REVOLUTIONARY ROADS

A spirited tour of the landscapes of the American Revolution and the panoply of characters who figured in them.

Thompson opens with a set piece from the Battle of Cowpens. Fought on Jan. 17, 1781, “on the South Carolina frontier,” the battle promised to be a decisive victory for the British under the dreaded Banastre Tarleton. Instead, the American soldiers wheeled from retreat and destroyed 80% of Tarleton’s forces, sending the British reeling out of the South to Yorktown. “We almost never think about what would have happened if neither the rebels nor the British had won the war,” Thompson muses, conjuring up an uneasy status quo. While what made the difference were the late battles in the Revolution, early victories at Lexington and Bunker Hill played their parts, too. The author turns up a number of lesser-known incidents such as the “Powder Alarm,” which subverted post–Tea Party efforts on the part of Britain to clamp down on the Colonies; and Benedict Arnold’s ill-fated attempt to invade Quebec and turn its French inhabitants against the British—an attempt that surely figured in Arnold’s later turn away from the revolutionary cause. Thompson is knowledgeable on both the purely military aspects of the war and the alliances it engendered—for example, dividing Native peoples into pro- and anti-British or American factions that would later play out in the postwar history of westward expansion. There are some memorable scenes throughout, including the rather horrible image of the British at Yorktown slitting the throats of the horses they could no longer feed. One demerit is Thompson’s fondness for flippant asides—e.g., “If you’re feeling snarky, you could call Hamilton the 10-Minute War Hero”; “Among South Carolina’s partisans, the Swamp Fox, Francis Marion, got his own Disney TV series; Andrew Pickens got the shaft, immortality-wise”—that add little to the narrative.

Good reading for Revolutionary War aficionados and maybe Banastre Tarleton fans as well.