We have now arrived on the cusp of the 250th anniversary of American independence, and speaking as a veteran of the 1976 Bicentennial, the word that comes most readily to mind for the celebrations 50 years later is flaccid. The excuse which usually follows is that we live today in a sea of political hatred, retribution, and instability, which makes it hard to celebrate the events that made it all possible.
But it’s worth remembering that in 1976, we had also just passed through the final debacle of Vietnam the year before; had just witnessed the national agony of Richard Nixon and Watergate two years before; and were caught on the horns of an economic crisis so mystifying that New York City was one day away from declaring bankruptcy. Yet, we managed to throw a stupendous national party that featured Operation Sail, a state visit from Queen Elizabeth II, and a Bicentennial Wagon Train that crossed the entire continent—from Oregon to Philadelphia. Bliss it was to be an American that year, and to be young—or at least, as I was, a young tour guide in 18th-century “small clothes” and formal white wig—was very heaven.
Certainly, a major reason for today’s chillier atmosphere lies with the way we have written the history of the American Revolution in the last 50 years. Like much of American historiography, historians of the Revolutionary era have increasingly moved from the history of individuals and moments to the social history of long-term economic and cultural movements, and that means battles and generals figure in substantially less prominent ways.
Another reason for the subdued atmosphere in 2025 is the turn in popular history and teaching toward political pessimism about the Revolution itself. The opening essays of The 1619 Project, for instance, recast the Revolutionary era in more critical terms than the Bicentennial did. But they are the product of a time of diminished confidence in American institutions, and so it becomes easier to attach the same discounted enthusiasm to the Revolution.
Which is not to say that the older mode of great-men-and-great-battles has been completely cast aside. George Washington seems to be the subject, on average, of a new book every year. Kevin Weddle’s The Compleat Victory: Saratoga and the American Revolution (2021) is the finest military history ever written on a Revolutionary battle; Stacy Schiff’s The Revolutionary: Sam Adams (2022) drags out of the political shadows one of the most talented rabble-rousers American politics ever produced; and the dean of American Revolutionary historians, Gordon Wood, provides one of the most cogent summaries of the move to independence in Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution (2021).
Even America’s quondam enemies have harvested a fine crop of specialty biographies. Andrew Roberts’s remarkable 2021 biography of George III almost makes the “last king of America” likable; Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy presents us with a collective biography of 10 British generals in The Men Who Lost America (2014) who were certainly not the incompetent Colonel Blimps they have often been made out to be.
And then there is Rick Atkinson.
Atkinson made his first career in journalism, covering defense issues in the 1980s. In 1982, he snagged a Pulitzer for a series of stories on a Vietnam-devastated West Point class, stories which became his first book, The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point’s Class of 1966.
The success of The Long Gray Line created too great a temptation not to return to the same pump, and after leaving newspapers in 1999, he set to work on a massive narrative trilogy on the U.S. Army in the Second World War’s European theater, An Army at Dawn (2002), The Day of Battle (2007), and The Guns at Last Light (2013). It was from there that he took an even longer step back in time, to the American Revolution, with the first book in a new trilogy, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777, in 2019. The Fate of the Day, just released, is the second volume of Atkinson’s Revolutionary trilogy.
It is one of the conceits of journalism that reporters write “the first draft of history.” It is one of the conceits of historians that we are likely to respond, “Yes, and that’s why historians are around to write the final draft and correct all the mistakes.” The same, however, should not be said of Atkinson. He has the journalist’s stylistic flair but a stupendous appetite for research that would put many a gray-haired Ph.D. to shame. Even more, he has an admirable reserve of judgment which prevents him from rushing too far, too fast.
Above all, for this 250th anniversary, Atkinson loves the ins-and-outs of military planning, strategy, and tactics, not unmixed with a canny eye for the flow of politics and political personalities, whether in Philadelphia, London, or Versailles. (He is, after all, an Army brat, like myself.) The result, in The Fate of the Day, is a massive, and massively enjoyable, excursion into the embattled history of the American republic, its imperial British enemy, and its opportunistic ally, France.
It is one of Atkinson’s convictions in both The British Are Coming and The Fate of the Day that Britain and its leaders were, even with the keenest of intentions, their own worst enemies. Britain’s North American colonies emerged from the trauma of the Seven Years’ War as grateful and devoted children of the Hanoverian crown and its newest representative, George III. What the imperial planners in London never quite fathomed was that this reverence was built on generations of improvised self-government in America, which the Americans saw no reason to surrender once the British government decided to impose an unprecedented series of direct taxes on them. It was not that the taxes were necessarily onerous; it was that they were imposed roughshod, without a by-your-leave to American habits.
It exploded when the Boston Tea Party turned to the outright destruction of property. No one was angered more seriously than the king, who insisted that unless the Americans were brought to heel, the rest of the empire—Ireland, India, and the Caribbean—would go the same way.
The British generals to whom this task was given—Sir William Howe, Sir Henry Clinton, Earl Cornwallis, “Gentlemanly Johnny” Burgoyne—were neither nitwits nor tyrants, and if we are to judge by the opening chapters of The Fate of the Day, they were remarkably close to winning their war in 1777. Burgoyne’s capture of Fort Ticonderoga in July 1777 should have guaranteed the success of his plan to move down the Hudson River Valley and cut off rebellious New England from the rest of the American rebel states; Howe’s dramatic combined-arms operation to capture Philadelphia steamrolled George Washington’s Continental Army at Brandywine in September, threw off a counterattack at Germantown in October, and consigned the Continentals to their dreadful winter encampment at Valley Forge.
But Howe’s adventure to Philadelphia left him unable to support Burgoyne when “Gentlemanly Johnny” was forced into surrender at Saratoga in October 1777. Howe himself had already concluded that the war was unwinnable and never lifted a finger to disturb Washington at Valley Forge. The Saratoga victory convinced the French that the British were vulnerable to a serious effort to recover France’s New World empire, and with the French entrance into the war, the principal theaters of operations had to be shifted elsewhere by Britain. Britain’s generals in America would still win a few dramatic victories, but they would lose the biggest battle at Yorktown in 1781, and after that, American independence only required the official stamp of the 1783 peace treaty.
The Fate of the Day stretches from the high point of British military fortunes in America through a steady slide that even the British capture of Savannah in 1778 and Charleston in 1780 cannot reverse. If some of this conjures up faint echoes of a similar slide of military fortunes in Indochina almost two centuries later, that is probably not a misjudgment. Along the way, though, Atkinson wants us to see how much the Revolution worked a kind of political, military, and diplomatic alchemy in America. In a new republic plagued by bickering, we found strength out of the bickering. In a land of farmers, immigrants, and merchants, we found the most unlikely and marvelous leaders. In a crisis that gave plenty of excuse for replacing one monarchy with another, we found a general whose political reserve never allowed him to step across the line that would undo a republic (just as Cromwell undid the English republic more than a century before). Atkinson makes no secret of his frank admiration for Washington, and largely because Washington understood a single basic fact about his soldiers and his countrymen—that they must be reasoned with, not bludgeoned.
Given the shortness of time, we will probably not mount a celebration in 2026 that matches the raucous scale of 1976. But having in hand Rick Atkinson’s new trilogy—and especially The Fate of the Day—will be no small compensation.
The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780
by Rick Atkinson
Crown, 880 pp., $42
Allen C. Guelzo is the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar in the James Madison Program at Princeton University and a Non-Resident Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute.
Read the full article here
