If it seems like I’ve been singularly inattentive to this blog of late (and I have), my excuse is that I’ve embarked on another literary rodeo (to mix metaphors), working on a manuscript that’s an extension of my most recent article in the Journal of the American Revolution—Washington’s Ten Best Military Decisions—and an alternative version of that piece which will appear shortly in the Fall/Winter 2025 issue of the Journal of America’s Military Past, entitled “Was General Washington Only Brilliant at Trenton and Princeton?” In addition to exploring Washington’s most critical decisions and the actions taken to implement them, the new book project will examine other factors that impinged on the outcome of the Revolutionary struggle—particularly how they figured into the odds of Great Britain winning the war, and if so of winning the peace. (No, I don’t have a publisher lined up yet but am hoping to hear about that very soon.)

Wishing you a great holiday season and a healthy and happy new year.

Best regards,

dp

P.S. I’ll be doing a book signing (for my latest book, Winning the Ten Crucial Days, and others) at Washington Crossing Historic Park on Christmas Day from 12 to 3 pm during the annual Delaware River crossing reenactment—well, actually the biannual reenactment since the first will be on the 14th. More information about these events is available here.

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Dear Reader:

I wanted to provide a few updates that may be of interest to some of you.

— You’ll find information about the 2025 Conrad M. Hall Symposium for Virginia History here. The focus will be on the important role Virginia played in the Revolution. It will be held October 4 at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, 428 N. Arthur Ashe Boulevard, Richmond, VA, and include several Revolutionary War-related presentations.

— Here’s a link to a notice about the upcoming conference sponsored by the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields National Historic District, “Forging Independence: The Revolutionary War’s Early Years,” to be held at the DoubleTree, Front Royal, VA on February 20-021, 2026.

— Any Rev War buff (nerd, geek, nut, maven, etc.) worthy of that species knows about Rick Atkinson’s latest creation, The Fate of the Day (the second volume in his trilogy on the War of Independence), but I’d like to call attention—for the benefit of anyone who’s unfamiliar with it—to John Maass’s new book, From Trenton to Yorktown: Turning Points of the Revolutionary War (Osprey Publishing, 2025). The author of several books on American military history, John is a historian with the National Museum of the United States Army and holds a doctorate in early American history from The Ohio State University. I wrote the following about his latest work on the book’s Amazon page:

Thanks to historian John Maass, readers—in particular, aficionados of our Revolutionary struggle specifically or military history more generally—can now feast on a splendid analysis of the most pivotal military events in the War of Independence: the Continental Army’s victories at Trenton and Princeton, the Saratoga campaign, the Valley Forge encampment, the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, and the siege of Yorktown. In this concise and lucid chronicle, the author lays out an illuminating and persuasive case for why and how these developments profoundly altered the course of the conflict and paved the road to victory for the Patriot insurgency. A book like this merits a wide readership, especially during our collective immersion in the semiquincentennial of American independence. John Maass’s newest literary effort is highly recommended.

— The most recent blurb received for my new book, Winning the Ten Crucial Days, is as follows:

“As a professional historian with a deep interest in regional history, I found that David Price’s book transports readers, both professional historians and the interested non-academic, to the 1776-77 winter action in the Delaware River Valley. The contours of the region, in terms of the topography, the people, and the major characters, are all brought to life. Price captures the dynamic of the ‘Ten Crucial Days’ as if he were an eyewitness relating those events.”
– JAMES E. HIGGINS, Ph.D., Executive Director, Lehigh Valley Heritage Museum/Lehigh County Historical Society and author of The Health of the Commonwealth

Happy reading!

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Dear Reader:

I wanted to let you know that, going forward, I plan to limit my blogging to providing informational links that may be of interest to others in regard to the Revolution and Founding Era (including my own efforts), rather than crafting original substantive content about such subject matter. I’ve been doing the latter since the inception of this website in August 2020; and to be honest, at this point, the motivation to continue that effort is simply not there. That said, I will always like to write, so we’ll see what else can be done to scratch a persistent itch.

