Hi, I'm David Bercot, and tonight we're gonna be talking about why America won the American Revolution. During the Middle Ages, there was a practice known as trial by combat. If someone accused you of a serious crime and the evidence against you wasn't overwhelming, then your guilt or innocence was decided by combat. You fought your opponent by jousting or some other method. And if you won, that meant you were innocent and went free. If you were defeated, it proved you were guilty.
The reasoning behind trial by combat was that surely God was on the side of the person who was in the right. So if you won, well, that meant God was on your side, that you were innocent. Well, today we would scoff at such a superstitious notion. Because you win a duel, that means you're innocent? Ridiculous. However, strangely, many Christians today fall into that same type of medieval superstitious thinking when it comes to the American Revolution.
Because America won that war, well, to them, that means that God was on the side of America. And America is God's favored nation. Well, you know, that was exactly the same kind of reasoning the Muslims used. And their conquest of the Christian Middle East and Christian North Africa during the early Middle Ages. Today, we think of the Middle East as being Muslim and North Africa as being Muslim countries. But in the fourth and fifth centuries, those were Christian nations. Perhaps I should say Christian territory.
They were part of the Christian Roman Empire. When I use the term Christian territories or the Christian Roman Empire, I'm of course referring to an empire where Christianity was the state religion and where nearly all of the inhabitants were professing Christians. As I've discussed in some of the previous messages, there is actually no such thing as a Christian nation because the kingdom of God is not of this world. You can't marry God's kingdom to an earthly kingdom.
Yet the Muslim armies were virtually unstoppable in their conquest, and Christian territory after Christian territory fell to their armies. So God was obviously on the side of the Muslims. And as I mentioned, Muslims still control those countries today. Talking about countries like Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, and you can go on. That had all been Christian territory at one time. Muslims not only conquered that territory, but the Christians were never able to take it back.
So then, again, let me ask you, does that mean God is on the side of the Muslims? Well, we would say, of course not. Victory in war doesn't prove God is on your side. Unless, of course, our armies are victorious, and then it proves that God is on our side. It's pretty poor logic. Obviously, nothing happens anywhere on Earth without God's passive will. But because God allows something to happen, it doesn't mean He approves it.
That is, unless you want to say that God has approved of every murder, every torture, every theft, every injustice, assault, every crime, every massacre that has ever occurred in human history. You're ready to say, " Yes, God approved of every one of those. " Okay, fine. All I can say is you have a very strange God, not this God I read about in the scriptures. So let's not reason like people did in the Middle Ages. Obviously, God permitted the Americans to win the American Revolution.
But the fact that He allowed it proves absolutely nothing. As we've already discussed in the previous message, the colonists were breaking Express New Testament commandments in refusing to pay their taxes and in taking up arms against their lawful rulers. And it's important that we understand that it didn't take a miracle for the Americans to win the American Revolution. Perhaps it would have taken a miracle for the British to win. I don't know.
Certainly if the Americans had made too many serious blunders, they might have lost it. But as long as the Americans didn't give the war away through mistakes, it's not clear that Britain could ever have won, even if they had conducted a flawless campaign. And they certainly did not conduct a flawless campaign. So tonight we're going to be looking at the 10 main reasons why the colonists won the American Revolution.
The number one reason why the Americans won the Revolution was because of the help that they received from France. From the very beginning, when war against Britain was being contemplated, the Americans counted on being able to get aid from France. After all, just 10 years earlier, France had been defeated by the British in the French and Indian War, and France was eager to get its revenge and to unseat Britain as the sole world power.
But Americans didn't just leave this matter of French intervention to chance or to God's intervention. No, right at the outset of the war, they sent the best ambassador possible to France to win their intervention. And that man was Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin was the most brilliant man in America. He was not only intellectual, but he had an enormous amount of just common horse sense. Plus, he was a very skillful and wise diplomat.
In addition to that, he was a hero in France before he ever set foot on French soil because of his scientific discoveries and writings. They all knew about Benjamin Franklin. In fact, he created quite a stir in Paris when he came over there. Well, almost immediately, before France ever openly declared war on Britain, Franklin was able to negotiate a secret treaty with them by which the French began surreptitiously sending arms and money to the colonies to help them in their fight.
