The current crisis and its restrictions on day to day mundane activities permits a silver lining, consistent time for reading and thinking.  The coordinated marriage of the two, concerted reading that leads to thinking about what you have read, is perhaps a neglected skill that deserves reinvigoration.  For those of us who love the study of history as a window and perspective into present turmoils, a deep dive into the struggle for independence of the American colonies from the British Empire is just such a marriage.  Personal freedom, the right to pursuit of life, liberty, and personal happiness,  is up front in the current conflict between the juxtaposed goals of safety and security and personal freedoms delineated in my previous essay.   Superficial feelings of safety give one initially a sense of comfort, but riskier personal actions that ultimately preserve liberties give long term awareness and recognition of the ultimate meaning of life as something more than a simple state of being.   Rick Atkinson, a multi-Pulitzer Prize winning author of military history , has begun spectacularly on another American trilogy, a narrative on the American War for Independence 1775-1783, the first volume currently published, that looks ultimately into the concept of risky personal actions under incredible hardships, individual sacrifice, and daunting odds, that were taken by Americans to win that most immeasurable of gifts, freedom to live one’s own destiny.

War is the violent rejection of the possible compromises of politics.  Limited war seeks improved political advantage;  all out war presents as the clash of outcomes – as Lincoln stated in his House Divided speech regarding the union of states,  “I do expect it will  cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”  Atkinson relates a narrative that suggests the power of the concept of personal freedom guiding one’s destiny,  from the individual soldier to the highest of Generals,  made incalculable individual sacrifices for an ideal an acceptable determination.  The initial sense by the British of a minority rabble led local insurrection ballooned rapidly into a transcontinental conflagration fought by hundreds of thousands over 8 years of conflict,  linked by the single philosophical sense that a life worth living could only exist under one unalterable outcome,  freedom from living under a dictated destiny.  There is little else to explain the willingness of average people to give up all thoughts of security, family, and property, and advance headlong into an unpredictable, extremely ruthless, and unlimited sacrifice against daunting odds of survival, on the minuscule chance that the birth of an idea would survive to the next generation.  As he did so brilliantly in his previous war trilogy, the Allied armies battle for  Europe in World War II,  Atkinson brings a modern intimacy to individual participants , as they ride through the whirlwind of events and actions that are fatefully decided for them, and by which they have no control or perception of outcome.

The first book in the trilogy centers on the first three years of organized aggression, from the events leading to the first stand at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts on April 18th, 1775 to the spectacular Christmas time mobile attack orchestrated by George Washington against Trenton and Princeton, December 1776- January 1777 that salvaged an almost inexorable sense of impending defeat permeating the colonies.  The events and personalities are stitched into the fragment of the American birth saga – Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, Quebec, New York and Trenton; Paul Revere, Charles Putnam and Henry Knox, Benedict Arnold, and George Washington himself.  Equally vivid in Atkinson’s tale are the formidable British opponents, The Howe brothers, Guy Carleton, Henry Clinton, George Cornwallis, and King George III.  Interwoven are the colors of detail that make the distant conflict come to life – particularly the insufferable effects of weather and disease that brought conditions for the average combatant.  The ravages of Small Pox a particularly catastrophic enemy of men in bivouac, a virus with a 15-60%mortality rate did more to destroy the American effort against royal Canada than the bullets of the defenders – poor nutrition, miserable camp hygiene, and the close quarters against the cold – made the men particularly susceptible to the human to human transmission of the virus.  A hundred thousand deaths from small pox across the colonies from 1775 to 1781 would severely impede the fighting spirit and contribution of the colonies populations to the war.  Another equally stark discovery in Atkinson’s book is the rapid acceleration of ruthless “total war actions” by both sides as the seriousness and extent of the conflict became obvious.  As Atkinson so poetically  states, ” The wolf had risen in the heart.”  Thousands of Continental troops died in captivity in naval prison vessels in the most appalling conditions with little concern from their former British countrymen.   Violence and ruthlessness traditionally reserved for troops extended quickly out to innocents in towns and villages across the continent.  Atkinson describes in detail such an example of inhumanity in the actions of British and mercenary Hessian soldiers through the New Jersey countryside:

In the Raritan valley, 650 houses- the homes of about a third of the families in Middlesex County- would be ransacked or burned, along with mills, churches, and other structures. A Presbyterian minister wrote that Newark ‘looked more like a scene of ruin then a pleasant well-cultivated village….Their plundering is so universal, their robberies so atrocious, I cannot fully describe their conduct.’  Other testimonials accumulated as county justices, clergymen, and the governors of New Jersey and New York investigated further, identifying victims as young as ten and as old as seventy, in what the historian David Hackett Fischer described as ‘an epidemic of rape’.”

