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The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy Book 1) Kindle Edition
Winner of the George Washington Prize
Winner of the Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize in American History
Winner of the Excellence in American History Book Award
Winner of the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award
From the bestselling author of the Liberation Trilogy comes the extraordinary first volume of his new trilogy about the American Revolution
Rick Atkinson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning An Army at Dawn and two other superb books about World War II, has long been admired for his deeply researched, stunningly vivid narrative histories. Now he turns his attention to a new war, and in the initial volume of the Revolution Trilogy he recounts the first twenty-one months of America’s violent war for independence.
From the battles at Lexington and Concord in spring 1775 to those at Trenton and Princeton in winter 1777, American militiamen and then the ragged Continental Army take on the world’s most formidable fighting force. It is a gripping saga alive with astonishing characters: Henry Knox, the former bookseller with an uncanny understanding of artillery; Nathanael Greene, the blue-eyed bumpkin who becomes a brilliant battle captain; Benjamin Franklin, the self-made man who proves to be the wiliest of diplomats; George Washington, the commander in chief who learns the difficult art of leadership when the war seems all but lost. The story is also told from the British perspective, making the mortal conflict between the redcoats and the rebels all the more compelling.
Full of riveting details and untold stories, The British Are Coming is a tale of heroes and knaves, of sacrifice and blunder, of redemption and profound suffering. Rick Atkinson has given stirring new life to the first act of our country’s creation drama.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHenry Holt and Co.
- Publication dateMay 14, 2019
- File size117943 KB
- Roughly a quarter million Americans would serve the cause in some military capacity. At least one in ten of them would die for that cause—25,674 deaths by one tally, as many as 35,800 by another.Highlighted by 695 Kindle readers
- Roughly five thousand African Americans would eventually serve in the Continental Army, a more integrated national force than would exist for nearly two centuries.Highlighted by 594 Kindle readers
- With no elected delegates in Parliament, the Americans had adopted a phrase heard in Ireland for decades: “no taxation without representation.”Highlighted by 554 Kindle readers
Editorial Reviews
Review
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“To say that Atkinson can tell a story is like saying Sinatra can sing. . . . Historians of the American Revolution take note. Atkinson is coming. He brings with him a Tolstoyan view of war; that is, he presumes war can be understood only by recovering the experience of ordinary men and women caught in the crucible of orchestrated violence beyond their control or comprehension.” ―Joseph J. Ellis, The New York Times Book Review
“Mr. Atkinson’s book . . . is chock full of momentous events and larger-than-life characters. Perfect material for a storyteller as masterly as Mr. Atkinson. . . . Mr. Atkinson commands great powers of description.” ―Mark Spencer, The Wall Street Journal
“[Atkinson has a] felicity for turning history into literature. . . . One lesson of The British Are Coming is the history-shaping power of individuals exercising their agency together: the volition of those who shouldered muskets in opposition to an empire. . . . The more that Americans are reminded by Atkinson and other supreme practitioners of the historians’ craft that their nation was not made by flimsy people, the less likely it is to be flimsy.” ―George F. Will, The Washington Post
“Atkinson…wastes no time reminding us of his considerable narrative talents. . . . His knowledge of military affairs shines in his reading of the sources. . . . For sheer dramatic intensity, swinging from the American catastrophes at Quebec and Fort Washington to the resounding and surprising successes at Trenton and Princeton, all told in a way equally deeply informed about British planning and responses, there are few better places to turn.” ―The Washington Post
“An epic tale, epically told. Atkinson excels at deftly summarizing personalities. . . . He moves effortlessly from the plans of commanders to the campfires of troops. The extraordinary scholarship involved―his meticulous endnotes cover 133 pages―is testament to a historian at the very top of his game…. The writing [is] incisive, humane, humorous, and often scintillating. . . . Anyone reading The British Are Coming will finish it looking forward impatiently to the next two. The trilogy looks fair to become the standard account of the war that brought the American Republic into being.” ―Andrew Roberts, Claremont Review of Books
