One of those things “everybody knows” is that the October 1781 surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown marked “the end” of the American Revolution.
Well, Yorktown certainly marked the point where Parliament and the British public said, “Your Majesty, enough!” We were going to be a country, but what sort of country was very much in doubt. Would it include the original 13 colonies? Including their western land claims? The portion we actually held? (The British still occupied Georgia, most southern cities, and New York City.) Nothing said we would get everything except Spanish Florida out to the Mississippi River.
To get that, the Americans needed to evict British forces from the south while keeping an eye on the still powerful British army in Manhattan. (Even after the surrender at Yorktown, the British still had more than 25,000 troops in North America.)
In 1782, General Anthony Wayne was given a small force and sent to deal with the British occupying Georgia. A little further north, Nathanael Greene’s army finished liberating the Carolinas. Wilmington, NC, was evacuated a month after Yorktown, a long round of partisan warfare cleared Redcoats and sympathizers from the interior, and finally the British left Charleston.
War west of the Appalachians intensified, with the British supporting raids by Indians in Kentucky and Tennessee. After the disastrous Battle of Blue Licks (Kentucky, August 1782), where many settlers were killed, Daniel Boone and George Rogers Clark led a punitive expedition that ended British support – and solidified the U.S. claim to the land west of the Appalachians.
The army that didn’t have to fight was probably more challenging than the military campaigns. Washington had to keep the main army, which hadn’t been paid or supplied properly for years and now had no enemy to fight, from either vanishing – which might cause the English to resume the war – or marching on Congress to demand their pay – which could have set the precedent that we’re a country where the military dictates to the civilians. In perhaps his finest moment, at Newburgh, NY, on March 15, 1783, Washington stared down a movement among some of his officers to go from asking Congress for back pay to demanding it. The so-called “Newburgh Conspiracy” represented one of the most dangerous moments in our young country’s history, but we survived this threat.
Winning the wars on the periphery and keeping the main British army bottled up in New York City gave America’s negotiators – led by Ben Franklin – a strong bargaining position. And Franklin’s team conducted a brilliant negotiation that secured vast territorial concessions, fishing access off Newfoundland and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and free navigation of the Mississippi River. In September 1783, the Treaty of Paris formally ended the war and granted the United States their independence – and a position among the powers of the world.
