Camp Gagnon - The American Independence Story You Were Told is a LIE

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

Today, we explore the real cause of the Revolutionary War—from the events that led to mass tension to the famous battles, internal conflicts, and the legacy of the Revolutionary War. Welcome to History Camp! 🏕️ Shoutout to our sponsors: CashApp and Take Ultra -Gett 15% OFF For New Customers with Code “CAMP” Who You Visit http://takeultra.com -Download Cash App Today: https://click.cash.app/ui6m/io6bi7nv #CashAppPod. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N.A., pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A. Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flex card. Savings provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. Want the even WILDER theories? SIGN UP TO THE PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/cw/CampGagnon 👕🧢 Shop CAMP Merch: https://camp-rd.com/collections/ufo 🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets: https://markgagnonlive.com 🎩👽 Daily Dose Of History: https://www.dailytodayinhistory.com Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:08 Shoutout AMERICA + Christos YAPPIN 3:48 American Legends we All Know 7:11 French and Indian War 14:27 Boston Tea Party 18:00 Americans Fighting Americans 33:10 Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride 35:37 Shot Heard Around The World + 37:03 Bunker Hill + Washington Put in Charge 41:36 Washington at Valley Forge 49:08 Battle of Saratoga + France Declares War 54:59 Treaty That Ends the War 1:01:17 Drop Your Thoughts! + HAPPY JULY 4th!!! #camping #history Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every 4th of July, America celebrates a story. 13 colonies united against a tyrant, crushing taxes of Midnight Rider, this honest general, an army of underdogs and liberty for all. But that's not exactly what really happened. The American Revolution was way more complicated than most of us learned in history class. From the colonies that actually were not united, to the taxes that were actually the lowest in the entire British Empire,

to the Midnight Rider yelling, the British are coming, who never even finished. his ride. What got passed down to us isn't all history. A lot of it is actually just legend. And today, we're breaking it all down. We're going to walk through the real actual journey of the American Revolution, step by step, and no holding back. We're going to go through the entire version that your history class probably buried and the names of the men who actually did it. The good, the bad, the brave, the ugly, the American. If you were interested in the real story of the American Revolution, this is the episode for you. Happy 4th of July. Sit back, relax,

And welcome to History Camp. What's up, people, and welcome back to History Camp. This is a very special episode because it is the 250th anniversary of America. This great country that I live in, that I'm a citizen of, that in many ways, is one of the most interesting and fascinating places in the entire planet. Not only right now, but also historically. Now, before we jump in to this episode, I want to give a big shout out to you. Yeah, dude, slash lady, whoever you are, whatever you're doing right now, I want to say thank you. whether you're in America or you're in one of the other places that America probably has a military base.

I want to say thank you for supporting the show. Every time you click on an episode or you like or you comment, you help the show grow. You help my dreams come true and you help keep the lights on the tent and you keep the fire burning here at the campsite. Also, I want to say big thanks to my palpado. Christos Papadapodos. Now Christos, how's it going? He doesn't have a microphone because we took it away because a lot of the comments, specifically on his, history camp, we're criticizing you for chiming in.

Every time we're doing a historical episode, you always jump in, you go, oh, the Greeks actually did that. Oh, the Greeks actually built it first. It's enough with the Greeks, okay? We're doing a hiatus on Greek episodes because you and your constant chiming in. Now, ladies and gentlemen, this episode is awesome because the American Revolution is perhaps one of the, I mean, it's maybe the foundational story of America in a lot of ways, right? Everything that happened before it is American colonies, all that bad stuff that happened.

British, okay? From here on out, it's America, all right? The American Revolution. Now, I don't know about you. What I learned in history class was not the truth about the American Revolution. And this is not some crazy conspiratorial rant that I sometimes do here, okay? I'm just saying there's details, like most history, that kind of gets formatted and shaped to be more palatable for public consumption, you know? America in many ways is an idea. It is a belief. It is a spirit because we're such a new country, you know? But like any new country, you need, myths and kind of legends to kind of, you know, propel the stories forward and help the ideas grow.

Well, today we're going to go through the actual events that happened and the real people that were a part of it. And I'm not here to, you know, malign any person or any nation because to be honest with you, I love America. Of course, we're not without our false, right? What country isn't? We have all sorts of, you know, morbid history. But I truly believe America, for me, is the best place to live.

I love this country. And on top of that, our World Cup team is ripping right now. So I got no complaints in this very moment. And for one day a year, I think we can all sit back and go, you know what? I'm proud of me an American. And then we can go back to fighting and arguing with and trying to kill each other later. But for today, I'm happy to live in this great nation. Now, the American Revolution is a massive topic.

And we can't do this topic justice by cramming it all into one episode. So what we're going to do today is just skim through the entire story, but focus on getting the biggest misconceptions actually correct. because this is so big that I don't know if you can even do it all in one episode. Now, I'm not here to say America is the greatest country ever or the worst country of all time or the victim or any claim like that. I am a crusader for the truth and I want to know what actually happened. I'll still choose to believe the myths because I like stories and legends, but in the interest of trying to actually know the facts of, you know, the nation that I live in,

I want to walk through all of the real details without rose-colored glasses. Now, before we get into this crazy undertaking, let's review what most of us probably learned in school. This is the school version you were taught. In, I don't know, the 1760s, the British Empire began squeezing the American colonies with a bunch of unfair taxes. The Stamp Act, the Townsend Acts, the T Act, all imposed without giving the colonists a single voice in Parliament. And this is the whole no taxation without representation thing. You can't take my money and not let me vote, you know? and that became the rallying cry of the oppressed people of the American colonies.

And in 1770, British soldiers gunned down innocent civilians in the Boston massacre. In 1773, the Sons of Liberty answered by dumping a bunch of British tea into the Boston Harbor. And when the king responded with punishment instead of compromise, the colonies united as one force against the king. And then in April 1775, Paul Revere rode through the night shouting, the British are coming, and at Lexington and Concord, brave minute men fired the shot herd around the world. George Washington took command of the Continental Army, and through honest, courageous and brilliant leadership, the man who could never tell a lie led his starving barefoot soldiers through the snows of Valley Forge and out the other side.

