Wow! I had no idea how much I didn't know about the colonies declaring their Independence.

I have had this book in my kindle for years and finally cracked it open after listening to the musical Hamilton. Funny enough, he is not in this book at all! Still, I learned so much about all of it and it was truly fascinating. I'm certainly not finished exploring the Revolution and I look forward to reading more about this fascinating period.

The book itself is easy to read and while it can get dry at times there is enough personal info about the major players to keep things interesting. ( )

Excellent! "Independence" focuses on the 10 or so years prior and up to July 1776. It offers detailed information from all sides and very clearly shows how delegates and leaders from the American colonies went from being terrified to even say "independence" to declaring just that. It highlights George III, his ministry, and Parliament as they tried to dictate their will upon the colonies.

With a clear style and tremendous detail, author John Ferling does a great job highlighting what caused the colonies to declare their independence. ( )

Finished Independence: The Struggle to Set America Free by John Ferling. A remarkable study on short period from 1763 to the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, which in 1773 was anything but inevitable.

The book by discusses the events which antecedents the emotional and finally to a political break up separating the colonies from the mother country, parliament and King. The Antecedents were the attempt to tax and control the colonies, through a variety of direct and indirect taxes and acts, including the Stamp and Teas Acts. and leading to the Coercive Acts of 1774(Intolerable Acts), which included (1) the Boston Port Bill, which closed Boston Harbor; (2) the Massachusetts Government Act, which replaced the elective local government with an appointive one and increased the powers of the military governor; (3) the Administration of Justice Act, which allowed British officials charged with capital offenses to be tried in another colony or in England; and (4) the Quartering Act, which permitted the requisition of unoccupied buildings to house British troops.

The players are well known but John Ferling dwells on the impacts both early and later of many familiar and less familiar individuals, including John and Samuel Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Hutchinson, Joseph Galloway, John Dickinson to name just a few.

A well written book which should be read by all interested in to the political acts and decisions which led to the formal separation of the colonies from England. ( )

Gives a more real-world (less textbook) look at what was happening before and during the Revolutionary War. THIS should be the required reading in elementary school. The founding fathers were real, imperfect, humans...not the pedestal-worth gods some Americans think they are. ( )

Independence: The Struggle to Set America Free, by John Ferling, is another recent history that revisits and refocuses our attention on the seminal events of the founding of the Republic, this one centering upon the confluence of people and events that led to a tenuous union of American colonies declaring its independence from Britain. Ferling, a noted scholar of early American history who is the author of a long list of titles directed at academic as well as popular audiences, succeeds remarkably well here.
While little new ground is covered, Ferling’s achievement is to assemble all of the various threads of the latest scholarship into an engaging narrative that manages to bring fresh nuance to various aspects of the ideological struggle for and against independence, both in the Americas and in the mother country, where George III, his ministers and Parliament manage to demonstrate that the colonies are theirs to lose by misstep – and then actually make all of those missteps and lose them! I knew a great deal of this story from Don Cook’s masterful The Long Fuse: How England Lost the American Colonies 1760-1785 and other sources, but again it is refreshing to observe Ferling speaking from the latest historiography which tends to view the conflict simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic, rather than the traditional approach which is all about the “Founders” and how they alone forged a divorce that was universally welcomed by all of the colonists and bitterly contested by all of the Brits, something that not only is an oversimplification but is also patently incorrect in many particulars. In Ferling’s coverage, there is the subtly unstated hint (that other authors emphasize more loudly) that the British Parliament’s intransigence in its refusal to show weakness in the face of resistance is often echoed by contemporary American foreign policy, with similar disastrous results. As in the latter, the eighteenth century MP’s seemed dully aware that every step they took carried them closer to a doomed outcome, yet they proceeded in step, not unlike a carefully formed regiment marching in cadence towards an entrenched machine gun nest. In Independence, Ferling resurrects a story that I think most Americans are largely unaware of.
While most of the material on the colonial side is more familiar, I did run across some new bits that piqued my curiosity. Ferling, a biographer of John Adams, details how a canny Sam Adams maneuvers and manipulates his more conventional cousin to eventually take the leading role in the Continental Congress that champions and finally wins independence. (In return, John teaches the urban squire Sam how to ride a horse!) I knew little about Sam Adams, a kind of squirrelly historical figure, and his relationship with his more notable relative, and Ferling succeeds in outlining how the two Adams’ played off each other’s strengths and weaknesses to achieve their common purpose – separation for the colonies. Ferling also spends more time here on other leading characters from the drama -- such as Richard Henry Lee and Joseph Galloway -- that many other treatments tend to minimize or entirely overlook.
Another arena Ferling treats is the complicated results of the near cataclysm in Benedict Arnold’s failed invasion of Canada. It turns out that this disaster, counter-intuitively to my mind, encouraged rather than discouraged the more radical bloc in Congress in their vociferous efforts to defeat the more moderate “reconciliationists,” led by John Dickenson, largely because this calamitous rout underscored to both sides the need to aggressively seek foreign assistance in order to stay in the game on the military side. Of course, the eventual success that brought the war to a close many years hence at Yorktown could not have been achieved without French intervention.
I was also struck by the debate over calling for the ban of the African slave trade. Jefferson, ever ambivalent about the peculiar institution, does write a passage in the Declaration – excised from the draft by other more circumspect legislators – that vehemently condemns George III for profiting on the evils of the slave trade. But while Jefferson may have been genuinely offended by the practice, other less moralistic Virginia planters called for the abolition of the slave trade primarily because they had a surplus of slave property they hoped to retail at higher prices to the lower South, where the market showed by a scarcity and a growing demand.
I have read Ferling before and while I have enjoyed his material, in general I tend to find his writing less compelling than a David McCullough or a Joseph Ellis. While that still may be true to some degree, Ferling’s style has improved over time and in Independence his narrative is much less stilted and far more engaging than in previous works. I would urge those who are interested in a single volume that explores the forces that led to the Declaration of Independence to read Ferling’s finely crafted book. ( )