american revolution research articles

• American Revolution Research Resources Online

The following online databases are valuable resources for the study of the American Revolution, the Society of the Cincinnati and other subjects related to our library’s holdings.

Open access research resources.

The following databases are open access and available outside of the library.

American Archives

This database reproduces the contents of American Archives,  a nine-volume collection of materials—chiefly manuscripts—documenting the events of 1775-1776. American Archives  was created by Peter Force (1790-1868), a printer, publisher, public official and pioneering archivist who amassed an enormous personal collection of materials relating to the colonial and Revolutionary origins of the United States. Force published some of the material documenting the colonial period in his four-volume Tracts and Other Papers, Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, published between 1836 and 1846. His nine-volume American Archives  was published between 1837 and 1853. In 1867, Congress purchased the entire Force collection—over 150,000 items—for $100,000. It has since been one of the most important collections in the Library of Congress. While the published edition American Archives  is widely held by research libraries, its massive scale and complicated organization makes it difficult to use. Recognizing the value of the material and the difficulty involved in using the printed version, Professor Alan Kulikoff conceived an effort to digitize American Archives , which was first funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities in 2001. The project was undertaken by the Northern Illinois University Digital Library, which now maintains the database.

Go to American Archives

Chronicling America

Chronicling America provides access to millions of searchable digitized newspaper pages published between 1789 and 1963. Chronicling America is a project of the National Digital Newspaper Program, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, which is engaged in a long-term effort to develop a comprehensive searchable online database of U.S. newspapers. Since 2005, the National Endowment for the Humanities has provided grant support to participating institutions in forty-eight states as well as Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands to digitize newspapers for the National Digital Newspaper Program. Despite the prodigious number of pages already digitized and available online, the project has millions of pages to go. The database is maintained and hosted by the Library of Congress.

Go to Chronicling America

Colonial North America at Harvard University

Colonial North America at Harvard University is an initiative to digitize and provide online access to approximately 650,000 pages, including all the known archival and manuscript materials in Harvard’s several libraries. These materials provide important insights on the American Revolution, and include documents that illuminate education, trade, finance, law, science, medicine, religion, family affairs and social life, women, American Indians, slavery, food and agriculture as well as politics. Many of the documents include drawings, sketches, maps, and other illustrations.

Go to the Colonial North America at Harvard

Founders Online

Created by the National Historic Publications and Records Commission, an agency of the National Archives, in partnership with the University of Virginia Press, Founders Online provides electronic access to over 185,000 documents transcribed and edited by the modern founding fathers editorial projects, including the papers of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, and the Adams family. These papers have been, or are being, published in letterpress documentary editions distinguished for their comprehensive scholarly presentation of manuscripts held by hundreds of repositories and private collections.  Unlike editions of the papers of the leading figures of the American Revolution published in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, these documentary editions include incoming as well as outgoing correspondence. Founders Online includes the annotation associated with the documents published in the letterpress editions. The Franklin, Hamilton, and Jay papers editoril projects are completed.  The Papers of George Washington is nearly complete, having only the papers from the last stages of the Revolutionary War to edit and publish.  The Jefferson, Madison, and Adams Family Papers editorial projects are ongoing. Founders Online includes working transcripts of documents not yet published by these projects.

Go to Founders Online

Naval Documents of the American Revolution

The Naval History and Heritage Command and its predecessor, the Naval History Division of the United States Navy, began publication of the printed edition of Naval Documents of the American Revolution in 1964. To date, thirteen volumes have been published, carrying the naval history of the American Revolution from December 1, 1774, through to August 15, 1778.  Unlike the documentary editions included in the Founders Online database, which are published by university presses, the printed volumes of Naval Documents of the American Revolution are published by the Government Printing Office. The Naval History and Heritage Command website provides downloadable PDFs of the thirteen volumes published to date. The volumes include correspondence, petitions, ship’s logs, muster rolls, orders, official reports, diary excerpts, and newspaper accounts on naval affairs documenting the American Revolution in the North American and European theaters of operation.

Go to Naval Documents of the American Revolution 

Rev War ’75 Index of Orderly Books

Orderly books were among the among the most important records kept by eighteenth-century armies and are fundamental to the study of the Revolutionary War.  The private website RevWar75.com, created by John K. Robertson and Bob McDonald, provides a cross-referenced index of some 950 surviving orderly books of the Continental Army.

Go to the Rev War ’75 Orderly Book Index

Southern Campaigns Revolutionary War Pension Statements & Rosters

Pension applications and the associated documentation are among the richest resources for studying the experience of Continental soldiers and sailors and militiamen who served in the Revolutionary War. Applications for pension benefits provided for by the Pension Act of 1818 and the Pension Act of 1832 and their various amendments and related legislation are preserved in the National Archives, while applications for state benefits and records of state bonus claims are preserved in some state archives.  Revwarapps.org is an extraordinary private website providing transcriptions and basic annotation for thousands of pension applications of veterans who served in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia (including the frontier regions out of which West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama were later formed). The transcription and annotation is the work of Will Graves and C. Leon Harris, to whom historians, students of the American Revolution in the South, and genealogists are all deeply indebted.

Go to the Southern Campaigns Pension Statements & Rosters

On-site Research Resources

The following databases are available on-site in the reading room.

Early American Newspapers

Early American Newspapers is a website constructed and maintained by Readex, a corporation founded in the 1940s as Readex Microprint Corporation to take advantage of advances in photographic technology that made it possible to reduce images of single pages to a tiny fraction of their original size and print them on cards, each holding hundreds of pages.  In 1955 Readex formed a partnership with the American Antiquarian Society to produce a microcard edition of all of the works in Charles Evans American Bibliography , a nearly comprehensive list of American imprints from 1639 to 1800. Readex followed this with a microcard edition of the works listed in the Shaw-Shoemaker bibliography of American imprints from 1801 to 1819, and Early American Newspapers, 1690-1876.  The dissemination of these microcard editions, which were acquired by research libraries along with the specialized opaque projectors to read them, transformed American Revolution research, providing access to rare materials to any researcher with access to a major university or special collections library that purchased them. Early American Newspapers has been digitized and made available online, includes more than 340,000 fully searchable issues from over 730 historical American newspapers.

Learn more about Early American Newspapers, Series 1, 1690-1876

Fold3, a website owned by Ancestry.com, provides access to millions of pages of military service records, including pension applications submitted by Revolutionary War veterans, which are among the richest sources available for studying the experience of Continental soldiers and sailors and militiamen who served in the Revolutionary War.  The largest body of Revolutionary War material available on Fold3 is a digitized version of National Archives National Archives microfilm publication M804, Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty-Land Warrant Application Files, which are a part of Record Group 15: Records of the Veterans Administration. The digitized microfilm images are indexed, and the navigational tools make reaching the files of individual veterans almost effortless. Once there, the researcher has to read the documents, mostly early nineteenth-century manuscripts, in the files. The texts are not individually catalogued or transcribed. The database is nonetheless a remarkable advance over going to the National Archives or a federal depository library to search for service records buried in reels of microfilm.

Learn more about Fold3  

Created in 1995 by a former president of Princeton University, JSTOR (short for journal storage) was originally intended to overcome the problem faced by research libraries of acquiring, cataloging, and storing the proliferating number of academic journals. JSTOR’s answer was to digitize them and make them available to subscribing institutions over the internet. JSTOR now archives and indexes over 1,900 journal titles containing millions of academic journal articles.  JSTOR is still only accessible to subscribers—chiefly institutions—but individuals can purchase access to a specific number of journal articles as well.  Titles of particular value for research on the American Revolution include the William and Mary Quarterly and the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography .

Learn more about JSTOR

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Setting the stage: The two armies

• Conflict begins in Massachusetts
• Paul Revere’s ride and the Battles of Lexington and Concord
• The Siege of Boston and the Battle of Bunker Hill
• Washington takes command
• The battle for New York
• A British general surrenders, and the French prepare for war
• After a hungry winter at Valley Forge
• Setbacks in the North
• Final campaigns in the South and the surrender of Cornwallis
• Early engagements and privateers
• French intervention and the decisive action at Virginia Capes
• The end of the war and the terms of the Peace of Paris (1783)
• How did the American colonies win the war?

What was the American Revolution?

How did the american revolution begin, what were the major causes of the american revolution, which countries fought on the side of the colonies during the american revolution, how was the american revolution a civil war.

American Revolution

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• Table Of Contents

The American Revolution —also called the U.S. War of Independence—was the insurrection fought between 1775 and 1783 through which 13 of Great Britain ’s North American colonies threw off British rule to establish the sovereign United States of America, founded with the Declaration of Independence in 1776. British attempts to assert greater control over colonial affairs after a long period of salutary neglect , including the imposition of unpopular taxes, had contributed to growing estrangement between the crown and a large and influential segment of colonists who ultimately saw armed rebellion as their only recourse.

