Mark Edward Lender & James Kirby Martin, War Without Mercy (Osprey, 2025)
The myth of the American Revolution as an honourably conducted war has been under attack by some military historians for a while now. What was once seen as a war fought under a shared set of rules and standards of behaviour, with a few isolated exceptions, is no longer tenable. Yet the myth still exists, particularly in the political arena, and particularly on the Patriot side. In War Without Mercy, Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin explode that perception and dig into the root causes of what was often a vicious existential war especially on the margins: ‘Liberty or Death’ was not so much a mere slogan but a statement of intent.
In this analysis of the Revolution’s military conduct away from the major armies, Lender and Martin highlight the local nature of the vast majority of military action with no constraining power to regulate engagements. In such circumstances, grievances and retaliations went unchecked, resulting in extreme violence. Such violence, the authors note, was nothing new on the frontiers against and between the Indians or internally against enslaved Black people. Acts of rebellion in the colonial period were also dealt with harshly, and that attitude continued into the revolutionary era. Lender and Martin add the impact of political ideology into the mix, which often led to terrorist actions, chiefly against Loyalists with the attendant retaliations that followed. The authors also consider the shock and then fury amongst Loyalists in their reactions to what was a profoundly shocking revolution. Once such a melting pot of preconditions for violence spilled over into a myriad of violent actions in the early stages of the Revolution, the momentum for further violence became self-justifying. And the authors detect this across all the colonies and communities involved in the Revolution from New Jersey down through the Carolinas and westward into the frontier regions and out to sea, noting that the further away from the main armies or centres of power, the more unrestrained the violence became. They conclude that this was indeed an existential war and fought without mercy.
War Without Mercy is an excellent study of the extreme violence that consumed the American Revolution. Lender and Martin set out their stall admirably and support their arguments with a plethora of grim and gruesome examples drawn from all across the colonies; some of which might be expected, such as the vicious frontier fighting, but others perhaps less so, especially in the northern colonies. Readers of military history, particularly those that study the subject at ground level, might be less surprised at the conclusions drawn by Lender and Martin, and those that already accept the Revolution as predominantly a civil war will expect the atrocities that so often accompany internal strife. For others, still labouring under the delusion of a clean overthrow of British rule, Lender and Martin’s findings might come as a profound shock. Whatever the case, in this fascinating analysis, Ender and Martin have demonstrated that any understanding of the American Revolution must take into account the existential nature of the conflict.
