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In this stirring book, David McCullough tells the intensely human story
of those who marched with General George Washington in the year of the
Declaration of Independence -- when the whole American cause was riding on
their success, without which all hope for independence would have been
dashed and the noble ideals of the Declaration would have amounted to
little more than words on paper.
Based on extensive research in both American and British archives, 1776
is a powerful drama written with extraordinary narrative vitality. It is
the story of Americans in the ranks, men of every shape, size, and color,
farmers, schoolteachers, shoemakers, no-accounts, and mere boys turned
soldiers. And it is the story of the King's men, the British commander,
William Howe, and his highly disciplined redcoats who looked on their
rebel foes with contempt and fought with a valor too little known.
Here also is the Revolution as experienced by American Loyalists,
Hessian mercenaries, politicians, preachers, traitors, spies, men and
women of all kinds caught in the paths of war.
At the center of the drama, with Washington, are two young American
patriots, who, at first, knew no more of war than what they had read in
books -- Nathanael Greene, a Quaker who was made a general at
thirty-three, and Henry Knox, a twenty-five-year-old bookseller who had
the preposterous idea of hauling the guns of Fort Ticonderoga overland to
Boston in the dead of winter.
But it is the American commander-in-chief who stands foremost --
Washington, who had never before led an army in battle.
The book begins in London on October 26, 1775, when His Majesty King
George III went before Parliament to declare America in rebellion and to
affirm his resolve to crush it. From there the story moves to the Siege of
Boston and its astonishing outcome, then to New York, where British ships
and British troops appear in numbers never imagined and the newly
proclaimed Continental Army confronts the enemy for the first time. David
McCullough's vivid rendering of the Battle of Brooklyn and the daring
American escape that followed is a part of the book few readers will ever
forget.
As the crucial weeks pass, defeat follows defeat, and in the long
retreat across New Jersey, all hope seems gone, until Washington launches
the "brilliant stroke" that will change history.
The darkest hours of that tumultuous year were as dark as any Americans
have known. Especially in our own tumultuous time, 1776 is powerful
testimony to how much is owed to a rare few in that brave founding epoch,
and what a miracle it was that things turned out as they did.
Written as a companion work to his celebrated biography of John Adams,
David McCullough's 1776 is another landmark in the literature of American
history.
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