Meanwhile, while Franklin was negotiating with France to get them to enter the war openly, John Jay was negotiating with Spain to try to get aid from them or to get them to enter the war also. Another American diplomat was negotiating with the rulers of the Netherlands to get them to help the cause of the Americans. Well, after the decisive Battle of Saratoga in 1777, the French entered a formal treaty with the 13 states, declared war on England, and began sending troops and ships to America.
Perhaps as importantly, they also brought experienced French military commanders over here. And it was the French intervention that virtually assured an American victory. For example, one of the major British victories before 1777 had been the capture of Philadelphia. They had captured New York, and then they had captured Philadelphia, holding two of the most important American ports. However, once the French entered the war, well, the British learned that the French fleet was shortly going to arrive in America.
And they realized that the French fleet could blockade the Delaware River and have them locked up in Philadelphia, cut off from supplies and reinforcements. So they were forced with having to abandon Philadelphia after having gone through all of the trouble of capturing it. They ended up turning around and retreating. Well, seeing that now the tide of the war was certainly on the American side, Spain and then the Netherlands both declared war on Great Britain.
Spain's entry was particularly important because it had armies and fleets in South America and also in Louisiana, not that far away from the 13 colonies. What this meant was that England now had a world war on its hands. Its shipping was open to attack everywhere in the world because the Netherlands had a powerful navy and so did the Spanish. And they had colonies all around the world. So British supply ships were not safe anywhere. British merchant ships weren't safe.
They had already been being raided by American ships. Now they had the Spanish and the Netherlands to worry about. So Britain now had to defend its many far-flung colonies in Africa and the Far East. And they had to keep a sufficient army at home to protect Britain from invasion from either the Netherlands or France, which were just across the English Channel. This made it impossible for Britain to commit the troops, the ships, and the arms that would be necessary to win the war in America.
As we all remember from American history, the final decisive battle of the American Revolution was Yorktown. But this crushing victory would have never happened without the French. When Cornwallis retreated to the peninsula where Yorktown is situated, he wasn't in any grave danger because he assumed the British Navy would be able to come up the Chesapeake Bay and evacuate his army across the bay.
However, at the last moment, the French fleet defeated the British in a small skirmish, and they took control of the Chesapeake Bay. They stood there with 37 battleships. The British Army under Cornwallis consisted of only 8, 700 men, and quickly they were surrounded by an army of 11,000 continental soldiers, and the French had at least 29,000 soldiers and sailors. So the British were hopelessly outnumbered, completely cut off from retreat.
And then when the French brought in their heavy artillery and started bombarding them, the situation was hopeless. But the interesting thing is at Yorktown, Frenchmen outnumbered Americans about three to one. Again, that victory would have never happened without the French. And that was the victory that ended up sealing the American victory. And it was that victory that ended up causing Britain to lose interest in the war.
The war didn't end immediately with the victory at Yorktown, but there were no more major battles after that. And at home, the British people were tired of the war, and negotiations were underway to make peace with the former colonies. The second reason why the colonies won the revolution was because of the divided British government and divided British public opinion about the war.
To a large degree, the very battle that had been going on in the pre-war colonies during the period, say between 1765 and 1775, pitting the revolutionaries against the loyalists, well, you had the same thing going on in Great Britain between the Whigs and the Tories. Let me just quickly review with you a few points of English history concerning their monarchy to lay the background. Back in the 1600s, Charles I was king.
We talked about him in an earlier message concerning the Puritan Revolution or the English Civil War. Charles I had been a champion of divine right of kings, and he wanted to be an absolute monarch. He thought that's what the Bible required. Of course, he and his armies were defeated in the English Civil War. He was beheaded. And for a while, Cromwell and Parliament became the ruling power in England. Eventually, Cromwell himself became it without Parliament.
Well, after Cromwell's death, Parliament invited Charles II, his son, to come back and take the throne. But it was with the understanding that he was not to behave as his father. He was still the sovereign, but Parliament now had a good bit more power than it had before. Well, then after he died and his brother James II took the throne, he was a Roman Catholic. And Parliament decided they did not want a Roman Catholic ruling England.
And so they invited William of Orange and his wife, Mary, and Mary was one of the persons in the line of succession of the Stuarts, the same family as King James and Charles, that family. Parliament invited him to invade, I'll put that in quotation marks, England and take the throne, which he did. There was never any actual battle. It was a bloodless revolution, and it's known in English history as the Glorious Revolution.
