One of my loves is reading history, and I've been binging on history books for quite a while now. While doing so, I've been rereading a few books on the American Revolution, and to be honest, both sides did some really dumb things, and since some of them are kinda hilarious, I thought I'd share some of the more galaxy brained things both sides did.
1. The only reason the war started was, quite simply, the British (King George especially) were too arrogant to not kill the golden goose. Up until the end of the Seven Years War, since the turn of the century (meaning from 1700-1763), the British had ruled their American colonies with a pretty light hand, to the point it had become "normal". Afterward, they started clamping down and demanding strict enforcement of tax laws they had otherwise been content to let off easy for several generations as well as dreaming up new ones that could only make their American subjects angrier. Then, they had the temerity to wonder why they were considered the bad guys after all this.
Had they acknowledged any of this, and acted with appropriate finesse, the United States might still be a British possession.
2. The Americans weren't much smarter in some ways. Their attempt to get Canada to rebel and attempt to invade them was a pipe dream at best. Sure, Canada was formerly French, but the British had done a good job of convincing them their new masters were far better than their former ones, and Americans thinking Canadians were gonna switch sides were just too stupid to read the room and blinded by their own bias.
3. The overall British strategy was dense. They thought they had to crush the rebel armies to win. What they needed to do, and failed miserably at doing, was break their spirit. Further, it was going to be easier to break the Britsh than it was the Americans because the longer things dragged out, the more pain it would deal with the British financially and morally, which it did. The American side was far more realistic in realizing all they had to do was outlast the other side.
4. Back to American stupidity, albeit not something they could have known without the benefit of hindsight, was that most of their officers who were ex-British Army in high places like Charles Lee and Horatio Gates were worse than useless. They might have had former military experience, but both were vainglorious, egotistical, and borderline traitors with how they spent more time trying to screw over their boss George Washington than they did showing battlefield competence. Both dropped the ball at several crucial intervals, and both ended their careers in disgrace as a result of this.
5. Turning back to British stupidity, they had this deluded notion that all they had to do was win battles and their loyal subjects would flock to plug any holes in holding these areas. While admittedly not entirely dense in some loyalist intensive places like New York, this idea cost them dearly elsewhere as they had a poor idea of just how many Americans still wanted to be loyal elsewhere. Cornwallis had his forces in the Carolinas nigh obliterated because of this delusion.
There are some other moments of idiocy worth covering, but these I consider some of the dimmest bulbs of an event where both sides were a bit dense, just the American side let fewer neurons spark out than the British in the long run.
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