This is the story of a vicious struggle between brothers, friends and families which forged a new nation. Using the most up-to-date scholarship, vivid eye-witness accounts and original documents, this book tells the history of the passionate, violent and bloody events of the 1770s. The book argues against the commonheld view that the war of independence was the American people's struggle for liberty against an oppressive colonial power. The truth is far more interesting. Many Americans were loyal to the Crown throughout the war. Men and women often chose sides not because they wanted freedom, but because they wanted their neighbour's land. This book explores intriguing paradoxes through personal stories of women such as Jane McCrea, whose fiance was a British officer but whose brother was a rebel soldier. There are stories representing every interest group: Redcoats, loyalists, rebels, neutrals, French soldiers, Indian warriors, slaves, landed gentry and sharecropper. The text explains how the real victors of the War of Independence were the French, not the Americans, how the British Army could have continued the land war, and how intervention by the French Navy was decisive in the British defeat. Slave uprisings supported the British against the rebels, because of their brutal treatment by the colonists and many Native American tribes remained loyal to the British, while both loyalists and rebels betrayed the tribes who had supported them. When the conflict began very few believed the 13 colonies would gain independence - in Britain and in America. There were many mutinies in the rebel army including one in New Jersey which had to be put down by a large force sent by a man whose name has become synonymous with the conflict - General Washington.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
'Redcoat is a wonderful book, full of anecdote and good sense. Anyone who has enjoyed a Sharpe story will love it, anyone who likes history will want to own it and anyone who cherishes good writing will read it with pleasure.' BERNARD CORNWELL, Daily Mail 'It would be hard to exaggerate the excellence of this book. It is vivid, comprehensive, well-written, pacy, colourful, and above all, highly informative. The author has a command of his subject of Wellingtonian proportions, and his enthusiasm communicates itself to the reader on every page.' Simon Heffer, Literary Review 'This is an army from another, and Redcoat is a splendidly entertaining, moving and informative description of its strengths and foibles.' Hew Strachan, Daily Telegraph
About the Author
Celebrated military historian and television presenter Richard Holmes is best known for his bestselling books Redcoat and Wellington: The Iron Duke. He has written and presented 8 series for the BBC including Battlefields, War Walks and The Western Front. His dozen books include Firing Line, and he is general editor of the definitive Oxford Companion to Military History. Hugh Bicheno is the author of Gettysburg. He is a military writer and historian, and former special forces member. He lives in Cambridgeshire.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Deliciously vicious--or consistently mean-spirited?,
By
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This review is from: Rebels and Redcoats: The American Revolutionary War (Paperback)
I recently read David McCollough's popular "1776" and Don Cook's less popular, but more thorough, "The Long Fuse: How England Lost the American Colonies, 1760-1785." They both left me with the question, "What were the British thinking?" I.e., what did the British decision-makers believe, know, intend, plan, and expect?
Via a British friend, I got a recommendation from a university Reader in American History (Associate Professor) for this book as "the best general history ... of a far higher standard than McCullough, but still lively and accessible to a general audience." "Rebels & Redcoats" was certainly eye-opening in some respects, including its view of the Founding Fathers as a reprehensible bunch who dragged their mostly-unwilling countrymen into an unnecessary war. It is incessant in its attacks on "the Foundation Myth" (on which I was raised). Depending on taste, this is either the most deliciously vicious, or the most consistently mean-spirited, book of historical non-fiction that I can recall. The only major figure (American or British) to emerge relatively unscathed is Benedict Arnold--possibly because his reputation has already been ruined. On topics where Bicheno agrees with the conventional view, he says little or nothing, and he presents little concrete evidence for many of his most sweeping character judgments. To my mind, much of the book reeks of what I call "Simon Schama-ism": The use of a book ostensibly directed to the general reader to attack other historians' positions, without the encumbering impedimenta of scholarly publication. Bicheno often assumes that the reader already knows the history he is commenting on, rather than troubling to present it himself. Had I not already read the other books, I would have been mystified by a number of Bicheno's discursions, and would have lacked the background to connect many of the book's parts to its whole. Three allegations in the book have the potential to significantly alter my view of important aspects of the Revolution: 1) The supply of arms and military stores cached in Concord in April 1775 included three 24-pounder cannon. "These were 5600-pound monsters requiring eight to ten men to serve them and a team of six horses to pull them... They were siege guns, not field artillery pieces, and how they came to be buried in the courtyard of the Concord jail is a mystery... The conspirators were desperate to provoke some bloody event to polarize opinion, and the French would have regarded a brace and a half of 24-pounders as seed corn... The existence of such powerful weapons at such a place and time of itself is one of those ugly facts so harmful to beautiful theories, in this case the myth of peace-loving farmers spontaneously rising up against unprovoked aggression." 