Well, as a result of the Glorious Revolution, Parliament became a key force in British government in partnership with the King. In some ways, Parliament was supreme because they're the one who had invited the king to come in, and thereafter, they were the one who decided who would become king or queen. Well, a few decades later, in 1714, Queen Anne, one of the last of the Stuart family heirs, she passed away, and all of her successors were Roman Catholic. And again, Parliament did not want a Roman Catholic ruler.
So they went way down the line of succession. You know, so many of the European kings and queens were related to each other. You could find someone of the nobility somewhere in Europe who would be related to the monarch of some other country. Well, they went down, I think he was at the 58th level. In other words, skipping about 58 different people who were higher up in the line of succession, Parliament chose George of the House of Hanover in Germany to become King of England, and he became George I.
He was a Protestant. All of the other ones ahead of him were Roman Catholics. Well, a political party known as the Tories felt that the Stuarts who were closer in the line of succession should be the rulers even if they were Roman Catholic. A political party known as the Whigs favored King George, and they ultimately won out. And in their political battles over the decades, the Tories tended to be the ones who sided with the King and his authority and the Whigs with Parliament and Parliament's authority.
Well, after George I came to the throne, Parliament indeed became the governing body of England. Now the king was more than a figurehead, to be sure, but Britain was now ruled largely by a cabinet and a prime minister, and Parliament was the one who selected the Prime Minister. He acted in the king's name and on the king's behalf, but the real power during George I and George II was parliament.
Neither one of those kings seemed to take that much interest in ruling England, and they both knew that they had been way down the line of succession, that the only reason that they were king was because of Parliament. However, when George III came to the throne, he felt like this wasn't right. He felt he had an obligation to the English people and an obligation before God to be a real king. Now, he had no desire to go back to the absolute monarchism of Charles I or the Queen Elizabeth and those kind of people.
But he did want to be a real king, to be the one making the policies, choosing his own prime minister, and that sort of thing. And this set up a battle between the Tories and the Whigs that was played out in Parliament. So when the American Revolution broke out, here you had the colonists fighting against the king. And then in England, you had the Whigs fighting against the King and the Tories.
And in fact, before the Revolution broke out, the Whigs tended to favor the colonies who objected to the taxes being imposed on them, and the Tories tended to be in favor of the taxes, as was King George III. And that was the reason why Parliament would pass a tax. Colonists would revolt and have protests, things like that, and then the tax would be taken back.
A lot of that was happening because the tax would be passed under a Tory rulership, and then the Tories would fall out of power, the Whigs would come in power, and they would repeal the tax. Well, of course, what it was telling America was, " Hey, if we just raise a ruckus, Parliament's gonna always back down. " And they did until finally the colonies pushed them too far with the Boston Tea Party.
Now, the Boston Tea Party temporarily united both the Whigs and the Tories and the public opinion in England against the colonies, that something had to be done. But then when the actual war started, England was again divided in its opinions about the war. Many English people had close relatives here in America, and they didn't like the thought of going to war against them.
And since George III was one of the leading persons promoting the war against the colonies, well, the Whigs decided, " Hey, I don't know that we want to support this war. " Because if George III wins and forces the colonies to obey him like he felt they should, well, the next step is he's going to make all of us in Britain do the same thing. So the Whigs tended to oppose the war because they were opposed to George III having more power.
They didn't want to lose the power that Parliament had gained during the first two Georges. At first, the English middle class were in favor of the war, but not if the war was going to be a long, drawn out affair and if it was going to cost them a lot of money. You have to remember what brought all of this up in the first place is that the British were groaning under the heavy tax burden that the French and Indian war, also known as the Seven Years War, had put upon them.
So they weren't in the mood at all for any increase in taxes in order to finance another war. So the American Revolution has often been called England's Vietnam. Because you basically had the same situation in England during the Revolution that you had in America during the Vietnam War. You had a divided public and a divided government about the war. No one wanted a prolonged war. This meant that the enemy knew that all they had to do to win was to outlast the other side.
They didn't have to have a crushing military victory. If they just stayed in it long enough, the other side would quit because there would be so much pressure at home to bring our troops home. Like Vietnam, no one in England wanted to pay more taxes to pay for a foreign war that was unpopular. As a student of history, I've come to the conclusion that such a war is unwinnable in today's society.
