Friends of Our Revolution

...Even more than the Dutch, France lent its considerable support to the colonists as a maneuver in its ancient rivalry with England...

...Tuchman's volume cannot stand by itself, nor is it intended to...

...The essential decisions of the Revolution were made not in America but in Europe, where peoples and nation-states were jockeying for position as they had done for hundreds of years...

...Tuchman's new instant best-seller, The First Salute (Knopf, 326 pp., $22.95), treats a familiar topic, the American Revolution, but with a difference...

...The Dutch, with a long history of maritime enterprise and anti-British intrepidity, were happy to oblige...

...Come it did...

...There are times when Tuchman seems eager to describe just about anything except the War of Independence—how barnacles were scraped off merchant ships' bottoms, who sat for Joshua Reynolds' portraits—yet this is no mere haphazard catalogue of offbeat information...

...She remains an assiduous researcher as well as an engaging writer, and The First Salute is a valuable book...

...It was intertwined with other events, other considerations, and its outcome was determined by the choices of foreigners...

...The relationship between the British Crown and its North American Colonies was only one part of this larger struggle, and not a very significant part at that...

...The American Revolution did not take place in a vacuum, nor spring full-blown from Thomas Jefferson's head...

...In the early stages of their rebellion, the colonists depended upon smuggled arms to survive...

...The long-term consequences, inestimable from our vantage point, were foreseen by practically nobody...

...Arms, money and men flowed from the most powerful monarchy in Europe for immediate, short-term geopolitical advantage...

...This molehill of an event is all the excuse Tuchman needs to build a mountain of significance...

...French aid was crucial to the success of the Revolution, and never more so than in the last two years of hostilities...

...Most important, from the appearance of the Andrew Doria at St...

...The cannons shot off in honor of an American ship come to collect ammunition for the Continental Army were an indication of the extent of official connivance in the practice, which infuriated the British...

...In this light, Tuchman's odd perspective is quite reasonable...

...The answers to these and other questions are the real story behind the salvos of that November day, and lead Tuchman into discussions of the founding of the American Navy, the nature of trade between the mainland and the Caribbean, even the woman who sewed the first national flag...

...This is a minor complaint, however...

...Eustatius, Tuchman traces the course of Dutch-American relations and their role in securing American independence...

...While the sound of muskets being fired can be heard in the distance, Tuchman guides her readers on a tour of Dutch politics in the 17th and 18th centuries or through a Scottish analysis of naval tactics...

...Desertions were increasing and troops in Pennsylvania were beginning to mutiny...

...At a time when U.S...

...schoolchild memorizes—Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill and Valley Forge—take place offstage as it were, outside the confines of the narrative...

...politics is influenced by what happens in Iran and Angola, when our economy is inextricably enmeshed in a tangle of international relationships, and when sermons preached in boardrooms and on campuses across the land stress the need for global thinking, it is good to have a book about our revolution that perceives America more as a piece on a chessboard than as a city on a hill...

...Eustatius...

...She wasn't Betsy Ross but a Philadelphia milliner named Margaret Manny, and the reason she isn't remembered, it would seem, is that her flag, made in 1775, wasn'tagenuinebannerofindependencesince the Colonies had not yet declared themselves sovereign...

...A plaque, presented to the island in 1939 in the name of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, now marks the occasion: " Here the sovereignty of the United States was first formally acknowledged to a national vessel by a foreign official...

...Admiral Rodney captured the island two short months later, but it was already too late...

...Without the coming of the French fleet to precipitate a crisis," declares Tuchman, "Britain and the Colonies would have floundered into some miserable compromise, for private sentiment on both sides was ready for mediation...

...The message is plain: Without the French and the Dutch, the Americans never would have won their independence...

...How did the Dutch happen to be there...

...In May 1780, Charleston, together with 5,000 rebel soldiers, was lost...

...When they declared war on the Dutch in 1780, following a series of crises and confrontations, one of the causes listed before Parliament was the salute of a " rebel privateer" at St...

...History had given de Grasse the task of carrying forward the Americans to completion of their break with Britain...

...To ignore or diminish their role is to engage in a kind of nationalist insularity, a mental isolationism made particularly dangerous by the fact that the world today is smaller than ever before, and still shrinking...

