American historians are better at history than math. So argues Kevin Phillips in his new book on the origins of America’s war for independence.
In 1775: A Good Year for Revolution, Phillips says that for too long historians have listed 1776 as the pivotal year in the beginning of the American Revolution. The correct date, he says, is 1775. As he writes in the book’s opening pages, “If 1775 hadn’t been a year of successful national building, 1776 might have been a year of lost opportunity, quiet disappointments, and continued colonial status.”
Yes, the Declaration of Independence and the formal separation from the British occurred in 1776. The year before, Phillips argues, laid the groundwork for all that followed.
Consider how active events became in 1775. In Massachusetts alone, the British faced fierce opposition at two of the most important battles in the war: Lexington and Concord. Within days of those skirmishes, the English troops found themselves marching up Breed’s Hill (commonly misremembered as Bunker Hill). Just how important did this one battle in the summer of 1775 turn out to be? Phillips writes, “The number of British officers killed and wounded on June 17 represented a quarter of those officers killed and wounded during the entire Revolutionary War.”
Meanwhile, Congress was already meeting in Philadelphia and establishing crucial policies that would help win the war. Primarily, the Continental Congress faced a munitions crisis. Where could the colonies find the weapons and ammunition needed to fight an empire that ruled much of the world?
The answer came when Congress established a “Committee of Secret Correspondence, charged with obtaining and distributing military supplies, and a Secret Committee, which was to employ agents overseas, gather intelligence about ammunition stores, and arrange their purchase ….” These seeds would eventually bloom into a well-armed military that would finally achieve victory in 1783. But the seeds themselves were planted in 1775 in Philadelphia.
At the same time that political leaders were waging war through policy, the people of the colonies themselves began uniting as never before. As Phillips writes, in 1775, a “vital transformation in American thinking — the colonists’ ballooning New World pride and incipient nationalism, their gradual shift of loyalty away from a once-cherished British monarchy to a new American Congress — did take shape before the serious fighting.”
This rage militaire began spreading throughout the colonies. Before 1775, there seemed to be hope that the issues could be resolved; but during that fateful year, the colonies decided they could and should fight a war. By the end of the year, royal governors throughout the colonies had been expelled, and American patriots were running the local governments.
In essence, Phillips presents 1775 as the year the Americans began accumulating the weapons and the unity they would need to fight a war. And 1775 also proved to be the year when the Americans showed on the battlefield they could hold their own. Without these important achievements — in policy, in national unity and on the battlefield — it seems unlikely the war would have been successfully concluded eight years later.
Phillips’ book provides an unfamiliar look at a familiar story. He shows that by the end of 1775, America had already become its own nation in so many ways.
Kasey S. Pipes is the author of Ike’s Final Battle: The Road to Little Rock and the Challenge of Equality, and is the Norris senior fellow at the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College.
A Good Year for Revolution