Quote:
Originally Posted by batffink
Do you honestly think that the government doesn't run your whole life in the USA Jwham?
Man, you're living in a dreamworld. And yes! you did beat the strongest army in the world - with the help of the French, the Spanish and the Indians.
You were all British at the time anyway.
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The French sent a token amount of 6,000 soldiers, which were of great help, but their main support was maritime in nature, and that was the real help.
Spain did not help, until much later, for they saw the American revolution as threatening the legitimacy of the Spanish Crown in its own Latin American colonies. Spain's help came in the form that they loaned (and even gave, no strings attached!) money to the US to fund the revolution. Spain also allowed the US to take advantage of Spanish trade and merchant ships as to send war materials.
The English government had the Quebec Act, restraining colonial expansion into the territory reserved to the Indians, Chief Joseph Brant, the Mohawk, after returning from England, where he was warmly received and highly honored, was convinced that the Indian future lay with the British Crown and not with the American colonists.Brant succeeded in getting four of the six Iroquois nations to take up the hatchet against the Americans. Only the Oneida and the Tuscarora refused.
The British hired Hessians and Germans into British regiments, and the use of a Scottish brigade in the pay of Holland, and attempts were made to procure 20,000 mercenaries from Russia, so they need help as well.