Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

By The Erudite Redneck

The War for America, 1775-1783. By Piers Mackesy. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993, pp. xxvi, 522; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964).

Americans are unused to seeing the terms “rebel” and “enemy” used to describe their revolutionary forebears, and the personal pronouns “we,” “our” and “us” referring to redcoats and the English Crown. Any discomfort first felt, however, in Piers Mackesy’s The War for America, 1775-1783 soon dissipates. The author, after begging forgiveness for any supposed slight, proceeds with an epic that puts the colonies where they belong: close but shy of center stage as the English government, the protagonist, stumbles into world war.

Mackesy tells the American story, although George Washington and other Americans remain in shadows compared to the likes of the Comte de Vergennes, in France, Catherine the Great, in Russia, and Charles III, in Spain. Mackesy has Washington earning his place as a head of state, or at least fighting his way to it, as England deals carefully with others. All, including England’s King George III, were maneuvering for world power.

The War for America is a history of “great men,” such as Lord George Germain, the British Secretary of State for much of the war, and others in the Cabinet, but is more. Mackesy tells a military history, giving due to significant battles from the Carolinas to the West Indies to the English Channel and India, and providing strategic analysis and technical information, such as fleet capability and fighting strength. He couches it within political history, the colonies’ aim for independence and Lord North’s response. England usually found itself reacting, awaiting a Loyalist movement that never sustained in America, rather than acting decisively, a point central to Mackesy’s interpretation.

The Crown dallied as it juggled far-flung goals and obligations. Toward the end, George III was just obstinate in the face of imperial ruin. Here and there throughout Mackesy’s work are hints at greater change at work as the war dragged on: a shift in English thinking, a questioning of oligarchy itself, especially as Lord Rockingham, then Lord Shelburne, extract the British government from the mire.

The War for America, with bibliographical references, index and a dozen maps, is an authoritative antidote for anyone, scholar or amateur, apt to see the American Revolution solely through the eyes of vaunted forefathers and nameless but heroic minutemen. Mackesy’s vita dates to the 1950s and is distinguished by service to the academy on both sides of the Atlantic. He wrote The War for America in the 1960s from the perspective of his own service during World War II, an illumination in the introduction by American historian John W. Shy. This insight is explicit in a few places where Mackesy compares situations similar in both wars; his wartime experience is never obtrusive. Mackesy’s work is a critical, but respectful, history of his own country at center stage during its failed “war for America.”

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