Historiography

HISTORIOGRAPHY. The historiography of the American Revolution always has been a much larger subject than the historiography of the War of Independence. Consider comments by two of the Revolution's major participants. For John Adams, the real Revolution was the huge change in Americans' attitudes as they abandoned being British. That change was over before a shot was fired. But for Philadelphia's Benjamin Rush, the end of hostilities marked the beginning of the real Revolution, the change in how Americans lived their lives.

The consequence is that much of the Revolution's most sophisticated study has paid scant attention to the long, bloody, difficult conflict that actually achieved independence. For scholars in Adams's long shadow, primarily interested in problems of language and consciousness, the interest has been to probe the destruction of British identity and the creation of what Gordon Wood has called "the American Science of Politics." For scholars more inspired by Rush, the experience of places, individuals, and groups has loomed larger than campaigns, battles, and generalship.

Most would agree with the proposition that the military narrative is not strong enough by itself to carry the larger Revolutionary story. This is unlike the Civil War, in which the story of armed conflict also is the story of failed southern white nationhood, of slavery's destruction, of African American freedom, and of the transformation of the fundamental terms of American existence. Yet the Revolutionary War is the second longest in American history. Its roughly 30,000 American casualties cannot possibly equate to the Civil War's 630,000, but they struck a much smaller population. Almost every place except central New England saw actual conflict at one point or another.

As Washington Irving's fictional Rip Van Winkle found, the war did leave America a vastly different place. Some of its historians have dealt only with the movement of troops, but many others have understood the need to see the Revolutionary War in all of its complexity. Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, the problems of military history and revolutionary transformation have come together in sophisticated ways.

ACCOUNTS OF PARTICIPANTS

In the beginning there were the participants. No military leader of the Revolution on either side produced a memoir comparable to the majestic achievement of Ulysses S. Grant. We cannot know the direct, first-hand experiences and remembered consciousness of Washington, Charles Lee, Nathanael Greene, and Henry Knox or of Thomas Gage, William Howe, John Burgoyne, and Henry Clinton.

But ranging from slightly below their level to ordinary privates, participants did believe that their stories were worth recounting. Many of these were published during the nineteenth century, and in 1968 the New York Times and Arno Press assembled most of the published editions into one series, called Eyewitness Accounts of the American Revolution (1968). The books show the Revolutionary War through many eyes and from many perspectives, and they are of great value. The memoirs of Hessian Major General Friedrich Adolphus Riedesel provide the best single source on Burgoyne's failed campaign down the Champlain-Hudson corridor in 1777. Virtually every historian of the war in the North draws on the rich diary kept by Connecticut private Joseph Plumb Martin during his long service in the Continental army. Between those two extremes, the Times series presents a wide variety of experiences, at all ranks and from all sides.

In the aftermath of the actual war, writers set out to create more formal histories, most of which are reprinted in the Times series. Necessarily, they took sides. For New York Loyalist Thomas Jones (as for others of his ilk), the story told in his History of New York during the Revolutionary War (2 vols., 1879) was of illicit, ungrateful rebellion. For the South Carolina physician David Ramsay, the tale in his History of the American Revolution (2 vols., 1793) was of heroic resistance and American liberty. Though Ramsay took direct part in the conflict, his real interest was political rather than military. Plagiarism was not a writerly sin in his time, and Ramsay unashamedly drew much of his account from Britain's Annual Register. The playwright Mercy Otis Warren of Boston, whose brother Joseph died at Bunker Hill, gave the war much more extended treatment. In her three-volume History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (1805), the conflict takes up half of the first volume and all of the second. But Warren was partisan in more than simply taking the American side. For her, the real point of the Revolution was not simply American independence, but the triumph of the Jeffersonian vision (limited rather than active government, agriculture-based development, and civil liberties) of what independence should mean.

As the Revolutionary generation aged and memories faded, emphasis shifted. Ordinary men and occasionally ordinary women who had served with the Revolutionary army found reason to recover and tell their personal stories. That was the only way to get the pensions owed them from the federal government, and frequently it meant overcoming the suspicions of latter-day clerks and budget-conscious Congressmen. Their petitions eventually found their way to the National Archives, where they became the stuff of genealogy.