"The British Are Coming is an exquisite masterpiece of history by one of the nation’s foremost writers and historians. There is a newness, eloquence, and immediacy in Atkinson’s telling that surpasses any previous Revolutionary War narrative; it conveys to the reader a sense of discovering the American Revolution for the very first time, in all of its sheer drama. This volume embraces the lived experience of the war’s early years with all of its complexities, ironies, triumphs, and tragedies. . . . This volume is, in short, a work to be reckoned with and one that will powerfully inform broader conversations on the importance and continued relevance of our national origins." ―Citation, 2020 George Washington Book Prize
"One of the best books written on the American War for Independence. . . . The reader finishes this volume uncertain of how either side can win this war, but very much wanting Atkinson to continue its telling." ―Robert J. Allison, The Journal of Military History
“[Atkinson’s] account promises to be as detailed a military history of the war as we will see in our lifetimes upon its completion. . . . Atkinson makes good use of information from letters and journals to give his reader a sense of what it would have been like to walk in the shoes of both the war’s illustrious and lesser known participants. . . . Atkinson’s accounts of battles are among the most lucid I’ve read. . . . Readers who enjoy richly detailed military history will be greatly anticipating his second volume.” ―Journal of the American Revolution
“Atkinson takes his time, but there's delight in all that detail. . . . Atkinson is a superb researcher, but more importantly a sublime writer. On occasion I reread sentences simply to feast on their elegance. . . . This is volume one of a planned trilogy. Atkinson will be a superb guide through the terrible years of killing ahead.” ―The Times (London)
“The British Are Coming [is] a sweeping narrative which captures the spirit and the savagery of the times. Based on exhaustive research on both sides of the Atlantic, Atkinson displays a mastery of the English language as well as military tactics which puts him in a class of his own as a writer.” ―Lionel Barber, Editor, Financial Times
“Rick Atkinson is emerging as America’s most talented military historian. . . . The British Are Coming is history written in a grand style and manner. It leaves one anxiously awaiting the next two volumes.” ―New York Journal of Books
“This first installment in Pulitzer-winning historian Atkinson’s new trilogy is a sweeping yet gritty American Revolutionary epic. With granular detail and refreshingly unfamiliar characterizations―an uncertain George Washington, a thoughtful King George III, a valiant Benedict Arnold―he makes an oft-told national origin story new again.” ―Publishers Weekly (One of the 10 best books of 2019)
“Pulitzer Prize-winner Atkinson (The Liberation Trilogy) replicates his previous books’ success in this captivatingly granular look at the American Revolution from the increasing tension in the colonies in 1773 to the battles of Trenton and Princeton in 1777. Extensive research . . . allows Atkinson to recreate the past like few other popular historians . . . A superlative treatment of the period.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“This balanced, elegantly written, and massively researched volume is the first in a projected trilogy about the Revolutionary War. . . . Combining apt quotation (largely from correspondence) with flowing and precise original language, Atkinson describes military encounters that, though often unbearably grim, are evoked in vivid and image-laden terms. . . . Aided by fine and numerous maps, this is superb military and diplomatic history and represents storytelling on a grand scale.” ―Booklist (starred review)
“Atkinson (The Guns at Last Light, etc.) is a longtime master of the set piece: soldiers move into place, usually not quite understanding why, and are put into motion against each other to bloody result. . . . A sturdy, swift-moving contribution to the popular literature of the American Revolution.” ―Kirkus (starred review)
“This book is, in a word, fantastic. It offers all the qualities that we have come to expect from the author: deep and wide research, vivid detail, a blend of voices from common soldiers to commanders, blazing characterizations of the leading personalities within the conflict and a narrative that flows like a good novel. . . . The British Are Coming is a superb ode to the grit and everyday heroism that eventually won the war.” ―BookPage (starred review)
