British Army during the American Revolutionary War
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The British Army during the American Revolutionary War served for eight years of armed conflict, fought in eastern North America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere from April 19, 1775 until the treaty ending the war, September 3, 1783. Britain had no European allies in the war, which was initially between Great Britain and American insurgents in the Thirteen Colonies. The war widened when the American insurgents made a formal alliance with France (1778) and gained the aid of France's ally Spain (1779).
In June 1775, the Second Continental Congress, gathered in present-day Independence Hall in the revolutionary capital of Philadelphia, appointed George Washington commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, which the Congress organized by uniting and organizing patriot militias into a single army under the command of Washington, who led it in its eight-year war against the British Army. The following year, in July 1776, the Second Continental Congress, representing the Thirteen Colonies, unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, an iconic and historical document largely written by Thomas Jefferson, addressed to King George III, which articulated why the delegates to the Congress felt were declaring themselves free and independent from the Kingdom of Great Britain. Adoption of the Declaration served to both inspire the cause of independence in the Thirteen Colonies and also formalized and escalated the Revolutionary War.
For several years, the outcome of the war was uncertain and indecisive. But on October 19, 1781, the British Army was defeated at the Siege of Yorktown by a combined Franco-American force supported by the French navy, led the British to conclude that the war in North America could not be won, forcing them to forfeit the Thirteen Colonies in eastern North America in the Treaty of Paris, which they signed in 1783, though sporadic fighting continued for several additional years.
When the American Revolutionary War commenced, the British Army was a volunteer force that had suffered from a lack of peacetime spending and ineffective recruitment in the decade since the Seven Years' War. In 1776, to offset this deficiency, the British Crown hastily hired German Hessian mercenary contingents, who supplemented their fighting capabilities and served with regular British units for the rest of the war. In 1778, limited army impressment was introduced in England and Scotland to bolster the army's size, but the practice proved unpopular and was suspended until being reintroduced two years later, in 1780.
The attrition of constant fighting, the decision by the Kingdom of France to ultimately lend considerable naval and army support to the cause of American independence, and the withdrawal of a sizable number of British forces from North America in 1778 were all factors in the British Army's ultimate defeat. At Yorktown in 1781, the British Army, then led by Charles Cornwallis, was forced to surrender, contributing to the Whigs gaining control of a parliamentary majority, which brought offensive British military operations in North America to an end.