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1. From the French Revolution of 1789 to Tiananmen Square in 1989, the American Revolution has inspired countless rebellions, uprisings, revolts, and demonstrations. About the ultimate meaning of the example set by the victorious colonists, Thomas Fleming is not in any doubt. Right at the beginning of his account of the American Revolution, he pauses to explain its world-historical significance:
In the Declaration of Independence, liberty became a birthright that every person could claim, no matter what any government said. In that great leap forward, the United States of America became more than a country; it became an idea, a heritage open to people of every race and creed. … The freedom to speak our minds, to worship in the churches of our faith, to vote for the political leaders of our choice, to pursue our careers, to manage our individual lives in a hundred different ways, depends on American liberty as it was enunciated and defined in the crisis years of the Revolution.
Fleming's theme, then, is the glorious progress of self-government.
Liberty! The American Revolution exhibits much of the verve, clean prose, and appealing production values that also marked the six-hour pbs special it accompanies. The stirring color prints with which the book is filled are a visual delight that contribute substantially to the narrative. The volume bears ample testimony to Fleming's wide reading in at least considerable stretches of the vast literature on the war and its effects. Several passages treating military subjects—on what exactly happened at Lexington and Concord on the eighteenth of April in 1775, the shifting goals of Britain's grand strategy, the skill of patriot generals George Washington and Nathanael Greene, and the brilliance of Gen. Benedict Arnold in the war's northern theater before he went over to the British—are as good as popular writing can get. Perhaps there could have been a few more maps, but the ones reproduced here are usually originals from the period and so add their own distinctive flavor to the volume's visual richness.
In Fleming's telling, liberty was secured in America through the far-sighted, self-denying leadership of the Founding Fathers. Chief among those fathers, and also the central figures of the book, are George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson are the principle supporting actors to the heroic Washington and the wily, old Franklin. The villains of the piece are George III (Britain's well-meaning but incompetent monarch who suffered delusions of despotism), George's prime minister, Lord North (a sniveling lackey who did not possess even enough savoir faire to carry out an effective resignation), and Lord George Germain (British secretary of state for the colonies whose hauteur blinded him alike to the oppressive habits of the British nobility and the legitimacy of American complaints). These leaders, in Fleming's view, did defend a notion they called "British liberty," but they never had a clue about the genuine liberty for which American patriots fought.
The book devotes some space, and many excellent illustrations, to other folk—wives, women who actually took up arms; British MPs; members of the Continental Congress; slaves and freed blacks; British generals and admirals; the French who eventually came to the aid of the new United States; and members of both the patriot militia and the Continental line. But it is the Big Patriot Men who define the point of view of the book.
Fleming is a superbly gifted narrator whose briskly confident pace rarely falters. Yet the story, as it unfolds—likewise the parallel story told in the pbs series—is jammed full of what, for lack of a better term, can only be termed curiosities.
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