British Generals of the Revolution

John Burgoyne Sir Henry Clinton Charles Cornwallis

Sir Thomas Gage Sir William Howe

Unfortunately for Britain, its generals in the field were much like the political leaders at home, possessed of average talents at best. John Burgoyne, Guy Carleton, Sir Henry Clinton, Charles Cornwallis, William Howe, and Thomas Gage were probably reasonably endowed to fight conventional wars on the plains of western Europe, where orthodox linear formations were in order. Eighteenth-century European generals, however, were scarcely professionals in a modern sense. Military education was apprenticeship training in the field rather than schooling at such institutions as the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst or its U.S. equivalent at West Point, which were created later. Officers lacked a body of strategic doctrine from which to choose between alternatives for practical application. The British generals revealed themselves grossly inept at improvisation in a unique struggle in America that demanded rapid movement, original tactics, winter campaigning, and--most important--contending with a people in arms. Moreover, some British commanders, notably the Howe brothers, were deliberately slow in prosecuting the war because they favored a political reconciliation with the rebels.

For all these reasons American generals, even with amateurish militia backgrounds, were not at so serious a disadvantage as they might have been in a subsequent period of history. American officers who had fought with the British army in the French and Indian Wars, observing its procedures and reading the standard military treatises, found in the Revolution that the pattern of warfare as practiced by the so-called experts had hardly changed at all. Washington and his comrades lacked experience in directing massive formations and planning campaigns; but, for that matter, British generals--and admirals too--had themselves been subordinate officers in the last war with France.

(See Bibliography below)

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Author: Don Higginbotham
Bibliography: Alden, John R., A History of the American Revolution (1969); Bailyn, Bernard, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967); Bemis, Samuel Flagg, The Diplomacy of the American Revolution (1957; repr. 1983); Dupuy, Richard E., The American Revolution, a Global War (1977); Higginbotham, Don, War of American Independence (1971); Langguth, A. J., Patriots (1988); Morgan, Edmund S., Birth of the Republic, 2d ed. (1977); Morris, Richard B., The American Revolution: A Short History (1979) and The Forging of the Union 1781-1789 (1987); Shy, John, A People Numerous and Armed (1976); Stokesbury, James L., A Short History of the American Revolution (1991); Tuchman, Barbara, The First Salute (1988); Wood, Gordon, Creation of the American Republic (1969).