The deadly intensity and costs of the struggle no doubt surprised greatly the British leaders.  Bunker Hill , the famous battle for Boston fought June 17, 1775, stunned both King and Parliament when the news of the outcome reached London.  Atkinson frames the epic conflict that made it clear to Britain that a simple expression of might by the greatest military force in the world at that time would not be sufficient to cower the rebellious Americans:

The rebels waited, now killing mad…A stupendous volley ripped into the British ranks blowing the fusiliers from their feet. Gun smoke rolled down a beach upholstered with dying regulars as their comrades stepped over them only to also be shot down. ..’It was like pushing a wax candle against a red-hot plate’  historian Christopher Ward would write. ” the head of the column simply melted away.’ …. 

Gage’s army had regained roughly a square mile of territory at the expense of over a thousand casualties…Over 40% of the stacking force had been killed or wounded, including 226 dead; … Nineteen officers had also been killed.  Of all the king’s officers who would die in battle during the long battle war against the Americans, more than one out of every eight had perished in the four hours on a June afternoon above Charlestown.

The extent of the ferocity never wavered over the years of the war.  The British Empire swollen to a position of world dominance by their victory in the world war with France culminating with the winning of the near entire expanse of the North American continent, was led by King George III , a highly intelligent monarch who nonetheless  could not fathom tolerating the loss of such a huge colonial expanse only 12 short years after securing it, nor the implied threat to his sovereignty.   The British effort to retain the colonies and subdue and destroy the rebellion was enormous, and enormously costly.   The extent of the commitment was highlighted in the battle for New York  July-August of 1776, almost immediately following the declaration of independence of the colonies on July 4th.  Britain amassed the largest amphibious force in the history of warfare prior to Normandy transporting 35000 fighting soldiers and over 200 naval ships the 3000 miles across the ocean to take the critical city from the rebels and nearly entirely decimate Washington’s Continental army in one epic battle.  They came within an eye-blink of success, routing Washington and forcing him out of the city and on the run across New Jersey.  The victory set the stage for one of the more amazing turnabouts in military history, when the dominant British forces and their Hessian allies suffered two calamitous defeats from Washington’s supposedly destroyed army assumed to be harboring in Pennsylvania and left in the cold to disappear.  A spectacular return across the Delaware River on Christmas Day, 1776 of Washington’s nearly entire force stunned the Hessian troops at Trenton and subsequently the British troops at Princeton, ending forever the British hope that conquering and securing the large cities would be sufficient to finally starve the rebellion.  Washington managed the impossible from his bedraggled and starving troops by appealing to the core  foundation of their sacrifice. It was tactic he had used previously at times of great risk:

The hour is fast approaching on which the honor and success of this army and the safety of our bleeding country depend.  Remember, officers and soldiers, that you are freemen, fighting for the blessings of liberty

George Washington, General Orders, August 23, 1776

The stories of heroism and sacrifice, cowardice  and treachery abound across the fantastic scape of Atkinson’s prose as the book positions the reader for long turmoil to come.  At the conclusion of the first book of the trilogy, the Americans have pushed back at the periphery, but the general state of the effort for independence is hanging by a thread.  The overwhelming British presence and military capacity has recaptured Canada and is positioning to drive down the Hudson and split the new country in half.  A massive second British army dominates America’s most important supply port at New York, and a third army is positioning to drive the American southern colonies out of the war.  There is little to suggest that the brief American experiment to create a new world predicated on liberty and individual destiny has any hope of survival.  We know the twists and turns to come, but Atkinson’s prose reads as intensely as a mystery novel packed with surprises.

I can hardly wait for the second act.

Recently,  the Governor of New Jersey , when confronted with the concern that restrictions he was mandating  in response to the Covid pandemic violated the Bill of Rights,  was quoted as saying “That’s above my pay grade.  I wasn’t thinking of the Bill of Rights when we did this.”  As one considers those decisions currently considered to roll back freedoms in the guise of protecting us against ourselves, one must remind one selves of a time when the very thought of liberty drove men to suffer and risk death to preserve those principles.

Rick Atkinson’s wonderful book tells us that, to a man in revolutionary America,  inalienable rights were at the very forefront of their pay grade.