They continued to fight either until 1781 or 1783, depending on whether you calculate by when they actually gave up or when the peace treaty was signed. So you can't really say the American Revolution was won before the fighting even started, but the truth is the American Revolution and the War for Independence weren't like this. They were like this. So here's what was pretty revolutionary about the American Revolution. The colonists threw off the rule of an imperial monarchy and replaced it with a government that didn't have a king, a radical idea in a world that didn't feature many non-monarchical forms of government. And if you look at the explanations for the Revolution, especially those contained in, like, the Declaration of Independence and in pamphlets like Thomas Paine's Common Sense, there's definitely a revolutionary zeal that's informed by the Enlightenment. And that's especially true if you focus on the idea of liberty, as many of the pamphleteers did.