On the ground, fighting in the American Revolution began with the skirmishes between British regulars and American provincials on April 19, 1775 , first at Lexington , where a British force of 700 faced 77 local minutemen , and then at Concord , where an American counterforce of 320 to 400 sent the British scurrying. The British had come to Concord to seize the military stores of the colonists, who had been forewarned of the raid through efficient lines of communication—including the ride of Paul Revere , which is celebrated with poetic license in Longfellow ’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1861).  

The American Revolution was principally caused by colonial opposition to British attempts to impose greater control over the colonies and to make them repay the crown for its defense of them during the French and Indian War (1754–63). Britain did this primarily by imposing a series of deeply unpopular laws and taxes, including the Sugar Act (1764), the Stamp Act (1765), and the so-called Intolerable Acts (1774).

Until early in 1778, the American Revolution was a civil war within the British Empire , but it became an international war as France (in 1778) and Spain (in 1779) joined the colonies against Britain. The Netherlands , which was engaged in its own war with Britain, provided financial support for the Americans as well as official recognition of their independence. The French navy in particular played a key role in bringing about the British surrender at Yorktown , which effectively ended the war.

In the early stages of the rebellion by the American colonists, most of them still saw themselves as English subjects who were being denied their rights as such. “Taxation without representation is tyranny,” James Otis reportedly said in protest of the lack of colonial representation in Parliament . What made the American Revolution look most like a civil war , though, was the reality that about one-third of the colonists, known as loyalists (or Tories), continued to support and fought on the side of the crown.

The American Revolution was an insurrection carried out by 13 of Great Britain ’s North American colonies that began in 1775 and ended with a peace treaty in 1783. The colonies won political independence and went on to form the United States of America . The war followed more than a decade of growing estrangement between the British crown and a large and influential segment of its North American colonies that was caused by British attempts to assert greater control over colonial affairs after having long adhered to a policy of salutary neglect .

Until early in 1778 the conflict was a civil war within the British Empire , but afterward it became an international war as France (in 1778) and Spain (in 1779) joined the colonies against Britain . Meanwhile, the Netherlands , which provided both official recognition of the United States and financial support for it, was engaged in its own war against Britain ( see Anglo-Dutch Wars ). From the beginning, sea power was vital in determining the course of the war, lending to British strategy a flexibility that helped compensate for the comparatively small numbers of troops sent to America and ultimately enabling the French to help bring about the final British surrender at Yorktown in 1781.

The American colonies fought the war on land with essentially two types of organization: the Continental (national) Army and the state militias . The total number of the former provided by quotas from the states throughout the conflict was 231,771 soldiers, and the militias totaled 164,087. At any given time, however, the American forces seldom numbered over 20,000; in 1781 there were only about 29,000 insurgents under arms throughout the country. The war was therefore one fought by small field armies. Militias, poorly disciplined and with elected officers, were summoned for periods usually not exceeding three months. The terms of Continental Army service were only gradually increased from one to three years, and not even bounties and the offer of land kept the army up to strength. Reasons for the difficulty in maintaining an adequate Continental force included the colonists’ traditional antipathy toward regular armies, the objections of farmers to being away from their fields, the competition of the states with the Continental Congress to keep men in the militia , and the wretched and uncertain pay in a period of inflation .

By contrast, the British army was a reliable steady force of professionals. Since it numbered only about 42,000, heavy recruiting programs were introduced. Many of the enlisted men were farm boys, as were most of the Americans, while others came from cities where they had been unable to find work. Still others joined the army to escape fines or imprisonment. The great majority became efficient soldiers as a result of sound training and ferocious discipline . The officers were drawn largely from the gentry and the aristocracy and obtained their commissions and promotions by purchase. Though they received no formal training, they were not so dependent on a book knowledge of military tactics as were many of the Americans. British generals, however, tended toward a lack of imagination and initiative , while those who demonstrated such qualities often were rash.

Because troops were few and conscription unknown, the British government, following a traditional policy, purchased about 30,000 troops from various German princes. The Lensgreve (landgrave) of Hesse furnished approximately three-fifths of that total. Few acts by the crown roused so much antagonism in America as that use of foreign mercenaries .

European journal of American studies

Home Electronic supplements Book reviews 2014 Reviews 2014-3 Robert S. Allison, The American R...

Robert S. Allison, The American Revolution: A Concise History

1 Allison’s well-written account of the American Revolution traces the essential transition of the United States from a group of isolated colonies to a new nation born in the aftermath of a successful revolution and guided by the principles of social and political liberalism. Although this volume does not represent the first attempt toward an analysis of the causes and consequences of the American Revolution, its significance lies in Allison’s ability to combine broad coverage of the events of the Revolution with targeted commentary. In this book, Allison sets out to provide an understanding of the political decisions of the revolutionary period that were intended, on the one hand, to knit thirteen separate colonies together into a new nation and, on the other, to redefine the United States’ position in international affairs.

2 The book’s opening chapter “The Revolution’s Origins” sets the stage for an exploration of the varying causes that led to a gradual transformation in the mentality of the North American colonists and the realization of their collective potential. Allison draws the distinct profile of each one of the thirteen British colonies underlining their geographical locations as a powerful factor determining their commercial opportunities and agricultural development. With different economic systems, social structures, and with almost non-existent transportation network joining them, the colonies prospered simultaneously but independently, while in some cases there were intense conflicts over land and control of Indian trade. Even the imminent threat posed by the encroaching French could not smooth over their differences and particularities. Allison carefully delineates the changing attitude of the colonies toward mother-England as well as the emergence of a collective political consciousness due to Parliament’s arbitrary attempts to regulate colonial trade and impose a series of revenue laws. He also succeeds in encapsulating the complexities of that historical moment into a framework of political resistance and ideological redefinition of the colonies’ status and role in relation to the British Empire. Allison points to the concerted effort on the part of the printed media of the time to mobilize all citizens across the colonies regardless of class, gender, and race “to unite against the empire that sought to govern them” (15).

3 In chapters two and three, “Rebellion in the Colonies” and “Independence,” Allison continues his interpretive account of the spreading of a “rebellious contagion” in the colonies caused by the Parliament’s “intolerable” acts and facilitated by a new rhetoric that justified the necessity of armed conflict. Allison’s detailed discussion of military events and political decisions is consistently highlighted by the changing “political dynamic in America” (27) bringing the reader’s attention to the arduous process of denouncing the old regime and instituting a republican form of government. The “self-evident” truths of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence opened the way for the establishment of a constitutional order that safeguarded liberty and the people’s right to rebel against unjust political authority and corrupt rulers. The Declaration not only framed the political identity of the newly-born nation but also set forth an ideology of human rights and liberty that was meant to give the American revolutionary cause a universal resonance. However, as Allison pointedly argues, the spirit of republicanism that animated the Americans’ political decisions and underlined the rhetorical promises of social regeneration concealed a number of glaring limitations especially when attempting to put theory to practice. For example, despite Abigail Adams’ entreaty to her husband to “Remember the Ladies” (30) when framing the Constitution, women were left with no political rights. The slaves were also excluded from their “inalienable rights” as human beings while property-less white males where denied the right to vote. Allison touches upon the challenge that the complex task of declaring independence posed both in terms of transforming the colonies into a nation and blurring the paradoxical nature of republicanism which, on the one hand, promoted the pursuit of individual happiness and, on the other, asserted the essential need for self-denying communal responsibility. Chapter four, “War,” provides a detailed description of the armed conflict, the American defeats and victories, the contribution of women to the war of independence, the Franco-American alliance, and the emergence of George Washington as war hero.

4 Allison closes his account of the American Revolution with a chapter entitled “Was America Different,” posing the question of whether Americans had it in their power to start the world anew, as Paine had forcefully asserted, of whether the country would be different from every other nation in the world. Allison focuses on “religious diversity and government institutions” (74) as distinct features that flourished in the process of nation-making. Both were inextricably linked to the wider tendency to reform the American political and social system based on republican principles. Fundamental to American thought was the urge to protect the people from legislative tyranny and, at the same time, ensure that the power of the people would not degenerate into anarchy, while who “we, the people” actually involved was vague and open to interpretation. The status of the slaves within the American republic remained an issue of heated debate while the Native Americans were blatantly excluded from the body politic. Although the Declaration of Independence had provided the ideological basis of the new American political thought, as the new nation was transforming itself into an industrial power, the essential inconsistencies of republicanism were difficult to conceal. Allison provides a brief analysis of the complexity of the early national politics – especially after the events of the French revolution – that soon led to the emergence of the two rival political parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, whose differing visions of the nation’s destiny were becoming increasingly vehement.

