A Review of Ellis

Revolution, Hanging by a ThreadJoseph J. Ellis Portrays the Pivotal Summer of 1776

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: July 1, 2013


In his 1783 Farewell Address to the Army, George Washington called the perseverance of the “Armies of the United States” through eight long years of war, “little short of a standing Miracle” and though not a deeply religious man, he thanked the “singular interpositions of Providence” for his troops’ survival and ultimate triumph.


REVOLUTIONARY SUMMER



The Birth of American Independence



By Joseph J. Ellis



Illustrated. 219 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

The Continental Army was never more vulnerable to extinction than in the summer of 1776, when the mighty British Army and Navy, what the historian Joseph J. Ellis has called “the most powerful and efficient machine for waging war in the world” at the time, had the opportunity to destroy it in New York. Instead, an assortment of military decisions, together with chance and some fortuitous fluctuations in the weather, enabled the ragtag American troops to escape annihilation and fight another day.



It is Mr. Ellis’s contention in his fast-paced new book, “Revolutionary Summer,” that the period between May and October of 1776 was “the crescendo moment in American history,” when a strategic framework for the war developed, a consensus in favor of American independence was reached, and the outlines for an American republic were first proposed. This argument feels less like a genuine historical insight than a somewhat strained conceit to explain the limited scope of Mr. Ellis’s book and to differentiate it from, say, David McCullough’s 2005 best-seller, “1776,” which itself offered a somewhat arbitrarily abbreviated chronicle of the Revolutionary War.



Much of this volume’s narrative amounts to a repurposing of material Mr. Ellis has laid out in enterprising earlier books like “Founding Brothers,” and in absorbing, psychologically astute portraits of individual members of the revolutionary generation including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the cantankerous John Adams. But no matter: Mr. Ellis writes with such élan and deep understanding of this era and its exceptional leaders that anyone interested in a succinct (if strangely truncated) account of this crucial period in American history will eagerly seize upon this volume.



Giving us a sort of stereoscopic history, Mr. Ellis conveys how participants experienced the pell-mell rush of momentous events as they occurred, even as he steps back to show how retrospective wisdom would later judge their many decisions made on the run. He even shows us how the now-revered Declaration of Independence was, at the time, regarded as a “minor administrative chore,” one taken on by Jefferson only after Benjamin Franklin and John Adams spurned the opportunity. Jefferson would regard the 85 revisions or deletions made to his text by the other members of the Continental Congress, Mr. Ellis says, as defacements, complaining to friends in Virginia that the congress had diluted the purity of his message.



Throughout this book, Mr. Ellis weaves together the political story of how the 13 colonies came together and agreed to secede from the British Empire with the military story of how the British “delivered a series of devastating defeats to an American army of amateurs” on Long Island and Manhattan, but “missed whatever chance existed to end it all.”



Frequently, Mr. Ellis observes, decisions being made by the Continental Congress were shaped by military events on the ground — and vice versa. George III’s rejection of political reconciliation and the approaching flotilla of his troops helped galvanize the decision of the colonies to commit to “The Cause” of American independence. The need not to appear militarily weak and vulnerable when independence was about to be declared similarly put pressure on Washington and the Continental Army to defend New York City, and not allow the British to occupy the town without a fight.



Unfortunately, Washington’s forces were at a huge disadvantage. The British brothers Richard and William Howe commanded, Mr. Ellis writes, a strike force of 42,000 soldiers, marines and sailors, “by far the largest military operation ever mounted in North America.” The American Army, in contrast, was a poorly equipped start-up operation made up of “former indentured servants; recent Irish immigrants; unemployed artisans; blacksmiths, and carpenters” — “a motley crew of marginal men and misfits, most wearing hunting shirts instead of uniforms.”



Because enlistments for most troops were for only a year, Mr. Ellis writes, “the Continental Army would become a permanent turnstile, different soldiers always coming and going, so that by the time they had learned the rudiments of military life, they were replaced by inexperienced recruits.”



The Battle of Long Island (fought largely in Brooklyn) ended badly for the Americans, as the untested and poorly trained soldiers ignored their superiors’ orders and scattered. Not only were there several hundred American casualties and nearly 1,000 were taken prisoner, Mr. Ellis says, but it also became clear that “the will of the Continental Army had been broken and any semblance of military discipline destroyed.” Convinced of the inevitability of British victory, reluctant to lose too many of his own men and eager to end the war with diplomatic reconciliation rather than military victory, General Richard Howe did not press his advantage and try to finish off the Americans.



Instead, Washington managed what Mr. Ellis calls “one of the most brilliant tactical withdrawals in the annals of military history”: getting nearly 10,000 men from Brooklyn to Manhattan across the East River, a body of water controlled by the British Navy. This feat was achieved with a combination of secrecy, expertise (a Massachusetts regiment of experienced Marblehead fishermen and seamen was a key to the evacuation over water) and cooperative weather, which brought favorable winds and the sudden descent of a dense fog on Aug. 30 that magically cloaked the escape of the last of the troops.



Because Mr. Ellis has defined the scope of this book as the summer of 1776, his narrative ends rather abruptly with the retreat of Washington’s troops from Manhattan to White Plains in October — a move that Mr. Ellis says was “the end of the beginning for the American side”: “Washington, from lessons learned at New York, would never again allow the survival of the Continental Army to be put at risk. Though it ran counter to all his instincts, he now realized that his goal was not to win the war but rather to not lose it.” It became increasingly clear that the war was going to be a protracted conflict — a development that did not favor an occupying army based across an ocean.



Missing from this volume is any meaningful discussion of the other momentous events of 1776, including Washington’s famous crossing of the Delaware River and his morale-boosting surprise victory in Trenton. Mr. Ellis cites a British staff officer’s account, which suggests that the likelihood of a British victory diminished with the failure of General Howe to destroy the Continental Army in 1776 for three specific reasons: As Washington adopted a more defensive strategy, chances of a decisive engagement grew less likely; the Continental Army improved with experience, especially with the development of a more professional officer corps; and the Franco-American treaty of 1778 provided the Americans with vital manpower and money.



Would the destruction of the Continental Army have ended the war and squashed the American rebellion in its infancy? On this question, Mr. Ellis is noncommital: “While we can never know for sure,” he writes, “the balance of historical scholarship over the last 40 years has made that a highly problematic assumption.” It’s possible, he writes, that “as both Adams and Franklin sincerely believed, the Continental Congress would have defiantly raised another army and appointed another version of Washington to lead it.” On the other hand, even if the founders had been able to cobble together a second Continental Army, how likely is it — given Mr. Ellis’s descriptions of Washington’s singular strengths in “His Excellency” — that they could have found “another version” of him to lead it?





This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:



Correction: July 1, 2013

An earlier version of this review misspelled the name of a town in Massachusetts whose fishermen aided in the evacuation of nearly 10,000 men from Brooklyn to Manhattan across the East River. It is Marblehead, not Mablehead.