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1776
By David McCullough
Hardcover: 400 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (May 24, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN: 0743226712

This book has been around awhile and it’s been reviewed by everybody, so there’s not too much I can add. I was looking for something that would be a good Saturday read, and this fulfilled that requirement nicely. McCullough is a well-known historian who won a Pulitzer for John Adams. This book is a little like Winick’s April 1865: The Month That Saved America, in that it concentrates on a relatively small slice of time during a much longer conflict and explains the importance of that period to the history of the period.

This book follows the young Continental Army from a rag tag collection of militias under the command of an inexperienced and vacillating General Washington through the first important battles of the American Revolution. It starts with the surprise victory of Washington at Boston, follows through the disasters in New York, and ends with the victories at Trenton and Princeton. The book’s primary value to me was in following the maturation of Washington, who had to suffer the defeats in New York in order to learn the most important lesson of military command — there is nothing worse than vacillation. It is much better to make the wrong decision than to make no decision at all, and Washington did not start to win until he took that lesson to heart. It cost him the support of Nahaniel Lee, one of his most important generals, who wrote to another of Washington’s officers, Joseph Reed:

I received your most obliging, flattering letter — lament with you that fatal indecision of mind which in war is a much greater disqualification than stupidity or even want of personal courage. Accident may put a decisive blunder in the right, but eternal defeat and miscarriage must attend the men of the best parts if cursed with indecision.

Had not Lee been captured shortly thereafter, there might well have been a mutiny. Washington was losing the war, and was losing the support of his officers and men. Machiavelli noted centuries before that

Of this, however, I am well persuaded, that it is better to be impetuous than cautious. For Fortune is a woman who to be kept under must be beaten and roughly handled; and we see that she suffers herself to be more readily mastered by those who so treat her than by those who are more timid in their approaches. And always, like a woman, she favours the young, because they are less scrupulous and fiercer, and command her with greater audacity.

While the approval of rough handling of women is not palatable as it was in the 16th century, the importance of audacity has not changed.

McCullough’s writing is not as easily read as Winick’s, and it focuses on command issues a bit to the exclusion of many other important issues of the day. But the book moves quickly enough, and goes deeply enough in its focus to provide interesting nuggets that are missing in broader approaches. One such nugget was scattered mention of the importance of black freemen to the fight, and the consternation that caused among the southern militias.

It is well worth the price. Any book like this is a worthy read in a country that no longer teaches its own history. Of course, the book, relying as it does so heavily on the writings of the persons involveed, cannot help but reveal the religious character of the fight. That will of course annoy those revisionists who insist that the Founding Fathers were secularists. If that offends, it might be better to stick to secularly bowlderized texts provided by the more politically correct revisionists.

Check it out!