1776 by David McCullough: Book 9 of 2022

 

I bought this book more than a year ago. A friend who teaches literature said he has read this book every couple of years for more than a decade.  He has read several books by David McCullough and 1776 is his favorite.  

I just finished a biography of Thomas Jefferson and decided now was the time to read about the most fateful year in American history.  The book is even better than my friend Ray led me to believe.  The story is riveting from end to end, and the end is the best. The drama of the battles for Trenton and Princeton kept me reading intently right to the final paragraph.  

The events of the year provide an arc that would make a good movie script.  The first battle of 1776 is the highest moment for America. The long seige of Boston ends when Washington puts a battery of cannon atop Dorchester Heights in one night without the British knowing what was happening.  In the evening the Heights are empty, in the morning nearly two dozen guns are emplaced behind revetments dragged up the hill by two thousand men.  

Within days the British are on the way to Halifax in defeat.

The triumph is followed by a long string of defeats in late summer in New York ending with the loss of Fort Washington with nearly 3,000 Americans captured. Several times in those campaigns, the British stopped just short of wiping out the American Army. As the year ended the bedraggled Americans were at a small fraction of the strength they started the year with. Lord Howe, the British commander decided to end the campaign and finish Washington off in the spring. 

The year almost ends with the Americans in total defeat. Then the night after Christmas, Washington personally led an attack in a blizzard across the Delaware River. The Americans defeated the 1,500 Hessians in Trenton, killing or capturing a thousand with five hundred fleeing. 

Along with the great drama of the story, is real insight into the character of the leaders, particularly George Washington.  The man who would become the first American President did not do everything right, be he carried himself with dignity in every situation. He was tireless and showed confidence in the worst situations.  And at the very worst times, as in the attack on Trenton, Washington was at the front of the attack and the perilous river crossing.  

The heroes of the story were young men. Washington was the old man of the Army at 44 years old.  Thomas Jefferson was 33 when the Declaration of Independence he wrote was read across the new nation.  Nathaniel Greene, one of Washington's best field commanders was also 33.  Colonel Henry Knox, the hero of the victory in Boston, was 25 when the British fled his guns.  One of his battery captains was Alexander Hamilton who was either 19 or 21 depending on when he was actually born, there is some doubt.  James Madison was 25 in 1776. John Adams who kept the Continental Congress focused on supporting the war had just turned 40.  

The founders of America were young men of great physical courage who fought for an ideal that has become a beacon of democracy to the world.   

In two years, I will re-read this book along with my friend Ray.

First eight books of 2022:

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Red Baron Memorial in France

 

Beside a narrow road Vaux-sur-Somme, France, is a modest memorial to the most well-known fighter pilot in history: Baron Manfred Friedrich Freiherr von Richtofen, the Red Baron.

Richtofen scored 80 victories in air-to-air combat before being killed in his last dogfight over France. Even in his last moments, fatally wounded, he landed his plane before dying in his cockpit of a chest wound on April 21, 1918. The previous April, von Richtofen scored 22 victories in air-to-air combat.

The single-engine, three-winged plane had a top speed of just over 100 mph. It was built on a steel-tube frame covered with canvas.  

The memorial is a series of four monochrome metal panels at reveal the image above only when the viewer stands directly in front of them.

The Ace of Aces of World War I was born on May 2, 1892. We share a birthdate. His remains were finally interred in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1975, a year before I began a three-year tour in that Germany city with the American Army.  I was 26 years old when I left Germany in 1979.  The Red Baron was 26 years old when he died in his Fokker Dr1 fighter plane in France.  

There are only 365 days in a year, so I know that coincidences are simply what happens when one lives a lot of years, but I love coincidences anyway. 

 Posts about traveling in France and neighboring countries in February 2022:

My favorite restaurant is a victim of COVID.

The Museum of the Great War.

The Waterloo Battlefield.

The Red Baron Memorial.

Chartres Cathedral.

High Performance Cars in a garage in Versailles.

Talking about Fathers and Careers at lunch.

A Visit to Chartres Cathedral

 

On the was back from visiting the Circuit de Sarthe, the race course of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, I stopped at Chartres Cathedral. It is one of not the greatest example of French Gothic architecture. The cathedrals at Reims and Amiens also have a claim to French Gothic supremacy.

I first heard of this cathedral from Professor Theodora Graham in one of my first college classes at Penn State.  She explained the architecture and the devotion of those who built it, many of whom would not see it completed.  

The cathedral sits atop a steep hill in a little town that is 80 kilometers southwest of Paris. The narrow roads and remote location keep the tourist traffic to a tiny fraction of the millions who swarm Notre Dame Cathedral in the center of Paris. 

Forty years after I first heard of Chartres and saw images from a slide projector, I finally got to walk around the cathedral on a sunny afternoon. I spent most of the time looking up, which is what the designers intended.

Posts about traveling in France and neighboring countries in February 2022:

My favorite restaurant is a victim of COVID.

The Museum of the Great War.

The Waterloo Battlefield.

The Red Baron Memorial.

Chartres Cathedral.

High Performance Cars in a garage in Versailles.

Talking about Fathers and Careers at lunch.