Historians have realized that these accounts present a mosaic of first-hand Revolutionary experience. John C. Dann assembled a collection of them in 1980 as The Revolution Remembered, covering the whole war from the firefight at Lexington in 1775 to Washington's departure from command in 1783. However rich the volumes in the New York Times series, there is no need anymore to rely on it alone for contemporary perspectives. The full riches of the tales in the archives remain to be exploited. Two studies by Alfred F. Young demonstrate the possibilities. The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (1999) shows the surprises and changes in one very ordinary man's life. Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier (2004) turns its subject from a figure of curiosity into a boundary prober (a woman who probed the boundaries of gender and opportunity) who redefined herself in uniform for fourteen undetected months and who grasped the Revolution's possibilities. Many women in addition to Sampson had direct military experience. A few others disguised themselves, though only briefly. Most were "women of the army." Holly A. Mayer tells their story in Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community during the American Revolution (1996).

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

While the veterans were telling their stories, nineteenth-century historians were embarking on other tasks. George Bancroft, in particular, set out to tell the American story in epic terms. During his studies in Germany, Bancroft felt the influence of the philosopher G.F.W. Hegel, who insisted that the course of history led to an increase in human freedom. During this time, Bancroft produced a History of the United States from the Discovery of the Continent (6 vols., 1888) that construed the entire tale in terms of the rise of American liberty. Bancroft was a staunch follower of President Andrew Jackson, and like Warren before him, he had a political agenda. The war years filled one and one-half volumes. His rhetoric could be overblown, as in his account of the spread of the news of fighting at Lexington and Concord:

Darkness close upon the country … but it was no night for sleep. Heralds by swift relays transmitted the war message … till village repeated it to village; the sea to the back woods; the plains to the highlands … its loud reveille broke the rest of the trappers of New Hampshire…. The hills along the Hudson told to one another the tale. As the summons hurried to the south, it was one day at New York; in one more at Philadelphia…. Crossing the Potomac near Mount Vernon, it was sent forward without a halt to Williamsburg.

Bancroft's German training had given him a strong positivistic sense of evidence as well as the capacity for high-flown generalizations about the course of history. Even at its most overblown, his prose rested on hard fact.

Benson J. Lossing's two-volume Pictorial Field Book of the Revolution (1860) was another monument of the era. Intended for general readership, it was a compilation of accounts of battles, capsule biographies, and verse, told in good part in the first person as Lossing explored the Revolution's sites. Like the enormous county histories that were popular at the time, Lossing's volumes were lavishly illustrated with steel engravings of historic places, natural features, the dwellings of great men and Lossing's hosts on his travels, and such latter-day achievements as a suspension bridge across the Niagara River below the Falls. Like Bancroft's account of the history of a United States that did not yet exist, Lossing's volumes indiscriminately included details from the whole colonial era. Its combined total of nearly fifteen hundred closely packed pages presented a formidable reading task. But the book is one to be leafed through and perhaps consulted for facts rather than taken as a narrative or analytical account.

Another nineteenth-century project was simply to assemble and preserve primary materials before the paper crumbled and the ink faded on aging manuscripts. Overt interpretation could wait. The contents of European and American archives, town records, muster rolls, and officers' reports were more important. Yet these collections were haphazard and often incomplete. Peter Force's nine massive volumes of American Archives (1837–1853) provide immense detail on the years from 1776 to 1778, but then they stop. Force originally planned at least twenty volumes, funded by the Department of State. Publication stopped when Secretary of State William Marcy withdrew funding. Edmund Bailey O'Callaghan's fifteen-volume Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York (1853–1887) include three on the war years. Half a century later, New York State archivists assembled an alphabetical list of soldiers who served in the Revolution. Such collections are invaluable for the war's social history. But to put faces on that list of names one must make a long trawl through county and town histories.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

After the turn of the twentieth century, scholarship on the Revolution turned in different directions. One, reflecting America's own emergence as an imperial power, was toward appreciation of Britain's difficulties in dealing with the cantankerous, disobedient, tax-resisting colonists. Another, drawing on the open class divisions of industrial capitalist society, was to break down the hitherto unitary concept of undifferentiated "Americans" into groups that conflicted with one another over the terms and conduct of American life. The first tendency is associated primarily with the work of Charles McLean Andrews and the second with that of Carl Lotus Becker and Charles A. Beard. Yet neither they nor their students and disciples dealt with the problems presented by the actual war.

