Read this book. Everyone, read this book!
I really enjoyed Russell Shorto's The Island at the Center of the World, so when I saw that NetGalley had his latest up for pre-publication review, I had to read it. Not only is he a fantastic researcher and eminently readable (easy, elegant, yet not overwhelming in his prose), the subject was the Revolutionary War, my favorite period of American History. Revolution Song was even better than I'd hoped, and I;d hoped it would be really good.
Mr. Shorto takes 6 figures from the Revolutionary War era, some famous, some not, some deserving to be better know than they are. Using exhausting and meticulous research, he traces the history of the trajectory to war and its consequences through the lives of these six. And being the contemporary historian that he is, he picked a powerful set of six people; George Washington, famous but yet never treated with as deft and thorough a history as here; Abraham Yates, well known in his lifetime in his home state but now my personal hero for his prescient and sagacious and wise trepidations about the revolution and the constitution; Cornplanter, an Iroquois leader, also prescient and in some ways the saddest figure of the six; Venture Smith, who is kidnapped as a boy in Africa, enslaved in America, and who earns his own freedom and perhaps understood that word far more intimately than the others, and certainly ore so than the readers; George Sackville Germain, an English nobleman and soldier who advocated for war from the safety of England; and Margaret Montcrieffe Coghlan, anAmerican by birth, an Englishwoman by marriage and choice, whose pitiable life demonstrates how the cruelty and indifference of men to women ruined entire lives, generations of lives, and continues to this day to be the norm in parts of the world.
A revolutionary American leader, a want-to-be English leader, a a wise Native leader, a prescient local leader, a freed man of strength, and an woman who was enslaved by her society--they represent large swaths of eighteenth century society and resonate with today's audience. Mr. Shorto makes them come alive. How they met and survived the war, and how it changed them and their worlds, is riveting reading.
But what I walked away with was, in his own words, not what Mr. Shorto himself admits he expected--the grave fears of Mr. Yates re: congressional overreach, party loyalty being placed above civic duty, the emergence of a would-be dictator enriching his own pockets while dismantling our government and the protections our forefathers (including my own great, great, great, great, great grandfather and his four brothers) expected government to provide the average American--they are so relevant to today, clearly enunciating what we see happening every day as reported in newspaper headlines, that I wonder what Abraham Yates would think if he were alive tp see what we did to this country, what we allowed to happen to this country. Actually, I think I know exactly what he would think.
"Secrecy... was the soil in which tyranny grew."
Political parties "...serve ...to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force--to put it in the place of the delegated will of the Nation, the will of the party."
"'The alternative domination of one faction over another... is itself a frightful disposition' which could lead 'to a more formal and permanent despotism."
Rough Hewer, we need your wisdom and your determination and courage again.
What an amazing book. It is the best book I have read all year, truly. Not only for the research and the writing, but the unexpected relevance to the United States of today, the reminder of how hard fought our freedom was, and the dangers our founding fathers tried to prevent.
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