In his meticulously researched, beautifully calibrated Liberty Is Sweet, historian Woody Holton adds necessary nuance, building on...stories previously marginalized (or invisible) in our narrative of the nation's birth while illuminating a collective yearning to form a more perfect union ... Holton's painstaking yet vivid military coverage is one of the book's crowning achievements. Until now I'd not grasped the machinations of battles such as Breed's (also known as Bunker) Hill or Cowpens, or even Washington's iconic crossing of the Delaware River ... Holton also enriches Liberty Is Sweet with astute analysis of how the young states began to organize themselves in their grand experiment of self-government ... Holton, then, threads the needle, expanding the spirit of the 1619 Project while bringing a granular scholarship and immersive storytelling in the mode of Gordon Wood and Sean Wilentz. Liberty Is Sweet is a magnificent book, a vital account worthy of all the accolades that will come its way.
Holton is a proficient and tireless researcher who, using his own findings and those of others, presents fresh appraisals of important developments based on lives and events long condemned to obscurity ... He is just as perceptive, however, when he assesses the strategy, tactics, and leadership of George Washington, as well as Washington’s fellow American and allied French officers and their British adversaries. His writing sparkles in these chapters, in crisp, assured expositions. While attentive to the cold logic of command, Holton never minimizes warfare’s grotesque inhumanity. His book’s real achievement may be to redirect academic historians’ attention to the battlefields and to appreciating anew some of the least hidden aspects of the Revolution ... Other of the book’s central interpretations are less convincing ... What Liberty Is Sweet fails to offer is a single piece of evidence—a letter or diary entry or newspaper article or pamphlet—in which any patriot states that Dunmore’s proclamation converted him or anyone else to support independence. Without that evidence, Holton’s argument collapses.
By widening the scope of what he looks at, Holton delivers a much more interesting and complicated story than the traditional legend of the nation’s founding ... Holton has righted a long-imposed wrong by telling these stories, introducing tribes that most readers will not recognize, so deeply has their history been buried. He does the same thing for African Americans and women, showing them as active participants in the formation of the United States, not passive bystanders ... Holton throws down [a] challenge to his readers, providing a richly researched, carefully thought-out, and complicatedly inclusive history, an antidote to the current black-and-white thinking that’s proving so divisive today.
A great strength of Liberty Is Sweet is that it refuses to paint either the colonists or the British Empire as simple villains or victims ... As Holton moves from the French and Indian War to the War of Independence, he spends much time on the battlefield. Though he has a gift for pacing and narrative detail, this section, by far the longest of the book, can begin to feel antiquated. But Holton is attuned to what is sometimes called the 'new military history' and therefore offers intriguing details ... Liberty Is Sweet underwhelms. It demonstrates Holton’s enviable grasp of the scholarship and his skill at narrative prose, but it offers no larger argument, only a myriad of smaller rejoinders to popular myths. It is full of interests but no big ideas. One senses that he is giving us a souped-up version of his college lectures rather than a fully thought-through narrative history.
... the opposite of the narrow caricature Adams imagined. It is a sweeping narrative history of the Revolution that attempts to include everyone—slave and free, men and women, prosperous businessmen and indebted farmers, immigrants and Native Americans—into a single story of different people struggling for freedom ... Mr. Holton emphasizes the stories of obscure individuals whom the new nation excluded, disappointed or dispossessed ... In bringing many obscure sources to light, Mr. Holton, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina and the author of an acclaimed biography of Abigail Adams, demonstrates an impressive range of erudition. But his imaginative sympathies don’t extend to the primary subject of his narrative, the political and military struggle for independence. Mr. Holton adopts a conspicuously listless attitude toward this epochal event, describing the pivotal moments and the key figures as if fulfilling a contractual obligation. The result is a bit like reading a steamy romance as retold by a Victorian moralist: The basic story is the same, but most of the enthralling details are suppressed ... Mr. Holton’s concern for the obscure and downtrodden enriches his portrait of the Revolution, but he often undermines his purpose with interpretive claims that are exaggerated or downright fanciful ... Instead of reckoning with the reality of slavery and honestly celebrating the resilience of its victims, Mr. Holton offers a fantasy of power wielded by the powerless. This is a very different caricature than the one John Adams imagined, of a Revolution that began with Dr. Franklin’s electric rod, but it is a caricature nevertheless.
... an ambitious if sprawling survey ... emphases accurately reflect dominant themes in contemporary scholarship, and they laudably expand our conception of the depth and complexity of the revolution. Yet they also come at a certain cost. Most important, they make it harder to explain why the revolution happened or to identify its lasting consequences for American politics ... he gives us sharp assessments of the war’s commanders and sobering descriptions of its brutality, and reveals a keen eye for the battlefield ... This section has a narrative verve that the other parts of the book lack ... The great weakness of Liberty Is Sweet rests with its approach to...traditional political concerns. Like his Progressive predecessors, Holton does not take constitutional arguments very seriously ... There are several problems with Holton’s account of the origins of the revolution ... In the end, one leaves Holton’s book wondering whether he deems the revolution worth commemorating at all.
Holton's detailed account, spanning from 1763 to 1795, reveals little-known factors that gradually transformed resistance into rebellion, and complexities of military decisions and encounters gone wrong and of the war's far-reaching and enduring aftermath ... Holton's exhaustive, masterfully written chronicle demonstrates that the Revolution was much more than a movement instigated by the political ideologies of a handful of elite, revered (although flawed) Founding Fathers against the British parliament and king. This book will be pivotal for scholars and requested by American history enthusiasts.
Historian Holton...has specifically set out to tell not just the economic and political history of the American Revolution. His deeper goal includes how the Revolution was shaped by not only the continent’s previous inhabitants, but also by the dream of liberty of the thousands of enslaved people who had been transported across the Atlantic from Africa ... Even readers who think they know all about the Revolution will find here a much broader, provocative narrative and new perspectives.
... sweeping ... Skillfully probing the Revolution’s ambiguities and inconsistencies, this richly detailed, multidimensional history casts America’s founding in a revealing new light.
A thoroughgoing work of scholarship ... Holton...delineates the story of the conflict in all its complexity, contradictions, and 'multiple dimensions' ... Through a painstaking, immensely readable chronological study, the author guides readers through specific elements of the war ... A rich, multifaceted work showing how the U.S. has always been a multiracial nation.