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The British Are Coming
The War of America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777
By Rick AtkinsonHenry Holt and Company
Copyright © 2019 Rick AtkinsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62779-043-7
Contents
TITLE PAGE,COPYRIGHT NOTICE,
DEDICATION,
EPIGRAPH,
LIST OF MAPS,
MAP LEGEND,
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS,
PROLOGUE, England, June 1773–March 1775,
1. Inspecting the Fleet,
2. Avenging the Tea,
3. Preparing for War,
Part One,
1. GOD HIMSELF OUR CAPTAIN Boston, March 6–April 17, 1775,
2. MEN CAME DOWN FROM THE CLOUDS Lexington and Concord, April 18–19, 1775,
3. I WISH THIS CURSED PLACE WAS BURNED Boston and Charlestown, May–June 1775,
4. WHAT SHALL WE SAY OF HUMAN NATURE? Cambridge Camp, July–October 1775,
5. I SHALL TRY TO RETARD THE EVIL HOURInto Canada, October–November 1775,
6. AMERICA IS AN UGLY JOB London, October–November 1775,
7. THEY FOUGHT, BLED, AND DIED LIKE ENGLISHMEN Norfolk, Virginia, December 1775,
8. THE PATHS OF GLORY Quebec, December 3, 1775–January 1, 1776,
Part Two,
9. THE WAYS OF HEAVEN ARE DARK AND INTRICATE Boston, January–February 1776,
10. THE WHIPPING SNAKE Cork, Ireland, and Moore's Creek, North Carolina, January–March 1776,
11. CITY OF OUR SOLEMNITIES Boston, March 1776,
12. A STRANGE REVERSE OF FORTUNE Quebec, April–June 1776,
13. SURROUNDED BY ENEMIES, OPEN AND CONCEALED New York, June 1776,
14. A DOG IN A DANCING SCHOOL Charleston, South Carolina, June 1776,
15. A FIGHT AMONG WOLVES New York, July–August 1776,
16. A SENTIMENTAL MANNER OF MAKING WAR New York, September 1776,
Part Three,
17. MASTER OF THE LAKES Lake Champlain, October 1776,
18. THE RETROGRADE MOTION OF THINGS New York, October–November 1776,
19. A QUAKER IN PARIS France, November–December 1776,
20. FIRE-AND-SWORD MEN New Jersey, December 1776,
21. THE SMILES OF PROVIDENCE Trenton, December 24–26, 1776,
22. THE DAY IS OUR OWN Trenton and Princeton, January 1777,
EPILOGUE, England and America, 1777,
Photographs,
AUTHOR'S NOTE,
NOTES,
SOURCES,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
INDEX,
ALSO BY RICK ATKINSON,
ABOUT THE AUTHOR,
COPYRIGHT,
CHAPTER 1
God Himself Our Captain
BOSTON, MARCH 6 — APRIL 17, 1775
The mildest winter in living memory had yielded to an early spring. Not once had the Charles River iced over, and even now whispers of green could be seen on the Common sward and across the tumbling hills to the north. By reducing the need for firewood, this "extraordinary weather for warlike preparations," as one pugnacious clergyman called it, had preserved Boston from even greater suffering in the nine months since British warships had closed the port. Still, warehouses stood vacant, shipyards idle, wharves deserted, shop shelves barren. The only topsail vessels in view were the eight Royal Navy men-of-war plugging the harbor approaches. "It is now a very gloomy place, the streets almost empty," a woman wrote an English friend in early March 1775. "Many families have removed from it, & the inhabitants are divided. ... Some appear desponding, others full of rage."
Only a bountiful local crop of lambs and charity from other colonies preserved Boston from hunger: fish and flour from elsewhere in New England, rice from the Carolinas, rye from Baltimore, a thousand bushels of wheat from Quebec, cash from Delaware and Montreal. By British decree, provisions arriving by sea were unloaded in Marblehead and carted twenty miles to Boston, an expensive, tedious detour. Town selectmen launched projects to employ the unemployed — street paving, well digging, building a new brickyard. But gangs of idle sailors, longshoremen, ropemakers, riggers, and carpenters could often be found loitering by the docks or in the town's ninety taverns.
Even in better days, Boston had known ample misery — smallpox and measles epidemics, Quaker and witch hangings. For the past three decades the population had stagnated at fifteen thousand people, all of them wedged into a pear-shaped, thousand-acre peninsula with seventeen churches, no banks, no theaters, and a single concert hall, in a room above a shop. Puritan severity was not far removed. A generation earlier, both actors and theatergoers could be fined for "immorality, impiety, and a contempt for religion"; other miscreants were branded alphabetically —"A" for adulterers, "B" for burglars, "F" for forgers. Counterfeiters who escaped a scorching "C" might be nailed to the pillory by their ears. But never had the town seemed more abject or more menacing; these days there were as many British soldiers in Boston as adult male civilians. One resident watching the regiments at drill lamented that the Common "glows with warlike red."
