This Fierce People: The Untold Story of America's Revolutionary War in the South
By Alan Pell Crawford
Knopf, 2024
For the average consumer of American history, one of the casualties of war is a full accounting of any given war. There’s only so much room – in wide circulation textbooks, even in personal bandwidth – for granular retellings of wars. Once lengthy accounts get condensed and the details are left to the professionals or truly avid amateurs. It creates an inertia of sorts, with established narratives getting baked into the national consciousness, and can produce major oversights, like the importance of the Civil War in the West and in the case of “This Fierce People,” the Revolutionary War in the South. It was Alan Pell Crawford’s task to rectify the latter with the story of how an eclectic collection of American military leaders forced the British to abandon their southern campaign and eventually surrender at Yorktown. In a fine work of (almost too much) history, Crawford achieved his goal, but for all the success his protagonists enjoyed, the reader was still left sad that they were unwilling or unable to translate their military victory into something larger.
One admires Crawford’s research chops and clean writing style as he covered a series of battles, some relatively well known (Cowpens) others not so much. Unlike some of his previous works (Note: the reviewer has been friends with Crawford for many years), he really went deep into the weeds, the book complete with mini-biographies of characters like Francis Marion and Banastre Tarleton and close examinations of the strategies and tactics on both sides.
As the narrative wound through battles like King’s Mountain, Blackstock Farms, Fort Watson, Hobkirk’s Hill and the retreat to the Dan, reader bandwidth issues threatened to kick in. Why all this attention to these battles? They certainly lacked the epic sweep of Gettysburg or the D-Day landings; the armies were smaller and the results often indecisive. But by presenting them collectively, Crawford made their overall significance clear; they kept American forces in the field and wore down the British materially and psychologically. Crawford portrayed American General Nathaniel Greene as a worthy precursor to Ulysses S. Grant, whose 1864 Overland Campaign, like Greene’s, was a series of (arguably) tactical losses/ties that eventually led to strategic victory. Detailing Greene’s success, therefore, was essential to giving the war in the South its proper due. Even so, one wonders if the point could still be made without all the detail; after all how much do people need to know about the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, North Anna and Cold Harbor to judge the campaign’s import? Crawford added a nice touch towards the end: after showing how the “untold” battles led to Yorktown, he made it clear that, contrary to the popular view, Yorktown was not the end of the war!
“This Fierce People’s” biggest disappointment was also one its strengths; it provided a clear sense how the revolution’s lofty goals had no practical application when it came to slavery and, indeed, what ”independence” meant to its protagonists. At the outset Crawford recognized that many of his subjects were “fighting for liberty while keeping others in bondage,” an issue the book will “explore and explain but not attempt to justify” (7). Then the matter essentially disappeared. This was not an oversight on Crawford’s part, or evidence of some political agenda. Rather it was more a tacit recognition that doing anything with slavery was a non-starter, at least in the short term.
Crawford portrayed Thomas Jefferson and Henry Laurens, conflicted enslavers and neither a truly central character in the overall story, as evidence that anti-slavery existed in the Southern upper classes The best either could do was (justifiably) spread the blame for slavery around – to England, to the Northern colonies – and (rather sadly) hope that the views of subsequent generations would evolve toward abolition. A particularly stark reminder of slavery’s psychological importance to the middle and even lower classes was the story of Thomas Sumter using captured slaves as payment to his officers and men (249), and for every James (Armistead), freed in reward for his spying on Lord Cornwallis, many more were emancipated…..and fought for the tyrannical British.
“This Fierce People” finally called into question whether the term American Revolution is a misnomer. Even though Marylanders led by a Rhode Islander fought alongside Carolinians, there was little sense that the war was a national endeavor. They, like southern politicians Crawford describes,
….saw themselves as representatives of a confederation that had come together to address a temporary emergency. Once that was done, they would once again operate as independent republics, and few of those officials envisioned the result of their efforts to be a great national government….(263).
Their focus was local – protecting their homes – and any ideological motivation seemed more negative – opposition to central authority – than positive – creating something larger. As time passed the ferocity of their descendants found new targets - federalism, tariffs, abolition and civil rights - all within their nation. This didn’t diminish their purely military triumph, or lessen the obvious value of “This Fierce People;” it just left the reader (probably unreasonably) hoping for better from the founding generation.