For the most part, study of the war remained at the level of accounts of campaigns and battles or of particular units. Frequently, that meant recounting familiar tales about a half-organized rabble in arms who managed somehow to face down the might of Britain's majestic, highly trained, well-disciplined, and well-equipped armed forces. Virtually all such writing construed the conflict solely in terms of one white group facing down another white group, with virtually no attention paid to the importance of the war from the point of view of both Native people and black slaves. To such writers, these people were simply problems to add to the American grievance list against Britain. John Richard Alden's mid-twentieth-century synthesis dismissed Natives, particularly, as no more than "savages" or, in one memorable phrase, "fickle, red-skinned allies." (The American Revolution, p. 139)

The British perspective. Matters changed during the twentieth century's second half. One reason was the Revolution's bicentennial, which provoked interest in (and funding for) studies of virtually every aspect of the Revolutionary era, the war included. Another was the emergence of a new style of military history, whose practitioners were interested not simply in armed hostilities but also in the entire social, economic, and cultural experience of warfare. Still another was a broadened scope of American social history, taking into account not only the class divisions that preoccupied early-twentieth-century "progressive" historians such as Becker and Beard but also the experiences of race and gender. It also became possible to take the experiences of both major sides seriously without waving either the Stars and Stripes or the Union Jack. The problem ceased to be one of justifying either the British or the American position and shifted to understanding a complex, total, and in many ways tragic historical process.

An important early statement came in 1964 from Oxford military historian Piers Mackesy. In The War for America, 1775–1783, Mackesy sought to understand the whole British experience of a distant, lost war from which Britain extricated itself slowly and painfully but ultimately successfully. Mackesy took London's perspective, in the sense that he set out to understand the problems of logistics, grand strategy, and politics that surrounded actual campaigning. He came closer than any previous historian to appreciating Britain's difficulties. As one instance, though British soldiers were better trained man-to-man than American ones, each of the former also represented a very high investment. Their lives were not to be squandered because every casualty was very difficult and very expensive to replace. This was one reason for the reluctance of British strategists to provide the forces needed or commanders to commit them in battle.

Mackesy also understood the sheer difficulty of supplying the distant troops. Previous accounts of the inland campaigns of Burgoyne in northern New York and of Charles Lord Cornwallis in the South had treated their problems of supply as, in effect, matters of happenstance or foolishness. The tale of Burgoyne's mile-long baggage train, laden with his and his officers' china, good food, and fine wine as well as with the troops' basic needs, is well-known. But Mackesy linked it to the larger problem that any British force faced as soon as it advanced more than a few miles from open water.

Mackesy's principal achievement was to explore the problems that the British effort faced at the very highest levels, among ministers and commanding officers of the army and the fleet. Far from being unified, they were a squabbling, conflicted lot, wracked with mutual antipathy, self-centered ambition, clashing goals, and poor coordination. Lord George Germain, who was war minister for much of the conflict, had no doubts about the goal he was pursuing in the king's name (although privately he wrestled with the lasting shame of his supposed cowardice at the Battle of Minden three decades earlier). His generals and admirals, however, did have doubts. It was impossible to recruit many of Britain's most experienced generals, such as Sir Jeffrey Amherst. But the first commander in chief, Thomas Gage, knew America well. He had replaced Amherst as commander, and his wife, Margaret Kemble, was American. Among the commanders in chief and lesser generals who followed him, both William Howe and John Burgoyne were opposition members of Parliament.

Mackesy also understood that from Britain's viewpoint the war during its course turned into a global conflict. To Americans, the combined French-American victory at Yorktown in 1781 marked the end of the struggle. But to British policy makers another problem loomed from 1778: protecting the West Indies from the combined force of the French and Spanish navies. The Royal Navy did so successfully in 1782 at the Battle of the Saints, capturing the French commander Admiral de Grasse. Yet even with that victory, Britain's problems were not over. The very last armed conflict between representatives of the two sides took place in India, in 1783. It ended without conclusion, thanks to the arrival of the news of a preliminary peace. Mackesy succeeded in turning a favorite American phrase to describe the opening bullets at Lexington in 1775—"the shot heard round the world"—into a statement of literal fact.