To be clear, this is not a total shutdown, but certainly a retrenchment. Please accept my deepest thanks for tuning into this platform and my best wishes in your pursuit of what I have been trying to provide for the past five years—engaging, informed, and myth-busting reading about the people, places, and events that defined young America’s exploratory path. Frankly, the relative paucity of reader feedback has made it difficult for me to judge how successful the effort was (or not), but then again, maybe that’s my answer.

And in case you’re interested .  .  .

— My new book, Winning the Ten Crucial Days, is reviewed by Kelsey DeFord in the Journal of the American Revolution (JAR) here.

— Also, an article of mine, “John Haslet: Service and Sacrifice in the Revolution,” will appear in the Spring/Summer Issue of The Journal of America’s Military Past, the scholarly, peer-reviewed publication of the Council on America’s Military Past (CAMP), which contains in-depth monographs on military history. The narrative is a spinoff from my third book, John Haslet’s World. You can’t access it electronically unless you’re a CAMP member; however, if you’d like to see the article, shoot me a request at dpauthor64@gmail.com, and I’ll send you a copy once the issue is published.

That’s it for now. Enjoy the rest of your summer.

dp

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FYI, here’s a tidbit about the challenges facing one Rev War site—the Bennington Battle Monument in Vermont—that arrived in an email courtesy of John Maass, historian at the National Museum of the U.S. Army: take a look if you’re interested. John also passed along a link to a Smithsonian Magazine article about the early stages of the American rebellion in the South, which can be viewed here.

Here’s a link to information about a conference on September 14-16 in Washington, DC, sponsored by the Jack Miller Center — “The American Revolution and Its Legacies from 1776 to Today.”

I’d like anyone who’s thinking about buying my new book—Winning the Tern Crucial Days—to know that, although it’s available wherever books are sold, if you’d like a signed copy AND want to support one of the most hallowed historic sites in North America, you can do so online through the gift shop at Washington Crossing Historic Park here (and nowhere else). FWIW, I’ll be speaking about the book as part of the park’s July 4 event — at 2 and again at 4 pm in the Visitor Center auditorium.

For your consideration  .  .  .

I’m always appreciative (as well I should be) when someone compliments me on one of my books; however, I would like to make a humble but earnest appeal to readers of that persuasion to share your sentiments with others online. In particular, for anyone who may be favorably impressed by the new book (or, as we say at Washington Crossing, if it floats your boat), I hope you’ll consider leaving a brief comment on Amazon—even just a sentence or two—BUT only if you honestly believe it deserves 5 stars. Quite frankly, those reviews are the mother’s milk of recognition for non-brand-name authors, so that would be very much appreciated—and many thanks in advance.

Please note: These remarks are not directed at the several readers who have graciously offered endorsement quotes for the book that are posted on this website, as well as by Brookline Books and Amazon. I am very grateful for your support!!

And Finally  .  .  .

Memorial Day being close at hand, I’ll leave you with this snippet from Thomas Paine:

“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must … undergo the fatigue of supporting it.” (The American Crisis IV, September 12, 1777)

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The Revolution has been a source of inspiration to many and contention to others. Let me suggest that anyone wanting to explore how its legacy has been interpreted by posterity would do well to read Michael D. Hattem’s new book, The Memory of ’76: The Revolution in American History (Yale University Press, 2024).

I’d like too share the following excerpt from Hattem’s epilogue (“The Revolution in the New Millennium”):

For nearly two hundred and fifty years, the popular memory of the Revolution has served as the nation’s origin myth. It has provided heroes and stories that have helped generations of Americans create emotional connections to the nation’s founding and often equally emotional definitions of what it means to be an American. The popular memory of the Revolution has been an important vehicle through which Americans have defined and voiced their understanding.of the present and their hopes for the future. Like those of many other older societies, the American origin myth has been consistently contested, as generation after generation has reimagined the Revolution in ways that are most meaningful and useful at the time. As a result, conflicts in American politics and culture over partisanship, regionalism, race, gender, class, ethnicity, and religion have unavoidably shaped and been shaped by the ways in which Americans have remembered and fought over their Revolution. Ultimately, the long history of the popular memory of the Revolution reveals that remembering the nation’s founding has often done far more to divide Americans than it has to unite them. It also reminds us that revising the past is an important and long-standing American political tradition, while this epilogue offers a clear indication that the memory of the Revolution remains a vitally contested part of American life well into the twenty-first century.

