Latest read – “1776”

I finished 1776 today, and what a really fine, fine book. I couldn’t recommend it more.

Gary McCullough’s narrative history of the year of the Declaration of Independence, from the human perspective of George Washington, his army and his opponents.

There is some special interest for those of us who live in the New York metropolitan area, because so much of what happens occurs on Long Island, in Brooklyn, in Westchester and northern New Jersey.

You don’t have to be a history buff to benefit from the book. It’s really a study of people. For example, why did a corpulent 25 year old named Henry Knox come up with the idea of moving the cannons from Fort Ticonderoga (they’d just been left there when the fort had been destroyed years earlier) down and over to Boston? He had no military background, except from reading books. And how did Washington recognize that Knox might be the man to do it and give him the OK? And then Knox pulls off this incredible feat. 120,000 pounds of steel, through the New York woods, in winter. Possessing the cannons was decisive in forcing the British to abandon Boston. And they provided the bulk of the continental army artillery for most of the rest of the war.

1776 is a pretty fast read, coming in at just under 300 pages. There’s plenty on the British leaders, individual troops on both sides, as well as on the vast majority of colonists who were either loyal to the King, or just apathetic.

The book is a reminder that all social movements, for good or bad, start off as minority movements. It’s not often emphasized that Washington himself was an incredibly wealthy man (In the last election several historians pointed out that the wealthiest President in our history was George Washington, and no other President is even remotely close). He could easily have not cared a whit and sat out the whole Revolution on his plantation. But something motivated him…

Here is part of McCullough’s summation of Washington (page 293):

“He was not a brilliant strategist or tactician, not a gifted orator, not an intellectual. At several crucial moments he had shown marked indecisiveness. He had made serious mistakes in judgment. But experience had been his great teacher from boyhood, and in this, his greatest test, he learned steadily from experience. Above all, Washington never forgot what was at stake and he never gave up.”