Ebbie - No arguments from me with what you said.

Art - Faded memory? THings muddled together. I know Necessity was after the capture of Trent, What I was under the impression of was that it was a recon party that Washington fired on about the same time... willing to concede that it has been a while and fog may have blurred it.

Field tactics and strategy are two different things. When Washington attempted to push his views on commanders during the war (early) bad things happened - like standing a fighting with half-trained troops against line regiments. Bad idea. (Long Island). Washington made good use of errors by his opponents who tended to get overly confident, and to learn from his mistakes - hence his escape from Long Island instead of standing and fighting again, and the war ending there.

Germantown and other battles demonstrated how much training had improved the abilities of the officers and men alike as the war progressed. The later battles also demonstrated how Washington learned to rely on subordinates to offer practical, workable suggestions, and the means to make them happen.

It is interesting that the same thing happened in the war of 1812 - half trained militia or troops in nominally "regular" regiments being whooped by militia and yoeman regiments made up of veterans and regular line regiments - and the officers wondering why... Until a young artillery officer presented them with the obvious solution - train, train, train and when you think its enough, train some more - then pick your ground and your fight and make it your own.

Now then, I do recall one discussion I had many many many years ago over drinks with a fellow. What we decided was that the "War of Revolution" was not - the "revolution" had happened some time before and the thought processes that lead up to the war were the result.

If you look at philosophy in Britain, say, thru to the early 1750's (around the start of the Seven Years War), and compare it with the thought processes by colonial "leaders" in the 1760s and early 1770s, you'd see very strong similarities. His point was that the level and class of society of people moving to the colonies changed around that point. Where second sons of gentry and aristocracy, educated and sort-of educated alike once came, and were heralded as "sophisticated thinkers" by the colonials, following the Seven Years War, many of these stopped coming, and those who came tended to be laborers and some craftsmen, but not the upper classes - along with convicts to some locations of course.

His point, and I may be foggy on it, was that before the 7 Years War, most people living in British America were emigrants from Britain or their direct offspring. By 1770, he claimed that was not the case. Most were born there. His argument was that where "political philosophy" had moved in in Britain, it had not in America - nor had it in parts of rural Britain. The result was that the colonial leaders in their petitions to Parliament and the King and the reasons for them, sounded, well, reasonable to most of the people reading them in the newspaper - and silly to the political elite of the day.

Add to that the "reasonable" need to recoup some of the expense of stationing troops in America and paying for the expenses of the war there, as far as the "elite" thought, and you get resentement from some, resignation to their lot from others, and another group believing that it was only fair, based on the expenses incurred on their behalf.

Ah well - back to work.