First Salute, The

Rating:
Summary: The First Salute
Review: Some of the greatest works of history are those that ask the simplest questions. In The First Salute Barbara Tuchman asks one of the most obvious of questions: How did England manage to lose the Revolutionary War? To answer the question, Tuchman leads us through a welter of 17th & 18th century European history. By the end of the book we find Britain's loss, paradoxically, both inevitable and avoidable.
The `first salute' was given by the Dutch owned West Indian port of St. Eustatius on November 16, 1776 in response to a salute given by the American brigantine Andrew Doria. It was a momentous moment, the first formal recognition of American as an independent nation.
Our esteem for the brave merchants of Holland is sorely tested by an early digression to explore Holland's confused and confusing diplomatic and political history. In the bibliography Tuchman refers to it as a "Dutch excursion," but "Dutch shanghai" would work just as well. Rather than leave it at "the Dutch had a history of war with Britain" and "their confused form of Republic government didn't help things" Tuchman devotes about forty pages to the Dutch, to their relations with their European neighbors, and to their confounded political system. Decisions like this are death to narrative histories, and Tuchman's wit and skill just barely redeems it.
For instance, that pithy wit takes this swipe at William III, duke of Orange, who "died childless in 1702, in a fall when his horse stumbled over a molehill, an obstacle that seems as if it should have some philosophical significance but, as far as can be seen, does not."
In due course Holland's overt and covert sympathetic attitude to the American rebels leads to a declaration of war by Britain. France, with an acute nose for the smell of blood in the water, throws in with the rebels. To this American reader the greatest surprise The First Salute presented was the value France and England gave to their West Indian possessions. Apparently the sugar trade was more important than the American colonies, and disrupting the enemy's trade seemed to take precedence over the war in North America.
For a good part of the narrative Tuchman follows the career of English Admiral Sir George Brydges Rodney. Rodney, who is painted by Tuchman as an energetic, able seaman bordering on genius, was thwarted by many factors - a moribund navy which employed obsolete tactics and suffered "a mental lethargy that underlay the general reluctance to change old habits", a fleet that was stronger on paper than on sea, and a poisoned military environment that led Tuchman to observe "everybody hated somebody in the course of conducting the American war." Tuchman's high regard for Rodney even leads her to speculate that he might have been the decisive factor averting colonial victory had illness not prevented his absence at the endgame.
Tuchman explains French intervention in the war rather prosaically. Rather than suffering a monarchical affinity to liberty, equality, and democracy, France intervened because of a centuries old, deep seated hostility to Britain, to disrupt the sugar trade and, more immediately, to redress losses suffered in the Seven Years' War. The irony of monarchy pitted against monarchy in the cause of democracy isn't lost on Tuchman. You would think regal intuition would have identified the greater enemy, an enemy that would consume it before the century was through.
Save for the unfortunate "Dutch excursion" I enjoyed The First Salute tremendously. As an American it was at first disorienting, and then refreshing, to view the American Revolution from a European perspective.

Rating:
Summary: The First Salute
Review: Some of the greatest works of history are those that ask the simplest questions. In The First Salute Barbara Tuchman asks one of the most obvious of questions: How did England manage to lose the Revolutionary War? To answer the question, Tuchman leads us through a welter of 17th & 18th century European history. By the end of the book we find Britain's loss, paradoxically, both inevitable and avoidable.
The 'first salute' was given by the Dutch owned West Indian port of St. Eustatius on November 16, 1776 in response to a salute given by the American brigantine Andrew Doria. It was a momentous moment, the first formal recognition of American as an independent nation.
Our esteem for the brave merchants of Holland is sorely tested by an early digression to explore Holland's confused and confusing diplomatic and political history. In the bibliography Tuchman refers to it as a "Dutch excursion," but "Dutch shanghai" would work just as well. Rather than leave it at "the Dutch had a history of war with Britain" and "their confused form of Republic government didn't help things" Tuchman devotes about forty pages to the Dutch, to their relations with their European neighbors, and to their confounded political system. Decisions like this are death to narrative histories, and Tuchman's wit and skill just barely redeems it.
For instance, that pithy wit takes this swipe at William III, duke of Orange, who "died childless in 1702, in a fall when his horse stumbled over a molehill, an obstacle that seems as if it should have some philosophical significance but, as far as can be seen, does not."
In due course Holland's overt and covert sympathetic attitude to the American rebels leads to a declaration of war by Britain. France, with an acute nose for the smell of blood in the water, throws in with the rebels. To this American reader the greatest surprise The First Salute presented was the value France and England gave to their West Indian possessions. Apparently the sugar trade was more important than the American colonies, and disrupting the enemy's trade seemed to take precedence over the war in North America.
For a good part of the narrative Tuchman follows the career of English Admiral Sir George Brydges Rodney. Rodney, who is painted by Tuchman as an energetic, able seaman bordering on genius, was thwarted by many factors - a moribund navy which employed obsolete tactics and suffered "a mental lethargy that underlay the general reluctance to change old habits", a fleet that was stronger on paper than on sea, and a poisoned military environment that led Tuchman to observe "everybody hated somebody in the course of conducting the American war." Tuchman's high regard for Rodney even leads her to speculate that he might have been the decisive factor averting colonial victory had illness not prevented his absence at the endgame.
Tuchman explains French intervention in the war rather prosaically. Rather than suffering a monarchical affinity to liberty, equality, and democracy, France intervened because of a centuries old, deep seated hostility to Britain, to disrupt the sugar trade and, more immediately, to redress losses suffered in the Seven Years' War. The irony of monarchy pitted against monarchy in the cause of democracy isn't lost on Tuchman. You would think regal intuition would have identified the greater enemy, an enemy that would consume it before the century was through.
Save for the unfortunate "Dutch excursion" I enjoyed The First Salute tremendously. As an American it was at first disorienting, and then refreshing, to view the American Revolution from a European perspective.

Rating:
Summary: Dry, but different focus
Review: Tuchman was recommended to me-- I will read another of her books to see what the hype is about. This one was dry and slow-going.
Although focusing on naval and European interest in the Revolution, it was still just tough to keep slogging through. I wouldn't recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: The Revolution as Seen from the Flank
Review: Tuchman's approach to the American Revolution gives American readers a fine taster of how conventional European historians view the Wars of the Amerian Revolution. From her initial vantage point at St. Eustatius, the Dutch Caribbean colony whose port was the first to salute an American vessel (it was running the British blockade), she takes us back to Holland to explore the Netherlands' rebellion of the sixteenth century: the first eruption of the modern, republican, Protestant, free-enterprise state. Thence to England, where similar convulsions brought about revolution and reform in the seventeenth century, and the creation of a worldwide naval empire. Viewed in this light, the American Revolutionaries of the eighteenth century were simply following established tradition. From there, we segue to the story of Admiral Rodney, the British admiral whose absence from fleet command in 1783 was critical - indeed, decisive - in establishing Washington and Rochambleau's advantage at Yorktown. And, once the international context is firmly established, we return to the more familiar perspective of George Washington's continental army. A brilliant exercise in lateral thinking for any American schooled in the conventional orthodoxies of the War, and a ripping tale at that.