On Monday morning, March 6, the "gloomy place" abruptly sprang to life. Hundreds and then thousands filled the streets, most of them walking, since by ordinance no carriage or wagon could be driven at speeds faster than "foot pace" without risk of a ten-shilling fine. The annual commemoration of the 1770 Boston Massacre would be held a day late this year to avoid profaning the Sabbath, and Dr. Joseph Warren, a prominent local physician, intended to deliver a speech titled "The Baleful Influence of Standing Armies in Time of Peace." An "immense concourse of people," as one witness described it, made for Milk and Marlborough Streets, where an octagonal steeple rose 180 feet above the Old South Meeting House, with its distinctive Flemish-bond brick walls, enormous clock, and split-banner weathervane. By eleven a.m., five thousand packed the place to the double rafters and cambered tie beams. More than a hundred box pews filled Old South's floor, with high paneled sides to block chilly drafts and wooden writing arms for those inclined to take notes on the day's sermon. An upper gallery with benches wrapped around the second floor. Between the arched compass-headed windows rose a high pulpit, now draped in black and crowned with a sounding board.
"People's expectations are alive for the oration," the lawyer John Adams had recently written. An uneasy murmur rose from the congregants, along with the smell of damp wool, perspiration, and badly tanned shoe leather. It was rumored that mass arrests were likely this morning, and that British officers had agreed that if the king were insulted they would draw swords and slaughter the offenders. "We may possibly be attacked in our trenches," Samuel Adams had warned, and a witness reported that almost every man in attendance "had a short stick, or bludgeon in his hand." The murmur in Old South grew louder when several dozen red-coated officers clumped through the door and stood in the aisles.
Samuel Adams was ready for them. An undistinguished petty official who had squandered a family malthouse fortune, Adams ran an impressive political organization, deftly shaping public opinion through a newspaper syndicate that for years had told other colonies — often with lurid hyperbole — what life was like in a free town occupied by combat troops. "He eats little, drinks little, sleeps little, thinks much," an adversary later wrote, "and is most decisive and indefatigable." Now fifty-two and afflicted with a pronounced tremor in his head and hands, he often stood on his toes when excited, and surely he was on his toes now. He quickly cleared the front pews and beckoned the officers so that, as he later explained, they "might have no pretense to behave ill." About forty eventually took seats on the forward benches or the pulpit stairs, while Adams settled into a deacon's chair, within sword thrust.
The crowd hushed when Dr. Warren appeared at the pulpit after sidling through the congested aisles. He was handsome and young, just thirty-three, pitied for having recently lost his wife, who'd left him four young children, yet much admired for his kindness, grace, and medical skill; more than a few of those in the audience had been inoculated by him during the smallpox outbreak a decade before. He was also a ringleader. As chairman of the extralegal Committee of Safety, he proved to be a capable organizer and insurgent strategist. John Adams, the previous day, had praised his "undaunted spirit and fire."
Later accounts would depict Warren wearing a white toga over his breeches, symbolic of antique virtues — simplicity, industry, probity, civic good over private interest. Although the doctor was likely dressed more conventionally, he did affect what was described as a "Demosthenian posture," with a handkerchief in his right hand, as he addressed "my ever honored fellow citizens":
Unhappily for us, unhappily for Britain, the madness of an avaricious minister ... has brought upon the stage discord, envy, hatred, and revenge, with civil war close in their rear. ... Our streets are again filled with armed men. Our harbor is crowded with ships of war. But these cannot intimidate us. Our liberty must be preserved. It is far dearer than life.
Warren invoked the long struggle to carve a country from the New England wilderness. He described Britain's recent efforts to assert hegemony over that country, and the shootings five years before that left "the stones bespattered with your father's brains." Then came the Coercive Acts, insult upon injury. "Our wish is that Britain and the colonies may, like the oak and the ivy, grow and increase in strength together," Warren said. "But if these pacific measures are ineffectual, and it appears that the only way to safety is through fields of blood, I know you will not turn your faces from your foes."
Several British officers hissed and rapped their sticks on the floor in disapproval. A captain sitting on the pulpit steps allegedly held up several lead bullets in his open palm, a menacing gesture.
Although one skeptic would describe the oration as "true puritanical whine," Dr. Warren knew his audience: farmers and merchants, seamen and artisans, with their queued hair, knee buckles, and linen shirts ruffled at the cuff, their pale, upturned faces watching him intently. They were a borderland people, living on the far rim of empire, where in six or seven generations the American clay had grown sturdy and tall. They were patriots — if that term implied political affiliation rather than a moral state of grace — who were disputatious and litigious, given to violence on the frontier and in the street: a gentle people they were not. Their disgruntlement now approached despair, with seething resentments and a conviction that designing, corrupt men in London — the king's men, if not the king himself — conspired to deprive them of what they and their ancestors had wrenched from this hard land. They were, a Boston writer concluded, "panting for an explosion."
