British Army during the American Revolutionary War

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The British Army during the American Revolutionary War served for eight years in the American Revolutionary War, which was fought throughout North America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere from April 19, 1775, to September 3, 1783. The war formally commenced at the Battles of Lexington and Concord in present-day Massachusetts. Two months later, in June 1775, the Second Continental Congress, gathered in the revolutionary capital of Philadelphia, appointed George Washington to organize patriot militias into the Continental Army and lead them in a war against the British Army. The following year, in July 1776, the Second Continental Congress, representing the Thirteen Colonies, declared themselves free and independent from colonial governance.

The war was indecisive for several years. But on October 19, 1781, the British Army's defeat at the Siege of Yorktown led the British to conclude that the war was unwinnable, forcing them to forfeit the Thirteen Colonies in eastern North America in the Treaty of Paris, which they signed in 1783, though sporadic fighting continued for several additional years.^[1]

When the American Revolutionary War commenced, the British Army was a volunteer force that had suffered from a lack of peacetime spending and ineffective recruitment in the decade since the Seven Years' War.^[2] In 1776, to offset this deficiency, the British Crown hastily hired German Hessian contingents, who supplemented their fighting capabilities and served with regular British units for the rest of the war. In 1778, limited army impressment was introduced in England and Scotland to bolster the army's size, but the practice proved unpopular and was suspended until being reintroduced two years later, in 1780.

The attrition of constant fighting,^[1] the decision by the Kingdom of France to ultimately lend considerable military support to the cause of American independence,^[1] and the withdrawal of a sizable number of British forces from North America in 1778 were all factors in the British Army's ultimate defeat.^[1] At Yorktown in 1781, the British Army, then led by Charles Cornwallis, was forced to surrender, contributing to the Whigs gaining control of a parliamentary majority, which brought offensive British military operations in North America to an end.