I'm not sure why colonial Americans thought they could succeed at blowing off the British to make their own country or countries, but that they needed to do something was obvious to a lot of people during the middle of the 18th century. In the end, it would turn out that the American Revolution was a little like a lot of other things that have happened in history (and prehistory): Very unlikely to have come out the way it did, because at so many junctures something quirky or unlikely happened, and shaped the course of events significantly. It might have been inevitable that the British living in the Americas would try out the whole Revolution thing, but once it got going there was no reason to expect it to work, and in fact it failed badly at many points. Many of the most important successes that would eventually be strung together in the post-hoc narrative we now tell as our country's origin story were actually very lucky breaks.
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