Reasonably democratic, reasonably egalitarian, wary of privilege and outsiders, they were accustomed to tending their own affairs, choosing their own ministers, militia officers, and political leaders. Convinced that their elected assemblies were equal in stature and authority to Parliament, they believed that governance by consent was paramount. They had not consented to being taxed, to being occupied, to seeing their councils dismissed and their port sealed like a graveyard crypt. They were godly, of course, placed here by the Almighty to do His will. Sometimes political strife was also a moral contest between right and wrong, good and evil. This struggle, as the historian Gordon S. Wood later wrote, would prove their blessedness.
Warren circled round to that very point:
Our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of. Our enemies are numerous and powerful, but we have many friends, determining to be free. ... On you depend the fortunes of America. You are to decide the important question, on which rest the happiness and liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves.
Applause rocked Old South. One British lieutenant would denounce "a most seditious, inflammatory harangue," although another concluded that the speech "contained nothing so violent as was expected." Swords remained sheathed. But when Samuel Adams heaved himself from his chair to move that "the thanks of the town should be presented to Dr. Warren for his elegant and spirited oration," the officers answered with more hisses, more stick rapping, and shouts of "Oh, fie! Fie!"
That was but a consonant removed from "fire." Panic swept the meetinghouse, "a scene of the greatest confusion imaginable," Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie told his diary. Women shrieked, men shouted, "Fire!," sniffing for smoke. Others thought a command to shoot had been issued, an error compounded by the trill and rap of fifes and drums from the 43rd Regiment, which happened to be passing in the street outside. Five thousand people tried "getting out as fast as they could by the doors and windows," wrote Lieutenant John Barker of the 4th Regiment of Foot. The nimbler congregants in the galleries "swarmed down gutters like rats," then hied through Coopers Alley, Cow Lane, and Queen Street.
A tense calm finally returned to a tense town. "To be sure," Ensign Jeremy Lister of the 10th Foot later wrote, "the scene was quite laughable."
* * *
Across the street from Old South, in the three-story brick mansion called Province House, Lieutenant General Gage was not laughing. Worried that the morning's oration would turn violent, he had placed his regiments under arms and on alert. The risible stampede came as a relief.
Thomas Gage was a mild, sensible man with a mild, sensible countenance; only a slight protrusion of his lower lip suggested truculence. Now in his mid-fifties, with thinning gray hair and a fixed gaze, he was the most powerful authority in North America as both military commander in chief and the royal governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Comrades knew him as "Honest Tom," and even an adversary conceded that he was "a good and wise man surrounded with difficulties." As a young officer he had seen ghastly combat in the British defeat by the French at Fontenoy in 1745 and in the British victory over rebellious Highlanders at Culloden a year later. In 1755, he led the vanguard of General Edward Braddock's expedition against the French in western Pennsylvania, where a disastrous ambush at the Monongahela River killed his commander and several hundred comrades; swarming bullets grazed Gage's belly and eyebrow, ventilated his coat, and twice wounded his horse. Three years later, Gage was a senior commander when the French battered a British expedition in New York at Fort Carillon, subsequently renamed Ticonderoga. These actions revealed a soldier without conspicuous gifts as a combat leader, a man perhaps meant to administer rather than command. It was Gage's misfortune to live in turbulent times.
Even so, twenty years of American service had been good to him, providing Gage with high rank, a comely American wife — the New Jersey heiress Margaret Kemble — and vast tracts of land in New York, Canada, and the West Indies. He evinced little sympathy for American political experiments. "Democracy is too prevalent in America," he had declared in 1772, when his headquarters was in New York.
The tea party had pushed his lower lip out a bit more. In an uncharacteristic fit of bravado during a return visit to London in February 1774, he assured King George that four regiments in Boston should suffice — perhaps two thousand men — since the Americans would be "lions whilst we are lambs" but would turn "very meek" in the face of British resolve. Other colonies were unlikely to support Massachusetts; southerners especially "talk very high," but the fear of slave rebellions and Indian attacks "will always keep them quiet." The thirteen colonies seemed too geographically scattered and too riven by diverse interests to collaborate effectively. Promises of suppression on the cheap appealed to the shilling pinchers in Lord North's government. Gage's views had also helped shape the Coercive Acts by feeding the pleasant delusion in Britain that insurrection was mostly a Boston phenomenon, organized by a small cabal of ambitious cynics able to gull the masses.
