Ep 200: Rick Atkinson on the American Revolution at 250

Rick Atkinson, historian and author of The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

Aaron MacLean:

Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome to the show today, Rick Atkinson. He is the number one New York Times bestselling author of seven previous works of history. I'm an admirer of your work on the US Army in Europe in World War II, The Liberation Trilogy, and for the last several years you've been at work on another trilogy focused on the American Revolution. The first book was called The British Are Coming, and today we have out The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston 1777 to 1780. Rick, thank you so much for joining the show.

Rick Atkinson:

Thank you, Aaron.

Aaron MacLean:

So, you had a long career in journalism before you turned to history writing. How did that get going? Why did you become a journalist in the first place?

Rick Atkinson:

Because I couldn't do anything else, in short. I thought I wanted to teach college English. I was in grad school, the University of Chicago. I got my master's there in English language and literature, and it seemed very sedentary to me. Not to mention there were no jobs at that time, mid '70s. My dad was an Army officer, and he was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas. I went out to visit them for Christmas. My mother was very worried about me. I had no job, no prospects, no money, and I had met at a party at my dad's house the previous summer, a guy who was a reservist. He was a lieutenant colonel doing his two weeks of reserve duty at Fort Riley. His name was Lee Porter, and he was the editor of the Topeka Kansas newspaper.

So, with my mother's pleading in my ear, I called him up. He kindly took my call and said, "I have no jobs here in the big city of Topeka for you, but I know about an opening for an entry level reporter in Pittsburgh." And I said, "Oh, Pittsburgh. That'd be great. My mom and dad are from Philadelphia. That'd be terrific." He said, "Not that Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, Kansas." So that's where I went. I started there with seven people in the newsroom, and I found I really liked the rhythm of it, I liked the excitement of it, I really liked the people that journalism attracted and so I was there about a year and a half, and then I went to Kansas City, and in Kansas City for four years. Then I went to Washington and eventually was hired at the Washington Post and was there for most of my journalism career.

Aaron MacLean:

And you had a remarkable run as a national security reporter. We had, well, it was an awkward moment for me. I don't know if it was an awkward moment for you, but we were at an event together not that long ago. And naturally, because we were discussing the Battle of Lexington and Concord, I made reference to the Battle of Mogadishu, which one reminded me of the other.

Rick Atkinson:

Yeah.

Aaron MacLean:

And I said, "Of course, everyone, you in the audience will know about the Battle of Mogadishu because there was this book by this guy named Mark Bowden, a great journalist, made into a movie." And Rick you very politely interjected and said, "Well, Mark Bowden's great. It's a wonderful book, entertaining movie. But of course I, Rick Atkinson, was..." I think you said you were the first American reporter on the site of crash site one. Is that accurate?

Rick Atkinson:

And crash site two. It is accurate.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah.

Rick Atkinson:

Yeah, I was in Somalia three times. The first time was not long after October 3rd and 4th, 1993, which had of course been a terrible firefight. 16 or 17 Americans killed, hundreds of Somalis probably killed. And I spent time there with the 10th Mountain Division, which was the unit that everybody knew about. What no one knew about other than those who were in on the know was that there was a Delta Squadron there. And I figured that out pretty quickly. And so I managed to find the guy named Aideed who was the head of the clan in that part of Mogadishu. He'd had a price on his head. The price was lifted after this terrible event of October 3rd and 4th. And I said, "I've got the American side of the story. I'd like to hear your side of it." And so he basically gave me a get out of jail pass and off I went to find the people who had fought on the side of the Somalis that night.

And the first thing that I did in this area called the Bakaara Market, was to go to crash site one. The Black Hawk had gone down, both pilots were killed. They couldn't get, when the rescue efforts arrived with the Delta guys and Rangers showed up, they couldn't get the bodies out. It slowed everything down. Many, many, many Somalis then rallied to the scene. Second Black Hawk went down, pilot is killed. The co-pilot, Warrent Officer Michael Durant, had broken his leg. Two Delta guys in the back of the helicopter fought valiantly, and they were both killed, both were subsequently awarded the Medal of Honor.

So this was very recent. And talking to people whose backyard had been the site of crash site two, they'd been cooking dinner that night, cooking pasta in their kitchen. So yeah, I was there early on, and I wrote about it for the Washington Post at some length, and then Mark came along a couple of years later and wrote that fine book.

Aaron MacLean:

I mean, a couple of questions on this. We want to get to the Revolutionary War, but this is really fascinating. First of all, help listeners understand just logistically how it would work for you to walk around the Bakaara Market relatively soon after such an extraordinary bloodletting in a place where I can't imagine there was no hostility to Americans. Did you have security? Was Aideed providing people to protect you? How did it actually work?

