The American Revolution is in its fifth year in Nathaniel Philbrick’s spirited new history, “In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown” (Viking), his third book detailing the Revolution. The French navy has arrived to back the Americans, but Washington can’t seem to get them out of Newport, Rhode Island, and the Caribbean to provide support to his ground troops.

The Nantucket, Massachusetts, author speaks about the book at Cambridge’s Brattle Theatre for the Harvard Book Store tonight, in Kingston on Thursday, on Nantucket on Nov. 28, in Eastham on Dec. 2, at the Boston Athenaeum on Dec. 3, and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston on Dec. 4.

Philbrick’s powerful first book in this series, 2013’s “Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution,” vividly recounted how the Revolution sparked in and around Boston. The second book, 2016’s “Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold and the Fate of the Revolution,” exploded with action during the battle for New York and Arnold’s exploits, but dragged as American forces were driven from New York and chased around as Washington slowly realized that his effort to confront superior British forces head-on wasn’t the best move.

Nathaniel Philbrick’s “In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown," 2018. (Viking)
Nathaniel Philbrick’s “In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown,” 2018. (Viking)

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“In the Hurricane’s Eye” is a mini biography of Washington from the late years of the war into his presidency and an exploration of the question the British faced: How does a great imperial power squash a local insurgency? The British are confounded by not wanting to go so far that they drive away white English colonists that they’re ostensibly trying to win back to the crown. But in addition to the usual careless cruelties of occupying armies, now and again, British forces grow so frustrated that they rampage to punish the ingrates. Then the Red Coats keep being surprised that Loyalists don’t rise up to join their side.

Philbrick is a charming writer, skilled at synthesizing history, and great at recounting rip-roaring tales of battle on land and water (especially, in this case, the British and French clash near Chesapeake Bay) with various “great” men strategizing at the helm.

Washington spends the book pleading with the French to send their navy into the fight. But this imperial power seems more interested in protecting its slave-worked sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Of course, all sides are defending their slave-based colonial economies in the Americas, where human bondage was big business from Massachusetts to the Caribbean, with Washington as the Continental Army’s slavemaster-in-chief. Philbrick reports that Britain’s Caribbean territories were then “worth much more” than its 13 North American colonies. (If you’re interested in Washington and this interplay of race, money and war, a good primer is Russell Shorto’s 2018 history “Revolution Song.”)

Philbrick’s Washington is a stately, patient hero struggling to keep his army from fraying as the American colonies and naiscent central government struggle for authority—and are reluctant to pay the soldiers for their service.

Meanwhile, Benedict Arnold, now on the British side, seizes the Southern capital of Richmond, Virginia, from a lackadasical Virginia Gov. Thomas Jefferson. And British army general Charles Cornwallis rampages around the Carolinas, playing a cat and mouse game with American forces under Nathaniel Greene and the Marquis de Lafayette, who repeatedly elude him.

Finally, Cornwallis stops to build a fortress at Yorktown, Virginia. Fortunately for the American Continental Army, this penninsula at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay is all too easily isolated—if you can control the waters.

And then French warships arrive from the Caribbean because European navies have learned from bad experience that they’re not safe in the Caribbean during the summer and fall hurricane season. They happen to appear near Chesapeake Bay just in time for a messy battle that drives British ships away. Cornwallis could have escaped during this time, but his pride drives him to misunderestimate American forces. He sticks around and leaves his forces in a trap. Cornwallis’s surrender after the 1781 siege of Yorktown is the final straw for British forces, not because it’s an unconditional defeat of their forces across North America, but a setback too big and too late in the war for a British populace tired of the whole thing.

Nathaniel Philbrick. (Christopher Noble/Viking)
Nathaniel Philbrick. (Christopher Noble/Viking)

Philbrick’s recounting of the victory at Yorktown feels anticlimactic in “Hurricane’s Eye,” perhaps because it was somewhat anticlimactic. The British elsewhere in the Colonies don’t surrender, they just depart. Philbrick doesn’t bring it up, but reading this sitting in global power America today, it’s hard not to feel echoes of the United States’ failures in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Philbrick quotes Jefferson’s praise for how Washington wrapped up the war and the ensuing politics: “The moderation and virtue of a single character has probably prevented this revolution from being closed as most others have been by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.”

As the British slunk home, they left many black Loyalists behind—former slaves to whom they’d promised freedom if they ran away and joined the British side. The Americans sent slave catchers to round them up—including Washington himself, who ordered the pursuit of black prisoners who’d escaped from his Mount Vernon plantation.


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Categories: Books History