The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson

combat experience, the force had fought few major battles since Quebec and Minden, sixteen years earlier. A few prominent commanders refused to fight the Americans, among them Sir Jeffrey Amherst, who had led North American forces against the French from 1758 to 1763. While some junior officers were keen to earn their spurs in New England, enough were leaving the service that in February the king declared he would “not listen to any further requests” from those hoping to sell their commissions rather than embark for America; he deemed such behavior a “great impropriety.” Lord North, as early as September 1774, had suggested that “Hessians and Hanoverians could be employed if necessary.” During the winter, secret negotiations had begun in Kassel to retain German hirelings, should war erupt in America.

      A fateful momentum swept the government along. Something must be done; even those wary of war agreed that American rebellion could not be condoned. Much of the particular planning fell to slender, rigorous William Legge, the Earl of Dartmouth and the colonial secretary, who was so pious a Christian that he was known as the “Psalm Singer”; his country home near Birmingham had provided a refuge for evangelical preachers and for revival meetings of sobbing, hysterical worshippers. Raised in the same household as North, his stepbrother, Lord Dartmouth was hardly a warmonger. But he believed that prideful rebels disobeyed both their British masters and their God. Obedience and Christ’s redemption were needed to set things right, along with a few regiments. After a decade of fitful, indecisive political skirmishing, a short, sharp contest of arms offered an appealing clarity.

      And so war stuffs spilled from the Tower and other depots to be loaded onto westbound ships: canteens, leather cartridge boxes, watch coats, tents, five-ton wagons by the dozen, muskets by the hundreds, powder by the ton. There was a run on New World maps, although one London skeptic later wrote, “The small scale of our maps deceived us, and as the word ‘America’ takes up no more room than the word ‘Yorkshire,’ we seemed to think the territories they represent are much the same bigness, though Charleston is as far from Boston as London from Venice.”

      Troops tramped toward the ports. A London newspaper reported that a light cavalry regiment preparing to deploy had inscribed “DEATH OR GLORY” on its caps, with an embroidered skull. Seven regiments of foot bound for America were brought to strength by drafting soldiers from units left behind. Each regiment was also permitted to take sixty women, twelve servants, and eighty-six tons of baggage. On the southern coast of Ireland, Cork grew so crowded that officers waiting to embark on transport ships complained of difficulty in finding lodging. Soldiers living in hovels on Blarney Lane or Brogue Market Street practiced the manual of arms, though some lacked muskets. Each would be issued a bunk, a bolster, a blanket, and a spoon for the voyage. The usual drunken sprees and fistfights between soldiers and sailors kept officers alert; dragoons preparing to sail from Cork found the ships’ holds stacked with so many casks of porter being smuggled for sale in Boston that they could not reach the stalls to feed their horses.

      As the squadrons awaited a fair wind, a vague unease drifted through the kingdom. “Our stake is deep,” wrote Horace Walpole. “It is that kind of war in which even victory may ruin us.” But the man who reigned over that kingdom remained constant, as ever. “When once these rebels have felt a smart blow,” George told his Admiralty, “they will submit.”

      Blows would decide, as the king had predicted. Yet no one could foresee that the American War of Independence would last 3,059 days. Or that the struggle would be marked by more than 1,300 actions, mostly small and bloody, with a few large and bloody, plus 241 naval engagements in a theater initially bounded by the Atlantic seaboard, the St. Lawrence and Mississippi Rivers, and the Gulf of Mexico, before expanding to other lands and other waters.

      Roughly a quarter million Americans would serve the cause in some military capacity. At least one in ten of them would die for that cause—25,674 deaths by one tally, as many as 35,800 by another. Those deaths were divided with rough parity among battle, disease, and British prisons, a larger proportion of the American population to perish in any conflict other than the Civil War. If many considered the war providential—ordained by God’s will and shaped by divine grace—certainly the outcome would also be determined by gutful soldiering, endurance, hard decisions (good and bad), and luck (good and bad). The odds were heavily stacked against the Americans: no colonial rebellion had ever succeeded in casting off imperial shackles. But, as Voltaire had observed, history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.

      This would not be a war between regimes or dynasties, fought for territory or the usual commercial advantages. Instead, what became known as the American Revolution was an improvised struggle between two peoples of a common heritage, now sundered by divergent values and conflicting visions of a world to come. Unlike most European wars of the eighteenth century, this one would not be fought by professional armies on flat, open terrain with reasonable roads, in daylight and good weather. And though it was fought in the age of reason, infused with Enlightenment ideals, this war, this civil war, would spiral into savagery, with sanguinary cruelty, casual killing, and atrocity.

      Those 3,059 hard days would yield two tectonic results. The first was in the United Kingdom, where the reduction of the empire by about one-third, including the demolition of the new dominions in North America, proved to be as divisive as any misfortune to befall the nation in the eighteenth century, at a cost of £128 million and thousands of British lives. The broader conflict that began in 1778, with the intervention of European powers on America’s behalf, led to the only British defeat in the seven Anglo-French wars fought between 1689 and 1815. Of course, what was lost by force of arms could be regained, and a second British Empire, in different garb, would flourish in the next century.

      The second consequence was epochal and enduring: the creation of the American republic. Surely among mankind’s most remarkable achievements, this majestic construct also inspired a creation myth that sometimes resembled a garish cartoon, a melodramatic tale of doughty yeomen resisting moronic, brutal lobsterbacks. The civil war that unspooled over those eight years would be both grander and more nuanced, a tale of heroes and knaves, of sacrifice and blunder, of redemption and profound suffering. Beyond the battlefield, then and forever, stood a shining city on a hill.

      An unusual bustle disturbed placid Craven Street on Monday morning, March 20, 1775. At No. 27, a looming town house with fourteen fireplaces, crates and trunks had been packed and prepared for shipment. Visitors in fine carriages had recently been seen wheeling up and wheeling off, bidding good-bye, adieu, bon voyage. Among the neighbors it was rumored that after almost two decades in London, Dr. Franklin was going home.

      He was famous in Craven Street, as he was famous everywhere, though he still referred to himself as “B. Franklin, printer.” Except for a brief return visit to Philadelphia in 1763–64, and a temporary move a few years later to a different house on the street, he had lived at No. 27 since arriving in England as a colonial agent in 1757. Because he was widely deemed a “universal genius”—the accolade did not displease him—his eccentricities were forgiven: chuffing up and down the nineteen oak stairs, dumbbells in hand, for exercise; sitting nude in the open window above the street, regardless of the season, for his morning “air bath”; playing his “harmonica,” an improbable contraption constructed of thirty-seven glass hemispheres mounted on an iron spindle and rotated with a foot treadle so that he could elicit three ghostly octaves by touching the moving edges with his moistened fingers. (Mozart and Beethoven, among others, would compose for the instrument.) And Craven Street had also been his laboratory, the site where he had launched inquiries into sunspots, magnetism, lead poisoning, the organic origins of coal, carriage wheel construction, and ocean salinity. At the foot of the street, on the Thames, he had repeated his celebrated kite-and-key demonstration; St. Paul’s Cathedral, nearby, was Britain’s first structure to install his lightning rod.

      The tall man who emerged onto the front stoop that morning was now sixty-nine, with thin, graying hair and sensual lips that made him look younger. He retained the broad shoulders of the leather-apron tradesman who’d once carried lead type for a living, though he had grown plump enough to call himself “a fat old fellow.” Furrows creased the prominent dome of his forehead, and the hooded blue eyes sagged. “Anxiety begins to disturb my rest,” he had written a friend in America a few weeks earlier, “and