Review: "The Fate of the Day," Rick Atkinson

By Paul Carrier

In 2019, historian Rick Atkinson gave us The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777. Billed as the first volume in a planned trilogy on the American Revolution, the book was well-received by critics, who praised Atkinson for his prodigious research and dazzling narrative skills.

Now Atkinson is back with The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, the second entry in the trilogy. And once again, Atkinson has mesmerized reviewers. As historian Joseph J. Ellis wrote in The New York Times: “To say that Atkinson can tell a story is like saying Sinatra can sing.”

The fact that Atkinson knows his stuff, and how to “sell it” to readers, should come as no surprise. He won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1982, while working for The Washington Post. Beginning in 2002, he published a World War II history entitled The Liberation Trilogy, the first volume of which — An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 — won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 2003.

Atkinson’s attention to detail is remarkable. In The Fate of the Day, he offers sharply focused profiles of major and minor players on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as granular descriptions of virtually every battle. The book has 25 full-page maps (plus smaller inset maps) and two sets of illustrations that include more than 100 portraits.

There may be glory in the outcome of a battle for the winning side, but Atkinson makes it quite clear that combat itself is far from glorious. The injuries and deaths of soldiers are  described in gut-wrenching detail, presumably to hammer home the point that winning the war came at a terrible price, with a hefty butcher’s bill on both sides.

Atkinson explores each battle so methodically that it feels like he has unearthed all of its strategic, tactical and human components. The author is so thorough that some of the lesser-known battles he chronicles may be eye-opening even to readers with a reasonable understanding of the Revolution. Yet he is skillful enough to breathe life into all that he touches, whether it’s the machinations of generals, the sobering ordeals of rank-and-file soldiers, or day-to-day life in major cities.

A description of New York City in 1777, for example, covers page after page, leaving the reader with a clear image of the city’s residents, businesses, habits, pastimes and attitudes. We learn that New York had one liquor retailer for every thirteen adult males, and that heavy drinkers were classified at the time as “one, two, or three bottle men.” In Paris, “the stink of open sewers mingled with the fragrance of lilacs, baking bread, and innumerable cheeses.” London “was so crowded that physicians urged their patients to loiter on the river bridges for a whiff of fresh air.”

The cast of characters in The Fate of the Day is too lengthy to list here. But Atkinson being Atkinson, the list is not only long but memorable as well. It includes the kings of France and Great Britain, such 18th-century luminaries as Benjamin Franklin, and a wide assortment of American, British and French combatants, from senior army and navy officers to letter-writing and diary-keeping soldiers and sailors.

The Fate of the Day makes for depressing reading at times, but not through any fault of the author. The Continental Army and its allied state militia units suffered one defeat after another in 1777, the first year covered in the book, which runs to more than 600 pages.

After the patriots relinquish Fort Ticonderoga, the rebels score a win in what is now Bennington, Vermont. But losses mount in Pennsylvania at Brandywine, Philadelphia, Paoli and, perhaps most depressingly, Germantown, where George Washington’s army somehow snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.

A spectacular rebel triumph at Saratoga, New York, in 1777 helps persuade France to enter the war on the rebel side. The patriots lose (and later reclaim) Philadelphia, survive Valley Forge, and welcome the arrival of French naval support. But in 1778 they fail to liberate Newport, Rhode Island, which the British later abandon. The war expands into the South, where the rebels suffer major setbacks when the British repel a patriot assault on Savannah in 1779 and snatch Charleston from the patriots in 1780. In Maine, the rebels in 1779 experience what would remain, until 1941, the worst naval disaster in American history.

Individuals are at the heart of all great works of history, and so it is here. Atkinson provides an almost cinematic account of the 1779 battle between John Paul Jones’ Bonhomme Richard and HMS Serapis. The following year, the Marquis de Lafayette, a high-spirited French nobleman with a general’s commission in the Continental Army, returns from France with news that the king has dispatched six ships of the line, several smaller warships, and thousands of troops to reinforce the rebels.

Atkinson chronicles it all so impressively that The Fate of the Day reads as if he was an eyewitness to the war. One of his greatest contributions, beyond his rigorous research and compelling storytelling, is his heavy reliance on primary sources: letters, journals, diaries, etc. Atkinson’s use of that trove provides a “you are there” experience. In The Fate of the Day, readers absorb history from those who made it. And described it for posterity.