The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Many had been forced into service by press gangs, while some detested the harsh life at sea; all resented the paltry nineteen shillings a month paid seamen since the reign of Charles II.”

Atkinson draws a distinction between the motivations of the patriots and loyalist troops. The troops in the British Army were demotivated and underpaid, undermining their loyalty. In contrast, the American patriots were motivated by sincere political beliefs and a sense of injustice. In this early part of the Revolution, this disparity in motivation hints at the broader narrative of the war as a struggle between freedom and empire.

“Popular lore later credited him with a stirring battle cry—‘The British are coming!’—but a witness quoted him as warning, more prosaically, ‘The regulars are coming out.’”

Atkinson interrogates the legend of the American Revolution, revealing to his audience that the fabled cry from Paul Revere actually contrasts with witness statements from the time. This process of demystification adds credence to Atkinson’s status as a historian: By separating truth from legend, he assures the audience of the meticulous nature of his research. At the same time, acknowledging the legend that grew out of Revere’s ride helps to illustrate how each detail of the American Revolution was incorporated into The Birth of the American Mythos.

“They looked because they could not look away.”

Describing the crowd of spectators that gathers to watch the battle, Atkinson notes that loyalists and patriots line up alongside one another. In spite of the violence, in spite of their fear for their loved ones, there is something captivating about battle. This “seductive spectacle” (128) crosses partisan lines, bringing together civilians who will soon consider one another mortal enemies. They are united by a common humanity.

“Still, service under British officers had deeply imprinted him with European orthodoxy, including strong preferences for offensive warfare, firepower, logistical competence, and rigid discipline. He was no brigand chieftain.”

Atkinson’s depiction of George Washington grounds him in a European military lineage that adds emotional context to the revolution. Like Putnam, Lee, and Ward, Washington fought for the British forces who have now become his enemy. The British tactics have become his tactics; their experience has become his experience. The American revolutionaries—embodied by Washington—are implied to have grown out of (and beyond) the British imperial forces. Washington, in this respect, represents the British Empire’s hubristic might being turned back against itself.

“That Richard Montgomery now prepared to finish conquering Canada for the American cause was no small irony, for as a young regular officer in an earlier life he had helped to conquer it for the British Empire.”

The biography of Richard Montgomery illustrates the fine divisions that separate the various sides. In his own lifetime, Montgomery fought twice in Canada for different sides, conquering it respectively for and the from the British Empire. As a British officer from Dublin who served in the West Indies, the circumstances of his life are steeped in colonial history, while his actions as an American soldier can be considered an act of rebellion against the same society that produced him.

“Additional letters were intercepted from foreign diplomats, European bankers, and political opponents trusting enough to rely on the Royal Mail.”

At this point in the revolution, Atkinson emphasizes the poverty of resources at the disposal of the Americans. In the previous chapter, he described the starvation of the American troops marching through Canada and the struggles of the revolutionaries to procure and supply necessities. In contrast, the British Empire can not only rely on institutions such as the Royal Mail, but can abuse its control over such institutions for the purposes of surveillance and espionage. By presenting this contrasting institutional power, Atkinson illustrates the huge disparity in resources and power between the sides.

“Among many examples, the almost two hundred thousand slaves in Jamaica outnumbered whites fifteen to one, and an uprising in 1760 had been suppressed by shooting several hundred blacks.”

Atkinson alludes to the racial aspect of imperial attitudes toward revolt. While the American revolutionaries were scorned by the British, they were dealt with very differently from the enslaved peoples who tried to rebel in other colonies. The Americans were treated as an armed insurrection to be dealt with politically and militarily, while enslaved Black people were simply shot as a matter of course. Due to their enslavement, their lives were taken as a cost of keeping the peace.

“Because so many wore scavenged British uniforms, each man was to fasten recognition emblems to his hat: a hemlock sprig and a scrap of paper with ‘liberty or death’ scribbled on it.”

Atkinson’s description of the soldiers’ uniforms tracks an emergent American identity. At the beginning of the war, when most American soldiers had until very recently been subjects of the British Empire, they were clothed just like British soldiers. To distinguish themselves, they added adornments and phrases, constructing a new physical identity alongside their identity as American revolutionaries (and, later, as independent Americans).