Rick Atkinson:

Yeah. Well, to get to Mogadishu, you basically had to go through Nairobi and you caught a flight with the UN plane that went once or twice a week. And yeah, I had two gunmen with me and they were provided by Aideed, they were of the right clan Habar Gidir, and basically Aideed had given me authorization to be there. So I'm looking over my shoulder a lot. I'm the only white guy for a long distance, and feelings ran high because this had been a very violent event. One of the things that I discovered early on was that in the middle of this firefight, very close to crash site one, the Somalis believed that the Americans were taking hostages, women and children, flex cuffing them and putting them in the back of a house that was at an intersection at the center of this fight.

From the American perspective, they were taking the women and children and getting them out of the way to save them because bullets are flying everywhere. Little Birds are overhead and there's a lot of gunfire coming down from the sky. And so this disparate point of view where the Somalis think that the Americans have taken their women and children hostage, for one thing that infuriated them to new levels of passion and risk-taking. From the American standpoint, they were doing the right thing, they were doing the humanitarian thing. So this is one of the things that I was able to discuss.

I went back to Berlin where I lived at the time, I was the Berlin Bureau Chief for the Washington Post. I called General Wayne Downing, who was the head of special ops for the US. I'd met him when he was a colonel in the Gulf War, and I told him what I'd seen and what I'd learned. I'd spent a lot of time in the Bakaara market. And there was a long pause on the phone and Downing said, "What do you need?" I said, "I need to talk to the Delta Squadron commander and the task force guys and others." And another long pause and Downing said, "Be at Quarters 12 Adams Road, Fort Bragg on Tuesday. I'll make it happen." So that's what happened.

Aaron MacLean:

You were also in the invasion of Iraq with the 101st Airborne. Whether it's your experiences in Mogadishu, there was also Bosnia, Iraq. What did you learn as a national security correspondent, a war reporter, that went on to inform or help you as a historian?

Rick Atkinson:

Yeah, that's an interesting question here. And I have thought about it, and I do think that it is useful writing as a historian. Yeah, I went with Dave Petraeus in the 101st Airborne Division. I went with him from Fort Campbell when they first staged in Kuwait. I was with Petraeus every day, all day long, either in the back of his Humvee or next to him on the Black Hawk for two months until they got to Baghdad and mission accomplished. And watching him, watching Major General Bill Nash, who commanded the First Armored Division in Bosnia, watching other senior officers that I've been around in tight predicaments, I think informs me about several things, including the necessity of building this mystical bond between leader and led that's so vital in any organization, but nowhere more important than in a military unit in combat.

Watching how the commander works upward in Petraeus' case to corps level and army level, and works downward to brigade, battalion. His relationships there. Watching things like sleep discipline. You know what that is, most people don't. If you don't get enough sleep, you make bad decisions, you make bad decisions in war, you get people killed. So watching these commanders force themselves to get enough sleep, whether it's Ambien or putting an aide right outside the door, "Do not disturb the general for the next five hours." Whatever it is. These things I think would be familiar to Thucydides. They're eternal verities. An infantryman is an infantryman is an infantryman over the course of history. There's certain basic things about it, including the fraternal love that blooms in combat between comrades, which is unlike anything else that I've ever seen. It's so vital to unit esprit. It's why men and women now risk their lives. It's for each other, fundamentally. It's not for the Constitution, it's not for the flag, it's not for the president.

And watching that play out I think gives me insights into earlier wars, earlier campaigns, earlier armies, because they're really of a piece in certain fundamental ways, even as they're completely different in their composite, the level of education, the level of training, the weaponry, all of that stuff is different, but the fundamentals of combat are similar.

Aaron MacLean:

Something you just said actually provides a great transition back to 1775, which is my intended destination. Of course, we are 250 years on now from that momentous spring and summer. It is certainly my experience that what you just said is true, that on the battlefield, as a general rule, people in combat are fighting for one another, that their minds are not particularly occupied by ideology or politics or anything like that, but it is a comradeship that is the primary factor. I actually wonder as things kick off in Massachusetts in 1775, as somebody who spent a lot of time with these characters reading their papers and diaries, are things more ideological on the American side as things are getting going, as these first shots are fired? It wasn't a question I was planning on asking, but it just struck me as a strange part of that moment maybe.