...Its openhanded support of the rebels practically bankrupted the treasury, forcing the calling of the Estates General in 1789 and leading ultimately to the French Revolution...

...Thus, while Manny's flag had 13 red and white stripes, the area where the 50 stars are now displayed contained the crosses of the British Union Jack...

...That is too bad...

...The British, making the normal assessments of costs and benefits, were taken completely by surprise, and Tuchman awards the admiral full credit for one of the bravest and most telling decisions of the war: "It was the act of a man who had either lost his heart to the venture in liberty or had a more farsighted view than most Europeans of what America would become...

...Nor is the book without flaws, most notably a quality of hauteur that causes Tuchman to view the actors in her drama as more foolish than they probably were...

...It is also likely to be the one work about the War of Independence that many thousands of Americans will read this year, perhaps the only one they will have read since leaving college or high school...

...On November 16, 1776, the fort on the tiny Dutch-ruled Caribbean island of St...

...He seemed to know it, to feel as if appointed to it....' Add François de Grasse, then, to the pantheon of Revolutionary War heroes, and make greater room in the textbooks for the contributions of the French and the Dutch as well—especially since, such being the irony of history, America's gain was their loss...

...Eustatius fired its guns to greet the arrival of the armed merchantman Andrew Doria...

...George Washington, that most stalwart of generals, was edging toward despair...

...As in the famous Tom Stoppard play, the main events that every U.S...

...For the French monarchy, fate was even crueler...

...This is not how our nation's history is currently taught in our schools, but how it should be...

...If the money and arms revitalized the Americans, those ships proved to be the difference in the war, enabling the American and French armies to trap Cornwallis at Yorktown while forestalling his supply or escape by sea...

...The West Indies, with the enormous wealth generated by their sugar plantations, counted for much morein everyone's calculations...

...Pleading for increased assistance from France, he wrote the American envoy in Paris: "We are at the end of our tether, and now or never our deliverance must come...

...In its war with Britain, the Netherlands surrendered colonies and trade, the legitimacy of its government was shaken, and in 1795 it was absorbed into Napoleon's empire...

...Eustatius...

...Although there was a government embargo against trade in war materiel, profits spoke louder than words to the eager Dutch merchants, and smuggling was rampant throughout the West Indies...

...By then the French had become allies of the rebels, and Tuchman's narrative shifts its focus...

...Tuchman notes that it was a stroke of considerable boldness for de Grasse to send his entire fleet to help the Americans, rather than leaving a portion of it in the Caribbean in defense of French interests there...

...it should be supplemented with a traditional account...

...Why was it calling at St...

...Concerned about the impact of a British victory in North America so soon after the capture of Canada, Louis XVI agreed to send massive shipments of cash and supplies, along with a fleet of 28 ships and 3,000 men under the command of Admiral de Grasse...

...This is history written in a Rosencrantz and Guildenstem Are Dead manner...

...What she is doing eventually becomes clear, and turns out to be something very worthwhile indeed...

...As a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection and with an initial printing of 160,000, The First Salute is destined for a wide audience...

...After the States General of the Netherlands refused to dismiss the island's governor, or to reprimand him in any way, they became still more irate...

...She accuses the British Navy, for example, of rigidity in its military tactics, yet Britain ruled the waves in those years and only an idiot or a genius would have dared tamper with success...

...American morale had sunk to a low...

...In keeping with the overall approach, Tuchman sidles into her subject by way of a peripheral and near-forgotten incident— "the first salute" offered to an American ship by a foreign power...

...Except for a few individuals like Lafayette, the democratic ideology of the rebels played no part in forging the alliance...

...What was the Andrew Doria...

...With the exception of Yorktown, more attention is devoted to the battles over obscure West Indies islands than to the fighting on the American mainland, and instead of John and Samuel Adams, Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson, the figures who dominate the pages of this book possess such unhousehold-like names as Sir George Brydges Rodney and François Joseph Paul de Grasse, admirals respectively in the British and French navies...

...A few months afterward, the talented Benedict Arnold turned traitor...

...Human folly has been something of an obsession for Tuchman throughout her career, and she is paying a price in arrogance...