Thomas Jefferson, you know him, he declared to the world that all men are created equal. And against impossible odds, a scrappy band of American patriots defeated the greatest military power that the earth had ever seen and capped it off with a stunning victory at Yorktown and they won liberty. Not just for themselves, but eventually for everyone. And that is the story they hear in like, I don't know, like 10th grade in history class or something. And it's great. It's a great story. It's inspiring. It fits, you know, neatly into the school year.

It's clean. But almost every single beat of it is maybe in. complete or exaggerated and even in some cases just wrong. Not wrong in like the technical sense, but like wrong in ways that completely change what the revolution really was. The taxes weren't crushing. The colonies weren't united, really. Washington actually lost more battles than he won.

And that famous midnight ride, Paul Revere never actually finished it. And in my opinion, the actual story of the American Revolution is actually more inspiring. It's actually more interesting. and it's not like, you know, a clean, you know, history class lesson. It's more like Game of Thrones. And that, to me, is way cooler. Hey, real quick, most people who watch this channel aren't subscribed. And when you subscribe, you help the channel grow and you stay in the loop with every new drop.

Religion camp, history camp, and camp gagnon. Now, let's get back to it. So, in order to find the real revolution, we have to start with, you know, where the real story starts, not in the Boston Harbor or at Lexington, but a decade earlier in the smoking aftermath of of a different war, a war that most Americans don't really remember, but one that Britain never forgot. Because Britain actually won that war, and winning it is what eventually cost them America. So let's go back to February 1763. The Treaty of Paris is signed, and Great Britain just won the largest war that the world had ever seen. We call our corner of it the French and

Indian War, but it was really a world war, fought across North America, Europe, the Caribbean, the open ocean, and Britain didn't just win, they dominated. They kicked France basically out of Canada and claimed everything east of the Mississippi. And there was just one problem with conquering half the planet, and that's the bill. The war had nearly doubled Britain's national debt. It was roughly like 75 million pounds in 7056 to 133 million in 1763. That is like less than 10 years that they doubled their debt. and the interest payments alone

were eating more than half of the entire national budget. I mean, think about that, right? Like, that's insane. I mean, war is costly and someone has to pay for it. So you can do all the conquest you want, but eventually you're going to put yourself into economic ruin. So before Britain could pay for a single soldier

or a ship or anything at all, not even like a biscuit or a McVittie's hobnob, half of every pound the government collected was gone. Just like that. and servicing the debt from a war that they had actually won. Like, that's where the money was going to an already achieved battle. And a huge chunk of that war had been fought to protect the American colonies. On top of that, Britain was now keeping around like 10,000 soldiers stationed in America.

And that cost was not nothing. That was roughly like 200,000 pounds a year. Guarding a frontier that had just exploded into violence with Pontiac's Rebellion, this massive Native American uprising in the Ohio country. So from London's point of view and from the perspective of the king, the math was pretty simple. Hey, we just spent a fortune defending you from all these people that were trying to take you

or take your land or kill you. And we're still spending a fortune protecting you to this day because the Native Americans are pissed and everyone around you is trying to get a piece. So now it's time that the colonies chip in. Now here's what we hit the first myth. What we're taught is this. Britain, we're crushing the colonies.

under the weight of these unbearable taxes, squeezing these helpless colonists that, you know, that were just there for a new life and they had no choice but to revolt. But the records actually show something a little different. The American colonists were just about the least tax people in the entire British Empire. And it's really not even close. In Britain itself, the average person paid around 26 shillings a year in taxes. So that's taxes on land, on houses, windows, carriages, newspaper, beer, literally everything. the actual British citizens were, you know, paying taxes on. In the American colonies, the per capita figure has been estimated to about one

shilling a year, which is a little bit less. I mean, they're still getting tax without being represented, but it's not exactly what I heard when I was in school. So by 1775, the British government was consuming about a fifth of its own citizens' income. Again, trying to pay off this costly war, while New Englanders were paying somewhere between like 1 and 2% of their income. So when the Stamp Act arrived in 1765, this is a tax on legal documents and newspapers and playing cards, anything that would kind of have a stamp on it. Colonists weren't being bled dry in the way that were kind of led to believe.

What actually enraged them was the precedent. And I think this is an important thing to think about when it comes to American history because Americans are very concerned about the precedent of everything. Like, yeah, this one thing isn't so bad, but what is it going to lead to? What is the slippery slope? And it starts really right here. Because up until that point, internal taxes had been the business of these colonial assemblies. But what I mean by that is like Americans were taxing Americans through legislatures they actually elected.

There weren't any of their own representatives in the British Parliament. And plus, parliament is demanding a shilling today. But tomorrow, who knows? It could be 10 shillings. It could be 100 shillings. They could just bleed us dry. And that's what the no taxation without representation really meant. it's like yeah was London being super unfair maybe not but could they be sure and that's why we got to push back that's the colonial mindset but that's still not the entire story because for some of the most powerful men in america there were other grievances and that's land that same year 1763 king george the third drew a line down the map of north america right along like the crest of the appalachian mountains and declared everything west of

it off limits to any type of colonial settlement. And it was called the Proclamation of 1763. So to the monarchists in London, that was damage control. Pontiac's rebellion that I just mentioned earlier was burning through the frontier and keeping settlers and native nations apart was actually a lot cheaper than any other type of skirmish or just a full-on other war. So they were like, hey, you can't go that way because it's going to be expensive for us to come in and clean up the mess. So you guys got to stay right here. But to a very specific class of very wealthy people, that line was a financial catastrophe. You see, the upper class of Virginia had actually been speculating in Western land for years. Since the 1740s, they had literally millions of acres that they had granted to firms for

future sales. So the proclamation's new restrictions kept all of these land speculators and investors from gaining the titles that they needed to secure their claims. So this new proclamation, was basically messing up their money. And one of the men that was hit the hardest was a tall Virginia planter and a veteran surveyor named George Washington. Yes, George Washington is many things, a brave man, a great general,