Gage's report so encouraged the king and his court that the general was dispatched to Massachusetts as both governor of the colony and military chief of the continent. Respectful Bostonians had greeted him with an honor guard, banners, and toasts in Faneuil Hall, although two weeks later he shifted his headquarters to Salem, upon closing Boston Harbor at noon on June 1, 1774. His marching orders from the government urged him "to quiet the minds of the people, to remove their prejudices, and, by mild and gentle persuasion to induce ... submission on their part." He imposed neither martial law nor press censorship. Troublemakers were permitted to assemble, to travel, to drill their militias, to fling bellicose insults at the king's regulars.
Gage had evidently learned little on the Monongahela or at Fort Carillon about the hazard of underestimating his adversaries; precisely what he had absorbed from two decades in America was unclear. But within weeks of planting his flag in Salem, he recognized that he had misjudged both the depth and the breadth of rebellion. The Coercive Acts, including the abrogation of colonial government in Massachusetts, had inflamed the insurrection. One ugly incident followed another. In mid-August, fifteen hundred insurgents prevented royal judges and magistrates from taking the bench in Berkshire County in western Massachusetts. Two weeks later, Gage sent foot troops to seize munitions from the provincial powder house, six miles northwest of Boston; rumors spread that the king's soldiers and sailors were butchering Bostonians. At least twenty thousand rebels marched toward the town with firelocks, cudgels, and plowshares beaten into edged weapons. "For about fifty miles each way round, there was an almost universal ferment, rising, seizing arms," wrote one clergyman. An Irish merchant described how "at every house women & children [were] making cartridges" and pouring molten lead into bullet molds. The insurgents found Boston unbruised and the British regulars back in their fortified camps, but the "Powder Alarm" emboldened the Americans, demonstrated the militancy of bumpkins in farms and villages across the colony, and revealed how crippled the Crown's authority had become. "Popular rage has appeared," Gage advised London.
Additional episodes followed. More than four thousand militiamen lined the main street in Worcester in early September, closing the royal courts and requiring two dozen officials to walk a quarter-mile gantlet, hats in hand, each recanting his loyalty to the Crown thirty times, aloud. A Massachusetts Provincial Congress convened in Salem in early October 1774 to elect the wealthy merchant John Hancock as president — a vain, petulant "empty barrel," in John Adams's estimation. Of more than two hundred Massachusetts communities, only twenty-one failed to send delegates. Like similar congresses soon established in other colonies, this extralegal assembly acted as a provisional government to circumvent British authority by passing resolutions, collecting revenue, and coordinating colonial affairs with the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.
(Continues...)Excerpted from The British Are Coming by Rick Atkinson. Copyright © 2019 Rick Atkinson. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : B07HF349XK
- Publisher : Henry Holt and Co. (May 14, 2019)
- Publication date : May 14, 2019
- Language : English
- File size : 117943 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 787 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #26,721 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Rick Atkinson is the bestselling author of six works of narrative military history, including The Guns at Last Light, The Day of Battle, An Army at Dawn, The Long Gray Line, In the Company of Soldiers, and Crusade. He also was the lead essayist in Where Valor Rests: Arlington National Cemetery, published by National Geographic. He was a reporter, foreign correspondent, war correspondent, and senior editor at The Washington Post for more than twenty years. His many awards include Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and history, the George Polk Award, and the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. He lives in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.liberationtrilogy.com.
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I have always considered myself pretty knowledgeable about the Revolution. Yet, my general impression of the first two years of the war was one of unmitigated disaster, except at the very beginning and the end of 1775 and the last days of 1776.. The reality, however, was very different. The American militia soundly defeated the regulars at Concord and the long, bloody retreat to Boston. Then, they mounted a successful siege of the city. Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys and Benedict Arnold seized Fort Ticonderoga with its cannon and Boston bookseller turned artilleryman, Henry Knox, sledged those guns to Boston in the dead of winter. Although the regulars had won a tactical victory at the battle of Bunker Hill (fought on Breed's Hill) it was a pyrrhic one and they never again tried to lift the siege with a frontal assault on dug in American defenders. When George Washington received Knox's guns and moved them with a brilliant deception to Dorchester Heights, British General William Howe decided that withdrawal from Boston was the better part of valor.
