Practice questions: The American Revolution

Answer: (C) Washington's army survived 1776 and was still in the field when France entered.

1. The British captured New York in 1776 and held it as their main base until they evacuated the city in 1783.
2. Congress kept a Continental Army in the field for the whole war, and Washington treated militia as a supplement to those regulars.
3. After nearly losing the army on Long Island, Washington refused to stake it on one battle, so a force was still in the field when France allied with the United States in 1778.
4. Britain shifted its main effort to the South in late 1778; in 1776 the principal fighting was around New York and New Jersey.

Answer: (D) Call on soldiers and civilians in the states to resist after the defeats of 1776.

1. The ten-dollar bounty for six more weeks was Washington's bargain with soldiers whose terms expired on December 31, separate from this public call to turn out.
2. Washington regarded short-term militia as too weak for a long campaign and was asking for a regular army, not telling civilians to stand aside.
3. The march across New Jersey was a retreat from a stronger army after the loss of New York, not a trap laid to pull the British away from the coast.
4. In December 1776, after New York fell and the army fell back across New Jersey, Paine urged people in the states to turn out and keep the fight going.

Answer: (B) revived Patriot confidence after months of defeat and carried the cause into 1777.

1. France signed its alliance in February 1778, after Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga, not after this December 1776 attack.
2. Trenton was a small action, about nine hundred Hessians captured, but it came after months of defeat and showed that the rebellion was still alive.
3. The British held New York from 1776 until the evacuation of 1783, and this attack was aimed at the Hessian post in Trenton.
4. Howe's main army was untouched; the prisoners were the Hessian garrison of one New Jersey town.

Answer: (A) Militia kept arriving until Burgoyne was surrounded and surrendered at Saratoga.

1. At Saratoga, militia kept arriving until they helped surround Burgoyne, and he surrendered about six thousand men on October 17, 1777.
2. Men leaving when short enlistments ended is the unreliability Washington was complaining about, so it illustrates his judgment.
3. Howe took Philadelphia in September 1777, which is true and says nothing about whether militia could be counted on in battle.
4. French shipments of money and gunpowder began in 1776 and do not test Washington's view of militia.

Answer: (B) France committed to American independence through a formal military alliance.

1. France's answer to Saratoga was recognition and a treaty in 1778, not an offer to mediate while refusing to treat the United States as independent.
2. On February 6, 1778, France signed the Treaty of Alliance and pledged to fight until American independence was won.
3. Secret money and gunpowder had been going out since 1776; Saratoga moved France from that covert help to an open alliance.
4. Spain entered the war in 1779 as France's ally and did not sign the 1778 treaty between France and the United States.

Answer: (D) weaken Britain, its rival since the loss of 1763, once the Patriots looked able to win.

1. Louis XVI was an absolute monarch and joined the war to hurt Britain, not to plant a republic in France.
2. Article 6 of the 1778 Treaty of Alliance renounced French claims to Canada and to Britain's other mainland possessions.
3. The alliance's stated end was American independence, and Spain entered in 1779 as France's ally rather than as a rival for a monopoly.
4. France had wanted to strike back since Britain took its North American empire in 1763, sent secret aid from 1776, and signed an open alliance only after Saratoga made an American victory look possible.

Answer: (D) Congress had no power to tax and paid suppliers in money that lost its value.

1. Saratoga, in the same season as the loss of Philadelphia, led France toward an open alliance, and secret aid had been flowing since 1776.
2. Continentals were the regulars enlisted for longer terms; militia were separate, short-service troops called out by the states.
3. The army outside Philadelphia went hungry because Congress could not raise money, not because a blockade had shut down Pennsylvania farms.
4. Congress could not levy taxes, and the paper money it printed, the continentals, lost nearly all its value, so the army could not buy food.

Answer: (B) published it fifty years later, charging that the nation had neglected its soldiers.

1. The writer was an enlisted Connecticut private, not an officer in charge of the commissary.
2. He published the memoir in 1830, half a century after the winter, and later charged that the country had used up its soldiers and turned them adrift without the land it had promised.
3. The account appeared in 1830, so it could not have been a wartime petition meant to move Congress that December.
4. He enlisted in 1776 and served to the end of the war on the Patriot side, and he wrote as one of those soldiers.

Answer: (C) A paid extension of service kept part of the army in the field after enlistments expired.

