British-America on the eve of the revolution was quite small, a long eastern coastal strip, no more than 300 miles wide, stretching from Maine in the north to Georgia in the south. The 13 colonies or states were quasi-independent and of little commercial significance to Britain. It was what was happening in America itself, rather than between Britain and America, that lit the fuse.
A population explosion caused fierce land hunger and widespread resentment against the existing social order. It was this, rather than any yearning for liberty, Robert Harvey argues, that caused the American War of Independence.
The greed for land brought white Americans into conflict with the Indians and caused the British to impose a limit on how far westwards the colonies could extend. The colonists deeply resented and ignored this British proclamation. The British sent an army to police the border and expected the colonists to pay for half its upkeep. American payment would be in the form of taxes. These hit wealthy and middle-class Americans who now united with the frustrated, establishment-resenting poor to form a potent mix.
In fact, the British ended up withdrawing most of the new taxes (except that on tea). However, when they gave the East India Company a monopoly on the importation of tea into America, the famous "Boston Tea Party" followed. Its purpose, according to Harvey, was "to goad the British government, so inept for so long, into action", and it worked.
Harvey denies that the first Continental Congress, which assembled in response to the British reaction to the Boston incident, was America's first parliament but rather a self-appointed gathering of radicals. He maintains that the congress was manipulated by the more extreme Massachusetts (led by Samuel Adams) and Virginia (led by George Washington) delegates and doubts that it represented a majority of American opinion. The delegates returned to their colonies to prepare for war. Opinion hardened on the British side as well but they failed to realise just how far events in America had moved.
Although most of his criticism thus far is reserved for the Americans, Harvey does describe the hard-line faction in Britain as shortsighted. They more or less forced General Gage into the futile Concord expedition which enabled those Americans who wanted war to point to British aggression and so persuade some of their indifferent countrymen to act with them. Harvey has no doubt who started the war: "The Americans' carefully constructed military machine outside Boston had set a well-laid trap, and the British had blundered into it, displaying appallingly futile intelligence."
At the second Continental Congress, the wealthy Virginian landowner George Washington, was appointed to lead the Americans. Harvey sees this as "the key decision" of the whole revolution: "the propertied classes of the central and southern states were determined to prevail over the social-revolutionary protagonists of the American cause from the beginning." Washington is also seen as the crucial figure in ensuring American success. The reputations of some of the "founding fathers" have been inflated, says Harvey, but Washington's has, if anything, been understated. Nevertheless, his ruthlessness in dealing with possible rivals and his rather forbidding coldness make him seem an unattractive character.
The British governor of Virginia proclaimed all slaves free and encouraged them to join the British army. In deference to the slave-owning colonists of the southern states, the American army prohibited blacks from joining it. As Harvey dryly remarks: ". . . even the northern colonies without slaves effectively spurned fully a fifth of the American population as unfit to share in the freedom they proclaimed as their guiding principle." The attitude to slavery was not quite the most shameful chapter in America's struggle for independence; that description is reserved for the treatment of the native Indians.
The "frontier war", which occurred along the border between white settler and Indian territory, led to the massacre of thousands of Indians, the burning of hundreds of Indian villages and the destruction of vast acres of land and crops. The horrendous campaign was carried out with the full encouragement and knowledge of Washington and Congress. "By far the blackest and most terrible chapter in the American Revolution, it forever besmirches the reputations of the founding fathers who ordered it."
The Americans would not have won without French aid and the decisive battle of Yorktown was more a French victory, Harvey argues. The irony of the situation is well captured: "Thus the United States was born, five years after the Declaration of Independence, by the old-fashioned defeat of one colonial power by another. The revolutionary Americans were handed their independence from the parliamentary government of England by the absolutist monarchy of Louis XVI."
Part I of the book, which explores the background to the war, is its most interesting section. Some of the "heroes" of American independence, such as Samuel Adams ("a demagogue of genius"); John Adams ("the most intelligent, devious and Machiavellian of them all"); Benjamin Franklin ("political guile bordering on dishonesty"), and Thomas Paine ("an alcoholic ne'er-do-well") do not come well out of it. It is to Harvey's credit that he makes so much of the book, which is concerned with the strategy and details of the many battles, so interesting and readable.
The book lacks the usual scholarly apparatus of cited sources. Parliamentary speeches and letters are quoted, statistics given and such like but without footnotes. This is a weakness in what is a very fine, clear narrative.
Brian Maye is a historian