As all this was taking place, Atkinson recounts the simultaneous but ill fated American expedition to Quebec. At first, the invasion went well with overall commander, Brigadier General Richard Montgomery taking control of all of Canada from the New York border at the head of Lake Champlain to Montreal while Benedict Arnold made his horrendous trek through Maine to Quebec. Montgomery, a former British officer who had sold his regular Army commission, was a superb leader of the expeditionary force. Nevertheless, he was killed in the battle for Quebec City and Arnold was wounded. Atkinson paints fine portraits of both men as well as their adversary, Sir Guy Carleton who outgeneraled both. Then he follows Arnold's fighting withdrawal down Lake Champlain and his outstanding delaying action at the battle of Valcour Island which put off the British Invasion from Canada for another year.
Atkinson, also tells of the failed British operations in the South. What he shows is a far more complex war in which the rebels, Americans, enjoyed a great deal of success from April 1775 until September 1776. In September, Howe, and his brother Admiral Lord Richard Howe, moved a huge British army under the guns of the Royal Navy from Halifax, Nova Scotia and Cork, Ireland to New York where they routed Washington in several battles. In the retreat from Brooklyn, Atkinson introduces us to Colonel John Glover and his Marblehead fisherman who evacuated the army and would later be the means for Washington to cross the Delaware to attack Trenton on Christmas Day, 1776.
One of the glories of the book is Atkinson's bringing the American caricatures of King George III, Lord North, the Prime Minister, and Lord George Germain, Secretary of State for America, to life as real people with three dimensions. These, along with military and naval commanders, Sir William and Admiral Lord Richard Howe, Sir Henry Clinton, "Gentleman" Johnny Burgoyne, and Sir Guy Carleton all come alive. But Atkinson does not neglect the very real modern problems these British officers and government officials faced. They were fighting an expeditionary war that had to be supplied by sea with just about everything they needed. And they were also fighting a counter insurgency war against both regular and irregular forces - a war that among the people of America was also a civil war, something the author captures very well.
Atkinson weaves his picture of this complex war that moved from "the regulars are coming out" to "the British are coming" as the colonists began to see themselves as Americans and the British as invaders. Meanwhile, most British soldiers and officers, save for the senior military and naval commanders, saw the rebels as ingrates who had to be put down - violently. This was even more true of the Loyalist forces recruited by the Crown, and the Hessian mercenary auxiliaries recruited by George III.
Rich Atkinson successfully transports the reader back in time to the true birth of the United States in the war of the Revolution. Clearly, this review cannot do justice to his work. So read it, enjoy it, and revel in what a bunch of amateurs with the help of a few professionals and lots of help from "providence" accomplished.
Rick Atkinson shows us how in this densely-packed, rousing military history of the first two years of the Revolutionary War. The Americans kept on foiling the British through a combination of brilliant tactical retreats, dogged determination, improvisation and faith in providence. His is primarily a military history that covers the opening salvo in Lexington and Concord to the engagements in Princeton and Trenton and Washington's crossing of the Delaware and his reversal of fortune. However, there is enough observational detail on the social and political aspects of the conflict and the sometimes larger than life personalities involved to make it a broader history. The account could be supplemented with other political histories such as ones by Gordon Wood, Bernard Bailyn and Joseph Ellis to provide a fuller view of the politics and the personalities.
Atkinson’s greatest strength is to bring an incredible wealth of detail to the narrative and pepper it with primary quotes from not just generals and soldiers but from ordinary men and women. His other big strength is logistical information. No detail seems to escape his eye; the kind and tonnage of food and clothing provisions and shipping, sundry details of types of weapons, ships, beasts of burden and ammunition, the improvised, grim burial of the dead, plundering by the soldiers, the kinds of diseases riddling the camps and the medieval medicine used to treat them (some of them positively so - "oil of whelps" was a grotesque substance concocted from white wine, earthworms and the flesh of dogs boiled alive), creative ditties composed by the soldiers ("Clinton, Burgoyne, Howe, Bow, wow, wow"), the constantly-changing weather and physical landscape, the political machinations in Whitehall and the Continental Congress…the list goes on and on. Sometimes the overwhelming detail can be distracting – for instance do we need to know the exact number of blankets and weight of salt pork supplied during the eve of a particular battle? – but overall the dense statistics and detail have the effect of immersing the reader in the narrative.