but also was a very prominent and very wealthy land speculator. Washington had dedicated a lot of his life to this exact pursuit. He chased economic independence and status amongst Virginia's elite. And again, this is not a knock on George Washington. I'm just saying the version

that we get on the first. the dollar bill is like, oh, this guy is the perfect man that's a, you know, he's basically Jesus. Well, the reality is all people, specifically people in history, they have kind of, you know, mixed elements of their life. He fought in the French and Indian War, partly on the promise of 200,000 acres of Western land for Virginia soldiers. And in 7063, he helped found the Mississippi Land Company, his most ambitious Western land scheme ever. And it was launched mere weeks before the proclamation slammed the door shut. So the bigger picture is that the revolution's leadership wasn't just fighting for principles. Some of them, perhaps George Washington himself, had investments

also riding on this independence, which brings us to the T. Again, here's what we're taught in what I talked about earlier. Britain taxed T so brutally that the furious colonists just said, you know what, F you, they dumped it into the harbor rather than, you know, pay the tax. But what the records actually show is that the T Act of 1773, in some ways made tea cheaper. Wildly enough, the East India Company, Britain's like mega corporation, basically like the OG like Amazon of the day,

they were drowning in debt with warehouses full of unsold tea. So Parliament passed the Tea Act in May of 1773 as like a corporate bailout. It gave the East India Company a tax break that actually made its tea cheaper than the tea being smuggled into the colonies. because that's the other thing that you may have not heard in history class.

America ran on smuggled tea. At this point in history, roughly 86% of all the tea that the colonies were getting was smuggled Dutch tea. We're talking like almost a million pounds of tea was coming in illegally every single year. So when those East India Company ships were sailing into Boston Harbor, cheap legal tea wasn't a relief. It was a threat to the smugglers and to the merchants who built first. fortunes smuggling in tea on the black market. Does that make sense? If they're bringing in the legit tea, but then the smuggled tea is a little bit cheaper. It's like, yeah, let's just go with the

smuggled tea and forget the East India company. And some of the merchants that were doing the smuggling would end up funding the resistance. Obviously for financial reasons, like, hey, let's get rid of this tea because we're making all of our bread on this tea, the company that we own, you know, like the illegal smuggling enterprise that we actually get a piece of. And to the principal side of the movement, cheap tea was something even worse. It was like a trap. You see, if you buy the discounted tea and pay the small duty that's attached to it, even though the tea is technically cheaper and the duty is so minuscule, you basically acquiesced to Parliament's right to tax you at all, which goes back again to that stamp act thing. It's like, hey, the precedent.

We don't care that the tax is actually basically nothing or that the tax makes it cheaper. You're taxing us without letting us vote. And that we can't. stand for. So on the night of December 16th, 1773, when a bunch of dudes dressed as mohawks dumped 342 chests of East India Company tea into Boston Harbor, they weren't just, you know, protesting against tea. They definitely weren't protesting against expensive tea. They were destroying the cheap tea that threatened their illegal business maneuvers. Now, quick review, because we've covered a lot so far. Here's where we stand. The colonists were the least taxed people in the empire, fighting over principle rather than actual financial oppression. Their wealthiest

leaders had a ton of land and land speculation that was behind a line that the king told them not to cross, so that also messed up their money. And the most famous protest in American history, the one that we hear about all the time, Boston Tea Party, was aimed at a price cut because it threatened the business of those running basically like a tea mafia. Now, none of that makes the American revolutionary cause like fake. It's not like, oh, this is BS. Like it was all, you know, we've been lied to. It's just not the complete truth. You know, the self-government argument was real. And people genuinely believe that they deserve the right to govern themselves. But it does mean that the question of why America revolted a lot more interesting and a lot more complicated

than just like, ah, tyranny. And that mess is about to get a lot bigger because America didn't actually agree on any of this. That's the part that I've been. find most interesting. When the fighting actually started, thousands of Americans looked at, you know, the Patriot Revolutionary Cause, and instead they were like, hey, we're just going to stick with the king. In some colonies, the fighting actually was less like a revolution and more, it was more like a civil war. Hey guys, I just want to take a break really quick to tell you about Cash App. I love cash app. I use it all the time. If you know anything about me, I try to make my life less chaotic because I travel a lot. I got kid. I got a wife. And I'm just doing stuff. I'm

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Now, this is actually something that I did here when I did a tour of Boston when I was like, I don't know, like the end of college, that basically at the time, you had one third loyalists that were loyal to the king. You had another third that were the patriots that were the rebels in America that wanted to shrug off the tyranny. And then you had another third that was kind of like in the middle. They were a little bit neutral. They didn't really know what was going on. And it's in textbooks and documentaries and even the tours that I took. and it's usually credited to one man, and that's John Adams. But right off the bat, there's a couple problems with this famous statistic.

First, Adams wasn't taking a poll in 1776. The quote comes from a letter that he wrote in 1815. That's 40 years after independence when he was living on and writing from his farm. And second, when historians actually look at the numbers, the picture of like this whole one-third divide is actually a lot less even. A landmark 1968 study put loyalists

at about 16% of the population. Nearly one in five free citizens were actually riding with the king. And historian Robert Calhoun found that active patriot support

topped out around like 40 to 45% of the free population. His words said, at most, no more than a bare majority. What's interesting here is that the revolution

was actively supported by barely half the people it claimed to speak for. Everyone else was either against it or just like keeping their heads down or just kind of focusing on their everyday life and hope that the armies just left them alone. And again, here's over Todd,

that these 13 colonies united against a common enemy and they fought the king very bravely, yada, yada, yada. But again, the record shows something a little bit more interesting that the population is basically split down the middle and at many turns was actually fighting themselves. So by 1783, around 19,000 Americans had enlisted in the British Army with thousands more in the loyalist militias. That is the many American armies in favor of Great Britain.

