The Day the Revolution Ended--19 October 1781 (review)

When popular history—the most difficult history to write—is done well it is a welcome contribution to furthering historical knowledge among the reading public. Unfortunately, The Day the Revolution Ended is riddled with errors, exaggerations, and bad writing as well as assertions and assessments that leave one flabbergasted.

Covering events leading to and including the Yorktown campaign, it begins with the Rebel plot to kidnap Benedict Arnold just before Sir Henry Clinton sent the traitor to Virginia on a raiding expedition. Here I suppose Mr. Hallahan's novelist's eye was captured by a good story. But to what purpose? And to what end the expenditure of fifty-eight pages on Arnold's adventures in Virginia when at the most a few pages could have provided enough background to the main tale?

The author then moves on to Nathanael Greene's Carolina campaign, which does merit close coverage, as it was vital to the final outcome at Yorktown. But this is a deeply flawed chapter. Historians of the period will be amazed at the assessment of Cornwallis as a "gifted general" (p. 59), who by "the end" of his career, "garnered the reputation of being one of the greatest generals of British history" (p. 261). The surrender of Charleston and its garrison, not the Battle of Camden, was the greatest American defeat of the war, and the Rebel army at Camden was not "completely erased" (p. 62). Mr. Hallahan also has problems with chronology. Banastre Tarleton won the actions at Monck's Corner and Lenud's Ferry before, not after, Camden. He confuses Major James Weymss's pursuit of Francis Marion (not Thomas Sumter, as he claims) in the country north of Charleston with his later attack on Sumter up country at Fishdam Ford. The British campaign to reconquer the Carolinas was certainly brutal, but to leap from that to the charge that it "finished with a Gotterdammerung policy" (p. 252) is a gross exaggeration.

Mr. Hallahan is a rifle enthusiast. He accepts the myth that had the British army adopted Patrick Ferguson's breech-loading rifle (which Ferguson did not invent, contrary to Hallahan and other writers), the war would have ended early with a British victory. This fanciful theory sweeps aside the technical deficiencies that made this rifle unsuitable as a standard firearm for infantry battalions. He claims that the Battle of King's Mountain "demonstrated unequivocally the superiority of the rifle over the musket" (p. 76). Yet except for the Tory unit of seventy-odd American Volunteers (who carried muskets, not breech-loading rifles, as Hallahan asserts), both sides were armed with muzzle-loading rifles. The rifle was a valuable weapon for sniping as well as skirmishing by light infantry. But no less an authority than Daniel Morgan, who led the American riflemen at Saratoga and won the Battle of Cowpens with a brilliant mix of initial rifle fire, then musketry followed by a bayonet charge, stated that men carrying slow-loading rifles had to be supported by regulars armed with muskets and bayonets. I should add that, contrary to Hallahan's assertion, there were no "tree-climbing Kentucky riflemen" (p. 81) at Saratoga; the relatively few who existed were busy throughout the war west of the Appalachians defending their isolated settlements against Indian attacks. There were no "massed American rifles" (p. 107) at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse; the great majority of Americans, militia and regulars, carried muskets. Hallahan's ubiquitous Kentucky riflemen did not fight at King's Mountain. Nor was Daniel Morgan a "first cousin to Daniel Boone" (p. 92); they were in no way related.

As for the Yorktown campaign, its most important element, one of history's decisive naval battles, merits only three pages, whereas the siege of Yorktown and its aftermath are given three chapters...