The Decisive Battles of World History

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x By December 1776, when both sides settled into winter camps,

Washington had lost 90 percent of his army to death, desertion,

division, capture, or simply because the volunteer soldiers’ short

terms of enlistment had expired.

x Washington’s reputation as a good general had been erased by

that fall’s unrelieved string of demoralizing defeats and retreats,

meaning that no new recruits would show up for the next campaign

season in the spring. To observers on both sides that winter, it

seemed certain that the American experiment was coming to an

unsurprising end as a miserable failure.

x Yet between December 25, 1776, and January 3, 1777, the elite

British soldiers would be defeated not once but twice; Washington’s

reputation as a military genius would be reestablished; and from

this low point, the revolution would gain an irresistible momentum,

culminating in the defeat and surrender of the British at Yorktown

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American Republic.

The Opponents

x The person responsible for this turnaround was Washington

himself. As a general, he had displayed a talent for holding together

the often unruly and independent volunteers who made up the

American ranks, and on the march, he habitually hovered at the end

of the line to give encouragement to those who were lagging.

x The general commanding the British army was an aristocrat named

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who ordered his men to scramble directly up the steep cliffs, taking

the French by surprise and winning the battle. Howe was a political

moderate who disagreed with the Crown’s harsh treatment of the

American colonies and who had considerable sympathy for them.

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mandated mission to rule.