“He was wrong, even foolish, and his lieutenants saved him from himself.”

In spite of George Washington’s vaunted place in the history of the United States, Atkinson is not seeking to write a hagiography. Washington, in Atkinson’s portrayal, is not the perfect general. He must be dissuaded from impetuous decisions by his lieutenants, to the point where his instincts may have lost the war in the early days. This impetuousness sets up Washington’s character arc, as he learns over the course of the book to temper his boldness with pragmatism and humility.

“For the Irish Catholics—‘Saint Patrick’s vermin,’ prohibited from sitting in Parliament, joining trade guilds, holding military commissions, carrying swords, buying land, or practicing law—wartime prosperity was more elusive.”

The British Are Coming focuses on the American Revolutionary war, but The Global Nature of Revolution means that forces are mustered from other British colonies such as Ireland. The Irish Catholics are being repressed by the British colonialists, so their sympathies lie with the Americans. American independence from the British Empire preceded Irish independence by almost two centuries, yet the imperial forces at play show the scale of these connected wars of independence. Across the world, separate (and related) peoples fought for their independence against an imperial machine. These battles would rage for centuries, yet the American Revolution is significant at one of the first major victories of an independence movement in the British Empire.

“The army decamped, the London Gazette explained, ‘with the greatest order and regularity, and without the least interruption from the rebels.’”

The British withdrawal from Boston is, in military terms, understood as a humiliating defeat. Yet the British press tell a very different story to those ensconced in the heart of the Empire. The British public is told little about the reality of the American war, and given the vast distances between America and Britain, accurate reporting is neither possible nor permitted. As such, sympathy with the American cause—or even an informed understanding of the conflict—is not available to a British public that is encouraged to take a dim view of the American Revolution.

“He also conceded that ‘Boston was almost impregnable, every avenue fortified’; it was plain that the frontal assaults he had proposed would likely have ended in disaster.”

Atkinson depicts George Washington as a general on the cusp of greatness. Having not yet fully developed as a military leader, he plans an assault on Boston without fully considering the challenges involved. The fortifications in Boston are an imposing and dreadful warning against such impetuousness. Washington had been willing to gamble everything on an all-out assault of the city, an assault that may have doomed the revolution. Instead, he listened to his lieutenants. The fortifications are a symbolic warning to Washington to remember the stakes of the war, a warning that helps shape the character of the general.

“The American penchant for subjugating those deemed in need of deliverance was hardly extinguished by the calamity in Canada. As the historian Eliot A. Cohen has observed, that impulse would recur often in the centuries to come.”

The American Revolution, Atkinson suggests, provides a template for future incidents in the nation’s history. He compares the failed foray into Canada to an “impulse” (362) to subjugate “those deemed in need of deliverance” (362), an impulse that Atkinson implies can be similarly read into the United States’s military interventions into the 21st century. The Revolution becomes an important text in this sense, as it describes the construction of a lasting American geopolitical psyche.

“Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world, that a freeman contending for liberty on his own ground is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.”

General Washington’s rallying cry to his soldiers—containing a jibe at Great Britain’s reliance on Hessian mercenaries who fought not for their country but strictly for pay—serves to inspire those in the war for their liberty but, as Atkinson presents it in the narrative, also gestures toward the fundamental irony of this war. Washington claims to be fighting for freedom, yet this freedom is limited. His attempts to free enslaved people and recruit them have been rebuffed; the American Revolutionaries explicitly position themselves against the “slavish mercenary” (393) that is their enemy, while also fighting for the right to enslave Black people.

“These little miscarriages I trust will have a good effect in the end. Englishmen always rally when things are at the worst.”

Atkinson depicts The Birth of the American Mythos while contrasting this mythos with that of the British. In spite of a terrible loss, the British rely on their national myth to reassure themselves of eventual victory. These narratives reinforce identity among the British soldiers, as they are beginning to do among the Americans. These diverging national myths—often in contention with one another—illustrate the divergence between Great Britain and the nascent United States.

“That at least a third of the delegates who would sign the Declaration were slave owners—Jefferson alone had two hundred—was a moral catastrophe that could never be reconciled with the avowed principles of equality and ‘unalienable rights,’ at least not in the eighteenth century.”