5 In conclusion, Allison’s is a recommendable book, of interest to scholars of American studies and accessible to the general but interested public. A study of the American Revolution is always timely as it offers useful insight into the core values that shaped the American political profile as well as their continued impact on the nation’s rhetorical strategies and political practices throughout the years. In my mind, Allison’s book could be used as textbook in courses on early American history and politics. The book’s brief but lucid approach to the American Revolution marks a wide space for further exploration and more in-depth research into the period’s political antagonisms, the discrepancies between the political ideology of republicanism and the exclusionary practices of the new nation, the social conflicts, and tensions.

Electronic reference

Zoe Detsi-Diamanti , “Robert S. Allison, The American Revolution: A Concise History” ,  European journal of American studies [Online], Book reviews, document 1, Online since 18 September 2014 , connection on 12 October 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/10321; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.10321

About the author

Zoe detsi-diamanti.

Assistant Professor in Early American Literature and Culture at the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

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• (Re)Considering American Studies in Greece [Full text] Article 8 Published in European journal of American studies , 1-1 | 2006

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Revolutionary War

By: History.com Editors

Updated: June 24, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2009

The Revolutionary War (1775-83), also known as the American Revolution, arose from growing tensions between residents of Great Britain’s 13 North American colonies and the colonial government, which represented the British crown.

Skirmishes between British troops and colonial militiamen in Lexington and Concord in April 1775 kicked off the armed conflict, and by the following summer, the rebels were waging a full-scale war for their independence.

France entered the American Revolution on the side of the colonists in 1778, turning what had essentially been a civil war into an international conflict. After French assistance helped the Continental Army force the British surrender at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781, the Americans had effectively won their independence, though fighting did not formally end until 1783.

Causes of the Revolutionary War

For more than a decade before the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775, tensions had been building between colonists and the British authorities.

The French and Indian War , or Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), brought new territories under the power of the crown, but the expensive conflict lead to new and unpopular taxes. Attempts by the British government to raise revenue by taxing the colonies (notably the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773) met with heated protest among many colonists, who resented their lack of representation in Parliament and demanded the same rights as other British subjects. 

Colonial resistance led to violence in 1770, when British soldiers opened fire on a mob of colonists, killing five men in what was known as the Boston Massacre . After December 1773, when a band of Bostonians altered their appearance to hide their identity boarded British ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party , an outraged Parliament passed a series of measures (known as the Intolerable, or Coercive Acts ) designed to reassert imperial authority in Massachusetts .

Did you know? Now most famous as a traitor to the American cause, General Benedict Arnold began the Revolutionary War as one of its earliest heroes, helping lead rebel forces in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775.

In response, a group of colonial delegates (including George Washington of Virginia , John and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, Patrick Henry of Virginia and John Jay of New York ) met in Philadelphia in September 1774 to give voice to their grievances against the British crown. This First Continental Congress did not go so far as to demand independence from Britain, but it denounced taxation without representation, as well as the maintenance of the British army in the colonies without their consent. It issued a declaration of the rights due every citizen, including life, liberty, property, assembly and trial by jury. The Continental Congress voted to meet again in May 1775 to consider further action, but by that time violence had already broken out. 

On the night of April 18, 1775, hundreds of British troops marched from Boston to nearby Concord, Massachusetts in order to seize an arms cache. Paul Revere and other riders sounded the alarm, and colonial militiamen began mobilizing to intercept the Redcoats. On April 19, local militiamen clashed with British soldiers in the Battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, marking the “shot heard round the world” that signified the start of the Revolutionary War. 

HISTORY Vault: The Revolution

From the roots of the rebellion to the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, explore this pivotal era in American history through sweeping cinematic recreations.

Declaring Independence (1775-76)

When the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, delegates—including new additions Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson —voted to form a Continental Army, with Washington as its commander in chief. On June 17, in the Revolution’s first major battle, colonial forces inflicted heavy casualties on the British regiment of General William Howe at Breed’s Hill in Boston. The engagement, known as the Battle of Bunker Hill , ended in British victory, but lent encouragement to the revolutionary cause. 

Throughout that fall and winter, Washington’s forces struggled to keep the British contained in Boston, but artillery captured at Fort Ticonderoga in New York helped shift the balance of that struggle in late winter. The British evacuated the city in March 1776, with Howe and his men retreating to Canada to prepare a major invasion of New York.

By June 1776, with the Revolutionary War in full swing, a growing majority of the colonists had come to favor independence from Britain. On July 4 , the Continental Congress voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence , drafted by a five-man committee including Franklin and John Adams but written mainly by Jefferson. That same month, determined to crush the rebellion, the British government sent a large fleet, along with more than 34,000 troops to New York. In August, Howe’s Redcoats routed the Continental Army on Long Island; Washington was forced to evacuate his troops from New York City by September. Pushed across the Delaware River , Washington fought back with a surprise attack in Trenton, New Jersey , on Christmas night and won another victory at Princeton to revive the rebels’ flagging hopes before making winter quarters at Morristown.

Saratoga: Revolutionary War Turning Point (1777-78)

British strategy in 1777 involved two main prongs of attack aimed at separating New England (where the rebellion enjoyed the most popular support) from the other colonies. To that end, General John Burgoyne’s army marched south from Canada toward a planned meeting with Howe’s forces on the Hudson River . Burgoyne’s men dealt a devastating loss to the Americans in July by retaking Fort Ticonderoga, while Howe decided to move his troops southward from New York to confront Washington’s army near the Chesapeake Bay. The British defeated the Americans at Brandywine Creek, Pennsylvania , on September 11 and entered Philadelphia on September 25. Washington rebounded to strike Germantown in early October before withdrawing to winter quarters near Valley Forge .

Howe’s move had left Burgoyne’s army exposed near Saratoga, New York, and the British suffered the consequences of this on September 19, when an American force under General Horatio Gates defeated them at Freeman’s Farm in the first Battle of Saratoga . After suffering another defeat on October 7 at Bemis Heights (the Second Battle of Saratoga), Burgoyne surrendered his remaining forces on October 17. The American victory Saratoga would prove to be a turning point of the American Revolution, as it prompted France (which had been secretly aiding the rebels since 1776) to enter the war openly on the American side, though it would not formally declare war on Great Britain until June 1778. The American Revolution, which had begun as a civil conflict between Britain and its colonies, had become a world war.

Stalemate in the North, Battle in the South (1778-81)

During the long, hard winter at Valley Forge, Washington’s troops benefited from the training and discipline of the Prussian military officer Baron Friedrich von Steuben (sent by the French) and the leadership of the French aristocrat Marquis de Lafayette . On June 28, 1778, as British forces under Sir Henry Clinton (who had replaced Howe as supreme commander) attempted to withdraw from Philadelphia to New York, Washington’s army attacked them near Monmouth, New Jersey. The battle effectively ended in a draw, as the Americans held their ground, but Clinton was able to get his army and supplies safely to New York. On July 8, a French fleet commanded by the Comte d’Estaing arrived off the Atlantic coast, ready to do battle with the British. A joint attack on the British at Newport, Rhode Island , in late July failed, and for the most part the war settled into a stalemate phase in the North.

The Americans suffered a number of setbacks from 1779 to 1781, including the defection of General Benedict Arnold to the British and the first serious mutinies within the Continental Army. In the South, the British occupied Georgia by early 1779 and captured Charleston, South Carolina in May 1780. British forces under Lord Charles Cornwallis then began an offensive in the region, crushing Gates’ American troops at Camden in mid-August, though the Americans scored a victory over Loyalist forces at King’s Mountain in early October. Nathanael Green replaced Gates as the American commander in the South that December. Under Green’s command, General Daniel Morgan scored a victory against a British force led by Colonel Banastre Tarleton at Cowpens, South Carolina, on January 17, 1781.

How the South Helped Win the American Revolution

Although not as iconic as those fought in the North, battles waged in the South determined the outcome of the Revolutionary War.

7 Events That Enraged Colonists and Led to the American Revolution

Colonists didn't just take up arms against the British out of the blue. A series of events escalated tensions that culminated in America's war for independence.

How the American Revolution Spurred Independence Movements Around the World

After the Revolutionary War, a series of revolutions took place throughout Europe and the Americas.

Revolutionary War Draws to a Close (1781-83)

By the fall of 1781, Greene’s American forces had managed to force Cornwallis and his men to withdraw to Virginia’s Yorktown peninsula, near where the York River empties into Chesapeake Bay. Supported by a French army commanded by General Jean Baptiste de Rochambeau, Washington moved against Yorktown with a total of around 14,000 soldiers, while a fleet of 36 French warships offshore prevented British reinforcement or evacuation. Trapped and overpowered, Cornwallis was forced to surrender his entire army on October 19. Claiming illness, the British general sent his deputy, Charles O’Hara, to surrender; after O’Hara approached Rochambeau to surrender his sword (the Frenchman deferred to Washington), Washington gave the nod to his own deputy, Benjamin Lincoln, who accepted it.

