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1776: Smugglers, land grabbers, and slave holders.
1776 is a historical novel narrated by Caleb Doyle, a fictional Boston orphan who lands at seventeen in John Hancock's warehouse and spends the next half-century inside the founding of the United States. He sets it all down in July and August of 1826, at seventy-two, dictating to his fourteen-year-old grandson Adams at the kitchen table. The frame is the morning news that Jefferson and Adams both died on the Fourth of July, fifty years to the hour after the signing. Caleb decides to tell the boy the version the schoolbooks left out. The one he was inside of.
The engine of the book is what Caleb learns before he learns anything noble. Hancock's warehouse runs the largest smuggling operation in New England behind a legitimate import house, and Caleb's first real education is keeping two sets of the one the king's men see, and the real one hidden under the floor. Boston has two harbors, and most weeks the illegal one is bigger. Samuel Adams is the engine and Hancock the boiler. One does the work, the other makes the noise. The Boston Massacre gets stage-managed. Paul Revere's engraving shows what people needed to believe, not what happened. Patrick Carr's deathbed forgiveness of the soldier who shot him gets suppressed because it could undo the movement. The Revolution, as Caleb sees it, runs as much on managed perception and merchant self-interest as on principle.
From there the novel walks the whole war and the whole peace. The tea in the harbor. Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, Philadelphia, the long retreat, Valley Forge, the foreign officers, the Conway cabal, the French alliance, Monmouth, the southern campaign, Arnold's treason, Yorktown, the near-mutiny at Newburgh. Then the empty years after the fighting, the 1787 convention, Washington's two terms, Adams's presidency, Jefferson's, the second war in 1812, the long peace, Lafayette's return. Caleb outlives nearly everyone, and the cost accumulates in the people the country never puts on a his daughter Sarah, a Black man named Cato kept alive only in a ledger Caleb keeps, debts owed and never paid.
The ending is the point of the whole thing. Caleb refuses to publish in his lifetime. A book published while its author lives becomes the property of his reputation; published after his death, it becomes the property of the reader. He tells his grandson to keep the manuscript in a trunk, wait until at least forty, add his own hand to it, pass it down, keep the chain. He signs it, the candle burns out, he goes up to bed. The one thing he cannot write is an anonymous one-legged veteran he saw on Boston Common in 1815, looking at nothing. The man the country is built on and has forgotten, the one the page can't hold because no one ever gave Caleb his name.
Roughly 89,000 words, thirty-five chapters and a prologue. The history as it was managed, not as it was mythologized, told by the one witness who kept the ledger nobody else was keeping.
The engine of the book is what Caleb learns before he learns anything noble. Hancock's warehouse runs the largest smuggling operation in New England behind a legitimate import house, and Caleb's first real education is keeping two sets of the one the king's men see, and the real one hidden under the floor. Boston has two harbors, and most weeks the illegal one is bigger. Samuel Adams is the engine and Hancock the boiler. One does the work, the other makes the noise. The Boston Massacre gets stage-managed. Paul Revere's engraving shows what people needed to believe, not what happened. Patrick Carr's deathbed forgiveness of the soldier who shot him gets suppressed because it could undo the movement. The Revolution, as Caleb sees it, runs as much on managed perception and merchant self-interest as on principle.
From there the novel walks the whole war and the whole peace. The tea in the harbor. Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, Philadelphia, the long retreat, Valley Forge, the foreign officers, the Conway cabal, the French alliance, Monmouth, the southern campaign, Arnold's treason, Yorktown, the near-mutiny at Newburgh. Then the empty years after the fighting, the 1787 convention, Washington's two terms, Adams's presidency, Jefferson's, the second war in 1812, the long peace, Lafayette's return. Caleb outlives nearly everyone, and the cost accumulates in the people the country never puts on a his daughter Sarah, a Black man named Cato kept alive only in a ledger Caleb keeps, debts owed and never paid.
The ending is the point of the whole thing. Caleb refuses to publish in his lifetime. A book published while its author lives becomes the property of his reputation; published after his death, it becomes the property of the reader. He tells his grandson to keep the manuscript in a trunk, wait until at least forty, add his own hand to it, pass it down, keep the chain. He signs it, the candle burns out, he goes up to bed. The one thing he cannot write is an anonymous one-legged veteran he saw on Boston Common in 1815, looking at nothing. The man the country is built on and has forgotten, the one the page can't hold because no one ever gave Caleb his name.
Roughly 89,000 words, thirty-five chapters and a prologue. The history as it was managed, not as it was mythologized, told by the one witness who kept the ledger nobody else was keeping.
226 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 6, 2026
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