. The British army led by now-British General Benedict Arnold then torched the public buildings in Richmond. Norfolk and Yorktown were destroyed during the war. So were plantations in Tidewater within reach of Navy raiders, such as William Brent's house on Aquia Creek, but George Washington's Mount Vernon was spared. The Governor's Palace in Williamsburg burned, by arson or accident, at the end of 1781.
Virginia's biggest industry, agriculture, was impacted during the American Revolution. On a small scale, individual farms in the Piedmont on the route of Cornwallis' army in 1781 were looted. On a larger scale. most acres that had grown tobacco for export before the war were converted to growing crops for food and fiber. The Royal Navy's control of the seas made shipping tobacco too hazardous, while Scottish merchants were viewed as as dangerous loyalists and forced to leave in 1776.
The demographic shift of the population westward continued even during the war, and settlers willing to move deep into the backcountry remained vulnerable to Native American raids. The military successes of George Rogers Clark led to Great Britain ceding land stretching westward to the Mississippi River, but the original occupants had not been displaced. Following the Treaty of Paris, the new United States government tried the same techniques as the British. It sought to constrain settlement of western lands in order to minimize warfare with the tribes.
The institution of slavery remained intact in 1783. Philosophical arguments about fighting for American liberty did not extend to freeing the enslaved people owned by white Virginians. Even Lord Dunmore never planned to emancipate all of the enslaved. He desired to raise an army by promising freedom to those who had been enslaved by the rebelling Virginians, while protecting the "property" of loyalists.
White Virginians reacted strongly to Governor Dunmore's Emancipation Proclamation. It raised fears of a general uprising of the 40% of the population held in bondage, causing whites to become radicalized and support independence. Most of the enslaved people who fled to the British and were recaptured were returned to their masters, or forced to work in the lead mines of Fincastle County.
Almost all revolutions transform societies and re-allocate power and wealth from the initial elite to one or more groups at the end of fighting. However, the gentry in Virginia retained control throughout the war. The wealthy landowners (and slaveowners) kept populist leaders such as Patrick Henry under control; there was no uprising of the landless and small farmers as occurred during Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. In 1783 the political, economic, and social power remained with the same class as at the start of the revolution.
The 1776 constitution created representation to accompany taxation. The new form of government restructured the General Assembly and minimized the authority of the governor. The electorate remained restricted to while, male property owners. Those who could vote continued to select from the wealthy elite in each county to serve as delegates and state senators, while the state legislature itself chose the governor.
To gain support for the revolution, the elite did grant religious freedoms to Baptists, Presbyterians, Catholics, and other religious minorities. The General Assembly eliminated the mandatory tax used to fund salaries for Church of England ministers. Most of them moved to England early in the war, along with Scottish merchants. Without ministers or support from members of the vestry, most of whom were unwilling to consider the king as the head of their church, the power of the state-established church waned.
With the signing of the 1783 Treaty of Paris, land companies lost the opportunity to survey and sell the acreage they had been granted prior to the revolution. Virginia ceded its claim to the Northwest Territory to the new national government, abandoning claims to the Pittsburgh area. New settlers would acquire ownership from the Confederation Congress and then the Federal government established in 1789, except for military reserves established first in what became the states of Kentucky and Ohio. Those acres were dedicated to fulfilling land bounties promised to military veterans due to their service.
Virginia did re-open its land office in 1779. While it ceded the Northwest Territory to the national government and supported Kentucky becoming a separate state, Virginia officials retained control of land stretching west to the Ohio River until the creation of West Virginia in 1863.
Source: American Battlefield Trust, The Revolutionary War in the North: Animated Battle Map
Source: American Battlefield Trust, The Revolutionary War in the South: Animated Battle Map
French support was essential to the success of the American Revolution. George Washington and other American generals won few military battles. Washington's Continental Army was forced out of New York City in 1776 and Philadelphia in 1777. The largest surrender of the rebelling colonists occurred in 1780, when General Benjamin Lincoln was besieged in Charles Town. The Virginia Line of the Continental Army ended up as prisoners of the British.
General Nathaniel Greene, who was forced out of South Carolina and North Carolina until he could use the Dan River in Virginia as a defensive barrier, summarized the tactics of the Continental Army:3
French troops, guns, and ships provided the essential support needed to achieve military success. The entry of the French, and later the Spanish and Dutch, transformed the war in North America into a worldwide conflict. The British Navy was forced to disperse its ships to places as far away as the Indian Ocean. The longest battle was far away from North America, the 1779-1783 siege at Gibraltar. The attack by the French and Spanish there in September 1782 was also the largest battle of the war.4
General Henry Clinton in New York had to reduce his army and send reinforcements to the Caribbean, in order to protect the more-valuable sugar islands. Clinton abandoned Philadelphia in 1778 and Newport (Rhode Island) in 1779, concentrating his troops in New York to prevent George Washington from capturing that city. General Charles Cornwallis was forced to rely upon loyalists in his failed efforts to conquer and hold onto South Carolina and North Carolina; there were not enough Regulars to expand his army.
French money, distributed as partial compensation for back pay, was key to uplifting morale of George Washington's troops around New York before they started south to Yorktown. The siege there depended upon the compte de Rochambeau's artillery.
Without the French fleet led by Admiral François-Joseph-Paul, comte de Grasse, the British fleet from New York would have been able to evacuate or reinforce Cornwallis in September 1781. The Battle of Yorktown was won at sea at the Battle of the Capes by the French ships before the first cannon was fired at the land fortifications occupied by Cornwallis's troops.
The persistence of the soldiers in the Continental Army and Navy, plus various state forces, was the most important factor in convincing the British Parliament and King George III that the war was un-winnable. There were not enough loyalists in the 13 states, not even in Georgia and South Carolina, to restore royal control. The British could capture territory, but could retain control of only a few cities along the Atlantic Ocean coastline and a few forts deep in the backcountry.
Public support for independence, and the willingnesas of soldiers and sailors to continue the fight, determined the final military outcome of the American Revolution. The political result was a new United States of America in which the central government exerted little control, a debt which could not be repaid, and with deep-seated conflicts between allied states over control of western lands.
Virginians played a leading role in creating the new nation after the fighting ended. What Great Britain recognized as an independent nation in 1783 was a weak confederacy of 13 separate nation states. The Articles of Confederation finally were discarded and replaced with a new US Constitution in 1789. After eight years of leadership by an "indispensable man," George Washington, in 1796 there was finally a united nation which could be governed effectively by elected leaders.
the burgesses initially used economic pressure to forces changes in British policy, and continued to socialize with Governor Dunmore even after he dissolved the House of Burgesses in May 1774
Source: Virginia Chronicle, Virginia Gazette (May 26, 1774, p.3)