The rape and ransacking carried out by some of the British troops "Converted potential friends into enemies." The loyalists, if organised properly, could have secured the land that the British army had won. Instead as the British army moved on from one area to the next the newly gained land was soon back in the hands of the Americans.
Major-General Charles Lee of the Continental Army had been a General in the British Army, he wrote in an essay in 1774 that the British Army was "Ineffective, recruited from the poorest classes and as short of generals as the American army." This was the view of a Major General in the Continental Army and that view must have been enhanced when the British withheld some of their best troops and kept them in England. The reason for this was because the British feared that the French might take advantage of the war and attack them at home. Therefore the British sent out some of their weaker forces and hired mercenaries to fight for them. One of the problems with using mercenaries was that they were not as committed to the cause as soldiers from Britain would have been. The mercenaries included up to 30,000 German Hessians, "They were especially detested by the Americans, for they plundered and destroyed with professional conscientiousness." On top of these problems with the army personnel there was a major communications problem. It took six weeks for messages to be sent backwards and forwards the three thousand miles from the government in Britain to the British generals fighting on American soil. The major supplies for the British came from England into the ports on the East Coast that were in British control. This meant that the British Army was not able to travel for any great distance from the coast. Although the major towns and cities had good roads once outside the boundaries good roads were few and far between. Large parts of the terrain were covered in impenetrable forests.