As someone once said, history is an argument that never ends. And I think that an essential part of being an American is arguing about what it means to be an American, or—in other words—what the Revolution means today.

This will probably be my last blog post until next year, as I’m working on another article for the Journal of the American Revolution (number 11, but who’s counting?) and expect that to supersede any other literary activity for the time being.

Have a great holiday season, everyone!

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The United States Postal Service has just unveiled a new Forever Stamp to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the First Continental Congress, which convened at Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774, and you can read about it here.

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Pyrrhic Victories

The resilience displayed by the Continental Army was paramount in England’s failure to defeat the American rebellion, especially as that insurrection was supported by weapons and ammunition from France and then subsequently by the armed forces of its monarch, Louis XVI. According to 18th-century military protocol, the side that held the field at the conclusion of battle was regarded as victorious; and, from that perspective, the redcoats won most of the Revolutionary War engagements from 1775 to 1783. They achieved unambiguous success (in chronological order) at Long Island, Kip’s Bay, Fort Washington, Brandywine Creek, Paoli, Germantown, Savannah, Charleston, Camden, and Waxhaws, while suffering clear-cut defeats at Princeton, Saratoga, Stony Point, Cowpens, and Yorktown. But they also “won” in a narrow tactical sense at Breed’s Hill, White Plains, Freeman’s Farm, Guilford Courthouse, Hobkirk Kill, and Eutaw Springs, by forcing the Americans to retire from the battlefield. However, those technical victories represented a strategic setback for the crown’s forces in that they depleted their precious reserves of military manpower, failed to neutralize enemy armies in the field, and were unable to sway public opinion against the insurrection.

When General Nathanael Greene, who was chosen by Washington to lead the Continental Army in the Southern Theater in 1780, memorably asserted his resolve to rebound from one of those purely tactical reversals, he arguably articulated the overall strategy behind the American war effort. Writing to the Chevalier de La Luzerne, Louis XVI’s minister to the United States, three days after the battle of Hobkirk Hill—near Camden, South Carolina—in April 1781, Greene declared, “We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again.”

A Case in Point

Hobkirk Hill is an illustrative example of the pyrrhic victories by the king’s troops that proved their undoing. This was a classic eighteenth-century battlefield engagement in which the opposing lines exchanged musket fire, at close range and in the open, until one side pulled back. Greene’s casualties were 270 (including 136 missing), and the British 258. Estimates vary as to the number of killed, wounded, captured, or missing on both sides, but the numerical equivalence between the respective casualty counts obscures a very disparate impact. The losses represented about 29 percent of the British force versus about 17 percent of the American.

The casualties sustained by the redcoats were substantial enough—along with other actions during this period, including the fall of Fort Watson to a rebel contingent led by Lieutenant Colonel Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee (father of Confederate general Robert E. Lee) and General Francis Marion (the legendary “Swamp Fox”) just two days before—that the British commander, Colonel Francis, Lord Rawdon, abandoned his position at Camden and fell back to Monk’s Corner on the Cooper River thirty miles north of Charleston. By doing so, Rawdon yielded the key British post in South Carolina, and significant strategic consequences ensued. This began the unraveling of Britain’s tenuous hold over the interior of the state, for one after another of the posts occupied by its regulars or Loyalist units fell to the rebels—Fort Granby, Fort Motte, Orangeburg, Fort Galpin, and Georgetown in South Carolina, and Augusta in Georgia.

