170 book reviews
Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy The Men who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of Empire, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013, xiv + 466 pp. isbn 978-0- 300-19107-3. $ 37.50.
If the War of American Independence had gone differently, the name of Sir Henry Clinton (suitably ennobled) would be on the doorways of public houses throughout Britain, emulating the Marquess of Granby, the popular hero of the Seven Years War, who is often commemorated in this fashion. As architects of British victory, Lord North and Lord George Germain would have found them- selves promoted to dukedoms and the memory of Germain’s court-martial for cowardice at the Battle of Minden in 1759 would have been erased, just as Winston Churchill’s failure at Gallipoli in 1915 has been eclipsed by his subse- quent fame for what he did in 1940. But as losers of the only major military defeat suffered by Britain in the long eighteenth-century, Clinton, Germain, North and the king they served have gone down in history as the men who lost America. Andrew O’Shaughnessy does not seek to rehabilitate these men’s reputa- tions as much as to understand whether the British political and military leadership in the War for American Independence was as bad as has been painted. His book is the second remarkable book he has written, significantly expanding his earlier account of the American Revolution in the Caribbean.1 What is remarkable about each book is that he has studied aspects of the American Revolution that should be central to current historiography. It is obvious that the American Revolution was a world-wide event that had repercussions well beyond its role in creating the United States of America (meaning that we need to know about how the Caribbean, Ireland, Europe and India were as central to British policymakers as was Massachusetts in the 1770s). It is just as obvious that in order to know why the military conflict turned out as it did we need to know more about British generals and politi- cians. It is no criticism of O’Shaughnessy to say that the dominant feeling on reading his two books on the American Revolution is that he is stating obvi- ous facts that we ought to know but somehow have forgotten. It shows how the study of the American Revolution has been handicapped by the often unthinking notion of American exceptionalism, of seeing it as a mainly American event with American consequences. It really is a British event, with global consequences.
1 Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution in the Caribbean (Phildelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania, 2000).
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/18770703-00401002
O’Shaughnessy’s book is highly traditional – loads of high politics and lots of battles. His technique, which works well, is to look at leadership through individual and sympathetic portraits of ten dead white men from the top reaches of British society. O’Shaughnessy takes these people seriously and refuses to accept American propaganda, still surprisingly potent, of “tyranni- cal” kings; “malicious” ministers; and “arrogant and brutal” generals and admi- rals. One great virtue of this book is its design: nine careful pen portraits (the Howe brothers are treated together) that incisively analyze complicated men. He shows how George III was not Benjamin Franklin’s and Thomas Jefferson’s cardboard cut-out villain but was instead a decent, if somewhat limited man, who acted as he did to America out of an outsized sense of duty. He exempli- fied, as his countrymen recognised, seldom falling out of affection for him long, the virtues Britons held dear – dogged persistence and a strong moral sense that made him a role model for his people if a hard father to his delin- quent sons. Unlike the earl of Chatham (whom he should have listened to more) he was no war leader, but he was admirable in his hard work and dedica- tion. George III was a fervent defender of Lord North. O’Shaughnessy shows why North attracted such devotion. North was one of those very rare political leaders who one can imagine as a friend – witty, modest, tolerant, and a gentle- man of wide interests and high moral standards. Nice guys, sadly, don’t do well in politics and his virtues were vices in the conduct of the war, especially when his tolerance of differing viewpoints showed itself to be a debilitating and exasperating indecisiveness. O’Shaughnessy does not go in for blame – he is a judicious and generous biographer – but it seems that if anyone was to blame for losing the war it was North and his protégé Germain (a man publicly despised by the greatest aristo- crats in the land as a criminal and the Coward of Minden but ironically a man of enormous courage and upright manliness). It is interesting to speculate on whether Britain might have won the war if the war had been entrusted to the mercurial, cantankerous, but undeniably brilliant Chatham or if George III had turned even earlier than he did to Chatham’s son, William Pitt the younger. Making him chief minister at 18, when his father died, seems obviously absurd but not much more so than appointing him to that post at 24 – when he proved himself very quickly to be Britain’s greatest prime minister and war leader. Could Britain have won the Revolutionary War? We can only answer that question if we think of the war in an Atlantic context. Once the war had started, Britain probably had no chance of getting the thirteen colonies back. American colonies were generally impervious to outside attack. Determined efforts to take poorly defended Spanish American colonies always failed, as they did again in this war with Britain’s ignominious defeat in Nicaragua in 1780. No journal of early american history 4 (2014) 167-184