Explaining the Miracle of American Independence

A new account shows that luck and British myopia both played a big part.

The American victory in the Revolutionary War, George Washington observed, was “little short of a standing miracle.” An ad hoc army backed by amateur militiamen; a conglomeration of often bickering state governments; irascible, politically appointed generals, some with little military experience—none of it boded well for success against one of the world’s great military powers. Indeed, the venture teetered time and again on the brink of failure. Yet in the end the Americans succeeded beyond their own expectations. John Ferling retells the story of how they accomplished this feat, one of the great sagas of history, with insight and drama in his new book, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence (Oxford, 704 pages, $29.95).

Ferling, a leading scholar of early America, brings a mastery of historical narrative to what is not a technical military history but a broad view of the war in its political and social context. He is particularly adept at highlighting the importance of less familiar battles and neglected facets of the war.

For example, he points out the significant role that New Jersey militiamen played after Washington’s beleaguered army retired to winter quarters in 1776. The British ensconced in New York City were dependent on feed for their horses. The Jersey volunteers effectively attacked enemy foraging parties and fought running battles like those at Lexington and Concord. Ferling concedes that militiamen “have been dogged by a negative image” and that Washington “never wavered in his belief that militia were unreliable when summoned to the front,” but his nuanced view of history leads him to highlight their contribution.

In his recounting of the pivotal campaign that ended in the Battle of Saratoga, he sheds light on the events that led up to the final clash. He describes the tragic choice facing Arthur St. Clair, who was put in charge of Fort Ticonderoga and found it unprepared to arrest the onslaught of Britain’s Gen. John Burgoyne. “If I evacuate the place, my character will be ruined; if I remain here, the army will be lost.” He retreated and saved his army; he was subjected to a court martial but was exonerated.

Ferling gives a vivid description of the Battle of Hubbardton, a fierce rear-guard action during that retreat, in which British and German soldiers advanced into, in the words of one of them, “showers of balls mingled with buck shot, which they plentifully bestowed among us.” Ferling writes that “though a small engagement, it was one of this war’s most ferocious fights, with total losses proportionally equal to those of the Battle of Waterloo.”

His graceful writing shifts effortlessly from the broad perspective to details that bring scenes to life. With the climactic battle at Saratoga looming, Gen. Horatio Gates was “dining on ox heart when word arrived of the enemy’s advance.” He is also deft with contemporary quotations. When a commander botched an effort to rid Maine of a British outpost, Gen. Nathanael Greene described the campaign as “a child of vanity, nourished by folly, and destroyed by temerity.”

In ways that may bring to mind the present war for some readers, Ferling reminds us that nothing is certain in the clash of arms: ”The only predictable thing about this war was the unpredictability of every campaign.” He shows how assumptions were often based on delusion or arrogance rather than information. The British cabinet “myopically held to the view that the great majority of colonists remained loyal to Great Britain and that little support for the rebellion existed below New England”; the Americans foresaw a successful invasion of Canada based on the premise that French Canadians were “hostile toward Great Britain and would welcome a rebel army as liberators.” We read that during Burgoyne’s early victories in his Saratoga campaign, King George “burst into the queen’s boudoir and exalted, ‘I have beat them! I have beat all the Americans!’”

Through it all, Ferling does not let us forget the terrible human cost of the Revolutionary War. He details the brutal, sometimes savage nature of the fighting and the appalling conditions that the soldiers on both sides endured year after year. Not a few contemporaries recommended terrorism—a refusal to give quarter, the sacking of cities—as the solution. “Nothing will secure these People but Fire & Sword,” one British officer insisted.

He also deftly draws the suffering of those left behind, such as Sarah Hodgkins, who supported her husband, an Ipswich, Massachusetts, shoemaker, in his initial enlistment with the rebel army but pleaded that “my troble will be grate” if he reenlisted. He did reenlist for another year, and then for three more years. Nor was the sacrifice shared equally. “Few, if any, affluent women,” Ferling points out, “had faced the rigors that this war imposed on Sarah Hodgkins.”

The author’s professed purpose in the book is to explain the miracle. Why, in fact, did the rebels win? The most critical impediment they faced was their aversion to a standing army and to a sovereign national government “with authority to plan, organize, and finance a concerted war effort.” They had the remarkable good fortune that Washington proved a capable and inspiring leader, despite the fact that, as John Adams noted, the selection of American officers was “so much of Accident.” Ferling gives a lucid account of how Washington, in spite of his faults, grew into his stature as overall commander.

The author dismisses the notion that the principal British failing was a slavish devotion to conventional European methods of making war. “The British often fought conventionally because it appeared to offer the best hope of success,” he notes. And except on isolated occasions, the Americans remained faithful to the European manner of war themselves.

Crucial to the British defeat was a “fatal flaw in the DNA of the British system of governance.” The government never established a commander in chief with independent power in North America but rather tried to manage the war from London. Also, politics dominated the British officer corps even more than it did the American. British generals failed to arm the Loyalists in a timely manner, lacked good maps and intelligence, and consistently underestimated the scope of the rebellion.

But all these factors together can’t explain the utter failure of the British cause. George Washington, Ferling states, was “the happy beneficiary of a series of occurrences in 1781 which he neither foresaw nor over which he exercised the least control.” The primary one was Cornwallis’s blunder of moving into Virginia, which led to the British debacle at Yorktown.

In the final analysis, Ferling agrees with Thomas Paine, who attributed the American victory to the fact that the war was “the country’s war, the public’s war . . . the war of the people in their own behalf.”

—Jack Kelly writes often for American Heritage magazine and is the author of Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics—A History of the Explosive That Changed the World (Basic Books).