The American Revolution Round Table of Richmond is very pleased to announce that the 2022 Harry M. Ward Book Prize honors two excellent but very different works on the War for Independence. Our winners are John Ferling’s, Winning Independence: The Decisive Years of the Revolutionary War, 1778-1781 (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), and Steven D. Smith’s, Francis Marion and the Snow's Island Community: Myth, History, and Archaeology (Ashville, NC: United Writers Press, 2021).
John
Ferling is (or certainly should be) a familiar name to anyone with more than a
passing interest in the Founding Era. He is one of the true deans of the
history of the Revolution and its related events. Winning Independence
takes a fresh new look at the later years of the War for Independence, when
after years of fighting, the course of the conflict continued to defy
prediction. The French Alliance had kept the patriot war effort war going, but
with the shift of major British operations to the South, there was seemingly no
end of the conflict in sight. Ferling’s perspective on the southern war is
provocative. He presents a new and positive re-evaluation of the strategic
vision of Henry Clinton, and thus takes a critical view of Cornwallis. Ferling
also suggests that time was not necessarily on the patriots’ side as the
American economy went into virtual free-fall and army and popular morale tanked
along with it. Clinton actually thought a British victory was within his grasp.
How Washington, the French, and any number of other patriots responded to all
of this, and how British miscalculations ultimately led to Yorktown, makes for
thoughtful and often dramatic reading. The book is based on an extraordinary
research effort and is beautifully written. Winning Independence is John
Ferling at his best.
Historians have looked at Francis Marion, the famous Swamp
Fox who so vexed the British campaign in South Carolina, from almost every
conceivable angle. Now, however, in Francis Marion and the Snow's Island Community, Steve D. Smith
has added a new dimension to the story. He has, so to speak, dug Marion up—by
excavating the territory that served as the partisan leader’s home base. Smith
is an archaeologist at the University of South Carolina’s Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, and his book is
based on an exhaustive study of Snow’s Island, a marshy and remote area north
of Charleston. The people living on and near Snow’s
Island were ardent rebels and were quick to join the rebellion against the
Crown. Many of them had become partisans as early as 1775, and after the
British capture of Charleston in 1780, they offered a haven to Marion when he
arrived to launch guerilla operations. Smith has used extensive archaeological
evidence to document the nature of the Snow’s Island community and how it
served as a base and as a source of supplies and recruits for the Swamp Fox.
Drawing deeply on the literature of partisan warfare, including the work of Mao
Zedong, Smith describes the interactions of Marion and the civilian population
and infrastructure that kept patriot resistance alive in South Carolina in the
face of enemy occupation and anti-partisan efforts. The book is a fascinating
read.