And when it all ended, roughly 80,000 people fled the country. It's really interesting. It's actually one of the largest refugee crises in early American history, and we never talk about it, the people that left America after the war was done because they were afraid for themselves, they were afraid for the nation that they lived in, and they just decided to flee. And those who stayed behind, the war between neighbors went on. Long before Lexington, Patriot crowds were enforcing loyalty with tarring and feathering.

You basically take a dude, you strip him naked, you pour like boiling hot pine tar all over his skin, and you coat him in feathers and then parade him through the town. Like the way I remember it in class, I was like, oh, that's kind of funny. I thought it was like a prank, you know, it sounds like fraternity hazing. Kind of torture. If you take a step back, they were just torturing dudes, basically. And it was designed to terrify anyone that was leaning toward the king and the cause of London. And it worked really well.

It worked so well, actually, that countless loyalists signed patriot oaths under this threat. Or they just went silent and just never said another word, which means even our best statistics still undercount them. Let that be shown. Like, if you meet someone that's like, yeah, you know, my family was actually here back in the 1700s. We got to be like, all right, well, what side were they on? Were they on the American side or were they like British loyalists that just kept their mouth shut? We get to check the records. I'm not giving you a pass because you were here back in the colonial days because you might have been a freaking traitor going for the British, right?

I'm not having it. Now, nowhere does the United Colonies myth collapse harder than inside the most famous American family of all. I think we actually talked about this in an episode that we did on this guy. But it is a crazy story and also just shows like the amount of passion and just like, like, patriotic fervor that was happening in the colonies at this time. So 1775, Benjamin Franklin was the most celebrated American on earth, and literally on earth. I mean, he was traveling all over and was admired basically everywhere he went. Now, he had a son, William Franklin, and he was the royal governor of New Jersey. And this is a post that he obviously got because of his hard work

and not because of his connections at all, right, Christos? Exactly right, yes. No, this is a job that he got because his daddy lobbied for him, which, again, people talk about, you know, like Trump and his kids or Biden and his kids. Nepotism is the name of the game in America. It's been going on since 70, 75 before we're even America. Think about that. Ben Franklin says, hey, New Jersey, guess what? William Franklin, my son, he's going to be in charge. And they were super close. Old Benny Frank had guided Williams education, his career, his entire life, like, literally trained him. And Ben Franklin, smart guy. Like he was his personal tutor.

And then when the empire cracked, the Franklin family cracked with it. Get this. January 1775, Governor William Franklin stood before the New Jersey legislator and begged them, begged them to stay loyal to the king. Warning that one road led to peace and that the other led to all the horrors of a civil war. How interesting is that that they're talking about civil war at this time? We think about the civil war, obviously, in the 1800s. This is the OG Civil War, where you have families fracturing, not just regular old, like, peasant families.

These are like high-ranking American aristocracy, fighting internally about what side to pick. And that if we go with this rebellion, there's going to be a civil war in America. And we don't want that. Before America is even a country, we're already fighting each other. Now, what's crazy is that William Franklin's own father came to his kid's mansion to win him over to independence. I mean, just imagine that scene. the two of them sitting at a table like this, looking at each other arguing.

Ben Franklin being like, hey, we're riding for our boys, we got money over here, we got our own little situation cooking, and we are going to take this country for ourselves. And his own son being like, Dad, it's going to be a lot of bloodshed, a lot of people are going to die, let's just try to negotiate this diplomatically,

let's do the right thing, let's work with the king, and keep everyone happy. So as a result, neither of them would bend. And in the end, Benjamin Franklin wrote off his, own son as a thorough government man. Basically saying like, yeah, dude, he's D-Ride in the king. Now, as a result, William was arrested. Ben Franklin got his own son arrested, convicted of treason,

and imprisoned in Connecticut. And when his wife was actually laying there dying, the patriots refused to let him go to see her. By 1777, he was in solitary confinement, the very son of Benjamin Franklin rotting in a patriot jail while his father said. sat in the Continental Congress. Throughout the entirety of the revolution, Ben and his son William, they never spoke. They only met once briefly after the war to settle family business,

and then they never reconciled. Ben Franklin helped birth a nation, and it literally cost him his own son. So think about that, because it's actually related to the central question of this whole story. We asked at the beginning of the episode, if the revolution was a united people

rising up for liberty, why did so many Americans fight against it? Why was there so much ambivalence within the colonies about whether or not they should do it? Well, the first half of the answer is pretty simple, because there was no united people. The revolution split America right down the middle. It split families like the Franklins, and that was largely true throughout the entire country. And so far, we've only been talking about the white Americans. If you widen the lens, this war for liberty means something completely different to different people that live in this country. In November 1775, Virginia's royal governor,

this guy Lord Dunmore, he issued a proclamation promising freedom to any enslaved person who left a rebel master and joined the British Army. Whoa. Our textbook villain was offering enslaved Americans the one thing that the self-proclaimed

army of liberty would not. I mean, that's a pretty crazy deal, right? Like, hey, you're enslaved in America. If you fight for the British, when we win, you'll be free. It's pretty, I mean, it's a good deal, right? Now, within weeks, hundreds had escaped to Dunmore's lines, joining what they called his Ethiopian regiment.

Some reportedly wearing shirts inscribed with the words liberty to slaves. In 70s and 75, the most literal fight for liberty on the continent was black Americans running toward the king's army, with liberty written across their chest while the planters chasing them wrote pamphlets about tyranny. I mean, how ironic is that? You have the American rebels talking about tyranny while they have, an enslaved class and then the enslaved people running over to the king to try to get freedom

for fighting for the British. Now again, I'm not here to write like, oh, this side's good, this side's bad. I'm just saying it's way more nuanced, way more complicated, in a lot of ways, way more interesting than the clean story that we've all been told. Now, here's the skeptic caveat about all of this. Dunmore's offer was not like an offer out of like, you know, good faith. It wasn't like a charity act. It wasn't him being like, oh, these poor enslaved black Americans, we need to help them. It was a tool. It was a political tool that anyone in that position probably would have used. It applied only to enslaved people of rebels.

