1776 David Mccullough Summary

David McCullough’s 1776 is a well written book, starting with its title. It's a story about the war, yet no actual fighting happens for most of the book. George Washington is often diminished compared to other characters in the book, and readers almost feel sorry for the usually infamous characters such as the loyalists, Hessians, and even King George III.
Another surprise is that David McCullough, best known for Rushmore-size biographies of underrated presidents, wrestles America's founding year into a taut 294 pages of text, describing the trying months that followed the heroics at Lexington, Concord and the Battle of Bunker Hill. The result is a lucid and lively work that will engage both Revolutionary War bores and general readers who have avoided the subject since their school days.
When we meet the colonials encamped around Boston in the summer of 1775, they are a wretched, ill-clad band, voiding ''excrement about the fields perniciously.'' Lack of sanitation bred rampant ''camp fever'' to go with a smallpox epidemic. Each man consumed, on average, a bottle of rum per day, and once-Puritan Boston was so rife with prostitutes that mapmakers labeled its red-light district ''Mount Whoredom.''
When the Virginia-bred Washington takes command, he exhibits the sort of haughty contempt for Yankees that Bostonians of a later era would display toward Southerners. ''These people,'' he complained, are ''exceedingly dirty and nasty'' and afflicted by an ''unaccountable kind of stupidity.'' Washington bristles at the leveling instincts of New England officers, whom he judged too familiar with their men. The slave-owning general also took offense at the presence of free blacks in the ranks. One of his first orders, later rescinded out of necessity, barred blacks from