This Fierce People

WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BATTLEFIELD TRUST PRIZE FOR HISTORY • A groundbreaking, important recovery of history; the overlooked story—fully explored—of the critical aspect of America’s Revolutionary War that was fought in the South, showing that the British surrender at Yorktown was the direct result of the southern campaign, and that the battles that emerged south of the Mason-Dixon line between loyalists to the Crown and patriots who fought for independence were, in fact, America’s first civil war. The famous battles that form the backbone of the story put forth of American independence—at Lexington and Concord, Brandywine, Germantown, Saratoga, and Monmouth—while crucial, did not lead to the surrender at Yorktown. It was in the three-plus years between Monmouth and Yorktown that the war was won. Alan Pell Crawford’s riveting new book, This Fierce People, tells the story of these missing three years, long ignored by historians, and of the fierce battles fought in the South that made up the central theater of military operations in the latter years of the Revolutionary War, upending the essential American myth that the War of Independence was fought primarily in the North. Weaving throughout the stories of the heroic men and women, largely unsung patriots—African Americans and whites, militiamen and “irregulars,” patriots and Tories, Americans, Frenchmen, Brits, and Hessians—Crawford reveals the misperceptions and contradictions of our accepted understanding of how our nation came to be, as well as the national narrative that America’s victory over the British lay solely with General George Washington and his troops.