As a boy I found adventure in comic books. I pedaled my bicycle from Princeton, New Jersey, over a narrow, rickety bridge and up what seemed to be a steep hill to Kingston and a twirling rack in a dingy shop.
Little did I know that where that very bridge stood George Washington had discussed war plans with his lieutenants after his Christmas 1776 victories in Trenton and Princeton. (His troops then wrecked the previous colonial-era span to slow British pursuit of his army.) Talk about superheroism.
Now, thanks to The British Are Coming by Rick Atkinson, I must find some way to reimagine my childhood haunts. As we approach the semiquincentennial anniversary of the American Revolution, we may tire of that tongue-twisting modifier. But this former Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s account of the first two years of that war will long remain a riveting retelling of its opening volleys.
Atkinson brings to his task the scholarship of a military historian and a novelist’s descriptive wizardry. Released in 2019, The British Are Coming is the first part of his trilogy on the war. A second volume, The Fate of the Day, covers 1777-80 and appeared earlier this year. Atkinson also collaborated with Ken Burns on the six-part, 12-hour PBS documentary about the war that begins airing tonight, November 16.
A fantastic attention to detail testifies to the author’s mastery of his material. Consider his description of the British retreat from Lexington and Concord: “Plunging fire gashed the column; grazing fire raked it. Men primed, loaded, and shot as fast as their fumbling hands allowed. A great nimbus of smoke rolled across the crest of the hill. Bullets nickered and pinged, and some hit flesh with the dull thump of a club beating a heavy rug.”
Similar magic surfaces in Atkinson’s colorful descriptions of major players. Of the 69-year-old Ben Franklin, he writes that his “thin, graying hair and sensual lips made him look younger.” King George III had “fine white teeth and blue eyes that bulbed from their orbits.” General Henry Knox, famed for dragging 58 cannons over 300 miles of winter roads to Boston, is a “bulky, bowlegged man” who “habitually wrapped his left hand in a silk handkerchief to conceal the stumps of two fingers” blown off in a hunting mishap.
Then there is Washington: “At age 43, he was all that and more: over six feet tall, but so erect he seemed taller; nimble for a large man, as demonstrated on many a dance floor, and so graceful in the saddle that some reckoned him the finest horseman of the age.”
Atkinson’s reveals the young commander’s complexity, too. Upon arriving in Boston after accepting election as general of the army by the Continental Congress, he learns the rebels barely have any gunpowder. “The general was so struck that he did not utter a word for a half an hour,” a fellow officer observed.
Washington struggled with fears and doubts. As winter descended in 1776, he wrote an aide that his army had no money, powder, or arms. “I have often thought how much happier I should have been if . . . I had taken my musket up on my shoulder & entered the ranks, or . . . retired to the back country, & lived in a wigwam.” So much for the stoic man on the 25-cent piece.
Events in Atkinson’s hands find new life. At Bunker Hill rebels aimed “Yankee peas” not at the whites of redcoats’ eyes but at their vulnerable waistbands. At the little-remembered skirmish at Moore’s Creek Bridge in North Carolina, Gaelic-speaking Scotsmen in kilts and feathered bonnets charged a fortified colonial position only to be mowed down. “One American militiaman,” writes Atkinson, “later said he felt as calm as if ‘shooting squirrels.’”
The author pays special attention to the suffering of soldiers. He writes of limbs lopped off, of doctors begging for medicines and supplies. He quotes a physician at Ticonderoga: “In the name of God, what shall we do with them all?” Then Atkinson answers the question himself. “All too often the answer was: bury them.”
To be held prisoner meant as much misery as being shot in the gut. Two-thirds of those captured after the loss of Fort Washington in New York died of disease, exposure or malnutrition within 18 months. Sickness killed more American than British soldiers. For his part, Washington ordered “a gentleness even to forbearance” to captured soldiers, urging they “be well-treated.”
The book climaxes with a cinematic retelling of the Crossing of the Delaware. Washington, depressed after losing battle after battle, calls for bold action. “Victory or death,” he tells sentries after writing John Hancock that “desperate diseases require desperate measures.” The Hessian commander at Trenton, Colonel Johann Rall, had dismissed American soldiers as “nothing but a lot of farmers.” He wakes up on Christmas morning to find the village a battlefield. Soon the British and their allies flee, and most colonials, their spirits revived by victory, await spring with fresh optimism.
Thus ended what John Adams called “the most critical and dangerous period of the whole Revolutionary War.” Since Lexington, 450 military actions had been fought, but the fighting would continue five more years.
At first the British believed Americans were “unruly, ungrateful children in need of caning,” Atkinson writes. Now British Admiral Richard Howe would tell his secretary, “I almost wish that the colonies had never existed.”
Washington feared what 1777 would hold. “I do not think that any officer since the creation ever had such a variety of difficulties & perplexities to encounter as I have,” he wrote his stepson.
From a distance, the Scottish economist Adam Smith had better foresight. “The Americans,” he wrote, “are employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which they flatter themselves will become, and which indeed seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.”
With the final volume of the trilogy a few years away, Atkinson may find himself in hot water: Shortly before British General Charles Corwallis’ surrender at Yorktown, my great-great-great-great grandfather Colonel William Harding Perkins fought redcoats at the Battles of Jamestown and Hot Water. Other than that, I know nothing about Colonel Perkins. Perhaps Atkinson will share more about him with me — and the world.
George Spencer is a freelance writer who lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina. His new book, When Memory Fades: What to Expect at Every Stage, from Early Signs to Full Support for Alzheimer's and Dementia, will be published in June 2026 by St. Martin’s.