Writing about the Declaration of Independence, Atkinson acknowledges the inherent contradiction in terms between the document and the reality of the emergent American society. The men calling for freedom and liberty were the same men who enslaved others. While acknowledging this contradiction, Atkinson frames the document as progressive for its time. For 18th-century audiences, the declaration’s contradictions are less obvious, Atkinson suggests, which is telling of the national mood and attitude toward enslavement and race in the early United States. Atkinson does not so much dispel the mythos of the Declaration of the Independence as contextualize its inherent contradictions.

“Driven by a brisk southerly breeze, the fire spread to the north and west, yet no bells clanged in alarm since all had been hauled off to rebel cannon works.”

The relentless hunger for arms and supplies has a devastating effect on the civilian population. Church bells are taken to be turned into cannons, so there are no warning systems left to alert the people of New York to a deadly fire. The victims of the war are not only the soldiers on the battlefield, but those whose lives are irrecoverably changed by the desperate demands of the revolution.

“For now George chose to pretend that Britain had won a great triumph in Canada.”

The naval battle on Lake Champlain was, by most accounts, a mixed success for the British. Though he may have lost and been forced into retreat, Arnold succeeded in delaying the British assault from Canada for a year. King George, greatly removed from the actual war, chose to believe that this was a success and—since he was king—there were few to challenge this perspective. The reluctance to challenge the king and the removal from the actual action illustrate the difficulty faced by British forces, even in apparent victory.

“Yet as with so many of his fallen countrymen, zeal for this cause had earned Evelyn little more than an excruciating death and an anonymous grave in a foreign field.”

Captain Evelyn enjoyed the respect of his superiors, while proving himself to be a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield. Yet he died in terrible pain for a failing cause, leaving behind no real legacy. He was then buried in an “anonymous grave in a foreign field” (535). Noble, well-intentioned men—on either side of the conflict—are forced to confront the brutal reality of war. For all the patriotism and good intentions on either side, even the noble meet ignoble ends. In this manner, Atkinson seeks to dispel the myth (on both sides) of the glorious past. The Revolution may have been successful, but such success was paid for with blood and suffering.

“When word spread in London of Franklin’s advance on Paris, British stocks fell.”

Atkinson conveys Franklin’s reputation to the audience not only by listing his accomplishments, but by portraying the reactions of everyone around Franklin. The French people welcome him with giddy intrigue, while his mere presence in France is enough to negatively affect the British stock market. Franklin is well-known to history, but he was also famous in his own time, so much so that his reputation could move markets in the time before mass communication.

“For years these remains lay scattered and bleaching along the Brooklyn shoreline, the human spoor of inhumanity, speaking bone to bone about how easy it had become to hate thine enemy.”

At the end of 1776, the British celebrate their apparent victory while American prisoners languish in terrible conditions. Those who die have their bodies unceremoniously dumped in the river. Yet this disrespectful treatment redounds on the British, symbolizing their cruelty to men who—to other Americans—seem to be fighting for a just cause. This cruel, vindictive treatment of prisoners provides immediate catharsis for the British but fuels the patriotic desire for independence from the imperial machine that will later lead to victory. The British cruelty, in this sense, is hubristic.

“‘He shook hands with each of us, and we all had to drink a glass of Madeira with him,’ a Hessian lieutenant wrote. ‘Nobody but the rebels would have made him a general.’”

After the rousing American victory, the Hessian troops—fighting on the British side—acknowledge the unique nature of the American army. Given the anti-colonial nature of the struggle, the immediacy of the Revolution has resulted in the dismantling of the traditional class structures and expectations of behavior. A Hessian lieutenant is shocked by the behavior of General Putnam, for example, but the American army benefits from Putnam’s talents as a soldier rather than marginalizes him for his unconventional behavior. In this respect, the makeup of the American army is a revolution in itself.

“I saw him brave all the dangers of the field, and his important life hanging as it were by a single hair with a thousand deaths flying around him.”

Atkinson uses firsthand accounts to illustrate how the myth of George Washington is birthed in real time. After the soon-to-be legendary crossing of the Delaware, Washington rallies his troops bravely in the middle of a battle. He is discussed as though he is a mythical figure, defying death and bullets through sheer force of personality. This is far removed from the naïve, chastened Washington of earlier in the book and shows how Washington and America simultaneously write themselves into the history books.