Book Review: 1776 by David McCullough

It was a good year for a revolution, 1776. Not that it started well. Those radical, barefoot boys and men had come from the farm and the street to become an army of provincials, old men and little boys playing the fife and drum.

It was later, after chasing the redcoats from Boston, that the rag-tag revolutionaries, those British subjects with too few guns; were, themselves, chased out of New York. Think of them, those ill-clad radicals and traitors to the crown. They fought the legal government of the 13 colonies and, later, on 2 July the Continental Congress took the revolutionary step of voting to "dissolve the connection" with Britain. It was a dangerous move – fighting the most powerful nation on earth.

King George was angry. He spoke before Parliament and ordered the insurrection stopped. His choice of commanders, Lord George Germain, thought the rebellion best crushed with a “decisive blow”. Edmund Burke spoke sympathetically for the colonists but even he called them "our" colonies.

Now, 236 years later, the early part is myth and history, the glorious Revolution has been forgotten. The CIA fights revolutionaries and many fear them, fear the people who flock behind the populists as Fidel's people once marched misguidedly out of Oriente Province into Havana. The year 1776 had its Tories, who fled behind British lines, spied against the would-be “Americans” and, in the end, retreated to the islands, Nova Scotia and the Commonwealth or were man-handled by the “patriots”.

Black (in reality, Afro-British) slaves joined the Tories when they could. Great Britain was decades ahead in the banning of slavery. We revolutionaries waited until 1862 and then had to kill ourselves about it.

David McCollugh writes a great yarn and good history, an action-adventure of a history. He has the story and the myths, the back-home boys writing letters and the Fathers of the nation, those mythological creatures who live on dollar bills and are indoctrinated into our baby heads between pledges of allegiance and anthems. His history does not “come alive”; it radiates.

George Washington is there astride his horse, brave and straight. He looked the commander and prided himself on making sure he looked the part because he believed that it was a requirement of a leader. His men thought so and wrote home of his being on the battlefields, exhorting and checking, leading his men and learning about them even if he, the Virginia gentleman, acted the aristocrat back at Mount Vernon.

Article Author: Howard Dratch

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