You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Hello and thank you for joining the American Revolution.

Today episode 174 the British changed strategy.

The winter of 1777-78 was a difficult turning point for the ministry in London. News of General Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga

shocked officials who never seriously considered such a possibility. Many had

figured the worst case would have been for Burgoyne's army to retreat back to

Fort Ticonderoga for another try the following year. Even before word of the surrender reached London, officials were growing increasingly

skeptical of an easy way out of the American quagmire.

In August, Prime Minister Lord North wrote one of his undersecretaries of State that, quote,

it has been for many months been clear to me that if we cannot reduce the colonies by force now employed under Howe and Clinton and

Berghoyne, we cannot send and support a force capable to reduce them.

The British Army in America in 1777 was already much larger than the entire

British Army around the world had been before the war began. Normally Britain kept between 12,000 and 15,000 soldiers in Ireland in order

to discourage revolts there. Because of the war in America, they had reduced the garrisons to around 3,000.

In 1776, after one of two regiments in Jamaica sailed for New York to support General Howe, officials had to put down a planned slave

insurrection that got its motivation from the reduction in military on the island. Much of the British Empire remained in peaceful obedience

because subjects believed that defiance would not lead to victory but only to a brutal suppression.

With Britain removing so many soldiers from other outposts around the world

to support the suppression of the American rebellion,

Britain was putting its other colonies at risk.

House calls for more soldiers in America would only make the situation even more

precarious in other parts of the empire. Britain had already sent the largest transatlantic

military force ever deployed up until that time to America in 1776. The point of that force was to shock and awe the colonists into

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