PREFACE
The American Revolution is taught to us in terms of well-chronicled battles and committees of Founding Fathers that were launched in April 1775 with what Emerson famously called “the shot heard ’round the world.” Such lessons, however, teach us only about the final stage of the amazing story of the founding of the United States. They neglect the remarkable events and even more remarkable people who shaped the Revolution during the years before muskets echoed on Lexington Green.
Savage Liberty opens in 1768, when many of the inhabitants of the American colonies were struggling with what today we would call an identity crisis. They weren’t thinking of themselves as Americans, they were just questioning what it meant to be British when their Parliament refused to treat them as full