Though the movement for American independence effectively triumphed at the Battle of Yorktown , contemporary observers did not see that as the decisive victory yet. British forces remained stationed around Charleston, and the powerful main army still resided in New York. Though neither side would take decisive action over the better part of the next two years, the British removal of their troops from Charleston and Savannah in late 1782 finally pointed to the end of the conflict. British and American negotiators in Paris signed preliminary peace terms in Paris late that November, and on September 3, 1783, Great Britain formally recognized the independence of the United States in the Treaty of Paris . At the same time, Britain signed separate peace treaties with France and Spain (which had entered the conflict in 1779), bringing the American Revolution to a close after eight long years.

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Article contents

Print, the press, and the american revolution.

• Robert G. Parkinson Robert G. Parkinson Binghamton University, SUNY
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.9
• Published online: 03 September 2015

According to David Ramsay, one of the first historians of the American Revolution, “in establishing American independence, the pen and press had merit equal to that of the sword.” Because of the unstable and fragile notions of unity among the thirteen American colonies, print acted as a binding agent that mitigated the chances that the colonies would not support one another when war with Britain broke out in 1775.

Two major types of print dealt with the political process of the American Revolution: pamphlets and newspapers. Pamphlets were one of the most important conveyors of ideas during the imperial crisis. Often written by elites under pseudonyms and published by booksellers, they have long been held by historians as the lifeblood of the American Revolution. There were also three dozen newspaper printers in the American mainland colonies at the start of the Revolution, each producing a four-page issue every week. These weekly papers, or one-sheet broadsides that appeared in American cities even more frequently, were the most important communication avenue to keep colonists informed of events hundreds of miles away. Because of the structure of the newspaper business in the 18th century, the stories that appeared in each paper were “exchanged” from other papers in different cities, creating a uniform effect akin to a modern news wire. The exchange system allowed for the same story to appear across North America, and it provided the Revolutionaries with a method to shore up that fragile sense of unity. It is difficult to imagine American independence—as a popular idea let alone a possible policy decision—without understanding how print worked in colonial America in the mid-18th century.

• Common Sense
• freedom of the press
• Sons of Liberty

According to one of the first historians of the Revolution, “in establishing American independence, the pen and press had merit equal to that of the sword.” 1 Print—whether the trade in books, the number of weekly newspapers, or the mass of pamphlets, broadsides, and other imprints—increased dramatically in the middle of the 18th century, with the general trend of economic prosperity and growing cultural norms about “refinement” and “improvement.” In the 1760s, print became a contested site of imperial reform with the Stamp Act, when Parliament chose texts as the locus of the constitutional debate over the colonies’ place in the empire and their responsibility in sharing tax burdens. The Stamp Act and the colonists’ resistance politicized print—and printers—in new ways. For the remainder of the imperial crisis, print remained at the center of the colonial resistance movement, connecting disparate resistance groups to one another, and providing the most reliable communications network across the Atlantic littoral. Newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides were, indeed, the lifeblood of American resistance. Because of the unstable and fragile notions of unity among the thirteen mainland American colonies, print acted as a binding agent that mitigated the chances that the colonies would not support one another when war with Britain broke out in 1775.

Two major types of print shaped the political processes of the American Revolution: pamphlets and newspapers. Pamphlets became strategic conveyors of ideas during the imperial crisis. Often written by elites under pseudonyms, they have long been held up by historians as agents of change in and of themselves—that texts like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense or John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania , to name two of the most famous, are often seen as actors themselves, driving the resistance movement forward. There were also three dozen newspapers active on the American mainland at the start of the Revolution, each producing a four-page issue once a week. Although these papers earlier in the 18th century had focused on news from European capitals and courts, with the burgeoning imperial crisis they began to feature news from other colonies. These weekly papers were the most important communication avenue that kept colonists informed of events hundreds of miles away. It is difficult to imagine American independence—as a popular idea let alone a potential policy decision—without understanding how print worked in colonial America in the later decades of the 18th century.

As Bernard Bailyn wrote in the foreword to his 1965 book, Pamphlets of the American Revolution , there were more than four hundred pamphlets published in the colonies on the imperial controversy up through 1776, and nearly four times that number by war’s end in 1783. 2 These pamphlets varied in their theme and approach, including tracts of constitutional theory or history, sermons and orations, correspondence, literary pieces, and political debate. Bailyn originally decided to print seventy-two of these in a significant project that began with fourteen dated 1750–1765. In a two-hundred-page general introduction to what promised to be a multivolume effort, Bailyn developed an interpretation about the content of what was to follow, an analysis that he would deepen a few years later in the seminal Ideological Origins of the American Revolution ( 1967 ).

According to Bailyn, the pamphlets—“booklets consisting of a few printer’s sheets, folded in various ways so as to make various sizes and numbers of pages and sold . . . for a few pence, at most a shilling or two”—were the “most important and characteristic writing of the American Revolution.” 3 They were normally small but quite flexible in size, ranging from ten to fifty pages in length. Because of this flexibility and cheap cost, they were printed everywhere. Bailyn found them especially grouped around three moments during the controversy: the Stamp Act crisis ( 1765–1766 ), the Townshend Duties and Boston Massacre ( 1767–1770 ), and the Boston Tea Party and Parliament’s response in the Coercive Acts ( 1774 ). In them, he argued, were the most creative and powerful arguments that drove the Anglo-American controversy to war and independence. No empty vessels of propaganda or intentional deceit, the political pamphlets clarified the abstract constitutional issues and sharpened American response, according to Bailyn.

The pamphlets channeled and focused colonial resistance by framing dissent via appeals to history and political experience. The pamphleteers often invoked the lessons from the fall of the Roman republic, the political strife of the English Civil War, and the libertarian warnings from those who opposed the administration of Robert Walpole in the early 1700s. They blended the political theories from republicans stretching back to the ancient world with English writers from the 17th and 18th centuries. Together, they instructed the colonial public that political and personal liberty were in jeopardy because British imperial reformers sought to strip them of their natural rights, especially the right to consent to a government that could hear and understand them. Without representation, American colonists were political dependents who lacked any form of redress. Many of the pamphlets assumed a significant amount of knowledge of recent and ancient history, as well as sophisticated understandings of constitutional and legal relationships. The most successful, however, were those who aimed their rhetoric to a larger reading public. Tom Paine’s Common Sense , is, of course, the classic example. Paine eschewed a learned style and posture and instead embraced vernacular language and forwarded arguments drawn from more readily understood sources, especially the Bible.

Pamphlets that supported the Crown appeared within a few months of one another in late 1774 and early 1775 . From the Stamp Act in 1765 until this point, loyalists had dismissed the patriot movement as inconsequential and unpopular, viewing their street protests and constitutional arguments as, apparently, not worth the effort of refutation. Once the First Continental Congress met in September– October 1774 and, especially, after loyalists saw the wide popularity of the Continental Association (the extensive, general boycott that was to be binding in all colonies) passed by that body, they suddenly realized this effort was worthwhile after all. Pamphlets by Samuel Seabury, Thomas Chandler, and Daniel Leonard all appeared during this frenzied moment, trying to halt the wave of patriot support, but it was largely too late. Although the patriots took their efforts seriously—John Adams (writing as “Novanglus”) saw it to engage Leonard (writing as “Massachusettensis”) point-by-point in extended newspaper exchanges—the loyalists had waited too long to present their side to the colonial public.

The key political pamphlets that supported resistance from 1765 to 1776 are: James Otis, Rights of British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston, 1764 ); Richard Bland, Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies (Williamsburg, 1766 ); John Dickinson, Letters of a Farmer in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1768 ); James Warren, Oration to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 1770 (Boston, 1772 ); Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British Americans (Williamsburg, 1774 ); Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Philadelphia, 1776 ); and John Adams, Thoughts on Government (Philadelphia, 1776 ).

The key political pamphlets that opposed colonial resistance from 1765 to 1776 are: Samuel Seabury, The Congress Canvassed (New York, 1774 ); Thomas B. Chandler, A Friendly Address to All Reasonable Americans (New York, 1774 ); Daniel Leonard, Origin of the American Contest . . . by Massachusettensis (Boston, 1775 ); Charles Inglis, The Deceiver Unmasked (New York, 1776 ); and James Chalmers, Plain Truth (Philadelphia, 1776 ).

