Ships from: Las Cruces, NM
Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Ships from: Las Cruces, NM
Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Ships from: Sussex, WI
Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Ships from: Deming, WA
Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Ships from: Kansas City, MO
Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Ships from: Boulder, CO
Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Ships from: La Grange, IL
Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Ships from: La Grange, IL
Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Ships from: Arlington, TX
Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Ships from: London, United Kingdom
Usually ships in 1-2 business days
William Hallahan's skillful and colorful narrative details the exuberance of the new nation, as news of England's surrender travels north, city by city, to Philadelphia, New York, Boston, then on to London and Paris, and our young nation takes its first steps toward fulfilling its brilliant destiny. Thrusting you into the revolution's worst year, 1780, and its finale the year after, The Day the Revolution Ended covers the many devastating blows that faced Washington and his impoverished troops during the last years of the war and the thrilling comeback of the allies -- made possible by France's resources -- as all forces made their way toward Yorktown in the final showdown of the American Revolution. After six long years of tooth-and-nail skirmishes, the Revolutionary War was drawing to a climactic close. The stage had been set. As General Cornwallis set up camp to make his final stand in the sleepy Virginian tobacco port of Yorktown, General Washington received the news that would change the fate of the colonies: France's Admiral de Grasse was leading a fleet of twenty-nine ships and six frigates from the French West Indies up to the Chesapeake. The allies would finally have the resources to win the revolution.
But with this great hope came far too many seemingly insurmountable obstacles: de Grasse would not stay in Chesapeake after October 15. This gave Washington and Lafayette less than two months to move their armies 450 miles, lay siege against Cornwallis, and compel him to surrender. If Cornwallis tried to escape by water, could the French Navy fight their way up the American coast past or through the British Navy and block Cornwalis's escape? Could Lafayette find enough cavalry and troops to block the Yorktown peninsula? Win or lose, the Battle of Yorktown would decide the fate of the colonies. William Hallahan's spellbinding narrative traces the dramatic events of those last crucial years of war and revolution, when all the gathered forces met in climactic resolution. He grippingly recreates the events that took place throughout America, England, and France during the revolution, culminating with the momentous sea battle between the French and British navies, the faceoff at Yorktown, and the world's reaction to Britain's surrender. Rivetingly told and vividly detailed, William Hallahan's breathtaking narrative follows a young, tenacious nation's relentless quest for emancipation and offers piercing portraits of the leading actors, on both sides, in the drama that shaped America's destiny.
On Broadway across from Bowling Green in New York City, Benedict Arnold, American turncoat and now a brigadier general in His Majesty's Royal British Army, limped into British army headquarters. It was late November 1780.
Arnold had been summoned by Sir Henry Clinton, fifty, commanding general of the British forces in North America, to get his marching orders for a new attack on the rebels. This was to be Arnold's first action against his former compatriots, and he had been urging Clinton to let him attack Philadelphia, a storehouse for vast quantities of military supplies and also the seat of the Continental Congress-those dozens of gallows-bait revolutionists whom Arnold hated so passionately. Such a military strike could entomb the revolution. Clinton had declined. Arnold then urged an attack in one of the southern states. Clinton had taken time to think it over.
General Clinton was squirming in a military and political cauldron. Nearly six years after the American Revolution had begun, the British army seemed no closer to defeating the rebels. In fact, for two and a half years, since the Battle of Monmouth in New Jersey, George Washington and his ragged band of starvelings had been waiting a few miles north on the Hudson highlands for Sir Henry to come out of his New York fortress to challenge them again on thebattlefield.
The two men sitting here across from each other were the very yin and yang of personalities: phlegmatic Sir Henry, the ever-planning, cautious, slow-to-move British career soldier; and mercurial Arnold, the ever-dangerous, explosive, militarily gifted Connecticut soldier, a legend even among British officers.
As a gifted military strategist and a very reluctant campaigner, Sir Henry-Harry to his friends-was searching desperately for the single masterstroke-entailing very little risk-that would bag that wily American fox, Washington, and ship him to the gallows in London-the stroke that would win the war, shower him with glory, and earn him a statue in St. Paul's Cathedral.