2) "Myth has it these were either personal weapons or stocks siezed from poorly guarded depots, but even if we are to suppose that every colony gave up every weapon it captured in 1775-76, more cannon were lost by the Rebels during the New York campaign than the British Army had ever felt it necessary to store in the colonies. It is impossible to reconcile the spontaneous uprising thesis with this proof of serious long-term planning and preparation." 3) Jefferson's first manuscript draft of the Declaration of Independence contained the following passage accusing George III of foisting the slave trade on the colonies: "He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare the opprobium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold he has prostituted his negative for supressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another." Since Bicheno does not specify the sources on which he bases these allegations, it is difficult for me to decide how much credence to give them. Bicheno is not overly concerned with consistency, being willing to assert a proposition to skewer one character, and then a contradictory proposition to eviscerate another. I'm not talking about minor points, but major ones, like whether or not the Tea Act precipitated the conflict, or whether the terms on which the war was settled in 1782 were significantly different from the ones offered by Britain in 1778. A few sample quotes: "It often crossed my mind that the standard accounts of the Anglo-American civil war of 1775-83 are the most outstanding example of propaganda not merely triumphing over historical substance, but virtually obliterating it." "The 1776 Declaration of Independence ... denounced measures taken for the common defence, the preservation of public order and the value of the currency, which most would regard as minimum obligations of any government." "Only the most devoted hagiographers have been able to stomach the personalities of Samuel Adams and John Hancock, the partnership that made the war happen." "Franklin was a pot-stirrer quite on a par with Samuel Adams, like him carefully tailoring his message to whatever audience he was addressing... Franklin's ... apparent moderation was simply a smokescreen." "But as all politicians know, the executive truth is what people can be persuaded to believe long enough to commit them to a course from which there is no easy retreat." "The Scots slaver and pirate John Paul alias Jones ... defeated the frigate HMS Serapis... His later career included service in the navy of the freedom-loving Catherine the Great of Russia, finally fleeing St Petersburg to evade an allegedly fabricated accusation of rape. What may have been his remains were exhumed from a built-over Paris cemetery in 1905 and escorted across the Atlantic by the US fleet for deposit in a magnificent crypt at the Annapolis Naval Academy. Not many other career criminals have been similarly honored." "After centuries in which the House of Lords, on occasion alone, resisted relentless centralization, the British are now to find out whether it will be an improvement to have an upper house packed with government placepersons possessing all the attributes of petty criminals save the minimum courage required to rob the helpless openly." "Despite a political history of almost unparalleled corruption and judicial malfeasance, Massachusetts remains the preferred domicile of the tiresomely self-righteous... Philadelphia treasures the cracked Liberty Bell, which perfectly symbolizes Pennsylvania's commitment to the cause of independence." This book did not satisfy my particular curiosity about what the British decision-makers believed, knew, intended, planned and expected. In fact, it gave remarkably little space to either decisions in Britain or by the British command in America. But it was a very interesting and thought-provoking read.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
More of a Philosophy...,
By
This review is from: Rebels and Redcoats: The American Revolutionary War (Paperback)
The author constructs this book around the premise that the success of the revolution was secured by the luck of the Americans and a lack of commitment by the British to total victory. His premise makes for a refreshing new approach to the conflict. However, the author supports his premise with so many opinionated statements (preceded by the words "may have" and "could have") placed next to unfootnoted factual statements, that this book presents more of a philosophy than a theory.
3 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Fanciful propaganda,
This review is from: Rebels and Redcoats: The American Revolutionary War (Paperback)
The continental forces won Ticonderoga, Saratoga, Trenton, Concord, King's Mountain, the cowpens, and with the help of the French, Yorktown. The british army sat in New York with the continental army (French-free) sitting across from them. The brits chose to sail off to Yorktown rather than come out of hiding n New York and assail the continental army.
This book is nothing but a pro-british propaganda book and the author never substantiates anything he claims.
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