The American Colonial Rebellion of 1776

Thunder. Lightning. Rain beating down in vicious sheets that I knew felt like daggers when it fell upon the backs of the Colonials. Wind blowing every which way, so fiercely that I could still feel it from where I viewed the maelstrom. At last, a great wave, taller than anything I had seen, rose above the city. Then, it crashed down, and it was gone. It was just gone.

— A British regular's recantation of the Great Storm of 1786

The American Colonial Rebellion of 1775, called the American Revolution by some, or sometimes lumped together as the American Stranding with the 1786 event of the same name, was a major uprising against British rule in the 13 British Colonies in America. It is highly disputed as to whether the Rebellion was successful or not, due to the unique circumstances and vast amount of disinformation and rumors surrounding it.

The War

The leading cause for the Rebellion is widely accepted as the several tax laws imposed by the British Parliament upon the Colonies. The taxes, which were on several mundane items such as stamps or tea, were considered unfair by many colonials. They argued that they should not be subject to extra taxes imposed on them by a government in which they lacked any sort of representation, with the political slogan "No taxation without representation" spreading like wildfire throughout the colonies. Tensions grew, and when five colonials were shot during a protest by British soldiers sent to quell the unrest in ______, it was just more fuel for the flame. ______ Colonials responded in 1773 in a protest that consisted of tossing many hundreds of chests of British East India Company into the waters. The British in turn responded by enacting a series of laws that harshly punished ______. This would all culminate when Colonial forces retaliated, attacking British regulars sent to recover supplies and laying siege to ______, driving British troops away. The American Colonial Rebellion had begun.

The exact events of the Rebellion are largely unimportant, except for the one with which it was concluded in 1786. Despite the determination of the Colonials to free themselves from British rule, they were fighting an uphill battle. Colonial commander-in-chief ______ __________ had one hope, and it was that his army could hold out long enough for Britain to consider the cost too great and give up. As the war progressed, the determination and fighting spirit of the Colonial troops surprising the world and costing Britain greatly, the idea was proposed to Parliament. Ultimately, however, the idea was rejected and the war continued, despite the cost to Britain. Parliament simply considered the Colonies too valuable to lose.

Questionable Tactics

This gamble paid out in early 1785, when the Colonial army was shaking on its last legs. They were running low on supplies, men, and morale, and it looked to all like their cause had turned out to be a doomed one. Despite all these odds, the ragtag Colonial Army pressed on with the dogged persistence that had characterized them since the beginning of the war. Then, General __________ ordered a final push which seemed to all to be suicidal. Attacks against many of the Colonies' largest port cities were ordered, and the army descended upon them all at once. To the whole world, this seemed like the worst decision __________ could have possible made.

Abandoning their previous ground to push themselves into these cities would only result in them being surrounded on all sides by the British, if they even managed to take the cities in the first place. However, when the Colonial Army clashed with the British, they came down with the force of a thunderbolt. British regulars would later say that the Colonials "fought like dogs out of Hell" and many were convinced that they were facing a foe possessed. The Colonials fought without regard to any convention of war, and despite all odds ended up taking several of the cities they had aimed for, mostly in the north and middle colonies, with a few in the south. The exact number of cities, as well as their names, have unfortunately been lost to history.

With the cities seized, the Colonials were still in a bad spot. Their numbers had been reduced heavily in the push, and they could not last long, being surrounded on all sides by the British army and navy. General __________ took this opportunity to make yet another baffling decision. He had his men dig a moat around every city they had claimed. It was not deep, but the project still took months to complete, and all the while the cities were under siege. Some fell to the British, but others held their ground when the project was finally finished in July 1786.

The Great Storm of 1786

What occurred next is heavily debated, even to this day. Countless eyewitnesses claim to have seen a great storm descend upon the Colonial-occupied cities. While some claim that it was a completely mundane, albeit unexpected and highly unlikely, event. Others maintain the claim that the storms were completely centralized around the cities, and did not extend beyond the moats dug by the Colonials. Additionally, some loyalists who escaped the cities before the Great Storm claim to have seen increasingly erratic behavior by the Colonials in the days leading up to the event. There are reports of locks being torn off doors and broken, chains being sundered, horses being set free. The Colonials seemed to have started a war against anything that could be used to bind or restrict movement. Regardless of what happened within the confines of the cities, the results were the same: when the storm subsided, the cities were gone.

The British claim they were destroyed, in a joint effort between the freak storms and a coordinated bombardment by the navy. When they were both done, the smoke and clouds cleared, the cities had been totally reduced to dust. This is the officially accepted explanation, and the one taught in textbooks. However, there are many supposed accounts of the cities being consumed by the sea, devoured by crashing waves until nothing remained of them. The textbooks say that the coastline was always like that, and that the coast depicted in many maps before 1786 was just a common cartographic error of the time. This explanation is, needless to say, controversial. Yet another blow to the textbooks, both to their claims and to their usefulness, is the fact that all records of the names of the cities and of those within their walls when they disappeared have vanished. The names have been erased from the pages, as if some occult hand had descended and peeled them off.

Regardless of what happened to the cities, whether they sank into the seas like Atlantis or were destroyed by wind and cannon-fire, historians can at least agree on one thing. The American Colonial Rebellion of 1775 was a complete failure. The Colonial Army and its generals, including __________ were destroyed alongside their cities, with no survivors emerging. It was destruction on such a scale, and so thorough, that some cannot believe it. Some claim that ______ __________ knew what he was doing, and that his moat-building and suicidal push to the coast had a reason behind it. Some claim that the Colonials escaped, disappeared into an Otherworld spoken of only in legend, which lurks on the other side of the sea. They are, of course, wrong. After all, the textbooks say otherwise.

Conflict Type

War