SETTING THE STAGE: AMERICA ASCENDANT

Summary

Seen from one point of view, the British forces seemed unconquerable. They were better trained, better equipped, superior in numbers, and supplemented by thirty thousand mercenaries from the German states. However, the quality of lower-ranking British officers was generally not high, since commissions in the cavalry and infantry regiments were sold to wealthy English gentlemen, often unqualified for leadership. The typical soldier was anything but a model of military efficiency; more likely, he was fighting only for the opportunity to make some money, having been recruited from a prison cell or from an urban slum. German mercenaries were all too often – from the British point of view – insufficiently committed to victory. So enamored of the New World were they that one-sixth of them voluntarily remained in America after the war.

Continental victories began to mount. George Rogers Clark captured the “Illinois Country” (a vast geographical area that now includes Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana) in 1779 with only 200 men, defeating not only the British but their Indian allies – a feat the British Lieutenant Colonel Henry Hamilton called “unequal perhaps in History.” Despite Clinton's successes in Savannah and Charleston, patriots administered a crushing defeat to Cornwallis's troops when he tried to extend British control to North Carolina in 1780. Then American raiders retook the British outposts in South Carolina, leading to victory in the South.