Customer Reviews

The Road to Guilford Courthouse: The American Revolution in the Carolinas

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is very well written and thoroughly researched. If the reader is looking to gain an understanding of a critical area of Revolutionary War operations in the Carolinas -- an area that has not received its due in history -- this book will more than satisfy.

Although often beating General Washington in the middle colonies, the British had certainly not subdued the Revolution in Pennsylvania, New Jersey or New York. They looked to Charleston and the Carolinas as an area where British arms could provide succor to loyalists and take those states and Georgia out of the war.

The British won many battles, including the taking of Charleston and the capture of 5,000 rebels. But they could not win hearts and minds nor subdue the countryside. Rebel militia, aided by some of the finest Continental units sent by Washington, were married with a master strategy and excellent generaliship to bloody, thwart and ultimately force a stragetic defeat on British arms. This was done by volunteers, milita, who though often broke when confronted by the bayonets of regular troops, were led by enough able colonels that their guerilla attacks significantly drew upon British strength.

The hero of the story is Gen. Nathaniel Greene, who was an excellent strategist. He mastered geography, his troops and militia commanders and drew Cornwallis hundreds of miles away from his base withoug exposing his weaker force to major battle until he was ready to strike upon fields of his own choosing. Greene never won a battle which he personnaly commanded, but won the war. General Morgan, his able lieutenant, did fight and win the masterful Battle of Cowpens, which gave in his words the British a "devil of a whipping" and set the stage for Greene's brilliant strategic dance with Cornwallis.

Buchannon, the author, does a masterful job with this wonderful saga. He uses many first person accounts from diaries and published recollections. This gives his book an immediacy and perspective from those who fought similar to that found in the best Civil War books by Sears, Priest and others. The author does an excellent job of revealing the major commanders to the reader. Greene, Morgan, Gates, Cornwallis, Clinton, Marion, Sumpter, Tarleton and about two dozen other significant charactors are introduced with brief biographical sketches at their point of entry to the campaign. This is very helpful as the experience and charactor of commanders often had a significant impact on strategy and tactics employed in the dangerous circumstances most faced. Also, this approach satisfies the curiosity of the reader. Buchannon tells us what the actors did before and what became of them after the war.

The best part about this book is that it is so well written. The author has a style and ease with language that make this very engaging. He is not afraid to editorialize nor draw conclusions and offer criticisms. But he presents significant and multiple sources to buttress his observations and they add to the book.

This campaign was at its heart a brutal civil war. Neighbor fought neighbor in actions where sometimes no quarter was given. The British under Banestre Tarleton (Bloody Ban)were particularly brutal, burning, raping and slashing their way through a back country they hoped to ally with their presence and draw support from. Their behavior forced many passive citizens to the rebel side and greatly complicated the efforts of Cornwallis to receive native support. Often the actions were all american affairs of Tories fighting militia. At one significant battle -- King's Mountain -- the only British soldier on the field was Major Ferguson, the British commander. It was a very different kind of war than that fought by Gen. Washington in the more famous battles.

The brutality, stategy, tactics and personalities are all weaved together in a memorable book that belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in understanding how our freedom was won.

In many ways I was raised to be the stereotypical southern white male amateur historian: the only war that mattered was the Civil War. The important battles were Chancellorsville & Vicksburg, Lookout Mountain & Gettysburg. The generals who mattered were R.E. Lee & Stonewall Jackson, Beauregard & A. P. Hill. All the action was in our own backyard.

The American Revolution was but a footnote in our elementary and high school texts. At college in Davidson, North Carolina (where the college itself was named for a militia general, constructed on land once owned by him!), the War of Norther Aggression took top status.

The Revolution was fought by a southernor, George Washington, on yankee battlefields: Lexington & Concord, Trenton & Saratoga, Valley Forge & Bunker Hill. The actions at Kings Mountain, Cowpens, and Yorktown were mere skirmishes which had little influence on the outcome of the war.

I am loath to admit that Hollywood changed my perspective. After seeing Mel Gibson's "The Patriot" on opening day, a childhood interest in my ancestor, Francis Marion, was rekindled. I hastily began burying my nose in every book I could find on the subject.

Now, six months and three dozen books later, I can say with conviction that if I had to pick one book as my solo source for what I could learn about the American Revolution in the south, it would be "The Road to Guilford Courthouse".

Buchanan does a masterful job setting the stage. His research into the backgrounds of all the players is thorough, and his analysis fair and balanced. He understands completely the lay of the land at the time, both figuratively and literally, and he presents it well.

I purchased copies of the book as Christmas gifts to my yankee in-laws, Bostonians who still think the American Revolution began and ended with Paul Revere's ride. I hope they will discover, as Buchanan so poignantly reveals, that the American Revolution was fought and won by southernors on southern soil.

If you're looking for a book on the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, this isn't it. Fewer than 25 pages are dedicated to it near the end of the book.

However, this is one of the best campaign studies on Greene's southern campaigns that I have ever read. The author's treatment of the campaign as a whole is masterful, and of the Retreat to the Dan in particular, is superb. He presents to the reader what could be a very confusing chain of events, and puts them in logical order to give a sequence that is easy to follow and highly informative.

This is military history at its best and it gives a more than clear picture of the campaign that led directly to Yorktown and American (and French) victory over the British.

Nathaniel Greene was one of the most effective and talented commanders this country has ever produced. Never winning a battle, but always winning his campaigns, he is an American Turenne, and one of the American commanders the British feared.

This volume belongs on the bookshelf of every military history enthusiast of the period.

