1776: A man, his war, and their year [Greg Laden's Blog]

1776 by David McCullough is not a new book — it was published in 2006 — but I just got around to reading it, enjoyed it, and wanted to say a few words about it.

But first my David McCullough story.

You probably don’t know Scotty MacNeish (aka Richard Stockton MacNeish), but you should. He ended his illustrious career in a car accident in the field (in Belize, if I recall correctly) about 15 years ago, but many years before that he started out his career by discovering the origin of Maize, identifying its site of domestication and the timing of that important moment in Native American prehistory.

I had these two friends, back in graduate school, one of whom worked on the Franklin Expedition, the other ran Biosphere for a while. Anyway, they got married, and I was invited to the wedding. As a non-relative and roughly equal friend to both, I was seated at the reception table for odd balls, and had the pleasure of sharing that table with Scotty.

There were two or three others at the table, including a very well dressed and dapper middle aged gentleman who seemed to be fancy. But, since we were at a wedding reception at the 18th century home of the state’s largest lumbar barron, there was a lot of wealth around, so he wasn’t sticking out. But, Scotty, who is a bulldog populist with the sense of humor of a hyena, seemed to be going after the guy, putting him down (in a humorous way, mostly) and essentially, trying to cut him down to size for some reason.

Somewhere during the conversation, someone, not this gentleman and not Scotty as I recall, but someone else, mentioned the just released and highly popular documentary, “The Civil War” by Ken Burns. Surely, you know it. But, at the time, I’d only had a chance to see one or two episodes and it has been a while since I saw them. The gentleman at the table seemed to know something about the series, so I asked him, “Did you have something to do with the Civil War documentary?”

He looked at me for a moment. Everyone at the table looked at me. It was pretty obvious I had faux pas’ed all over myself. He grinned a little and said, “Young man, I am the Civil War.”

That was David McCullough. The guy who did the Civil War. Like this (starting about 1:40):

OK, so, now, about the book, 1776.

This is a book about a man, his army, and a year that he and they might like to mostly forget.

The American Revolution had roots back many decades before 1776, and the first actions of the war happened in 1775. 1776 started with the siege of Boston by Washington and his army, and it ends with Washington’s crossing of the Delaware to defeat the unsuspecting Hessian army.

One could argue that the evacuation of Boston by the British was a solid victory for the Patriots, but really, it was not so simple. One could argue that the crossing of the Delaware and defeat of the Hessians at Trenton was a solid victory for the Patriots, and that would be undeniably true, even if in the larger scheme it was a small victory compared to some other things that happened. In between these two events, almost everything that could go wrong went wrong. Reading the history of Washington’s army in that year, if you could do that without already knowing what ultimately happened, you can imagine any of a number of possible outcomes, none of which is an American victory over the British. And, the final event of the year, the victory in New Jersey, was not the kind of victory that changes the course of a war. If anything, it was just enough to decide not to give up yet.

I was generally aware of what happened that year. I’ve done a lot of work and research surrounding the American Revolution in New York and New England. I excavated the city burned during the battle of Bunker Hill, and did work along Paul Revere’s Ride (did not find hoof prints), and other Revolutionary war related localities in Massachusetts. I grew up visiting Fort George and Fort Ticonderoga in New York every few years, and I excavated on Phillip Schuyler’s grounds (you will know him as the father of Hamilton’s wife), and spent a fair amount of time in the vicinity of Saratoga (the decisive battle of that war). But, 1776 was not a rehash for me. First, it was not archaeological, but historical. Second, McCollough uses a lot of source material that had not been developed back when I was doing scholarly work in this area. Third, much of the story takes place in New York (the city) and although I’m from up river, it is not an area with Revolutionary War sites I’m familiar with.

American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 is very well written. It is not dense or long, as many history books are, yet it is very well documented if you want to follow the footnotes. It is revealing of the real George Washington, who was probably a mixture of what you were thinking and some stuff you were not thinking, and it is also revealing of the nature of the Revolution itself, how close it was to failing, while at the same time, how inevitable it was to take a certain course. I recommend the book.

I read this book because I wanted to develop an updated perspective on that time, and this, I felt, would be a good segue from other things I’d been reading, and a good refresher. Next in line: American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 by Taylor, followed by Alexander Hamilton by Chernow.