Three major works. Three important books by American scholars followed directly on Mackesy's achievement and in the direction he charted. John Shy, a West Point graduate with a Princeton doctorate in history, explored the place of the British army in the coming of the Revolution in Toward Lexington (1965). Shy's interest was not at all in the conventional stuff of military history; he was writing about a peacetime army. He understood that the army's very presence was a major irritant to the colonials and sought to explore the reasons. As one reviewer noted, Shy broke free of "headquarters" history and explored the army's role in American society, particularly the ways in which both soldiers and officers came into conflict with their respective civilian counterparts. Sixteen years later, Sylvia Frey extended this theme into the war years with The British Soldier in America: A Social History of Military Life in the Revolutionary Period (1981). Ira Gruber returned to the level of generals and generalship in The Howe Brothers and the American Revolution (1972). Using previously untouched British archives, he probed the connections between the two brothers' political ambitions, their commissions both to wage war and to negotiate peace, and their duty as joint commanders in chief between 1776 and 1778. Among the problems that Gruber confronted was William Howe's reluctance, particularly, to follow through whenever he seemed to have an advantage over his opposite number, George Washington.

Mackesy's treatment of the large issues of the war from a British (though not chauvinistic) viewpoint virtually required an American-framed riposte on a similar scale. In 1971 Don Higginbotham provided that response with The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763–1789. As one British reviewer noted, Higginbotham's great theme was to link military experience on the American side to the sort of people Americans were, meaning both their long experience as colonials and their immediate needs as revolutionaries. Mackesy had shown the infighting and sheer inefficiency of the British command and logistic structures, leading to their inability to achieve what policy makers and strategists wanted. Higginbotham began with the fact that though the rebellious colonials had ample experience of subordinate service under British leadership, they had no experience at all at the levels of organizing, financing, supplying, and fighting a major war by themselves. Their eventual success at the first three underpinned their ultimate success at the fourth. Like Mackesy, Higginbotham blended policy level, strategic level, and soldier level history into a coherent account. Taken together, the two books form a remarkably complementary pair.

Shy returned to the subject of the Revolution in 1976 with a collection of essays, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence. Published in the aftermath of America's own losing experience in Vietnam, the volume asked what was genuinely revolutionary about the armed conflict. Its centerpiece was his previous contribution to Essays on the American Revolution (1973), titled "The Military Conflict as a Revolutionary War." Shy knew better than simply to stamp the American struggle with a latter-day mold constructed from the writings and experiences of Trotsky, Mao, and Giap. But he did understand what already was implicit in the work of Mackesy: the British were using conventional European military means to attempt to suppress an extra-European attempt at revolutionary social and political change. Taken this way, several old-chestnut questions found new answers. One is whether the British "lost" the war through their mistakes or the Americans "won" it by their virtues and the help of their French friends. Another is whether on the American side it is more important to consider the Continental army or the separate state militias. The real point, Shy suggested, was that from the American perspective the whole experience of war between 1775 and 1781 was "a social process of political education that can be explored and should be analyzed" (The American Revolution: The Military Conflict Considered as a Revolutionary War, p. 156).

Culture and the military. One major general development in Revolution studies during the twentieth century's third quarter was an extended exploration of political culture, especially in the work of Bernard Bailyn and Gordon S. Wood. Primarily, this meant the study of civilian writings as Americans wrestled with the problem of creating their eventual republic, but as both Higginbotham and Shy understood, the problem spilled over into military life. Charles Royster rose to the task of linking culture and warfare in A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (1979). Densely argued and not reader friendly, Royster's book set out to bridge the whole gap between conventional (or even new-style) military studies and cultural development. One of his achievements reached right back to Bancroft's highly dramatized account of the spread of the war news from Lexington in 1775. Bancroft had rightly understood that as the messengers rode north, west, and south, they precipitated a general crisis. Royster described what ensued as rage militaire, (martial enthusiasm) and he explored both that phenomenon's extent and its limits.

In particular, Royster picked up on a point that military historians long had understood. Whatever the importance of the militia, the Continental army had perdured throughout the war and ultimately could claim victory. Royster explored both the tensions between the fact of what Washington would describe as a "respectable army" and a culture that regarded standing armies as dangerous. He also considered the emergence of the army's officer corps as a self-conscious gentry, however absurd their pretensions appeared to the real gentlemen and outright aristocrats whom they faced. One outcome of the Revolution is the subordination of military might to political control in American life. Royster turned that outcome into something much more complex than Washington's personal squelching of the Newburgh Conspiracy and his resignation from command in 1783.

