Episode Details

In June 1778, a barefoot Connecticut private named Joseph Plumb Martin marched out of Valley Forge and, for the first time in the war, toward the enemy. This is the story of the moment the American Revolution stopped being a war of survival and became a war to win. Hardened by a Prussian drillmaster and backed by a new alliance with France, Washington’s reborn army takes the offensive — while Britain, its navy suddenly threatened and its war gone global, abandons the American capital and gambles everything on a new plan. Convinced by exiled Loyalists like Joseph Galloway that the South is secretly loyal, London bets it can raise the King’s friends, roll the rebellion up from Georgia, and choke the young United States into surrender. The whole strategy rests on a single question no one in London can actually answer: are those loyal Americans really there? Independence has been declared. Now it has to be won — and the hard road to it runs south.