In 1775 General George Washington secretly armed a handful of small ships and sent them to sea against the world's mightiest navy.
From the author of the critically acclaimed Benedict Arnold's Navy, here is the story of how America's first commander-in-chief--whose previous military experience had been entirely on land--nursed the fledgling American Revolution through a season of stalemate by sending troops to sea. Mining previously overlooked sources, James L. Nelson's swiftly moving narrative shows that George Washington deliberately withheld knowledge of his tiny navy from the Continental Congress for more than two critical months, and that he did so precisely because he knew Congress would not approve.
“Mr. Nelson has taken an episode that occupies no more than a few paragraphs in other histories of the Revolution and, with convincing research and vivid narrative style, turned it into an important, marvelously readable book."
--Thomas Fleming, author of The Perils of Peace: America's Struggle to Survive after Yorktown"James Nelson is not the first historian to reveal this little-known albeit incredibly important aspect of our Revolution, but no one has done it more thoroughly or with greater literary grace."
--William M. Fowler, author of Empires at War“Nelson wonderfully brings to life a largely forgotten but critically important piece of America's past.”
--Eric Jay Dolin, author of Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America
- ISBN13 9780071628259
- Publish Date 16 June 2009
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 5 April 2011
- Publish Country US
- Imprint International Marine Publishing Co
- Format Paperback
- Pages 400
- Language English