Newspapers and the American Revolution

For much of the 18th century colonial newspaper printers published content that was mostly related to the affairs of government, whether proclamations, laws, orders, or money. This was by necessity; because of weak markets, tight credit, scare supplies, poor transportation, and irregular labor, printers who did not have a connection to government contracts had a near impossible time making ends meet. 4 Most colonial printers lived very precarious economic lives. Their social status was low—they worked hard, and with their hands—but their information largely came from gentlemen. They depended on the circles of gentle folk, but were not welcome in them. 5 The columns of their usually four-page weekly newspaper issues were filled with information from England and Europe before mid-century, usually stories taken from London papers. From their newspapers colonists knew far more about the goings-on at the courts and capitals of Europe than they did about one another. Printers depended on their colleagues in other cities for news: they sent free copies of their papers across the Atlantic for the purposes of the “exchanges”—the clipping of news items from one paper and placing it in your own issue. They also depended on local gentlemen and city officials to come into their shops bearing information of public import, whether a portion of a private letter that they volunteered to be anonymously extracted for public consumption, or documents with bearing on public concern that they ordered sent to the printer for publication. Printers were not seekers but receivers of information in the late 18th century. The “exchanges,” however, acted as a powerful tool for political mobilization. Because they acted in many ways like a modern newswire, carrying the same story almost intact from city to city, the “exchanges” provided a form of simultaneity and shared political experience. The exchange system provided the members of the colonial resistance movement with a method to shore up a very inchoate and unstable sense of intercolonial unity. Crafty patriot writers understood and used the “exchange” system to great advantage to get certain key messages or images that fostered resistance out to a wide continental public to foster support they would have otherwise had difficulty building.

Reliance on government largesse shifted in the 1760s, as political items, stories, and essays about the burgeoning “imperial crisis” appeared more frequently. Starting in the 1760s the number of newspapers rose significantly, doubling between 1763 and 1775 , and then doubling again from 1775 to 1790. 6 Political engagement also led to a shift away from the traditional efforts by newspaper printers earlier in the century to keep their columns open to both sides of debates. After the Stamp Act—whether because of personal political leanings or because they thought it best to suit their market niche—printers began to abandon the ideal of neutrality to embrace or reject colonial resistance of British imperial reform. 7 A few printers, including William Goddard (Providence), William Bradford (Philadelphia), Peter Timothy (Charleston), John Holt (New York City), Benjamin Edes and John Gill (Boston) joined in the “cause” in various ways, either by becoming members of the Sons of Liberty, opening their print shops for political meetings, or publishing a wide array of stories, essays, and items that supported the cause. On the other hand, a few other printers, including James Rivington, Richard Draper, and Robert Wells, made their newspapers available for loyalists to submit essays that criticized patriot resistance efforts.

Anonymity was a key feature of publication in the late 18th century. Authors of essays that either appeared in pamphlet form or were serialized across several weekly issues of newspapers often appeared under a pseudonym to protect all involved parties: the writer, the publisher, and the concept of a “free press.” But with printers taking increasingly polarized political stances—and popular understanding of the role of newspaper printers in the burgeoning “imperial crisis” shifting—the effectiveness of the shield of pseudonyms faltered.

For example, what happened at the end of 1767 between the printers of the Boston Gazette and Boston Chronicle illuminates the increasing political pressure on newspaper publishers, and the suddenness by which a confrontation could now escalate into violence. From its opening issue that year, the Boston Chronicle , published by recent Scot emigrant John Mein and his partner John Fleeming, provoked the city’s opponents of imperial reform. Mein and Fleeming started the Chronicle with an attack on two of the patriots’ favorite British leaders, the Earl of Chatham and the Marquis of Rockingham. Naturally, the Boston radicals who paid close attention to matters of print, that is, Samuel Adams and James Otis, fought back in their dedicated organ, Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette . Under the cover of a pseudonym, Otis wrote an essay slandering Mein as a Jacobite. Soon an outraged Mein burst into the Gazette office demanding the contributor’s name, but got no satisfaction. Still fuming, a few nights later he caned his Gazette colleague John Gill on a Boston street. 8 Several weeks later, Samuel Adams, writing as “Populus,” described this clubbing not as a private affair between the two printers but instead a “Spaniard-like Attempt” to restrict press freedom. 9

Criminal charges and severe fines did not deter Mein. Nearly two years later, Mein and Fleeming sought to embarrass the Sons of Liberty once again, this time by revealing the caprice and self-interest that they thought really actuated the non-importation boycott the Sons had organized to resist the Townshend Duties. The Chronicle featured fifty-five lists of shipping manifests revealing the names of merchants who broke the non-importation agreement, including many who had actually signed the boycott. In response it was many upset Bostonians who embraced vigilantism this time. Mein and Fleeming had published the lists to suggest the boycott was really an effort to eliminate business competition on the part of merchants sympathetic to the Sons. Now they had to stuff pistols in their pockets to walk the streets of Boston. 10 In October the Boston town meeting condemned Mein as an enemy of his country, and a few days later a large crowd confronted the offending printers on King Street, producing a scuffle that left Mein bruised, Fleeming’s pistol empty, and a few dozen angry Bostonians facing British bayonets. Mein at first took shelter in the guardhouse, but, when Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson did not offer vigorous support, the truculent printer departed for England.

Evidence of a growing polarization and politicization, the clash between the Boston Gazette and Boston Chronicle was also about naming names. Mein wanted the Gazette printers to tell him who called him a Jacobite; his own paper’s revealing of the identities of importers animated the crowd and forced the Chronicle printer into exile. Anonymity was itself a transforming concept during the imperial crisis. Long a key feature of 18th-century print culture, with the republican claims of the patriots, anonymity took on a new significance in print, one that allowed for a broader inclusion of the public, and, by implication, the possibility of greater purchase by the people at large. As a rule, contributors to the newspapers shielded themselves with pseudonyms, often judiciously employed to cast themselves as public defenders (“Populus,” “Salus Populi,” “Rusticus”) or guardians of ancient liberty and virtue (“Mucius Scaevola,” “Cato,” “Nestor,” “Neoptelemus”). As one literary scholar has suggested, by adopting such identities those “guardians” were then not real , individual inhabitants of Boston or Philadelphia, with particular social interests, but universal promoters of republican liberty. 11 Analysts often point to the destruction of the concept of deference—a staple of 18th-century social structure—as a sign of the Revolution’s radicalness. The shift in the understanding of anonymity in print was a key factor in decoupling social status from political authority. That shift helped undermine deference as an organizing concept of American social and political culture.

Printers, then, mediated several fluid and rapidly changing concepts of both their professions and colonial politics before the Revolution. They were the keepers of very important political secrets. They alone knew who had submitted a manuscript for publication; only they could pierce the republican fiction of anonymity. Often, this position was precarious. As political pressure increased in the 1760s and 1770s, the impulse to throw off these veils was occasionally very strong. Printers periodically found themselves or their property in harm’s way if they refused to bow to the will of angry demands that they confess.

John Gill would not be the only one to suffer from this increasing imperative; throughout the Revolution several printers on both sides of the imperial question found themselves or their property at risk. In 1776 , when New York Packet printer Samuel Loudon dared to advertise the publication of a pamphlet that answered Tom Paine’s Common Sense and called the “scheme of Independence ruinous and delusive,” the Mechanics Committee, a radical patriot group created in 1774 out of the Sons of Liberty, summoned the printer to explain his behavior and reveal the author’s identity. 12 Loudon refused to tell the committee the Anglican rector of Trinity Church, Charles Inglis, had written the pamphlet, so six members of the committee went to his shop and, in Loudon’s words, “nailed and sealed up the printed sheets in boxes, except a few which were drying in an empty house, which they locked, and took the key with them.” 13 They warned Loudon to stop publishing the pamphlet, or else his “personal safety might be endangered.” Although he “promised to comply,” this pledge “availed nothing for my security.” Late the next night, forty men returned, broke into his office, grabbed all fifteen hundred copies of Inglis’s pamphlet, “carried them into the commons, and there burned them.” 14

The highly charged content of those publications, whether the weekly newspapers or pamphlets like The Deceiver Unmasked , also fueled partisanship. The imperial crisis witnessed what one scholar has called the advent of the “exposé” in America. 15 As printers increasingly gave space to contributors who claimed they were unmasking corruption or conspiracy, they aided in the disintegration of established concepts of what kept a press “free.” The most impassioned publications of the 1760s–1770s—Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, the chronicle of soldiers’ abuses known as the “Journal of Occurrences,” Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre, and Thomas Hutchinson’s private letters—all centered on revealing or dramatizing the government’s true aims of stripping American colonists of their liberties. There were not two sides to “truth.” Either behind pseudonyms or not, the patriot writers or artists who brought these plots to light claimed they were heroic servants of the people, informants seeking to protect an unwitting public from tyranny’s stealthy advance. This was not a debate. So framed, it was also a difficult position to counter. At the same time, the appearance of each of these “exposés” also represented a choice by the printers themselves. By giving space to the “truth”—and, by extension, to the protection of the people’s rights—they took a side that changed the older values of press freedom forever. A free or open press, they decided, did not have to allow equal space for opposing viewpoints that they characterized as endorsing lies and tyranny.

