Trina's Reviews > 1776

Reads like a refresher course in American History. Good, solid account of the momentous events in 1776, the first year of the revolutionary war. McCullough is at pains to give both sides of the story, British as well as American. The narrative sags at the start since for some reason he begins with the King - the year before - denouncing the rebellious colonies to Parliament. Big snore. But then suddenly we're at the siege of Boston late in 1776 with Gen. Washington bottling up the British with his ranks of ill-clad, ill-trained farmhands and booksellers turned soldier. I personally think it would have been more effective to start off the story of 1776 with the dragging of the abandoned canons from Fort Ticonderoga - way the hell up in Vermont - down to Massachusetts (or I should say across the Berkshires) that summer, which totally saved the day by allowing Washington to take the high ground above Boston harbor in one of his daring nighttime maneuvers. The other "brilliant stroke" he had was the desperate night attack on the Hessian mercenary soldiers left by the Brutish to hold Trenton, NJ for them that winter - only Washington had other plans, and executed them superbly with his ragtag army on Christmas night. I don't even know how you get canons and horses across an icy river like the Delaware in the dark let alone in a snowstorm! And yet they managed to take the enemy by surprise, and that became the real turning point in the war. If the British had simply run Washington to ground, like a fox, as he retreated across New Jersey to the Pennsylvania side of the river, they'd still be serving tea in this country.