The American Revolution saw 13 North American colonies rise up against their British masters. The result was a long and hard-fought war, and the fledgling nation's victory over one of the era's greatest military powers went on to inspire political ideas and revolutions around the globe.
Click through this gallery to see a collection of extraordinary items from one of history's most important conflicts...
This unassuming oval-shaped tent served both as George Washington’s office and bedroom, and was effectively his mobile headquarters over the course of the war. Within its linen walls the course of the war was plotted and important decisions were made by generals, including Alexander Hamilton, that led to the eventual triumph of the Continental Army. Today it forms the centrepiece of a stunning audiovisual display at the Museum of the American Revolution, drawing more than one million visitors since it was put on display in 2017.
Its journey to the Museum of the American Revolution was quite the battle too. Martha Washington’s grandson is said to have cut out pieces and sold them as souvenirs. It then passed on to the wife of Confederate General Robert E Lee, and Union soldiers ransacked his Arlington home looking for it. For many years it sat in a box at the US Patent office, so it's little wonder that it took a conservator more than 500 hours to get it ready to go on display. This watercolour of the tent at Verplanck’s Point, New York, in 1782 is the only known wartime depiction of it.
Dredged up from the bottom of New York’s Lake Champlain in 1935 by civil engineer Lorenzo F Haggulund, the Gunboat Philadelphia now sits on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC as America’s oldest surviving fighting vessel. The 54-foot (16m), 29-tonne gunboat was built in 1776 and sunk in the October of that same year, part of a nine-vessel armada that many historians call 'the first American Navy'.
Led by the charismatic (and later treacherous) Brigadier General Benedict Arnold, the armada's task was to support forts along Lake Champlain, like Fort Saint-Frederic (pictured after it was captured by the British), in order to defend against British landings. A three-day engagement with the British in October 1776 saw most of the fleet destroyed. But the battle delayed the British long enough for the American army to gather its strength and win a decisive victory at Saratoga the following year.
In the summer of 2023, archaeologists at Colonial Williamsburg unearthed an intriguing time capsule – the remains of a barracks burned by the British in 1781 during the Revolutionary War. The barracks was set on fire by British General Cornwallis and his troops as they made their way towards Yorktown. As well as rubble from the structures (pictured), archaeologists found the remains of guns, high-quality ceramics and lead shot that appears to have been chewed by bored soldiers.
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For Cornwallis, retribution soon came. His troops were roundly beaten at Yorktown when the British ships he had hoped to rendezvous with never arrived. Instead, in October 1781, he was surrounded by nearly 17,000 American and French troops. In this 1812 engraving, Cornwallis bequeaths his sword to General Washington, signalling his surrender. Legend has it that his 8,000 troops then marched out of Yorktown to the tune of 'The World Turned Upside Down', a popular song later co-opted into the musical Hamilton, by Lin-Manuel Miranda.
A powder horn was an essential piece of equipment for riflemen during the Revolutionary War. They were made from cow or ox horn and used to carry gunpowder and keep it dry. They were often decorated with personal engravings, like this one belonging to Prince Simbo, found in Glastonbury in Connecticut and now on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Prince Simbo’s ox horn was carved with an image of a dove carrying a banner proclaiming 'Liberty', as well as his name and the date 'November 17, 1777'.
Prince Simbo was a private in the 7th Connecticut Regiment, and is thought to be one of the free Black revolutionary soldiers known as 'the Black Patriots'. It is believed that up to 8,000 African Americans served in the Continental Army and Patriot Militia, including Crispus Attucks (pictured), often called the first Black Patriot after he was killed in the 1770 Boston Massacre. Despite being wounded and suffering numerous diseases, Prince Simbo survived the war and was given land in his hometown of Glastonbury in honour of his service.
This unassuming chunk of concrete, covered in oyster shells, sits largely unnoticed in Marion Square in Charleston, one of the few remaining sections of a massive fortress that protected the city in colonial times and controlled access to its strategically important port. As we can see from this postcard, dated 1865, it ranks among the first artefacts from the conflict to have been found and recognised as worth preserving.
This slab of tabby concrete formed part of the 'horn work', an irregular-shaped bastion that gave defenders a variety of angles to fire upon approaching enemies. You’ll see it marked by the letter 'H' in this colonial-era map of the fortifications. It served as the command post for Major General Benjamin Lincoln, the commander of American forces in the South, and was considered to be Charleston's 'Alamo' – the place to which soldiers would retreat when all else failed. Today, what's left sits behind a modest iron fence, marked by an equally modest plaque.
Here we see a campaign chest that belonged to Lieutenant James Grant, a Scotsman who served with the 77th Regiment, a Highland Scottish regiment within the British Army. It was cleared from his home in Dutchess County in New York and is now on display at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. The modest pine box would have housed Grant's personal belongings as he fought in the French and Indian War in 1758, and may have included items like extra clothing, shoes, his papers, writing implements and tobacco.
Grant (pictured) settled in New York, but his contempt for colonial Americans was well-known, and he became a British loyalist when the Revolution began. He was elected to the British parliament in 1773, where he famously proclaimed that Americans "could not fight" and that he would happily "march from one end of America to the other and geld all the [American] males". He served as governor of East Florida and as a strategist for the British during the war, but unsurprisingly had to leave the country after the Patriot victory.
