Crucible of Revolution: Fred Anderson’s Seven Years’ War

Abstract

Francis Parkman, more than a century ago, wrote an enormously popular history of the climactic war between Great Britain and France for dominance in North America.(1) Parkman cast the struggle as a contest between the dynamic force of English Protestantism and the inflexible power of French absolutism and Catholicism, and he personified these qualities in the respective military leaders, James Wolfe and the Marquis de Montcalm. That both men died in the decisive battle for Quebec gave Parkman's history a satisfying dramatic credibility, making Montcalm and Wolfe an enduring classic of American historical writing and anchoring its message firmly in American national mythology. Fred Anderson has produced a very different version of this war, but his Crucible of War deserves the attention, popularity, and durability enjoyed by Parkman's masterpiece. Like Parkman, Anderson writes fluently and forcefully. Like Parkman he has absorbed and digested a wide range of evidence and historical writing. And like Parkman's, Anderson's story bears an important message: that the origins of the American Revolution lie less in the seventeenth-century departure of unhappy people from England for the American colonies and in the standard story of British blunders and American grievance that began with the 1765 Stamp Act, than in the volcanic events of a tremendous war between the world's two greatest maritime and economic empires. A third historian, Lawrence Henry Gipson, a generation ago anticipated Anderson's message and spent a lifetime producing fifteen volumes that trace the first British Empire from 1748 to its apotheosis in 1759-60, and then on its subsequent stumbling course to the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. But Gipson, immersed in a sea of documents from the Public Record Office and the British Museum, admired the greatness of the old Empire far too much to see clearly and set forth persuasively the vital connection that drives Anderson's narrative -- that out of the American colonial war, 1754-64, came the experience, the memories, the perceptions, the emotions, the conditions, the problems, and many of the people that, a decade later, caused the Empire to erupt in civil war. The story is familiar: young Washington and Fort Necessity, Braddock, Fort William Henry, the imperious Loudoun, William Pitt, Montcalm at Ticonderoga, Wolfe at Louisbourg and Quebec, Amherst and Pontiac's war; yet Anderson makes it crisp and original, in part with very good writing but also by bringing to each episode a rare grasp of both difficulties and context. For example, from Anderson's judicious quotation from the diaries kept by many New England soldiers, a reader feels the shocking experience for thousands of colonial farm boys of seeing hundreds of British regulars caught in an abatis of felled trees (tree limbs sharpened and woven together) and being slaughtered by French musketry and grapeshot at Ticonderoga. A few pages on, he artfully conveys the underlying desperation of this last great victory in the doomed defense of New France when six weeks after defeat at Ticonderoga British and provincial raiders destroyed the French supply base at Fort Frontenac, where Lake Ontario empties into the St. Lawrence. The appalling difficulties of hacking a road straight west across the mountain ridges of Pennsylvania, from Carlisle to the forks of the Ohio, by a force commanded by an iron-willed British general so sick he had to be carried on a litter, has never been better described, nor has the concurrent effort to persuade the Delaware Indians to give up their support of the French and to make peace with the Anglo-Americans. These are not war stories retold for their own sake, but human experience reconstructed, clearly and persuasively but with all the nuances, personalities, and connections preserved, as well as it can be done on a printed page. Reading the whole story, who can question that the war was indeed a crucible? …