It was an age of fascinating leaders and difficult choices, of
grand ideas eloquently expressed and of epic conflicts bitterly
fought. Now comes a brilliant portrait of the American Revolution,
one that is compelling in its prose, fascinating in its details,
and provocative in its fresh interpretations.
In A Leap in the Dark, John Ferling offers a magisterial new
history that surges from the first rumblings of colonial protest to
the volcanic election of 1800. Ferling's swift-moving narrative
teems with fascinating details. We see Benjamin Franklin trying to
decide if his loyalty was to Great Britain or to America, and we
meet George Washington when he was a shrewd planter-businessman who
discovered personal economic advantages to American independence.
We encounter those who supported the war against Great Britain in
1776, but opposed independence because it was a "leap in the dark."
Following the war, we hear talk in the North of secession from the
United States. The author offers a gripping account of the most
dramatic events of our history, showing just how closely fought
were the struggle for independence, the adoption of the
Constitution, and the later battle between Federalists and
Democratic-Republicans. Yet, without slowing the flow of events, he
has also produced a landmark study of leadership and ideas. Here is
all the erratic brilliance of Hamilton and Jefferson battling to
shape the new nation, and here too is the passion and political
shrewdness of revolutionaries, such as Samuel Adams and Patrick
Henry, and their Loyalist counterparts, Joseph Galloway and Thomas
Hutchinson. Here as well are activists who are not so well known
today, men like Abraham Yates, who battled for democratic change,
and Theodore Sedgwick, who fought to preserve the political and
social system of the colonial past. Ferling shows that throughout
this period the epic political battles often resembled today's
politics and the politicians--the founders--played a political
hardball attendant with enmities, selfish motivations, and
bitterness. The political stakes, this book demonstrates, were
extraordinary: first to secure independence, then to determine the
meaning of the American Revolution.
John Ferling has shown himself to be an insightful historian of our
Revolution, and an unusually skillful writer. A Leap in the Dark is
his masterpiece, work that provokes, enlightens, and entertains in
full measure.
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