Written as a companion to 2001’s best-selling “John Adams,” “1776,” the latest offering from historian David McCullough – a two-time winner of the Pultizer Prize – is the story of a particularly eventful year in America. It lends literary focus to a group of men rather than an individual and their declarations of independence from a tyrant, and the struggle to defeat the world’s most powerful army and navy.
It is also one of the most compelling nonfiction works McCullough has written and should be required reading in living rooms from coast to coast.
Beginning with King George III’s declaration to the British Parliament that he would crush the rebellion in America, McCullough’s well-written, and almost novelistic, narrative sweeps the reader into the story of the Siege of Boston, the outcome of which was certainly unexpected by both sides.
McCullough’s research is always evident but never heavy-handed in such details as British Commander Lord General Howe’s belief that the American rebellion would never succeed. After all, these were mere farmers, shoemakers, schoolteachers and even young boys.
But because of the ingenuity and dogged determination of men like bookseller Henry Knox, the rebellion did succeed. It was Knox who traveled 600 miles over harsh, wintry terrain to deliver 120,000 pounds of artillery from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston. Making use of that artillery and some nighttime guerrilla fighting tactics enabled the Americans to capture Dorchester Heights and eventually the entire city.
And McCullough is evenhanded in his accounts of the men on both sides who sought out peaceful compromises: Parliament conciliators like Edmund Burke and Charles Fox, who attacked their government’s policies as needlessly provocative; the members of the Continental Congress who wanted to avoid war.
The role of luck in many of the battles also is pointed out, from the harsh winter storm that prevented a British counterattack at Boston to the skin-of- his-teeth escapes realized by Gen. George Washington and his troops – one of which led to the famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware.
When delving into the characters of well-known figures such as Washington, whose steel will is sometimes shown to be capable of wavering, or King George III, who is shown to be more intelligent than most Americans know, McCullough is evenhanded and thorough.
From the siege of Boston to the Battle of Brooklyn to the many defeats suffered by the fledgling Continental Army and on to Washington’s final, brilliant stratagems that changed the course of the war and eventually changed the course of history, McCullough’s “1776” moves with the narrative drive of the sort of thick “thrillers” that many readers can be found paging through during the summer months.
But “1776” is also a book weighted in the authority of history, the telling details about the lives of ordinary men and women, the meticulous research of its author and the solemn knowledge and certainty that the men and women of whom McCullough writes lived, breathed and walked along the same avenues that many of us enjoy in our freedoms today.
Dorman T. Shindler, a freelancer from Missouri, is a regular contributor to national magazines and newspapers.
1776
By David McCollough
400 pages, $32