1. A payment for six more weeks does not establish why those men had enlisted in the first place.
2. Congress did recruit men for three years or the war, but this bargain was ten dollars for six weeks, a stopgap when the 1776 terms ran out.
3. On January 1, 1777, at least half the New England troops took ten dollars to stay six weeks, so the army did not dissolve when those enlistments ended.
4. Washington reported that the men knew they were needed and set a price; the bounty was a concession, not an order they were already bound to obey.

Answer: (D) Patriot states enlisted Black soldiers and promised freedom in return for service.

1. Dunmore's 1775 offer threatened slaveholders' property and pushed many of them toward the Patriot side.
2. Congress made no general promise of freedom, and it did not abolish slavery in occupied states.
3. Britain did not abolish slavery in its empire until 1833; the wartime offer was protection inside British lines.
4. Patriot leaders were slow to recruit Black men, but about five thousand served, and in 1778 Rhode Island promised freedom to enslaved men who enlisted.

Answer: (C) Cornwallis marched into Virginia and was trapped at Yorktown by French and American forces.

1. King's Mountain and Cowpens went the other way: Patriot militia and Continentals broke Loyalist and British forces, and the countryside stayed hard to hold.
2. The British left Boston in March 1776, and the southern strategy, begun in late 1778, was still the plan when Cornwallis moved north.
3. Greene lost battles and kept his army alive, and Cornwallis, worn down, left the Carolinas for Virginia, where the French and American armies trapped him at Yorktown.
4. Spain fought Britain from 1779 as France's ally, mainly along the Gulf, and did not send an army to Greene in the Carolinas.

Answer: (B) That southern Loyalists would turn out and help Britain hold the region.

1. A French fleet under de Grasse reached the Chesapeake in 1781, but King's Mountain was a backcountry fight among Americans and did not decide where that fleet sailed.
2. From late 1778 Britain expected southern Loyalists to help hold the region, and at King's Mountain Patriot militia destroyed a Loyalist force in a fight where almost all the men on both sides were American.
3. Many Native nations that fought sided with Britain, and this battle was Patriot militia against Loyalists, not a test of Native neutrality.
4. Spain had already entered the war in 1779, a year before King's Mountain, as an ally of France.

Answer: (A) French forces outnumbered the Americans, so Yorktown was a joint allied victory.

1. About 9,000 French soldiers and 28,500 French sailors and marines served beside about 9,150 Americans, and Cornwallis surrendered to the combined force.
2. Militia were 3,300 of the ground troops, fewer than the 5,850 Continentals and the 9,000 French soldiers ashore.
3. Washington had at most about 20,000 Continentals at one time, and this table counts one siege rather than British forces across North America.
4. The fleet that held the mouth of the Chesapeake was French, under Admiral de Grasse, and Spain sent no squadron to Yorktown.

Answer: (A) Allied coordination combined a land siege with French naval power to isolate Cornwallis.

1. In September 1781 de Grasse's fleet held the Chesapeake while the French and American armies besieged Yorktown, and Cornwallis surrendered on October 19.
2. The allied armies and the French fleet had already cut the town off; a British rescue fleet left New York only on the day of the surrender.
3. Washington fielded at most about 20,000 Continentals at once, and Britain kept the larger army and the stronger navy for most of the war.
4. American troops stormed one British redoubt and the French stormed the other, so French forces joined the Continental Army rather than replacing it.

Answer: (A) The western boundary at the Mississippi, across land that Native nations still held.

1. The treaty set the western border at the Mississippi even though no Native nation signed it, and those nations still held most of the land inside that line.
2. Canada stayed British; the treaty let Americans fish off British coasts in Canada and did not share the government of Canada.
3. In the separate 1783 settlement with Spain, Britain ceded East and West Florida to Spain, so Florida did not return to Britain.
4. The ban on slavery north of the Ohio came in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, not in the 1783 treaty.

Answer: (C) A French fleet kept British ships from entering the Chesapeake in September 1781.

1. Valley Forge shows soldiers staying through hunger and disease, which is the case Interpretation 1 makes.
2. Trenton was an American attack on Hessians in 1776, before the French alliance, so it supports the soldiers' side of the argument.
3. De Grasse's fleet drove off a British squadron at the mouth of the Chesapeake and sealed Cornwallis in, which is the French naval role Interpretation 2 credits with ending the war.
4. Cowpens was won by militia and Continentals under Morgan, with no French troops on the field.