THE SEASON OF LIBERTY

English: George Washington accepting command of the Continental Army. George Washington (middle) surrounded by members of the Continental Congress, lithograph by Currier & Ives, c. 1876. Currier & Ives Collection, Library of Congress, Neg. No. LC-USZC2-3154 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Revolutionary Summer
By Joseph J. Ellis 
Knopf, 219 pages, $26.95

The summer of 1776 was a perilous time for the fledgling American revolution.
By KIRK DAVIS SWINEHART
In June 1776, Britain dispatched the largest invading force since the Spanish Armada to New York in an attempt—ultimately unsuccessful—to crush the rebellion later known as the American Revolution. By the second week of August, 427 warships carrying 34,000 British and Hessian troops sat menacingly at the entrance of New York Harbor, the hulking vessels' soaring masts looking for all the world like an impenetrable floating forest. "I . . . could not believe my eyes," said a Pennsylvania rifleman. "I declare that I thought all London was afloat." (click below to read more)


For the Crown, events unfolded as hoped and expected. The ensuing battles of Long Island and Manhattan forced Gen. George Washington's ragtag band of amateur soldiers to evacuate through New Jersey to Pennsylvania. Confidence in the rebellion took a sharp blow among the fighting men. And, for the duration of the war, strategically placed New York City remained firmly in British hands. Yet in four months' time, on a bitterly cold December night, Washington would cross the Delaware and lead a victorious attack on Hessian forces at Trenton, N.J., that revived his army's flagging morale and boosted enlistments. With time, what many initially regarded as a defeat became for Washington the war's most providential moment. The British failed to destroy the Continental Army when they were best equipped to do so and, in failing to pursue Washington into New Jersey, all but ensured that army's survival.

In his superb and dramatic "Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence," Joseph J. Ellis explains, among other things, why postwar British chroniclers fixated on the invasion of New York—together with Washington's "near-miraculous escape across the East River"—as the "golden opportunity" that Britain squandered.

The summer of 1776 was a perilous season, Mr. Ellis writes, when America's fledgling struggle for independence faced daunting obstacles not only in the field but also in the Second Continental Congress. And although each was separately capable of wrecking what George Washington mystically called "The Cause," neither the rebellion's military deficiencies nor its ideological fissures can truly be separated. So it is that Mr. Ellis aims to reconcile two sets of actors too long kept apart by historians: the wrangling political classes gathered at the congress in Philadelphia, charged with setting the rebellion in motion; and the beleaguered campaign strategists of George Washington's Continental Army in New York. For Mr. Ellis, the Revolution's "political and military experiences were two sides of a single story . . . incomprehensible unless told together."

From a welter of published and unpublished sources, Mr. Ellis, a professor emeritus of history at Mount Holyoke College, distills a shambolic behind-the-scenes birthing into a single, coherent story. Like his "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation" (2000), "Revolutionary Summer" abounds with the usual heavy hitters, including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, as well as some pivotal lesser-knowns. But here the founders' group conversation, although no less fractious than in the postwar years, has a terrible urgency, intensified by Mr. Ellis's focus on a single five-month period: from May to October 1776. This tight chronology permits him to observe, up close, the war's gestation in Philadelphia alongside its initial prosecution on the ground.

In the beginning, at least, the American Revolution's success was about as inconceivable to most contemporaries as a jaunt to Saturn. And small wonder, Mr. Ellis explains. In 1774-75, conciliatory moderates held "a substantial majority" in the Continental Congress. By the spring of 1776, with war a vicious actuality on the northeastern seaboard, those numbers hadn't changed. "For despite the mounting carnage, the official position of the congress remained abiding loyalty to the British Crown." How—in the wake of Lexington, Concord and "the bloodbath" at Bunker Hill—could this have been so? If anything, the battle tolls might have been expected to inspire modest optimism: American losses so far "numbered in the hundreds"; Britain's dead exceeded a thousand. Then, at the end of March 1776, Washington had repelled a British invasion force during the nine-month Siege of Boston. Less than a year after assuming military command, he was a hero. What wasn't to believe in?

Trouble was, support for the rebellion lost some of its fervor once you ventured south of Boston, toward the middle colonies of New York and Pennsylvania. New England's early and overwhelming embrace of "The Cause" made eminent good sense, given recent events in Boston (to say nothing of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill). But among true believers, that zeal generated as much concern in Philadelphia as it did excitement: Could the remaining colonies—none of which had seen New England's level of violence—be persuaded to fall in line? Not everyone thought so. And for Washington, this lack of unanimity potentially meant real trouble. He took his orders from Philadelphia; without consensus there, Washington grimly recognized, his army had no chance at victory. In 1776, "over 90 percent of his troops were New Englanders." This wasn't merely a problem of metrics. Washington needed more bodies, to be sure. But the fighting men had to come from every colony: Lacking variety in its ranks, the Continental Army would lack unity of purpose.

