I can't say enough about how tremendous this book is! I read A LOT about the American Revolution and this is easily in my top 5. "Revolution Song" reads like a novel, but is straight-up nonfiction.

Author Russell Shorto takes six people: George Washington, Lord George Germain (American Sec. of State for England), Abraham Yates (NY laborer and later politician), Cornplanter (Seneca/Iroquois warrior/chief), Margaret Coghlan (daughter of a British general), and Venture Smith (slave who bought his freedom) and intertwines their stories like none I've read before.

All of the high points of the Revolutionary period and later are hit but in such a natural, effortless way that again, it reads like a novel.

Don't pass this book by! ( )

This history of the American Revolution is in fact the parallel biographies of six individuals whose lives came in contact with the war and the underlying ideologies of American independence. I really like this approach to writing history because while it is unwieldy to attempt a comprehensive history of the American Revolution, by focusing on six individuals you get a better sense of how the war affected different kinds of people. And as Short tells their entire life stories we get a lot of detail beyond just the 8 years of the war of their lives before and after the conflict. Finally, we also get to see how these six historical figures dealt with the ideals and challenges of freedom. I should add, and Shorto makes this explicitly clear, that these six individuals are not representatives of greater populations but simply their own American Revolution stories.

The six subjects of Revolution Song are:

• George Washington - The most obvious figure of the story of the American Revolution, and yet Shorto is able to get beneath the "great general and first President" story to get an understanding of a many struggling to find his place in society and the opportunities that military leadership bring.


• Venture Smith - Born in modern-day Ghana as Broteer Furro, Venture Smith was kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery, eventually living in servitude in Rhode Island, New York, and Connecticut. Venture purchased his freedom and that of his wife and children and became a successful farmer in Connecticut. One of his son's would serve in Washington's army during the war. His A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America was one of the first published slave narratives.


• George Germain - The only figure in the book who never set foot in the Americas is George Germain, 1st Viscount Sackville. Having been court martialed during the Seven Years War, he was disgraced in aristocratic circles. Nevertheless he was a favorite of King George III and was able to claw his way into politics and get appointed Secretary of State for the American Department. His aggressive approach to attempting to suppress the rebellion and lack of familiarity of the reality of the situation in the colonies is blamed for the British failure in the war.


• Cornplanter - The chief warrior for the Seneca people who fought in both the French & Indian War and the Revolution allied with the British forces. He and his people suffered greatly when General Washington instructed Major General John Sullivan to carry out a scorched earth campaign destroying Iroquois Six Nation villages throughout New York. After the war, Cornplanter protested against the Treaty of Paris ceding Iroquois land to the United States that had never been under control of Britain, and met with President Washington in person in 1790.


• Abraham Yates - A revolutionary lawyer and politician from Albany, Yates took a more radical position on individual liberty and mistrust of government. He became a rival to Alexander Hamilton and a staunch opponent of Federalism and the Constitution.


• Margaret Moncrieffe - The only woman in this book, Margaret Moncrieffe was a child when the Revolution started living in New York as the daughter of a British officer. Her father arranged her marriage to the cruel British Lieutenant John Coghlan although she was in love with Aaron Burr. After moving to Britain, she separated from her husband and found a measure of independence as the mistress of several prominent men in Britain and Europe.

I think the stories of Venture Smith, Cornplanter, and Margaret Moncrieff are the most interesting since they are the type of people that don't appear in histories that focus on military and political leaders. Nevertheless, the whole book reads very well and is an interesting addition to Revolutionary War historical studies. ( )

I enjoyed this a great deal—Shorto follows a number of people around the Revolution, including an Iroquois war/peace leader; a New York politician who was ultimately an antifederalist (and whose worries about presidential power sound pretty prescient, although Shorto himself selected those quotes in the past year or so, so no surprise there); a young British woman whose attempts at freedom didn’t end up well for her; an enslaved and then free man trying to carve out a life in the North; a British lord; and George Washington. Each of these people interacted with at least one of the others (mostly George Washington), with the exception of the African-turned-American who went by Venture Smith; the closest Shorto gets is that Smith could have gone to see Washington at one particular point where Washington was nearby and publicly feted, but there is no evidence one way or the other (and he didn’t seem like the type to go watch politicians). He successfully gets across the many ways in which the Revolution did, and didn’t, change things for various people. ( )

Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom
by Russell Shorto

Review 7/29/19

Interesting perspective on the American Revolution is provided in this exposition, interweaving stories from the lives of six persons whose own tales exemplify some of the difficulties associated with the Revolution’s challenges.
- George Washington, trying to be a successful Virginia planter with all the social cache to which such folk thought they were entitled, instead becomes the Commander who accomplishes Cornwallis’ and the British’s defeat. He sees the fatal flaw in slavery but does little to extricate himself from it.
- Ghanaian youth Broteer Furro, captured and shipped from the Gold Coast of Africa, finds himself in slavery in New England. Renamed Venture Smith, he eventually extricates himself, his wife, and his children through both hard work and a sharp exercise of capitalist financial knowhow.
- Seneca leader Cornplanter, whose father was white, experiences the disaster that European inroads bring the Iroquois in what would become western New York and Pennsylvania. After observing, and participating in, massacres on both sides, he shares in negotiations (including with Washington himself) that place his families in settlements that appear to be “safe” ... for a while.
- Abraham Yates, Jr., of Albany, NY, becomes one of the staunchest early supporters of the rights of the common man (the self-made merchant class), trying to avoid a return to the supremacy of the elites.
- Margaret Montcrieffe Coghlan is a motherless teenager, her father a military officer, when New York City changes hands from the revolutionaries to the British. Her father marries her off, and she and her abusive new husband sail to England. But Margaret rebels, walks away, and eventually must acknowledge that the freedom espoused by the Americans is not yet truly available for women.
- George Germain (later Sackville), becomes Britain’s American Secretary, trying to use extreme firmness to bring the Americans to heel. He attempts to run the war from a distance, but he and his generals together manage to fail.

Russell Shorto never fails to deliver stories that drop you in the middle of history with sights, sounds, emotions and humanity that render you unable to put the book down. Through written records including legal records, journals and book publications (as well as other sources), we attend the weddings, births and funerals, understand the probable motivations accompanying the legal infighting and intrigue, and see that our sugar-coated version of the American Revolution as taught in schools was seriously deficient.

I always say that if southerners are still fighting the Civil War, Northerners (more precisely northeasterners) are still fighting the Revolution. We grew up with the battlegrounds, graves and monuments all around us and we went to school with the descendants of patriots. Even having been to or lived around many of the sites of history, I gained a new appreciation for details that were previously not touched on by many chroniclers. Having researched George Washington’s early life as it intersected with other southern families in my genealogical research. I was aware of his failures and shortcomings as an American “hero”.

The author provides us with fascinating portraits of the characters, an indispensable map and a meticulous bibliography. By bringing in five lesser-known characters in the drama, as well as showing us the George Washington and his family that we thought we knew, Shorto brings the pain and struggle, fears and hopes into sharp focus. There are the elites, the Livingstons, Jays, and Johnsons familiar to New Yorkers as well as our Native elites, Joseph Brant, Molly Jemison and Red Jacket travelling through the pages, playing their parts in the story. His characters are as diverse as America.

Somewhat chilling was the life-long warning of Abraham Yates to be wary of the Federalists who might wish to take too much power away from the states, concentrating it in the hands of the central government. His opponent was today’s hero on Broadway, Alexander Hamilton. After Yates’ death, George Washington, perhaps with Yates in mind, gave his Farewell Address to an adoring crowd, leaving us with this to ponder for the next two hundred or so years:

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”

Since it is the fourth of July today, and the weather is nice, it might be a good day for me to pay my respects to some of the people who brought us all here today. Thanks to my ancestors, the Native Americans, the British Loyalists, the American Patriots, the French Huguenots, the Dutch colonists, and others I may have overlooked for whatever small or large contribution they made. Thanks also to Russell Shorto for getting us excited about our collective history once again. ( )