Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Mud and Guts: A Look at the Common Soldier of the American Revolution
The average American in those days was about what he is today: a small property owner who admired independence and occasion ally was even known to practice it. Then, as today, he resented being governed and taxed by a bunch of remote and powerful bureaucrats. He grumbled a lot over little tyrannies such as stamp acts and tea taxes - but a revolution? The very word causes a shud der to run up the bourgeois spine, and if there ever were, and are, two bourgeois societies, they're England and America.
Most people would rather be moderately comfortable and safe than stand up and fight for an illusive term like independence. It has been said that if there had been a back door in the Alamo there would be no Texas. Likewise, if the royal administrators who ran the colonies had had an ounce of sense and perception, our hard-nosed radicals, such as Tom Paine, would never have pre vailed and there would have been no revolution, or rebellion, or whatever it was. The British were really nuts to have let all this happen. But that's the way things go when bureaucrats feel safe. They become blind and arrogant.
Those were confusing times, however. It's easy today to say.
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