From Trenton to Yorktown

Turning Points of the Revolutionary War

By John R. Maass, Review by J. Britt McCarley

Article published on: January 1, 2026 in the Winter Edition of Army History 2026

Read Time: < 5 mins

Osprey Publishing, 2025
Pp. 272. $30

Published in 2025, John R. Maass’s From Trenton to Yorktown: Turning Points of the Revolutionary War comes at an opportune time, as the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the American War of Independence. Maass defines “decisive battle” and its corollary, “turning point,” and uses those terms to evaluate five wartime events. These key events, he argues, were critical to the Americans’ military victory over Great Britain and the establishment of U.S. independence. In his introduction, Maass describes these turning points as “battles, campaigns, sieges, and other military events that are decisive and result in significant change that alters the trajectory of the conflict toward the war’s outcome”. He also declares his intent “to provoke debate and discussion among those interested in the young country’s founding conflict”. Maass’s five key events are the 1776–1777 Battles of Trenton and Princeton, the 1777 Saratoga Campaign, the 1777–1778 Valley Forge encampment, the 1781 Battle of Guilford Courthouse, and the 1781 siege of Yorktown. Maass contextualizes his topics by immersing them in the sequence of events leading to them and the consequences that followed. By choosing a handful of decisive turning points, Maass avoids the historian’s interpretive offense of monocausation for complex events.

After the dramatic New York campaign of 1776, the British seized New York City and its deepwater harbor. General George Washington’s defeated Continental Army retreated across New Jersey toward the rebel capital of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This was the lowest point in the American war effort. The British, after failing to finish off Washington’s army during the retreat, occupied scattered winter camps. They expected to resume operations in the spring, quickly capture Philadelphia, and end the American rebellion. Even with his Continentals depleted, Washington boldly assumed the offensive on Christmas. Over the next ten crucial days, often in frigid weather, his troops won twice at Trenton and once at Princeton. They defeated British regulars and their German auxiliaries. Maass asserts, “Washington recognized that the army was the visible, physical symbol of the revolution’s viability and of the American quest for liberty”. This explains why Washington risked offensive action in such a desperate situation. Concerning the engagements’ decisiveness, Maass holds that these battles “staved off the collapse of the army, the war, and the cause of liberty, and renewed the struggle for American independence”.

Maass continues with the pivotal Saratoga campaign, through which the British intended to win the war by cutting off the seat of American rebellion in New England along the rivers and lakes of eastern New York. To their chagrin, the British learned that operating in that state’s pristine wilderness was much harder than they anticipated, and their divided command in North America led them to disperse troops and materiel in an attempt to accomplish too many objectives, including simultaneously capturing Philadelphia. As a result, their main effort along the Hudson River in northern New York, under Lt. Gen. John Burgoyne, stalled. American Continentals and militia surrounded them, leading to their surrender after engagements in late September and early October. The British thus lost an entire field army to captivity, and the Americans gained a formal ally in Bourbon France, which had been supporting the American rebellion covertly while also looking to side openly with the rebels against Great Britain, the traditional French enemy. Maass contends categorically that the Saratoga campaign was “the most important turning point in the Revolutionary War” because “now the American cause had a military asset it could not create itself: a powerful navy. The vital importance of the French navy for the eventual victory of the United States can hardly be overstated”.

Maass next covers the often-mythologized Continental Army winter encampment at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. There, after the British captured Philadelphia in the fall of 1777, Washington spent the next half year reforming the army and preparing it to resume campaigning the next spring. Throughout, Washington dealt with many challenges: supplying the army despite a broken transportation system, fending off fellow officers seeking to supplant him as commanding general, getting Congress to understand the plight of the army at this critical moment, and supporting the Prussian officer Friedrich von Steuben, who instilled discipline and tactical acumen in the private soldiers and their officers. Maass maintains that through it all, “Washington had kept the army together” to produce “an improved fighting force, dedicated officers, capable quartermaster and commissary generals, and the support of Congress,” which “turned the trajectory of the war toward eventual victory”. During the battle at Monmouth Courthouse, New Jersey, in June 1778, Washington’s army held its own in a stand-up fight with the British as the latter withdrew from Philadelphia to their base at New York City, proving that Valley Forge indeed had been a transformative experience for both the Continental Army and Washington as its commander.

From 1778 through the war’s end, the British turned their attention to the South to draw on presumed loyalist support there to fight the American rebels to a decision, in what became a series of campaigns rather than one all-encompassing Southern campaign. The most decisive of these operations was the Carolinas Campaign of 1780–1781, which included such famous engagements as the siege of Charleston, South Carolina; the battles at Camden, Kings Mountain, and Cowpens; and the culminating battle on 15 March 1781 at Guilford Courthouse, North Carolina. The principal Continental Army commander in the South, Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene, learned how to fight the British army in the southern provinces based on the cumulative American experience on the region’s earlier battlefields. As a result, when he faced Lt. Gen. Charles, 2nd Earl Cornwallis, at Guilford, Greene fought the redcoats until it was clear that prudence required him to withdraw from the battlefield, yielding the place but not complete victory to the British. Maass summarizes the long-range effects of the battle as “the only engagement that completely reversed British fortunes and ultimately drove the redcoat invaders out of the state, apart from a small garrison at Wilmington”. Maass explains that “Greene saved his army, wore down the enemy, and ultimately triumphed over the British in 1783, in part because he prudently retreated from the hotly contested battleground of Guilford County, North Carolina”.

Maass finishes his interpretation of the war with the definitive British capitulation following the siege of Yorktown, Virginia, in September and October 1781. Against Lt. Gen. Sir Henry Clinton’s orders, General Cornwallis left Wilmington and marched into Virginia, intending to knock it out of the war because it had sustained American operations logistically in the Carolinas. After campaigning inconclusively in the Tidewater and Piedmont regions, Cornwallis withdrew to the coast, as ordered, to establish a deepwater anchorage for the Royal Navy. He awaited further direction about transporting his army to New York City to help defend it from Franco-American forces operating there. Meanwhile, the French Caribbean fleet alerted Washington by letter that it would operate around Chesapeake Bay during the late summer and early fall of 1781 against Cornwallis in Yorktown. Over the next two months, Franco-American land and naval forces gathered from near and far; seized local control of the sea through the pivotal naval Battle of the Capes; and forced Cornwallis’s army to surrender through siege, thereby effectively ending the major military operations of the American War of Independence. Maass ends his lineup of decisive turning points by maintaining that “it is an ironic circumstance that the most decisive event in the entire Yorktown campaign was a sea battle that involved no American forces”. He asserts that “the most valuable assistance the French gave to the American cause [was] naval support, which in this remarkable instance came together with French troops, Washington’s army, and British blunders to ensure a victorious campaign for America”.

Maass’s conclusion restates his definitions and key messages from each chapter, reaffirming the five pivotal military events that determined American victory in the Revolutionary War and established the United States as an independent and sovereign nation. Maass conveys his message in an approachable, conversational style that will appeal to a broad audience and spark debate about how and why the Americans, with great-power assistance from France, won their independence from the British Empire.