“We are,” John Adams wrote to a friend early in June 1776, “in the very midst of a Revolution, the most compleat, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the History of Nations.” Adams was right, but it took prescience to discern it at that moment. In the aftermath of the costly British victory at Bunker Hill the year before—a few more victories like that, one former officer observed, and British army will be annihilated—George Washington had driven the Brits from Massachusetts, but they were on their way back with the largest armada ever sent across the Atlantic till that time. Asked later who was primarily responsible for pushing the American colonists to embrace independence, Adams liked to cite King George III. His implacable demands made reconciliation impossible. And now Lord Germain, the king’s minister for the American colonies, meant to crush the rebellion once and for all by a massive military …