With Fire and Sword
The Battle of Bunker Hill and the Beginning of the American Revolution
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A masterful history of the first set-piece battle of the Revolutionary War, James L. Nelson's With Fire and Sword offers critical new insights into one of the most important actions of our country's founding.
On June 17, 1775, the entire dynamic of the newborn American Revolution was changed. If the Battle of Lexington and Concord was, in the immortal words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the "shot heard round the world," Bunker Hill was the volley that rocked Britain's Parliament and the ministry of King George III to its core. The Battle of Bunker Hill was the first hostile engagement of the Revolution between two organized armies, and the first time that a genuine American army had ever taken the field. It gave the British their first inkling that the Colonial rabble-in-arms they had envisioned might actually prove to be a formidable fighting force.
In this book, award-winning author James L. Nelson tells the exciting and dramatic story of the fight that changed the face of the American Revolution. He looks at the events leading up to that fateful day, the personalities on both the British and American sides who made momentous decisions, and the bloody outcome of those crucial choices, which would affect the British strategy on the battlefield throughout the coming six more years of active warfare.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This rousing history rescues Bunker Hill from its folkloric shroud and pre-sents it as one of the revolution's more significant and dramatic battles. Historian and novelist Nelson (Benedict Arnold's Navy) calls the 1775 engagement a struggle for high ground from which American artillery could hit the British stronghold in Boston the revolution's "first real battle." Amateurish Minutemen weathered a standup fight against the superbly drilled redcoats. (That they could obey the famous order to hold their fire until they could see the whites of their enemies' eyes was a triumph in itself.) The outcome was a bloodbath in which "the front ranks were mowed down as if the hand of God had swept them away" until the ammunition ran out and the Americans fled. Nelson's gripping portrait of the battle caps a lively chronicle of the early days of the rebellion in Massachusetts and of the revolutionaries' scramble to establish a government and organize an army as they edged uneasily toward independence. Nelson's well-researched, entertaining account of the revolution's opening chapter aptly conveys the difficulty and riskiness of the patriots' gamble. 2 maps.
