{"id":9347,"date":"2018-11-14T11:31:40","date_gmt":"2018-11-14T16:31:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=9347"},"modified":"2018-11-14T11:34:14","modified_gmt":"2018-11-14T16:34:14","slug":"philbrick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2018\/11\/14\/philbrick\/","title":{"rendered":"In Nathaniel Philbrick\u2019s New Book, How The French Navy Turned The Tide Of The American Revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

The American Revolution is in its fifth year in Nathaniel Philbrick\u2019s spirited new history, \u201cIn the Hurricane\u2019s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown\u201d<\/a> (Viking), his third book detailing the Revolution. The French navy has arrived to back the Americans, but Washington can\u2019t seem to get them out of Newport, Rhode Island, and the Caribbean to provide support to his ground troops.<\/p>\n

The Nantucket, Massachusetts, author speaks<\/a> about the book at Cambridge\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Philbrick\u2019s powerful first book in this series, 2013\u2019s \u201cBunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution,\u201d vividly recounted how the Revolution sparked in and around Boston. The second book, 2016\u2019s \u201cValiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold and the Fate of the Revolution,\u201d exploded with action during the battle for New York and Arnold\u2019s 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\u2019t the best move.<\/p>\n

\"Nathaniel<\/a>
Nathaniel Philbrick\u2019s \u201cIn the Hurricane\u2019s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown,” 2018. (Viking)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\u201cIn the Hurricane\u2019s Eye\u201d 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\u2019re 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\u2019t rise up to join their side.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cgreat\u201d men strategizing at the helm.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s slavemaster-in-chief. Philbrick reports that Britain\u2019s Caribbean territories were then \u201cworth much more\u201d than its 13 North American colonies. (If you\u2019re interested in Washington and this interplay of race, money and war, a good primer is Russell Shorto\u2019s 2018 history \u201cRevolution Song.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Philbrick\u2019s Washington is a stately, patient hero struggling to keep his army from fraying as the American colonies and naiscent central government struggle for authority\u2014and are reluctant to pay the soldiers for their service.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014if you can control the waters.<\/p>\n

And then French warships arrive from the Caribbean because European navies have learned from bad experience that they\u2019re 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\u2019s surrender after the 1781 siege of Yorktown is the final straw for British forces, not because it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"Nathaniel<\/a>
Nathaniel Philbrick. (Christopher Noble\/Viking)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Philbrick\u2019s recounting of the victory at Yorktown feels anticlimactic in \u201cHurricane\u2019s Eye,\u201d perhaps because it was somewhat anticlimactic. The British elsewhere in the Colonies don\u2019t surrender, they just depart. Philbrick doesn\u2019t bring it up, but reading this sitting in global power America today, it\u2019s hard not to feel echoes of the United States\u2019 failures in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

Philbrick quotes Jefferson\u2019s praise for how Washington wrapped up the war and the ensuing politics: \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the British slunk home, they left many black Loyalists behind\u2014former slaves to whom they\u2019d promised freedom if they ran away and joined the British side. The Americans sent slave catchers to round them up\u2014including Washington himself, who ordered the pursuit of black prisoners who\u2019d escaped from his Mount Vernon plantation.<\/p>\n

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Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activisms (and our great festivals) by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

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The American Revolution is in its fifth year in Nathaniel Philbrick\u2019s spirited new history, \u201cIn the Hurricane\u2019s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown\u201d (Viking), his third book detailing the Revolution. The French navy has arrived to back the Americans, but Washington can\u2019t seem to get them out of Newport, Rhode […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9351,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107,120],"tags":[479],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9347"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9347"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9357,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9347\/revisions\/9357"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}