1775: A Good Year for Revolution

by Kevin Phillips

Overview

The contrarian historian and analyst upends the conventional reading of the American Revolution

In 1775, iconoclastic historian and bestselling author Kevin Phillips punctures the myth that 1776 was the watershed year of the American Revolution. He suggests that the great events and confrontations of 1775—Congress’s belligerent economic ultimatums to Britain, New England’s rage militaire, the exodus of British troops and expulsion of royal governors up and down the seaboard, and the new provincial congresses and hundreds of local  committees that quickly reconstituted local authority in Patriot hands­—achieved a  sweeping Patriot control of territory and local government that Britain was never able to overcome.  These each added to the Revolution’s essential momentum so when the British finally attacked in great strength the following year, they could not regain the control they had lost in 1775.

Analyzing the political climate, economic structures, and military preparations, as well as the roles of ethnicity, religion, and class, Phillips tackles the eighteenth century with the same skill and insights he has shown in analyzing contemporary politics and economics.  The result is a dramatic narrative brimming with original insights. 1775 revolutionizes our understanding of America’s origins.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101601082
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/27/2012
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	672
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Kevin Phillips has been a political and an economic commentator for four decades. This is his fifteenth book. The predecessor to this book, The Cousins’ Wars, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. He lives in Connecticut.

Table of Contents

Preface: Why 1775 vii

List of Maps xxv

Part I Introduction

Chapter 1 The Spirit of 1775 3

Part II The Revolution-Provocations, Motivations, and Alignments

Chapter 2 Liberty's Vanguard 37

Chapter 3 Religion, Ethnicity, and Revolutionary Loyalty 67

Chapter 4 A Revolution for Economic Self-Determination 91

Chapter 5 Urban Radicalism and the Tide of Revolution 132

Chapter 6 Challenge from the Backcountry 164

Chapter 7 The Ideologies of Revolution 195

Part III 1775-The Battlegrounds

Chapter 8 Fortress New England? 225

Chapter 9 Declaring Economic War 249

Chapter 10 Five Roads to Canada 272

Chapter 11 The Global Munitions Struggle, 1774-1776 295

Chapter 12 The Supply War at Sea 314

Chapter 13 The First British Southern Strategy, 1775-1776 331

Chapter 14 Is Falmouth Burning? 343

Chapter 15 Red, White, and Black 357

Chapter 16 Divided National Opinion and Britain's Need to Hire Mercenaries 378

Chapter 17 The Chesapeake-America's Vulnerable Estuary 394

Chapter 18 The American Revolution as a Civil War 414

Chapter 19 The Declaration of Independence-a Stitch in Time? 431

Part IV Consequences and Ramifications

Chapter 20 The Battle of Boston: A Great American Victory 447

Chapter 21 Canada: Defeat or Victory? 461

Chapter 22 Lord Dunmore's Second War 477

Chapter 23 Whaleboats, Row Galleys, Schooners, and Submarines: The Small-Ship Origins of the U.S. Navy 492

Chapter 24 Europe, the Bourbon Compact, and the American Revolution 506

Chapter 25 The Southern Expedition of 1775 and the Limitations of British Power 522

Chapter 26 1775: A Good Year for Revolution 539

Acknowledgments 547

Notes 551

Bibliography 593

Index 605

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"A solid, well-argued, and informative re-examination of our beginnings as a nation-state."—Booklist

Editorial Reviews

One does not have to accept Phillips's claim about the seminal significance of 1775 as the decisive year to appreciate his larger achievement. This is a feisty, fearless, edgy book, blissfully bereft of academic jargon, propelled by the energy of an author with the bit in his teeth…Phillips is attempting to occupy the multiple arenas—legislatures, churches, militia units, urban taverns, backwoods firesides, coastal flotillas, munitions depots—where resistance to British authority became the American Revolution. In that sense, the story he tells is not neat and orderly because making a revolution is, almost by definition, a dizzy experience that no one at the time fully comprehends. Phillips's major accomplishment is to recover that sense of excitement, confusion and improvisation as, almost providentially, the perfect storm formed.
—Joseph J. Ellis