It worked when you had absolute rulers who didn't have to care about public opinion, like during the wars in the Middle Ages and in ancient times, things like that. It didn't matter if the war was popular or not. The Monarch ruled and that was it. But Britain in 1775 was on the verge of becoming a modern nation in today's sense. They already had a parliament that was at least equal in power to the king, if not greater in power. And the 13 colonies were already basically a modern group of nations.
And in such a situation where public opinion and where the elected representatives are heavily divided, I think it's foolish for any government to try to wage a war because you're almost certain that you're going to lose. And that's why it was a virtual certainty that Britain was going to lose the war with the colonies. A third reason why the Americans won their revolution was because it was primarily fought as a guerrilla war.
If the Revolution had been fought as a conventional war, like the wars in Europe or the American Civil War, well, England would have easily won. I say that because they won virtually every conventional battle in which they engaged the Continental Army. That is where the two sides drew up stationary positions and then fought each other. An example would be the Battle of Long Island, where the Americans were soundly defeated and their entire army was nearly captured.
But George Washington quickly realized that his inexperienced troops were no match for the highly trained, experienced, and well-supplied British army. So he wisely tried to avoid those types of battles. Instead, he played a cat and mouse game with the British armies. He spent most of the war just simply staying out of their reach. In fact, after the revolution was over, Thomas Paine, who wrote the pamphlet Common Sense, accused Washington of having done nothing throughout the war. That wasn't entirely true.
Washington certainly did engage the British in a number of battles. However, he purposely avoided a head-to-head confrontation with the British Army, or to put himself in a position where his army could be captured. So what his critics thought was doing nothing was really a matter of shrewd tactics.
And due to the fact that the war wasn't particularly popular in England, Washington realized that all he had to do to win was to keep the British from capturing the Continental Army and then to simply outlast the British until they either gave up or until foreign countries like France came in. And in the end, both things happened. Now he did have to win enough battles here and there to keep the revolutionary spirits alive and to convince France and Spain that the Americans had a chance of winning.
But he did not ultimately have to defeat the entire British army. Those American victories that we learned about in school were primarily guerrilla type of victories. For example, the battles at Concord and Ticonderoga. At Ticonderoga, the British there didn't even know there was a war going on, so it was pretty easy to capture it. Concord, you had the situation of farmers firing muskets and rifles at the British troops marching down the road. And the Americans were behind walls and places like that.
A very different kind of war than what the British troops were used to. At Trenton, the famous battle where Washington crossed the Delaware and surprised the Hessians. This wasn't a regular battle. This was in the winter. The British army, as was typical in Europe, during winter, you didn't fight. You found a good place to spend the winter, and then you enjoyed life perhaps in the winter, particularly the officers would.
And then in spring, you would start a campaign again to carry on spring, summer, and fall, and then in winter, you'd take a vacation. And so this was a Hessian outpost, hardly expecting a battle, particularly on Christmas Day. And as a result, Washington was able to capture them. Other skirmishes were battles against the British supply units far away from the main force of the British.
One of the few conventional battles that Washington won was Yorktown, but as we talked about before, this victory was due to the French fleet, the French Army, and the French artillery. The Americans played an important part, but they would never have been able to defeat the British there without the French intervention. Furthermore, the Americans were used to this type of guerrilla warfare because they had been fighting the Indians for over a century, and this is how the Indians had fought.
So it was normal combat for the Americans. It was totally different for the British and the Hessians. In fact, under the European notion of warfare, the way the Americans fought was considered cheating. I mean, in Europe, you didn't just hide behind walls and shoot at the enemy as they marched by. No, you drew up lines. Sometimes you'd even agree when the actual fighting would take place. Once again, as I've said, the American Revolution was essentially England's Vietnam.
As the Americans learn in Vietnam, the fact that you're a more populous country, that you have a superior army means very little in a guerrilla warfare. A fourth reason why the British lost the revolution is because they could win battles easily enough, but they couldn't hold territory once they won the battles. We mentioned Washington's strategy, which was just to hold on until the British lost interest in the war, or the French joined the war, or both of those things. What was the British strategy?
Well, unfortunately for the British, their initial strategy was based on faulty information on a misconception of the political state of the colonies. The British had been told that the vast majority of the colonists were loyal to England. So they began the war thinking that all they had to do was to defeat the American rebels in a series of battles, hopefully capture some of the ringleaders.