And here sitting across from him was the very paladin he needed-this ambulating maelstrom, this brilliant battlefield berserker. In his spanking-new British general's uniform, thirty-nine-year-old Benedict Arnold had one thing on his volcanically erupting mind: revenge. Revenge on the pack of politicians in the Continental Congress who, he believed, had ganged up on him and driven him into his new red coat.
From his first meeting with Sir Henry Clinton, Arnold had talked obsessively about his master plan for personally finishing the revolution. By pouncing on Philadelphia with a cadre of redcoats, he would destroy the vitally important manufacturing infrastructure and supply nexus of the Continental Army there, make an inferno of the supply ships and docks, then, surrounding the State House, pluck from it all his enemies in both the Continental Congress and the Pennsylvania Assembly to haul them in chains across the ocean and fling them at the feet of George III, the whole rotten pack of them, a noose around each neck.
Pennsylvanian Joseph Reed; that New England gang-especially the Adams cousins, Sam and John; Horatio Gates; James Wilkinson; Thomas Conway; and many more. That one stroke could destroy the core of the revolution and bring the resistance to a sudden end.
And toward that end, with Clinton's encouragement, he was busy forming a new, fast-moving, hard-hitting military legion to be composed of the very men who would be most highly motivated to attack-American deserters, each with his personal score to settle.
But as the two talked now, Arnold realized that Sir Harry, while talking about an attack in the South, was issuing some very strange orders.
"You will be pleased to proceed with the troops which are embarked under your command to Chesapeake Bay," Sir Henry told him. And with those 1,600 lightly armed and mobile troops, he was to set up a base of operations there at Portsmouth, strategically situated on the Elizabeth River, right in the comforting shadow of the masts and rigging of British warships-his built-in naval escape hatch in the event of major attack by land or sea.
This was to be a temporary naval and raiding base, not a permanent major military installation. From there he was to mount a series of punishing raids on the Tidewater region. Destroy the rebels' military storehouses, particularly in Richmond and Petersburg. Stop the flow of troop reinforcements and supplies to General Greene in the Carolinas and cause his army in the South to wither and die. Ruin the Virginia economy, which was helping to finance the rebel cause. Most of all, snap the spine of the colonial snake, thereby separating the North from the South, for piecemeal conquest.
Sir Henry also specified certain other activities in those marching orders: Arnold was to issue a call to the Virginia Loyalists, those "well affected to His Majesty's government," then arm and train them-a whole army of them. Arnold was also to build a number of boats and assemble a naval force in Albemarle Sound "for the purpose of annoying the enemy's communications and trade and securing means of intelligence or even of a retreat for his detachment in case a superior French fleet should take a temporary possession of the Chesapeake."
That single thrust into Virginia offered other benefits. It could distract Washington from his plans to invade New York City. It would smooth the royal brow in London. Most important, it could regain the initiative for that fizzling Carolinas campaign from which Clinton had promised London so much.
And always that timid stipulation: Do this only if it can be done "without much risk." Sir Henry wanted daringly safe warfare.
Then Clinton stunned Arnold, must have made him regret turning his coat. Arnold was not getting an unfettered command. He was part of a troika. Going with Arnold were lieutenant colonels Dundas and Simcoe -"officers of great experience and much in my confidence." Further, "I am to desire that you will always consult those gentlemen previous to your undertaking any operation of consequence."
In short, Clinton was putting Arnold on a leash-two leashes. Arnold's actions could be vetoed by the other two lesser officers. In effect, the timorous Clinton was sending his prized new champion into battle handcuffed. Then he weakened his own orders to the level of request. Lord Cornwallis, in the South, would also be able to veto any of Arnold's moves. Clinton's orders were explicit: "You are directed to obey His Lordship's commands."
This was a typical Clinton move, cautious, equivocal, with built-in escape hatches, creating a self-canceling troika to fight a risk-free battle.