Winning By Not Losing

In the end, the Continental Army and its supporting militia prevailed in a war of attrition against a military superior opponent, That achievement was notwithstanding the various challenges posed by man and nature: battlefield reverses; desertions; expiring enlistments; the specter of mutiny; illness; and ongoing shortages of equipment, food, and supplies—and in spite of the many unforced errors made by American generals.

The insurgent side won the contest by not losing it. A lengthy war of attrition eventually sapped Britain’s will to fight following Lord Cornwallis’s surrender to the Franco-American army at Yorktown, Virginia in October 1781. There followed parliament’s vote to abandon the struggle and any claim to sovereignty over the 13 former colonies. What did England have to show for its eight-year-long effort to subdue the rebellion? Losses of 40,000 casualties and 50,000,000 pounds, including at least 20,000 soldiers and sailors whose lives ended in America, the West Indies, or at sea, some from battlefield wounds but more from disease—often in some squalid setting—and typically without the benefit of a stone to mark the final resting place of anyone other than a commissioned officer.

In a Broader Sense

All this begs the question of whether Britain could have ever “won” in terms of indefinitely suppressing the American quest for independence or whether that independence was inevitable. If as John Adams insisted, the revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people (the Whig faction, to be sure), would a purely military victory by the crown have made that population any more amenable to subjugation? Could the mother country have possibly borne the cost of deploying a permanent army of occupation in the colonies large enough to effectively impose British rule over a largely hostile people spread across an expanse of territory that dwarfed Great Britain in size? For how long? What reason is there to assume that her North American colonies would not at some point have attained their sovereignty given what happened with Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, and New Zealand? Surely it’s a question of when and not whether that would have occurred. In this context, I’m reminded of remarks by the great parliamentary orator Edmund Burke in March 1775, arguing for a policy of conciliation towards America, that included this: “Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom, and a great empire and little minds go ill together.”

Much of the preceding is adapted from my upcoming book, Winning the Ten Crucial Days. For those interested, the manuscript is now in the hands of the publisher, Brookline Books (an imprint of Casemate Publishers), and an image of the preliminary front-cover cover design can be viewed here.

If you’d like to read more about the battle of Hobkirk Hill, check out my article in the Journal of the American Revolution—Hobkirk Hill: A Major Minor Battle (June 27, 2023).

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Hi All –

The approach of the 247th anniversary of American independence calls to mind the following excerpt from President Lincoln’s Message to Congress in Special Session on July 4, 1861, in the incipient stages of the Civil War. I think it must rank among the most vital ever articulated in connection with the jubilee, and it’s obviously no coincidence that he chose that date to convey his missive  .  .  .

This is essentially a People’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life. Yielding to partial, and temporary departures, from necessity, this is the leading object of the government for whose existence we contend….

Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it, our people have already settled—the successful establishing, and the successful administering of it. One still remains—its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it. It is now for them to demonstrate to the world, that those who can fairly carry an election, can also suppress a rebellion—that ballots are the rightful, and peaceful, successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal, except to ballots themselves, at succeeding elections. Such will be a great lesson of peace; teaching men that what they cannot take by an election, neither can they take it by a war—teaching all, the folly of being the beginners of a war.

Amen.

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The answer to the question posed above is “no.” At least according to historian Page Smith, writing in his magisterial work, A New Age Now Begins: A People’s History of the American Revolution (McGraw-Hill 1976). Smith’s analysis, in the final chapter of his second and concluding volume, echoes the thought expressed by John Adams many years after American independence was achieved: “But what do We mean by the American Revolution? Do We mean the American War? The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People.” (Letter to Hezekiah Niles, February 13, 1818)

Here then is Mr. Smith (pp. 1823-1826):

Historians are great ‘if-ers,’ and the revolution offers them a field day…. One consequence of the work of the ‘if-ers’ is that the Revolution has commonly been treated as a ‘war’ rather than as a ‘revolution.’ This of course was the British mistake as well. In a war, especially in the eighteenth-century variety, when one side has absorbed a sufficient number of defeats, lost a sufficient number of soldiers, and surrendered a sufficient number of towns and cities, it adds up the profits and losses, finds that the debit column far outweighs the gains, and petitions for peace, or, more abjectly, surrenders. But a revolution is a different matter. A revolution is for keeps. A true revolution is not reversible; it cannot be ‘defeated’ in any conventional sense. The people can be decimated, starved, virtually destroyed, and in the right circumstances, by means of utter ruthlessness, the revolution can be suppressed. But ‘suppressed’ is different from ‘defeated.’