They thought that each time the British would win a battle, then that area would be safe for the loyalists who they thought would be the majority. The loyalists would then be back in control, and the British Army could move to another place, drive the rebels from there and keep driving them until the entire area was controlled by the American loyalists. But as I said, their information was faulty.
The vast majority of the Americans, at least when the war started, were in favor of the revolution, or whether they liked it or not, they fought on the side of the revolutionaries. So here was England faced with trying to seize control of a country that was vastly larger than England. England couldn't possibly commit enough troops to America to hold this vast area. As I said, it depended upon the loyalists being able to do that once the British would win a victory.
But not only were the loyalists a minority, they weren't the ones who were ready to have a war to begin with. They were counting on the British Army for protection. They certainly weren't prepared to then try to hold vast amounts of territories against their fellow Americans once the British moved on. So from the very beginning, the British strategy was undoable. The British could easily capture a city, particularly the port cities, because the British Navy was able to go in and take any port basically at will.
So the British easily captured New York. They fairly easily captured Philadelphia. But did that mean they controlled that whole area from New York City to Philadelphia? No, it didn't mean that. They established outposts to try to hold these areas like they did at Trenton. The outpost would then be subject to a sneak attack. This situation makes me think very much of the war in which presently the United States is engaged in in Afghanistan. At the beginning of the war, in just a matter of months, the U.S.
forces defeated the Taliban, and they took over the major cities of Afghanistan. And at that time, I thought that was the end of that war. But now eight years later, the war is still going on. Why? Because the American army can't possibly hold all of the territory between the various cities. Like in Vietnam, the Americans are fighting a guerrilla war where the fact that they have a superior army, that advantage is largely neutralized.
The Americans can win a particular area or segment of Afghanistan only once they leave to have the Taliban come right back in and recapture it. A similar thing happened in the American Revolution. The British Army under Cornwallis, they had the idea that they would go through the south and reconquer the South. And again, the loyalists would be there to keep it once the British Army had advanced. And Cornwallis won quite a number of battles. But he couldn't hold the territory that he conquered.
And as soon as he moved on to another state, well, the colonists won back most of the territory that he had gained. Similarly, as I mentioned, the Americans had no answer for the British Navy. They did win a few naval battles, but the British could bring their fleet in and attack virtually any American port, and they did. In fact, at one time or another, the British captured just about every major American port along the eastern seaboard.
But Britain didn't have the resources to blockade the entire eastern seaboard of the United States. So American ships could still get in and bring in supplies that were needed, and ships could go out, which they did, and they didn't attack the British navies most of the time. They attacked British merchant shipping.
And of course, this made the war even more unpopular in Britain when merchants then were taking great losses because their ships were being attacked by American privateers who were basically legalized pirates. They could go and attack a British ship and keep most of the booty from it, but it was done under the authority of the American government. The fifth reason we want to look at is that the Americans were fighting on their home turf. And this gave the Americans a huge advantage.
For one thing, they were used to the climate here. The British and the Hessians lost more men to sickness and disease than they did to battle casualties. The northern winters in America were much more harsh than what the English soldiers had experienced in England. And in America, the summers were much hotter than they were in England, particularly in the south and in the middle colonies. In contrast, the Americans were fighting in their own climate.
And when they were in a particular region, like say New England, most of the soldiers fighting there were soldiers from New England. They're fighting in the south. Most of the soldiers were southerners for the Americans. Because it was on their home turf, the Americans knew the territory. They knew the terrain on which they were fighting. And this particularly aided them in their guerrilla warfare. They knew where to hide, where to get out of reach, areas to avoid in order to not be trapped.
You know, I recently read an article from a God and Country organization that portrayed the American victory in the Revolution as simply miraculous. Because as it said, Great Britain was far more populous than the colonies. It was wealthier, and it had the best army and the best navy in the entire world. And all of those factors are true. And certainly if the Americans had tried to invade England and the battle was fought in England, not in America, well, the Americans wouldn't have had a chance.
And if they had done that, if they had invaded England and conquered it, then I would be the first to say that was truly a miracle. But as the United States learned in Vietnam, it doesn't matter if you are a more populous country, if you have the mightiest army and navy in the world. And if you're vastly wealthier than the country you're fighting. None of those things matter if you're fighting a guerrilla war on their turf.
