A British Tory, at the same time, might have replied: "We fight, we
cannot do less, in order to discipline and punish these wretches who
assume to deny the jurisdiction of the British Crown and to rebel
against the authority of the British Parliament." A few years before,
an English general had boasted that with an army of five thousand
troops he would undertake a march from Canada, through the Colonies,
straight to the Gulf of Mexico. And Colonel George Washington, who had
seen something of the quality of the British regulars, remarked that
with a thousand seasoned Virginians he would engage to block the five
thousand wherever he met them. The test was now to be made.

The first thing that strikes us is the great extent of the field of
war. From the farthest settlements in the northeast, in what is now
Maine, to the border villages in Georgia was about fifteen hundred
miles; but mere distance did not represent the difficulty of the
journey. Between Boston and Baltimore ran a carriage road, not always
kept in good repair. Most of the other stretches had to be traversed
on horseback. The country along the seaboard was generally well
supplied with food, but the supply was nowhere near large enough to
furnish regular permanent subsistence for an army. A lack of munitions
seriously threatened the Colonists' ability to fight at all, but the
discovery of lead in Virginia made good this deficiency until the year
1781, when the lead mine was exhausted.

More important than material concerns, however, was the diversity
in origin and customs among the Colonists themselves. The total
population numbered in 1775 nearly two and one half million souls. Of
these, the slaves formed about 500,000. The three largest Colonies,
Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania contained 900,000