Among the biggest impediments to consensus in Philadelphia, as delegates debated secession, concerned the moral integrity of the enterprise at hand. Abigail Adams famously asked her husband to "remember the ladies." Still others wanted to broaden the electorate to include propertyless men. No way, John Adams said: "There will be no end to it . . . and Every Man, who has not a Farthing will demand an equal Voice with any other in all Acts of State." But nothing caused him greater alarm than talk of ending slavery: that way lay chaos, rank hypocrisy be damned. He judged correctly: Moving to abolish slavery would have driven crucial Southern delegates from the congress and doomed "The Cause." In our own time, the founders' inaction on this count casts a dark pall over the war's legacy. But there is a richer, more generous, perspective: "Hindsight," Mr. Ellis writes, "allows us to see that, in the space of a very few months, the entire liberal agenda for the next century was inserted into political conversation."

With the resolution of egregious inequities left to future generations, the tide in Philadelphia at last began to turn. Although the dithering delegates from predominantly Loyalist New York and moderate Pennsylvania threatened to derail "The Cause," the pro-rebellion camp received an unexpected gift from Philadelphia's "mechanics, artisans, and ordinary farmers," who "mobilized enough supporters to create a provisional government dominated by pro-independence representatives." And in New York, reluctant revolutionaries were swept aside by vocal proponents of war, although not until July 9, 1776, did the state's delegates endorse independence—"a full week after the Continental Congress made the dramatic move."

But just as the congress threw caution to the wind, those on the battle lines awaiting orders from Philadelphia took to questioning their sanity. Who in his right mind would be foolhardy enough to take on the world's largest, most powerful army and navy? Like the conciliatory factions that had so exasperated him weeks before, George Washington in July 1776 found himself haunted by that very question. With mounting dismay, which he dared not share too widely, he lamented the unfitness of his troops. The Boston Siege had given Washington a deceptive air of invincibility, and he worried that lionization had come too soon. In some of the finest passages in "Revolutionary Summer," Mr. Ellis gives readers Washington at his least confident and most introspective, doing battle with himself in the privacy of his own mind as he prepares to take on brothers Adm. Richard Howe and Gen. William Howe, the men coordinating the amphibious and land assaults on New York. Washington felt again what he had felt during the Siege of Boston: "To expect then the same Service from Raw, and undisciplined Recruits as from Veteran Soldiers is to expect what never did, and perhaps never will happen."

Inevitably, there isn't a lot of room in this book for the brothers Howe or others on the losing side—foremost among them Lord George Germain, secretary of state for the American colonies and the New York invasion's chief architect. Still, Mr. Ellis is quick to acknowledge the risks taken by British commanders, some of whom regretted the war as an agonizing rift between fellow subjects. Germain, who had no affection for the American insurgents, would emerge in Britain as the prime scapegoat, viciously humiliated for bungling the entire war. He in fact "grasped instinctively the seriousness and depth" of the rebellion, Mr. Ellis writes, but the bold strategy he formulated in response failed for reasons largely beyond his control. In his excellent final chapter, Mr. Ellis counts Germain's vilification among the "necessary fictions" that grew up around the Revolution after its end, in 1783. It's a poignant counterpoint to the well-worn narrative of Washington's deification and a tribute to Mr. Ellis's sympathetic grasp of human nature.

America had its own necessary fictions, of course. Mr. Ellis writes movingly, for example, about the disgraceful treatment of Continental Army veterans—who were considered "embarrassing" reminders that a standing army had been formed to fight a loathed standing army. But it is the war's legacy in Britain that lingers most powerfully in my mind. "Denial was vastly preferable to a candid appraisal of the debacle," says Mr. Ellis, "for that would have required the British government to face some extremely unpleasant facts that . . . undermined the core presumption on which the entire British imperial agenda rested." Perhaps it was arrogant to assume that superior firepower would carry the day, and to "consistently misread the level of resistance within the American population." Yet Britons were no less persuaded of their cause's essential greatness than rebelling Americans were of theirs. And by the 1920s, while America languished on the periphery of the world stage, the British Empire would span a quarter of the globe. Painful as it was, the loss of America freed Britain to expand elsewhere.