And the situation for the British in the American Revolution was far worse than it was for the Americans in Vietnam. I mean, the leaders in Washington, D.C., during the Vietnam War, well, they could instantly communicate with their field commanders in Vietnam. Getting supplies to the American Army in Vietnam was just a matter of days. But in the American Revolution, it took weeks, sometimes months, for orders from England to reach the British commanders in America.
Because the war was being planned in England, decisions were made there, and then it would have to travel by ship across the ocean and reach the British commander over here. Or the Americans could instantly make a decision and carry it out. The British had to bring in their troops and supply them from all the way across the ocean. Nowadays, that's not too horrible a hurdle with ships that move quickly and with airplanes. But back then, the trip across the ocean took maybe six weeks.
It could sometimes take several months. Invariably, a number of the troops would die during the voyage. Many of them would get sick and would arrive in the United States in poor health. And the British could never count on quick reinforcements because the reinforcements would be often coming all the way from Great Britain. Furthermore, even though Great Britain was far more populous than the colonies, in most battles the British did not outnumber the Americans.
As we mentioned earlier, in the decisive Battle of Yorktown, the British were outnumbered three to one or more. The Battle of Saratoga is a perfect example of the huge disadvantage the British were at because they were fighting on American soil. To begin with, the idea and the orders had come over from England, being made by people who perhaps had never even set foot in America, who understood little about the realities of fighting over here.
But the directive was that three different British armies under different generals were supposed to take various routes and then they would all meet together in southern New York. But what happened was two of the generals either misunderstood the orders or decided to ignore them or gave them no more than a half-hearted attempt. The one general who decided to follow through with it was General Burgoyne, who was leading an army down from Canada.
And what happened to his army demonstrates what would happen to any British army if it tried to go very far inland into the American wilderness? Burgoyne came south from Canada, but he found it very difficult to maintain a supply train over such a long distance. So before long, he was in the thick of the American wilderness, the Americans knowing every move that he made, and he knowing very little about where the Americans were.
He was on unfamiliar ground, and he soon was facing a serious supply problem, needing food, horses, and materials like that. Well, at one point, he sent out a unit to round up some food and horses and other things at the small town of Bennington, which he understood was only lightly defended. But when the unit got there, they were suddenly surprised by the Americans who outnumbered them two to one. A battle ensued, and eventually the British were forced to surrender.
So Burgoyne lost a portion of his army, and more importantly, he got no supplies. And he didn't dare to send out any more units to forage for supplies because he realized the same thing was going to happen. Well, finally, he met the main American force at Saratoga. And here was this large army that was every bit as large as his, that had suddenly just materialized out of nowhere, at least based on the intelligence that he had. There wasn't supposed to be an American army there.
And he was badly defeated, and that ended up being the turning point of the war. And then the French came in after that, and then later, Spain and the Netherlands. It was pretty much a lost cause for the British after Saratoga. If there had ever been a chance to win the war, and perhaps there really never was, unless Washington had tried to fight a conventional war against the British, then I think the British would have probably won.
Up to this point, we've looked at five reasons why the Americans won the war, none of them requiring a miracle on God's part. In fact, just the first two or three reasons were sufficient to mean that America was almost certain to win the revolution. Britain would have needed a miracle, and God did not choose to give them one. The final five reasons we'll be looking at are basically icing on the cake. Without them, the Americans would still have won, but they did make the victory that much easier.
We're not going to be spending much time on each of these final five reasons. I'll state them, explain them a bit, and then we're going to just move on. So let's start with reason number six. And that is the degree of motivation between the two sides. Even before the war started, the extremely effective propaganda campaign that Samuel Adams and others carried out led most Americans to believe that if they didn't stand up to the British with arms, the British would reduce them to slaves.
It was rather absurd, but that theme was echoed again and again throughout the colonies. The same propaganda had led them to believe that the British soldiers were bloodthirsty men who would kill without hesitation and would assault the American women. Second, once the Americans did take up arms against the British, the American soldiers in militia had good reason to believe that their homes, their farms, their businesses would be taken from them if they lost the war. The leaders might even be hanged or imprisoned.
So the American soldiers were highly motivated out of fear of what would happen if they were to lose. In contrast, the English soldiers had virtually nothing to lose. Whether they won or lost the war, nothing would change in the lives of most of the British soldiers. And the same would be true of the Hessians. They would return home to England and continue forward with a military career or else return to civilian life.