Rick Atkinson:

Yeah, no, that's a good question too. I don't think it's ideological in the sense that they've got a bill of grievances that are clearly enunciated a year later in the Declaration of Independence. They're not thinking about independence at this point, April 1775, when the American Revolution begins, when the shooting begins. They've got an ideology in the sense that they've been largely left alone for a century. There's been a benign neglect by Britain, and the colonists have become accustomed to making their own decisions. They have their own local assemblies, they have colonial assemblies, they have a large voice in how they govern themselves, and they've become used to that, and it's part of their worldview of how things should work. And so when that erodes, and the British first of all impose relatively modest taxation because they're deeply in debt as a consequence of war debts accumulated in the Seven Years' War, the French and Indian War as we know it.

And when they leave British regiments stationed in America, partly to keep the colonials and the Indians from starting a war on the frontier, but then they move some of those British troops into Boston and then there are frictions and that leads to a certain ideology. We don't want them here. And of course, push comes to shove. There's the Boston Massacre where five rioters are killed in Boston in 1770. So it's an inchoate ideology that they've got. They know what they don't like, and they have vague ideas of what they want, and they have vague ideas of what they think the country, and that's a very loose term at that point, and the future can hold. They have a vague idea of the better world that they're trying to build.

And it's going to take a while for this all to gel and to become less inchoate and be articulated by the likes of Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense comes out in January 1776, and really lays out the argument against the Crown, against monarchy and so on, in very easy to understand terms that lights a match. And in the Declaration of Independence, which is overstated fairly well, and the accusations against the king are somewhat ridiculous, but the beginning of it is lofty and elegant. "We hold these truths to be self-evident." It's aspirational. So these things are going to become part and parcel, warp and woof of the Revolution, but they're not really there in the beginning. Nobody can articulate it particularly well.

Aaron MacLean:

Talk a bit about the British side of things at the beginning. Of course, looking back on it now, as so many things seem in history, it seems a foregone conclusion that what did happen was going to happen. But of course, there are a couple of years there at the start of the war, the start of the rebellion when it's quite plausible that the British could have ultimately squashed it one way or the other. I think the balance ultimately shifts decisively against them as time goes on. But even so, I mean by the time the shooting starts in 1775, my impression is you really are downstream of some serious errors of British statecraft, some real mismanagement of the relationship that have let things come to a crisis that ought better have just been avoided, whether through a degree of appeasement, British appeasement of American interests or however you want to frame it, how did things get to this point of crisis?

Rick Atkinson:

Yeah, obviously diplomacy is botched. If it comes to shooting, diplomacy has failed. It's a ten-year run-up to the war beginning in April 1775, and the British have tried, they would dispute your notion that there hasn't been appeasement. They pass the Stamp Act and then they repeal it, they pass other acts, and they basically repeal those too. The one thing that they don't repeal is a small tax on tea, which is not so much to raise money, it's to affirm Parliament's right of taxation. And this is a point on which King George III will not budge. They have several strategic misconceptions that propel them into this war. They believe, for example, that it's going to be short and quick, and it needs to be short and quick because they're looking over their shoulders at the French and the Spanish. They know that there are grievances in the Bourbon regimes, and they don't want it to be a global war. They don't want it to be a European war, which of course it's going to become. So they want this to happen quickly.

They believe that superior British firepower will cowl the rebels, that the other 12 colonies will not rally to Massachusetts when the shooting starts. And this is also quite wrong. The other 12 colonies basically say, "If it can happen to Massachusetts, it can happen to us." And there is a remarkable unity. There's a belief that the level of loyalism throughout the colonies is much higher than it actually is. The King believes virtually to the end of the war in 1783 that there's a silent majority of Americans who really do support the Crown and don't want to be separated from the British Empire, from the mother country. That's wrong. Modern scholarship shows that maybe 20% of the 2 million white Americans are more or less committed loyalists, and that's never enough to really tip the balance.

And then the last thing I'd say is that is really a serious strategic misconception. The King, his government, majorities in both houses of Parliament, the House of Commons, and the House of Lords believe that if the American colonies are permitted to slip away, it will encourage insurrections in Canada, in Ireland, in India, in the Sugar Islands of the West Indies, where the real money is, and that it will be the beginning of the end of the First British Empire, which has been created by Britain's victory in the Seven Years' War where they have taken Canada and they've gotten more rich Sugar Islands. They've taken a large tract of fertile country beyond the Appalachians in America.

The King just believes that the empire will collapse, and it's not going to happen on his watch. We get to the point later in the war where he drafts an abdication letter, he's going to quit rather than allow his government to be anything other than rigid and rigorous in opposing American independence. So when it gets to this point, as Petraeus says, "If you get the big ideas wrong, it's hard to get the rest of it right." And they've got some of the big ideas really wrong.

Aaron MacLean:

I'm going to linger a bit in the 1775, even though your most recent book carries the war forward well past that, but just because we're at the 250th anniversary here. What is life like in Boston in as we come up onto Lexington and Concord? What does the British occupation look like? How does it feel like to be a Bostonian in that period in time?

