THE FATE OF THE DAY

The Revolutionary War enters its most desperate phase in the second volume of Atkinson’s trilogy.

To read this book by prolific military historian Atkinson is to see the Revolutionary War as both a civil war—loyalists against rebels, with a sizable number of uncommitted colonists in between—and an international war involving numerous European powers. Indeed, Atkinson’s book opens in France, where two nobles, Baron Johann de Kalb and Gilbert du Motier, a.k.a. the Marquis de Lafayette, are surreptitiously making their way to a boat to America, where both have been recruited to join the Continental Army at high rank. Atkinson then shifts the scene to the frontier: to Ticonderoga, where Continentals were routed twice, and to a farm settlement where British-allied Indians infamously scalped a young woman—ironically, engaged to a loyalist officer—while she was still alive, whipping up a furiously vengeful response: “Newspaper accounts of the atrocity, published over the coming weeks…fueled American contempt for the British and rage at the Indians.” Atkinson thoughtfully appraises some of the principal figures in the conflict, including British General John Burgoyne, immensely popular with his troops and insistent on recruiting Irish Catholics, “traditionally excluded from the army.” (Toward the close of his book, Atkinson writes of anti-Catholic riots in London that in the end were quashed with military force.) As for George Washington, having survived disastrous defeats and the hard winter at Valley Forge, Atkinson concludes that “in an era of great men, he already was in the front rank.” Between vivid accounts of engagements such as the crushing Continental defeat at Charleston, Atkinson looks at the practical facts of the war, including the heavy casualty rate the British suffered in trying to retain their colonies for an adamant King George III—for, as Atkinson rightly asks, “Without America, would Britain even have an empire?”

As ever with Atkinson, an exemplary work of narrative history.