Yet taking risks-audacious, breathtaking risks-was the one feature that had made Arnold such a ferocious, brilliant, and victorious general. One need not guess at Arnold's opinion of Clinton.
No other British general knew the Americans better than Sir Henry. Born in New Brunswick, Canada, he spent many of his boyhood years in New York City while his father, Admiral George Clinton, was royal governor of the Colony of New York. He had gone to school with colonists' sons, and at fourteen received his first military commission, as captain-lieutenant of the New York militia.
Few in the British army had spent more time fighting the rebels. Arriving in Boston right after the Battle of Lexington-Concord, he was present at the Battle of Bunker Hill, which the British, suffering an unimaginable slaughter, won only after the embattled farmers had run out of ammunition and left the field. The slaughter of redcoats on that hill on that day was so great (44 percent casualties-1,154 men and officers killed and wounded) that even the Americans were awed.
Sir Henry had warned General Thomas Gage that the frontal attack uphill against an entrenched enemy was suicidal. He recommended instead that British troops outflank the Americans and cut off their escape route from Bunker Hill. General Gage ignored him.
In the five intervening years, Sir Henry had fought many battles against the American army.
The pivotal moment came on June 28, 1778, a brutally hot day at Monmouth, New Jersey, in a stand-up, head-on, thumb-in-your-eye battle. Clinton had been moving his army from Philadelphia to New York and was caught with a seventeen-mile wagon train behind him. The Americans took on the redcoats in classic European style, musket against musket, bayonet against bayonet. This time, the Americans didn't run out of ammunition, didn't break and run from the deadly British bayonets. Using the British army's own tactics, they were winning when darkness descended. Historians still disagree over who might have won if the light had not failed. It is possible that dusk saved Clinton from the most disastrous British defeat of the war.
The next morning the Americans found that, on the plea of getting his army into camp in New York City, Clinton and his army had slipped away during the night, leaving Washington in possession of an empty battlefield. The Americans claimed victory.
Clinton also claimed victory, but it did not really sit right. He knew the American army had finally gelled. From that moment on it was every bit a match for his own. Since that day, Sir Henry had seemed reluctant to face his adversary again.
Unlike his high-born, aristocratic second in command, Lord Cornwallis, Sir Harry didn't act like the aggressive general he should have been, heavily bemedaled and battle-eager, nor, also unlike Lord Cornwallis, did he look the part. At age fifty, his baggy body had gone soft, his face so coarse-featured he looked more like a publican in a rough neighborhood than a member of the British peerage.
When confronted with the need for action, Sir Henry delayed. He hesitated. He planned to excess, loved to spin out one scheme after another without end, many of them brilliant. But then, unable to settle on one, he settled on none.
One of his major failings was the inability to communicate clearly. He hated to argue with people who disagreed with him, so he came to regard opposition to his ideas as disloyalty to him personally. Yet his subordinates often couldn't figure out what he wanted. In truth, he himself often seemed not to know. Like his handwriting, his orders were undecipherable. Often running for pages, they contradicted themselves. The puzzled readers did what seemed best. Then Sir Harry would complain that they had not carried out his orders.
When confusion brought on failure, Sir Henry would shift blame onto others. He would invent orders from his superiors in London, or single out a subordinate, confront him with previous conversations that never took place, then extract from him abject apologies. He kept notes, listing the errors, failures, and even scraps of conversation of others. As a result, Sir Henry believed himself surrounded by conspiracy.
This neurotic, indecisive, often paranoid manner cost him the friendship of most of his colleagues in America. Few people liked him; fewer trusted him. He was isolated.
Thomas Jones, justice of the Supreme Court of the Province of New York, dismissed Sir Harry in one sentence: "Clinton was one of the most irresolute, timid, stupid and ignorant animals in the world."
Old Major General James Robertson, governor of New York, had observed many times the endless bickering between Sir Harry and the aged, feeble Admiral Arbuthnot, who was so lost in his dementia he often could not remember five minutes later any promises he had made. Robertson described them as "birds of a feather" and opined that "it was hard to tell which was the greater fool."
