Robert Middlekauff - The Glorious Cause



Robert Middlekauff - The Glorious Cause

The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free of the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America. They first rejected the authority of the Parliament of Great Britain to govern them from overseas without representation, and then expelled all royal officials. By 1774 each colony had established a Provincial Congress, or an equivalent governmental institution, to form individual self-governing states. Through representatives sent in 1775 to the Second Continental Congress, they joined together at first to defend their respective self-governance and manage the armed conflict against the British known as the American Revolutionary War (1775-83, also American War of Independence). Ultimately, the states collectively determined that the British monarchy, by acts of tyranny, could no longer legitimately claim their allegiance. They then severed ties with the British Empire in July 1776, when the Congress issued the Declaration of Independence, rejecting the monarchy on behalf of the new nation. The war ended with effective American victory in October 1781, followed by formal British abandonment of any claims to the United States with the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

Middlekauff's book, although not difficult to understand, will probably only be best understood by those who have studied the American Revolution before (besides in your eight-grade history class). Some key figures are given fairly good descriptions, but others simply appear without any sort of introduction. The events are not presented in the chronological narrative structure that newcomers to the subject will be able to follow easily. In an attempt to surround events to understand them fully, Middlekauff jumps around a lot. This leads to not only gaps of information that other reviewers have detailed, but repetition of information.

Content: Many histories of the American Revolution are written as if on stained glass, with George Washington's forces of good battling King George III's redcoat devils. The actual events were, of course, far more complex than that, and Robert Middlekauff undertakes the difficult task of separating the real from the mythic with great success. From him we learn that England taxed the colonials so heavily in an attempt to retire the massive debt incurred in defending those very colonials against other powers, notably France; that the writing of the Constitution was delayed for two years while states argued among themselves in the face of massive military losses; and that demographic shifts during the Revolution did much to increase America's ethic diversity at an early and decisive time. Vividly told, this is a superb account of the nation's founding.

The book is uneven in its studies - some events are detailed with extreme clarity and others are muddled through or skipped over. The most well-written parts of the book involve the Stamp Act crisis and the details of the major conflicts. Middlekauff's attempts to explain what was happening in Britain during the time period are mixtures of ...