Military supply. Culture alone, however, does not keep an army in the field. Supply is not a glamorous subject, but both Mackesy and Higginbotham understood its great importance. E. Wayne Carp addressed the problem squarely in To Starve the Army at Pleasure: Continental Army Administration and American Political Culture, 1775–1783 (1984). Carp's insights fitted both with Royster's and with the earlier economic history of Curtis P. Nettels, The Emergence of a National Economy, 1775–1815 (1962), developing the point that both the absolute needs of the army and the experience of the people charged with meeting those needs began the process of transforming divergent provincial and local economies into a single structure.

The local context. James Kirby Martin and Mark Edward Lender brought many of these themes together in their student-level synthesis, A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763–1789 (1982). At a more specialist level, so did the collection edited by Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, Arms and Independence: The Military Character of the American Revolution (1984). Other historians probed the question of the war and its effects from the very different perspective of local and group experience. Unlike general arguments about strategy, political culture, and supply, their studies were concerned with particular people in specific places.

One pioneer study was Robert Gross's account of The Minutemen and Their World (1976). Short and elegant, Gross's book worked within the then-dominant paradigm of New England town studies to examine how the very ordinary farmers, artisans, and gentlemen of Concord, Massachusetts, came to the point of confronting British regulars at the bridge on the edge of their town on the morning of 19 April 1775. Their town's moment of actual armed conflict was brief, but it was part of a much larger transformation.

Gross's townsmen rallied, of course, because messengers like Paul Revere brought them the news that "the Regulars are coming out." Revere's ride and the firefights that followed were the moment when uneasy peace bled into conflict that British soldiers and New Englanders alike had been expecting. Paul Revere's Ride (1994), by David Hackett Fischer, explored that tense moment. Like Royster, Fischer wrote in George Bancroft's long shadow, but more than Bancroft he understood that what happened was the result of intense preparation and organization. New Englanders had risen spontaneously and incoherently in September 1774, when news spread that General Gage had seized the gunpowder in the Cambridge powderhouse. They were quick to rally the following April, and this time they were disciplined and ready. The damage they inflicted on retreating British troops and the impromptu siege that they imposed on occupied Boston sprang from those facts. So did their Pyrrhic victory at Bunker (Breed's) Hill in June, when they inflicted unacceptable losses on the British before finally retreating.

The war in Connecticut. For most Massachusetts people the war was effectively over after the British withdrew from Boston in March 1776. But for their Connecticut neighbors it had barely begun. The British occupation of New York City and Long Island the following summer made Long Island Sound into a permanent war zone and put great pressure on the people on that zone's northern side. Richard Buel Jr. explored that problem in Dear Liberty: Connecticut's Mobilization for the Revolutionary War (1980). Like Carp, his prime concern was how people supplied the army. Much more than Carp, however, he dealt with the demands that doing so placed upon civilian life. Beyond supply, Connecticut people had to deal with constant raiding across Long Island Sound. They never endured a major campaign, but the war was on their doorsteps, particularly in 1779, when the British attacked New Haven and destroyed the towns of Fairfield and Norwalk. In Buel's estimation, Connecticut did not fully recover from the war's costs until into the nineteenth century.

NEW YORK WARFARE

Of all the founding states, New York probably suffered longest and most intensely. The British took over its "southern district"—New York City and vicinity—just after independence was declared. They stayed there until 1783, withdrawing only when the Treaty of Paris required them to go. The state lost two of its counties when Vermont seceded from it early in 1777. It experienced not only invasion by the largest seaborne armada the modern world had seen when the Howe brothers drove Washington from Brooklyn and Manhattan, but another major invasion a year later when Burgoyne came south from Montreal. In its western reaches, what had been a mixed society of Native and white people collapsed into a civil war that seemed to pit all against all and that lasted for years. With so much and such extended conflict, it is not surprising that the state generated a rich wartime historiography.

Barnet Schechter's The Battle for New York: The City at the Heart of the American Revolution (2002) brings much of that seven-year agony into a single account. Schechter's interest is much larger than the battle of New York that followed immediately on the British invasion, although that does comprise somewhat more than half of his account. To his mind, New York City remained central throughout the war. As he shows, Washington would have agreed, wanting until the very end to achieve military recompense for the humiliation he had suffered at the hands of the Howes. The fiasco of British policy in 1777, when Burgoyne's grand expedition came to nothing and when Howe decided to take Philadelphia, formed part of the larger battle for the city. Within New York, only the western conflict does not fit into Schechter's framework.

