In the opening months of the Revolutionary War, America’s ragtag militias and jerry-built Continental Army squared off against the most professional army then on the planet. The battles of Lexington and Concord demonstrated that Americans would fight, and fight hard.
Two months later, they won respect at Boston’s battle of Bunker Hill, yielding the battlefield but inflicting punishing casualties that staggered British officers. Thirteen thousand New Englanders raced to surround Boston and seal off the enemy forces from the rest of North America. The Royal Navy would be forced to evacuate those troops.
But British power soon took its toll. A multi-pronged American invasion of Canada ended ignominiously. Some Americans wavered, uncertain whether their goal should be independence, or simply winning greater respect from British officialdom, or peace at any price. At the end of the year, a pamphlet by a recent immigrant from England brought focus to that choice, persuading great swaths of colonials that only independence would do.