The day of the underdog

To a British reader who knows the subject, 1776 may seem pretty thin. To one who doesn’t, it may be confusing. It is an account of the military history of a single year of the American revolution, so the ambitions of the author are oddly limited. David McCullough doesn’t explain why the revolution began. He doesn’t explain why the Americans won. He doesn’t even delve much into the origins of the Declaration of Independence, which was proclaimed in 1776, or reveal much about the men who signed it.

But McCullough nevertheless demonstrates, once again, why he is America’s best-selling historian. For his book does lend colour and interest to events that have sadly come to seem dry and dusty to most Americans. Say ‘1776’ to your average Vermonter or your typical Californian, and he will look a little blank and then perhaps remember a dark painting of the Constitutional Congress that he once saw a long time ago, or the preamble to the Declaration (‘We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union…’) which he had to memorise in school. Say ‘George Washington,’ and he will think of the silhouette of Washington’s head that appears on the nickel, or recall some of the legends, mostly false, told about the first president: he threw a silver dollar across the Potomac river, he had wooden teeth, he never told a lie, even when he cut down his father’s cherry tree.

In McCullough’s account, the revolutionaries under General Washington’s command are not abstract ideas or painted images but actual men, and rather shabbily dressed ones at that. McCullough describes them:

They wore heavy homespun coats and shirts, these often in tatters from constant wear, britches of every colour and condition, cowhide shoes and moccasins, and on their heads old broad-brimmed felt hats, weathered and sweat-stained, beaver hats, farmer’s straw hats or striped bandanas tied sailor-fashion.