Taken on its own, the Saratoga campaign of 1777 has generated a great deal of writing. The most recent complete account is Richard Ketchum's extended narrative, Saratoga (2002). But Max Mintz's The Generals of Saratoga: John Burgoyne and Horatio Gates (1990) develops the human interest point that the two had known each other since they joined the same British regiment at the entry-level rank of subaltern during Britain's long contest with the French. That Burgoyne climbed to fame, wealth, and a seat in Parliament while Gates left the army and settled in Virginia, speaks to the large differences between the two sides. It also lends poignancy to their famous exchange at the surrender, when Gates told Burgoyne that he was "very glad" to see him and Burgoyne broke gentlemanly form by replying that he was not glad to see Gates at all.

War against Native peoples. New York's other great conflict was westward. Irregular war broke out in 1777 as Lieutenant Colonel Barry St. Leger led an expedition of regulars, Loyalists, and Native fighters east from Oswego to link up with Burgoyne. The sharpest conflicts came that summer as Patriot militia blundered into slaughter in a ravine near Oriskany, and in 1779, when an American expedition under Generals John Sullivan and James Clinton set out to ravage the country of the Six Nations.

But Isabel Kelsay's more-than-full-length biography, Joseph Brant: Man of Two Worlds (1984), more than compensates. Brant acquired a ferocious, Atlantic-spanning reputation, but Kelsay shows both him and his people as caught up in a complex struggle in which they sought their own best interests on completely rational grounds. They were not at all the "merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions" whom Jefferson described in the Declaration of Independence. Kelsay shows as well that this struggle was not entirely racial; many of the people whom the highly cultured Brant led in combat were white, not Native at all. Like their settler neighbors, the nations of the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederation, had split. For each of these convoluted sides, the Revolutionary War amounted to a total conflict that, in fact, did end in mutual "undistinguished destruction."

Colin Calloway has expanded this theme in what is the most comprehensive account of warfare against Native Americans in The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (1995). Calloway understands that to speak simply of "Indians" is to phrase the subject so broadly as to render it meaningless. Instead of synthesizing, he offers close descriptions of eight separate Native communities, from Abenaki people near the St. Lawrence to Choctaws on the Mississippi. Like Kelsay, Calloway understands that Native people split, that they became totally caught up in the war, and that no matter which side they chose, they got little good from the Revolution at all.

Many of the same points emerge from modern studies of the southern interior, including Henry Lumpkin's From Savannah to Yorktown: The American Revolution in the South (1981) and such anthologies as An Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry during the American Revolution(1985), edited by Ronald Hoffman and Peter Albert. For southerners the duration of civil conflict was shorter than for New Yorkers and the Iroquois, really erupting only when British strategy turned southward in 1779. The British hope was to find loyalist support, which did exist. But the reality was to tear the South's tri-racial society to shreds. Cherokee Indians already had experienced Patriot wrath for joining the British side, but they had negotiated their way out of a losing situation at the price of surrendering a huge amount of land.

Impact on Black Americans. In the South and North alike, enslaved and free black people also became part of the Revolutionary struggle. The era saw the beginning of western-hemisphere slavery's long, difficult destruction, and in important ways the war opened into a struggle for black liberation. But as with Native and white people, the broad category "black" is far too simple. On both the British and American sides there were white people who were bothered by slavery and other white people who cared not at all. Some black people found their own freedom under the Union Jack, others under the Stars and Stripes. British General Lord Cornwallis disgraced himself by expelling black people from his ranks during the siege of Yorktown. But to his credit, Sir Guy Carleton, the final commander in chief, refused to permit victorious revolutionaries to remove self-freed slaves from transports about to depart from New York.

The full story of black soldiers remains to be told. But it is explored by Benjamin Quarles (The Negro in the American Revolution [1961]) and Sylvia Frey [Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (1991)]. Sydney and Emma Kaplan provide a great deal of evidence in The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution (1989), including a brief discussion of the so-called Black Regiment of Rhode Island. George Washington's own journey, from rejecting the black men among the New Englanders who besieged to including one largely black Rhode Island company among the troops making the final assault at Yorktown, is described by Henry Wiencek in An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (2003).

