The War of Independence

Claude H. Van Tyne's The War of Independence carries forward the project he had begun seven years earlier with The Causes of the War of Independence, moving from the political and economic grievances that led to the break with Britain into the fighting itself: the military campaigns, the diplomacy that brought France into the war on the American side, and the political struggle inside the colonies to actually sustain a war effort against the world's leading naval power. Van Tyne had spent his career from 1903 at the University of Michigan studying the Revolutionary era from multiple angles, including an earlier study of the Loyalists who opposed independence, and this book represents the culmination of that decades long project.

The book follows the war's uneven course, the early defeats around New York, the harder years that tested the Continental Congress's ability to keep an army in the field at all, and the alliance with France that eventually turned the conflict into a wider war Britain could not sustain indefinitely. Van Tyne treats the war as a genuinely close run thing rather than an inevitable American victory, giving real weight to the financial and political fragility of the American cause at several points when defeat looked at least as likely as independence.

Van Tyne died in March 1930, only weeks before the book earned him the recognition that capped his career, and reading it today means encountering a historian's final major statement on the subject he had spent his professional life examining from every angle: cause, opposition, and finally the war itself. It suits a reader who has already read an account of why the Revolution happened and wants the war that resulted from it told with the same close attention to political detail.