So get that. Loyalist slaveholders could still keep their human property just fine. That was okay. If you were a slaveholder that was riding with the king, yeah, your slaves are slaves. Like it was an insane double standard that was obviously just a political move. He was trying to weaken the arm of the rebellion. But for the enslaved people themselves, the motives in London didn't matter. A door to freedom had cracked open a little bit and tens of thousands would run through it before the war was over.

And interestingly, the Native Americans were kind of given the same offer. You see, the Iroquois Confederacy was torn apart. They consisted of six nations under the Great Tree of Peace. This was this alliance that's actually older than like a lot of European countries. The Oneida and the Tuscarora Native sided with the Americans. But the Mohawk, the Seneca, the Cayuga, and the Onondaga, led by the Mohawk leader Joseph Brandt, actually fought for the British. And if anything, I mean, they kind of have a good reason. Remember the proclamation line that the king made about not going farther west.

If you're a Native American, put yourself in their moccasins, right? Immediately, it makes a lot more sense. A British victory meant that settlers would stay east of the mountains. But American victory, I mean, all bets were off. They were going to be going west. So a Confederacy that had kept the peace for centuries went to war against itself at the Battle of Oransconi in 1777. You have Iroquois fighting Iroquois, and afterwards, Brant's Mohawks burned the Oneida settlement of Arisca, and the Oneida struck back at Mohawk villages. The Longhouse was burned from the inside.

And in 1779, Washington ordered the Sullivan campaign to destroy like 40 villages with everything, their crops, their homes, displacing over 5,000 Iroquois into a winter that starved and froze them. So that little detail, that little snippet from history, just put that in your back pocket, hold on to it. And it's a part of the American story and in a lot of ways, Washington story, that we'll come back to in a minute.

So here's the map that we just redrew, okay? No 13 colonies united against an empire, a bare majority against their own neighbors enforced by this public humiliation slash torture of tarred feathering. A revolution that split families, sent enslaved people running towards the British in pursuit of liberty,

and shattered a century-old Native American Confederacy into a civil war within the civil war amongst the colonial settlers within the revolutionary war. You see what's happening here? This isn't just like one war. It is a bunch of different battles and skirmishes within their own groups

that is sort of under the umbrella of the revolution. So for the majority of the people on the continent, this revolution was not a very simple, clean one on the side of freedom. But, and this is why the truth is way more interesting, this divided, fractured, half-willing collection of colonies took on the most powerful military on the planet, and they won. I mean, like, if you think about it, like, oh, the Americans all came together and they kicked out the British,

it's like, okay, that's interesting. But now it's like, okay, America has a civil war. the Native Americans have a civil war. Like, you have enslaved black Americans that are fleeing to go fight, you know, fight for the British, and somehow the colonies still win? Now, how is it possible? Well, the story of how this happened

is its own very complicated and nuanced story filled with myths and super interesting information. And it starts with a silversmith on a horse, racing through the dark, shouting a phrase that he may have actually never said So now let's back up to April 18th, 1775, Boston, just before midnight. A 40-year-old dude named Paul Revere slips across the Charles River in a rowboat. He borrows a horse from his homie and rides off into the history books.

You know what happens next, right? Here's what we're taught. Paul Revere galloped alone through the night saying, the British are coming from village to village, single-handily, basically rousing the militia in time to meet the redcoats at dawn. But the records don't show that story exactly. It kind of says that he couldn't have shouted the British coming. Most colonists in Massachusetts still considered themselves British.

So the phrase wouldn't really have made any sense. What he actually said was probably closer to the regulars are coming out. And he wasn't shouting it anywhere because the mission depended on extreme secrecy. He stopped at houses and warned people quietly. Because remember, not everyone in the villages were united. Do you have some people going for the British and other people that were going for the Patriots? So if you just ran through and shouted at everyone,

then everyone would know. And also, Paul Revere wasn't alone. William Dawes rode a different route with the same message. And a doctor named Samuel Prescott joined them on the road as well. Actually, an estimated 40 riders carried the same alarm across the towns west of Boston that night, a network of riders and signal guns and church bells

with redundancy baked in. because the Patriots assumed that the riders would be caught. And one of them actually was. On the outskirts of Lincoln, the three ran into British patrol. Daz and Prescott escaped, but Paul Revere was captured and played no further role in the events of April 19th. It was Prescott who actually reached Concord. So the man on the statue never actually finished the ride. And the man who finished the ride is like barely remembered at all.

And what's so interesting is that we know Paul. Revere for this midnight ride, but this ride wasn't even mentioned in his own obituary. So then the question is, how did Paul Revere become the name? How did he become the guy that we all know for this midnight ride? Well, he wasn't really the guy, not for like 85 years. Someone made him the guy long after he was dead for reasons that had nothing to do with 1775 at all, and everything to do with what America was about to go through in 1861. Now, remember that detail, too, about Paul Revere, because it is the key to this entire story that we're going to come back to in just a second. Meanwhile, it's dawn. April 19, 75, on Lexington Green. About 70 militia men under Captain

John Parker stand facing 700 British regulars, basically British redcoats. And here's what we're taught. The British open fire on innocent farmers. And, you know, this is the shot herd around the world. But what the record shows is that no one actually knows. who fired first. Both sides had been ordered not to shoot. British officers swore that the shot came from behind the hedge. The militia were just as certain that it was a British officer. And 250 years later, historians are still not settled on this. What we do know is what followed, a ragged, unordered British volley, eight militiamen died against only one injured British redcoat. Lexington wasn't a battle. It was more like a skirmish.

like a weird spasm, confused, accidental, and ultimately irreversible. Even the iconic phrase is borrowed. That shot heard around the world was written decades later by Rolf Waldo Emerson, about Concord, where the militia made their real stand at the North Bridge and sent the British column reeling back towards Boston, under fire the entire way. Two months later came the battle that showed both sides what this war would actually cost. And this is the Battle of Bunker Hill, which in perfect keeping with the episode was mostly fought on Breeds Hill. Just kind of another, we call it Bunker Hill, but it's actually fought on a different hill.

