Robert W. Coakley - The American Revolution (Vol. 1-3)

Robert W. Coakley, Stetson Conn & U.S. Army Center of Military History

Narrative, Chronology and Bibliography

Madison & Adams Press, 2018.
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ISBN = 978-80-268-8871-0

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This reference work on the American Revolution consists of three parts-a brief narrative history of the war, a chronology of military events, and a bibliography. Each part requires a word of explanation.

The narrative consists of one chapter on the colonial background of American military history and two on the Revolution itself. These three chapters ate reprints of Chapters 2-4 of American Military History, edited by Maurice Matloff, a volume prepared by the predecessor agency of the Center of Military History, the Office of the Chief of Military History, the most recent edition published in 1973. American Military History is a volume in the Army Historical Series, whose primary purpose is to serve as an ROTC text, although it has also found numerous other uses in the academic world. The narrative presented in these chapters reprinted here is the same as that in the original 1969 edition of American Military History; it was drawn very largely from secondary sources and reflects, insofar as possible, the best of modern scholarship on the military conflict as interpreted by the author.

Part Two is a chronology, oriented toward military events, covering the period between the signing of the Treaty of Paris ending the Seven Years War in 1763 and the ratification by the Continental Congress some twenty years later of a second Treaty of Paris confirming American independence. These were an eventful twenty years both in the history of the United States and of the world, and no attempt has been made to include all the important events of that period. The emphasis has been placed on the events of the land war, 1775-1783, and on events that relate to the institutional history of the Army-hence the designation of an Army Chronology. The chronology includes major milestones on the road to war, 1763- 1775, and major political and diplomatic developments afterward, but the focus is on the military conflict. And within this area of concentration, only the more important events of the war at sea receive notice. A chronology by its very nature lacks selective emphasis. The small skirmish is likely to receive as much attention as the great battle, depending on the space required to make clear what the event described was rather than on its intrinsic historical significance. The selective emphasis appears in the narrative; the chronology is to provide a reference on specific dates and places and to place all events listed in their proper time relationship. This our Army Chronology attempts to do.

Part Three, the bibliography, contains listings of over a thousand titles of books, articles, and published source material on the American Revolution. The emphasis is again on the land war, but proportionately the bibliography gives more attention to the political, social and economic aspects of the Revolution and to its naval phase than do either the narrative or the chronology. It is not an annotated bibliography. The author found himself faced with alternatives of presenting a much more select and critical bibliography, containing his own personal opinion on each work, or of providing a much larger number of listings without critical comment. He opted for the latter alternative in the belief that there are, in the works he has listed, many more evaluative bibliographical essays than there are comprehensive listings of the great multitude of works that have been published on the military history of the American Revolution in the last two hundred years. Even with the multitude of listings, however, this bibliography is by no means a complete one of books and articles in print. Its organization and its limitations are set forth further in the introduction to Part Three.

Dr. Stetson Conn, while still Chief Historian, developed the concept for this volume and prepared the draft of the chronology before his departure from the Office of the Chief of Military History in 1971. Dr. Robert W. Coakley, currently Deputy Chief Historian, Center of Military History, is the author of the chapters reprinted hom AmeTican MilitaTy History) revised the chronology for publication, and compiled the bibliography. Acknowledgments are due to Dr. Howard H. Peckham of the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Mr. Donald H. Kent, Director of the Bureau of Archives and History, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Colonel Thomas E. Griess, Professor and Head of the Department of History, U.S. Military Academy, Dr. William B. Willcox of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Lieutenant General Joseph M. Heiser, Jr., USA, and Dr. Brooks E. Kleber, Chief Historian, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command for helpful comments on the chronology. Mrs. Mary Thomas, Miss Evelina Mounts, Mrs. Anita Dyson, and Mrs. Arlene Morris did yeoman service in typing a difficult manuscript. Mr. Joseph Friedman and Mr. Duncan Miller edited the manuscript in preparation for the printer. The authors, however, acknowledge responsibility for all errors of fact or interpretation found herein.

The United States as a nation was, in its origins, a product of English expansion in the New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-a part of the general outward thrust of western European peoples in this epoch. British people and institutions, transplanted to a virgin continent and mixed with people of different origins, underwent changes that eventually produced a distinctive American culture. In no area was the interaction of the two influences-European heredity and American environment-more apparent than in the shaping of the military institutions of the new nation.

The European military heritage reaches far back into the dim recesses of history. Many centuries before the birth of Christ, organized armies under formal discipline and employing definite systems of battlefield tactics appeared in the empires of the Near East, rivaling in numbers and in the scope of their conflicts anything that was to appear in the Western World before the nineteenth century. In the fourth century B.C., Alexander the Great of Macedonia brought all these empires and dominions, in fact most of civilization known to the Western World, under his suzerainty in a series of rapid military conquests. In so doing, he carried to the highest point of development the art of war as it was practiced in the Greek city-states. He utilized the phalanx - a solid mass infantry formation using pikes as its cutting edge-as the Greeks had long done, but put far greater emphasis on heavy cavalry and contingents of archers and slingers to increase the maneuverability of his armies.