The major battles – Lexington and Bunker Hill, Long Island and Manhattan, Quebec and Ticonderoga, Charleston and Norfolk, Princeton and Trenton – are dissected with fine detail and rousing descriptions of men, material, the thrust and parry at the front and the desperation, disappointments, retreats and triumphs that often marked the field of battle. The writing can occasionally be almost hallucinatory: "Revere swung into the saddle and took off at a canter across Charlestown Neck, hooves striking sparks, rider and steed merged into a single elegant creature, bound for glory". The accounts of the almost unbelievably desperate and excruciating winter fighting and retreat in Canada are probably the highlights of the military narratives; the final engagements in Princeton and Trenton are vividly described but seem more rushed in my opinion. Lesser-known conflicts in Virginia and South Carolina in which the British were squarely routed also get ample space. Particularly interesting is the improbable and self-serving slave uprising drummed up by Lord Dunmore, Virginia's governor, and the far-reaching fears that it inspired in the Southern Colonies. Epic quotes that have become part of American history are seen in a more circumspect light; for instance, it’s not clear who said “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” during Bunker Hill, and instead of the famous “The British are coming” cry that is attributed to Paul Revere, it’s more likely that he said “The regulars are coming.” Also, the British army might have been experienced, but they too were constantly impacted by shortage of food and material, and this shortage was a major factor in many of their decisions, including the retreat from Boston. Brittania might have ruled the waves, but she wasn’t always properly nourished.
The one lesson that is constantly driven home is how events that seem providential and epic now were so uncertain and riddled with improvisation and desperation when they happened; in that sense hindsight is always convenient. Atkinson makes us aware of the sheer miserable conditions the soldiers and generals lived in; the threadbare clothing which provided scant protection against the cold, the horrific smallpox, dysentery and other diseases which swept entire battle companies off the face of the planet without warning and the problems constantly posed by loyalists, deserters and soldiers who refused to stay after their enlistments had ended. There were many opportunities for men to turn on one another, and yet we also see both friends and enemies being surprisingly humane toward each other. In many ways, it is Atkinson’s ability to provide insights across a wide cross-section of society, to make the reader feel the pain and uncertainty faced by ordinary men and women, that contribute to the uniqueness of his writing.
Atkinson paints a sympathetic and sometimes heroic portrait of both British politicians and military leaders, but he also makes it clear how clueless, bumbling and misguided they were when it came to understanding the fundamental DNA of the colonies, their frontier spirit, their Enlightenment thinking and their very different perception of their relationship with Britain. An excellent complement to Atkinson’s book for understanding British political miscalculations leading up to the war would be Nick Bunker’s “An Empire on the Edge”. While primarily not a study of personality, Atkinson’s portraits of American commanders George Washington, Benedict Arnold, Henry Knox, Charles Lee, Israel Putnam and British commanders William and Richard Howe, George Clinton, Guy Carleton and others are crisp and vivid. Many of these commanders led their men and accomplished remarkable feats through cold and disease, in the wilderness and on the high seas; others like American John Sullivan in Canada and Briton George Clinton in Charleston could be remarkably naive and clueless in judging enemy strength and resolve. Atkinson also dispels some common beliefs; for instance, while the rank and file were indeed generally inexperienced, there were plenty of more senior officers including Washington who had gained good fighting experience in the ten-year-old French and Indian War.
As a general, Washington’s genius was to know when to quickly retreat and disappear, to make the enemy fight a battle of attrition, to inspire and scold when necessary, and somehow to keep this ragtag group fighting men and their logistical support together. He was also adept at carefully maneuvering the levers of Congress and to keep driving home the great need for ammunition, weapons and ordinary provision through a mixture of cajoling and appeals to men’s better angels. After the Battle of Trenton in which his army crossed the icy Delaware and roundly trounced the British Hessian Guards in the middle of the night - Atkinson’s account of this semi-urban surprise attack is especially vivid - his reputation and confidence soared, and he came into his own not just as a great military commander but as a model American. After that there was no looking back from the path to fame and freedom.
For anyone wanting a detailed and definitive military history of the Revolutionary War, Atkinson’s book is highly recommended. It gives an excellent account of the military details of the “glorious cause” and it paints a convincing account of the sheer improbability and capriciousness of its success.
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A remarkable example of history scholarship.