On Christmas Day 1776, the ambitious, well-connected war hero, General John Burgoyne, soon to be appointed commander of British forces in Canada, agreed a wager of 50 guineas with Charles James Fox ‘that he will be home victorious from America by Christmas Day 1777.’ Nine weeks short of that date, on 17 October, Burgoyne surrendered his sword and an army of more than 8,000 men, together with 50 cannon and vast quantities of muskets and gunpowder, to an American general, Horatio Gates, after defeat and encirclement at the battle of Saratoga in upstate New York. No bet was ever more comprehensively lost.
The victory at Saratoga, won by citizen-soldiers over professional troops, played a vital role in the dramatic events that led to the birth of the United States. And the story that Americans tell about those events, of a people who earned independence by their own individual endeavour, remains integral to the way they see themselves today.
The narrative comprises both physical action — the civil resistance to unjust taxation from London that spiralled into violence during the decade from 1765 to 1775 — and, more significantly, the evolution of an idea of freedom from the English common law’s support for the inalienable rights of a property-owner into an authentically home-grown assertion of each person’s innate right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It was in the crucible of the Revolutionary War that these two ingredients fused into a national reality, enabling American enterprise and commitment to triumph over the brute force of German mercenaries and British redcoats.
Andrew O’Shaughnessy’s fascinating examination of the war does not challenge this scenario. Instead, by rescuing Britain’s generals, and to some extent its politicians, from the general charge of unthinking incompetence, he seeks to buttress it. ‘If we take seriously the capabilities of the British leadership,’ he writes in the introduction, ‘the achievements of the American commanders appear much greater.’
On the basis of his earlier ground-breaking history on 18th-century Atlantic colonialism, the Anglo-American O’Shaughnessy commands respect, but it is also possible to draw another conclusion from his research, one less flattering to national pride but perhaps more apt for the age.
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