Textbooks call it this American morale victory, but the numbers are starker. The British took the hill at a cost of like a thousand casualties. I think about 1,054 casualties specifically, roughly double the American total, including a devastating share of their officers. one British officer wrote that his generals had expected rather to punish a mob than fight with troops that would look them in the face. Now, that sentence is like the whole first year of this war. Britain kept winning the ground and losing the math, right? Like, they're winning these battles, but they're losing so many men. This is what we'd call a Pyrrhic victory, right?

Like, they're winning, but at what cost? And that brings us to the man that the Continental Congress chose to lead this entire thing. that very same Virginia man with the commanding presence. He was tall. You know, he's got experience in the French and Indian War and a home colony that the cause desperately needed on board. And that's George Washington. The Marvel statue version of Washington is this military genius

who outfought the British. But the truth is, Washington actually lost more battles than he won, which I think doesn't tarnish his legacy. It actually makes it way cooler. And 7076, in New York, he came home with a rainstorm of losing the entire war in one summer. The British arrived at New York with the largest force ever assembled in North America. And at the Battle of Long Island, on August 27, 1776, they just absolutely tore Washington's army apart.

10,000 men under General Clinton marched through a pass that Washington had just left unguarded, turned the American flank, and sent his troops fleeing for their lives. Around 300 Americans were killed and over a thousand were captured. And of those prisoners, a few as like maybe half would actually survive the British captivity. So as Washington watched, 400 Marylanders sacrificed themselves to cover the route, Washington reportedly cried out, good God, what brave fellows I must lose. Kind of a beautiful human moment from Washington, I think. And then the British did something super weird.

They just stopped. This is one of like the most consequential moments of the entire Revolutionary War. So this guy, how one of like the main commanders of the British forces in America during the early part of the revolution, he basically went for a siege instead of storming the trenches. He basically just like set up camp and was kind of going to try to strangle the American, the continental forces. And many historians believe that if he went forward and actually went at him, the war would have just been over. over, how Doug and his forces would have just won and crushed the American Rebellion in August of 1776. But two nights later, under cover of a storm that kept the Royal Navy out of the East River, like 9,000 Continentals, like 9,000 patriots were rowed silently back to Manhattan.

The entire army evacuated without losing a single life. Now, the battle, I mean, it was a catastrophe. And it was kind of Washington's fault. The escape was, I mean, a brilliant masterpiece that saved the entire operation. He couldn't out general the British in this specific battle, but he was learning that he could out-survive them. Which, again, is another interesting element, I think, of American culture, that, you know, I don't know if Americans specifically in their day was ever like, hey, we are the intellectual genuses of the world. I think the French and the English probably touted themselves that way. But Americans were always like, hey, we'll outlast you.

You know, like, that's that grittiness that I think is imbued in the American spirit. And this is a great example right in the early days of the founding of the nation. Now, the rest of 1776 was just, I mean, a nightmare after a nightmare. They were beaten at White Plains and then at Fort Washington where 2,800 men were lost in a single day while Washington was just basically crying, watching from across the Hudson. Now, between Brooklyn and Fort Washington alone, nearly 4,000 men, were wiped out. And what was left were treated across New Jersey into Pennsylvania.

Now, in December of 1776, the revolution is 18 months old. Its army has lost New York and thousands of men. Its commander has been outfought in every major engagement. Congress fled to Philadelphia. And remember, this is the bare majority cause. Remember, this is like, you know, what, like 40% of people are riding for this. They go to Philly. And defeat doesn't just shrink on.

armies like that one, it just, it empties them. By every rational measure, by December, this rebellion was going to collapse. Like, it was a matter of days, maybe weeks, and the whole thing was going to be over. Washington knew better than anyone that the whole operation was in danger. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break real quick, because I want to tell you about a brand that I actually love. You've probably seen ads for it on Instagram, and it's ultra. It's the best. As you already know, I'm super locked in on, like, fitness and sleep and fasting and all that kind of stuff. and one thing that I care about now is getting energy and focus without feeling like jittery and cracked out and on edge like my heart is beating out of my chest. And that's why I reached out to Ultra.

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That's take-Ultra.com for 15% off with the code camp. And after you purchase, they're going to ask you where you heard about them. Please tell them that Mark and Christos from the campsite, Sensha. Now let's get back to the show. So, on Christmas night, 1776, he loaded his last 2,400 men into boats. And it's one of the most pivotal moments on this entire story.

He literally takes his last 2,000 men onto a boat and bet the entire revolution on a coin flip. Basically a dawn attack at the garrison of Trenton. Roughly 1,500 Hessians. These are like German professional soldiers that were hired by the British. Well, they were there. And here we hit one of the craziest myths in the entire story, because for once, the myth actually runs against the American side.

Washington won at Trenton because the Hessians were sleeping off this drunken Christmas party. That was one of the stories that a lot of people get told. But the records actually are more interesting because there's no evidence that the Hessians were drunk. So Colonel Johann Rawl knew that an attack might come, and warnings reached him from a British spot. a loyalist doctor and a pair of deserters. His men slept in their uniforms, guns beside them, had been called out on alerts three days running. The garrison wasn't hung over.

It was actually exhausted from being on edge for three days. And that exhaustion was no accident. Washington had spent weeks wearing the Hessians down with raids and skirmishes, including a 40-man strike on one of their outposts on Christmas night itself. But the time that the real attack came through the snow at dawn, the defenders had been basically crying wolf for three days, and they just had nothing left. So notice what the myth does.

Like the story is that like, oh, Washington won because the Hessians were so drunk. And it kind of turns the victory at Trenton, maybe the most important victory in the entire Revolutionary War, into just like dumb luck. But the record actually is way more impressive. It paints the picture that Washington engineered the conditions, for his own miracle to happen and then bet everything on that miracle.

So a week later, he slipped past the British again and then mauled their entire rearguard at Princeton. The revolution was supposed to be dead by New Year's, but instead, recruits started to come back, and the army held, and the war went on. Now, American textbooks love Trenton because it was Washington's best night, and it makes just like an amazing story. It's a beautiful painting, but the army spent most of 1777 losing again, including Philadelphia, like literally the capital itself. Trenton didn't win the war. Trenton just bought time.

