Gordon S. Wood - The American Revolution: A History

Contents

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Scott Moyers of Random House and to my wife Louise and my daughter Amy for their expert editorial assistance. My thanks also to Houghton Mifflin for permission to use portions of my section of The Great Republic by Bernard Bailyn et al.

Pattern of Settlement in the Colonies, 1760

Northern Campaigns, 17751776

Northern Campaigns, 1777

Yorktown and the Southern Campaigns, 17781781

Chronology

1763

1764

1765

1766

1767

1768

1770

1772

1773

1774

1775

1776

1777

1778

1780

1781

1783

1786

1787

Preface

When in the midst of the Civil War Abraham Lincoln sought to define the significance of the United States, he naturally looked back to the American Revolution. He knew that the Revolution not only had legally created the United States, but also had produced all of the great hopes and values of the American people. The noblest ideals and aspirations of Americanstheir commitments to freedom, constitutionalism, the well-being of ordinary people, and equality, especially equalitycame out of the Revolutionary era. But Lincoln saw as well that the Revolution had convinced Americans that they were a special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty. The Revolution, in short, gave birth to whatever sense of nationhood and national purpose Americans have had.

Such a momentous event has inevitably attracted successive generations of historical interpretation. At the outset Americans saw their Revolution as a heroic moral struggle for liberty against the evils of British tyranny, with the participants being larger-than-life heroes or villains. Then through much of the nineteenth century, largely through the work of George Bancroft, the Revolution lost some of its highly personal character and became the providential fulfillment of the American peoples democratic destiny, something preordained from the very beginning of the seventeenth-century colonial settlements. And like the nation it produced, it was exceptional. Unlike the French Revolution, which had been caused by actual tyranny, the American Revolution was seen as a peculiarly intellectual and conservative affair, as something brought about not by actual oppression but by the anticipation of oppression, by reasoning and devotion to principle, such as "no taxation without representation."