Almost A Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence - Softcover

Ferling, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195382927 ISBN 13: 9780195382921

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2009

Synopsis

In this gripping chronicle of America's struggle for independence, award-winning historian John Ferling transports readers to the grim realities of that war, capturing an eight-year conflict filled with heroism, suffering, cowardice, betrayal, and fierce dedication. As Ferling demonstrates, it was a war that America came much closer to losing than is now usually remembered. General George Washington put it best when he said that the American victory was "little short of a standing miracle."

Almost a Miracle offers an illuminating portrait of America's triumph, offering vivid descriptions of all the major engagements, from the first shots fired on Lexington Green to the surrender of General Cornwallis at Yorktown, revealing how these battles often hinged on intangibles such as leadership under fire, heroism, good fortune, blunders, tenacity, and surprise. Ferling paints sharp-eyed portraits of the key figures in the war, including General Washington and other American officers and civilian leaders. Some do not always measure up to their iconic reputations, including Washington himself. The book also examines the many faceless men who soldiered, often for years on end, braving untold dangers and enduring abounding miseries. The author explains why they served and sacrificed, and sees them as the forgotten heroes who won American independence.

About this title

About the Author:

John Ferling brings to this book nearly forty years of experience as a historian of early America. He is the author of nine books and numerous articles on the American Revolution and early American wars, and has appeared in four television documentaries devoted to the Revolution and the War of Independence. His book A Leap in the Dark won the Fraunces Tavern Book Award as the year's best book on the American Revolution. He and his wife live in metropolitan Atlanta.

From The Washington Post:

Reviewed by Jon Meacham In late 1779, John Adams, then America's "minister plenipotentiary for peace," set out across the Atlantic for France. It was a difficult moment. The Revolution was turning into a long war. It had been more than four years since Lexington and Concord and three since the Declaration of Independence; the American forces and their French allies had just lost an important engagement in Savannah. Adams had much to do, and his journey marked the beginning of yet another lengthy separation from Abigail. Sacrifices, however, were necessary, Adams said, adding: "We shall be happy, whenever our Country is so."

But as John Ferling makes clear in Almost a Miracle, his comprehensive and engaging new history of the Revolution, that day of national happiness was nowhere near. Ferling's book is a sprawling account of the military side of the war, an oft-told story that still rarely fails to engage. The American victory, as Wellington said of Waterloo, was a close-run thing, and the details of the clash of the world's mightiest empire with a guerrilla force of rebels remain compelling. Ferling's own attitude, recounted in his preface, is a common one: "I find the lure of the War of Independence to be ever more irresistible. It was war on a grand scale. Near its end, John Adams remarked that the American Revolution had set the world ablaze, and indeed the War of Independence grew to be a world war, with men fighting from Florida to Canada, from the Caribbean to Africa to India, and across broad reaches of high seas." Grand stuff and sweeping themes. But reading the book now, in the fifth summer of another American war in a very different century, one is also struck by the echo, however faint, of how asymmetrical warfare waged by native peoples can bedevil even the finest professional soldiers.

The rebels had honed their unconventional tactics long before the Revolution, mostly in combat against Native Americans. "The colonists learned how to minimize the chances of an enemy ambush, sometimes employed a hit-and-run style of fighting, often utilized a mobile strategy, and not infrequently adopted terror tactics that included torture; killing women, children, and the elderly; the destruction of Indian villages and food supplies. . . . In time, warfare in the colonies came to be associated with a manner of fighting that England's career soldiers variously called 'irregular war,' 'bush war,' or simply the 'American way of war.' " There was also a clash of cultures between the independent-minded Americans and the haughtier British officers in the years leading up to the Revolution; there were scourges and beatings and hangings.

The combustible intersection of brute tactics, the Brits' resentment of their rebellious colonialists, and the fury many Americans felt at their London masters turned the Revolution into a grim and bloody conflict even by the standards of warfare. In South Carolina, for example, there was what Ferling calls "a saturnalia of bloodshed" at the Waxhaws crossroads (home of the young Andrew Jackson), a massacre of "severed hands and limbs, crushed skulls, and breached arteries. Some men were decapitated by the slashing cavalrymen. Others were trampled by maddened horses. The bellies of many were laid open by bayonets." The victims were Americans, and for years the rebels could only scrape by; George Washington spent a lot of time, Ferling notes, putting "a rosy face on . . . defeat, a skill that he had perfected."

The decisive moment came not where the Revolution was born (in the North) but in the hot, distant fields of the South. Ferling is particularly strong in recreating the relentless misery of the war in Georgia and the Carolinas, an essential theater that is overlooked in many popular recountings. The gradual colonial successes in the Carolinas were crucial to the ultimate victory; it was Nathaniel Greene's satisfaction with a battle at Eutaw Springs, S.C., that led him, in September 1781, to think that perhaps, just perhaps, "this cruel war" might "end gloriously" for the rebels.

He was right. The British failure to subdue the region (they were driven to Savannah and Charleston, coastal outposts) was almost immediately followed by what turned out to be the final showdown at Yorktown, Va., in October 1781. George Washington was surprised to receive a note from Cornwallis requesting a ceasefire so that the British might sue for peace; as Ferling points out, no one in the whole choppy history of the war had ever surrendered to Washington before.

The guns silent, word of Cornwallis's capitulation spread rapidly. As a dispatch rider galloped north with the news, a 15-year-old Virginia militiaman guarding prisoners near the Appomattox River recalled that "every American present" threw "his cocked hat up in the air," shouting, "America is ours." In London, Lord North, the prime minister, paced and muttered, "Oh God, it is all over!" And in Philadelphia, Congress processed to a Lutheran Church to give thanks to God and pray for a sound peace. The people, as John Adams had hoped, were as happy as their country.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0195382927
• ISBN 13: 9780195382921
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 696