A fresh look at Revolutionary battles

Patriot Battles: How the War of Independence Was Fought
By Michael Stephenson
HarperCollins, 421 pp., $27.95

Here is the commander in the field writing to his political masters back in the overseas capital: "If force is to be used at length, it must be a considerable one, for to begin with small numbers will encourage resistance and not terrify; and will in the end cost more blood and terror."

However present-time that sounds, it is not from an on-the-ground commander's evaluation of the situation early in the Iraq War, but from General Thomas Gage , the British commander in Boston, writing back to London in the aftermath of the battles at Lexington and Concord, 232 years ago this week.

As military historian Michael Stephenson acknowledges in "Patriot Battles," his spirited interpretation of the American Revolution, "there is an understandable instinct to insulate the sanctity of the great war of national liberation from any association" with Vietnam or Iraq.

Nevertheless, he writes, "the comparisons are illuminating because colonial wars share a basic architecture that arises when an occupying force far from the mother-country tries to suppress a popular uprising." As its sense of "isolation and vulnerability" grows, it emboldens the insurgency.

And while a defeated Patriot force "could melt back into the countryside from which it came," a defeated British force "was likely to be totally lost."

These observations set in motion a sharply focused view of the Revolution; its "Nuts and Bolts" -- the combatants, their equipment and supplies, their medical care, even the "Trulls and Doxies" who accompanied the armies -- and a vivid account of 11 major battles or campaigns, each illustrated by superbly executed maps.

Among the "nuts and bolts" is a particularly impressive account of the role of the militia.

Their "glory days," Stephenson writes in one of the popular culture analogies of which he appears fond, were in "the Norman Rockwell moments of the war," the early battles in New England. But they also "did fearsome work as partisan fighters in the South" under leaders such as Daniel Morgan.

Stephenson also identifies a "critical task" the militia performed: "to root out and ruthlessly suppress Loyalist opposition." It was an activity, he writes, similar to that performed by the Viet Cong political cadres, the IRA, and the Iraq insurgents, in all cases "an essential element of an anti-colonial war."

Even readers familiar with the military history of the Revolution will find fresh insights in Stephenson's accounts of the major battles. Few run longer than a dozen pages, but all clearly detail both the strategic context and the tactical maneuvers, still finding room for human touches, quick definitions, and participants' accounts.

From the Battle of Cowpens, South Carolina, in January 1781 , Stephenson quotes Thomas Young, a 16-year-old volunteer in the Continental Light Dragoons, who reported that the British "came running at us as if they intended to eat us up." At that, "every officer was crying, 'Don't fire!' for it was a hard matter to keep us from it."

The militia fired first and "it was for a time, pop-pop-pop, and then a whole volley; but when the regulars fired, it seemed like one sheet of flame from right to left."

Not quite Lexington and Concord -- where Stephenson notes that "only one patriot ball in 270 found its mark" in a British soldier. Perhaps more like Bunker Hill (which Stephenson cites as "Bunker's Hill," one of several contemporary usages) where the British gained the field, but at a punitive cost.

At Cowpens, the British lost 86 percent of their force, killed, wounded or captured, crippling their campaign in the South and "[paving] the way to Yorktown."

"Oh!" wrote Young, the Patriot observer, "It was beautiful."

Michael Kenney is a freelance writer who lives in Cambridge.