Annual Booklist 2022 : Don N. Hagist
Don N. Hagist is the managing editor of Journal of the American Revolution (http://allthingsliberty.com). He studies the lives and service of individual British soldiers in the 1770s and 1780s, relying almost exclusively on primary sources. His books include Noble Volunteers: the British Soldiers who Fought the American Revolution (2020) and These Distinguished Corps : British Grenadier and Light Infantry Battalions in the American Revolution (2021). He is an engineer for a major medical device manufacturer and lives in Providence, Rhode Island, USA.
My own motivation for writing books about the British army during the 1775-1783 American War for Independence has been the rarity of good books on the subject – “good” meaning well-grounded in primary sources. That makes it challenging to recommend five without repeating the selections of others. I do have a few favorites. Most are recent, for most of the really well-researched volumes (with the exception of published primary sources) have been published in that time frame. But there a notable exception.
An older, but reliable title reminds us that the war in America was an expeditionary war, fraught with challenges that bedeviled the army’s strategic effectiveness. Logistics and the Failure of the British Army in America, 1775-1783 by Arthur Bowler (Princeton University Press, 1975) brings into focus the difficulties of providing for a far-off army operating in hostile territory; it is a solid nuts-and-bolts study of the subject. A good but hard-to-find supplement to Bowler’s book is Government and Contractors: The British Treasury and War Supplies, 1775–1783 by Norman Baker (Athlone Press, 1971).
The American War provides an example of good, professional soldiers winning repeatedly on the battlefield but failing to win the war, something that continues to happen to this day. Understanding this means, in part, understanding the political and military leaders involved, and this is the focus of The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy (Yale University Press, 2014). It looks at the ten most influential leaders in the monarchy, the government, the navy and the army to show how aspects of their personalities, decisions and ability to work together undermined the ability to realize a strategy first for avoiding war, then for bringing it to a successful conclusion. A new book that complements it is The Howe Dynasty: The Untold Story of a Military Family and the Women Behind Britain’s Wars for America by Julie Flavell (Liveright, 2021), an enlightening study of the military family at the centre of many of the war’s political and military events.
One of the most eye-opening works to be published recently is Quarters: The Accommodation of the British Army and the Coming of the American Revolution by John Gilbert McCurdy (Cornell University Press, 2019). This highly-readable work examines the political, logistical, and legal challenges faced by the army’s commander-in-chief in America, General Thomas Gage, as he struggled to find ways to maintain the army garrisons necessitated by British success in the Seven Years’ War. It is an exceptional study of the considerations of supporting a peacetime army in an ever-more-hostile environment.
There are many studies of the military campaigns of the war. One of the newest, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775–1777 by Rick Atkinson (Henry Holt and Co., 2019), is the first of a planned trilogy that brings together journalistic analysis and exceptional writing, and includes many more participant’s-eye views – from the King to the common soldier – than most previous works of this type. And an under-acclaimed archetype of how campaign studies should be written is Grand Forage 1778: The Battleground Around New York City by Todd W. Braisted (Westholme, 2016).
To reaffirm the fact that, on the battlefield, the war was fought well, With Zeal and With Bayonets Only: The British Army on Campaign in North America, 1775–1783 by Matthew H. Spring (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008) offers an in-depth technical study of the way war was waged by professional British soldiers on the ground in America.
What of a book that should exist but doesn’t? A detailed social history of the army’s officers dealing specifically with the 1770s and 1780s. There are excellent works on prior and subsequent periods, with the gap still waiting to be filled. People have asked me to do it, but I study only the rank and file – the men who did the work.