First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [184]
Bibliography
THE PERIOD covered in this book, leaving aside the Dutch excursion, is approximately six years, from 1776 to 1781.
On the several subjects that make up the body of the story, that is to say, the salute to the Andrew Doria, the affairs of the Dutch Republic, naval warfare of the period focusing on Admiral Rodney, the American land battles in the South, and finally the long march leading to the siege of Yorktown, the published and unpublished material is far more extensive than I realized when I began, and too much for a standard bibliography. I have offered a limited bibliography of the sources that I used, together with a selection of works that were most useful for my purposes or for anyone interested in further reading.
Sources will be found in the notes located by page number and an identifying phrase from the text. The book title in each case will be found under the author’s name in the bibliography, with an indication of title in case he is responsible for more than one book.
The letter q. stands for material quoted from a secondary source.
Proceedings in the House of Parliament will be found under the given date of the statement in the relevant volume of Great Britain, Parliament.
SELECTED WORKS
On the Andrew Doria the most complete is J. Franklin Jameson’s “St. Eustatius in the American Revolution” and on the beginnings of the American navy, William Bell Clark’s Naval Documents of the American Revolution and Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison’s John Paul Jones: A Sailor’s Biography.
On the Dutch Republic, apart from the inevitable John Lathrop Motley, more modern and excellent works on the revolt of the Netherlands and the growth of the nation are Petrus Johannes Blok’s History of the People of the Netherlands; C. M. Davies’ The History of Holland and the Dutch Nation and Charles Boxer’s The Dutch Seaborne Empire.
For my period, the most useful by far was Nordholt Schulte’s The Dutch Republic and American Independence, which has something of everything.
For Admiral Rodney there are four biographies. The first and foundation work published in 1830, containing the most correspondence, is by Lieutenant-General George B. Mundy, Rodney’s son-in-law, who is said by his editor, George Bilias, to have “taken liberties with the wording” of the letters (preface to vol. I, p. ix of 1972 edition). Mundy was followed, while Rodney was still living, by the biography of a naval writer, David Hannay, published in 1891. Two modern biographies have followed since then, by Captain Donald MacIntyre in 1963 and David Spinney in 1969.
On naval warfare in general, one must begin with Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History; an essential study of shipboard life is Tobias Smollett’s novel Roderick Random, while the most informative work on management of sail and gunnery is Admiral Morison’s John Paul Jones. The most useful histories of naval events in my period are Captain W. M. James’s The British Navy in Adversity and Charles Lee Lewis’ Admiral de Grasse and American Independence. A fine complement is A. B. C. Whipple’s Age of Fighting Sail. Limited in subject matter but very readable is Harold A. Larrabee’s Decision at the Chesapeake on the Battle of the Bay.
A military guide to American land battles of the time is The Compact History of the Revolutionary War by Colonel Ernest and Trevor Dupuy. For the general reader seeking a comprehensive and lively survey of the period, I recommend John C. Miller’s Triumph of Freedom 1775–1783 and Samuel B. Griffith’s In Defense of the Public Liberty.