Crawford, the author of books such as the aging-Jefferson study Twilight at Monticello, aims to revive the story of the war in the South. As he notes in his introduction, the Civil War and the role of slavery in the South had a good deal to do with why commemoration of these battles and campaigns did not keep pace with those in the North. Most Americans outside of South Carolina today know Sumter, “the Gamecock,” more for the fort that was named in his honor and just completed in 1861.
There were other factors as well. Many of them were tiny engagements even by the standards of the war in the North — let alone compared with European wars of the day or battles in the 19th century. Washington was absent until Yorktown. Few of the figures of the Southern war went on to careers in politics (an exception being the teenage North Carolina errand-runner Andrew Jackson), and the commanders varied from one battle to the next. Some, like the militia leaders at Huck’s Defeat and King’s Mountain, played no great role before or after the battle. Nathanael Greene, the most prominent figure in the army in the campaign, died young of heat stroke before the Constitution was written. Johann de Kalb and Casimir Pulaski died in battle. Horatio Gates, the victor of Saratoga, had his career all but ended by the fiasco at Camden.
Crawford begins the book with de Kalb, an officer of German extraction and French loyalty, and offers portraits of many others on both sides as well, such as “Light Horse” Harry Lee (father of Robert E.), Tarleton, Greene, Gates, Marion, Sumter, Daniel Morgan, Henry and John Laurens, Jackson, Benjamin Lincoln, and Patrick Ferguson. Not until late in the book do Washington and Lafayette take center stage.
We meet Thomas Jefferson not as president, diplomat, or wordsmith, but as governor of Virginia in the midst of a war that tore back and forth through his state and threatened to capture Jefferson himself. In a foreshadowing of the relationship between Robert E. Lee’s army and the rest of the Confederate war effort, Jefferson had to tell Greene and Baron von Steuben that he could spare few of Virginia’s men to fight outside its borders.