The actual turning point came 10 months later on a battlefield that Washington never actually set foot on. And we'll get there. But first, we have to walk through the snow. And that snow is in Valley Forge. It's in the winter. This is between 1777 and 1778, the most sacred suffering in American memory.

Barefoot soldiers, gangrene, bloody footprints, and noble endurance against just the most brutal winter you can imagine. Around 2,000 soldiers died at Valley Forge, overwhelmingly from disease, basically, tearing through the camp of malnourished men. More Americans died in that camp in six months without a single battle than at Long Island, Trenton, and Princeton combined. But the myth here isn't about suffering. It's about the villain. History has always framed Valley Forge as man and the will of the human spirit against the cruel, you know, death of nature. But the records frame it as kind of American dysfunction. And here's what I mean by that. The British didn't starve that army. Congress did. The critical quartermastered post sat unfilled. That post is so important. That is the person that's in charge of maintaining the entire supply chain. So as a result, all the food and

armaments and other things that the army needed just collapsed. And Washington bombarded Congress with appeals. He literally kept going to Congress warning that without immediate reform, the army must dissolve, aka, like, all my boys are going to die if you guys don't send food. Meanwhile, this was farm country. The food existed. Pennsylvania's farmers just kept on selling to the British in Philadelphia who paid in solid coin instead of Congress, which was paying in this like collapsing paper money. So the men freezing at Valley Forge weren't just victims of the winter. Like obviously, yes, it was the winter that was attacking them, but they were ultimately victims of their own government that couldn't organize a supply wagon or get food to them and a marketplace that

didn't really want the, you know, paper money that the continental government was going to give them. And yet, here's the part that the myth gets right and deserves its due. The army that walked out of Valley Forge was better than the one that actually went in. So a Prussian drillmaster, this guy, Baran von Steuben, spent that winter rebuilding it from the boots up, and the survivors emerged seasoned and disciplined. Now, here's the actual turning point of the war. While Washington was losing Philadelphia in the fall of 1777, something extraordinary was happening, 300 miles north near a town called Saratoga.

The British plan for 1777 was just a knockout blow. They wanted to just end it all. So General John Burgoyne would drive south from Canada down the Hudson Valley and slice New England clean off from the rest of the colonies. Instead, the other British forces never showed up, leaving Bergoin isolated in this hostile country while militia swarmed from the hills. So two brutal battles just demolished his army. And on October 17, 1777, the unthinkable happened.

Burgoyne surrendered his entire army to General Horatio Gates, the first British army to surrender in world history. That's crazy. The first time the British were like, hey, we surrender. And it was that guy, Burgoyne, that gave it to Horatio Gates. And the battlefield hero of Saratoga, the man whose attacks actually brosven, broke the British lines while Gates hung back at headquarters was a fiery American general.

And his name is Benedict Arnold. Yes, that Benedict Arnold, the traitor, the most despised name in American history. Well, in October of 1777, he was arguably the man most responsible for its most important victory. And it was the last time that he ever commanded Patriot troops in battle. Now, how we got from that hilltop to history's most fictory. famous betrayal and literally just synonymous with being a traitor is one of the craziest character arcs in the entire era. And Creeze does, we actually should do just an entire episode on Benedict Arnold's because his story is fascinating. And I don't know if people really can connect

how he went from like the biggest hero in American history to the biggest trader still to this day. So just if you can write that down. Now on February 6th, 1778, the alliance was signed. and covert aid now became just a straight open war. So for three years, Britain fought an expensive war to crush a rebellion at the edge of its empire. And then Saratoga happens. The Americans have this insane victory. France declared war on June of 1778.

Spain and the Netherlands then followed, and a police action against colonists became Britain against three naval powers at once with no ally. defending home waters, the American coast, the Mediterranean, India, the Caribbean, all these places, their entire empire all of a sudden turning on them with no one willing to help them out. Britain wasn't fighting a rebellion anymore. They are now in a world war. So Britain made a decision that would change how Americans perceive the revolution. In like your history books, it'll say that Britain threw everything at the colonies and they lost. But the records say that after 1770s,

it stopped treating America as the main event because money. The tiny Caribbean sugar islands were economic monsters that George III considered essential to funding the war. The cabinet actually debated abandoning the 13 colonies to fight harder for the Caribbean sugar islands. So in 1778, it pulled 5,000 troops out of North America for the West Indies, part of why it actually gave up Philadelphia. Ad Gibraltar under siege, a Franco-Spanish Armada in the Channel, India contested, and the colonies

are one front amongst six across the entire globe. And that's how a bankrupt collection of colonies actually outlasted a superpower. That doesn't shrink the American achievement. Don't get me wrong. It just changes the calculation a little bit. When Benjamin Franklin reached France in December of 1776 to beg for help, he understood what no other American did at the time. France didn't need an argument.

It needed to be seduced by a story. Already a Parisian celebrity, Ben Franklin was already very well known around Paris. He gave the city the character it wanted, and they ate it up. Franklin made America fashionable before France helped make it free. Which reframes the entire war.

For France, this was their war against their oldest enemy. If you think the colonialist didn't like the king. I mean, France hates the British. I mean, to this day. And so now American Independence is on the table. The French are like, hell yeah, let's do it. This move here was just classic George Washington, Ben Franklin, kind of hybrid, you know, Shaq and Kobe. But the machine here was actually French. Rochambeau pushed for Virginia. DeGrasse's fleet settled in. French troops now outnumbered the Continentals. And the decisive battle had no Americans in it at all. And on September 5th, DeGrasse beat the British fleet at Chesapeake and cut

Cornwallis off from rescue. So when the British surrendered on October 19th, Frenchmen were half the army and basically the entire operation. And when the news actually reached London, Britain didn't even stop. It fought on at Gibraltar and in the Caribbean and in India for two more years and then decided that the American front just wasn't worth it. I mean, bad calculation on their part, but they were just like, yeah, dude, I mean, we're fighting like a six front war. I mean, what are we going to do?

