War Without Mercy
Liberty or Death in the American Revolution
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- US$21.99
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Drawing on vivid contemporary accounts, this is a fascinating exploration of how and why the Revolutionary War descended into a brutal existential struggle.
This engrossing history of the Revolutionary War conclusively shows that those caught up in it believed they had nothing to lose by fighting without regard for the rules of so-called "civilized warfare." The clarion call to arms "Liberty or Death" was far more than just rhetoric. At its grimmest level, it was a conflict in which military restraint was more the exception than the rule, a struggle in which combatants believed their very existence was in question. This led to an acceptance of violence against persons and property as preferable to a defeat equated with political, cultural, and even physical extinction. It was war with an expectation and acceptance of ferocity and brutality – anything to avoid defeat.
A number of historians have previously concluded that United States' founding struggle reached a level of ferocity few Americans now associate with the movement for independence. However, these studies have described what happened, without looking in detail at why the conflict took such a violent a turn. Written by two esteemed Revolutionary War historians, War Without Mercy does exactly that. Based on years of research and enlivened by little known primary sources, this is an intriguing and fresh look at a period of history we thought we knew.
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Historians Lender and Martin (231 Days) argue in this potent study that the American Revolution was an existential war of total annihilation. The authors dig deep into firsthand accounts to reveal a "catalogue of horrors"—atrocities perpetrated by patriots, loyalists, redcoats, and Native American allies on both sides. Lender and Martin contend that this resort to fighting "without mercy" came from the combatants' fear of obliteration at the hands of the enemy. Surveying the conflicts' various theaters, the authors measure incidents of savagery against the era's notions of jus in bello, or "fighting justly." (A fascinating tangent is the authors' excavation of the origins of jus in bello among Enlightenment-era lawyers and jurists.) They find that it was the West—the largest theater of war, encompassing "the farthest backcountries" of the colonies—that saw the most merciless and unrestricted warfare: countless brutal raids and counterraids that included torture, execution, rape, pillaging, and property destruction. But the authors also spotlight incidents in the other, less lawless theaters that still seemed to signify a goal of total annihilation, such as Benedict Arnold's turncoat raid on the rebel haven of New London, Conn., wherein he set fire to the town, an uncharacteristic move for a British army officer at the time. Detailed and persuasive, it's a unique recasting of the Revolution as a dark and murderous conflict.