Rick Atkinson:

Well, it's fraught. I think we can say that. Boston is a little town. The topography of Boston has changed a lot since the end of the 18th century. It was about one square mile, connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus. It's almost an island. Back Bay was really a bay then, and now it's multi-million dollar homes on landfill. It's a very prudish colony. There are no theaters in Boston. The roots of Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Puritan ethic still has a grip, I think, to a pretty substantial degree on Bostonians, Massachusetts Bay, generally. In many communities, church is mandatory, there are lots of restrictions. William Dawes, who along with Paul Revere, they're the two guys who ride out the night of April 18th warning that "the British are coming," although that's not what they said. William Dawes writes about when he was a younger man, and he was still pretty young, on Sunday, they were not permitted to look outside the window because you were to be focused on God. You couldn't even look outside. So it's that kind of community.

The restrictions that the British, the punitive efforts that the British have made to try to bring the rascals to heel means that Boston is really suffering at this point. Fishermen cannot go out, ships cannot sail, trade cannot come in or go out. There's a lot of relief food and other goods coming from the other colonies and coming from places like Canada. Boston has made it clear that it is really suffering, that civilians who have really no bone to pick with the King are jobless. Food is scarce. So it's like that. And of course this adds to the sense of desperation. And when we get to April 19th, there's a bit of a powder keg quality to the place.

Aaron MacLean:

Speak a bit about what actually happens that day, the day of the shot heard 'round the world. I mean, as we alluded to earlier in our conversation, looking back at it across the distance of time, it has this classic military quality of a failed raid. Talk also a bit about the impact of its relative failure on the British conception of how this was going to go.

Rick Atkinson:

Yeah. And it is a failure from their standpoint. Well, push has come to shove. General Thomas Gage, the senior British commander in Boston, who really believes that initially that the Americans are not likely to resist forceful measures by his troops, but he's told in a letter that arrives from London, former General Lord George Germain is the American secretary. He's the Robert McNamara of the war. He's the one who gives orders with the advice and consent of the King and the rest of the cabinet. And they're tired of this in London. The Boston Tea Party in which the rascals have dressed up as Indians and tossed 43 tons of tea into Boston Harbor really irks them to no end. And King George says, "Blows must decide." And so the order comes to Gage, "You are to send an attachment to Concord, and you are to seize munitions that we know are in Concord, the British have pretty good intelligence, and any of the ringleaders who are out there, and we're going to show them that we're not messing around anymore."

So about 800 men tiptoe out of Boston on the night of April 18th. You don't send 800 men tiptoeing out of Boston without the entire town knowing about it. And Revere and Dawes are sent out to warn the countryside. Revere is on horseback yelling, "The regulars are coming out." Meaning the regular British army coming out. They get to Lexington. This is a pretty formidable force. The officers tend to have a fair amount of combat experience from the Seven Years' War. Troops, not so much. But they get to Lexington and they find about 75 or 80 militiamen who've been waiting in the cold, and they've gone into a tavern because the British don't seem to be coming. And then the word comes, "Yeah, they are coming." So they go back out, many of them have gone home.

And a shot rings out. Nobody knows who fired the first shot, but it's rather undisciplined firing by the British officers who are trying to get them to cease firing. It goes on long enough for eight Americans to lay dead, 10 to be wounded, virtually no casualties at all to the British. It's not really even a skirmish, it's a massacre. And then they're going on to Concord. The orders have been changed slightly. General Gage does not want them running all over Massachusetts trying to arrest John Hancock and Samuel Adams. He knows that's a fool's errand, but let's go out there and seize the cannons and the gunpowder we know that's in Concord. Well, it has been moved by this time, so there's very little there. And by the time they get to Concord, which is 20 miles from Boston, Concord is ready for them.

And militiamen have been coming from 50 communities in the greater Boston area. They're going to be about 4,000 militiamen involved in direct combat with the British that day and thousands more who are surging toward the sounds of the guns. They get to Concord, and they quickly realize that they are outgunned. That their 800 is about half of what they've got in Concord, famously a Concord Bridge, more gunfire. This time it's known that the British fired first. Men fall dead on both sides. The commander of this expedition recognizes, his name is Smith, he's lieutenant colonel, that he's in danger of being annihilated because there are angry, armed rebels coming from every direction, and so he's going to hightail it back to Boston. Now it's a long way. He's got wounded men; he's got dead men. He abandons his dead. He abandons some of the wounded, particularly enlisted, and it's going to be a nasty six hours or so back to Boston.

