Colonial revolt
SAM WILLIS is enthralled by a new account of the crucial early years of the American War of Independence
There are few greater challenges in writing military history than tackling the American War of Independence. The first problem is scale. From first breath to last gasp, the war lasted eight years, making it one of the longest conflicts in American history.
It involved armies and navies immense in scale. The naval sphere was particularly complex at the time and demands careful attention from historians now. No fewer than 22 separate navies fought in the war, and did so on five different oceans. There were also naval campaigns enacted in rivers, as well as some in entirely land-locked lakes.
In terms of narrative, it is easy to become lost. There are no simple themes to follow, as everything is linked to everything else in a formidable, and moveable, web. What happened in Paris affected what happened at sea, which affected what happened in Boston – and Charleston, the West Indies, Madrid and India – for make no mistake, this was a global war. This made things hugely complicated for the main belligerents: what occurred in London might or might not have had the intended impact in America; and what occurred in America might or might not have been reported accurately in England – and only weeks later.
But if one can keep one’s head, the rewards for the historian – and the reader – are immense. The war is a tale of loyalty, treachery, confusion, luck, shipwrecks, smuggling, slavery, nervous breakdowns, love, treasure ships and cruelty. There’s imperialism at its worst and humanity at its best. And there is no more fascinating section of the war than the beginning, the period that Atkinson has targeted in this immense volume. (Perhaps he did this on purpose, but what better page count for a war that reached one of its most important crisis points in 1776 than exactly 776 pages?)
The British Are Coming looks at the crucial period of 1775–1777. At the heart of the war is one of the greatest historical mysteries of the era: how did a loose collection of colonies, without any standing army or navy, win its independence from the most powerful country in the world, a nation that could wield seapower like no other ever had before? Often with this war, focus falls on the end – on the dismal surrender of the British general, Charles Cornwallis, at Yorktown in 1781, which effectively ended the war by bursting the bubble of political support for it in England. But none of that makes any sense unless you understand what happened between 1775 and 1777. To look at these years, moreover, is to see just how many times, and in how many ways, the war could have taken a different turn.
All of this means that the American War of Independence is a war that actually helps us to understand what warfare in this period actually was – how it worked in practice and how it shaped the world in which we now live. Atkinson has written a book that respects the significance of its subject, and he has done so with immense patience, scholarship and narrative flair. The achievement is quite brilliant,
The war is a tale of loyalty, treachery, confusion, luck, shipwrecks, smuggling, slavery, nervous breakdowns, love, treasure and cruelty
although in an age where one needs to be concise – yes, even us historians! – it could perhaps have been filleted to a length that does not take quite so long to reach its conclusion, or wander down so many blind (though important) alleys. But do we have another example of Atkinson’s genius here? Is the book itself a metaphor for the war? I do hope so.