They certainly had a degree of pride at stake, and they felt they were acting on behalf of law and order in putting down a rebellion. But they didn't have the degree of dogged desperation the Americans had. And of course the German soldiers had even less. Unlike what our history books told us, they were not mercenaries. Most of them were either conscripts or men who had joined the army of their German state. And now they were ordered to go over to America to fight the colonists there.
They had only a fuzzy idea of what it was all about. Now England was paying Germany for their service, but they themselves were not mercenaries. And of course, King George was of German ancestry, so the two royal houses were closely connected. The difference in the degree of motivation was even greater at the leadership level. Men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and so many other American leaders would likely lose their sizable estates if Britain had won. They themselves might have been hanged.
So not only did they have the fear motivation, they also had some positive motivation, both them and the men who fought under them. Because they had exciting ideas of a new type of country, a country without kings and without class distinctions, a country where men would truly be free. In contrast, the best British generals had declined to serve in the war. They didn't want to fight against America. So all of the British generals who participated in the American Revolution were second rate.
They were not the first choices of Parliament. Worse than that, they were poorly motivated. In fact, in the middle of the war, you had three British generals over here who detested each other, and they each had a differing strategy of what should be done. They often didn't come to one another's aid or cooperate with each other. Maybe they realized the situation was hopeless, so they didn't care.
But they were nothing like the British military leaders who later defeated Napoleon, or the British generals who had defeated the French in the French and Indian War. Reason number seven. Britain was fighting a limited war because they didn't want to alienate the American population. This again brings back echoes of Vietnam and Afghanistan. In World War II, America and its allies gave no consideration whatsoever about alienating the local population.
It was assumed that the entire German and Japanese nations were at war, which was, I think, essentially a correct assumption. So the Americans did things like firebombing Dresden and Tokyo. They were not overly concerned about how many civilian deaths these bombings might cause. They dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The general strategy was that the more the civilians suffered, the more those countries would lose their will to fight.
Now please understand, I'm not applauding that, I'm just stating that was what was done. That was the policy. But in a war like the present war going on in Afghanistan, every time a civilian is killed, even accidentally by United States troops or by a drone from the air, it strengthens the Taliban. The people get upset, they blame the Americans. So America has to be so careful in its tactics to avoid alienating the local population.
And that makes for a war that's extremely difficult to implement and very difficult to win. It's not impossible to win a limited war, but it's certainly very difficult. Well you see, that was the position England was in, or at least it thought it was in. Because it entered the war with the incorrect notion that most of the population was loyal to Britain, the English made a decision at the very beginning to fight only a limited war.
Let's not alienate the local population who are on our side unless we do something that turned them against us. So during the American Revolution, there was nothing on the part of the British like Sherman's March to the sea or America's bombing of Germany and Japan in World War II. There were civilian casualties, and each time they happened, it did stir people up against the British, but they did their best to try to keep civilian casualties to a minimum.
But even if they weren't concerned about alienating the population, even if they figured, OK, they're all rebels, public opinion back in Britain would not have allowed them to carry on a scorched earth campaign. Now, if they were carrying it on against the American Indians or the Indians in East Asia or against an African nation, yeah, the British people probably wouldn't have minded.
But since these were essentially fellow Britons, no, they had to be very careful on what they did, or it would turn public opinion in Britain against the war. Reason number eight, why the Americans won the revolution. Because of the colonial draft and the retaliation against loyalists. Now going through school, I had received the impression that the American Revolution was fought totally with volunteers. But that's not true.
Now the Continental Army was made up of volunteers, but virtually every colony instituted a military draft at the beginning of the war. The typical statute required all free males from age, say, 16 to 55. I mean, it carried a huge range of the male population. They were required to participate in military drills and to serve three months of the year in the state militia. Now to be sure, these militiamen weren't super soldiers. They certainly couldn't go head-to-head against the British regulars in a regular fight.
But what it did mean was that you had about a half a million armed men in the 13 colonies, part of whom could suddenly materialize in any given situation when the need warranted it. Both armies foraged often for supplies by going to farms and taking grain or taking horses, things like that. But when the British did it, they never knew if they were going to get surprised by a group of militiamen who might decimate them.
