[steve-b]

Where your thinking is EXTREMELY flawed is your total failure to understand the limitations of lace warfare. Because an 18th century army was a uniformed maximum security prison, soldiers could not be allowed beyond the sight of their officers. Given half a chance they would desert and many redcoats and Hessians did. So pursuit did not exist then. That is why a defeated army always got away in one piece (unless it was surrounded in the middle of a forest). Pursuit is what turns a defeated army into a panic stricken mob. Napoleonic warfare had pursuit which is why after a Napoleonic victory his enemies had no army left.
After rebel defeats, the rebel army always got away in one piece. The British could not crush Washington like a bug because that just plain isn't how 18th century aristocratic armies worked.

About a third of the American colonists were loyal to King and Crown. Even if the British commanders couldn't trust their own troops, they could trust the Tory irregulars (who had to win the war or become refugees -- which is precisely what many of them did after their side lost).

The British failed to pursue because they failed to take full advantage of their opportunities, not because it was fundamentally impossible for them to do so as you suggest.

[Sam the Sham]

Your basic pro-deviance has rotted your brain so responding to you is often a waste of time, especially since you are so insignificant in the GOP.

The absence of pursuit is why the victories of Frederick the Great were never decisive. He had the same problem the British did, i.e. a barrack slave army created by coercion and held together by the gauntlet, the lash, and the gallows. Like Wombat101, you fancy yourself educated when you know very little.