Looking beyond the commonly accepted interpretation of the American War of Independence provides more insight for military professionals seeking to understand war and educate themselves for it. According to the customary view, the American Revolution started in 1775, with the battles of Lexington, Concord and Boston in 1776 and ended in 1781 with the Battle of Yorktown.

However, this interpretation reflects more the bias to view war as just fighting—i.e., major combat operations—than it does historical accuracy. It’s a view that looks at war through a telescope rather than wide-angle binoculars. Rare is the war that begins with major combat operations, especially revolutionary ones. Equally rare is the war that ends when major fighting stops.

No analogy is perfect, but Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution provides an important insight to understanding wars, especially revolutionary ones like America’s War of Independence. “Revolutions,” he says are “a kind of fever.” Initially, there will be “signs of the coming disturbance … not quite symptoms, since when the symptoms are fully enough developed the disease is already present.”

Then comes the fever, the revolution itself, which develops in fits and starts into a crisis—a “delirium” of sorts. After which comes convalescence, including perhaps a relapse or two before the fever finally subsides.

Using Brinton’s construct, we can see America’s War of Independence began well before 1775 and ended well after 1781. In fact, the “war” unfolded in four overlapping phases. The first, a period of incubation, or what Brinton calls the “prodromal” phase, ran roughly between 1760 and 1768. This phase included the British Crown’s renewal of the Molasses Act in 1764, the Stamp Act of 1765, the Declaratory Act of 1766 and the Townshend Acts of 1767–68, all designed to replenish Britain’s drained coffers from its war with France.

Violent Reactions

The American Colonies reacted to these acts, sometimes violently. The reaction generally took the form of mobs intimidating royal officials, destroying homes, tar and feathering individuals, and demonstrating in front of public buildings and private homes. Nonviolent reaction took the form of newspaper articles, published pamphlets and public and private meetings to coordinate actions and strategies. In this period, Colonists started to organize their resistance to British authority around two themes.

The first was an economic one, emphasizing boycotts of British goods that included “nonimportation associations” with enforcement arms. The second was a political theme that began refining the argument that Britain, especially Parliament, was bent on depriving Colonists of their rights as British subjects—especially the right to not be taxed without representation.

At the beginning of this incubation period, the violent and nonviolent reactions were mostly local. By the end of the period, however, they became more trans-Colonial—contributing to a growing “national” sense. Colonies started to communicate with each other through committees of correspondence, newspapers republished articles from one Colony to the other, pamphlets made their way across Colonies, and Colonial leaders increased correspondence with each other.

Furthermore, disbanded Colonial legislatures reformed as extralegal bodies, and local associations and enforcement committees began to function as a nascent shadow government. This set the stage for the next phase of the War of Independence.

The second phase, which Brinton calls the “fever itself,” rightly earns the title of “insurgency.” It began about 1769 and ended around 1774. This is the period in which the “fever” of resisting British authority and contesting British power grew in intensity. This period was marked by the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, Britain’s retaliatory Coercive Acts and the Colonists’ creation of the First Continental Congress.

Shifting Attitudes

Jeremy Black reminds readers in Insurgency and Counterinsurgency: A Global History that not all insurgencies aim for independence, and the American Colonial insurgency was initially one of those. In the beginning, the Colonists’ goal was to realign British authority and power with what Colonial leaders thought were their rights as British subjects. The Colonists continued to appeal to British agents as well as send formal letters and resolves to the British king and parliamentary leaders.

Throughout this period, the soon-to-be-rebels continued to use violence and intimidation as means to contest British power. And they continued boycotts; arguments in articles and pamphlets; and correspondence, both personal and among the extralegal legislatures, of rights-based treatment; all of which, over time, morphed into a trans-Colonial national movement of resistance to British authority.

As Joseph Ellis’ The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773–1783 tells us, “there was no such thing as an American national identity.”

To help create this identity, Colonial leaders used the term the “the Cause,” “a conveniently ambiguous label that provided a verbal canopy under which a diverse variety of political and regional persuasions could coexist.”

Common Action

This approach worked well enough. It created sufficient cohesion among the Colonies to allow common action: first, in coordinating political violence and forwarding letters and resolves to the British king and Parliament—which the First Continental Congress did in 1774; then, in a national reaction to British rejection of the Colonies’ appeals and military escalation—actions the Second Continental Congress took up.

During the insurgency, the Colonists had a limited aim: to convince British authorities to recognize their rights as British subjects. They failed to achieve this because Britain was not interested in such recognition. Instead, British leaders chose to impose their will on the Colonies by force and began doing so in Boston, then in Lexington and Concord, both in Massachusetts—precipitating open rebellion and major combat operations in America. This is when, using Brinton’s model, the fever turned into delirium.

Open rebellion in America lasted from 1775 to 1781. This phase was marked by Lexington, Concord, the Siege of Boston, the Second Continental Congress and the Declaration of Independence, and the major battles and campaigns—from British defeat of Washington in New York to George Washington forcing British Lt. Gen. Lord Charles Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown, Virginia.