Because even though the militiamen weren't trained disciplined soldiers, they knew how to fire a rifle accurately. And many of those men lived on the frontier. They were undisciplined as troops, but they were tough fighters. The battle at King's Mountain was one example where the Frontiersmen soundly defeated the British. Now since these draft laws in the 13 colonies applied to all free males, a man couldn't excuse himself by saying, look, I'm not in favor of the war. I'm loyal to Britain.
To say that would have got you immediately jailed and perhaps killed. Whether they liked it or not, the male inhabitants were forced to be on the side of the revolution or else they had to sneak away and try to find British protection. So even if ideologically at the beginning of the war, most of the Americans were neutral, which perhaps was the case, you weren't allowed to sit on the fence. You had to join the revolution or face being put in jail or having to flee and losing your house and land and all of that.
Again, this gave the colonies a big edge against the British. Advantage number nine that the Americans had was their superior military intelligence and spy network. Now this certainly wasn't a decisive factor, but it was a huge help to the American side that George Washington had developed an intricate network of spies. You see, the British assumed that a person was a loyalist unless he showed himself or herself differently.
And this made it easy for both men and women, whether they were highborn or servants, to find out what the British were up to most of the time. The highborn spies would be at the various parties the British officers had. I mean, war was conducted a little bit differently in those days than it is now. And as I mentioned earlier, particularly in the winter, the British would hole up in a city somewhere, and they would have balls and entertainment and things like that.
And so they intermingled with the colonists, assuming they were all of their friends. So it wasn't hard for men and women there to overhear conversations, to ask questions, to do things like that, and then get the report back to Washington. Likewise, servants. They were everywhere in society at that time, at least among the upper class, which would be the British officers. They had servants waiting on them.
And again, they just assumed the servants didn't know much of anything, didn't care, or that they were on the British side. And so servants often acted as spies. To my knowledge, neither the Continental Army nor the state militias were ever caught in a surprise attack by the British. But the reverse did happen to the British and the Hessians. Washington's crossing of the Delaware and surprising the Hessian army there is just one example. Washington hadn't just made a naked gamble.
He had had plenty of intelligence as to what the Hessians were up to, what their customary habits were, et cetera. He was quite certain when he crossed the Delaware that he would catch them by surprise. And the final reason we're going to look at tonight, number 10, was the control of the press by the revolutionaries. Two things that immediately went out the window at the beginning of the Revolutionary War were freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
Throughout the war, the Revolutionary Party controlled the presses in America, except in the few cities that were under British occupation. And this played a huge role in both keeping up the colonial morale and whipping up anger against the British. I mean, it's interesting to read the colonial newspaper articles about the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
I mean, you would get the impression that these were just bloodthirsty savages, the British soldiers, who just came in killing and murdering, and these poor farmers had to protect themselves and shot back in self-defense. And that made Americans everywhere afraid the British might show up in their little village and start killing people at random.
And all throughout the war, any civilians who were killed by the British in the course of the war, any atrocities committed by the British or Hessian troops, whether they were real or imagined, oh, these were heralded in all the newspapers to just whip up more animosity against the British. Along the same vein, every victory of the Americans, even ones that were not militarily significant, like the victory over the Hessians at Trenton, oh, these were trumpeted up in the papers as being huge triumphs.
In contrast, in England, the population was hearing both sides of what was happening in the war. In each report that reached the British press of English casualties, battles lost, et cetera. Will this just help to dampen the morale in Britain and stir up the significant party who were against the war? So in the colonies, people were generally hearing only the side that would make them want to fight. In England, they were generally hearing both sides of the story.
Now, I don't mean to imply that the American newspapers never reported on the American defeats. Oh, I mean, they did that. I just mean that the news was always heavily slanted to help keep the revolution going, and it was a big advantage that the Americans had. Well, in conclusion, was it a miracle that Americans defeated the British and won their independence? No, not in the least.
To be sure, like every victorious army in probably every war that's ever been fought in human history, the Americans thanked God for their victory and felt their victory proved that God was on their side. Just as the British had felt when they defeated the French 20 years before that, just as the Muslims felt when they defeated the professing Christian countries of the Middle East and North Africa 1,500 years previously. But I know whose side God really is on. He's always on the side of the children of the kingdom.
But that doesn't carry with it any promises that we kingdom Christians are going to materially prosper or have any power in this world. Jesus didn't have any, and a servant is not above his master.