The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History) Paperback by Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy (Yale University Press)

In this exceptional book, Author O’Shaughnessy undertakes to tell the story of the American Revolution from the viewpoint of the ten British overseers who actually managed it, if ‘managed’ is the right word in this context. And he very definitely succeeds. None of the many, many other books I have read on the rebellion have portrayed as well the challenges facing those who took up the colonists’ challenge and sought to counter it from their remote location with all that its isolation portended for miscommunication, misunderstanding, erroneous presumptions, and manpower and supply challenges that ultimately doomed them to defeat.

The reader gets an invaluable look at the three primary reasons that the war was not only lost, but doomed to failure before it commenced. First, the British grossly misjudged the number of loyalists among the American population, their commanders waiting time and again, against all hope, for pro-British colonists to come forward to fight with them. Second, and despite the fact that a good map would have revealed the truth of it, they under-appreciated the sheer size of the theater they were trying to conquer and hold, essentially never succeeding in first taking and then being able to secure any sizeable chunk of territory. Third, and perhaps most crucially, they simply could neither afford nor transport enough men and materiel to overwhelm the opposition. Add to these reasons the more subtle but nonetheless crucial inability of the leadership to set and adhere to priorities among Britain’s Caribbean holdings, the continuing threat of French and/or Spanish intervention, and other pressing demands, and you have all the makings of the disaster that inevitably ensued.

The book does present a couple of issues, though. The first and most important is the difficulty faced by any author who undertakes to fashion joint biographies of contemporaries engaged in the same enterprise, repetition of events and attitudes. For instance, by the time the reader has completed the portraits of George III and Prime Minister Lord North, he understands many times over that North early on really, really, absolutely, urgently, and honest to goodness wanted to resign. Indeed, the reader understands so well that he is tempted to resign himself, resign, that is, from reading the rest of the book. Second, the author is a pedestrian writer who while he does a decent job of portraying the respective roles of the subjects, lapses into Wikipedia-like flatness when he sets out the ‘after-action’ lives of the protagonists. Finally, and as I wrote in my review of “The Siege of Fort William Henry,” I guess authors don’t want to take the time to consult Mapquest or Google Earth when citing locations and distances. On page 142, O’Shaughnessy writes, “The delay allowed the enemy force to strengthen their fortifications at Crown Point and Ticonderoga, the former situated at the north end of Lake George and the latter near the southern end of Lake Champlain.” Uh, no. Ticonderoga is indeed located at the southern end of Lake Champlain, and Crown Point is located approximately 10 miles NNW, just a bit farther up Champlain’s western shore and relatively nowhere near Lake George.

All in all, this a most worthwhile read, and not only because you won’t find the same amalgam somewhere else. It stands alone as an excellent and unique piece of scholarship, innovative and long overdue.