Irreversible Decline?
I’ve come to appreciate Harlow Giles Unger’s work as the perfect sort of history for audio. While his books are chock full of good details and telling insights, his style is easy on the ears. True, the ease of listening may be due to reading habits. Over the past 15 years I’ve read a lot about the causes and course of the American Revolution. But while everything here was more or less familiar, much was new—I didn’t know, for example, that John Hancock’s great grandfather, the “Bishop”, had founded Lexington Massachusetts, of all places. The value of any history is really the perspective that the historian brings to it. In this case, Unger’s evenhandedness gives a picture of real human beings on both sides of the water, caught in difficult times and conflicting loyalties. He shows us the tragedy of the Loyalists, forced to flee the land that had been home to their families for a century and a half. He reminds us that even the most towering figures—Washington, John Adams, John Hancock, Edmund Burke—are capable of fluctuations of feeling, irresolution and a natural interest in their own interests. He explains how the establishment of an independent republic failed to deliver the civil rights—or the abolition of all taxes—promised to the people in the heady days of the Tea Party. And the best part? None of this is done to “deconstruct” or “demythologize”; Unger is simply giving us a fully rounded picture of the emergence of the “Glorious Cause”. True, there are some flies in this otherwise excellent ointment. Once again we are told that a bunch of ragged farmers stood up to “crack troops” from the world’s best-trained army. Actually, by the spring of 1775 a new generation of soldiers filled the ranks of the army that had scaled the heights at Quebec, a generation that may have been trained but had never seen combat. While Britain had the world’s best navy—and even that arm of the service was in some disrepair—her army, always the poor stepchild in the island kingdom, would come in second when compared to, say, Frederick the Great’s Prussians. But I can point to only two or three real faults. First, Unger repeatedly tells us that tea had become a fashionable beverage among fashionable colonial ladies. Each time he tells us, it sounds as if he’s telling us for the first time. Very strange that Unger’s editor didn’t do something about that. His stats on the American tea boycott get garbled, too; sometimes it sounds as if the boycott was effective, sometimes not. Secondly, and more seriously, in the second to last chapter Unger claims that the shots fired on Lexington Green, “ignited a revolution that would send the world’s greatest empire into irreversible decline”. Really? The British Empire in 1775—in terms of territory, treasure and population—was as nothing to what it would be in 1875. And this most expansive of imperial projects only started its decline with the advent of the First World War. But the core of the book—the story of how men like Sam Adams, who sparked a revolution with a “tempest” of incendiary language and stage-managed street violence, saw that revolution slip into the hands of more moderate, polished statesman—is essential to understanding the vast web of ironies that made America. William Hughes is a fine narrator—a little anonymous, but that may be best for a work of history.