The United States Army celebrated its 250th birthday on June 14, 2025, although stating that the “U.S. Army” is 250 years old is more complicated.

The First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia from Sept. 5 to Oct. 26, 1774, to discuss a response to the Intolerable Acts, which were five punitive measures passed by the British Parliament after the Boston Tea Party of Dec. 13, 1773. Representatives from 12 of the 13 American colonies — Georgia was still dominated by British loyalists — urged each of the colonies to establish a state militia and planned an embargo of British goods.

By February, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress controlled the region outside Boston and the British considered the colony to be in rebellion. In April 1775, British troops marched to Concord, Mass., to seize colonial militia supplies and cannons. Militiamen from surrounding towns fired on the British first at Lexington, then at Concord, and harassed the column back to Boston, ultimately killing or wounding about 10% of the British force.

The Second Continental Congress met on June 14, 1775, — this time with Georgia participating — and voted to create the Continental Army out of the Massachusetts and other militia units around Boston, which at that time numbered 22,000 men from the 13 colonies.

The next day, Congress named George Washington commander of the army. Washington had served as a colonel in the Virginia militia and commanded the Virginia Regiment during the French and Indian War.

The Continental Army of 1775 consisted of seven departments, with the Main Army of the Eastern Department composed mainly of New England regiments, 38 in all, organized into three divisions and six brigades. The Main Army largely absorbed the Northern Department and Middle Department of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland under Washington’s command by April 1776. The Western Department focused on harassing British outposts in what is now Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. The Highlands Department, centered on West Point, N.Y., protected colonial interests on the Hudson River upstream from New York City. The Canadian Department was tasked with invading Quebec and Ontario.

The Southern Department consisting of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia was largely independent. Unlike British and Continental armies in the north, which paused for the brutal winters, the Southern Department army fought year-round. It was also wholly destroyed twice, first when Gen. Benjamin Lincoln surrendered 5,000 colonial regulars in the siege of Charleston, S.C., on May 12, 1780, and again when Gen. Horatio Gates and 2,000 of his untrained militiamen were defeated at Camden three months later on Aug. 16.

But Lincoln, Gates and Benedict Arnold’s earlier victory at the Battles of Saratoga on Sept. 19 and Oct. 7, 1777, had convinced French King Louis XVI to join the American cause with troops and naval power, in no small part to avenge his recent defeat in the French and Indian War.

In the summer of 1781, Washington’s Continental Army and the newly-landed French army of the Comte de Rochambeau staged a feint toward New York City, threatening a possible siege, but then marched to Virginia, rendezvousing with the 29-ship fleet of the Comte de Grasse, who had sailed to Chesapeake Bay to besiege Gen. Charles Cornwallis’ army at Yorktown.

The British surrender at Yorktown on Oct. 19, 1781, stunned the world and led to American independence in the 1783 Treaty of Paris.

The Continental Army was demobilized in 1781 and completely disbanded by 1783, except for units in outposts on the western frontier and at the military arsenal at West Point, which consisted of a total of 500 infantry and 100 artillerymen.

Due to British rule, Americans had an aversion to a standing army, and under the Articles of Confederation, the new Confederation Congress reissued the disbandment resolution on June 2, 1784, reducing the army to 80 men, stating that “standing armies in time of peace are inconsistent with the principles of republican government, dangerous to the liberties of a free people and generally converted into destructive engines for establishing despotism.”

The Confederation Congress created the United States Army by resolution on June 3, 1784, to serve at West Point and in frontier outposts. The First American Regiment consisted of eight companies of infantry and two artillery, half of whose enlisted men and noncommissioned officers had been born outside what was the United States.

Assembled from militias and known as the Regular Army, it suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Northwestern Confederacy at the Battle of Wabash on Nov. 4, 1791, with 656 of the 1,000 men killed and 279 wounded.

Deciding that civilian militias were insufficient, Congress reorganized the army into the Legion of the United States, which grew to a standing army of about 5,190 and fought the Northwest Indian War until 1795.

In 1796, Congress reverted the legion’s name back to the “United States Army.”

The legacy of the U.S. Army dates back to 1775, certainly, but the path to get there was a bit complicated.