20 Revolutionary War Myths Hollywood Still Gets Wrong

When George Washington became president in 1789, he had but one remaining tooth. The story that his grimace was due to wooden dentures, which caused pain as he chewed, is a complete fiction. Washington’s few remaining dentures are now stored at Mount Vernon. They are made of hippopotamus and elephant ivory, gold plate, lead, and human teeth, some bought from donors and some from enslaved people. Wood would have absorbed moisture and quickly decayed. And yes, the teeth were truly painful. Just not wooden.

There actually was a Philadelphia upholsteress named Betsy Ross who made flags during the Revolutionary War. The popular version of the story is that she also designed the first Stars and Stripes after receiving a mysterious visit from George Washington in 1776. There’s no documentation from the time to support that claim. The story was first put forward by her grandson several decades later as family lore. Congressional records show a Continental Congressman named Francis Hopkinson billing Congress for his work designing the flag it had already chosen.

In Emanuel Leutze’s iconic painting from 1851, George Washington stands heroically in a rowboat in a half-light dawn while a stars-and-stripes flag waves overhead. The actual crossing was intended as a surprise attack against British-allied troops stationed at Trenton on Christmas night, 1776. It happened in full dark, amid sleet and snow, with soldiers packed into large, flat-bottomed cargo boats loaded with artillery that would have tipped over if anyone had tried to stand. The flag depicted hadn’t yet been adopted. The crossing was real, though, and audacious.

There is no record that 6-year-old George Washington chopped down his father’s cherry tree and then told the truth about it by saying, “I cannot tell a lie.” A minister and author named Mason Locke Weems made it up for the fifth edition of his biography of Washington in 1806. Weems privately admitted he made up stories like this to help sell books and give young readers something to look up to. The tale has outlived most of what people actually know about him.

On the evening of April 18, 1775, the Boston Committee of Safety dispatched a number of riders, including Paul Revere, to alert Patriot leaders of a British troop movement. In order to avoid detection, which could mean arrest since Massachusetts was then occupied by British soldiers, Revere moved quietly between safehouses. Revere was captured by a British patrol near Lincoln, so another rider completed the mission for him. The idea of a single rider traveling through the countryside yelling out a warning was popularized by a 19th-century poem.

The delegates in the Continental Congress voted on July 2, 1776, to approve independence, and adopted Thomas Jefferson’s written draft on July 4, 1776, two days later. But only John Hancock, Congress’s president, and its secretary signed that working draft before it was sent off to the printer. They didn’t order a formal copy on parchment until weeks later, and the grand signing ceremony you’re thinking of began in August, with 50 of the eventual 56 delegates adding their names. The rest signed in the months following. July 4 mattered, just not for the scene you pictured.

Hollywood movies have claimed that the Hessians were so drunk after Christmas that they couldn’t fight back against Washington’s attack. That wasn’t true. The Germans weren’t drunk, but they were exhausted from weeks of constant night attacks by the New Jersey militia. They were sleeping in full uniform with their weapons ready. Even so, Washington’s crossing was a complete surprise. Nearly 900 were captured, and their commander died of his wounds.

“Molly Pitcher” was the name later used for a Revolutionary War folk heroine associated with women who carried water to soldiers and sometimes helped work the artillery. There was no such person as Molly Pitcher. Her name comes from the 19th century, when “Molly” was a frequent diminutive for Mary, and “Pitcher” came from the cries of soldiers asking the women who carried buckets of water to keep the overheated guns cool. These real-life women had their stories woven together to create a single folk heroine. Mary Ludwig Hays loaded and fired a cannon at the Battle of Monmouth, and Margaret Corbin was badly wounded while firing a cannon at Fort Washington and eventually earned a military pension.

Long before his name became synonymous with betrayal, Benedict Arnold served as one of the Continentals’ best fighters, commanding engagements at Fort Ticonderoga and Lake Champlain and a crucial assault at Saratoga, where he was badly wounded. Overlooked for promotion, mired in debt, and bitter, Arnold allied himself with a British officer to turn over West Point to the enemy in 1780. The officer was captured and hanged. Arnold fled to fight for the British and eventually died in exile in England.

The bell did not ring on July 4, 1776. The Declaration wasn’t read aloud in Philadelphia until a few days later, when bells rang out all over town. The bell had cracked before, on its inaugural strike several years prior, and two foundrymen recast it afterward. Its last crack occurred many years later, while tolling for a funeral. Abolitionists dubbed it the Liberty Bell in the 1830s and adopted it as a symbol of liberty.