The only reason they are not annihilated is that another force has come out from Boston. There's been confusion over who should go and when they should go. But about a thousand men come out of Boston. And in Lexington as this bedraggled column is retreating, a column of Redcoats, they are embraced by this detachment that saves them from being slaughtered, and they're going to fall back into Charlestown and eventually make their way across the Charles River into Boston. The war has begun and all the way from basically Cambridge to Concord, there are bodies. There are bodies of men, there are bodies of horses, the carcasses of cattle. It's a really awful bloody day for both sides. And at this point, the genie's out of the bottle. It's going to be very hard to put that genie back in the bottle.

Aaron MacLean:

And what is the British conception of how to win the war at this point? What is their strategy at this first stage?

Rick Atkinson:

Well, they think that the Americans are going to come-to with the demonstration of this British firepower. Let's remember Britain has the greatest fleet the world has ever seen. The Americans can't begin to match them on the high seas, and they never will. So they think that the military that won the Seven Years' War, that so handily defeated the French, which have a huge army and the Spanish and created the empire in which the sun never sets, which is a phrase that was coined in 1773. They think that Americans are simply going to capitulate. Well, that's not a strategy, that's a hope. And subsequently, they're going to be stuck in Boston for the rest of the winter. Subsequently, the strategy that evolves, and this is where we get into my second volume, they're going to send an army out of Canada, down Lake Champlain, under General John Burgoyne, and the idea is to get into the Hudson River Valley and go all the way down to Albany and maybe even all the way to New York and cleave the New England colonies away from the Mid-Atlantic colonies.

This is not a bad strategy. It would really cause problems for the Americans. The problem is that the main British army under general William Howe, who had been in Boston, had been the commander on the ground at Bunker Hill where the British had a thousand casualties, 226 dead at Bunker Hill in June 1775. William Howe decides to go the other direction instead of going upriver, up the Hudson to meet Burgoyne's force. Burgoyne has about 8,000 men coming out of Canada. He goes the other direction. He decides that the war is to be won by taking Philadelphia and trying to flip Pennsylvania; he believes there are a lot of loyalists in Pennsylvania. And no one in London adjudicates this. Lord Germain, the American Secretary doesn't say, "Hey, wait a minute, this makes no sense. This is strategically incomprehensible." He basically signs off on Burgoyne's plan, on Howe's plan. So this strategy isn't so much a strategy as guys doing whatever it is they feel like they should be doing without any overarching intelligence directing the campaign.

Aaron MacLean:

Let's talk about George Washington, if you will. Among the many really remarkable elements of your books are these portraits of the key figures that you introduce, and you come back and forth to the key figures as you write. You open the first one, if I recall correctly, we get the first of any number of extended illustrations and reflections on George III, and I want to come back to him too. But from 1775 into '6, and then up to the period we're talking about now, there's this political coalescence on the American side, and there's this critical decision to elevate Washington. Talk about his role in all this. Talk about his strategic conception and the contribution he makes. Every American, of course, knows that it was significant. What's the actual reality of it?

Rick Atkinson:

Yeah, I mean, he's been embalmed in reverence, and while I'm reverential toward him, it's not for the usual reasons. I know that he’s got feet of clay. I know that he can be vain and moody with a molten temper. The man who proverbially could never lie sure can prevaricate when it comes time to telling Congress what's happened in the latest battlefield mishap. He becomes the commanding general upon appointment by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, he's a member of that Congress. He shows up in uniform to remind them that in fact, he's had five years of military experience as a militia colonel from Virginia, always under superior British command. He's seen quite a bit of combat, but he has been out of uniform for 16 years taking care of business in Mount Vernon.

Nevertheless, he seems the obvious choice. There's really no other candidate. And he's sent off, he looks the part for one thing. He's almost 6 '3 at an age when the average man was 5' 7 or so. He looks great on a horse. Jefferson says he's the greatest horseman of his age. And so he is sent as a Virginian to command the new Continental Army. It's largely a New England militia army that has been essentially federalized, although there's no such thing in those days, in the hopes that he will make it a Continental Army and he'll be a recruiting tool for southerners to rally to the cause and to join the Continental Army. And he shows up in Cambridge. The British are stuck in Boston, basically surrounded, and there's a lot he's got to learn.

Again, he's been away from any army for a long time. He doesn't know much about cavalry; he doesn't know much about artillery. He knows nothing about continental logistics because there's never been a need for such a thing. He has very little good to say about New Englanders. They're from another country as far as he's concerned. He calls them dirty New Englanders. He's very disparaging of the junior officers who show up, and he doesn't really recognize that while he has several hundred slaves back in Mount Vernon taking care of business while he's away, these men who have left their farms and their shops and their families to serve with him in the cause, serve at his side, don't have that. And he's got to come to recognize the sacrifice that they're making, and he's got to build this mystical bond between leader and led. And that's going to take him a while. He does, and one of the attributes that he's got, and he's got many virtues as a commander, is that he's a quick learner and he learns from his mistakes.

