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The First American Army

The Untold Story of George Washington and the Men behind America's First Fight for Freedom

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

This is the first book that offers a you-are-there look at the American Revolution through the eyes of the enlisted men. Through searing portraits of individual soldiers, Bruce Chadwick, author of George Washington's War, brings alive what it was like to serve then in the American army.


With interlocking stories of ordinary Americans, he evokes what it meant to face brutal winters, starvation, terrible homesickness and to go into battle against the much-vaunted British regulars and their deadly Hessian mercenaries.


The reader lives through the experiences of those terrible and heroic times when a fifteen-year-old fifer survived the Battle of Bunker Hill, when Private Josiah Atkins escaped unscathed from the bloody battles in New York and when a doctor and a minister shared the misery of the wounded and dying. These intertwining stories are drawn from their letters and never-before-quoted journals found in the libraries belonging to the camps where Washington quartered his troops during those desperate years.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 3, 2005
      In this novelistic treatment of the Revolutionary War, Chadwick (George Washington's War, Brother Against Brother) uses the experiences of eight men to give the reader a "bottom up" look at the war. Drawing on their letters and diaries, he follows them through their years in and out of the war, from the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775 to the American victory at Yorktown in 1781. Although the horrors of battle are a main focus of their writings, everyday activities and concerns-romance, food, clothing, leisure and friendship-reveal much about these early Americans' lives. Readers will find little academic analysis of the subjects; except for a few expansive chapter introductions, Chadwick keeps standard history writing to a minimum. Instead, he focuses on these men's day-to-day and writes in lively prose, although some accounts push the limits of reconstruction and read like fiction. Readers unfamiliar with the history of the revolutionary war may find themselves lost in the rapid shuffling between campaigns, battles and locations, but the stories of individual soldiers, doctors and ministers are strong enough to carry casual readers as well as those accustomed to academic histories.

    • Library Journal

      November 7, 2005
      In this novelistic treatment of the Revolutionary War, Chadwick (George Washington's War, Brother Against Brother) uses the experiences of eight men to give the reader a "bottom up" look at the war. Drawing on their letters and diaries, he follows them through their years in and out of the war, from the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775 to the American victory at Yorktown in 1781. Although the horrors of battle are a main focus of their writings, everyday activities and concerns-romance, food, clothing, leisure and friendship-reveal much about these early Americans' lives. Readers will find little academic analysis of the subjects; except for a few expansive chapter introductions, Chadwick keeps standard history writing to a minimum. Instead, he focuses on these men's day-to-day and writes in lively prose, although some accounts push the limits of reconstruction and read like fiction. Readers unfamiliar with the history of the revolutionary war may find themselves lost in the rapid shuffling between campaigns, battles and locations, but the stories of individual soldiers, doctors and ministers are strong enough to carry casual readers as well as those accustomed to academic histories.

      Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Booklist

      November 1, 2005
      What was it like to be an American soldier at the battles of Bunker Hill, Quebec, Saratoga, and Monmouth? Historian Chadwick's well-crafted narrative of the Continental Army tells the tale through several journals and memoirs. History readers wanting a break from reading generals' biographies will be interested in meeting Chadwick's enlisted men, beginning with fifer John Greenwood, a Johnny Tremain-like 15-year-old who was present at Bunker Hill, much to his mother's distress. Another teenager, Jeremiah Greenman, marched in the disastrous 1775-76 invasion of Canada led by then-hero Benedict Arnold. The smallpox-ravaged survivors of that campaign retreated to the Lake Champlain-Lake George area to have their souls saved by Reverend Ammi Robbins, and their bodies salved by Dr. Lewis Beebe. The latter two exemplify the author's emphasis on the civilian support that sustained the Continental Army, which was not a static organization but one that men were continually joining and leaving. Chadwick makes palpable the day-to-day hardships and intermittent distractions of army life during the Revolutionary War.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)

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  • English

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