"In this ... work, Alan Pell Crawford upends an enduring American myth: that the War of Independence was fought primarily in the North. The famous battles that form the backbone of the story of the American Revolution--at Lexington and Concord, Brandywine, Germantown, Saratoga, and Monmouth--while crucial, did not lead to the surrender at Yorktown. It was in the three-plus years between Monmouth and Yorktown that the war was won. The fierce battles fought in the South during these crucial three years, long ignored by historians, made up the central theater of military operations in the latter part of the Revolutionary War. When the British surrendered at Yorktown, Crawford argues, it was a direct result of the southern campaign: the battles that emerged south of the Mason-Dixon Line between loyalists to the Crown and patriots who fought for independence were, in fact, America's first civil war. Weaving throughout the stories of the men and women on both sides of the conflict--African Americans and whites, militiamen and irregulars, patriots and Tories, the French, the British, and the Hessians--Crawford reveals the misperceptions and contradictions of our accepted understanding of how our nation came to be, as well as the national narrative that America's victory over the British lay solely with General George Washington and his troops"-- Dust jacket flap.
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