Initially, he's instinctively very aggressive, and he would like to just have one titanic battle that settles it all right now and let's have done with it. And he's going to learn that not with this force. You're not going to beat the British army. You're not going to beat the greatest navy the world has ever seen, which gives the British great mobility and great firepower when you're close to the sea where the Royal Navy can bring their guns to bear. He's going to come to realize after nearly losing the army in the cause at Long Island in August of '76, nearly losing the army, he loses 3000 men at Fort Washington north of what's now Harlem. And he was chased across New Jersey. His army is down to about 3000 men. The British are hard on his heels. He comes to realize that his notion of a Titanic battle in which it's all settled mano-a-mano in one day is not going to happen. It might be settled in one day, but it's not going to be in his favor.

So he comes, Aaron, to embrace what today we would call the strategic defensive. He's looking for opportunities to nick and bleed the British. He's looking for opportunities to fight on his terms. He's always eager for a real ruckus, but more often than not, he's going to dance out of the way, and he's going to try and wear them down, both the army and British public opinion. He's very aware that if the mother country, the body politic in Britain grows weary of the war, he's probably going to win.

And also he comes to know, although he never quite articulates this, I mean, we know now as a consequence of Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan that if you're fighting an expeditionary counterinsurgency, you have to win. If you are conducting that insurgency on your own turf, you have to not lose. And so he comes to the not lose proposition, recognizing that if he can keep hope alive, if he can keep the army more or less intact, if he can keep it fed and shod, which is very, very difficult, that eventually he's likely to wear down the British and to win. So that's his ultimate strategy, and I think it turns out to be a war winning approach to it.

Aaron MacLean:

Meanwhile, overseas, what the British fear comes to pass. It becomes a European, or even in a way, a global war. Talk about how that happens. I mean, the French and the Spanish are watching all of this from the start, eyeing their advantage, but what actually brings their intervention to pass? What role do people like Ben Franklin play in all of this? Help us understand that.

Rick Atkinson:

Yeah. This book, Fate of the Day, opens not in New Jersey, it opens in Versailles because the game for the Americans at this point, it's the spring of 1777, is to persuade the Roman Catholic absolute monarch, Louis XVI, to come on the side of the angels and to support Protestant wannabe Republicans waging armed rebellion against their lawful monarch. It's a heavy lift diplomatically. And the guy sent to make it happen is Benjamin Franklin, who's a septuagenarian at this point. He arrives in Paris, the most famous American in the world as a consequence of his scientific discoveries, he's treated like a demigod, a rock star in Paris. People run after his carriage and people have little busts of Franklin on their mantelpieces and portraits in their bedrooms of him, which he really likes. He loves being, he loves the adulation. But he arrives in Paris in December of 1776, and his job is to persuade the French to not just provide clandestine arms and support, which they've been doing on the sly, but to really come in with both feet and to provide a fleet and to provide an army.

And his argument is basically, France feels humiliated as a consequence of the loss in the Seven Years' War, and the territory that they've lost and the respect that they feel that they've lost among European powers. And Franklin's argument to them is that the best way to regain the position of France as first among equals, among all the European powers, is to stick it to the British. And the best way to stick it to the British is by supporting the Americans who are bent on sticking it to the British and are in fact sticking it to the British. This is going to take a while because the French are not convinced that the Americans can in fact hold their own. It's the Battle of Saratoga, the two battles in September and October 1777, and actually the Battle of Germantown, which is an American loss, but shows fighting esprit. It shows Washington at his most aggressive and daring, although not at his tactical best.

It's this sequence of events in America that persuade Louis XVI, his foreign minister Vergennes, that in fact they are going to, they're going to sign treaties with the Americans, and they are going to become our allies. The Spanish are a little more wary. They don't want to encourage insurrections. They've got Peru and Mexico, and that's where the real money for them is. So they will come in, they're bound to the French, the Bourbon Pact, the Family Pact that binds them together. And they're going to come in against the British, although not actually on our side, just as opponents of the British, and then the Dutch are eventually going to come into it too. So it becomes, it goes from being this obscure brush fire war on the edge of the civilized world to a global war, fought on four continents, the seven seas. At the same time, it's a civil war in America with all the nastiness that every civil war brings with it.

So the British ambition to have a short, quick teach the fractious children to fall in line kind of war has spun completely out of control for them, and it becomes really for them, for the British, also a war that's about their very existence. It is existential for them, too.

