In his excellent new book, “Shots Heard Round the World: America, Britain, and Europe in the Revolutionary War,” author John Ferling places much of his emphasis on “the world.” Ferling dramatically conveys the global significance of America’s long fight for independence in what he calls an “international history” of the war.
This is not to suggest that the author, a professor emeritus at the University of West Georgia, neglects the home front in his elegantly written volume. He opens with the circumstances that led the 13 American Colonies to break from England and then covers each year of the drawn-out conflict in vivid detail. He describes the pivotal confrontations – from the opening Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775 to the victorious Battle of Yorktown exactly 6 1/2 years later – and analyzes the strategies, accomplishments, and missteps of Continental army Commander in Chief George Washington, British commander William Howe, and Howe’s eventual replacement, Henry Clinton.
Ferling also captures the everyday experiences of the soldiers. “Life for enlisted men in the Continental army included gluts of boredom, excessive regulation, harsh discipline, and episodic periods of extreme peril,” he observes. He explores each of these, and his passages on the shocking brutality of 18th-century warfare are graphic, as if daring any reader to romanticize this conflict. (In addition, he remarks that the harsh punishments for desertion, which affected the Army throughout the war, “appear to have been conceived by sadists.”)
Why We Wrote This
Many Americans think of the Revolutionary War as a conflict solely between colonists and British soldiers. They may not know about a French diplomat’s clandestine efforts to aid the Americans in their fight.
Conditions on both sides were extremely challenging. American soldiers often lacked shoes, blankets, coats, and adequate food; roughly 36,000 are thought to have perished in the war, and more died as a result of disease than in battle. British soldiers also suffered mightily, particularly during the summers, when they experienced heat and humidity unlike anything they’d encountered at home.
Hardship wasn’t confined to the Army. The war destroyed America’s economy: Trade with Britain, a pillar of Colonial commerce, disappeared, leading to a decline in incomes, steep increases in prices, and severe tax hikes. “Regardless of their social status, every American on the home front faced some level of economic adversity because of the war,” Ferling notes.
The author also devotes attention to the grand ideals that drove the war, emphasizing how very radical they were for their time – even as the country still struggles to live up to them centuries later. Thomas Paine, whom Ferling calls a “true revolutionary,” published the explosive and widely read pamphlet “Common Sense,” a full-throated call for independence and for egalitarian government, in January 1776. Thomas Jefferson hoped that his Declaration of Independence, written months later, would, in Ferling’s words, “give birth to a new world,” in which government by the people would replace the tyrannies of the Age of Monarchy.
Woven into this familiar American story is the broader picture of the conflict’s international scope, which focuses largely on Comte Charles Gravier de Vergennes, the French foreign minister under King Louis XVI. Vergennes played a pivotal role in securing French aid for the Americans, in part by helping Louis XVI overcome his reluctance to provide assistance to an insurrection against a monarchy. (The king, of course, would be executed in 1793, during France’s revolution.)
France had suffered a disastrous loss to England in the Seven Years’ War, which concluded in 1763. The French believed that Britain owed much of its wealth and dominance to its Colonial holdings in America. Vergennes presumed not only that England would be weakened by a prolonged war culminating in the loss of the Colonies, but also that France would be positioned to gain Britain’s lost trade with America.
Ferling deftly lays out the tricky politics that Vergennes had to maneuver through. France, still in the process of rebuilding its military after the Seven Years’ War, secretly provided crucial aid to the rebels in hopes of keeping the conflict alive without provoking the British. Spain – which, like France, had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the British in the Seven Years’ War – also provided clandestine assistance before declaring war on England in 1779. When France finally joined a formal alliance with the United States in 1778, after the decisive American victory at the Battles of Saratoga, “It was as if the sun burst through dark, threatening clouds and shined its rays on America,” Ferling writes. Still, in the following years of stalemate, Washington worried about France’s staying power just as he worried about Americans wearying of the protracted war.
But assistance from France eventually helped turn the tide, as French army and navy forces, led by the Comte de Rochambeau and the Comte de Grasse, respectively, played a pivotal role in the American victory at Yorktown in 1781, the final engagement of the war.
Vergennes hoped that the young U.S. would remain dependent on France, a dynamic that John Jay perceived during negotiations for the Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the war. (Ferling’s depictions of the fraught relationships among America’s primary peace negotiators – Jay, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams – are fascinating.) “Jay understood that France was committed to American independence, as that would weaken Great Britain,” Ferling writes. “But he now understood, if he had not previously, that it was not in France’s interest that ‘we should become a great and formidable people’ and that the French ‘will not help us to become so.’”
Still, Ferling credits Vergennes with stepping back, even as he realized that the U.S. had negotiated a separate peace with England, cutting out the French. The author then, in a striking claim, proposes Vergennes, a figure with whom most Americans are unfamiliar, as the war’s hero. “History is filled with astounding twists and turns,” he marvels, “and few things in this long war were more astonishing than that American independence in all likelihood would never have been gained had it not been for Vergennes.”
It’s fitting that Ferling, the author of many books on the Revolutionary period, has published his account to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the outbreak of the war. Surely many new reappraisals of the American Revolution will appear as we approach the semiquincentennial of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Other historians might differ in their conclusions, but Ferling has set a high standard indeed.