In September 1779, the British scuttled their warship HMS Rose in the Savannah River to block the waterway, stopping the French Navy providing support to American troops besieging the city of Savannah, which the British held at the time. In 2021, almost 250 years later, a team from the US Army Corps of Engineers dredged up 19 of its cannons, as well as an anchor and assorted pieces of timber from the ship. Here we see Commodore Philip Nash of the British Royal Navy (left) and archaeologist Andrea Farmer inspecting the finds.
The HMS Rose was a real thorn in the side of the American Revolution, intercepting ships smuggling arms and supplies to Rhode Island, and patrolling the Hudson River and the Eastern Seaboard. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and the scuttling of the Rose and one other ship ultimately ensured that Savannah was not taken. Here we see an illustration of HMS Rose in her glory days. Sketched by Sir James Wallace, it shows HMS Rose and her sister ship, HMS Phoenix, engaging enemy ships on 16 August 1776.
Here’s a ghastly relic from the fight for independence: a set of George Washington’s false teeth, proudly displayed in the museum on his Mount Vernon estate. Washington spent his entire adult life plagued by dental issues, regularly complaining about toothache, lost teeth and inflamed gums, and by the time of the Revolutionary War he was wearing dentures. A contemporary legend holds that they were made from wood, but the truth was altogether more macabre. Washington’s dentures were fashioned from the teeth of cows, horses and even people.
The gruesome-looking dentures meant that Washington rarely smiled, particularly when posing for portraits like this one painted by Rembrandt Peale in 1795. They also needed constant cleaning which, in a roundabout way, may have impacted the course of the war. In 1781, the British intercepted a letter intended for Washington’s dentist asking for tooth scrapers to be sent to New York, leading them to assume that American and French forces weren’t, at that point, on their way to Yorktown. They didn’t send reinforcements to Lord Cornwallis and, at the Battle of Yorktown, his troops were defeated.
Much like how the Royal Standard in the UK denotes the presence of the monarch, this unassuming and surprisingly small silk flag marked the presence of General George Washington on the battlefield during the Revolutionary War. Measuring just two feet (60cm) by three feet (91cm), it featured 13 white six-pointed stars, representing the 13 colonies at the time. Known as the Commander-in-Chief standard, it's thought to be the earliest surviving 13-star American flag, and is now so fragile that it is only displayed at the Museum of the American Revolution on special occasions.
Legend has it that in 1776 three members of a secret committee from the Continental Congress, including George Washington, asked seamstress Betsy Ross to incorporate the Commander-in-Chief standard into the design of a new flag for the new nation. This famous painting by Percy Moran, The Birth of Old Glory, is an imagining of the moment she presented it to them. The story is almost certainly fiction, and in 1910 descendants of George Washington’s sister donated the standard to Reverend W Herbert Burk’s American history museum at Valley Forge, the predecessor of its current home, the Museum of the American Revolution.
War encourages and demands innovation, and the American War of Independence was no different. The conflict saw great advances in weaponry, particularly in artillery. Here we see specialised projectiles on display at the Museum of the American Revolution, which would once have been fired out of ships' cannons. Solid iron 'round shots' were used to penetrate enemy vessels, while the deadly 'bar shots' and 'chain shots' were meant to destroy masts and rigging, and generally spread panic and fear.
As the names suggest, bar shots and chain shots were both cannonballs (or half cannonballs) held together by bars or chains. When fired they flew through the air with a high-velocity spinning motion, destroying everything in their path and creating an ungodly high-pitched sound that terrified soldiers and sailors. Sailors, in particular, suffered cruelly, not just from wounds caused by the projectiles but from the wooden splinters that erupted from their battered vessels as well.
Like all armies, the forces that fought in the American Revolution had to carry so much more than weapons. Chests were used to transport personal belongings, while utensils and cooking equipment to be used by officers and their staff were carried in boxes like this one on display at the National Museum of American History. The leather covering suggests it belonged to an officer of high standing – probably George Washington himself. He had so many camp chests that two horses were needed to carry them all.
While the museum cannot be absolutely sure if this particular camp chest belonged to Washington, curators were extremely impressed by how well stocked it was. When it was opened they found tin plates, pots with detachable wooden handles, glass containers for condiments like salt, pepper and sugar, and knives and forks with dyed-black ivory handles. The chest also contained a tinder box, a candle stand and a folding gridiron – everything the general of a young nation could ask for.
By far the most common artefacts to have survived from the American Revolution are the weapons used by soldiers on both sides of the conflict. Some have been uncovered on former battlefields, others in the backs of closets after being handed down through generations. Here we see visitors viewing a range of weaponry in the Museum of the American Revolution's Arms of Independence case – just a tiny fraction of the thousands of military items they have in their collection.
The collection includes a wide range of weapons, alongside the bits of kit needed to use them. Flintlock muskets were the most common guns during the war, particularly the Brown Bess, a British weapon that was heavy but easy to load, and the Charleville musket, a reliable weapon provided to the Continental Army by the French. Both sides employed early rifles, such as the Ferguson rifle and the Pattern 1776 infantry rifle, a British weapon based on the German Jager. The museum features flintlock pistols too, though they were mainly used by officers.
Read on to see extraordinary early photos that bring the American Civil War to life