Print was an essential factor in pushing the colonists toward revolution even if it was not sufficient to cause the Revolution. Benjamin Franklin, it should not surprise, grasped perfectly the power of newspapers. “By the press we can speak to nations,” the printer-turned-politician wrote a friend in 1782. Thanks to newspapers, Franklin concluded, political leaders could not only “strike while the iron is hot” but also stoke fires by “continually striking.” 16 Those bundles of newspapers—dropped off at crossroad inns and subscribers’ rural estates in the countryside, distributed among urban taverns and gathering places in the cities, imported into the army camps—had the potential to be potent tools of revolutionary mobilization. Patriot leaders from the mid-1760s through the Treaty of Paris spent a great deal of time and, more illuminating, moneysupporting all kinds of print: subsidizing printers, aiding in paper supplies, contributing private correspondence to newspapers, ordering the publication of certain documents, treating printing presses as military contraband, sending pamphlets in diplomatic packets, arranging for illustrations for a child’s book of British atrocities. The journals of the proceedings of patriot political authorities at all levels, from local committees of safety, to state legislatures, to the Continental Congress, give evidence that they saw their actions as intertwined with printers. The working men and women attached to American print shops—the riders carrying papers to the countryside, the apprentices and slaves working the press, the journeymen assembling types, for example—were essential to the Revolution too.

A Guide to Newspapers during the American Revolution

On April 19, 1775, there were thirty-seven active newspapers in the colonies. When Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, 1781, there were thirty-five. Of those original thirty-seven papers that printed the news of Lexington and Concord, only twenty made it through the war and very few of those were able to continue publishing a paper each week. This number would ebb and flow. War exacerbated printers’ capacity to secure ready supplies of materials, especially paper. Seventeen prewar prints would expire during the fighting while eighteen new ventures were started but were also discontinued at some point. The mean number for active newspapers between 1775 and 1783 is thirty-five; the approximate number of thirty-five holds up throughout the war’s duration.

In Boston, the engagements at Lexington and Concord instantly upended the city’s newspaper production. Three prints that defended the Ministry closed that month. Patriot papers, including Benjamin Edes and John Gill’s radical Boston Gazette and Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy had to suspend publication as they fled to the countryside. On May 3, Thomas continued to print from Worcester, where he would stay throughout the remainder of the war. Edes also brought out the Boston Gazette again from Watertown on June 5. When the British evacuated Boston in March 1776 , the Boston Gazette again took up residence in the city, but the important Edes and Gill partnership had not survived the move out of Boston. John Gill started his own pro-American organ, the Continental Journal , in May. A fifth paper, Powers and Willis’s New England Chronicle became the Independent Chronicle in 1776 . In 1778 Edward Draper and John Folsom started another Boston paper, the Independent Ledger . For much of the war Boston boasted six prints. When one closed, another, like James White and Thomas Adams’s Boston Evening Post (which ran from October 1778 to March 1780 ) opened. Outside Boston, John Mycall published the Essex Journal in Newburyport from 1775 to early 1777 . In all, Massachusetts boasted of six long-lasting and important papers that supported the Revolution, with the Massachusetts Spy , Boston Gazette , and Continental Journal being the most significant.

Newspapers in Connecticut enjoyed the most stability during the war. The same four papers that contained the news of Lexington also reprinted the Treaty of Paris. Since the mid-18th century the powerful Green family dominated the colony’s print business. During the Revolution they operated the Connecticut Gazette in New London (Timothy Green) and the Connecticut Journal in New Haven (Thomas and Samuel Green). Ebenezer Watson and later George Goodwin and Barzillai Hudson ran the Green-founded Connecticut Courant in Hartford. None suffered suspensions or dislocations. The fourth, the Norwich Packet , had begun in 1773 by John Trumbull and two brothers, Alexander and James Robertson. In May 1776 , the Robertsons, who were loyalists from Scotland, went to New York, leaving Trumbull to operate the paper alone, which he did until 1802 .

If Connecticut was the land of steady print habits, the other New England provinces, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, were the opposite. Robert Fowle had published the New Hampshire Gazette in Portsmouth since his uncle had begun the business in 1756 . In 1776 , however, New Hampshire authorities suspected Fowle of counterfeiting and printing items against the “cause.” The Gazette ceased publication on January 9. A few months later Benjamin Dearborn picked up printing in Portsmouth with the Freeman’s Journal which operated until 1778 when Robert’s uncle Daniel took over and changed the name of the print back to the New Hampshire Gazette . The war’s intrusion also hampered the press in Rhode Island. John Carter, one of Franklin’s apprentices, was able to maintain his Whiggish Providence Gazette throughout the war. Solomon Southwick and the Newport Mercury were less lucky. In November 1775 , fearing an impending invasion, Southwick moved his materials out of his Newport office. A year later, when the British did occupy the city, he was forced to bury his press and types for four years. A patriot, Southwick tried to keep active by printing on a borrowed press in Attleborough and Providence in the interim, but the Newport Mercury lay dormant until January 1780 when Henry Barber carried on.

Southwick’s problems were minor compared to the experiences of New York’s printers. At the outbreak of war there were three papers in New York City: John Holt’s New York Journal , Hugh Gaine’s New York Gazette & Weekly Mercury , and James Rivington’s New York Gazetteer . Holt supported the Revolutionaries, Gaine equivocated, and Rivington was popularly known as the leading Tory printer in the colonies. In August 1775 , James Anderson began a second patriot press, the New York Constitutional Gazette , which brought out a paper three times a week. Another pro-American print began in January 1776 with Samuel Loudon beginning production of the New York Packet . These last two papers had little time to get settled because the British invasion in September 1776 changed everything. Anderson closed permanently, Loudon went to Fishkill, New York, Holt took his types to Kingston, New York (also known as Esopus), and Gaine fled for a few weeks to Newark, New Jersey. While Gaine was in New Jersey, the British army, lacking a paper, commissioned Ambrose Serle to start his own “engine.” Gaine, who had been printing a paper in New York since 1752 , decided after a few weeks that the British market would better serve his financial interests, and he returned to the city on November 11, 1776 , to displace Serle’s nascent operation. Gaine’s decision to turn his coat infuriated the Revolutionaries, and his name would be synonymous with deceit and greed for the remainder of the war. Philip Freneau’s stinging poem, “Hugh Gaine’s Life,” which some patriot printers happily published in 1783, typified this anger.

In occupied New York, papers flourished. In addition to Gaine, Rivington, the well-educated son of a prominent London book-seller, returned in 1777 and reestablished his print tri-weekly, the Robertson brothers from Norwich also began a bi-weekly Royal American Gazette that year, and when William Lewis started the New York Mercury in September 1779 , New York had a combination daily newspaper. Meanwhile, the dispersed patriot papers had a more difficult time outside the city. Outside the main avenues of communication, Loudon still managed to maintain publication of the Packet from Fishkill throughout the war. Holt published from Kingston from July to October 1777 when disaster struck again as the British sacked the town. In May 1778 he resurfaced in even more remote Poughkeepsie, New York, where he struggled to maintain his connections with Governor George Clinton and keep the New York Journal in circulation.

The presence of the British army in New York also meant that New Jersey would be an active theater of violence from 1776 onward. In December 1777 , Isaac Collins, a Quaker who was sponsored by Governor William Livingston and partly financed by the state, founded the New Jersey Gazette in Burlington. A few months later he relocated to Trenton, where he would maintain publication until July 1783 . Sheppard Kollock, a former Continental Army lieutenant, started a second newspaper ( New Jersey Journal ) in Chatham, New Jersey in February 1779 because Washington wanted his troops to have a newspaper while they were in winter quarters in nearby Morristown. Since a large number of Kollock’s subscribers were soldiers, this paper contained a high quotient of war news until the end of hostilities. The sponsorship of newspapers in New Jersey by patriot authorities suggests how they thought about the centrality of print to the war effort. The New Jersey state legislature and governor, the Continental Army, and Continental Congress all expended valuable time and money to put sheets of newsprint in the hands of soldiers and civilians in the zone between Philadelphia and occupied Manhattan.