The colonies didn't bring the empire to its knees, maybe in the way that we tell ourselves as Americans, but they brought it to its accountants. And then it was the accountants that were like, yeah, we got to stop trying to defend America. We got to just let that go. Now, finally, September of 1783. Ben Franklin signs the treaty that officially ends the war.

But the real cost of the victory wasn't just felt by Britain. I mean, of course, the Native Americans were completely left out of negotiations that carved up a lot of the land that they obviously had a claim to. Most Native nations had sided with Britain precisely because a British win meant that that line, right on, you know, the Appalachian Mountains, would keep the settlers east. Now their ally signed them away.

And also, what about the enslaved people that were, running towards freedom. Well, Dunmore's proclamation had sent enslaved Americans fleeing to British lines, and over eight years, the trickle became an exodus. By some estimates, as many as 100,000. It was the largest self-mancipation event that America had seen up until this point. And history books don't really frame it this way, because those freeing themselves were, again, going towards the loyalists and going towards the king and his armies. And then you have the losers' America. the most interesting question, what happened to all the loyalists, all the people that loved the

king and wanted to stick with Britain after the war's over? Well, roughly 80,000 loyalists left. 46,000 went to Canada, America's first political refugees, and they were kind of written out of history so that most Americans don't know that they ever existed. Two countries came out of the revolution. We usually tell the story of one, but that's not really what it looked like. Victory is way more interesting. Half a continent opened for the spectrum. freedom seized by thousands, native nations betrayed by both sides, basically at once, which leaves this one question. If the real ending was this disjointed, who turned the American revolution into this nice, neat, you know, bedtime story with a bow on it? Well, that's, I think,

an episode for a later date. And I think it's a really interesting one, because now that you understand kind of the real details and the nuance of how these battles and how these characters sort of come up in this story, understanding how the propaganda and the myth building, which again, I'm not against. I think every nation needs a story to actually build and statecraft as its very own type of literary art.

I'm not even criticizing. I'm just saying it is what it is. And the way that that's done, I think, is an episode in and of itself. But at the beginning of our entire journey here, we listed what America celebrates on the 4th of July. 13 United Colonies, crushing taxes, the Midnight Rehnian,

rider, the honest general, and liberty for all. And no part of this neat story holds up perfectly to the scrutiny of history. The colonies were not unified. They were, as it was said, a bare majority enforced by tar and feathering, splitting families right down the middle. The taxes were the lowest in the empire, and the tea tax was actually making tea cheaper, and it was going against the T-Mafia. The Midnight Rider never finished his ride, but again, respect to Paul Revere, he did what he could, and whether he said the British are coming or the regulars are pulling up, to me doesn't make a huge difference, but the truth and the nuance, I think, is important. And then, of course, the Army of Liberty kept human beings in chains, which, you know,

was kind of an irony of America in general that we are the home of the free land of the brave, but yet also did American slavery way later than a lot of countries throughout the world. And the British were actually the ones that were offering freedom, you know, albeit for a price, and it was really just a political move in general. And then, of course, the ultimate victory itself, handed across the finish line by French money and French troops and a French fleet. I mean, come on now. You're welcome, dude. If you're French-American, you're really the most American.

How about that? How about that story? If you're like me, born in Paris, raised in America, you're the most American you can possibly be because we actually supported the revolution to get rid of the British. There's some Americans that have been here since the 1700s, and let me tell you, they were probably British loyalists

on their knees, gobbling it up for old King George III. That's all I'm saying. Sorry to be crass. Now, every year, the fireworks go up, which are awesome, and the stories get told again and again, and I'll probably tell my kid the myth,

because I think the myth is also important, but you can't just have the myth. You need the myth, and you also need the truth and the nuance. And maybe the real, question isn't what happened in 1776. It's what we've chosen to remember and why. And if this is how the United States started, were we ever really united? Right? Like we talk about like, man, this is the most divided America's ever been. There was a civil war, dog. There was a real,

full-blown civil war, brothers killing brothers. And then in the civil war, they were like, man, this is the most divided America's ever been. There was a full revolution that was like five civil wars plus the world war all happening at once i mean it's crazy you got the black americans running for freedom to go to the british you got george washington who's a good general and a good guy but also had his own slaves was also out here kind of you know land speculating trying to get all that you know precious green on the west of appalachia it's it's way more interesting way more detailed and way more nuanced than i think the history books give a credit for and the real story, I mean, I don't know,

Chris, am I off here? I think the real story is way more interesting. But I don't know. That's just me. This is one of those stories that I think is important to know and I think is helpful for people to know when thinking about American politics to this day. Because, again,

America, like every country, is partially truth, and it's partially a story. And the stories aren't bad. The stories aren't evil. It's like, you just need to recognize what is kind of the myth and what is kind of like, you know, built up and what's actually going on. And you can hold both at the same time. That's what I try to do, at least. I try to take,

okay, here's the stuff that we tell ourselves, and then here's the kind of the reality, and both are helpful. I don't know. That's how I deal with it. But anyway, that has been our brief synopsis and overview of the American Revolutionary War, specifically the myths and the misconceptions and the legends that surround this miraculous and fascinating event. And I hope we got through what actually is happening. Now, let me say a few disclaimers. I am not a historian. You guys know this.

I'm a stand-a-comedian, and I'm a podcaster, and I sit in a tent and I have a Wi-Fi connection, and I try to figure out everything that's ever happened in history ever. And I'm trying my best. So if there's anything I missed, please don't hesitate to correct me. I'm not immune to evidence. And so if there's anything that you've read in a book, maybe you're a historian yourself, maybe you studied American history in college. Tell me, is there anything that I oversimplified, anything I got wrong?

I would love to see it in the comments. Even if I don't respond to it, it'll be helpful for other people that are reading the comments to educate themselves and get the whole truth. And hopefully we can spark a conversation that helps people become smarter and less dumb. Now, this has been another episode of History Camp. God bless you. Thank you all so much for tuning in. And I will see you in the future to talk about the past.

Happy 4th of July. God bless America. And I'll see you next time. Peace.