There was no clean line between the insurgency and open rebellion. In fact, when Washington set off to Boston from Philadelphia as the newly appointed commander in chief of American forces, the Declaration of Independence was still over a year away.

By 1776, however, the Colonists’ aims shifted away from clamoring for their rights as Englishmen to achieving independence. Before the Declaration of Independence, the primary military objective had been limited: produce a sufficiently decisive British defeat in and around Boston to convince them to negotiate. But the blood spilled on both sides during the battle for Boston made conciliation no longer possible.

Eject the British

Independence and boundary expansion, as Dave Palmer’s George Washington’s Military Genius demonstrates, became the Colonists’ political objectives during the rebellion phase of the war. The primary military objective of Washington’s major combat operations was this: eject British forces and do so in such a way that a government consistent with the principles of the Declaration of Independence would emerge in the end.

Palmer provides an excellent description of the multiple battles and campaigns during this phase of the war. He also provides an excellent description of how Washington, always in coordination with Congress and often with state governors and legislatures, adapted his military strategy during this phase.

Success for the Colonists was not guaranteed or inevitable. “The British did not have to lose; the patriots were not fated to triumph.” Palmer notes. “Had British leadership been better or American leadership less astute, the war could well have ended differently.”

With Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown, major fighting ended. But the war was not over. Yorktown opened the door to America’s future. It allowed the last phase of the War of Independence, political consolidation, to begin. Brinton’s fever model called this period “convalescence.” In 1781, America’s future was far from assured.

Purpose Identified

Carl von Clausewitz’s On War explains why this political consolidation should be considered as part of any war. “War springs from some political purpose,” Clausewitz reminds his readers. “The political object is the goal, war [i.e., violent use of force] is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.” Said another way, Clausewitz suggests that wars begin when a political community identifies a purpose important enough to use violence to achieve it.

In the American War of Independence, that purpose was clearly identified between the prodromal and insurgency periods. And when that political purpose is achieved, or the political community is forced to abandon its purpose, the war ends.

When Washington resigned his commission in December 1783, he considered his personal task fulfilled. However, as Joseph Ellis in His Excellency, George Washington makes clear: “[Washington] did not feel that the American Revolution was over.”

The last phase of America’s War of Independence—political consolidation—featured several notable activities. From 1781 to 1783, the focus was on tamping down the residual violence between Tories and Patriots, containing the remaining British troops until they were withdrawn in 1783, preventing a near-mutiny in the Continental Army, and negotiating terms and conditions with the British and French.

Then came a crisis precipitated by the weaknesses and ultimate failures of the Articles of Confederation. As Ellis puts it: “Washington believed that America’s hard-won independence would be short-lived unless the United States became a singular rather than a plural term, because a mere confederation of states would become … ‘dupes of some foreign power.’ ” Other revolutionary leaders came to the same conclusion.

This crisis led to the Constitutional Convention, the compromises that produced the Constitution, and the campaign to achieve ratification. After the fighting, Akhil Reed Amar reminds his readers in The Words that Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840, “Americans would have to forge new constitutions … to replace the old provincial and imperial legal order they had just cast off. Unless these new legal systems made life significantly better than it had been under Britain, all the patriots’ foreseeable sacrifices of blood and treasure would be for naught.”

The amorphous “the Cause” had kept the Colonies together long enough to accomplish the negative aim of ejecting British forces, but now—during the political consolidation period of the war—the Colonists had to focus on the positive aim of forming a government that could secure a future the leaders envisioned. There were plenty of opinions as to what kind of government that would be.

A convention was formed to amend the Articles of Confederation, but after much debate, argument, negotiation, political wrangling and compromise, the convention produced a new American Constitution that required nine of the 13 states to ratify. On June 21, 1788, New Hampshire became the ninth.

The new Constitution became law, a national government was formed, and the war’s political objective was attained.

Wider View

The interpretation of the War of Independence that most accept includes only one phase of war—the major combat operations phase. This interpretation produces a limited understanding of war, because it looks at war too narrowly. The result is a truncated understanding of a much larger phenomenon. War always includes more than fighting. Rather than looking through a telescope, a proper understanding of any war requires using wide-angle binoculars.

Why does this matter? Because today, America’s leaders, from senior military and political leaders at the strategic level to field grade officers who serve on senior staffs, face a complex strategic environment. Relying on a telescopic understanding of war decreases America’s probability of success in this environment.

The Army’s professional education system, as well as individual self-study, must produce leaders who understand war more holistically. Otherwise, the nation risks being served by leaders with strategic myopia.

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Lt. Gen. James Dubik, U.S. Army retired, a former commander of Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq, is a senior fellow of the Association of the U.S. Army. He holds a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and is the author of Just War Reconsidered: Strategy, Ethics, and Theory.