Question

In the given graphic organizer, identify and describe the most important event in turning
the war in the patriot's favor.
Events
Importance to the end of war

(Please help me I have an exam tmr )​

Answer 1

1) Saratoga. Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga was the decisive factor that brought France into the war. Before then, the American colonies were a way to annoy and weaken the perfidious rosbifs, and not much more. After Saratoga, Franklin could credibly use the threat of a negotiated peace with Britain that left France with nothing to show for their investments to get the crown on board with an alliance and commercial treaty, plus much-needed loans and arms on top of what had already been sent. And without French intervention spreading the war to all fronts of Great Britain’s early empire, the English could have continued pouring all their resources into suppressing the revolution. Before Saratoga, the redcoats were generally on the offensive; after, generally on the defensive.

2) Trenton/Princeton. As small as the engagements were, they proved that American forces had the resiliency to “fight, get whipped, and fight again,” until they won a victory. These victories shifted expectations from notions that the rebellion would collapse under overwhelming imperial forces to an expectation of a long, bitter resistance. From that point on, even when whole states were overrun, there were always colonists willing to rally to the militias or to fight guerilla wars to resist- and against that resistance nothing less than wholesale extermination could have re-established British sovereignty.

3) Doomed from the start. The United Kingdom was crippled by war debts going back to the War of the Spanish Succession and further hamstrung by supply lines three thousand miles long. They were trying to subdue two million people with an army that at no time exceeded fifty thousand troops total in all the Americas. They weren’t willing to use Cromwellian scorched-earth tactics to roust out the rebels and replace them with loyal new colonists, and without such ethnic cleansing no repression of the rebellion would last. The only way England could have won the Revolution, in short, was for the patriots to simply give up- and they refused to.