The Rhode Island Black Regiment deserves a full treatment. But the most famous black unit of the era was Lord Dunmore's Aethiopian Regiment, recruited from among slaves "pertaining to rebels" by Virginia's final royal governor late in 1775. By then Dunmore's own safety required that he be on shipboard in Chesapeake Bay, and his proclamation helped rally white Virginia opinion in favor of independence. Nonetheless, about eight hundred black men made their way to the British, and the uniforms he provided bore the motto "Liberty to Slaves."

Inoculation against smallpox. Sadly, most of them perished in the smallpox epidemic that was breaking out at the same time they tried to claim their freedom. Elisabeth Fenn's Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (2001) shows how the war between human beings and the variola major virus for control of human bodies intersected with the war of humans with one another for control of America. As she demonstrates, one of Washington's great achievements as the American commander was to require that his soldiers undergo the dangerous process of inoculation rather than wait for the disease to come and take them.

EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

As of 2005, Washington himself is the prime subject of three of the most recent studies of the Revolutionary period. Each has received wide attention. All are part of a general surge of interest in the "founding fathers" on the part of writers, publishers, and the general reading public. One of them, Joseph Ellis's His Excellency: George Washington (2004), is a biography in snapshots, devoting two chapters to the war years. In the spirit of his earlier writing, Ellis unashamedly rejects the social history project, presenting what some might call "traditional (narrative, heroic) American history" in virtually pure form.

The other two are more tightly focused in time and much more ambitious intellectually. David Hackett Fischer's Washington's Crossing (2004) is in the spirit of his earlier close study, Paul Revere's Ride. Fischer rejects all determinism, arguing strongly that historians must deal in the language of change and contingency. Nowhere is this more true for him than in the study of war. But in another sense he draws deeply on social historiography, including its recognition that structures do count. Taking as his theme Emmanuel Leutze's famous painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware (1850), he shows that far from being latter-day patriotic bombast, the canvas tells a great deal about the sort of people whom Washington led against Hessians at Trenton and Princeton at the end of 1776, when the Revolution's fortunes and prospects looked very dark. Reaching beyond that core group, he goes on to explore the lives and situations of all ranks among the Hessians Washington attacked, their British allies, Washington's own soldiers, and the civilians who surrounded them all. One of his points is to contrast the two sides in the largest terms, but also to show each as presenting a different face of emerging modernity. The face of the British and their hired Hessians was of hierarchical obedience for the sake of a common cause. The face of the Americans was of voluntary adherence, again for the sake of a common cause. Neither side was capable of fully understanding the other. The result is both a grand narrative of the first two years of the war and an intense dissection of the participants.

David McCullough's project is very similar in 1776 (2005). His goal is simply to describe one intense year in the fullest possible narrative detail, without theorizing or academic controversy. But, like Fischer, he understands that during that year, a very large number of human beings became caught up in events that were not wholly or even largely of their choosing and that turned on the most fundamental questions that they were capable of imagining.

In one sense, early twenty-first-century accounts of the Revolutionary War have returned full circle to the themes running through the patriotic narratives of Mercy Otis Warren and George Bancroft. In this they were prefigured by the strong emphasis on traditional military history by Robert Middlekauff in The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 (1982). Taken this way, they can be seen as in reaction to the concern with the experience of minorities and subordinates and to the interest in internal conflict that ran through much of the social history movement of the second half of the twentieth century. Abandoning overt analysis, their authors opt to tell highly readable stories. But no reaction can be complete. Taken in another way, Fischer and McCullough attempt to present a picture of the Revolutionary War not so much in the spirit of George Bancroft, with his unashamedly purple prose, as in the spirit of another great nineteenth-century American writer who is read much more often now than Bancroft: the poet Walt Whitman. Whitman sought to grasp the full complexity of American life in his time. Perhaps the full complexity of the Revolutionary War still eludes writers, at least in terms of a single comprehensive account. But anybody who chooses can learn a great deal about it, particularly if the reader finds that one book leads to another, and then another.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alden, John R. The American Revolution, 1775–1783. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954.

Shy, John. "The American Revolution: The Military Conflict Considered as a Revolutionary War." In Essays on the American Revolution. Edited by Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973.