A Fresh Assessment of the Southern War Before Yorktown
Our account starts in 1780, years after what poet Ralph Waldo Emerson called the “shot heard round the world” and well after renowned Northern incidents and episodes, including Lexington/Concord, Bunker Hill, Washington crossing the Delaware, Saratoga, Valley Forge, and many more. Much time had gone by; the British still held New York and Philadelphia, and were headed toward a key Southern port in South Carolina — Charles Town (later known as Charleston). “The last battle in the North, the inconclusive clash at Monmouth, took place in June 1778, exactly two years earlier. After that,” as the author puts it, “not much had happened, and the cause of independence seemed to have stalled.”
George Washington, then in New Jersey, was trying to direct others to break the impasse in the South. So, too, were the British. The conflict, of course, was not just between American Continentals and Redcoats from the mother country. As we read, the conflict was also being fought “with astonishing ferocity between ‘partisans’ fighting for independence and their ‘loyalist’ neighbors, in battles, skirmishes, and appalling acts of domestic terrorism. The South had its Molly Pitchers, too, and their stories need to be told.”
The man doing the telling — compellingly — is historian Alan Pell Crawford, who has penned pieces for American History, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Crawford also regularly writes book reviews for The Wall Street Journal. His previous books have centered on, among others, Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain. Another book (dated 1980) likely won’t attract many of our readers: Thunder on the Right: The “New Right” and the Politics of Resentment, with a subtitle that gives away its proclivities. The book under review here, This Fierce People: The Untold Story of America’s Revolutionary War in the South, on the other hand, should appeal to patriots seeking to better appreciate our struggles and roots. Crawford has been a resident scholar at the International Center for Jefferson Studies and Monticello, as well as at Mount Vernon.
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