War or Revolution?

TRIUMPH OF FREEDOM 1775-1783 (718 pp.]--John C. Miller--Little, Brown ($6.50).

This new one-volume history of the American Revolution is as coldly dispassionate about a passionate subject as an indictment for murder. It is doubtful whether any other study of the revolution is at once so compact and so inclusive, or succeeds so well in avoiding the myths of the professional flag-wavers or the narrow materialism of the muckrakers.

Most U.S. readers know what an ordeal the revolution was in the U.S.; few of them know what it meant to the British Empire. At its beginning, the British viewed it as a minor dispute. They believed that the colonists could not fight, that the people were not deeply hostile, that the trouble would end once the ringleaders were rounded up, and that a deep love of the old country persisted despite the increasingly bitter battles.

They had been so long accustomed to fighting with the support of the American population that they could not visualize the danger of fighting with most of the people against them. By the time they woke up to the seriousness of the war, says Author Miller, the French were involved and "the struggle became a war of survival against some of the most formidable odds faced by the island kingdom since the days of the Spanish Armada."

Lazy Tories. The best part of Triumph of Freedom is its picture of the Tory ministry of Lord North that lost Britain a third of her empire. His was a government of gamblers and profiteers. North was lazy and self-indulgent, good-natured, not deeply moved by the revolt of the American colonies (or by anything else), queerly responsible and honest despite his squanderings.

Fat, clumsy, big-nosed and dull-eyed, North dozed quietly while Fox, Burke, Sheridan, Chatham and Barre hurled at him some of the greatest invective in English. He admired their eloquence; sometimes he even applauded, but he regarded their speeches generally as so much windy verbiage. Though his ministry was corrupt, he was personally honest, went into debt, and wept in the House of Commons over his poverty. When he heard the news of Yorktown, he staggered as though shot, cried: "Oh God, it is all over!"

Other portraits:

Lord George Germain. Disgraced as a British soldier for refusing to lead his forces into action against the French, he was court-martialed, branded as a coward, cut in society, but rose to colonial secretary as "the most implacable enemy of the American colonists," demanded unconditional surrender, and excelled at jeering at the cowardice of Americans.

Charles James Fox. Short and fat, harsh-voiced defender of the colonists, haggard from dissipation, he lost so much money at faro that he had to borrow from the waiters at Brooks's to pay for his meals. When he walked the streets, moneylenders, tailors and haberdashers swarmed around him dunning him for their pay. After he lost his fortune he set himself up as a gambler in his own right, became wealthy, bought race horses and got a new mistress. The Prince of Wales campaigned for his re-election to Parliament, and traded mistresses with him.

If the war seemed a revolution in England, it seemed to most of the U.S. (and still seems) a war for independence. The chief weakness of Triumph of Freedom is that Author Miller does not distinguish between the two. The revolution and the war of independence went on simultaneously, the war in the strategy of the armies, the diplomatic deals in France (very fully treated in this volume) and the actions of Congress taken by the colonists as a whole; the revolution in the property seizures of the patriot committees, the defiance of the riflemen to their officers, the punishment visited on Loyalists or near-Loyalists by vigilant rebels.

Yet as a revolution, the war did not amount to much. Compared to the French and Russian revolutions there was a minimum of storming through the streets, emptying the jails, rioting or looting. There were even, in some parts of the country, known Loyalists who lived throughout the war alongside patriotic heroes, only visited and warned if they became too outspoken or charged too high prices. Some of the same people attended American dances, after the recapture of Philadelphia, as had danced with the British officers during the winter of Valley Forge.

"Now Cheer." Author Miller, who teaches at Bryn Mawr, is the author of a biography of Sam Adams and of Origins of the American Revolution. He writes in the carefully documented tradition of Henry Adams--i.e., unsparing, exact, relying largely on original sources, skeptical of pretensions to high motives. There is, in fact, an undercurrent of exasperation in Author Miller's account, as if he placed the grim record of incompetence and theft and treason in evidence, and said: "Now cheer." Curiously enough, the heroism of the seven years' struggle is all the more remarkable in an account that gives few people credit for much of anything, let alone heroism.

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