1776 – America and Britain at War
By David McCullough
Published by Penguin, 2006

Politics is ignored as a gifted historian gets himself embedded in the muck with America’s baby army and British shells rain down around them. Moving words, not pictures, to follow. My review for The Nation, published on September 3.

Is there something to this fine history book beyond a moving story wonderfully retold? There’s no such intimation offered, not even a preface for that matter. This year is the 230th anniversary of the pivotal clashes, described here, en route to American independence, but I’ve heard of no particular commemoration in either country, whose armies are after all busy at the moment with their common modern enemies.

McCullough allows no room for speculation that, for example, the insurgencies which the former foes are now together fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq might be echoes of the one George Washington led against George III. And I don’t suspect he set out to write this book with current resonance in mind. He had no such “back story” when he delivered his remarkable biography of John Adams five years ago.

There’s no preface, but what a great opening chapter. Histories of the American Revolution always start in America. This one starts with the king of England’s massive gilt carriage clattering through the streets of London to Parliament, where his summons to the politicians to nip this colonial bellowing in the bud is followed by an all-night debate. Some of the best minds of that generation argue heatedly against the use of military force, but not persuasively enough.

Across the Atlantic there is a city under siege. The British forces huddled on the “island” of Boston with some 4,000 Loyalist citizens play a waiting game with the fledgling Continental Army, whose strength teeters alarmingly as New Englanders get fed up and go home as soon as their tour of duty is up. There’s hardly any gunpowder anyway.

Winter is coming and both sides are chopping down every tree and abandoned house around for firewood. Both sides believe this conflict is going to be a short, sharp explosion of battle, a matter of shock and awe, not a drawn-out war.

So the resonance is there if you wish.

For the reader, though, this is a war far too short. McCullough stands rigidly astride the year of the title. Before we even begin, Bunker Hill, Lexington and Concord are already part of history, and when we finish, Brandywine and Valley Forge have yet to be visited, and Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown is still five years away, the peace treaty seven.

McCullough’s aim is to throw 1776 into brisk relief, and in 300 pages – there are another 90 of notes, images and maps – he gives us all the hopes, horrors, highs and lows of a conflict that was a long time coming, had a long time still to go and yet swung decisively on a handful of key battles that year, even as Congress produced its Declaration of Independence in a far-off place called Philadelphia.

What emerges, for the most part, is surprising for anyone not fully versed in the American Revolution. For one thing, it’s utterly amazing that it succeeded at all. Not only were the numbers horrendously stacked against America, most of the men who took up arms on its behalf were more concerned about that year’s harvest, and George Washington – well, he just wasn’t that good a general to begin with.

The reason there is a United States of America today appears to have been largely a matter of luck – and weather. One suspects too that, later in the war, the French played a bigger role in the revolution’s success than the Americans like to let on, but of course they hadn’t yet shown up in 1776.

In March ’76, the Continental Army stunned the British by somehow getting all its cannon to the top of Dorchester Heights overlooking Boston in the dead of one night. And the cannon had been dragged to the front all the way from upstate New York in a tremendous feat of manpower.

In December, Washington again used guerrilla tactics and the darkness to shock the German mercenaries at Trenton, New Jersey.

These were the meagre yet crucial American victories of 1776 (some seem to think their escape from New York was another, but it was a retreat, after all), and yet even these turned on nature’s whim. Time after time massive storms and thick fogs concealed Washington’s flittering about, and even though his army was battered by awful weather too, it does appear that “fate, luck, Providence, the hand of God” was on his side.

The general certainly needed it during a year that Thomas Paine most accurately described as “the times that try men’s souls”. Multitudes of his starving soldiers in rags were quitting simply because their contract was up, or were deserting en masse, or ill with rampant disease, or given to plunder and hooliganism. General Howe’s British land and sea force was getting more massive all the time. No money was forthcoming from Philadelphia, and few reinforcements.

But George Washington, self-taught from childhood, kept learning as a general. Repeatedly hammered on the battlefield, he only became more resolute and tenacious, even as trusted officers were telling Congress they’d be better off without him. He was, says the author, a commander of “almost excessive self-command”, made of marble long before the first statue of him was sculpted.

When it comes to the general and his staff – and all the British officers arrayed against them – McCullough is a gifted portraitist, and he has a remarkable sense of the moment in retelling history. The months and weeks and days of 1776 are reported with the immediacy of CNN, but with measured insight and great compassion for both sides.