"}The Revolution was not a single struggle, but a series of four \nseparate Wars of Independence, waged in very different ways by the major\n cultures of British America. \u00a0The first American Revolution (1775-76) \nwas a massive popular insurrection in New England. \u00a0An army of British \nregulars was defeated by a Yankee militia which was much like the \nPuritan train bands from which they were descended. \u00a0These citizen \nsoldiers were urged into battle by New England\u2019s \u2018black regiment\u2019 of \nCalvinist clergy. \u00a0The purpose of New England\u2019s War for Independence, as\n stated both by ministers and by laymen such as John and Samuel Adams, \nwas not to secure the rights of man in any universal sense. \u00a0Most New \nEnglanders showed little interest in John Locke or Cato\u2019s letters. \u00a0They\n sought mainly to defend their accustomed ways against what the town of \nMalden called \u2018the contagion of venality and dissipation\u2019 which was \nspreading from London to America.
Many years later, historian George Bancroft asked a New England \ntownsman why he and his friends took up arms in the Revolution. \u00a0Had he \nbeen inspired by the ideas of John Locke? \u00a0The old soldier confessed \nthat he had never heard of Locke. \u00a0Had he been moved by Thomas Paine\u2019s \nCommon Sense? \u00a0The honest Yankee admitted that he had never read Tom \nPaine. \u00a0Had the Declaration of Independence made a difference? \u00a0The \nveteran thought not. \u00a0When asked to explain why he fought in his own \nwords, he answered simply that New Englanders had always managed their \nown affairs, and Britain tried to stop them, and so the war began.
In 1775, these Yankee soldiers were angry and determined men, in no \nmood for halfway measures. \u00a0Their revolution was not merely a mind game.\n \u00a0Most able-bodied males served in the war, and the fighting was cruel \nand bitter. \u00a0So powerful was the resistance of this people-in-arms that \nafter 1776 a British army was never again able to remain in force on the\n New England mainland.
The second American War for Independence (1776-81) was a more \nprotracted conflict in the middle states and the coastal south. \u00a0This \nwas a gentlemen\u2019s war. \u00a0On one side was a professional army of regulars \nand mercenaries commanded by English gentry. \u00a0On the other side was an \nincreasingly professional American army led by a member of the Virginia \ngentry. \u00a0The principles of this second American Revolution were given \ntheir Aristotelian statement in the Declaration of Independence by \nanother Virginia gentleman, Thomas Jefferson, who believed that he was \nfighting for the ancient liberties of his \u2018Saxon ancestors.\u2019
The third American Revolution reached its climax in the years from \n1779 to 1781. \u00a0This was a rising of British borderers in the southern \nbackcountry against American loyalists and British regulars who invaded \nthe region. \u00a0The result was a savage struggle which resembled many \nearlier conflicts in North Britain, with much family feuding and \nterrible atrocities committed on both sides. \u00a0Prisoners were \nslaughtered, homes were burned, women were raped and even small children\n were put to the sword.
The fourth American Revolution continued in the years from 1781 to \n1783. \u00a0This was a non-violent economic and diplomatic struggle, in which\n the elites of the Delaware Valley played a leading part. \u00a0The economic \nwar was organized by Robert Morris of Philadelphia. \u00a0The genius of \nAmerican diplomacy was Benjamin Franklin. \u00a0The Delaware culture \ncontributed comparatively little to the fighting, but much to other \nforms of struggle.
The loyalists who opposed the revolution tended to be \ngroups who were not part of the four leading cultures. \u00a0They included \nthe new imperial elites who had begun to multiply rapidly in many \ncolonial capitals, and also various ethnic groups who lived on the \nmargins of the major cultures: \u00a0notably the polyglot population of lower\n New York, the Highland Scots of Carolina and African slaves who \ninclined against their Whiggish masters.
\u2013 David Hackett Fischer, Albion\u2019s Seed.