Moreover, the king was a man of considerable taste and talent. The monarch’s initial response to the American rebellion, he shows, was measured, cautious and hopeful for a peaceful resolution.
McCullough was determined to give the much-maligned King George III his due.
But I’m finding my way into that other time and into the lives of those other people through material that came from that other time and from those other people.” I respect what they’re doing, and I read much of it. “I want to be influenced by what other historians are writing now. “I tried to soak up if only for the vocabulary,” he says. “A lot of what happened with those in the British army and those who were trying to manage the war in London has not been fairly understood.” To understand it better, McCullough traveled to London and pored through such primary sources of the period as letters, diaries, newspapers and magazines. “I think too little has been written about the British in the Revolutionary War,” he says. While much of McCullough’s account is involved in showing how the reluctant George Washington developed into an effective military leader, it is just as attentive to the importance of lower-ranking officers and foot soldiers on both sides of the conflict. When I was writing the John Adams biography and trying to understand everything that was going on in Philadelphia that summer of 1776, I realized, perhaps more than I had before, that all they were doing there was theoretical and that the Declaration itself would have been nothing but words on paper had it not been for the people out fighting the war. Also, it was the year of the Declaration of Independence. The prospects of there even being a United States of America were never more bleak.
McCullough chose to focus on 1776 “because that was the low point of our fortunes, not just in the war, but, I think one can say, in the whole history of the country. It begins with the siege of Boston, an American triumph continues through the struggles for New York in which the British forces prevailed and ends with the American resurgence in the wintry frays at Trenton and Princeton, New Jersey. McCullough’s ghostly audience this time around would include the American rebels, British regulars and their leaders who clashed with each other during the second year of the Revolutionary War. “I try to write a book so that if they could read it, they would say, yes, he got it.” “This has been true of everything I’ve written,” the 71-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner tells BookPage from his home on Martha’s Vineyard. The reader that David McCullough imagines peering over his shoulder as he crafts his meticulously researched histories and biographies is the person he happens to be writing about at the time, whether it’s John Adams, Harry Truman or some anonymous soldier in a long-forgotten battle.
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