On this day in 1780, following a siege that began on April 2 of that year, Americans suffer their worst defeat of the American Revolution, with the unconditional surrender of Major General Benjamin Lincoln to British Lieutenant General Sir Henry Clinton and his army of 10,000 in Charleston, South Carolina. The British captured more than 3,000 Patriots and a great quantity of munitions and equipment, with 250 of their own killed and wounded in the process. Confident of British control in the South, Lieutenant General Clinton sailed north to British-occupied New York after having learned of an impending French expedition to the northern state. He left General Charles Cornwallis in command of over 8,000 British forces in the South. South Carolina was a bitterly divided state, and the British presence unleashed the full violence of a civil war upon the population. The guerrilla warfare strategies employed by Patriots Thomas Sumter, Nathanael Greene, and Francis Marion throughout the ...

On this day in 1783, The American Revolution finally comes to a close with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. Involving representatives of the United States, Great Britain, France, and Spain, it cemented America’s status as a free nation, as Britain formally recognized the independence of its 13 former American colonies, and the boundaries of the new republic were established: Florida north to the Great Lakes and the Atlantic coast west to the Mississippi River. The events leading up to the treaty dated back to April 1775, when American colonists in Lexington, Massachusetts responded to King George III’s refusal to grant them economic and political reform with armed revolution. On July 4, 1776, more than a year after the first shots of the war rang out, the Second Continental Congress officially adopted the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson. Five years later, in October 1781, British General Charles Lord Cornwallis surrendered to American and French forces a...