n7axw wrote:n7axw wrote:
The rebels were actually about a third of the population and the loyalists about the same. I've pondered your thought for years. The French contribution, though not huge, may well have been decisive. Without it the conflict would have gone on longer and the question would have been who wore out first. There was "wear" showing on both sides prior to the French involvement and how it would have turned out and how long it would have gone on is impossible to say. I suspect that the rebels would have still won, but the final battle would have been in London, not Yorktown.
Don
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roseandheather wrote:I actually don't think we would've won without French involvement. Face it - all the odds on the planet were against us then. We were facing not only a professional army used to policing an empire, but the greatest navy to ever rule the seas. Add to that the fact that we were torn straight down the middle - you're right, we were roughly a third revolutionaries, a third Loyalists, and a third who just wanted it all to stop, even if the Colonies were officially "unanimous" in declaring independence - and without the French on our side, we almost certainly wouldn't have made it.
The fact that the French government's involvement in our successful revolution brought it crumbling down around its ears less than two decades later is.... I'm not even sure there's a word for what that is, honestly.
It's hard to know. Washington and the other colonial generals had gained a lot of experience and their troops had been trained and hardened. Even before the French intervened, the British record was mixed at best. And even worse, "Lord North's war" was unpopular at home. In at least some respects, there are some interesting parallels between the English experience in America and the American experience in Vietnam.
Don
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French intervention was far less significant on the ground in North America than it was elsewhere, because it was French recognition of the rebels that turned an insurrection/civil war that just happened to have the Atlantic in the middle of it into a genuine world war. From the French perspective, it was round 2 of the French and Indians War. Aside from a handful of people like Lafayette, the French aristocracy could have cared less about the Declaration of Independence. What they and (more importantly) the French court saw was a chance to break England's kneecaps and take advantage of English distraction in North America as a way to gain ground elsewhere.
I'm sure there were French aristocrats and philosophes who thought the American Revolution was a great thing, as long as it didn't impact
their world of salons and gracious living. After all, there are members of the American elites who think Hugo Chavez was a great idea, but I very much doubt they'd have cared to have him making the rules for
them. The entire impetus behind the official French decision to intervene was the chance to regain lost ground from the Brits after the last set to. As part of that, they saw the creation of a new nation that gobbled up most of Great Britain's existing empire and created a new threat to Canada --- and whose radical notions (which, of course, not good French aristo could take seriouslt) were safely quarantined on the far side of the Atlantic --- as a move with no downside for them.
For the Americans who wanted independence, it was a godsend. No matter how much experience Washington and his generals might have acquired --- and I'll concede that they'd gotten
far better as they went along --- the colonists simply did not have the resources to defeat the mother country in the end any more than North Vietnam could have defeated the US without massive support from its sponsors. In the end, they won for the same reason North Vietnam won: Great Britain decided to cut its losses in the face of the far larger threat arising from the Franco-Spanish alliance against it in Europe. We declined to pay the cost of a major invasion of the North, with all the attendant crisis of great power confrontation; the Brits declined to pay the cost of a major invasion to regain a foothold after Yorktown.
But the collapse of the French monarchy so soon after "The World Turned Upside Down" in Virginia was at least as much due to the . . . unfortunate way in which France's rivalry with England ended (with a collapsing exchequer and the loss of the rest of its overseas empire) as it did to the "contamination" leaking back across the Atlantic. The American contagion was the final impetus for a fall which had been a long time coming. Indeed, for a fall which had already begun even before Saratoga and the decision to officially recognize the rebels.