Aaron MacLean:

It's an interesting reversal of the usual pattern you see with British grand strategy or the British role in the world in the 18th, 19th centuries, 20th century for that matter, where it's typically, I'm a bit on a limb here, I'm making this up as I go along, but I'm curious to your response to this. Typically, the Brits are leading or are senior partners in some anti-hegemonic condition or coalition, rather, targeting some continental state. I mean, this goes back really to the early modern period, right? Targeting the Spanish, then targeting the French. Later in the 20th century, it'll be the Germans, keeping said state from achieving hegemony that puts Britain at some permanent disadvantage, whereas here they have become the victims of an anti-hegemonic coalition that they have somehow failed to prevent from ganging up on them through their own errors.

Rick Atkinson:

Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And part of it is overweening pride, this notion that coming out of 1763 and British overwhelming victory in the Seven Years' War, they are the biggest, baddest guy on the block. They dominate world trade. There are 8,000 British merchant ships plying the world seas. But they have no friends. The only ally they've got is tiny Portugal, and they're not going to have any friends throughout the American Revolution. And I think one of the lessons of our history is that the best team usually wins. We've shown this in World War II and World War I and in the Revolution, I mean, it's one of our first and greatest diplomatic lessons. We had the better team. We managed to put together our own coalition against the British non coalition.

I mean, in 1779, late summer of 1779, the British woke up on the southern coast of England, there is a huge Franco-Spanish Armada right off the coast, intent on taking Portsmouth, the greatest port in southern England, and perhaps marching out of London. This is where they find themselves. And to say that George III can never quite figure out how his reign, and he's going to be king for almost 60 years, has been so tangled up in this minor skirmish against colonists in the distant march lands of his empire. Instead, it becomes really this existential fight where he has to take a role as Captain General of British forces.

Aaron MacLean:

Things get stalemated in the northern part of the Atlantic seaboard, the British ultimately shift south. I want to step down from strategic considerations for a second to the battlefield. You mentioned a few minutes ago about just the violence and awfulness that comes along with civil war wherever it may be occurring. The battlefield itself, of course, is a pretty savage place, and I think at times, people who are thinking casually about this period of history tend to picture the 18th century battlefield as a fairly sterile place maybe compared to their notions of a 20th century battlefield or something like that.

With your permission, I'm going to read a passage from your most recent book about a relatively small engagement that happens after the fall of Charleston. So I guess this is 1780, and it speaks, I think, to battlefield conditions. It also speaks to your own literary style, so I'll just take a minute here.

"At 03:30 pm, Tarleton's Legion massed 300 yards from the rebel line, then trotted forward before breaking into a full gallop to attack Buford's center in both flanks. The single point-blank volley from continental muskets staggered the charge, but only for an instant. Some Americans threw down their weapons and raised their hands, others fumbled to reload or broke through the rear. A bullet through the forehead brought down Tarleton's lathered horse, spilling the colonel to the ground, and momentarily pinning him beneath the carcass. He soon regained his feet, but word passed from lip to ear that Tarleton had been killed, an affront that, quote, 'stimulated the soldiers to a vindictive asperity not easily restrained.' He later wrote, quote, "Slaughter was commenced.""

"British dragoons wheeled through the terrified Continentals hacking and thrusting. One lieutenant's nose and lip were bisected obliquely and the lower jaw completely divided. Another soldier suffered 22 sword and bayonet wounds, including a fractured skull and the amputation of part of his right hand. They were among the lucky survivors. Within half an hour, 113 Americans sprawled dead in the dirt. Another 150 wounded lay bleeding and were carried off as prisoners. Farmers carted the injured to a log church with a straw floor. Those tending their wounds included a woman named Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson, who was accompanied by her 13-year-old son, Andrew. The future president later wrote that, quote, 'None of the men had less than three or four or some as many as 13 gashes in them.' Andrew Jackson would despise the British for the rest of his long life."

That passage stuck with me. It's one of many that I think do what words can to convey just the nature of the awfulness of it all. This war goes on for more than half a decade. What are its consequences on the people who live through it? I mean, this is a terrible thing occurring all up and down through the populated areas of the colonies that will ultimately be the United States. What's the legacy of it for the people who actually fight it and survive it?

Rick Atkinson:

Yeah, I mean, we tend to think of the bright spots, including an independent country, and we're off on our own, and the Constitution is going to derive from victory in these eight years of war. I think it's hard to know what the psychological effect is on some of those who've been through a lot of this. You're right, we tend to think of the war as a faded lithograph. The blood has been leached out of it over 250 years, and it's really not like that. Not only do you have scenes like that, which was fought right on the South Carolina, North Carolina border after the fall of Charleston where an American army of 5,000 men surrendered. That's a catastrophe in and of itself. The battlefield is bad enough, but of the 25,000 to 35,000 Americans who died for the cause, most of them die of disease.