I became interested in the Revolutionary War in the Carolinas after viewing the movie, "The Patriot". I found the cruelty by the British, that was portrayed in "The Patriot", hard to believe, so I wanted to learn more about the war in the Carolinas. This book was what I was looking for. It is well documented and the presentation and conclusions of the author make more sense than the movie--the British not as cruel and the Americans are not as innocent. It's a great history and a good read.

This is a very good book. It will still be a good book 50 years from now. It compares favorably with the popular book on Stonewall Jackson, but does not focus on one personality. Protrayals of Nathanial Greene, Daniel Morgan, and Andrew Pickens were extremely moving and enlightening. The Dust-Jacket protrays the Battle of the CowPens, which is described on page 326. I was glad to have this famous painting finally described to me. I would have preferred that the author had identified the "black body servant" who rescued William Washington, but perhaps he is lost in history. I was very frustrated with the pausity of maps, i.e. spatial descriptions of what the author was talking about. Most military history students think spatially. The author also seemed to feel that he could only use complex "authentic-historical maps". The maps used were virtually unreadable. Unless the reader "knows the country", the reader will lose about 20 per cent of the author's information. This is easy to correct in the second edition. This is probably an excellant book to start in reading on the "First Civil War-American Revolution". That's what I'm doing. Again, this is a very good book.

Many military-history books are written as if the battles happened in a vacuum, with no regard to circumstances happening around the battlefields. Buchanan gives us the whole picture, from strategies that led to the shift in theatres to the class struggles underlying motives for each battle, skirmish and troop movement. Buchanan paints an ugly picture of life in the South during the time of the campaigns as both sides committed grizzly atrocities against the other in the name of ideology. His description of the first American civil war that turned neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother and father against son is brought to life in extreme detail, giving the most vivid and complete account of life and war in the Carolinas from the early stages of the war through 1782. This book is a must-have for any student of the Revolution.

The book has three facets that highly recommend it. First, the author has a mature intelligent voice that comes through in his writing enabling him to depict events with empathy and depth. Secondly, the work is comprehensive, describing small partisan actions that otherwise get short shrift. Third, I enjoyed his choice of assessing the command skills of the various combatants. His reasoning is sounds and buoyed well by the facts as he, admittedly, presents them. I also found his prose style engaging.
My only criticism is that he gives equal time to minor engagements and major battles. He also describes so many skirmishes that without maps or illustration they tend to dissolve into one another. Furthermore, it would have been nice if he had chosen to chronicle the remainder of the campaign. Of course, my desire for the book to be longer only demonstrates my appreciation of it.
I recommend it.

Until this book I always associated the battles of the Revolutionary War with those fought in the Northern Colonies: Quebec, Saratoga, Boston, Brooklyn, Brandywine, etc. I had certainly heard of King's Mountain and Cowpens but I had no idea of the savagery or the multiplicity of engagements fought in the Carolinas.

This is a book that sets the record straight. From Sullivan's Island to Charleston, from Camden to King's Mountain and from Cowpens to Guilford Courthouse, the fidelity and the zeal of the American Rebellion burned here with an intensity second to none. In fact, the Revolutionary War in the Carolinas was more a civil war than a revolt. Brothers really fought and slew brothers. The British campaign was in reality an intense war of extermination.

John Buchanan has delivered the extraordinary sacrifices made to the cause of liberty in a rousing good manner. Written with grace and style, this is an amazing contribution to the literature surrounding the American War for Independence.

Buchanan has done a remarkable job of bringing to life the key Revoluntionary War characters and events of 1780-81 in the Carolinas. His masterful interpretation of personalities and their motives provides insight into the critical battles of the southern war. He moves back and forth between the major antagonists on both sides to develop the background for understanding the brilliance of the rebel strategy and the British arrogance that lead to their eventual loss in the south. Not only do we learn about famous personalities such as Francis Marion, Daniel Morgan, Nathanael Greene, Lord Cornwallis and Banastre Tarleton, but we gain an understanding of the anonymous mortals without whom the Revolution would have been lost: the individual militia men from the back country of the Carolinas. Buchanan has an uncanny ability to explain in simple language the complexities of the troop placement and individual unit actions that occurred in the various battles. However, his book would be immensely improved if he had provided maps of the region and of the battlegrounds he described. Like many biographers, Buchanan grows to have an attachment (or detachment) for the people he has so painstakingly researched, which I find of great interest. One must be aware of some of the potential bias that might creep in with any biographical interpretation, including his. I recently finished biographies on Daniel Morgan and Nathanael Greene, yet discovered new information about each man in Buchanan's exposition. A very thorough job, indeed. One caveat: one should probably have read somewhat extensively regarding the Revolution to fully enjoy and understand Buchanan's book. He occasionally assumes some prior knowledfge of events and people.

This book is very well written with a conversational tone that reminds this reader of Flexner. Please see the five star reviews for justifiably excellent comments on the text, research, author's analysis, etc. I highly recommend this book.

At the same time, please see the four star reviews regarding the glaring omission of maps. There are only two maps in the first 350 pages of the book, and those are half page reductions of much larger maps showing (i) much of the Southern United States and, 200 pages later, (ii) the South Carolina and North Carolina regions that figure prominently in the battles covered. The first map is too small to be of any use, and the second map, while at least legible, does not identify battle locations -- one must scour the map for familiar names. The map also does not provide any information about the troops. Literally nothing about troop locations, sizes or movements. Trying to follow detailed descriptions of who moved where and when is made much more difficult for no discernable reason. Truly, it is puzzling how a work of this high quality was published without maps.

In the end, the omission of maps caused me to give the book four stars instead of five.