The Men Who Lost America

The ten biographical subjects of this book were the key British decisionmakers who oversaw the conduct of the war for America. They include George III, who was portrayed in the Declaration of Independence as the tyrant responsible for the American Revolution; Lord North, the prime minister regarded as having triggered the war with his fateful decision to punish the people of Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party through the Coercive Acts of 1774; General Sir William Howe and Admiral Lord Richard Howe, the brothers commanding the British army and navy in America during the first half of the war who are regarded as having missed the best opportunity to defeat the Continental Army in 1776; John Burgoyne, the general who surrendered at Saratoga (1777); Lord George Germain, the secretary of state for America and the chief architect of the American War in Britain; Sir Henry Clinton, commander of the British army in America during the second half of the war when he was accused by critics of inactivity; Lord Cornwallis, whose surrender at Yorktown effectively ended the British war for America; Admiral Sir George Rodney, one of the few commanders to emerge with his reputation enhanced from the war but who failed to prevent the French fleet of Admiral Francois-Joseph Paul, comte de Grasse, from entrapping Lord Cornwallis's army at Yorktown; and John Montague, earl of Sandwich, the first lord of the Admiralty, whom critics held responsible for the inadequacy of the Royal Navy.

--Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy, The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 5.