Admiral Rodney, after his latest visit to New York, let his assessment of Clinton be known all over London: "Nature has not given him an enterprising and active spirit, capable of pushing the advantages he may have gained in battle. But when success has crowned his arms, an immediate relaxation takes place; and his affection for New York (in which island he has four different houses) induces him to retire to that place, where without any settled plan he idles his time and ... suffers himself to be cooped up by Washington with an inferior army, without making any attempt to dislodge him." Rodney condemned Clinton's officers for putting on plays instead of chasing rebels.
Like most loners, Clinton had few friends in London to speak up for him because he had few friends-which meant that in Whitehall, to counter growing criticism, he had no advocates, while the winsome Cornwallis had many. In a military beauty contest, Clinton would never claim the crown.
Sir Henry also knew that almost every man who served him, down to the lowest stable boy, disliked him-many detested him. Here was a shy man, a diffident man, insecure and deeply tinged with paranoia, who had surrounded himself with a collection of second-raters, smiling incompetents ever ready with gushing praises for their leader. Sir Henry was a passive man in an action job.
He lived in fear that Washington's men, in a reprise of their haunting Christmas night attack at Trenton in 1776, would attack him in his fortress city. On some dark, bitter night in the coming winter, after the Hudson had frozen to five or six feet, the ragamuffin army on bleeding bare feet would come bursting out of a blinding snowstorm across the ice and onto the streets of Manhattan to take him in his bed.
But he was also ever aware that among British generals America was known as the "grave of reputations." And that made him very careful.
On Friday, October 20, 1780, George Washington summoned the twenty-three-year-old commandant of his Virginia light horse legion, Major Henry (Light-Horse Harry) Lee, to his headquarters at Tappan on the Hudson and gave him a stunning mission: Kidnap Benedict Arnold.
Washington had come to rely increasingly on this very young officer who was already an army legend. A passionate Virginian to his bootsoles, Henry Lee was graduated from Princeton at seventeen in 1773 and, several years later, was just about to board ship for law school at London's Middle Temple when the war broke out. Barely twenty, as a newly minted captain of a Virginia cavalry outfit, he rode off to war and fame, which quickly came-particularly after his excellent defense of Eagle Tavern and his raid on Paulus Hook in August 1779. Washington elevated Lee and his cavalry to a key part of his army.
That evening, by the time that he had cantered the twenty miles or so back into his camp in Totowa, New Jersey, Major Lee was very conscious that he had been given one of the strangest assignments any cavalryman had ever received. So serious was this mission that Washington had assured Lee that the man who kidnapped Arnold will "lay me under great obligations personally, and in behalf of the United States I will reward him amply."
Continues...
Excerpted from The Day the Revolution Ended: 19 October 1781 by William H. Hallahan Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
| 1 | Adversaries in a Cauldron | 1 |
| 2 | Arnold versus Jefferson | 41 |
| 3 | Cornwallis versus Greene | 59 |
| 4 | Lafayette versus Arnold | 111 |
| 5 | Lafayette versus Cornwallis | 124 |
| 6 | Cornwallis versus Washington | 141 |
| 7 | Siege at Yorktown | 167 |
| 8 | Surrender | 191 |
| 9 | The World Reacts | 214 |
| 10 | Afterward | 254 |
| Timeline of the Revolution's Endgame | 269 | |
| Notes | 271 | |
| Bibliography | 277 | |
| Index | 283 |
Anonymous
Posted May 5, 2004
If all history books were written like this one more people would be historians! Hallahan tells the story about the end of the American Revolution through the eyes of the people involved. He uses key characters like Benedict Arnold, Clinton, Cornwallis, Lafayette and Washington as well as relatively unknown people, such as the wife of a tavern keeper who left her remininces in her diary or another woman who was sorry to see the war end. Hallahan is a master at weaving the events and characters together in a way that makes the story about the end of the American Revolution come alive. Stayed up late to finish it!
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted August 23, 2012
No text was provided for this review.
Overview