Book Review: 'The American Revolution: A History'

© 2003 Modern Library Books. Cover Designed by Wendy Lai. Illustration © Bettman/CORBIS

On August 19, 2003, Modern Library, an imprint of publishing giant Random House, published the paperback edition of Grant S. Wood's The American Revolution: A History. As the title states, Wood's modest-sized work is a one-volume overview of the late colonial period in the 13 colonies on the East Coast of North America, the growing strains between the colonists and Great Britain, and the resulting War of Independence (1775-1781) and its aftermath. 

Originally published in 2002 as a hardcover, Wood's book is not a detailed, blow-by-blow look at the quarter-century-long span between the end of the French and Indian War and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. What readers will get instead is a scholarly (but still fascinating) summary of the economic, philosophical, and political forces that drove the Founding Fathers and about one third of the total population in Britain's 13 North American colonies to break the ties that bound them to King George III and the Mother Country to create a new nation: the United States of America. 

Wood, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution, explains the many complex issues that led to the 18th Century's "Great Experiment" to create a new nation that was based on republican ideas and was intended by its founders to someday surpass Western Europe as the source of literary, scientific, cultural, and political innovation. Concisely but vividly, the professor of history at Brown University chronicles the chain of events that started when cash-starved Britain conceived the idea of taxing the American colonies to help cover the costs of the French and Indian War and ended with the rise of Virginia planter George Washington to the Presidency of the newly-minted United States. 

In The American Revolution: A History, readers will learn how much has changed in the way historians perceive and write about the War of Independence and the birth of the American Republic. Where in the earlier versions of American history the British (especially King George III and his advisers) were cruel tyrants and the colonists were portrayed as a people united to resist the perceived cruelties and indignities heaped upon them by their monarch and the fat cats in Parliament, Wood offers a more nuanced view. 

Historians no longer depict George III as a tyrant seeking to undermine the English constitution by choosing his ministers against Parliament's wishes. But there can be little doubt that men of the time felt that George III, whether he meant to or not, was violating the political conventions of the day. When he chose Lord Bute, his Scottish favorite, who had little strength in Parliament, to lead his government, thereby excluding such Whig ministers as William Pitt and the Duke of Newcastle, who did have political support in Parliament, the new king may not have been acting unconstitutionally, but he certainly was violating certain political realities.

In essence, Wood points out that George III's inexperience, impetuousness, and stubborn desire to rule personally contributed in no small fashion to the various political crises that arose between the end of the French and Indian War and the first skirmishes between redcoats and rebels at Lexington and Concord near Boston, Massachusetts.  

Wood also chronicles the various forces - immigration, the evolution of religious, political, and philosophical thought in Colonial America, and the changes in British imperial society as a whole that led to the Revolution. In The American Revolution: A History, he takes the reader in a whirlwind tour of the last decades of British rule in the thirteen colonies, the beginning of the war in 1775, the crises that afflicted the Patriots from 1776 to 1780, and finally the Franco-American victory at Yorktown and its earthshaking consequences. 

When Abraham Lincoln sought to define the significance of the United States, he naturally looked back to the American Revolution. He knew that the Revolution not only had legally created the United States, but also had produced all of the great hopes and values of the American people. Our noblest ideals and aspirations-our commitments to freedom, constitutionalism, the well-being of ordinary people, and equality-came out of the Revolutionary era. Lincoln saw as well that the Revolution had convinced Americans that they were a special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty. The Revolution, in short, gave birth to whatever sense of nationhood and national purpose Americans have had.

No doubt the story is a dramatic one: Thirteen insignificant colonies three thousand miles from the centers of Western civilization fought off British rule to become, in fewer than three decades, a huge, sprawling, rambunctious republic of nearly four million citizens. But the history of the American Revolution, like the history of the nation as a whole, ought not to be viewed simply as a story of right and wrong from which moral lessons are to be drawn. It is a complicated and at times ironic story that needs to be explained and understood, not blindly celebrated or condemned. How did this great revolution come about? What was its character? What were its consequences? These are the questions this short history seeks to answer. That it succeeds in such a profound and enthralling way is a tribute to Gordon Wood’s mastery of his subject, and of the historian’s craft.  - Publisher's blurb, The American Revolution: A History

My Take

For the past 20 years, my go-to historical accounts of the American Revolution have been limited to two television documentaries (PBS's Liberty! The American Revolution and The History Channel Presents: The Revolution) and one book, The American Heritage History of the American Revolution by Bruce Lancaster). The latter is a paperback edition that I've owned since I was in college; as such, it is now dog-eared, missing its front cover, and a bit outdated, even though it is a "modern" history that was originally published in 1960 and reissued by different publishers. (My copy is from 1987 and has survived several hurricanes, unnecessarily rough handling, and even a move.) Thus, I wanted to get a more contemporary one-volume history of the War of Independence to tide me over until The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777,  the first book in Rick Atkinson's Revolution Trilogy, is published in May. 

In some ways, The American Revolution: A History is not the book I really wanted. As I said in my summary of the book above, it's not the kind of narrative where readers can hear the noises of battle and smell the acrid fumes of gunpowder while leafing through its pages. It's more of an academic work that delves more into the Big Picture/Big Ideas perspective of the Revolutionary War and the founding of America. As such, it's not the sort of book one curls up with on the couch to travel back in time to Bunker Hill, Valley Forge, the Battles of Trenton and Princeton, or the Saratoga campaign that ended in such disaster for the British in the North.

That having been said, if you need a book with a more academic bent for a research paper or a brief overview of the Revolution and its causes, then The American Revolution is the perfect literary work for you. It is well written by a recognized expert on the subject, and it is not boring or dry.