Since the mid-18th century, Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia had been the center of colonial print culture. At the war’s outset, there were six English language newspapers being published in Philadelphia. The two oldest prints were the Pennsylvania Gazette and Pennsylvania Journal . David Hall and William Sellers now operated Franklin’s organ, the nearly fifty-year-old Pennsylvania Gazette , while William Bradford—who had branched into coffee houses, marine insurance—still operated the Pennsylvania Journal more than thirty years after its founding. Irish printer John Dunlap had joined them in 1771 with the Pennsylvania Packet , while three more papers, Benjamin Towne’s tri-weekly Pennsylvania Evening Post , Story and David Humphrey’s Pennsylvania Mercury , and John Humphreys Jr.’s Pennsylvania Ledger , began in early 1775 . Bradford and Dunlap were the most active Whigs among their colleagues, Hall and Sellers took a moderate course, John Humphreys tended toward the king, and Towne—like Gaine in New York—fended for himself. Congress spread their printing business around: for example John Dunlap was the first to produce a broadside text of the Declaration of Independence, while Towne had the honor of being the first to insert it in his July 6 issue. Delegates to the Continental Congress who wrote articles and essays sent them to Bradford and Dunlap.

Early on there was some turbulence in the Philadelphia print community. In December 1775 a fire ended the Mercury . The following November, Towne, an Englishman, attacked James Humphreys for being a Tory, a campaign that subsequently drove him out of town. Just as Humphreys fled, it appeared that the British might sweep into Philadelphia and all papers suspended publication except Towne’s Evening Post . Bradford joined the Continental Army as a colonel and fought in New Jersey. After the invasion scare dissipated with Washington’s victories at Trenton and Princeton, Philadelphia papers resumed operations. The following fall, though, Howe’s successful expedition against Philadelphia scattered printers and delegates alike across Pennsylvania. With the occupation, Bradford suspended his Journal , Hall and Sellers followed Congress to York and published there, while Dunlap took the Packet to nearby Lancaster for a period of months. Towne, on the other hand, stayed put, deciding to turn his coat and print a loyalist paper. Humphreys returned to Philadelphia and restarted the Ledger during the nine-month occupation. James Robertson came down from New York to produce a Royal Pennsylvania Gazette from March to May 1778 . When the British left Philadelphia in May, Humphreys closed the Ledger and went along. Apparently attached to the city no matter the political climate, Towne turned his coat back again toward the Revolution and kept his paper alive. Towne’s navigation of choppy political waters earned him disdain among Whigs but not permanent banishment. The Evening Post would soon have the distinction of becoming America’s first daily newspaper. The Gazette and Journal returned from the countryside after the British evacuated, although Thomas Bradford took over production from his aging father who had reprised his role as printer-turned-officer when the British occupied Philadelphia. Later in the war, two volatile prints appeared in Philadelphia, Francis Bailey’s Freeman’s Journal and Eleazer Oswald’s Independent Gazette , which were each attached to political factions surrounding the Pennsylvania constitution. Bailey had previously published the United States Magazine in Philadelphia, which was edited by Hugh Henry Brackenridge and featured the poetry of Philip Freneau.

In Baltimore, the Goddards’ Maryland Journal was constant. Founded by William Goddard but operated by his sister Mary, the Maryland Journal maintained active publishing throughout the war, although it declined in importance after William Goddard backed Charles Lee in his dispute with Washington over the conduct of the war. In 1779 , Mary took on Eleazer Oswald as a partner, which lasted for two years before he left for Philadelphia to begin the Independent Gazetteer . A second paper in Baltimore ran from May 1775 to September 1778 , called Dunlap’s Maryland Gazette . James Hayes subsequently took over for Dunlap and continued it in Baltimore for a year. Another of the Connecticut Green printers, Jonas Green, had established a Maryland Gazette in Annapolis in 1745 . During the war it was an important paper operated by his son Frederick (after his wife Anne Catherine had kept it active for five years in the 1760s–1770s). It too suffered a sixteen-month suspension from December 1777 to April 1779 .

Confusion reigns about Revolutionary newspapers in 18th-century Virginia because they all shared the same name. In April 1775 there were four Virginia Gazettes , three in Williamsburg and one in Norfolk. John Pinkney had inherited a press from Clementina Rind in 1774 , which he operated in Williamsburg until February 3, 1776 . Alexander Purdie, a Scot, had a paper that he ran from early 1775 until his death in April 1779, when his nephew John Clarkson and one of Purdie’s printers, Augustine Davis, continued the press until December 1780 . John Dixon and William Hunter operated one Virginia Gazette that had been established in 1751 . When Hunter decided to throw his lot in with the British in December 1778 , Dixon (who would eventually become mayor of Williamsburg) took on a new partner, Thomas Nicholson, and continued until April 1780 . British invasions that year wreaked havoc on the press. Clarkson and Davis’s Gazette folded and Dixon and Nicholson transferred their operation to the safety of Richmond, where they would print until May 1781 . The surrender of Cornwallis allowed the submerged press to resurface, and two new versions of the Virginia Gazette appeared in Richmond at the end of 1781 : one by Nicholson and William Prentis, and a second by James Hayes.

In the Deep South, newspaper coverage was sparse. North Carolina boasted two papers in 1775 , the Cape Fear Mercury and North Carolina Gazette . Since copies of neither have been well preserved, the best estimate is that the Wilmington Cape Fear Mercury ceased publication in September 1775 . Shortly afterwards, its printer, Adam Boyd, joined the Continental Army. A second paper, the North Carolina Gazette, was printed sporadically by James Davis in New Bern until November 1778 . James Johnston operated the only paper in Georgia, Savannah’s Georgia Gazette , beginning in 1763 . Apparently disaffected to the Revolution, Johnston discontinued the paper in February 1776 , only to revive it as the Royal Georgia Gazette in January 1779 after the British occupied the city. He maintained that paper until the British evacuated in 1782 but was able to stay in Savannah when his name was placed on a list of those loyalists who were allowed to remain if they paid a fine. In January 1783 , he established the Gazette of the State of Georgia .

The presence of the British Army in South Carolina interfered with newspaper production more than anywhere else. Whereas printers in New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island adjusted their production to the upheaval of war, Charleston printers did not. After 1780 , no pro-American newspaper was published south of Williamsburg. The impact of this print vacuum is seldom appreciated (because difficult to quantify) in scholars’ interpretations for why the war in the south turned into a brutal civil war in the early 1780s. If print was essential to organizing and garnering support for the war in the 1770s in the northern and middle colonies, then it stands to reason that the lack of it in the south—or the robust appearance of British papers—also contributed to the fraying of patriot support in the Deep South. Three papers reported the news of Lexington, Peter Timothy’s South Carolina Gazette , the South Carolina & American General Gazette printed by Robert Wells and his son John, and Charles Crouch’s South Carolina Gazette & Country Journal . Soon after word of war in Massachusetts reached South Carolina, the conflict’s effects began to take their toll. Robert Wells left for England right away, never to return. In August 1775 , Crouch discontinued the Country Journal and subsequently died en route to New York. Timothy, Crouch’s brother-in-law, the most ardently Whig of the South Carolina printers, and the son of another Franklin apprentice, also folded his shop in December 1775 . John Wells Jr. alone carried on publication, invasion scares in 1776 and 1779 notwithstanding. Timothy returned with a new name, the Gazette of the State of South Carolina , in April 1777 , giving the Revolutionaries two organs in the South—until the British siege disrupted everything in early 1780 . When the city fell in March Timothy was taken prisoner and sent to St. Augustine. The following year he would perish in a sea accident. Despite the fact that he had purposely added “Jr.” to his name in order to distance himself from his loyalist family and had fought at Savannah in 1779 , John Wells Jr. decided to protect his property by remaining in Charleston and his paper became the Royal Gazette . After the war this decision forced him to take his press to Nassau and found the Bahama Gazette . New York printer James Robertson arrived with Cornwallis and, along with two partners, established the Royal South Carolina Gazette in June 1780 . Both Wells and Robertson’s papers ran as long as the British occupation.

By 1783 , the travails of war (especially in the South) had diminished the number of newspapers to thirty, with twelve in New England and thirteen in the middle states. Several printers had managed to weather the storm and kept turning out papers for subscribers. New titles also emerged by war’s end, most notably Eleazer Oswald’s radical Independent Gazetteer , one of the only Philadelphia newspapers to publish criticisms of the Constitution in 1788 . In the first years of the “more perfect union,” however, the appearance of new newspapers exploded, with an average of twenty separate papers being founded in each year of the early republic, a massive efflorescence aided in part by their being subsidized by the federal government in the form of low postal rates. Print in the 1790s would be far more specialized, with printers becoming even more embedded in professional politics. 17

Discussion of the Literature

Ever since the early historian of the Revolution David Ramsay made his 1789 pronouncement about the “pen and press” having “merit equal to that of the sword,” print has enjoyed a central place in interpretations of the Revolution’s causes and consequences. Whiggish nationalist historians in the 19th century celebrated print as a carrier of the Revolution’s noble ideas and high-minded principles. Skeptical, Progressive historians in the early decades of the 1900s argued that newspapers and pamphlets were rather simply mechanisms of self-interested politicians. They were not carriers of ideals but rather tools of propaganda to dupe an unsuspecting public into ratifying policies that lined the pockets of political and economic elites. Samuel Adams, according to John C. Miller’s 1936 book Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda , manipulated print to get the Boston crowds to do his bidding. In his 1940 study Propaganda and the American Revolution , Philip Davidson contended that because the Revolution was “at best but the work of an aggressive minority,” patriot leaders needed a “conscious, systemic effort” (xiv)—to convince the public to follow their lead. One Progressive historian, Arthur Meier Schlesinger, published a central text about the role of print in the Revolution in 1957 . His Prelude to Independence moved past the instrumental Progressive interpretation that saw the patriots as false prophets. For Schlesinger, the printers were essential to moving the Revolution forward, and they also believed in the broader deals articulated in the newspaper essays and pamphlets that they sent forth from their print shops each week.