Smallpox, the "king of terrors" as it's sometimes called, is horrible. It destroys the army that we send into Canada in 1775. Typhus is the great killer of armies over the centuries, and Typhus kills more soldiers than bullets do. Typhoid, dysentery, it's a long list of diseases. At Valley Forge in that grim winter of '77, '78, more than 2000 American soldiers die, and they die of malnutrition and disease and bad clothing, and many of them don't have shoes in the winter. So the consequences for the loyalists, for the tens of thousands of loyalists, they lose their country in many cases. Many of them emigrate, and they go to Canada, they go to Jamaica, to Barbados, back to England in some cases, and it's a sad thing because in some cases they've tried to straddle the fence, not really committed to the Crown full bore, not really committed to the rebellion full bore, wanting to just stay out of the way, but they get caught up in the notion that you got to choose.

Very few can remain really neutral through these eight years. Now some do, and there's a period of forgiveness, and there are relatively few repercussions once the war's over against those who have either showed loyalist tendencies or actually fought on behalf of the Crown, but there are those tens of thousands who have left. For a guy like Washington, all he wants to do is go back to his plantation, and that's what he does. He's been at it for eight years. He's only been back to Mount Vernon once in those eight years, and it's for a very short period of time when he is on his way to Yorktown in 1781.

We know that he's tired. It's a good thing he's as robust as he is. He never seems to even catch cold, but we know that he's worn out, and we can anticipate that all those who've been with him for most of the campaigns like Henry Knox, 25-year-old, overweight Boston bookseller Washington somehow identifies as the future father of American artillery. Or Nathanael Greene, a lapsed Quaker from New England, an anchorsmith. Somehow Washington recognizes that this guy's going to be second only to him as the most indispensable man in the army. We know they're worn out too. They're tired, and so for the average soldier, most of them haven't been fighting for eight years. They go in and out of service. The militia certainly go in and out of service, but a lot of them come out of it broke. Nathanael Greene is flat broke because the dollar's proverbially not worth the Continental. I mean, it is worth nothing. And so you've been collecting your pay, but it's not worth anything, literally not worth anything. So they're stuck with building their lives over again and trying to, okay, we did it. We're independent. We're on our own. Now what do we do?

So there's that period, and they're going to grapple for a while before they find a workable political structure that will put it all together for them, and they're going to blunder along for a while. There are, as we know, in every war there are widows left by themselves, there are orphans. The whole panoply, the whole disaster of war is part of the landscape in the 13 states when peace finally comes in 1783. And it's going to take a while to recognize that, okay, here we go. We're going to make something out of this. We've been fighting for a reason and now we're going to build on that.

Aaron MacLean:

It's extraordinary how much suffering and failure are baked into victory, an ultimate success. We are at the front end of this 250-year celebration, I guess. What do you hope people take from these celebrations that I expect will peak next summer with the anniversary of 1776 and the Declaration? What is it that you hope are the things, the parts of this inheritance that people pay the most attention to?

Rick Atkinson:

Well, I think it's important to remember, and we should celebrate, we should commemorate, or we should remember. I'm old enough to remember the bicentennial, and it was a pretty happy occasion. We felt a sense of unity. This is right after Watergate, right after Vietnam, and it was a unifying thing. I hope people remember, recognize that we're the beneficiaries of an enlightened political heritage handed down to us from that revolutionary generation. It includes personal liberties and strictures on how to divide power and to keep it from concentrating in the hands of authoritarians who think primarily of themselves. We can't allow that priceless heritage to slip away or to be taken away, and we can't be oblivious to the hundreds of thousands who've given their lives to affirm and sustain it over the past 250 years. This is one of the essences of what the Revolution is about.

So I think we should look back on people that we've come to think of as demigods and perhaps see that they all have feet of clay, that they all have flaws, those 577 slaves that worked in Mount Vernon in Washington's lifetime, that's a horrific reminder that the prosperity of this country was built on human bondage. Let's not shy away from that. We don't need to think less of the achievements of the Revolution or everything that came out of it and that we've built on in the subsequent 250 years because it is a flawed thing, or that these are flawed men and women. Of course they are. So I hope that we have a realistic, forgiving, inclusive notion of what the Revolution was.

Aaron MacLean:

Rick Atkinson, author most recently of The Fate of the Day, the War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a great pleasure.

Rick Atkinson:

It's been my pleasure, Aaron. Thanks for having me-