A Christmas Miracle

In the summer of 1776, a colonial soldier from Maryland watched an endless parade of British ships drop anchor in Lower New York Bay and said it looked like "all of London was afloat." He was not exaggerating. The Spanish Armada of 1588 had numbered 197 ships. The British fleet arriving to crush the American rebellion numbered 400. Aboard those ships were 25,000 soldiers—British regulars, Scottish Highlanders, and Hessian auxiliaries hired from Germany. George Washington stood on the southern tip of Manhattan and watched them come. His own force numbered about 10,000. Most had never fired a shot in battle. In a letter to his brother that May, Washington had written: "We expect a very bloody summer, and I am sorry that we are not, either in men or arms prepared for it."

The Road to War

Twenty years before watching that fleet, Washington had fought alongside the British army. He served with distinction in the French and Indian War—the North American theater of the Seven Years' War that ended in 1763. Almost immediately after the peace treaty, friction began between Parliament and the colonies. Parliament believed the colonists had not carried their share of the war's burden. The colonists believed it was not their duty to fight a war—that was the army's job.