Will: The scars of our nation’s violent beginnings

He writes in the manner of current academics, who are forever “unmasking” this and that. Hoock is, however, right to document the harrowing violence, often opportunistic and sadistic, that was “fundamental” to how both sides experienced “America’s founding moment.”

The human cost

After the second civil war, William Tecumseh Sherman declared that “war is hell.” Hoock demonstrates that this was true even when battle casualties (only 23 patriots died at Yorktown) were small by modern standards. He is, however, mistaken in suggesting that he is uniquely sensitive to our founding mayhem. Consider two recent books that examine the anarchic violence on both sides.

Nathaniel Philbrick’s “Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution” (2013) recounts a patriot mob’s long torture, in January 1774, of loyalist John Malcom, a Boston customs officer, who was tarred and feathered.

Alan Taylor’s “American Revolutions: A Continental History” (2016) hammers home the war’s human costs. A Connecticut critic of the Continental Congress was tarred, carried to a sty and covered with hog’s dung, some of which was forced down his throat. Connecticut loyalists were imprisoned in a copper mine, in darkness 120 feet underground. Georgia patriots knocked a loyalist unconscious, “tied him to a tree, tarred his legs, and set them on fire” and then partially scalped him. Some courts ordered loyalists “branded on the face or cut off their ears” to make them recognizable.

The museum’s bookstore includes “The Last Muster,” a treasure of photographs displayed in the museum. They are of people who were born before the Revolution and lived to sit in front of cameras. An unquenchable dignity radiates from the visage of Caesar, who was born in 1737, and was owned as a slave by four generations of a New York family until his death in 1852, shortly before a new birth of freedom in our complicated country.