There must have been some reason why America was the graveyard of British military reputations; why no British general emerged with his laurels untarnished. After all, these were the same men, or at the very least the same type of men, who had administered a decisive drubbing to the French and Spanish during the Seven Years’ War. They made up the best military and naval force in the world. As we have seen, it never occurred to any but a handful of congenital optimists that they could be defeated by a ragtag citizen army of untrained levies. And properly speaking they weren’t. They ‘won’ almost every major engagement. From the ‘battle’ of Lexington and Concord, which wasn’t, properly speaking, a battle at all, to Yorktown, the British claimed an almost unbroken series of victories….

The American Revolution was, in modern parlance, the first ‘people’s liberation movement.’ In order to make any sense out of the question of whether Great Britain could have ‘won the war,’ we have to rephrase the question in a different form: Could Great Britain, after, let us say, the battle of Bunker Hill, and after, certainly the Declaration of Independence, have reduced the colonies to a ‘proper state of subordination’? Could they, in short, have turned off the revolution? Could they have restored the status quo ante bellum, as the military and diplomatic historians put it? And the answer, of course, is an emphatic no. It is quite literally impossible to imagine [Governor] Thomas Hutchinson returning to Massachusetts to guide its affairs and squabble with his council once again; or William Tryon back in North Carolina or New York [where he had served successively as royal governor], or, indeed, any other governor directing the affairs of this or that colony. In 1779, with the Carlisle Commission, Great Britain went as far as it could have possibly gone short of granting complete independence in meeting the American grievances that had brought on the ‘war’; and while Washington and Congress ‘feared it like the devil,’ it caused hardly a stir among the rank and file of patriots. No peace movement developed in the states to barter for a return to the parental fold, which had once appeared such a haven of security. It was indeed as Washington had said of the people crowding around him on the march from New York to Virginia [en route to Yorktown in 1781]: ‘We may be beaten by the English…but here is an army they will never conquer.’

American independence was not a precarious issue, hanging always in the balance, resting on a victory here or there, on this alliance or that, on the preservation of Robert Howe’s army of the Southern Department, or Benjamin Lincoln’s army of the Southern Department, or Horatio Gates’s army of the Southern Department—each of which were successively obliterated—or even on the survival of Nathanael Greene’s army, or the Continental Army of George Washington himself. The Revolution was, quite simply, the first and one of the most powerful expressions of the determination of a people to be free.

Well, there you have it. For those wishing to take issue with any of the above, have at it. As they say, history is an argument without end.

What Now?

Dear Reader,

This feels like a good time for me to hit the “pause” button on creating new posts. After spending more than two and a half years in the blogosphere, I’ve reached a point where it feels more like a chore than an opportunity—and that suggests that, at least for the near future, I need to take a blatant blog break. (Try saying that three times fast.) This pivot won’t necessarily entail a total or permanent abstention from blogging, as I foresee wanting to share information or thoughts on a particular topic at various times or posting a link to something that I hope will be of interest to you (especially if it’s something to which yours truly has been or will be connected). I’ll always enjoy writing, so you can expect me to seek outlets for that impulse, that is, beyond compiling a really long and diversified grocery list.

To anyone who may be disappointed by this news, I offer my regrets and a reminder of the sage advice commonly attributed to P.T. Barnum: “Always leave them wanting more.” And to those who feel otherwise, I’m pleased to do you this favor.

Thank you very much for reading, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride. We’ll see where it goes from here. As Yogi Berra allegedly opined, “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Best wishes,

dp