The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

March 15, 2019
The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian shifts his focus from modern battlefields to the conflict that founded the United States.Atkinson (The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945, 2013, 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. He doesn't disappoint here, in the first of a promised trilogy on the Revolutionary War. As he writes of the Battle of Bunker Hill, for instance, "Charlestown burned and burned, painting the low clouds bright orange in what one diarist called 'a sublime scene of military magnificence and ruin, ' " even as snipers fired away and soldiers lay moaning in heaps on the ground. At Lexington, British officers were spun in circles by well-landed shots while American prisoners such as Ethan Allen languished in British camps and spies for both sides moved uneasily from line to line. There's plenty of motion and carnage to keep the reader's attention. Yet Atkinson also has a good command of the big-picture issues that sparked the revolt and fed its fire, from King George's disdain of disorder to the hated effects of the Coercive Acts. As he writes, the Stamp Act was, among other things, an attempt to get American colonists to pay their fair share for the costs of their imperial defense ("a typical American...paid no more than sixpence a year in Crown taxes, compared to the average Englishman's twenty-five shillings"). Despite a succession of early disasters and defeats, Atkinson clearly demonstrates, through revealing portraits of the commanders on both sides, how the colonials "outgeneraled" the British, whose army was generally understaffed and plagued by illness, desertion, and disaffection, even if "the American army had not been proficient in any general sense." A bonus: Readers learn what it was that Paul Revere really hollered on his famed ride.A sturdy, swift-moving contribution to the popular literature of the American Revolution.

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Starred review from April 1, 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 (including delving into the unpublished papers of King George III, only recently made available to scholars) allows Atkinson to recreate the past like few other popular historians. The result is a definitive survey of the first stage of the war, which would ultimately yield “two tectonic results”: the reduction of the British Empire by one-third, and the creation of the United States. By providing vivid portraits of even minor characters, Atkinson enables readers to feel the loss of individual lives on both sides of the conflict, and by providing memorable details—such as starving soldiers relishing a stew made out of a squirrel’s head and some candlewicks—he brings new life even to chapters of oft-told American history. Atkinson doesn’t shy away from noting the hypocrisy of the slave-owning founding fathers, and his mordant prose (the author of a letter advocating a belligerent attitude towards the colonials is described as having “the cocksure clarity of a man who slept in his own bed every night three thousand miles from trouble”) is another plus. This is a superlative treatment of the period.

Starred review from April 1, 2019

In this first volume of the "Revolution Trilogy," Pulitzer Prize-winning Atkinson (An Army at Dawn) chronicles the first two years of the American War for Independence. He explains both sides of the conflict: Britain's determination to reduce its debt and uphold its financial and political status; and the staunch resistance by American radicals, merchants, tradesmen, and farmers to thwart British interference. In a compelling narrative that's exhaustively researched and documented, with background details and quotes from journal entries, personal and official correspondence, and other documents from American, British, and French participants at all levels--from kings and generals to infantrymen, Atkinson effectively relates a history that runs counter to the glorified "creation myth of the American republic." There were, of course, heroic actions, the blessings of good fortune, and the gruesomeness of battle, but also the humiliation and suffering caused by disease, cold, supply shortages, poor funding, cruel atrocities, plunder, rape, inexperienced and ineffective leadership, disunity, betrayal, and low morale. VERDICT This graphic account will especially appeal to military history enthusiasts but is accessible for all readers seeking to experience the realities of the revolution.--Margaret Kappanadze, Elmira Coll. Lib., NY

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Starred review from March 15, 2019
This balanced, elegantly written, and massively researched volume is the first in a projected trilogy about the Revolutionary War, which follows Atkinson's Liberation trilogy about WWII, the premier volume of which (An Army at Dawn, 2002) won a Pulitzer Prize in History. 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. Beginning with Concord and Bunker Hill, and including the subsequent British victory at the Battle of Brooklyn Heights and occupation of Manhattan, he covers the beginning of the war, through the startling American victories at Trenton and Princeton. Besides military operations per se, Atkinson comprehensively covers related phenomena such as recruitment (and desertion), transit (and logistics), provisioning (food and ammunition), imprisonment and recreation, and physical conditions, including weather and prevalent diseases such as smallpox. His profiles of American and English (and allied Hessian) statesmen and soldiers are fair and sharply etched. His treatment of the elderly Benjamin Franklin, especially his diplomacy in Paris, is masterful and funny. Benedict Arnold, at this point in the narrative, emerges strongly as a brilliant officer and an American hero. The portrait of the omnipresent George Washington foreshadows his skills and later great accomplishments. Aided by fine and numerous maps, this is superb military and diplomatic history and represents storytelling on a grand scale.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)