The great nineteenth-century novelist Harold Frederic (The Damnation of Theron Ware) had a character complain “I cannot read or listen to the inflated accounts” of the role played in the Revolution by Massachusetts and Virginia “without smashing my pipe in wrath.”

Frederic’s pipe-smasher would smoke in peaceful raptness while reading Alan Pell Crawford’s engrossing new book, This Fierce People: The Untold Story of America’s Revolutionary War in the South.