In Mel Gibson’s 2000 movie “The Patriot,” a British officer named Tavington locks up the townspeople in a church and burns them alive. This never occurred in the Revolutionary War, and historians have noted that the depiction in the movie is similar to the massacre of a French town, Oradour-sur-Glane, by Nazi soldiers during World War II. Tavington was loosely inspired by Banastre Tarleton, a British cavalry commander, who gained notoriety for cutting down surrendering troops at the Battle of Waxhaws. Burning people alive in a church was not one of his crimes.

In films, you almost always see the frontiersman pop a Redcoat from behind the tree while the British army charges straight ahead. But 18th-century smooth-bore muskets such as the British Brown Bess were only accurate up to around 100 yards, and took around 30 seconds to reload. That meant you needed to stand in line and fire together in order to inflict enough damage on the opposing army for them to retreat. The militia could disrupt supply lines, but could never hold a line during a bayonet charge. Washington called upon a Prussian officer, Baron von Steuben, to instruct his Continentals how to fight in the traditional European style.

The 12,000 Continental Army soldiers encamped at Valley Forge, Pa., during the winter of 1777 to 1778 faced weather that was actually fairly mild and damp, not the brutal blizzards often shown on screen. There was no fighting that winter, since the British stayed in comfortable quarters in nearby Philadelphia, but a corrupt supply network left many soldiers without shoes or clothes, and dysentery, typhus, influenza, and typhoid spread through camp. Nearly 2,000 perished. And yet a Prussian drill master transformed this camp into a true fighting machine.

Britain’s Parliament passed new taxes on the colonies after the expensive Seven Years’ War to pay off some of its debt. The typical story of overtaxed colonists isn’t quite accurate. Some economic estimates place colonial tax rates at less than a tenth of what people in Great Britain paid, though it varied by region. The real issue was that Parliament claimed the power to tax colonists who had no vote for its representatives. The taxes were just the spark for that debate. The money was never the problem.

The visual of farmers picking up hunting rifles and driving out the British Empire is missing a lot of the reality. The local militias had a lot of important functions, like patrolling their region, raiding British supply trains, and keeping Loyalists in check. However, George Washington told Congress many times that militias without training couldn’t hold up against the British bayonet charge, which is why Congress formed a professional Continental Army. Major battles in the Revolutionary War were won by regular infantry, artillery, and later allied foreign forces in the ranks, not short-term volunteers.

George Washington, in our eyes, seems to have been the ideal military strategist. In reality, he lost more field battles than he won, notably those fought at Long Island, White Plains, Brandywine, and Germantown, and in most instances, managed to escape total annihilation. He was a superior strategist because as long as the Continental Army survived, the British Empire could not win the war. It was only after a series of inconclusive conflicts, coupled with an adept management of Congress, that the British government was forced to admit its inability to sustain the war effort.

Dramas often portray all 13 colonies united against British rule. Estimates suggest that about one-third of the colonists were supporters of independence. One-fifth to one-third were loyalists to the Crown. The remainder were largely non-combatants who wished to maintain order and keep their property. There were also numerous Loyalist militias that engaged in guerrilla warfare against Patriot militias, particularly in the South. After the war, over 60,000 Loyalists left for Canada, Britain, and the Caribbean. It was also a civil war.

Films love to depict a heroic minuteman intentionally shooting the first shot of the war on the morning of April 19, 1775, on Lexington Green. But neither commander on the ground wanted that: militia captain John Parker told his men to disperse, while British Major John Pitcairn directed his troops to stand down. One shot was fired by someone unknown, and the ensuing volleys from the British soldiers killed eight militiamen. Depositions gathered after the battle by both sides don’t agree on who fired first, and historians remain divided to this day.

Movies and TV shows depicting Black Americans in this era almost always show them fighting for the Patriot cause. But Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s royal governor, issued a proclamation in 1775 promising freedom to any enslaved person held by Patriots who escaped to join the British cause. Over 20,000 enslaved Black Americans accepted Dunmore’s offer, far more than the roughly 5,000 to 8,000 Black soldiers who fought for the Continental forces, including in racially integrated regiments such as the 1st Rhode Island Regiment. There were two paths. Blacks chose whichever one offered actual freedom.

Films tend to limit the war to the small towns of New England and the plantations of Virginia. After the Americans defeated the British at Saratoga, France officially became an ally of the United States, and Spain and the Netherlands quickly followed. The conflict expanded into the Caribbean, Europe, the Atlantic, and India. Because Britain had to defend itself on so many fronts, it withdrew more than half of its naval and military strength from North America, allowing American and French troops to corner the British general Lord Cornwallis in Yorktown and bring the conflict to a close.

This content was created with the help of AI.