Book Review

These works offer a marked contrast in scope, approach, and methodology, yet they grapple with two perennial questions: How does one account for the Revolutionary War's outcome? and what were its consequences for the Anglo-American world? Using the lens of military history, Lawrence E. Babits addresses the first issue by offering a microscopic analysis of the battle at Cowpens in 1781. In that crucial milestone on the road to Yorktown, Daniel Morgan's army routed Banastre Tarleton's British regulars and Loyalists. Babits attributes that success to a combination of Morgan's tactical skill and British exhaustion. Morgan deployed his mixture of Continentals, state troops, and diverse militia effectively to establish progressively more resolute linear defenses that sapped Tarleton's men's physical and mental resolve. Already worn down by four days' marching, poor rations, and their opponents' skirmishing, the harassed British forces were suddenly paralyzed by combat fatigue. As a result, Babits argues, the Americans scored a rare decisive victory.	1
Using insights from the work of John Keegan and S. L. A. Marshall to complement his own intimate knowledge of weaponry and military tactics, Babits creates an atmospheric, ordinary soldier's version of that vital engagement. One can almost feel the heat, fire, and confusion of battle. His principal methodological contribution lies in reading later, sworn pension statements as if they were postbattle interviews. The technique provides invaluable insights into such issues as timing, deployment, and casualties that he then checked against more conventional evidence. Babits's narrative sheds light on important aspects of the clash that are suggestive for the Revolutionary War more broadly considered. His account, for example, highlights the American cavalry's crucial role. More significantly, it substantiates Tarleton's estimate that 2,000 men, not the 800 that Morgan claimed, were involved in the victory. To boost the case for a Continental standing army, the American commander had in retrospect ignored the militia's vital contribution.	2
A Devil of a Whipping is arguably one of the best analyses that we have of an individual Revolutionary War engagement. Because the focus rarely strays from the battlefield, however, Babits sidelines the social dimension that distinguishes the "new military history," leaving unaddressed some key questions: How were the rival armies recruited? What backgrounds were the soldiers from? What were relations like between officers and men or between the forces' different constituent elements?	3
The political commentator Kevin Phillips began with aspirations that paralleled Babits's. His original intention was to examine an even more familiar turning point, the Saratoga campaign of 1777, to see whether a more aggressive British policy could have prevented the permanent rupture of the imperial connection. What started as an analysis of a particular moment, however, metamorphosed into an ambitious comparative study of the principal watersheds in Anglo-American history as Phillips began to explore political, religious, and ethnic alignments on both sides of the late-eighteenth-century Atlantic. He concluded that the struggle for independence entailed a messy internecine conflict that had marked continuities with the earlier English and subsequent American civil wars.	4
All those "cousins' wars," Phillips argues, were inextricably linked, helped spawn each other, and generated similar underlying patterns of allegiance. Broadly speaking, they pitted evangelical Protestants against Anglicans, republicans against monarchists, middling merchants or industrialists against aristocrats or monopolists, free marketers against economic traditionalists, and westward expansionists against consolidationists. As the "republican" pluralities of the 1640s, 1770s, and 1860s emerged victorious, according to Phillips, they launched Great Britain and America on dual paths toward global hegemony and played a major role in shaping the contemporary world.	. . .