Explore a Dramatic Trial Over Justice, Honor, and the Rule of Law
A master historian uncovers a spellbinding story illustrating the stakes for the new nation in the American War for Independence.
How does a new country demonstrate to the world that it is prepared to uphold the rule of law? During the winter of 1778, in the midst of revolution, a bizarre and dramatic court-martial forced an American community to confront the full implications of its independence from Great Britain―and produced a frank reexamination of a struggling nation’s cultural and political values. British General John Burgoyne, a prisoner of war, accused an American colonel of mistreating fellow British prisoners.
Angry and embarrassed after surrendering his army at Saratoga, he demanded an unprecedented full trial before an American jury. In a stunning decision, American military officers not only acquiesced to an unprecedented request for a court-martial but also allowed Burgoyne, an enemy commander, to serve as prosecutor.
Why were the Americans so accommodating of this audacious request? Burgoyne’s challenge, as T. H. Breen shows, had become about much more than an American soldier’s individual transgression―it sparked an emotional rejection of aristocratic privilege that went to the heart of the revolutionary cause itself.
The American Revolution on Trial spectacularly illustrates how the platform provided to Burgoyne offered the new, rebellious republic an opportunity to demonstrate, to themselves and the world, that they were sufficiently civilized to deliver genuine justice. This saga and its larger significance address questions about the rule of law and a nation’s honor that challenge us to this day.
About the Author
T.H. Breen
T.H. Breen (Ph.D., Yale, 1968), William Smith Mason Professor of American History, is an Early American historian interested in the history of political thought, material culture, and cultural anthropology. A Guggenheim fellow, he has held appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study and the National Humanities Center as well as the Pitt Professorship of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University and the Harmsworth Professorship at Oxford University.
He has won several awards for distinguished teaching, including one from the Northwestern Alumni Society. His publications include five monographs, among them Tobacco Culture: the Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (recipient of the T. Saloutos Prize) and Imagining the Past: East Hampton Histories (winner of the Historical Preservation Book Prize), as well as portions of the highly successful undergraduate text, America: Past and Present. Breen's Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford UP) won the Colonial War Society Prize for the best book in 2004 on the American Revolution.
Breen is the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Award from the German government and a Fellowship from the Max Planck Institute. His most recent publications include American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (2010), George Washington’s Journey: The President Forges a New Nation (2014), which won the Society of the Cincinnati Award in 2016, and The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America (2019), as well as several essays in collections on Irish and American history by the University of Virginia Press. He is also a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. At present, he is completing a new project entitled American Revolution on Trial: The Cambridge Ordeal.
The founding director of Northwestern's Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, Breen has also served as a special consultant for Colonial Williamsburg and held the Rockefeller Fellowship. In 2017, he was appointed the John Kluge Professor of American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress. He now holds the James Marsh Professorship-at-large at the University of Vermont.