In the 1960s, Bernard Bailyn, himself reacting against the Progressive interpretation of self-interest and conflict, planned a major study of the ideology that underpinned the prodigious number of political pamphlets that appeared during the imperial crisis, the first volume of which, Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1765 appeared in 1965 . Two years later, Bailyn extended this interpretation in a celebrated, prize-winning volume titled Ideological Origins of the American Revolution , which not only took ideas seriously (and not merely dismissing the pamphlets as empty expressions of propaganda), but also by implication the medium in which they appeared as well. A few years later, the American Antiquarian Society—the central repository for early American print since its founding in 1812—invited Bailyn to coedit a volume of essays on print and press freedom in commemoration of the bicentennial, which was soon published with the title The Press and the American Revolution . One of the essayists in that volume, Stephen Botein, had recently published an extended, seminal essay in the journal Perspectives in American History , entitled “‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press: The Business and Political Practices of Colonial American Printers.”

In 2001 , Jeffrey Pasley, a former news reporter turned historian, published “ The Tyranny of Printers ,” a study that took the efforts of newspaper publishers very seriously and at their word. Pasley sought not to explain the role of press in the Revolution but used the 1770s as his starting point to explore the central role of newspaper printers in the political life of the early American republic, especially in the creation of political parties. For Pasley, the Revolution did not lead to the politicization of newspapers or their printers as previous historians suggested, instead pointing to the 1790s as the turning point rather than the 1760s. For him, it was the preferences of the public at large that encouraged precarious printers to choose sides in the Revolution rather than the printers’ own political principles.

In the face of all these studies that took Ramsay’s aphorism as a starting point, in 2007 Trish Loughran published The Republic in Print . Loughran argued that the ability of print to carry ideas as previous historians asserted was impossible in the 1700s. Lacking industrialized, steam-powered presses, there was simply no way hundreds of thousands of people read Common Sense in 1776 , she argued. The capacity to produce and deliver the number of texts that would be required for print to do what historians suggested it did (i.e., cause and sustain the Revolution) was not viable in the 1770s. An iconoclastic study, The Republic in Print offers the first major dissent in more than two centuries about whether print was indeed central (for good or ill) in the coming and consequences of the American Revolution. Loughran’s emphasis on materiality is refreshing, but it suffers from postindustrial expectations. Although it is certainly wise to doubt Tom Paine’s boasts of hundreds of thousands of copies of Common Sense flooding every household in America, that should not translate into interpretations that print—in its preindustrial, hand-pressed, horse-carried form—was therefore scarce and ineffective. Print’s influence was hardly limited to the initial purchaser or reader, but was often shared in taverns, coffeehouses, and other public spaces, where it also crossed into oral cultures. A final word on Loughran’s iconoclasm should come from Ambrose Serle, a member of Lord Howe’s staff when the British occupied New York City in 1776 . In a letter back to the British secretary of state, Serle opined “among other engines, which have raised the present commotions none has had a more extensive or stronger influence than the Newspapers of the respective colonies. One is astonished to see with what Avidity they are sought after, and how implicitly they are believed by the great Bulk of the People.” 18 Serle believed the biggest mistake the British had made was not taking print seriously. He soon started a royalist newspaper in New York City to rectify this blunder. Serle, for one, would be quite surprised to read Loughran’s book.

Literary scholar Russ Castronovo’s book Propaganda 1776 embraces the old problem of propaganda once again, but instead of seeing the patriots in 20th-century guises (Sam Adams as America’s Joseph Goebbels), he sees them as propagators—a useful term that 18th-century farmers would have recognized. They used print to grow more patriots. According to Castronovo, the particular nature of print, with its inherent ability to carry emotion over wide spaces, pushed the Revolution faster than it might have gone otherwise. Here, it seems, the interpretation of print as a genuine motivator of hearts and minds at the heart of the Revolutionary movement has returned to a position in the historiography that David Ramsay would appreciate.

Primary Sources

Relevant primary sources include: Clarence Brigham, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690–1820 (2 vols., Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1947 ); Charles Lathem, ed., Chronological Tables of American Newspapers, 1690–1850 (Barre, MA: American Antiquarian Society and Barre Publishers, 1972 ); Frank Moore, The Diary of the American Revolution, 1775–1781 (New York: Washington Square Press, 1967 [ 1876 ]); and Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America, With a Biography of Printers & An Account of Newspapers (New York: Weathervane Press, 1970 [ 1874 ]).

Links to Digital Materials

Index to Virginia Gazettes

American Antiquarian Society Digital Images Archive

American Archives : documents from 1774 to 1776, including many letters that would become newspaper “reports,” compiled by Peter Force in the 1830s–1840s.

American Historical Newspapers (Readex; by subscription)

Rag Linen : collector Todd Andrlik’s blog on Revolutionary era newspapers, including many images.

Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800 (Readex; by subscription)

Historical Periodicals Collection, 1691-1820 (EBSCO; by subscription)

The Sid Lapidus '59 Collection on Liberty and the American Revolution : collection of 150 pamphlets of the American Revolution, of which 74 are scanned and available at Princeton University Digital Library.

“ The Coming of the Revolution, 1764-1776 ”: an online exhibit by the Massachusetts Historical Society, containing many printed images.

Further Reading

• Amory, Hugh , and David D. Hall , eds. A History of the Book in America: Volume 1: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
• Bailyn, Bernard . Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1765. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965.
• Bailyn, Bernard , and John B. Hench , eds. The Press and the American Revolution. Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1980.
• Botein, Stephen . “‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press: The Business and Political Strategies of Colonial American Printers.” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 127–225.
• Castronovo, Russ . Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communication in Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
• Clark, Charles E. The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Davidson, Philip . Propaganda and the American Revolution . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940.
• Loughran, Trish . The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
• Monaghan, E. Jennifer . Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005.
• Pasley, Jeffrey L. “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001.
• Schlesinger, Arthur Meier, Sr. Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764–1776. New York: Vintage, 1957.
• Warner, Michael . The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

1. David Ramsay , The History of the American Revolution , ed. Lester H. Cohen, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1990) , vol. 2, 633–634. Originally published in 1789.

2. Bernard Bailyn , Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), vii, 8 .

3. Ibid. , 3 .

4. David D. Hall , “The Atlantic Economy in the Eighteenth Century,” in A History of the Book in America: Volume 1: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World , ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 155 , 163.

5. Stephen Botein , “‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press: The Business and Political Strategies of Colonial American Printers,” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 150–151.

6. Charles E. Clark, “Early American Journalism: News and Opinion in the Popular Press,” in History of the Book in America , ed. Amory and Hall, vol. 1, 359.

7. Botein, “Meer Mechanics,” 211–225.

8. For more see Hiller Zobel , The Boston Massacre (New York: Norton, 1970), 66–67 , and Richard Archer , As If an Enemy’s Country: The British Occupation of Boston and the Origins of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 147–148 .

9. Boston Gazette , February 1, 1768.

10. Zobel, Boston Massacre , 152–163; Archer, As If an Enemy’s Country , 162–163; and Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr ., Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764–1776 (New York: Vintage, 1957), 105–108 .

11. Michael Warner , The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 34–72 .

12. Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence , 257.

13. Memorial of Samuel Loudon to the New York Committee of Safety, 20 March 1776, in American Archives 4th series, ed. Peter Force (Washington, DC, 1839), vol. 5, 439.

14. Ibid. , 5: 440.

15. Thomas C. Leonard , “News for a Revolution: The Exposé in America, 1768–1773,” Journal of American History 67 (June 1980): 26–40 .

16. Benjamin Franklin to Richard Price, Passy, 13 June 1782, in Papers of Benjamin Franklin , ed. William Wilcox (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959–), vol. 37, 472–473 .

17. Pasley, “Tyranny of Printers,” 47–48, 404.

18. Ambrose Serle to the Earl of Dartmouth, 25 July 1776, in Facsimiles of Manuscripts in European Archives Relating to America, 1773–1783 , ed. Benjamin F. Stevens (Wilmington, DE: Mellifont, 1970), vol. 24, 2040–2046 .

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