Red Dawn at Lexington: "If They Mean to Have a War, Let It Begin Here!"

by Louis Birnbaum

For Louis Birnbaum, the early period of the American Revolution is one of the greatest stories in the world—and he has written his book to give us back that immediacy and excitement. Careful scholarship underlies every line, but the author’s purpose is to make us feel we were there—keeping watch on the British through the slow spring until the famous night that set Paul Revere galloping; sweltering with the British regulars in the unseasonable April heat as they are driven back from Concord; fighting it out to the last bullet and grain of powder on Breed’s Hill; coaxing the cannon from Ticonderoga across thin ice to get them to Washington in time; improvising the above-ground defenses on Dorchester Heights when Washington seized the high ground and found it frozen like iron; firing those cannon just enough to push the British out of Boston without burning the city as they had Charlestown across the harbor.

This brilliant new history is the crown of a lifetime’s enthusiasm and research. From the embarkation of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers to strengthen General Gage in 1773, to the departure of the British from Boston in 1776, we have a totally fascinating, detailed, and moving account of the beginnings of the Revolution on the New England front.

As the author writes in his foreword: “Some of this material is rare or has come to light only recently; all of it offers the modern reader the detail and sense of immediacy found only in eyewitness accounts.”

Genres: History, American Revolutionary War, Nonfiction, American History

402 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1986

Reviews

[Greg Thiele · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book does an excellent job of describing the outbreak of the American Revolution as an insurgency. There may have been no way for the British to prevent the colonies from breaking away, but this book does a good job illustrating how badly the British misread the situation in America and played into the hands of the revolutionaries.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good overall, but the writing is uneven (sometimes brilliant and captivating, sometimes oddly amateur) and it too often bogs down in minutia.

Again, good overall, and I'm glad I read it.

Fascinating period of history, and Birnbaum obviously knows his stuff.

[Dawn Dorsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This well-researched history reads more like a novel, enabling it to hold the attention of both scholars of the Americans Revolution and less serious readers. In addition to consulting the proceedings of Parliament, the colonial legislative bodies and Continental Congress, military records of both sides, and similar usual records of military history, Birnbaum delved into the personal correspondence and journals of officers and private soldiers of both sides and their wives, minutes of town meetings and selectmen, public health records, and other sources to find out what life was like for townsfolk, country folk, and the soldiery, what they thought and how they lived, why some reached a state of rebellion while others remained Loyalists to the crown, and how these decisions affected their lives.

Birnbaum looked to the beginnings of colonial settlement and life on the frontier to find how the American character had already developed and differentiated from the English, throughout the different levels of society, and Americans had even grown to be better fed, and therefore taller and stronger than most Englishmen, without necessarily any difference in genetic and cultural background except that of growing up in the American colonies. He focused on a few individual soldiers and colonials to build personal stories that rendered a picture of family life with the English regiments or in Boston and surrounding villages, as well as less detail in other colonies, allowing his readers to experience world-changing social and political developments As if we were there.

This book focuses only of the beginnings of the Revolution, as the situation developed over the 1760s and 1770s to the point of open rebellion, and traces how a series of English decisions and blunders in colonial management effecting only one colony grew to garner support from all thirteen sufficient to inspire rebellion in a day when the British Army and Navy were respected worldwide, and no colony had ever successfully rebelled against a European state. The book ends with the once unbelievable retreat of the entire British force in 1776 from Boston to Halifax, driven hence by colonials who had been assumed by the English army to be little more than an unruly mob, uneducated and afraid to fight against the formidable British Regulars, and certainly incapable of organizing and conducting a full scale war. The war was still in its early stages, but America had completely overset the world stage and the world was sitting up to watch.

[Mark James]

This is an excellent and exciting account of the early days of the American Revolution. Boston and the surrounding countryside had been anticipating and preparing for armed conflict with the British for a year before the first shots were fired at Lexington. The author gives us a first-hand account not only of the events but of the people who took part in them. If this is a subject you are interested in I definitely recommend this book.