from which we are likely to derive nothing but poverty, disgrace, defeat and ruin." Charles James Fox, a 26-year-old fop who wore "high-heeled shoes, each of a different color," observed of the prime minister, Lord North: "Alexander the Great never gained more in one campaign than the noble lord has lost - he has lost a whole continent." Fox went on: "I cannot consent to the bloody consequences of so silly a contest about so silly an object, conducted in the silliest manner. Most Americans may not know that almost a third of the members voted against waging war. McCullough pairs his earthy introduction of colonial Boston with a pomp-filled opener in London, where King George arrives at Westminster in a chariot drawn by a team of Hanoverian Creams to address Parliament on the state of his "unhappy people" in America.
One of his first orders, later rescinded out of necessity, barred blacks from enlistment. The slave-owning general also took offense at the presence of free blacks in the ranks. "These people," he complained, are "exceedingly dirty and nasty" and afflicted by an "unaccountable kind of stupidity." Washington bristles at the leveling instincts of New England officers, whom he judged too familiar with their men. When the Virginia-bred Washington takes command, he exhibits the sort of haughty contempt for Yankees that Bostonians of a later era would display toward Southerners. Each man consumed, on average, a bottle of rum per day, and once-Puritan Boston was so rife with prostitutes that mapmakers labeled its red-light district "Mount Whoredom." When we meet the colonials encamped around Boston in the summer of 1775, they are a wretched, ill-clad band, voiding "excrement about the fields perniciously." Lack of sanitation bred rampant "camp fever" to go with a smallpox epidemic. The result is a lucid and lively work that will engage both Revolutionary War bores and general readers who have avoided the subject since their school days.īut forget about Minute Men, Paul Revere's ride and steely rebels holding their fire until they could see the whites of their enemies' eyes. George Washington often pales beside his supporting cast, and readers are invited to empathize with traditionally reviled figures: Tories, Hessian mercenaries, even King George III.Īnother surprise is that David McCullough, best known for Rushmore-size biographies of underrated presidents, wrestles America's founding year into a taut 294 pages of text, describing the trying months that followed the heroics at Lexington, Concord and the Battle of Bunker Hill. Yet no combat takes place for most of the narrative.
THIS is a sly book, beginning with its title, "1776." It's a story of war, not words - the great declaration in Philadelphia occurs offstage.
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