The New York Times Book Review

The year 1776 is overrated, writes political commentator-turned-historian Phillips (The Cousins’ Wars), who makes a convincing case in this long, detailed, but entirely enthralling account. The July 4, 1776, Declaration of Independence, he states, was merely the last of a series of “practical” declarations—opening ports to non-British ships, the formation of the Continental Congress, a “de facto government”—and was immediately followed by months of discouraging military defeats. Luckily, says Phillips, the die had been cast in 1775, when exasperation over Britain’s clumsy attempts to re-exert control over its quasi-independent colonies culminated in a widespread “rage militaire.” Militias organized and drilled, royal governors were forced into exile. Besides the 1775 New England battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, dozens of lesser-known clashes and naval skirmishes occurred that year. More important and almost unnoticed by scholars, Phillips writes, the rebels acquired scarce arms and gunpowder through raids, smuggling, and purchases. By December 1775, the British had left or been expelled everywhere except in besieged Boston. Encyclopedic in exploring the political, economic, religious, ethnic, geographic, and military background of the Revolution, this is a richly satisfying, lucid history from the bestselling author. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"A feisty, fearless, edgy book, blissfully bereft of academic jargon, propelled by the energy of an author with the bit in his teeth.”—The New York Times Book Review

“In his amassing of mountains of facts from numerous monographs, Phillips has tried to do what most academic historians these days have not been much interested in doing—bring together all the meticulous research that has been going on for decades and turn it into a comprehensive and readable book designed for general readers. Much of what Phillips has written is clear and free of jargon. His assessments of the various military situations, especially those faced by the British, are always realistically based, and his judgments of what was possible and what was not possible for the British to do are always sound.”—The New York Review of Books

"Enthralling."—Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review)

"Impressively authoritative...[A] deeply researched, meticulously argued, multidimensional history."—Kirkus (starred review)

"A solid, well-argued, and informative re-examination of our beginnings as a nation-state."—Booklist

From the Publisher

Noted political analyst Phillips (Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism) objects to the oversimplifications concerning the Revolutionary War made by professional historians and laity who mischaracterize its spirit and causes. With painstaking detail and extensive documentation, he convincingly demonstrates that rebelliousness, resentment, and confrontation had been increasing for decades before 1776; colonials had been organizing, networking, arming, and training since 1774; and Lexington-Concord was no surprise. He argues that 1775, not 1776 (misused shorthand for the birth of independence), is the pivotal year for the clash. Phillips focuses on religious and ethnic animosities, commercial frustrations, emerging American nationalism and expansionism, political ideology, and anger over deliberate, threatening English restrictions as the complex causes for war. As he did in The Cousins' Wars (1999), he particularly emphasizes the role of religion in the conflict, arguing that Calvinism provided impetus to insurgency, and continues his characterization of the Revolution as a civil war. VERDICT Phillips relies primarily on numerous secondary sources, analyzing over 200 years of the historiography of the Revolution to present the complete picture. The exhaustive detail will lose some casual readers, but the steadfast popular or academic Revolutionary-era enthusiast will be enlightened.—Margaret Kappanadze, Elmira Coll. Lib., NY

Library Journal

This 25-hour audiobook about the American Revolution, alas, provides plenty of opportunity for the listener's mind to wander. Author Kevin Phillips argues that the year 1775 does not get its due as being key to the war and American independence. Phillips can't help himself, though, and the book ends up covering much more than that single year as it discusses the politics, battles, and prominent figures of the era. While not academic, Phillips's writing style is still on the dry side. The book might have been better served if narrator Arthur Morey had picked up the pace of his performance. As it is, his unhurried interpretation of Phillips's analytical style makes it a challenge for the listener to stay engaged. G.S.D. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2013 - AudioFile

A noted historian and political commentator claims 1775 as the American Revolution's true beginning. It will probably take more than this deeply researched, meticulously argued, multidimensional history to dislodge 1776 from the popular mind as the inaugural year of our independence, but Phillips (Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, 2008, etc.) makes the persuasive case--as Jefferson insisted long ago--that a de facto independence existed well before the Declaration of Independence. It wasn't merely a matter of military skirmishes, raids, expeditions and battles that bloodied the year, but also of campaigns opened on other, critical fronts: the ousting of numerous royal governors and lesser officials from office; the takeover of local militias and the establishment of committees, associations and congresses to take up the business of self-government; the desperate scramble for gunpowder and munitions to prosecute the war; and the courting of European powers happy to see Britain weakened. In all these fights during 1775, the colonists made crucial advances, both material and psychological, from which the plodding British never quite recovered. Highlighting, especially, developments in the "vanguard" colonies of Virginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut and South Carolina, where the concentration of wealth, population and leadership accounted for an outsized influence, Phillips explores the ethnic, religious, demographic, political and economic roots of the revolution. He examines the differing class interests (including those of slaves and Native Americans), regional preoccupations and various ideologies, sometimes clashing, sometimes aligning, that contributed to the revolutionary fervor and reminds us how much sorting out was necessary to prepare the national mind for the new order that the Declaration merely ratified. Casual readers may find Phillips' treatment a bit daunting, but serious history students will revel in the overwhelming detail he marshals to make his convincing argument. Impressively authoritative.

Kirkus Reviews