Hurricane of Independence!

I have quite an interest in what I guess are called the Colonial, Revolutionary, and Young Republic Eras of U.S. history. I can't quite trace it back to what jump-started that interest, but about three years ago we visited Mt. Vernon and read James Thomas Flexner's biography of our first president, Washington: The Indispensible Man. For my birthday my wife had gotten me a gift certificate to a bookstore plus a night off from the kids to go find something I wanted to read. I sat and read the first chapters of 5 Washington biographies, and liked Flexner's prose best. It's quite good, and I recommend it.


Now I'm reading Tony Williams' Hurricane of Independence: The Untold Story of the Deadly Storm at the Deciding Moment of the American Revolution. It's not very good, at least not as a narrative of the hurricane of 1775 that hit the center of the British American colonies. There's not much to report there, apparently. Williams makes a lot of pedestrian references to high winds and rain and flooding and damage, but really it's all just kind of an excuse to write about what was going on in that area in the years leading up to and even after the hurricane. I get the metaphor and all, but my impression is that the hurricane did some serious damage to the Outer Banks of North Carolina and southeastern Virginia early on, petered out, and didn't really have much effect on the political and social upheaval that was going on. You'd think the damage to crops and to shipments on ships and docks would have affected the economy and put a fine point on the situation the colonists were in politically, but if it did Williams barely touches on it.


It's a pretty good look at that place and time, though, and covers a lot of ground without straining itself. His prose is pretty weak when talking about the hurricane as such, but he handles the rest of the material pretty well, and that's well over 90% of the book anyway.