... was the Revolution truly a 'civil war' at heart? And what was the role of the many tens of thousands of everyday Loyalists whose presence made it potentially so? Where were they, who were they, and did they actually fight? Readers looking for answers to such questions will have to look elsewhere. What Mr. Brands provides is a brisk, engaging narrative history of the Revolution itself. He highlights the Franklin drama, alongside more glancing accounts of other Loyalist cases, to ensure that an oft-overlooked part of the American Revolution receives its due.
Brands offers a fast-paced, often riveting account of the military and political events leading up to the Declaration of Independence and those that followed during the war ... This focus on individual experiences and actions allows a reader the comfort of revisiting old friends whose life histories are twice-told tales, while also providing introductions to less well-known but equally interesting men ... The author deftly narrates the military action of the Great War for Empire and then offers a vivid account of the protests against the new, harsher British colonial policies that end in revolution. While there is little new in his account, he tells the story well ... Brands peppers his narrative with anecdotes that sharpen his portraits of the book’s leading figures and events ... But, in the end, Brands’s heavy reliance on the perceptions and actions of leading figures of the era leaves much of the story untold ... Brands’s top-down approach may explain his failure to answer the central questions he asks in his prologue ... Brands does his readers a service by reminding them that division, as much as unity, is central to the founding of our nation. One wishes he had limned that division with a sharper pen.
The author ably documents the drift from petitioning to open rebellion, and cites anecdotes on the consequences experienced by Loyalists during the war. He quotes liberally from letters between Patriot leaders ... But what Brands doesn’t do is delve deeply, or in any great detail, into the civil war that he has set up as his book’s errand. Loyalists and their contribution to the British cause appear infrequently throughout, almost on the order of a footnote to the narrative on America’s drift toward radicalization and the war ... The reader is never provided with a clear sense of how many Loyalists there were, how many of them took up arms, and how effective their intransigence was for the British cause. There are thousands, of course, the reader learns, but not how many thousands. Perhaps such numbers are hard to ascertain with precision from the historical record, but if that is the case, the author doesn’t make it.
Much of the book is devoted to the evolution of Washington and Franklin from staunch Britons to unlikely leaders in the movement for independence. But Franklin’s sad family history is equally intriguing ... Brands also shows that the British were their own worst enemies, treating sincere compromise efforts with arrogant contempt, then ignoring informed advice from Loyalists over the war’s conduct ... Brands shows how fraught and complicated it was for the generation that lived through it, a perspective well worth considering amid our current divisions.
This engaging book, which includes often-neglected Indigenous and Black perspectives of the war, reads like the story of a contentious extended family, as opposed to a traditional military history. It will appeal to a wide audience.
... a page-turning account ... Gripping prose and lucid explanations of the period’s complex politics make this an essential reconsideration of the Revolutionary era.
... an expert account narrated heavily through quotes from the writings of Washington, Franklin, and their contemporaries. The author’s use of original documents lends the book a vivid, historically authentic flavor, though some readers may not thrill to pages of 18th-century prose ... A skillful traditional history of the American Revolution that pays more than the usual attention to its American opponents.
